The Killing Fields: His Version

We had a speaker on campus who was a survivor of the killing fields. He talked to us about his experiences when he was there and how he got through the years and the totalitarian rule of the Khmer Rouge.

He started off the session with a brief summary of the events that led to the uprising of the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide. Then, he followed up by sharing his experiences: how he would go to school always having the fear that American B-52 bombers might bomb his part of town, how he had the fear that he would not see his parents after returning from school. After the Khmer Rouge got power, he was taken to a concentration camp, and he described the long walks as horrible and too much for anyone to comprehend. Patients were taken out of their beds and made to walk, children died on the road, women gave birth in the middle of the road. And when they finally reached the concentration camps, they were forced into labour and given only a handful of rice daily. Most people died there because of malnutrition. But, the main reason for death was the Khmer Rouge troops. They killed because they didn’t like the person, or because the person was working slow. They had total power there and as a consequence,the genocide went on for 4 years.

The shocking thing I found out from his talk was that the genocide quelled because the North Vietnamese came into Cambodia and fought against the Khmer Rouge. The world had known of this genocide, which had been going on for four years and the whole world simply ignored it. The U.N. had vowed “never again” to any genocide. Still, they did nothing.

When the speaker finally fled from the concentration camp and reached neighboring Thailand, he saw signs of the international community in the form of UNHCR camps.

If the UN had taken quick action to stop the genocide, it would definitely had been stopped. The Cambodian genocide can be taken as a correlation to the Darfur genocide going on right now, in our time. The international community did not give its full attention to Cambodia, so countless lives were lost from the human society. In the present context, we all are aware of the genocide in Darfur. Even if the Sudanese government does not want negotiations to end the genocide, every effort, every resource should be utilized to save lives there no matter what, even if it means deploying the UN troops and sweeping out the current inhumane Sudanese government.