There were many other bloody genocides that happened except for the holocaust. The genocide of Cambodia is one of those. This genocide was caused by a government group called the Khmer Rouge. The genocide of Cambodia started on April 17,1975, and ended on January 9,1979. The ally groups of the Khmer Rouge were the North Vietnam, Viet Cong and Pathet Lao. After the Khmer Rouge conquered Phnom Penh, it changed its name into Democratic Kampuchea. The leaders of the Khmer Rouge Were Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen and Khieu Samphan. The main leader was Pol Pot. He was born in Prek Sbauk on May 19, 1928. His real name was Saloth Sar. He went to French to study college. The name Pol Pot comes from the French word “Politique Potentielle.” After he came back from France, he got interested in politics. On the year of 1953, he left home and joined the government group Viet Minh’s Eastern Zone Headquarters. This group was later called the Khmer RougeOn the year 1955, Prince Nordom Sihanovk was elected as the leader of Cambodia. In the same year, Pol Pot was promoted as the leader of the Khmer Rouge. He tried …show more content…
Pol Pot believed that Cambodia could be a great country without the helps from the United States. After a long and hard series of thoughts and arguments, he decided to kill people that lived in farms or places that were far away from Phnom Penh. But it is incorrect to say that Pol Pot started the genocide because hundreds and thousands of Cambodians were captured and arrested by GR UNK. It started at 1966, when Lon Nol believed that people who disagree with their idea should be executed. “Right here in Amsterdam everyday hundreds of Jews disappear”(“The Diary Of Anne Frank” play, collections book. Page 306) The genocide caused by the Khmer Rouge is still recorded as one of the most deadliest genocide in
Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot-the leader of the Khmer Rouge followed Maoist communism, which they thought they could create an agrarian utopia. Agrarian means that the society was based on agriculture. They wanted all members of society to be rural agricultural workers and killed intellectuals, who had been depraved by western capitalist ideas. A utopia means a perfect society. This idea went to extremes when The Khmer Rouge resumed that only pure people were qualified to build the revolution. They killed Cambodians without reasons by uncivilized actions such as: cutting heads, burying alive… There were about 1.7 million people killed by the Khmer Rouge.
This genocide took place all throughout Europe. It started in Germany and spread all the way to Great Britain. (“Some of the things that are not). The Cambodian Genocide was an attempt by the Khmer Rouge to take over and centralize all Cambodian farmers (“Cambodian”). This genocide lasted from 1975 to 1978 when the Khmer Rouge was finally overthrown by the Vietnamese (“Cambodian”).
In 1975, as he became ruler, he established the Khmer Rouge, a communist party. In the act of taking over Cambodia, Pol Pot did whatever he had to in order to gain total control. Cambodia had a harsh government run by military forces ("Pol Pot"). Pol Pot created a dictatorship in Cambodia. He continuously executed, overworked, tortured, imprisoned, and used fear tactics on Cambodians ("Pol Pot"). Also, Pol Pot let his people starve to death and develop many diseases ("Pol Pot").
In the 1960s and 1970s, the most controversial war the United States had ever been involved in during its rich two-hundred year history would engulf the country, ultimately leading to the collapse of a president, and the division of a nation. The Vietnam War was a military struggle fought in Vietnam and neighboring countries from 1959-1975 involving the North Vietnamese and NLF (National Liberation Front) versus the United States and the South Vietnamese ("The Vietnam..."). In 1969, newly elected President Richard M. Nixon, aiming to achieve "peace with honor" in Vietnam, began to put his "Vietnamization" policy into place -- removing the number of American military personnel in the country and transferring combat roles to the South Vietnamese ("Speeches..."). But at the same time, Nixon resumed the secret bombing of North Vietnam and launched B-52 bombing raids over Cambodia, intending to wipe out NLF and North Vietnamese base camps along the border. The intensive secret bombing, codenamed Operation Menu, lasted for four years and was intentionally concealed from the American public; meanwhile, Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia by United States troops, arguing that it was necessary to protect the security of American units. This invasion into an allegedly neutral country was cause for much protest in the States, especially on college campuses such as Kent State University, where students rioted and held walk-outs. Ultimately, the secret bombing of neutral Cambodia was deliberately conducted without the consent of Congress, violating the articles outlined in the United States Constitution, and would have been grounds for impeachment had Nixon not resigned under the cloud of the Watergate scandal in August of 1974 ("Richard M....
(Haugen and Musser) The Cambodian genocide is not nearly as well known as the Holocaust. The leader of the Khmer Rouge was a man named Pol Pot.
The Khmer Rouge years was a period of time that devastated all of the small country Cambodia, a story that was so well told by Loung Ung about the Pol Pot regime. The Khmer Rouge years was from 1975 to 1979 (http://www.cambodiatribunal.org). The Khmer Rouge, otherwise known as Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), conquered Cambodia for four years. The Khmer Rouge forced people to work in the fields including children. To make matters worse, the people that were forced to work were also malnourished and were living in grim conditions (http://www.wcl.american.edu).
In the late 1980s through the 1990s, the republics of the former Yugoslavia experienced serious ethnic tensions, escalating into all-out war which resulted in some of the worst war crimes committed in Europe since World War II. In 1993, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was formed with the goal of punishing perpetrators who carried out acts of genocide and crimes against humanity in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and to prevent any such atrocities from ever occurring again. One of the most significant and high-profile trials of this tribunal was that of Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of both Serbia and the former Yugoslavia, who was accused of committing crimes against humanity, war crimes, and abuses of power and corruption. Milosevic died in 2006, and his trial was never concluded. Whether or not he would have been convicted of these crimes is a subject of debate.
