Genocide in Cambodia

[Name of the Institute]

Genocide in Cambodia

Introduction

Cambodia is a country located in Southeast Asia and shares borders with the Gulf of Thailand, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. The country has a history of one of the biggest and cruelest genocide of the 19th century. The Cambodian genocide was executed by the Khmer Rouge regime, the political party that ruled the so-called Maoist ideology Democratic Kampuchea between 1975 and 1979, with an extremist conception of revolution. During the time of the Khmer Rouge government vanished two to three million people. The time of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975 - 1979), is the subject of study, discussion and research. The speech called Democratic Party of Cambodia (DC) is known as the Khmer Rouge to inaugurate his regime in April 1975 in Phnom Penh was that two thousand years of history of the country had done to start a new era (Cambodia Year zero) (Chandler, 1996). Under this perspective, absolutely everything that represented the last decreed was to disappear: the currency, market, education, ways of dressing, religion, books, which come from abroad, traditional forms of government, family and all the other things that were declared things of feudalism.According to David Chandler (2008), no other government in the country's history had been so radical and had so many changes in such short a time.

The Background

After gaining independence from France and joining the UN in 1953, Cambodia's new government, a constitutional monarchy, was led by King Norodom Sihanouk until 1970, when it was overthrown by Lon Nol. Following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from both South Vietnam and Cambodia, Phnom Penh was established in the regime of Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, who would lead the country until October 1979. Pol Pot was actually named Saloth Sar was born on May 19, 1928 in the village of Prek Cambodian Sbauv, within a family of peasants. In 1949, just turned 21 and thanks to the contacts of his brother in the palace, Saloth Sar received a scholarship to study in Paris radioelectricity. There, the student came into contact with Marxist-Leninist theories. His interest in politics shifted everything else, and together with other compatriots founded the Circle of Communist Studies. It was at this time that he met what would be his first wife, Kieu Ponnary (Bardacke, 1996).

In 1953, Saloth returned to Cambodia a few months before the country gained independence from France in 1954. For a time he worked as a teacher of French language and literature, but his main activity was the one developed in the underground Communist Party. Still reading the theorists of Marxism and reorganizing their own ideas about private property, the class struggle and the poison of capitalism. A trip to China in 1965, where he could learn about the phenomenon of the Cultural Revolution and Maoist plans of the "leap forward", convinced him that something was possible also in Cambodia. Of course, the Cambodian perfected to the extent the Chinese project. An army ready to start guerrilla warfare which ...