X-Nico

4 unusual facts about Khmer Rouge


American Assistance for Cambodia

American Assistance for Cambodia is a non-profit organization founded in 1993, by Bernard Krisher aimed at giving hope to the Cambodian people following the extermination of 2 million Cambodians during the Khmer Rouge genocide.

Dap Prampi Mesa Chokchey

Supposedly, the Khmer Rouge and/or Pol Pot himself wrote the piece, but its status remains unknown.

Khmer numbers

The Khmer Rouge also attempted to cleanse the language by removing all words which were considered politically incorrect.

United States Ambassador to Cambodia

Five days later, April 17, the government of Cambodia surrendered to the Khmer Rouge.


Al Rockoff

Al Rockoff is an American photojournalist made famous by his coverage of the Vietnam War and of the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital.

Cambodian Australian

After the fall of Phnom Penh to the communist Khmer Rouge in 1975, a few Cambodians managed to escape, but not until the Khmer Rouge was overthrown in 1979 did large waves of Cambodians began immigrating to Australia as refugees.

Damnak Chang'aeur District

In June 1994, Phnom Voar in Damnak Chang'aeur hit the international headlines as the site of the kidnapping of three westerners, Australian David Wilson, 29, Briton Mark Slater, 28, and Frenchman Jean-Michel Braquet, 27 from a train by Khmer Rouge forces led by Commander Chouk Rin.

Denise Affonço

Denise Affonço is an author who wrote about her terrible sufferings under the Khmer Rouge in a powerful memoir To The End Of Hell (La Digues Des Veuves) with an introduction by Jon Swain.

Domino theory

The fall of Cambodia had more complex causes but ultimately also resulted from the country being dragged into the Vietnam war, first by the Viet Cong who operated bases in the country and used it as part of the Ho Chi Minh trail, and then by full scale NVA attack, in conjunction with the Khmer Rouge, against the pro-U.S Lon Nol republic.

Finding Moon

He would later set the story in Southeast Asia in 1975, coinciding with the fall of Saigon, the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the beginning of the Marcos era in the Philippines.

Geoff Ryman

His novel The King's Last Song (2006) was set both in the Angkor Wat era and the time after Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

Khmer Krom

In 1976 a group of 68 "White Scarves" and their leader sought refuge in a village close to the Vietnamese border in Kiri Vong District and approached the Khmer Rouge authorities telling them to communicate their decision to Khieu Samphan.

Norodom Chantaraingsey

After the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge on April 17, 1975, Chantaraingsey is thought to have retreated with his men to the area around the former hill station of Kirirom, where he had considerable support from the local peasantry.

Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting

1976: Sydney H. Schanberg, New York Times, "for his coverage of the Communist takeover in Cambodia, carried out at great risk when he elected to stay at his post after the fall of Phnom Penh."

Reportage Press

For example, a percentage of profits from Denise Affonço's To The End Of Hell go to the Documenation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam), where a scholarship has been set up in the name of Denise Affonço's nine-year-old daughter Jeannie, who starved to death in 1976 under the Khmer Rouge regime.

Small Voices: The Stories of Cambodia's Children

After Saigonell, the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and killed 1.7 Million people in a former high school also known as S21 that also included rape, torture and a living hell.

The Burnt Theatre

While much of Cambodia's cultural heritage was eradicated through the deaths of many artists during the Khmer Rouge era, the country's main theatrical structure, Preah Suramarit National Theatre remained standing throughout the Cambodian Civil War, even occasionally being used by the communist regime for official visits and propaganda pageants.


see also

1967 war

Cambodian Civil War (1967–1975), a conflict between the communists (Khmer Rouge) and the governorment forces of Cambodia

Al Rockoff

On the morning of the city's fall, he was visiting the Preah Keth Melea hospital with New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg and Jon Swain of The Sunday Times when they were arrested by a furious company of teenage Khmer Rouge soldiers.

After several years in Vietnam, Rockoff came to the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh in the spring of 1973, when the US-backed government of Lon Nol was fighting the Khmer Rouge insurgents.

Angka

Angka, the ruling body of the Khmer Rouge (also Angkar)

Anlong Veng District

The Dângrêk Mountains were used as a base by the Khmer Rouge when they fought against the Khmer Republic led by general Lon Nol.

Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy

After Phnom Penh's residents were forced to leave by the Khmer Rouge, Bophana and Sitha were reunited, only to both be caught up in the genocidal regime's purges, in which they were arrested and taken to S21 prison, where they were tortured and forced to make confessions before they were both executed in 1976.

Sitha, disgusted by the corruption of the Lon Nol regime, joined the Communist Khmer Rouge resistance, and the couple was separated.

Cambodian genocide denial

French scholar, Jean Lacouture, formerly a sympathizer of the Khmer Rouge, reviewed Ponchaud's book favorably in the New York Times Review of Books on March 31, 1977.

Gareth Porter

This book, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, was criticized by author William Shawcross for using Khmer Rouge sources in their research.

GRUNK

By the time of the Khmer Rouge's entry into Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, the communists were firmly in control of the GRUNK, and communications with Cambodia were effectively cut off.

Command of the military was however in reality in the hands of Saloth Sar, whose existence in the Khmer Rouge's senior levels (along with that of Nuon Chea, Son Sen and Ieng Sary) was kept essentially secret.

History of Cambodia

Following an invasion by Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge were deposed and the People's Republic of Kampuchea was established.

Hou Yuon

In one version, related by a CPK cadre from Kampong Cham, Yuon was said to have been shot in August 1975 by a group of Khmer Rouge soldiers after he sympathetically addressed a group of evacuees at Prek Por, Srey Santhor District, and his body thrown into the Mekong.

Joseph Chhmar Salas

Salas became the head, but he was sent by the Khmer Rouge Regime to a rice field in Kompong Thom.

Khmer National Navy

That same month at the Battle of Oudong, the MNK carried out its second large-scale amphibious assault, Operation ‘Castor 50’, during which another task-force of assault landing crafts was ferried up the Tonle Sap river to retake Oudong, the capital of Oudong Meanchey Province from the Khmer Rouge, who were waiting for them at the predicted landing site with B-40 rocket launchers and 75mm recoilless rifles.

Killing caves of Phnom Sampeau

Remnants of war artillery (of the government forces) are seen there, oriented towards Phnom Krapau (Crocodile Mountain), which was the strategic location of the Khmer Rouge during the war.

Lili Damita

During the Cambodian Civil War (Khmer Rouge Reign), her son Sean Flynn was working as a freelance photo journalist under contract to Time magazine when he and fellow journalist Dana Stone went missing on the road south of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on April 6, 1970.

Malcolm Caldwell

In December 1978, along with Elizabeth Becker and Richard Dudman, Caldwell was a member of the first group of Western journalists and writers invited to visit Cambodia since the Khmer Rouge had taken power in April 1975.

Narath Tan

In 1978, following Khmer Rouge tension with Vietnam, Tan, who had been living in nearby Prey Veng province, was sent away to Pursat, in the west of the country.

Noise Fest

This included the music of John Rehnberger, Off Beach, Ut, Lee Ranaldo, Mofungo, Khmer Rouge, The Problem, Smoking Section, Sonic Youth, Jeff Lohn, Ima, Jules Baptiste Red Decade, EQ'D, Avant Squares, Don King, Primivites, Ad Hoc Rock, Y Pants, Barbotemagus (as it is spelled on the cover), Economical Animal, Chinese Puzzle, Glorious Strangers, Built On Guilt, Fakir, Lampshades.

Phnom Malai

Refugees from refugee camps in Aranyaprathet, Thailand, were forcefully sent back across the border in 1980 to areas under Khmer Rouge control and many of them ended up in Phnom Malai.

Sihanouk Trail

In the new Year Zero, the Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of Pol Pot, began its descent into mass murder and auto-genocide.

Sisowath Sirik Matak

On April 12, 1975, United States's Ambassador to Cambodia John Gunther Dean, offered high officials of the Khmer Republic political asylum in the United States, but Sirik Matak, Long Boret and Lon Non, along with other members of Lon Nol's cabinet, declined - despite the names of Boret and Sirik Matak being published by the Khmer Rouge in a list of "Seven Traitors" marked down for execution.

Theary Seng

The game featured former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, which brought attention to asserted American guilt in bringing the Khmer Rouge to power after the bombing.

Tôn Đức Thắng

By January 7, 1979, the Vietnamese had easily captured the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, and deposed the Khmer Rouge régime.