I met with some of the survivors who survived the Pol Pot massacres by playing dead after being wounded. Also visited the prison in Phnom Penh as saw the pictures of all the executed political prisoners.
Pol Pot executed the entire family if one family member opposed him.
Hard to believe that this happened in 1975 to 1979. I have friends that were shot in Cambodia during the Vietnam War and an uncle that worked in Cambodia for the CIA in the 1950’s. I spent some time there in 2020 to better understand what happened. Traveled down the Mekong River from up near the Laos/China border by boat, sleeping in thatched huts.
Was quite an eye opening experience.
The highlight of the trip was meeting up with Thich Nhat Hanh in Vietnam, our last meeting before he died.
Delayed Justice: How US Actions Paved the Way for the Khmer Rouge and Prevented Justice in Cambodia
Casey Elmhirst
HIST-498 Advanced Research Thesis
May 2, 2023
Excerpt from the thesis:
“The US had a singular focus on restricting and containing communism and, therefore, saw sending special forces to train the Khmer Rouge as a countermeasure against Vietnamese communism but, in
truth, this negatively affected Cambodian civilians. The Khmer Rouge were able to enact genocide on such a large scale in part because of this special training, and while the US surely did not intend for this, the Cambodians were seen as expendable and the US did nothing to remedy the consequences of their actions.
This thesis will address the reasons as to why the United States contributed and escalated the Cambodian genocide for their own gain, hindered justice being realized following the Cambodian genocide, and supported Khmer Rouge leadership because of their common enemy of Vietnam. This thesis is grounded in recently released top secret correspondence from the Digital National Security Archive, and this reveals the US government’s entangled involvement in the Cambodian conflict. The Digital National Security Archives provides access to declassified government documents and offers insights into the inner workings of US foreign policy during the Cold War era. The use of DNSA to demonstrate how US politicians hid their actions in Cambodia from the US public is crucial, as it provides a comprehensive and factual account of the events that transpired, free from biased or incomplete narratives. While the Khmer Rouge regime is widely recognized as the primary perpetrators of this atrocity, the United States’ played a secondary role in perpetuating genocidal conditions.”