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Documentary "Mekong, the river of nine dragons" [ Ссылка ]
In 1975, Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot, plunged his country into the most profound hell. While neighbouring Vietnam was fighting a bloody struggle against the American invader, Pol Pot founded the clandestine Kampuchea Workers Party, a movement first planned in the 1950s in the classrooms of the Sorbonne university in Paris, where Pol Pot had been given a grant to study.
In 1965, on a visit to China at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot discovered radical politics. A peasant revolt marked the beginning of a declaration of armed struggle, but Pol Pot and his army of Khmers Rouges did not develop their vision of a revolutionary society until they had succeeded in gaining absolute power.
Events speeded up as the war against the Americans in Vietnam escalated. The coup d'état by general Lon Nol, and the proclamation of the Khmer Republic unleashed civil war. Five years later, in April 1975, the Khmers Rouges succeeded in conquering the capital, Phnom Penh.
The population, weary of war, welcomed the victors as heroes bringing peace. But what they could never have imagined was that that very same day a nightmare had begun, and would continue for four long years.The worst was yet to come.
Immediately, massive evacuation from the capital began, and the population was interned in communes, made to do forced labour.
All basic rights were abolished, and the most absolute reign of terror began. Pol Pot, Big Brother number one, was finally able to put into practice what he had so long dreamt of ; "The intellectuals must learn from the young, illiterate peasants."
Anyone who had received secondary education was condemned to be executed. Wearing glasses, and not having calluses on your hands made you a candidate for death. 90% of doctors were killed. Babies were murdered by throwing them against the trees and, using hoes in order to save ammunition, thousands of Cambodians were wiped out.
The fields of Cambodia were soon strewn with dead bodies in a holocaust comparable to that of Hitler or Stalin, and which cost the lives of two million people that is, a third of the population. Toul Kork, a suburb of Phnom Penh, was the place chosen to bury over twenty thousand victims. Today, we can still see the mass graves of the most horrific, blood-curdling place in south east Asia.
The Democratic Régime of Kampuchea converted the Tuol Svary catholic school into the main detention and interrogation centre of the political police. Known as S-21, it remains the greatest symbol of Pol Pot's reign of terror. In order to stop the torture, prisoners had to declare themselves guilty of one of three basic accusations: either they were agents of the CIA, the KGB or the Vietnamese secret services. Daily, they were subjected to such brutal punishment that many of them simply could no longer bear it, and took their own lives, throwing themselves from the upper floors. To avoid these suicides, the Khmers Rouges put barbed wire around the walls of the entire building.
On the fifteenth of April, 1998, Pol Pot died at the age of 70, in a small shack in the jungle of Thailand, where he had taken refuge along with the last Khmers Rouges. His death came at a very opportune moment. Bill Clinton had begun legal proceedings to have him captured brought to trial.
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