Fifty years after the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge rebel army, the events of April 17, 1975 continue to cast a long shadow over Cambodia and its political system.Emerging from the bloodshed and chaos of the spreading war in neighbouring Vietnam, Pol Pot’s radical peasant movement rose up and defeated the United States-backed regime of General Lon Nol.
The war culminated five decades ago on Thursday, with Pol Pot’s forces sweeping into Cambodia’s capital and ordering the city’s more than two million people into the countryside with little more than the belongings they could carry.
With Cambodia’s urban centres abandoned, the Khmer Rouge embarked on rebuilding the country from “Year Zero”, transforming it into an agrarian, classless society.
In less than four years under Pol Pot’s rule, between 1.5 and three million people were dead. They would also almost wipe out Cambodia’s rich cultural history and religion.
Many Cambodians were brutally killed in the Khmer Rouge’s “killing fields”, but far more died of starvation, disease and exhaustion labouring on collective farms to build the Communist regime’s rural utopia. Advertisement
In late December 1978, Vietnam invaded alongside Cambodian defectors, toppling the Khmer Rouge from power on January 7, 1979. It is from this point onwards that popular knowledge of Cambodia’s contemporary tragic history typically ends, picking up in the mid-2000s with the start of the United Nations-backed war crimes tribunal in Phnom Penh, where former regime leaders were put on trial.
For many Cambodians, howe …