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Cambodia marks 40 years since the fall of Phnom Penh to Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge
ABC Radio Australia - April 17, 2015
Almost two million people are thought to have died between 1975 and 1979.
Tearful survivors on Friday marked four decades to the day of the march of Pol Pot's forces on Phnom Penh, ending a civil war but leaving the capital a ghost town.
"Forty years ago Pol Pot turned Cambodia into a hell, a ghost land," said 67-year-old Huot Huorn, 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."
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.
Cambodia's opposition leader, Sam Rainsy, lead prayers at the former killing fields. He reminded Cambodians of the importance of the ongoing trials of surviving Khmer Rouge leaders.
"It is why every year we remind the people in power to support the Khmer Rouge tribunal," he said. "To proceed, and not to hinder in any way, the judicial proceedings that is intended to bring justice to the Khmer people."
In March, the court charged three more former Khmer Rouge members with crimes against humanity, ignoring warnings by long-time Cambodian premier Hun Sen, a mid-ranking regime cadre before he defected, that further prosecutions risked re-igniting conflict.
Last year two top leaders, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, were jailed for life after being convicted by Cambodia's UN-backed tribunal of crimes against humanity.
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.
In 2010, the court sentenced former Tuol Sleng prison chief Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, to 30 years in prison and 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.
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.
Revolution that targeted own people
The April 17, 1975 triumph of the Khmer Rouge over the US-backed republican army of Lon Nol started a four-year 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 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 make a living off the parched soil.
By the time the tyrannical rule of "Brother Number One" Pol Pot 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.
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.
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 of poverty. (ABC/AFP)
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