Cambodia is a country in the eastern region of Asia between surrounding neighboring countries Thailand at the North West, Vietnam at the east, and Laos situated at the northern section. Cambodia has a dark past that many people of today’s society aren’t aware of. A past so appalling it is even having effects on the country today. Cambodia is a country home to one of the most atrocious acts that have ever occurred in the world. During the 1970’s Cambodia was plagued by an act of genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge so horrendous that it nearly decimated the entire populace of Cambodia. During the 1960’s through the 1970’s Cambodia was engulfed with battles for authority primarily between two political organizations. One political organization was the Khmer Republic. The Khmer Republic didn’t agree on the direction its country was heading at the hands of its monarch. As a result members of the Khmer Republic initiated a rebellion against the monarch in efforts to dethrone and to gain political strength. Another was the Communist Party of Kampuchea better known as the Khmer Rouge with the unpleasant intentions of initiating its ideology. Cambodia is a country that was held captive for four grueling years by Khmer Rouge. The intention of this organization was to return the country back to an agrarian society composed of peasant people focused on agriculture. This Political organization was led by a man with the radical name Pol Pot. This communist regime without a doubt would have slaughtered more of its own people if it weren’t for the invasion of Cambodia by the Vietnamese Army. This invasion ended the horror of the Cambodian population and the rule of terror by the Khmer Rouge.
The leader of the Khmer Rouge was a man named Sa...
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...oners were also jailed in these facilities. The families of the prisoners were also tortured into giving force confessions. Prisoners of these facilities were often malnourished. Some even committed suicide to avoid being tortured into giving a force confession. “The prisoners were selected from all around the country, and usually were former Khmer Rouge members and soldiers, accused of treason.” (Miller). During the operation of the prisons there were 14,200 prisoners who entered S-21. “Of the 14,000 people known to have entered, only seven survived.” (S21). This facility employed many different types of torture methods ranging from removing the nails off of the prisoner’s phalanges, drowning them, electrocution, using hot metal objects to burn the prisoner, and or hanging them. Finally in 1979 this facility was shut down after the invasion of the Vietnamese army.
Mortality encumbered the prisons effortlessly. Every day is a struggle for food, survival, and sanity. Fear of being led into the gas chambers or lined up for shooting was a constant. Hard labor and inadequate amounts of rest and nutrition took a toll on prisoners. They also endured beatings from members of the SS, or they were forced to watch the killings of others.
Thousands of individuals, including women and children, were murdered, stores and other properties were plundered and burned, and countless of women were raped . The Japanese government regarded sex as a way to keep the soldiers obedient and focused so rape was a device used to maintain good, Japanese warriors . Not only did human experimentation occur in German concentration camps, but also in Japanese prison camps. The 731 Unit conducted experiments dealing with plague, cholera, typhoid, frostbite, and gas gangrene . American prisoners of war were treated especially cruel during these human experiments. In one incident, an individual had his skull sliced open while Dr. Fukujiro placed a surgical knife inside of his skull cavity
While being forced to live in Auschwitz they endured many cruel and harsh punishments. The main form of punishment was the gas chambers. These chambers were cells that were made underground and were able to be sealed. Zyklon-B was the poison used to gas and kill the Jewish people. “It takes about 10 minutes to kill 2,000 to 3,000 people in the gas chamber.” (Saldinger p.57) After gassing they would then be extracted from the chamber and taken to the crematorium where the bodies would be disposed of. Sometimes it wasn’t even the guards who would dispose of the bodies, most of the time it was the prisoners who were forced to extract their own people from the chambers. This was just one of the many forms of punishment; there were many more and some were just as bad.
Ung (2000) mentions that the Cambodian genocide is a product of a perfect agrarian vision that can be built by eliminating Western influence. More specifically, the Angkar perceives peasants and farmers as “model citizens” because many have not left the village and were not subjected to Western influence (Ung 2000:57). Moreover, the Khmer Rouge emphasized the ethnic cleansing of individuals from other races who were not considered “true Khmer” and represented a “source of evil, corruption, [and] poison” (Ung 2000:92). Lastly, the ideology centered on obtaining lost territory was based on a “time when Kampuchea was a large empire with territories” (Ung 2000:78). In essence, Ung successfully demonstrates that multiple causes encouraged the Cambodian
Throughout the years 1975-1979 the Communist Khmer Rouge Regime party held control of the Cambodia and instituted the Angkar government system. In this system evolution and change was frowned upon. Intellectuals like students, teachers, monks, government officials, military workers, etc were considered corrupt. In the eyes of the Angkar, a model citizen was a peasant farmer who lived in the countryside and did not own any type of technology or possess any Western influence. Intellectuals (i.e. people who lived in cities like Phnom Penh) were forced to evacuate their homes and move into villages in the countryside. These villages were controlled by village chiefs and soldiers from the Khmer Rouge regime. The new villagers were forced to work long hours in the rice fields and the community gardens with
The death and torture rates are extremely high where the prisoners are
In human history, the most famous prison camp is the Auschwitz concentration camp where millions of human beings spent the last of their days. The most notorious group from Auschwitz being the Jews who lost the greatest number of its people and also the most remembered from the concentration camp. A prison camp is defined as “a camp for the confinement of war or political prisoners” (“Prison camps,” Dictionary.com). Prison camps found in the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (DPNK) have been found to treat its prisoners little more than beasts. The atrocities done in North Korea are unknown but the severity of the camps have left great scars on the people of North Korea. If left unknown, the prison camps in North Korea can mirror Auschwitz’s mass genocide on millions of people.
