Khmer Rouge Legacy

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Crossing the border from Thailand into Cambodia you could immediately see the impact that the Khmer Rouge had on this wonderful country. Men hopping around on one leg, or on a bike that they have to pedal with their arms. Throughout the country you see people who have lost limbs to landmines. There are still over 6 million unexploded landmines laying around the countryside.
I've heard my father talk a lot about the Pol Pot regime that took control of the country in the 70's. It tried to reduce the country to a completely agrarian society, one in which everyone worked the land for the good of the land. Hence intellectuals were seen as a threat and duly executed. Men and women were simply murdered for being teachers, mechanics, Dr.s ect. It got worse and worse and soon men, women and children were being murdered from any walk of life. He literally made people leave all the major cities and towns and marched them into the fields.
We went to Tuol Sleng or S21 as it is sometimes called. It was a prison camp where the Khmer Rouge tortured confessions out of innocent people. It was such a bizarre feeling stepping inside these rooms where people were tortured and murdered. Crazy.
I also went to the Killing Fields outside of Phnon Penh, where about 20 000 people were exterminated and dumped into mass graves. This is the biggest such killing field but there are many scattered throughout the country. They have a memorial in the middle of it with thousands of skulls placed in glass cabinets reaching up to the sky. You can see how some have been bashed in, the reason being that they did not want to waste precious bullets and hence bludgeoned them to death. You can still see their clothes laying stuck in the ground as well as their teeth and bones scattered about. 46 mass graves in this Killing Field have still yet to be exhumed. I was talking to a guy there and he was telling me that the Cambodian govt. has only now allowed the UN to look into the genocide that the Khmer Rouge inflicted. So strange. Pol Pot himself was never tried or brought to justice for what he did, ended up dying in 1998 under house arrest. It makes no sense really. Very sad it all is

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