By Parker Fulton, staff writer of the WRHS newspaper
When you walk down one of Phnom Penh's bustling city streets, it's hard to imagine such a joyful group of people wrapped up in a bout of genocide. Believe it or not, it has happened; and recently. This summer I had the opportunity to visit Cambodia with a small Denver based NGO (non governmental organization) and several other Denver high school students.
What we witnessed was incredible. Just over 25 years after a fight with genocide, Cambodians are happy about life, love and the future. Never in my life have I seen a kinder group of people.
Although still few adults are educated, there is a large shift with more of an emphasis on education. As with many developing countries, there are major flaws in the governmental and infrastructural systems in Cambodia. In contrast, however, there are more NGOs in Cambodia than almost any developing nation and also just as much international support.
It started in the mid-1960s when the United States entered the Vietnam War. For years, U.S. troops attempted to oust North Vietnamese Communists without much luck. In 1970, Cambodia's leader, Prince Sihanouk, was removed by a military coup and replaced by American backed lieutenant-general Lon Nol.
Unlike Prince Sihanouk, Lon Nol cared little about maintaining neutrality in the Vietnam War. By allowing more US troops to enter Cambodia to fight the Vietnamese, he opened Cambodia up as a Vietnam battlefield.
During the early 1970s the Cambodian communist guerrilla movement, the Khmer Rouge, was gaining steam. In 1975, under their French educated leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge was able to gain power in Cambodia, at the same time Saigon (the capitol of Vietnam) fell to the North Vietnamese.
Within several days of his take over, Pol pot started to implement his extremist ideas. His plans were relatively simple. He wanted to turn Cambodia into a country of laborers who would work for the "common good." Anybody who was educated, could not work, or could possibly stand in the way was to be exterminated.
Pol pot immediately evacuated the city to a series of killing fields. Though there weren't trains as in Nazi Germany, there were large covered trucks that were stuffed full of men, women and children.
Just to be cruel, the Khmer Rouge opened up a four room school house as a jail and interrogation center. The educated were taken here before being slain. Men and women were beaten, drowned and electrocuted. Women were raped. Thirty to forty men and women were clamped together and laid down together on the floor for days on end. Only when they were about to die would they be given two bites of rice soup.
After weeks and months of interrogation, the living humans were bused to the killing fields. There they were beaten to death so the Khmer Rouge didn't have to waste bullets.
In 1979 the Khmer Rouge was overthrown by the Vietnamese. Two million people died during the genocide; 25 to 30 percent of the entire population at the time. Very few educated Cambodians survived.
How such a peaceful group of people was pushed to such extremes was beyond the imagination of most members of our travel group. Though we thought long and hard about possible causes, we struggled most with the fact that these atrocities happened, and actions like them continue to happen, as is the case with the Darfur region of Sudan. The question is; when will the violence end and what must we do as global citizens to protect the humanitarian rights of others?