Cambodian Genocide

From 1975 to 1979 Cambodian people lived under the dark and fear of the “Khmer Rouge”, an army group of extreme communist ideas lead by Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge wanted to convert Cambodia in a self-sustainable farming country that could be independent from capitalism. Their method of trying to attain this goal was to force people to leave their homes, separate from their family members, and move to remote countryside in conditions close to slavery, where they were expected to work the land for up to 15 hours per day without proper food. Schools, temples, markets, and entire cities, including Phnom Penh, were closed and evacuated. The Khmer Rouge believed that education wasn’t needed and transformed schools into centers of detention for interrogation, torture, and killing. We got to visit an example of this conversion at the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum, which previously was a primary school. It is estimated that 20,000 Cambodians were detained, torture, and assassinated between 1975 to 1978 in Toul Sleng, not including children. Following the idea “to weed the land you have, you must remove the root”, the Khmer Rouge eliminated entire families of innocent people, as a way to prevent future retaliation against the regimen. In total, the country suffered a loss of about 25% of their population or approximately 3 million people in almost 4 years.