There were many other bloody genocides that happened except for the holocaust. The genocide of Cambodia is one of those. This genocide was caused by a government group called the Khmer Rouge. The genocide of Cambodia started on April 17,1975, and ended on January 9,1979. The ally groups of the Khmer Rouge were the North Vietnam, Viet Cong and Pathet Lao. After the Khmer Rouge conquered Phnom Penh, it changed its name into Democratic Kampuchea. The leaders of the Khmer Rouge Were Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen and Khieu Samphan. The main leader was Pol Pot. He was born in Prek Sbauk on May 19, 1928. His real name was Saloth Sar. He went to French to study college. The name Pol Pot comes from the French word “Politique Potentielle.” After he came back from France, he got interested in politics. On the year of 1953, he left home and joined the government group Viet Minh’s Eastern Zone Headquarters. This group was later called the Khmer RougeOn the year 1955, Prince Nordom Sihanovk was elected as the leader of Cambodia. In the same year, Pol Pot was promoted as the leader of the Khmer Rouge. He tried …show more content…
Pol Pot believed that Cambodia could be a great country without the helps from the United States. After a long and hard series of thoughts and arguments, he decided to kill people that lived in farms or places that were far away from Phnom Penh. But it is incorrect to say that Pol Pot started the genocide because hundreds and thousands of Cambodians were captured and arrested by GR UNK. It started at 1966, when Lon Nol believed that people who disagree with their idea should be executed. “Right here in Amsterdam everyday hundreds of Jews disappear”(“The Diary Of Anne Frank” play, collections book. Page 306) The genocide caused by the Khmer Rouge is still recorded as one of the most deadliest genocide in
Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot-the leader of the Khmer Rouge followed Maoist communism, which they thought they could create an agrarian utopia. Agrarian means that the society was based on agriculture. They wanted all members of society to be rural agricultural workers and killed intellectuals, who had been depraved by western capitalist ideas. A utopia means a perfect society. This idea went to extremes when The Khmer Rouge resumed that only pure people were qualified to build the revolution. They killed Cambodians without reasons by uncivilized actions such as: cutting heads, burying alive… There were about 1.7 million people killed by the Khmer Rouge.
Evil doesn’t even begin to cover it. The mass murder of millions of people. The complete obliteration of an entire society. Each and every genocide has the same core principles, but a distinct face. A dictator takes over a weak country with promises of returning it to its former glory, once he has everyone’s support, he implements extremely discriminatory laws and finds reasons to kill anyone who dares oppose him. The Holocaust and the Cambodian genocides are remarkably similar, and yet strikingly different. The Holocaust was an attempt to wipe out all Jews and other minorities such as gypsies and handicapped people. The Cambodian genocide, led by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, was in some ways a mirror image of the Holocaust, but it happened forty-two years later. On the other hand, there are many more that one distinction that sets Cambodia apart from all other genocides.
Compared to Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot looks like the good guy! Even though both dictators were incredibly bad Hitler takes the cake for managing to kill and torture over 6 million people. On the other hand Pot wanted to make everyone work on one huge federation of collective farms. The Holocaust was an attempt by Hitler and the Nazi party to take over Europe and create a “Master Race” (“Holocaust,” “Some”). The Holocaust lasted from 1933 to 1945, when Hitler finally committed suicide in fear of being captured by American troops. This genocide took place all throughout Europe. It started in Germany and spread all the way to Great Britain. (“Some”). The Cambodian Genocide was an attempt by the Khmer Rouge to take over and centralize all Cambodian farmers (“Cambodian”). This genocide lasted from 1975 to 1978 when the Khmer rouge was finally overthrown by the Vietnamese (“Cambodian”). The Cambodian genocide happened in Cambodia, a country in south-east Asia. Khmer Rouge, started in 1960 and their leader Pot are the reason for the horrible genocide (“Cambodian”). Both Genocides are different in there own ways. The goal of the Cambodian genocide was to revert back to “year zero” and to make everyone work on a huge collection of farms. Whereas the goal of the Holocaust was to create a “master race” which ended up killing over 6 million people. These genocides are also similar in many ways, two of which are their government overthrows and who they killed.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the most controversial war the United States had ever been involved in during its rich two-hundred year history would engulf the country, ultimately leading to the collapse of a president, and the division of a nation. The Vietnam War was a military struggle fought in Vietnam and neighboring countries from 1959-1975 involving the North Vietnamese and NLF (National Liberation Front) versus the United States and the South Vietnamese ("The Vietnam..."). In 1969, newly elected President Richard M. Nixon, aiming to achieve "peace with honor" in Vietnam, began to put his "Vietnamization" policy into place -- removing the number of American military personnel in the country and transferring combat roles to the South Vietnamese ("Speeches..."). But at the same time, Nixon resumed the secret bombing of North Vietnam and launched B-52 bombing raids over Cambodia, intending to wipe out NLF and North Vietnamese base camps along the border. The intensive secret bombing, codenamed Operation Menu, lasted for four years and was intentionally concealed from the American public; meanwhile, Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia by United States troops, arguing that it was necessary to protect the security of American units. This invasion into an allegedly neutral country was cause for much protest in the States, especially on college campuses such as Kent State University, where students rioted and held walk-outs. Ultimately, the secret bombing of neutral Cambodia was deliberately conducted without the consent of Congress, violating the articles outlined in the United States Constitution, and would have been grounds for impeachment had Nixon not resigned under the cloud of the Watergate scandal in August of 1974 ("Richard M....
