Khmer Rouge Atrocities
Goddess Ganga’s Mother of Water,
the great Mekong River
flows through the Kingdom of Cambodia.
The former Kampuchea borders Thailand, Laos and Vietnam.
It was once a powerful Buddhist Khmer empire
that between the 11th and 14th century ruled
most of the Indochinese Peninsula.
On its red background, between two horizontal blue stripes,
the Khmer national flag displays a stylized image of Angkor,
the magnificent ancient temple complex,
a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The temple ruins are located amid forests and farms
at Tonle Sap, the Great Lake.
The people of Cambodia take stately pride in Angkor,
as a lofty symbol of Khmer nationhood and identity,
In the 20th century Cambodia underwent turbulent changes
and during the Vietnam War the Americans bombed
and invaded the country.
In the 1970s the Maoist Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge
attempted to turn Cambodia into a classless peasant society
by forcing the urban population to move from the cities
to agricultural communities.
Similarly to Mao, Pot Pol saw farmers as the base of
the working class proletariat.
The dictator persecuted teachers, lawyers, doctors
and everyone else with a university education.
Also, the anti-colonialist ideology of the Communist regime
led to the arrest and torture of those who visited another country,
or spoke foreign languages.
The Khmer Rouge had classified these people as class enemies.
Pot Pol abolished money, closed banks,
schools and hospitals and ordered to burn the books.
After all Mao, too, believed that the more books you read,
the more stupid you become.
The Khmer Rouge also tried to extirpate western medicine
and substitute it for traditional peasant medicine.
The Communist revolution in Cambodia
led not only to terrible bloodshed and suffering,
but also involved some very bizarre specificities.
[...] Read more
poem by Paul Hartal
Added by Poetry Lover
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