Cambodia marks 40 years since evacuation of Phnom Penh
Agence France-Presse
PHNOM PENH

PHNOM PENH: -- Tearful survivors on Friday marked 40 years to the day since the Khmer Rouge marched on Phnom Penh, ending a civil war but heralding a terror that would kill a quarter of Cambodians and leave the capital a ghost town.

A few hundred people, including monks and elderly regime survivors, gathered early Friday at Choeung Ek -- the most notorious of the regime’s "Killing Fields" -- on the capital’s outskirts, burning incense and saying Buddhist prayers at a memorial stupa housing the skulls and bones of victims.

The event commemorated the April 17, 1975 triumph of the Khmer Rouge over the US-backed republican army of Lon Nol and with it the start of four years of a genocidal communist revolution.

Initially, the Khmer Rouge were given a cautious welcome by Phnom Penh’s war-weary residents as they entered the city astride tanks, their distinctive red-chequered scarves fluttering behind them.

But soon enough cadres began to evacuate the city of two million people at gunpoint, in one of the largest forced migrations in recent history.

The sick, elderly and very young perished, their bodies littering the roadsides, as "bourgeois" city dwellers were marched into the countryside to scratch a living from the parched soil.

By the time the tyrannical rule of Pol Pot -- or "Brother Number One" -- was ousted four years later, an estimated two million Cambodians had been killed by execution, starvation or overwork as the Khmer Rouge drove the country back to "Year Zero" through an agrarian peasant revolution.

"Forty years ago Pol Pot turned Cambodia into a hell -- a ghost land," Huot Huorn, 67, told AFP with tears in her eyes after lighting incense for the 36 relatives she lost to the regime.

"I still hate that regime... their sins are vivid in my eyes now. They starved us, jailed people with no food and water until they died... I saw them smash children’s heads against a tree trunk."

- Horror untold -

=================

Only after the regime was forced out by Vietnamese soldiers in 1979 did the scale of its atrocities emerge, with the bones of thousands of victims -- including children -- uncovered at mass graves across the country, including at Choeung Ek.

Many had first suffered at Phnom Penh’s notorious torture house -- Tuol Sleng, or S21 -- as perceived enemies of the revolution.

The former school-turned-torture-chamber has also been preserved as a grisly testament to the horrors of the era, which ended when the Khmer Rouge were forced to retreat to jungle hideouts.

In 2010, a UN-backed war crimes court sentenced former Tuol Sleng prison chief Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, to 30 years in prison -- later increased on appeal to life -- for overseeing the deaths of 15,000 people.

He was the first person to be held accountable for the regime’s crimes.

Last August the two most senior surviving Khmer Rouge leaders -- Nuon Chea, 88, known as "Brother Number Two", and former head of state Khieu Samphan, 83 -- were given life sentences for crimes against humanity. Both have appealed.

Their two-year trial focused on the forced evacuation of Cambodians from Phnom Penh into rural labour camps as well as murders at one execution site.

Cambodians remain divided over how to move forward, with those clamouring for justice countered by others urging reconciliation in a nation where both perpetrators and victims of the regime are still alive.

In March, the court charged three more former Khmer Rouge members with crimes against humanity, ignoring warnings by strongman Cambodian premier Hun Sen -- a mid-ranking regime cadre before he defected -- that further prosecutions risked reigniting conflict.

Speaking at Friday’s memorial, opposition leader Sam Rainsy repeated a call for further trials, insisting only the guilty "fear the truth".

Phnom Penh has rebounded from the shell of a city left in 1979 to become the driving force of a small but growing Cambodian economy that many hope will lift the nation out from poverty.

Source: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/aec/Cambodia-marks-40-years-since-evacuation-of-Phnom--30258163.html


-- The Nation 2015-04-17

To Thailand's shame they welcomed Pol Pot and what remained of his army when the Vietnamese drove him out.

He later returned to Cambodia and died of old age never repenting or paying for the atrocities he committed against his countrymen.

Although he ordered the execution of doctors (etc etc), shunned modern medicine and turned hospitals into barracks or pig sties, the wiley old devil was treated for piles in a Thai hospital.

(John Pilger. Voices)

Definitions;

Khmer-Ethnic indigenous peoples of Kampuchea (Cambodia).
Khmer Rouge- Communist Khmers...aka the KR...or DK after UN
enters Kampuchea. DK=Democratic Kampuchea.

