I would like to emphasize that the Khmer Rouge Communist Party of Kampuchea Cambodia was INFLUENCED and INSPIRED by The Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx aka MARXISM!
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The Khmer Rouge (Khmer: “Khmer Krahom” in Khmer) literally translated as Red Cambodians was the name given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, who were the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, led by Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen and Khieu Samphan. Democratic Kampuchea was the name of the state as controlled by the government of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979.
Khmer Rouge means Communist Cambodians. 'Rouge' comes from the French word for red, which is a symbol of communism. Khmer means people from the Cambodian region. This was another name for the Communist Party of Kampuchea that was given by the former King Sihanouk. The organization began in January 1968 as the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea and was changed thirteen years later to Party of Democratic Kampuchea.
This organization is remembered primarily for its policy of social engineering, which resulted in genocide. Its attempts at agricultural reform led to widespread famine, while its insistence on absolute self-sufficiency, even in the supply of medicine, led to the deaths of thousands from treatable diseases (such as malaria). Arbitrary executions and torture carried out by its cadres against perceived subversive elements, or during purges of its own ranks between 1975 and 1978, are considered to have constituted a genocide.
The Khmer Rouge reached Phnom Penh and took power in 1975. The regime, led by Pol Pot, changed the official name of the country to Democratic Kampuchea. They immediately evacuated the cities and sent the entire population on forced marches to rural work projects. They attempted to rebuild the country's agriculture on the model of the 11th century, discarded Western medicine, and destroyed temples, libraries, and anything considered Western. At least a million Cambodians, out of a total population of 8 million, died from executions, overwork, starvation and disease.
Estimates as to how many people were killed by the Khmer Rouge regime range from approximately one to three million; the most commonly cited figure is two million (about one-third of the population). This era gave rise to the term Killing Fields, and the prison Tuol Sleng became notorious for its history of mass killing. Hundreds of thousands fled across the border into neighbouring Thailand. The regime disproportionately targeted ethnic minority groups. The Cham Muslims suffered serious purges with as much as half of their population exterminated. [source: wikipedia]
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The Telegraph UK
written by By Simon Lewis in Phnom Penh
Monday December 5, 2011
The former "Brother Number Two" of the Khmer Rouge, under whom up to two million people died in Cambodia in the 1970s, has claimed his party were not "bad people", in evidence at a UN backed tribunal.
Monday saw the first day of evidence in the trial of three former leaders of the communist movement that ruled the South East Asian state between 1975 and 1979.
Nuon Chea, 85, who was second in command in the Khmer Rouge, said: "I don't want the next generation to misunderstand history. I don't want them to believe the Khmer Rouge is bad people, are criminal. Nothing is true about that."
The comment came as part of a protracted history lesson to the students, monks and victims who gathered at a specially built courthouse on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital.
In a speech lasting more than an hour Nuon Chea, laid the blame for the war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity, with Cambodia's neighbour Vietnam.
In the years preceding the Khmer Rouge's "liberation" of Phnom Penh in April 1975, Nuon Chea, who denies the charges, said the Vietnamese operated a "puppet" movement posing as a Cambodian-led communist party.
He went on to play on historic animosity between Cambodia and Vietnam.
"How many Vietnamese people are now in Cambodia, both legal and illegal? If you don't protect the country, the country will be gone."
Nuon Chea, replacing his trademark sunglasses with reading glasses, took his time and often failed to answer questions by the judge.
Fellow defendants, former head of state Khieu Samphan and former foreign minister Ieng Sary, sat slumped in their chairs most of the day at the court.
Nuon Chea also spoke of a radicalising experience in Thailand, where he worked for the Thai Foreign Ministry in the late 1940s.
"Injustice was everywhere" in Thailand, he said.
He said was privy to reports coming out of Cambodia at the time. "I observed ... the shooting of Cambodian people by the French [colonial rulers] ... I was heartbroken and I started my resistance."
Chum Sirath, of the group Ksaem Ksan, or the Victims Association of Democratic Kampuchea, said Nuon Chea's strategy was "shrewd".
He said: "He mixes historic truths such as the suffering of the people during French colonialist era, the expansionist policy of neighbouring countries detrimental to Cambodia, with lies about the crimes committed during his regime: deportations of populations, concentration camps, forced marriages, detention and torture centres and so on, saying all was perpetrated by Vietnamese agents."
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