It began around 1985 with at first one training team going out from the SAS Regiment in Hereford to the Thai-Cambodian border to begin what became a series of training courses, seminars ... for the Khmer Rouge ... The British are still involved in supplying those sort of the mines, yes. Simon O’Dwyer-Russell, diplomatic correspondent Sunday Telegraph
It’s hard to comprehend the level of the military misfits who took over Cambodia. Brian Barron, BBC south-east Asia correspondent
The more reasonable ones in the Khmer Rouge will have to play some part in a future government. Margaret Thatcher, to minister of Khmer Rouge
No form of British assistance, military or otherwise, has been, or will be, given to the Khmer Rouge. Margaret Thatcher, letter
The Great Act of Genocide in the modern period is Pol Pot from 1975 through 1978. Professor Noam Chomsky
Even such atrocities as the slaughter in Cambodia that the US conducted and presided over in the early 1970s have faded quietly away. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy
In the parallel case of the Khmer Rouge, in contrast, we documented a record of deceit that would have impressed Stalin, including massive fabrication of evidence. ibid.
The Decade of the Genocide – the one independent government investigation of the horrors of Cambodia by the government of Finland – The Decade of the Genocide: decade, because it started in 1969 with the US bombing began, continued in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took over and ended in 1979 when they were kicked out by the Vietnamese. Noam Chomsky with Christopher Hitchens, University of the District of Columbia December 1995, US Foreign Policy, Youtube 1.54.14
The Cambodian Blood Bath And The Great Silence. News Watch article
Three to four million people fell into a deep, black, echoless hole. Wall Street Journal article
Communist guerrillas of the Khmer Rouge seized Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh on the 17th April. Immediately they began a bloody revenge on their opponents. The Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot announced that Cambodia was to be saved from Western decadence by being turned back into an agrarian society. Over the next four years a nightmare experiment to create a workers’ utopia was to be conduction on the Cambodian people. Their cities and towns were emptied and left to decay. The population was herded to forced labour in the fields. Thousands were to die of malnutrition and brutal treatment. The country was cut off from the outside world. Great Crimes & Trials: Pol Pot & the Killing Fields of Cambodia
Out in the countryside the population was forced to work in the fields for eighteen hours a day on minimal rations. The camps became vast killing fields with the weak dying of malnutrition and brutal treatment. Thousands of others were taken away for execution as class traitors or subversives. ibid.
The US government insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed ... the US preferred that the Khmer Rouge operation benefit from the credibility of an internationally known relief operation. Linda Mason & Roger Brown, relief workers
If our assistance, our overt and our covert assistance, is successful it will have the direct result of returning the Khmer Rouge the power ... The United States policy is simply an obscenity. Chester Atkins, Congressman
The people of Cambodia say they have a real Tarzan living in their jungles ... An ape-like wild man. Destination Truth s2e3, Discovery 2008
Visitors to the hallowed Angkor Wat temple have reported countless paranormal encounters. Destination Truth s4e2, Discovery 2009
It was President Richard Nixon who finally approved the sending of American troops into Cambodia on 1st May 1970. Secrets of War: Vietnam s1e22: Hidden in Plain Sight, 2009
Between March 1969 and May 1970 over 3,000 raids were flown across the Cambodian frontier … hundreds of thousands of civilians lost their lives. Secrets of War s1e58: Cold War: Nixon’s Secrets
Stacey’s going to Cambodia to investigate how thousands of young girls are being sold into sexual slavery. She discovers how young girls are often betrayed by those they trust most: their families. Stacey Dooley: Sex Trafficking in Cambodia, BBC 2010
It is thought that around a third of the estimated 100,000 sex workers in Cambodia are under the age of 18. ibid.
‘Ten dollars up to thirty.’ ibid.
As criminals blaze trails into Cambodia’s most remote mountains, little by little the forest is being devoured from this inside out. And all to help satisfy the global demand for this little pill. Vanguard: Forest of Ecstasy, 2009
A substance called safrole oil … ‘Safrole oil can produce ecstasy.’ ibid.
The carcinogenic waste products end up polluting the water. ibid.
These factories are run by Vietnamese crime syndicates. ibid.
Angkor Wat, Cambodia: A man who believes these temples are home to his ancestral spirits risks his life to save them from the jungle … This vast complex of over seventy temples was once part of an ancient mega-city. Sacred Wonders s1e1, BBC 2019
In the early 1970s a single-minded revolutionary lay concealed in the Cambodian jungle. As American bombs exploded around him, he remained obsessed with his secret plan to destroy his own culture in the name of utopia. Paranoid, he sought enemies everywhere. He turned Cambodia into a hell on Earth, and the name Pol Pot became synonymous with mass murder. In building his perfect society, his regime wreaked chaos. Two million people died: nearly one in every four Cambodians. History’s Most Hated s1e7: Pol Pot, 2017
Pol Pot returned to the jungle inspired by Mao’s revolution but convinced he could do even better. He began planning the most extreme social experiment of the twentieth century: to restore Cambodia’s greatness he felt he needed to eliminate all traces of the modern world; he regarded cities as evil and vowed to force the residents into the countryside to build an agrarian society. ibid.
Anyone with an education posed a threat, so Pol Pot began rounding up monks, artists and intellectuals … and buried in mass graves. ibid.
Pol Pot became increasingly paranoid. ibid.
Saturday will be the 100th birthday of Henry Kissinger … A damning new investigation by The Intercept on the US’ bombing of Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians that Kissinger authorised during the US war in Vietnam. Kissinger at 100: New War Crimes, Democracy Now 2023