Cambodian Atrocities

To understand Cambodia today you have to understand their recent dark history. Ready for more trauma?

In the early 70s, the Cambodian king was in exile in Beijing after a coup and he threw his lot in with a guerrilla group called the Khmer Rouge who had a stated aim to throw out the coup leader and restore the monarchy. What he, and many of the guerrillas who joined them didn’t know, was that their leader, Pol Pot, intended to completely destroy the existing society and remake it.

April 17, 1975, tanks rolled through the streets of the capital, Phnom Penh, and families were herded out of their homes and separated. Some children were given weapons to become child soldiers. Adults, children, infants and the elderly were sent out to work in the agrarian labor camps around the country for 12-15 hour days and fed a diet of thin gruel. Many died of disease or starvation. The cities were left virtually empty. Intellectuals, doctors, lawyers, artists, journalists, monks, professors, anyone wearing glasses, ethnic and religious minorities, etc. were taking into detention and eventually killed. In Phnom Penh, they, and anyone associated with anything which the regime did not approve, were taken to a former high school turned prison and torture centre. Numbers vary, but 20,000-14,000 adults, children and infants were brought here, documented, tortured, re-photographed and then sent to the killing field death camp. Only 7 people were known to make it out of this prison alive. There were similar centres across the country.

The Killing Fields near Phnom Penh was one of the site of executions of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, including purged Khmer Rouge members. There is a stupa filled with skulls of victims and there are mass graves from which bones regularly emerge after heavy rains. 

Vietnam invaded and overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1979, although the war continued until 1998, creating instability. The monarch did eventually return from exile and installed his son. By that time, over 2.2 million people from a population of 8 million had died directly or from starvation and disease.

There have been international trials of some of the Khmer Rouge leaders in the 90s and 2000s and a few were sentenced to life sentences. 

There are killing fields memorials and genocide museums across the country where you can see bones of the victims and hear the stories. Families are fragmented and missing members. 

All of this to say, Cambodian society has quite recently been through trauma and terror. They are rebuilding their culture and they are having to do so with their own ingenuity, having lost  access to much of the wisdom of their elder religious or intellectual leaders. Medical and other kinds of infrastructure and knowledge were lost. A generation of thought leaders are missing. And yet, I see a thriving arts and culture scene. I see teachers from around the world here to offer their knowledge to the people of Cambodia, and the locals being eager to learn. People are focused on the future, while holding on to the parts of their culture that still exist from the past. The Royal Palace in Phnom Penh has its precious artifacts because people safeguarded them during the genocide and war and then returned them when the king returned. Even the evils they have lived through cannot stop their attachment to the past or their hopes for the future.