Cambodia

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Cambodia is a country in Southeast Asia, notable mostly for being the home of some spectacular ruins (Angkor Wat) and some bloodthirsty assholes (Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge) who managed to kill 20 to 50 percent of the population of the country in less than five years.

Contents

[edit] Short history lesson

Cambodia was colonised by the French in the 19th century, and granted independence in 1954. There followed a gradual decline until the 1970s, when Lon Nol's right-wing Junta ruled. This unpleasant episode was followed by the Khmer Rouge regime of mass murder which killed one in seven Cambodians. Finally Vietnam invaded and drove Pol Pot and his forces out of the capital and into the jungle. Gradually order was restored, and in the 1990s most of the Khmer Rouge leadership (with the notable exception for Pol Pot) was charged under an international tribunal which dragged on for more than a decade, eventually failing to convict all but one of the defendants[1].

[edit] Complicity in the killing fields

Multiple states, decision-makers and ideologies were complicit in the genocide. [2]

First, the example of ethnic cleansing and genocide was provided by the rightist Lon Nol military regime which was placed in power by the United States. It expelled some 320,000 of the 400,000 ethnic Vietnamese living in Cambodia and conducted massacres of tens of thousands of others, all before the Khmer Rouge took power.
Second, the Khmer Rouge were initially armed by North Vietnam, whose leaders and government professed an orthodox Soviet style Marxism-Leninism. They sought to influence events in Cambodia for the same geopolitical reasons that they supported an orthodox Marxist-Leninist insurgency in Laos. The North Vietnamese ultimately redeemed themselves somewhat by putting an end to the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979.
Third, the United States conducted massive aerial bombardment of eastern Cambodia, killing many Cambodian peasants and driving the angry survivors into the waiting arms of the Khmer Rouge. For 1973 alone, 257,465 tons of explosives were dropped. That is approximately one-half the amount dropped on Japan by the U.S. during its entire aerial bombardment in the entire Second World War. In effect, the United States created the essential pool of political supporters and military recruits without whom the Khmer Rouge could not have committed genocide on such a large scale.
Fourth, the Khmer Rouge leaders were motivated by a mixture of Khmer nationalism (largely a French colonial construct) and Marxism-Leninism-Maoism Zedong Thought, itself the vehicle for Chinese nationalism.
Fifth, the People's Republic of China supported the Khmer Rouge with arms and economic aid after they took power in 1976.

So the list of states, leaders and ideas that may be blamed for the Cambodian Genocide is long.

[edit] Angkor "dinosaur"

As evidence that humans and dinosaurs existed simultaneously, and that therefore the earth could be young, creationists present a carving found among the ruins near Siem Reap in Cambodia that they claim is of a stegosaurus. Answers in Genesis has concluded, "That means that only a little over 800 years ago, some dinosaurs were likely still living in the region of Cambodia!" They also assert that "we know from Genesis 1 that land animals (such as dinosaurs) and humans were living together in the beginning, and that representatives of the land animals (e.g., dinosaurs) were saved on the Ark to repopulate the earth after the Flood only 4,300 years ago."[3] The drawing, of course, depicts something else entirely: among other things, the "stegosaurus" is shown as having long ears. In reality, it is either a drawing of a modern animal such as a rhinoceros, or a modern hoax.[4]

[edit] Footnotes

  1. [1]
  2. BBC News- Cambodia Profile -Timeline, A timeline of events.
  3. Cole, Kenneth E. (Jan. 15, 2007). "Evidence of dinosaurs at Angkor." Answers in Genesis.
  4. "Stegosaurus, Rhinoceros, or Hoax?" at Smithsonianmag.com "http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dinosaur/2009/03/stegosaurus-rhinoceros-hoax/"
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