Cambodian+Genocide.+ild

== =The Reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.=

//"The **Khmer Rouge period** (1975–1979) refers to the rule of Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Khieu Samphan and the Khmer Rouge Communist party over Cambodia, which the Khmer Rouge renamed as Democratic Kampuchea.// //The four-year period saw the deaths of approximately 2 million Cambodians through the combined result of political executions, starvation, and forced labour. Due to the large numbers, the deaths during the rule of the Khmer Rouge are often considered a genocide, and commonly known as the **Cambodian Holocaust** or **Cambodian Genocide**. The Khmer Rouge period ended with the invasion of Cambodia by neighbour and former ally Vietnam in the Cambodian–Vietnamese War, which left Cambodia under Vietnamese occupation for a decade."// -[]

Up to the 1975 communist victory, Saloth Sar, better know as Pol Pot, was Prime Minister and had gained control of many aspects of the CPK (Communist Parties of Kampuchea) and the state hierarchies, and his associates had become part of his political bureau and together they basically controlled the Central Committee. On April 17, 1975 The Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, bringing about a new constitution on January 5, 1976 officially changing the name of the country to Democratic Kampuchea, and on April the 11th to the 13th, a new government was made, Pol Pot being Prime Minister.

After the fall of Phnom Penh, Year Zero was implemented, evacuating all of Phnom Penh and all other captured cities and towns with the excuse that America had been bombing the surrounding areas and that for their own safety, they had to comply. The first evacuations began around 1968 in the Ratanikiri area, moving the towns people further into khmer rouge territories to better control them, but from 1971-1973 things were a bit different, Pol Pot did not like the ways that "His People" were living, with their ways and trends, so when everything else failed to cease these actions, a complete evacuation to the countryside was initiated. 1976, people were re-classified, no longer were people treated as a whole, but class systems were put in place. The three classes were: Full rights people, Candidates, and depositees, The depositees consisting of most of the people that came from the cities as evacuees, this class of people were marked for destruction and their rations were reduced to near nothing, leading to widespread starvation. The Khmer Rouge declared over the government controlled radio that they only needed a select amount of people to start their new utopian communist society, and that for all others, as the rouge put it, "To keep you is no benefit, To destroy you is no loss.."

Hundreds of thousands of new arrivals and depositees were then taken in shackles out to fields where they were to dig their own mass graves. After these graves were dug, The khmer rouge soldiers either beat them to death or they buried these people alive. These graves were later reffered to as the "Killing Fields", the rouge ordered that bullets were not to be wasted in this ordeal. The khmer rouge also classified their victims by ethnicity and race, some of the people who were classified are as follows: Buddhist monks, Muslims, Christians, Western-educated intellectuals, educated people in general, people who had contact with Western countries or with Vietnam, disabled people, and the ethnic Chinese, Laotians and Vietnamese. They banned all religion and dispersed minority groups, forbidding them to speak their languages or to practice their beliefs and customs. Some were put in the S-21 camp for interrogation involving torture in cases where a confession was useful to the government. Many others were summarily executed. Confessions forced at S-21 were extracted from prisoners through such methods as raising prisoners by their arms tied behind and dislocating shoulders, removing toenails with pliers, suffocating a prisoner repeatedly, and skinning a person while alive. Millions died of starvation, Murder, Torture, and brutal government-inflicted overwork in the countryside. To the Khmer Rouge, outside aid went against their principle of national self-reliance.

US officials had predicted that more than one million people would be killed by the Khmer Rouge if they took power, and President Gerald Ford had warned of "an unbelievable horror story."Different estimates as to the number killed by the Khmer Rouge regime vary from 750,000 to over three million. Analysis of 20,000 mass grave sites by the DC-Cam Mapping Program and Yale University indicate at least 1,386,734 victims. Estimates of the total number of deaths resulting from Khmer Rouge policies, including disease and starvation, range from 1.7 to 2.5 million out of a population of around 8 million.Credible Western and Eastern sources put the death toll inflicted by the Khmer Rouge at 1.7 million. A specific source, such as a figure of 3 million deaths between 1975 and 1979, was given by the People's Republic of Kampuchea. François Ponchaud suggested 2.3 million, R.J. Rummel 2.4 million (counting democide in the civil wars), the Yale Cambodian Genocide Project 1.7 million, and Amnesty International 1.4 million. Demographer Marek Sliwinski concluded that at least 1.8 million were killed from 1975-9 on the basis of the total population decline, compared to roughly 40,000 killed by the US bombing.Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching some 20,000 grave sites, he concludes that, "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution." Execution is believed to have accounted for about 30-50% of the death toll. This would indicate 2.5 to 3 million deaths, but normal mortality over this period would have accounted for about 500,000 deaths

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