While the Khmer Rouge was in power, they set up policies that ignored human life and produced massive massacres. Cambodia later became a place where nearly two million people died, including family members. The perpetrator was the Khmer Rouge. They forced around two million people in Phnom Penh and other cities into the countryside to handle agricultural work (Cambodia Tribunal Monitor). People who refused to leave, didn’t leave fast enough, and those who didn’t obey the orders were killed. Children were taken from their parents and were placed in forced labor camps. Buildings like schools, hospitals, and factories were all shut down. Professional people like lawyers, doctors, scientists, teachers were murdered along with their extended families. Religious people were also victims of this genocides like the Buddhists monks. They were killed and their temples were burned down and destroyed. Half of the Cham Muslim population were murdered and about eight thousand Christians were executed. Races like the Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, and ancestries were also victims in this genocide. The Khmer Rouge launched an organized mission: they ruthlessly imposed an extremist programme to reconstruct Cambodia on the communist model of Mao’s China (Talking About …show more content…
Rebuilding the country was difficult as there was little foreign aid and all existing infrastructure had been destroyed by Pol Pot’s regime. As a result of the genocide, PTSD (also known as post traumatic stress disorder) was very prevalent among survivors, although it largely went untreated throughout the 1900s due to lack of healthcare professionals in the country. The level of destruction imposed by the Khmer Rouge has greatly influenced to the large amounts of poverty that many the Cambodians face today (The Cambodian Genocide). Studying events from the Khmer Rouge genocide should have an influence on how we can prevent this from happening again in the future. This genocide caused terrible and horrific events that can never be removed from history. I learned so much more about what a genocide is and how much it has affected Cambodia. The importance of this was to understand the decisions and consequences that all parties had to suffer