Cambodia has convened a genocide tribunal and has started the trial of Kaing Guek Eav. He is also known as Duch. Duch was the commander of a prison where an estimated 16,000 people were tortured and brutalized before their deaths. Read the AP news article here.
I have done a fair amount of reading and have watched numerous documentaries about the atrocities committed by Nazi during World War II and The Holocaust. The reign of terror imposed on Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge did not kill as many people as The Holocaust, it was no less brutal and resulted in the deaths of 1.7 million people.
Perhaps the reason that this particular genocide has always had special meaning to me is because we had refugees from Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia move into my town when I was in high school. At the time, my hometown consisted almost entirely of white families and Native American families. The addition of Asians was impossible to miss. I remember one guy from Laos that was 19 years old and spoke very little English. Some people laughed at him when he first came to our school because he was too old for the grade that he was in and didn't speak English very well. A few days after he arrived, he joined a gym class. In the shower, you could see scars from two bullet wounds on his back and a large scar from a knife across his chest. Nobody ever laughed at him for being different again. It was quite an eye-opener for a high school kid.
The 1984 movie, The Killing Fields, tells the story of a Cambodian reporter trapped in the country when the Khmer Rouge seized power and began to murder any Cambodian with education or foreign connections. If you have not seen this move, I would recommend that you watch it. This will give some context for the genocide tribunal that is now taking place in Cambodia.
I remember reading about Dith Pran, the reporter whose story is detailed in The Killing Fields last year. He had died of pancreatic cancer in New Jersey. What I didn't realize was that he had died precisely one year ago, on March 30, 2008. Fitting that the opening remarks of the trial of one of the butchers of the Khmer Rouge should start on the anniversary of Dith Pran's death.
If you really want to learn more about the genocide, I would also strongly recommend that you read the book "First They Killed My Father", by Loung Ung. I read this book a few years ago and thought it was amazing. It tells the tale of a five year old girl and her experiences during the genocide. Some of the stories that are in there are pretty heart-wrenching. The children were forced to become soldiers and kill adults that did not fit into the Khmer Rouge's mold of what a perfect citizen of Cambodia should be. There was another story about how guilty she felt for stealing a few grains of rice from her family because she was starving. Some pretty sad stuff in there. It was a pretty powerful book and, again, I strongly recommend this to everyone.
Hopefully, the tribunal in Cambodia will help to bring some closure to the survivors that have been permanently scarred by the brutality of the Khmer Rouge regime. Justice is long overdue and I hope they find some measure of it in these trials.
I have done a fair amount of reading and have watched numerous documentaries about the atrocities committed by Nazi during World War II and The Holocaust. The reign of terror imposed on Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge did not kill as many people as The Holocaust, it was no less brutal and resulted in the deaths of 1.7 million people.
Perhaps the reason that this particular genocide has always had special meaning to me is because we had refugees from Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia move into my town when I was in high school. At the time, my hometown consisted almost entirely of white families and Native American families. The addition of Asians was impossible to miss. I remember one guy from Laos that was 19 years old and spoke very little English. Some people laughed at him when he first came to our school because he was too old for the grade that he was in and didn't speak English very well. A few days after he arrived, he joined a gym class. In the shower, you could see scars from two bullet wounds on his back and a large scar from a knife across his chest. Nobody ever laughed at him for being different again. It was quite an eye-opener for a high school kid.
The 1984 movie, The Killing Fields, tells the story of a Cambodian reporter trapped in the country when the Khmer Rouge seized power and began to murder any Cambodian with education or foreign connections. If you have not seen this move, I would recommend that you watch it. This will give some context for the genocide tribunal that is now taking place in Cambodia.
I remember reading about Dith Pran, the reporter whose story is detailed in The Killing Fields last year. He had died of pancreatic cancer in New Jersey. What I didn't realize was that he had died precisely one year ago, on March 30, 2008. Fitting that the opening remarks of the trial of one of the butchers of the Khmer Rouge should start on the anniversary of Dith Pran's death.
If you really want to learn more about the genocide, I would also strongly recommend that you read the book "First They Killed My Father", by Loung Ung. I read this book a few years ago and thought it was amazing. It tells the tale of a five year old girl and her experiences during the genocide. Some of the stories that are in there are pretty heart-wrenching. The children were forced to become soldiers and kill adults that did not fit into the Khmer Rouge's mold of what a perfect citizen of Cambodia should be. There was another story about how guilty she felt for stealing a few grains of rice from her family because she was starving. Some pretty sad stuff in there. It was a pretty powerful book and, again, I strongly recommend this to everyone.
Hopefully, the tribunal in Cambodia will help to bring some closure to the survivors that have been permanently scarred by the brutality of the Khmer Rouge regime. Justice is long overdue and I hope they find some measure of it in these trials.
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