On the morning of the 17th of April 1975 the first Khmer Rouge (KR) troops
who entered Phnom Penh were not true KR troops. They were a mix of KR
sympathising students, disgruntled FANK troops, sympathising Khmer civilians
and a handfull of true KR troopers.

Why this mix?

Why would any battle hardened general send into a city and into a possible
terrible ambush his hardened troops? Cities provide perfect ambush locations.
Think about it. So the first KR who entered the city of Phnom Penh were a mix
of sympathisers and true KR troops. They sussed out the city and reported
their findings back to higher authority.

Once "higher" was assured there were no more US & FANK troops in the city
set in ambush positions...aka the city was "clean"...the KR generals sent in
the "real" Khmer Rouge troops. These troops didn't smile & shake hands with
the city population. They marched cold faced to predetermined locations & set
up their perimeters and awaited orders.

The civilians who had not left were ordered to remain at home and await further
instructions. The KR began detaining upper echelon politicos and civilians
during the late afternoon of the 17th. This would continue until the KR had in
custody everyone on their list, which by 18 April their list had been filled, in
other words the KR had all the main or initial people they were looking for
in custody.

On the 19th the KR began the mass evacuation of Phnom Penh and every other
city in Kampuchea. From provincial capitol to local village...every place was
was emptied of its population. Hospitals were emptied of patients, who had
to walk or crawl with the throngs of people herded out of the cities. If they
couldn't walk or crawl, they were killed on the spot or simply left to die.
The KR stripped people of their gold & silver & precious belongings..even
gold teeth were forcibly pulled from mouths. If one wore glasses they would be
targeted for execution after their glasses were removed. The list of evil can
continue but I'll stop here. You can learn more if you want, easily these days
via the web. Start with the Cambodian Genocide Centre..it's a good place.

To Thailand's shame they welcomed Pol Pot and what remained of his army when the Vietnamese drove him out.

He later returned to Cambodia and died of old age never repenting or paying for the atrocities he committed against his countrymen.

No one comes out of the Cambodian nightmare smelling like roses. The Chinese supported the Khymer Rouge to the hilt and kept them in power. They even invaded the Vietnam to punish them for invading Cambodia when the Vietnamese were trying to stop the KR from killing Vietnamese villagers in border areas. At least the Vietnamese tried to make amends by getting rid of this menace although they had helped to put the KR in power in the first place. And they withdrew their troops after 10 years, albeit leaving behind a pro-Vietnamese government.

The UN allowed the KR to keep their seat at the UN until 1993 - this required the acquiescence of the majority of nations represented at the UN. Hmmmmm. The Thai government provided refuge and trade opportunities to keep the higher level cadre of the KR in the standard of living to which they had become accustomed for many years.

The US policy of carpet bombing the east of Cambodia is credited by at least some historians with sending the rural population into the arms of the KR on the basis that "my enemy's enemy is my friend."

After the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam, the United States, which never maintained any form of diplomatic ties with the Khmer Rouge’s Democratic Kampuchea, showed strong support for the membership of their former enemy (Khmer Rouge) in the UN General Assembly, and echoed ASEAN's call for an immediate withdrawal of Vietnamese military forces from Kampuchea. Had the Vietnamese withdrawn then, the only alternative power base would have taken over, which was the KR.

And no country did anything about the KR when it was clear what they were doing to their own people.

The US supported the KR under the...the enemy of my enemy is my friend...until the

Vietnamese invaded Kampuchea. TheViets invaded as a result of the KR killings of

villagers along the Cambo-VN border region plus two KR attempts at an all out

invasion of Vietnam to gain territory. Those so called invasions went terribly wrong

for the KR and only angered the Vietnamese government into an all out invasion

of Kampuchea, which, eventually led to the downfall of the KR from power. The KR

survived to the UN days in small pockets of territory in the Northwest, West &

Southwest areas along the Cambo-Thai border. The last official surrender of KR

troops occured in Pailin in 1996. The troops were absorbed into the Royal

Cambodian Armed Forces.

The US also supported another group in Kampuchea after the fall of Phnom Penh.

The group was the KPNLF...Khmer Peoples Nation Liberation Front...hardline anti

Khmer Rouge fighters.