The Facts

“Cambodia, a tropical kingdom in Southeast Asia, makes up part of the Indochinese Peninsula. It has suffered devastating civil conflict that began with the rule of the Khmer Rouge.”(WH Modern Era). This small country has been inundated with several civil conflicts and has had a corrupted past that is trying to fix the problems within their society. The second most horrific genocide behind the holocaust is the Cambodian Genocide; many people are unaware of this terrible incident. This terrible instance started when France made Cambodia as one of their colonies. When Prince Sihanouk was in power, he felt as though he should please the United States and his own people. He felt this task was very difficult and based on his decisions while in power led to the eventual downfall of the government and the rise of the Cambodian Communist party led by the notorious Pol Pot.  The timeframe of these terrible killings started in 1975 and ended around 4 years later in 1979. Pol pot had the idea that all his people should be “cleansed”. This means that he wanted to create a utopian agrarian society with all the people in Cambodia. The only way to do this is to eliminate the people who Pol Pot dislikes. This was the rule of the Khmer Rouge.  “The Khmer Rouge period refers to the rule of Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Khieu Samphan and the Khmer Rouge Communist party over Cambodia, which the Khmer Rouge renamed as Democratic Kampuchea”(WH Modern Era). During this time the Communist Party and its followers were also named the Khmer Rouge, with that in mind many ethic groups grew to dislike this name very much. Some of these groups such as the Buddhists, which were 95% of the population in Cambodia and there were other tribal religions. But out of all the people, 2.5 million people died from these two groups. This had a tremendous affect in why this wide scale extermination took place.