History is Kmer Rouge

All schools and universities, pagodas and mosques, banks and
businesses were forced to close. Freedom of religion, press, private property,
speech and movement were eliminated by the Maoist-inspired Khmer Rouge.
And with the emptying of the cities came the first wave of killings. Those
associated with the previous Lon Nol regime were the first to die. Next came
the Khmer Rouge’s perceived enemies: supposed members or associates of
the US CIA, Russia’s KGB, and the Vietnamese. Later, the regime turned on
itself, seeing enemies everywhere within its own ranks and killing many of its
own.
Over the next four years, the Communist Party of Kampuchea was
directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of at least 1.7 million
Cambodians from starvation, disease, overwork, and outright execution.
Throughout history, other governments have killed large numbers of their
own people but none has approached the almost unimaginable toll exacted by
the Khmer Rouge. The Nazis, for example, killed about 6% of the people in
the parts of Europe they occupied, and Rwandans butchered 14% of their
people in 1994. In contrast, the Khmer Rouge were responsible for the deaths
of between a quarter and a third of Cambodia’s population.
Another distinguishing feature of this period of Cambodian history is
that not a single credible trial of its former leaders has ever been held.
Members of Hitler’s Nazi regime were brought to justice in the late 1940s, and
more recently, international tribunals have been held about atrocities in the
former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, East Timor, and elsewhere. But with the
exception of what have been widely regarded as “absentia trials” held by the
successor government to the
Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s
and a few cases where villagers
took justice into their own hands
after the regime fell in 1979.