Throughout the nation’s 2000-year history, Cambodia, a developing Southeast Asian country located on the Indochina Peninsula, has experienced a number of glories and tragedies; as a matter of fact, it was until 1993 that the democratic election, supported by the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), were conducted to restore peace in Cambodia under a coalition government (CIA World Factbook, 2013). In order to transform from the negative peace which is just the absent of direct violence to the positive peace meaning the absent of cultural and structural violence, Cambodia, the younger member of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), has been trying as hard as possible to address the problem of inequality with the obvious hope that if inequality is not natural, according to Hobbes, but rather constructed, there are probably chances to level down its impacts or even demolish its existence.
I thought it was cruel that they manipulated these prisoners and gave them long-term behavioral problems, such as nausea, paralysis, and helplessness. For example, one of the Holmesburg victims—Jesse Williams—experienced abuse by “physicians and technicians had rubbed acid into his scrotum until skin fell away—all for three dollars a session” (244). Holmesburg Prison experiments occurred during 1962-1968 and tested 153 experimental drugs on victims in the prison. These prisoners were inoculated with herpes, vaccinia, and viruses. Based on the research files, there was not an indication of them and the uprisings of drugs preformed were also
Stewart Gordon is an expert historian who specializes in Asian history. He is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan and has authored three different books on Asia. Gordon’s When Asia Was The World uses the narratives of several different men to explore The Golden Age of medieval Asia. The fact that this book is based on the travels and experiences of the everyday lives of real people gives the reader a feeling of actually experiencing the history. Gordon’s work reveals to the reader that while the Europeans were trapped in the dark ages, Asia was prosperous, bursting with culture, and widely connected by trade. This book serves to teach readers about the varieties of cultures, social practices, and religions that sprang from and spread out from ancient Asia itself and shows just how far Asia was ahead of the rest of the world
...from stories of the time. While many sources say that they argue with the wild perpetuation in their first paragraph they then maintain an indefinite description of the prison and attempt not to give a detailed look at the components and history of the prison before it lost life when shutting down aside from those stories describing how wild the west was. With this I was also not able to talk to any true experts of the prison, nor visit the prison or those surviving the ones who lived there on either side of the law causing my knowledge and research to be limited to the web, which as before mentioned is limited by lack of fresh or widely varied information. Had there been more sources that went into detail about the prisons other features aside from its capacity I would have been able to give more than an educated, generalized guess on how the some of the prison was.
The mental inhumanity was so bad that most prisoners thought of suicide and some even committed it. Along with this was the pain and torture the prisoners felt from the physical inhumanity which resulted in deaths of over 50% of the inmates who stayed there. The total effect of both of the camps is shown throughout the inhumanity brought about there. The fact that inhumanity was able to cause the deaths of just about 6,000,000 people shows how easy it is for it to hurt other humans.
The Cambodian Genocide has the historical context of the Vietnam War and the country’s own civil war. During the Vietnam War, leading up to the conflicts that would contribute to the genocide, Cambodia was used as a U.S. battleground for the Vietnam War. Cambodia would become a battle ground for American troops fighting in Vietnam for four years; the war would kill up to 750,00 Cambodians through U.S. efforts to destroy suspected North Vietnamese supply lines. This devastation would take its toll on the Cambodian peoples’ morale and would later help to contribute that conflicts that caused the Cambodian genocide. In the 1970’s the Khmer rouge guerilla movement would form. The leader of the Khmer rouge, Pol Pot was educated in France and believed in Maoist Communism. These communist ideas would become important foundations for the ideas of the genocide, and which groups would be persecuted. The genocide it’s self, would be based on Pol Pot’s ideas to bring Cambodia back to an agrarian society, starting at the year zero. His main goal was to achieve this, romanticized idea of old Cambodia, based on the ancient Cambodian ruins, with all citizens having agrarian farming lives, and being equal to each other. Due to him wanting society to be equal, and agrarian based, the victims would be those that were educated, intellectuals, professionals, and minority ethnic g...
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...
Cambodia has come a long way from its days under French rule and the disastrous rule of the Khmer Rouge. With 14.9 million people living a relativity peaceful and prosperous life, Cambodia still has a long ways to go to join the ranks of world powers. Education has flourished in Cambodia with most its population attending school and have gone on to even higher education. The main goal is to make sure all of its population is literate so they can be active in life. The government is taking an active role to provide the best for its people whether through reform whether through education or elections. It makes sure to never repeat it’s dark past and always have a bright future.