"Pol Pot in Cambodia 1975-1979." The History Place : Genocide in the 20th Century: Pol Pot in Cambodia 1975-1979. The History Place, n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2014. .
Saloth Sar, or better known by this alias Pol Pot, was a serial killer. 2 million people in Cambodia died in the years of 1975-1979 and Pol Pot was the reason those people lost their lives. He was the controller of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, otherwise known as the Khmer Rouge. Hélène Lambert from the University of Exeter writes, "[Pol Pot was] often described as a calm, kind, and smiling person on the outside, he was, in fact, a mass murderer." There has been many heated debates over whether or not Pol Pot was the commander for a genocide.
The Communist Party of Kampuchea, also known as the Khmer Rouge, took control of Cambodia on April 17, 1975, which lasted until January 1979. For their three-year, eight-month, and twenty-one day rule of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge committed some of the most heinous crimes in current history. The main leader who orchestrated these crimes was a man named Pol Pot. In 1962, Pol Pot had become the coordinator of the Cambodian Communist Party. The Prince of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk, did not approve of the Party and forced Pol Pot to flee to exile in the jungle. There, Pol formed a fortified resistance movement, which became known as the Khmer Rouge, and pursued a guerrilla war against Sihanouk’s government. As Pol Pot began to accumulate power, he ruthlessly imposed an extremist system to restructure Cambodia. Populations of Cambodia's inner-city districts were vacated from their homes and forced to walk into rural areas to work. All intellectuals and educated people were eradicated and together with all un-communist aspects of traditional Cambodian society. The remaining citizens were made to work as laborers in various concentration camps made up of collective farms. On these farms, people would harvest the crops to feed their camps. For every man, woman, and child it was mandatory to labor in the fields for twelve to fifteen hours each day. An estimated two million people, or twenty-one percent of Cambodia's population, lost their lives and many of these victims were brutally executed. Countless more of them died of malnourishment, fatigue, and disease. Ethnic groups such as the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cham Muslims were attacked, along with twenty other smaller groups. Fifty percent of the estimated 425,000 Chinese living in Cambod...
As a strong communist organization with aims for Cambodia that would leave the country in dire need of help, the Khmer Rouge defectively impacted the easy-going life Cambodians knew. With much determination, the Khmer Rouge was an insurgent movement of varying ideological backgrounds developed against the Lon Nol regime in 1960 (Rowat 2006). It began as a left-wing organization made up of a small group of French educated communists, but soon grew to become Cambodia?s leading and most influential political party. Following the establishment of the party, the Khmer Rouge?s revolutionary army grew rapidly, aiming to consolidate its control taking over most of the country (Dennis 1988). Their leader Pol Pot was an admirer of Maoist communism, which is where the group?s strong communist ideas originated. Pol Pot?s ideologies for the future of Cambodia were truly corrupted and powerfully triggered the downfall of the nation of Cambodia (Peace Pledge Union 2007). Pol Pot wanted to wipe out all traces of the old Cambodia and start a new society, one that was strictly ordered and structured by a series of rules. With the Khmer Rouge becoming even more powerful in the very late 1960s, US bombers interfered to st...
