KHMER ROUGE

Posted under Southeast Asia 2009

From the ancient grandeur of the Ankor area, Cambodia is now a country of relative poverty. This was aggravated by the despotic leader and the Khmer Rouge, who plundered and murdered their way through the countryside in the latter days of the Vietnam war. Pol Pot, who was educated in France, led the Khmer Rouge on a killing spree that exterminated some two million Cambodian peoples, about twenty-five percent of the entire population. As Pol Pot had the support of the communists in both North Vietnam and the USSR, it took the support of the South Vietnamese military and the US forces to defeat this aggression. At the close of WW11, we swore that the type of genocide experienced during the holocaust should never be repeated, and yet we have Cambodia, Bosnia, Uganda, Rwanda, and who knows how many others. Man’s inhumanity to man.

 

Although the Cambodian situation took place nearly forty years ago, the consequences are still felt on a daily basis. As the Khmer Rouge plundered the land, they also littered the countryside with land mines. This was done without mapping the areas. The US air force also dropped thousands of miniature anti personnel devices from the air, which littered the target areas with no way of mapping. Add to this mix tons of unexploded ordinance, and you have a cocktail for disaster.

 

It is quite common to see peasants missing limbs that were lost to unexpected mines as they tried to plant their crops, but the real sadness lies with the children. Because of the overall poverty, children scrounge about the battlefields looking for brass shell casings that can be sold for scrap, and they too find the minefields. Because it was more expensive and time consuming to attend to the injured, anti personnel mines were designed to maim, rather than kill, and they did it very well. Many of the countries young are missing limbs, hands, feet or both. As if it is not difficult to exist with a body intact. Even with all of this, there is a sense of happiness for the little that they do have, and a smile is available, for free, to all who will accept it.

 

It is estimated that it will take approximately an additional 100 years to remove the remaining unexploded munitions. The leaders of the Khmer Rouge are only now being tried for their crimes against humanity.

 

On to Vietnam.

 

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