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...
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Brunner, Borgna. "The Khmer Rouge — Infoplease.com." Infoplease: Encyclopedia, Almanac, Atlas, Biographies, Dictionary, Thesaurus. Free Online Reference, Research & Homework Help. — Infoplease.com. Pearson Education, Inc, 2007. Web. 19 Dec. 2011. .
Marks, Stephen P. "Elusive Justice For The Victims Of The Khmer Rouge." Journal Of International Affairs 52.2 (1999): 691. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 19 Dec. 2011. .
Scheffer, David J. "Responding To Genocide And Crimes Against Humanity." U.S. Department Of State Dispatch 9.4 (1998): 20. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 19 Dec. 2011. .
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
On December 25th, 1978 Vietnam organized a invasion of Cambodia. On January 7th, 1979, Phnom Penh was no longer controlled by Pol Pot, who fled to Thailand with the remains of his Khmer Rouge regime. A new government, created by Khmer Rouge defectors, was instituted. Once Pol Pot lost control of the capital of Cambodia he lost a substantial amount of power and no longer could face the people of Cambodia and the Vietnam troops head-on. He decided to flee to Thailand to continue his plans of creating a communist government in Cambodia. For the next 17 years he continued fighting Cambodian governments but eventually lost complete control of the Khmer Rouge. Before he could be tried for what he did throughout the years 1975-1979 he died of a heart attack (i.e. heart attack was caused by a
Most people in the world have not heard of the genocide going on in Laos today. Most people have not taken notice, read about it or bother to spend more than thirty seconds of their lives learning about it. The world has managed to almost entirely ignore the genocide of the Hmong people in Laos for over 30 years and still allows this crime against humanity to continue. Since the 1970s, the ethnic Hmong people in the Southeast Asian country of Laos have been persecuted by the Laotian government (Malakunas, 2000). This harassment is a direct result of the Hmong’s link to the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States in what has become to be known as the Secret War (Malakunas, 2000). The Laotian government officials directing this massacre have not been detained due to lack of evidence (Sommer P.4).
Walker, Luke. "Cambodian Genocide World Without Genocide." Cambodian Genocide. William Mitchell College of Law, n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2014. .
When ruthless and destructive leaders come to power, millions of lives are immediately put in danger. In tough and troublesome times, intelligent leaders come into play and easily influence individuals into doing terrible things. Pol Pot of Cambodia encouraged young children to be soldiers, forced people to work, and committed mass murder. The goal of the genocide in Cambodia was to get rid of old Cambodian society and reconstruct it starting from the beginning. Pol Pot’s socialized charismatic leadership ended with millions of innocent people left dead and an unavoidable question of what caused this genocide.
Also, he had all threats to his reign, including intellectuals and politicians, tortured and executed within S-21, the old high school that the Khmer Rouge secret police was based within. In addition, Pot created re-education camps in order to instill his way of thinking within the people within his country. However, many of the people who worked within the work camps were malnourished and overworked, resulting in the deaths of many residents. The estimated amount of deaths of Cambodians is between 1.5 and 3 million casualties. In 1979, after four years of such an unprecedented reign, the Vietnamese continued to attack their borders. Even when Pol Pot was made aware of the attacks, the entire country was invaded by the Vietnamese army. Despite attempting to regain his power a few times over, it wasn't enough. Fearful for his life, he lived underground for several years. During his absence from Khmer Rouge activity, the communist group split into two factions, with the larger group sided with Sihanouk and his government. In 1997, Pol Pot was finally captured and sentenced by the Cambodian government to life under house arrest. After a year, he was killed by heart failure on April 15,