In the late 1980s through the 1990s, the republics of the former Yugoslavia experienced serious ethnic tensions, escalating into all-out war which resulted in some of the worst war crimes committed in Europe since World War II. In 1993, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was formed with the goal of punishing perpetrators who carried out acts of genocide and crimes against humanity in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and to prevent any such atrocities from ever occurring again. One of the most significant and high-profile trials of this tribunal was that of Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of both Serbia and the former Yugoslavia, who was accused of committing crimes against humanity, war crimes, and abuses of power and corruption. Milosevic died in 2006, and his trial was never concluded. Whether or not he would have been convicted of these crimes is a subject of debate.
Pol Pot was a frightful man that not many people know about or are aware of. We are lucky that we live in a country of such extraordinary freedom. He could have stayed in control and killed even half of the population. Pol Pot should have at least gotten punished for his wrongdoing. Pol Pot was the leader of Khmer Rouge who led his communist party to kill twenty five percent of Cambodia resulting from starvation, overwork, and executions.
The Cambodian Genocide has the historical context of the Vietnam War and the country’s own civil war. During the Vietnam War, leading up to the conflicts that would contribute to the genocide, Cambodia was used as a U.S. battleground for the Vietnam War. Cambodia would become a battle ground for American troops fighting in Vietnam for four years; the war would kill up to 750,00 Cambodians through U.S. efforts to destroy suspected North Vietnamese supply lines. This devastation would take its toll on the Cambodian peoples’ morale and would later help to contribute that conflicts that caused the Cambodian genocide. In the 1970’s the Khmer rouge guerilla movement would form. The leader of the Khmer rouge, Pol Pot was educated in France and believed in Maoist Communism. These communist ideas would become important foundations for the ideas of the genocide, and which groups would be persecuted. The genocide it’s self, would be based on Pol Pot’s ideas to bring Cambodia back to an agrarian society, starting at the year zero. His main goal was to achieve this, romanticized idea of old Cambodia, based on the ancient Cambodian ruins, with all citizens having agrarian farming lives, and being equal to each other. Due to him wanting society to be equal, and agrarian based, the victims would be those that were educated, intellectuals, professionals, and minority ethnic g...
“I know of no parallel to the conditions which have been experienced in Cambodia over the past decade to any other experience I have had. In the case of post-war Europe, there is the vast tragedy of the concentration camps . . . but thank God, the world had an immediate reaction and to this moment, there has been a sensitivity to events which happened forty years ago. But, in the case of Cambodia, for some
Vietnam was not the only country fighting for its independence. In 1953, after Cambodia won its independence from France, Prince Norodom Sihanouk became the head of state and ruler of Cambodia. The CPK was formed in 1960 from growing opposition to Sihanouk. In response, Sihanouk named the group the Khmer Rouge, to show that he was not serious about them. The word Khmer Rouge comes from the French word for red added to the language of the people (Timeline). Based in secluded forest and mountain areas in the north-east parts of the country, the group hardly gained members. Ten years later, Marshal Lon Nol, “a Cambodian politician who had previously served as prime mi...
We all know who Hitler was, but who was Stalin? Mao Zedong? Idi Amin? Pol Pot?
Settled in the end of the fifth century, two groups established themselves in what is now present day Cambodia. The Champa controlled the central and southern part of Vietnam and the Funan is the southernmost part Vietnam and present-day Cambodia. Influences from both China and India were obvious as dance and music spread throughout the area. Ruling on its own till 1864 when the French absorbed it into French Indochina Along with Laos and Vietnam. For nearly a century, the French exploited Cambodia commercially, and demanded power over politics, economics, and social life. It was not until a leader Norodom Sihanouk proclaimed Cambodia's independence in 1949 which was later granted in 1953. Cambodia fell into chaos during the 1970’s as General Lon Nol and his connections to the Khmer Rouge brought Cambodia into a genocidal age. For a decade Cambodia was surrounded by despair and carnage until the reign of the Khmer Rouge ended in 1979. Slowly rebuilding of the nation began as outside countries and organization such as the United Nation helped to get Cambodia back on its feet. Plans were made for general elections by 1993 which lead to the constitutional monarchy that the country has today. With its cyclical and oppressive history, Cambodia future is optimistic with the economy growing rapidly due to industries such as tourism, textiles, oil and the traditional farming. Slowly the nation reaches to find its place among the other powerhouses in Southeast Asia and around the world.