Cambodia - Phnom Pehn

Cambodia - friendly people - smiling all over the country. We arrived in Phnom Pehn, crossing the boarder from Vietnam to Cambodia by Bus. 

  Cambodia became a protectorate of France in the 19th century, being ruled as part of French Indochina.

 It became an independent kingdom in 1953 under Norodom Sihanouk. The Vietnam War extended into Cambodia, giving rise to the Khmer Rouge, which took Phnom Penh in 1975 and carried out a campaign of mass killing. Over 2 million people were killed without reasons (population in that time was around 8 million) including women and babys. Pol Pot wanted a communist population without any good educated people and other ideas.The Khmer Rouge regime arrested and eventually executed almost everyone suspected of connections with the former government or with foreign governments, as well as professionals and intellectuals. Ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Thai, ethnic Chinese, ethnic Cham, Cambodian Christians, and the Buddhist monkhood were the demographic targets of persecution. As a result, Pol Pot is sometimes described as "the Hitler of Cambodia" and "a genocidal tyrant.  We always just speak about Hitler in Europe, but actually this kind of person you can find in other histories too and it is so sad and shocking to see what a human can do - incredible. 

 You walk through the killing fields in Phnom pehn and you can still see bons and cloths laying around. (With rain and earth moving they come visible)  The government pick them up every month. You really can imagen the graves with dead bodies. Some of them have been opened to expose them in the memorial in the middle of the area. Also the prison S21 where people were killed and hurt is just incredible sad.

The whole world didn't notice this crime until years later. Following an invasion by Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge were deposed and the People's Republic of Kampuchea was established. After years of isolation, the war-ravaged nation was reunited under the monarchy in 1993 and has seen rapid economic progress while rebuilding from decades of civil war.