BBC's website carried a lead story in afternoon yesterday, on Cambodian genocide by Khmer Rouge. The report said 'The long-awaited UN-backed trial of a former Khmer Rouge leader in Cambodia has opened at a Phnom Penh court, 30 years after the murderous regime fell.
Kaing Guek Eav - better known as Duch - was head of a notorious prison camp and is accused of presiding over the murder and torture of at least 15,000 inmates.
The trial is the result of a decade of painstaking and often ill-tempered negotiations, a BBC correspondent says.'
Khmer Rouge, a Communist movement was founded by Pol Pot (Saloth Sar) during 70s in Cambodia. He was said to be forced the city people into villages to bring agrarian civilisation. But history held him responsible for death of two million people, who died from starvation, overwork and execution as the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities to send people to work on collective farms during its four years in power.
This reminds me a book written by Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father:A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers. The book shares a real story of her childhood and beginning of Pol Pot regime.
Loung's family was forced to flee to countryside with leaving everything behind except some money and clothes. I was aghast when I read the description of her family's separation, hard work, hunger and cruelty at children camps. One incident I must mention here, the family left with no food at all and in order to survive, her mother cooks earthworms which grow on deadbodies, for the siblings.
Slowly, she looses her father, brothers, sisters and mother too.Finally she and two brothers managed to escape to Vietnam, then Thailand, then finally to America.
The story was really horrible. The communist regime was criticised by her for destroying a complete generation. But I think, some part of the section, mostly weaker, always undergo such a severe pain whether the regime is communist, capitalist or even democratic. Just think of India, where 77 per cent of our population (836 million people) live on a per capita consumption of less than Rs 20 a day, (Arjun Sengupta report ). The question is how they live?
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