Khmer Rouge

Cambodia's history may not be as pleasant as you think, since there was a time of when the Khmer Rouge were ruling the country of who's leader was Pol Pot.

It was in 1975 when Pol Pot had gain power and was the time many surviving Cambodians would probably most likely want to forget, But that is all what the Khmer Rouge wanted for you to do. Forget the past, forget your beliefs, forget what money is, forget basic rights and forget about the country's name since. Once Pol Pot had token over Phon Phen they had renamed the country to Democratic Kampuchea. And all of this was calledYear Zero.

But you may think that well they just want you to forget, but no it wasn’t just forgetting the past torture and mass killings had also occurred. As a young boy watched his father, taken away from him to be tortured he commented:

The brutality of my fathers punishment was so extreme that even the executioner himself could not speak without shock.
-Sisowath Doung Chanto
One of the few remaining survivors who talks about his fathers punishment after he had tried to rebuild Cambodia during the
1970-1975 civil war

And because of this brutal and cruel rule for nearly 5 years, Cambodia have been impacted for years to come. Since literacy rates dropped nearly too zero when pol pot was in power because he had commanded to kill all educated people so that the government would turn the people into some what animals, unable to think of ideas to riot and overthrow the Khmer Rouge.

But As the ruling of the Khmer Rouge continued in 1976, Hundreds of thousands of people died of starvation and this was mainly because of the amount of food was given to the people.

Vann Nath another survivor of the khmer rouge commented during court when senior khmer rouge officer Duch was on trial “They even gave animals more food.”

The amount of food which was given to the people was said to about six teaspoons of rice porridge a day. But this did depend on your gender since most of the time females would have gotten more food. And because of that Vann Nath Commented “We were so hungry , we would eat insects that dropped from the ceiling,We would quickly grab and eat them so we could avoid being seen by the guards."

But even just the lack of food, the hygiene of where they ate it was possibly so dirty that people would easily become sick and with lack of food there was no way of recovery.

"We didn’t care we were like animals".-Vann Nath 29/6/12

As Vann Nath commented on the Khmer Rouge’s cruel ways of making him eat his meals next to dead bodies. But the fact that even a person who were alive through out the ruling was so confused and was full of fear that they would do anything to stay alive.

But the worst was to come as Pol Pot orders to kill mass numbers of people during 1977. As well as military attacks on all 3 borders, Thailand,Vietnam and Laos.

But even when all this was going on through out the country at this time not many knew that the man behind all this which was Pol Pot.

As Sok Sonang (Matt) said during his interview “Pol Pot was not well-known at that time. When I was in the city, we never knew that name. We knew the name Ieng Saray, but not Pol Pot. He was like a godfather, the man behind the scenes.The name we heard every day was Angka. When they wanted you to do something, they always said, ‘Angka wants you’ to do this or that. And if you didn’t do it, you were betraying the party, Angka, not the individual.”

But knowing about it Angka wasn’t real it was fake, something that Pol Pot had created to not make people think that it was a dictatorship of some type which if people knew could have started rebellions.

But deciding to order military attacks on vietnam was a costly decision created by Pol Pot. It ended the Khmer Rouge ruling in the late 1978, because of Vietnamese fighting back and eventually in 1979 taking over Pheng Phen and when doing so the republic of Kampuchea is created and rights were established of which the Khmer Rouge had token away but the scars of the brutal torture of being ruled by the Khmer Rouge were still there.

Because of this Sisowath Doung Chanto writes about the loss of talent. “A lot of talented individuals died because some defected semi- intellectuals such as Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were too incompetent to deal with social development”

as well as thinking of this brutal part in Cambodia’s history that it should be remembered.

“It is a reminder of what happened to our society in the last 20 years. The Khmer Rouge legacy should not be neglected or overlooked because it was the past. It should be a monumental lesson for our future generation. Such an atrocity should never be allowed to reoccur. But it should never be forgotten.” -Sisowath Doung Chanto

But problems have occurred through out researching on this tough and touching topic of simply Bias. Primary sources of victams and survivors are most likely ream but as in my case of using Sisowath Doung Chanto’s story I did find out that he was about the age of 5-6 when Pol Pot gained power and because of this his story could be slightly off by a few facts because of the human memory. As well as survivors stories being biased, articles by the gaurdian and a interview by travelerstales were also slightly biased because of them writing to a western audience of who at most time don’t care unless the article is interesting and extremely abnormal to the western society. And because of writing to a western audience they would change a few of the survivors stories words to add more descriptive words to make readers feel a lot more sorry for Cambodia.