We all know who Hitler was, but who was Stalin? Mao Zedong? Idi Amin? Pol Pot?
Evil doesn’t even begin to cover it. The mass murder of millions of people. The complete obliteration of an entire society. Each and every genocide has the same core principles, but a distinct face. A dictator takes over a weak country with promises of returning it to its former glory, once he has everyone’s support, he implements extremely discriminatory laws and finds reasons to kill anyone who dares oppose him. The Holocaust and the Cambodian genocides are remarkably similar, and yet strikingly different. The Holocaust was an attempt to wipe out all Jews and other minorities such as gypsies and handicapped people. The Cambodian genocide, led by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, was in some ways a mirror image of the Holocaust, but it happened forty-two years later. On the other hand, there are many more that one distinction that sets Cambodia apart from all other genocides.
“I know of no parallel to the conditions which have been experienced in Cambodia over the past decade to any other experience I have had. In the case of post-war Europe, there is the vast tragedy of the concentration camps . . . but thank God, the world had an immediate reaction and to this moment, there has been a sensitivity to events which happened forty years ago. But, in the case of Cambodia, for some
The Cambodian Genocide took place from 1975 to 1979 in the Southeastern Asian country of Cambodia. The genocide was a brutal massacre that killed 1.4 to 2.2 million people, about 21% of Cambodia’s population. This essay, will discuss the history of the Cambodian genocide, specifically, what happened, the victims and the perpetrators and the world’s response to the genocide.
The Khmer Rouge, also known as the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), was a group led by Pol Pot that dictated Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 (Time). This massacre has roots back to the 1940s, when France had its own colonized countries such as Cambodia and Vietnam. In 1954, Vietnam defeated France at war and won its independence. The new country of Vietnam was divided into two sections: “communist North Vietnam and pro-Western South Vietnam (backed by the US)” (Peace). Soon Vietnam was a battlefield. Viet Cong, a group of communist guerrillas, was supported by North Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union. America joined the Vietnam War in 1964, bringing bombs, airpower, and poison defoliants. For years the country fought, but the war did not come to any victory against the strong-willed and committed Vietnamese communists. By the time it was over, the Vietnam War had devastated the country, costing many American and Vietnamese lives, and achieved nothing but misery for those caught up in it -including the Cambodians.
The Cambodian genocide and the Holocaust are unique in the areas of by methods of extermination used and why they were killed. The Holocaust had different killing methods than the Cambodian genocide. Before some even made it to the concentration camps, “Einsatzgruppen - armed militias forming mobile killing units - follow the invading SS troops and commit mass slaughter of Jews throughout Eastern Europe” (“Genocide- Holocaust”). The existing camp at Majdanek, and also at Auschwitz (where a second camp equipped with huge crematoria and gas-chambers has been built), are adapted for slaughter (“Genocide”). These were called “Death Camps”. Ma...
The Communist Party of Kampuchea, also known as the Khmer Rouge, took control of Cambodia on April 17, 1975, which lasted until January 1979. For their three-year, eight-month, and twenty-one day rule of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge committed some of the most heinous crimes in current history. The main leader who orchestrated these crimes was a man named Pol Pot. In 1962, Pol Pot had become the coordinator of the Cambodian Communist Party. The Prince of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk, did not approve of the Party and forced Pol Pot to flee to exile in the jungle. There, Pol formed a fortified resistance movement, which became known as the Khmer Rouge, and pursued a guerrilla war against Sihanouk’s government. As Pol Pot began to accumulate power, he ruthlessly imposed an extremist system to restructure Cambodia. Populations of Cambodia's inner-city districts were vacated from their homes and forced to walk into rural areas to work. All intellectuals and educated people were eradicated and together with all un-communist aspects of traditional Cambodian society. The remaining citizens were made to work as laborers in various concentration camps made up of collective farms. On these farms, people would harvest the crops to feed their camps. For every man, woman, and child it was mandatory to labor in the fields for twelve to fifteen hours each day. An estimated two million people, or twenty-one percent of Cambodia's population, lost their lives and many of these victims were brutally executed. Countless more of them died of malnourishment, fatigue, and disease. Ethnic groups such as the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cham Muslims were attacked, along with twenty other smaller groups. Fifty percent of the estimated 425,000 Chinese living in Cambod...
Settled in the end of the fifth century, two groups established themselves in what is now present day Cambodia. The Champa controlled the central and southern part of Vietnam and the Funan is the southernmost part Vietnam and present-day Cambodia. Influences from both China and India were obvious as dance and music spread throughout the area. Ruling on its own till 1864 when the French absorbed it into French Indochina Along with Laos and Vietnam. For nearly a century, the French exploited Cambodia commercially, and demanded power over politics, economics, and social life. It was not until a leader Norodom Sihanouk proclaimed Cambodia's independence in 1949 which was later granted in 1953. Cambodia fell into chaos during the 1970’s as General Lon Nol and his connections to the Khmer Rouge brought Cambodia into a genocidal age. For a decade Cambodia was surrounded by despair and carnage until the reign of the Khmer Rouge ended in 1979. Slowly rebuilding of the nation began as outside countries and organization such as the United Nation helped to get Cambodia back on its feet. Plans were made for general elections by 1993 which lead to the constitutional monarchy that the country has today. With its cyclical and oppressive history, Cambodia future is optimistic with the economy growing rapidly due to industries such as tourism, textiles, oil and the traditional farming. Slowly the nation reaches to find its place among the other powerhouses in Southeast Asia and around the world.