17145007315200 Essays - Khmer Rouge, Southeast Asia,

17145007315200 Emma Nicholas Professor Liffiton ENG 102 02 October 2016 0 Emma Nicholas Professor Liffiton ENG 102 02 October 2016 14859002743200 Khmer Rouge Gone Rogue : Cambodian Genocide Khmer Rouge Gone Rogue : Cambodian Genocide Khmer Rouge Gone Rogue Within the borders of a small Southeast Asian country of Cambodia, the majority of the residents were dealt a very bad hand. Primitively, it was agree with evil or be killed. From 1975-1978, the Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, attempted to "nationalize and centralize the peasant farming society of Cambodia virtually overnight[this] resulted in the gradual devastation of over 25% of the country's population" ( Krkljes). In less then four years twenty-five percent of a nation would be gone, wiped out, being equivalent to 70 million Americans, being one of the worst mass killings of the twentieth century. Under the dictator leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge attempted the take over of Cambodia to bring it back to the middle a ges, constraining millions of people from the city to work as slaves on communal farms. In order to understand why the events in Cambodia constitute a genocide according to the UN Resolution 260 III A, it is necessary to look at the "killing members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group" (General Assembly). Killing members of the Khmer group was a heinous crime in which millions were eliminated due to an evil process accounted by one of the fortunate survivors. To define killing, one could seek out the descriptive definition in which to apply to the Cambodian genocide, that is "to deprive of life in any manner; cause the death of to destroy or neutralize" (The Definition of Kill). The lethal revolutionary group, Khmer Rouge was brutal in recruiting people with intent to revolutionize Cambodian Society; resulting somewhere between 1.5-3 million deaths throughout the country in just three short years. The country lays host to the Killing Fields, which refer to the largest physical evidence of the genocide . These fields took place not shortly after the takeover of power by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime followers (Jarvis) . Consisting of mass graves with innocent Cambodians, their bodies lying as corpses with the ground surrounding them riddled with clothe s; t his being their callous resting place for their unlucky forced deaths. " City people were persecutednot only civil servants and military from the former regime, the elite, and professionals, but also urban workers. Some 35% of the population of the capital city o f Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, did not survive, compared to an 8% loss from the remote a nd rural northeastern provinces" (Jarvis). It was through executions, exhaustion, starvation and disease that made the enemy so effect in executing so many helpless victims. Pol Pot had quite the laundry list of many blatantly cruel methods of killing and torturing the victims that were hapless to get caught. Some of the evil ways were physical as well as they were psychological, equally monstrous . " Fo r one thing, there was a torture [killing] method where a cloth would be placed over the head, obscuring the person's eyesight and limiting the breath, and then water would be poured continuously over the cloth. This gave the feeling of drowning and it only took a few minutes before the person would succumb [to death due to drow n ing] " (Year Zero). Water , appeared to be extremely effective . " People were held upside down in water, put in boiling hot water, were splashed with boiling hot water, and so fort h [dying from third degree burns] " (Year Zero). These held as more creative' ways to individually kill victims, otherwise most were mass murdered over large graves with firearms. In one account, a fortunate survivor from all the cruel festivities came across a terror "when I went to the water well to fetch water, I found it full with floating bodies" (Cambodian Genocide: Leng Houth Personal Account). " In a way to cultivate the growth of Cambodia and also