Often times, independence creates the perfect situation for radical ideas to overtake rational thoughts, and, if not well thought out, it leads to self destruction. When based on a peaceful belief system, the results of this primal rejection of traditional standards are catastrophic due to the persuasive nature of the fundamental essence of peace. Genocide is a horrific tragedy that no human being should be able to rationalize without this serious skewing of well-intentioned teachings to reflect extreme ideals or the occurrence of a great mental disturbance to push one over the edge of sanity into the depths of reasonless treachery. This shift was apparent in the rise to power and the reign of communist leader Pol Pot, a genocidal purist bound on cleansing Cambodia’s ethnic and moral system after its freedom
"From 1975 to 1779- through execution, starvation, disease, and forced labor-the Khmer Rouge systematically kill an estimated two million Cambodians, almost a fourth of the countries population."(Ung Author's Note). In First They Killed My Father, Loung Ung and her family were victims of Pol Pot's invasion of Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia. She, her parents, and her six brothers and sisters were all forced into labor camps to work for the Khmer Rouge and fight a battle that wasn't even theirs to fight. From 1975 until 1979, the Khmer Rouge held control over much of Cambodia. To keep the people under their control the soldiers used many techniques of terror. In the memoir, First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung, the author describes how the Khmer Rouge used the techniques of intimidation, restriction, and isolation in order to keep people
Simpson, Kirk. "Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide." Anthropology in Action, vol. 15, no. 1, 2008, p. 46+. Student Resources In Context, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A396528165/SUIC?u=j108911&sid=SUIC&xid=0ac8bfa8. Accessed 27 Apr. 2018.
Harff, Barbara. Genocide and Human Rights: International Legal and Political Issues. Denver: University of Denver, 1984.
We asked ourselves why we learned from our mistakes in the past. The same answers has always continued to be, “so we will not repeat the same mistakes in the future”. So if the past is a guideline to our future, then why has mass genocide continued to occur? Did we not learned from the deaths of millions of innocence during the Holocaust? Than why has Cambodia lost an estimated 1.7 million of its population in the last century. An absence of 21% from its total population during the Khmer Rouge. My main obligation in this paper is to ultimately answer how the Khmer Rouge embarked on their corrupt domination to cause such destruction, and why we continued to let history repeats itself.
SAINATI, TATIANA E. "Toward A Comparative Approach To The Crime Of Genocide." Duke Law Journal 62.1 (2012): 161-202. Academic Search Premier. Web. 25 Nov. 2013
After exerting over a decade and $300 million dollars, the United Nations chose to proceed with a tribunal that would prosecute the accomplices of the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge is responsible for the deaths of at least 1.7 million Cambodians. This is possibly one of the most horrific mass killings that this past century has witnessed and, since the trail has begun, the Court has only successfully prosecuted three men. The trial’s extremely slow pace and its susceptibility to political interference are the reason for a very awkward compromise that was reached by Cambodia and the United Nations as they agreed to set up a combined international court, which formally began in 2006. The crimes that were being prosecuted by the ECCC’S included genocide crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Convention, and religious persecution as defined by the Cambodian Penal Code of 1956. Of the Three people Convicted felons all three of them are sentenced to life in prison. They are sentenced Life in prison as the maximum punishment, because Cambodian Law prohibits the act of the death penalty. The ECCC is the first ever to allow victims to participate directly as civil parties. Civil parties are represented by lawyers who speak for
“The bones cannot find peace until the truth they hold in themselves has been revealed” This quote, said by Deputy Military Police Chief Nhim Seila, means that the deceased persecutors of the Cambodian Genocide cannot rest well until the reason for their actions has been told to the public. On April 17, 1975, soldiers of a communist group known as the Khmer Rogue, stormed into the capital city of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, and attacked the city, forcing all the citizens into the countryside to work vigorously for the Khmer Rouge. The stories of Samnang Shawn Vann and Sisowath Doung Chanto paint a picture of what it was like to live under this cruel group.
Ratner, Steven R. B.G. Ramcharan, Payam Akhavan and Delissa Ridgway: The Genocide Convention after Fifty Years: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (American Society of International Law), Vol. 92,The Challenge of Non-State Actors (APRIL 1-4, 1998), pp. 1-19