the khmer rouge regime a personal nightmare enotes

The first to die in Pol Pot’s peasant Utopia were the civil servants, soldiers and police of the defeated regime, the educated, doctors, Buddhist monks, anyone contaminated by Western influences: singers and performers. The exiled city people had to build their own shelters in the first weeks of Pol Pot’s newly named Democratic Kampuchea, a contemptuous misnomer for one of the most ruthless regimes of the 20th century. Patients were ejected from hospitals at gunpoint and those too ill to move were left to die in their beds or along the roadside in gurneys.Īllowed to taking nothing but what they could carry, the Khmer Rouge forced the entire population of Phnom Penh and other towns, into the countryside where there was little food and no medicine. “If you said one word against, you would be killed.”Įmptying the defeated capital of its exhausted, war-weary population was the first order of Pol Pot’s new regime. If we even had one tablet of medicine, she would have survived,” says Young, who is now 73. “I could only look at my daughter’s face. “I feel such pity,” Young says, recounting the heartrending events that began to unfold 40 years ago today when the Khmer Rouge took power in Phnom Penh. Everyone must toil to build Pol Pot’s agrarian society.Īlmost two million Cambodians perished, many from execution and more, like Young Soeun’s daughter, from sickness and starvation during the three years, eight months and 20 days that Pol Pot ruled this country.

Parents are unnecessary: The revolution will raise the nation’s children. This is the last day of Cambodia’s 5-year-long civil war and the first of Pol Pot’s rise to power. Hospitals can’t cope with the dying and wounded. Surrounded for months, starved of food, and shelled daily by communist Khmer Rouge rebels, the city is overflowing with more than a million refugees from the countryside. The date is April 17, 1975, and the Cambodian capital is in its death throes. Her baby would die two years later, and so would her husband and many other family members.

When she did, Young Soeun gave birth without medical care and was sent to work in a rice field soon after. Gathering her two young children, she began walking and didn’t stop for almost a month. Phnom Penh, Cambodia – Young Soeun was eight months pregnant when boy soldiers with rifles and hate in their eyes ordered her to leave home.

The khmer rouge regime a personal nightmare enotes