Who was the target of the Cambodian genocide in the 1970's?

Answer 1

Any Cambodian who was perceived as being against the Khmer Rouge.

It was pretty much a vicious totalitarian government destroying it's own people.

Answer 2

The US-backed Khmer Rouge murdered 1.5 million ethnic Vietnamese living in Cambodia. Kissinger advocated the support of Pol Pot in order to play them against the Vietnamese. The US is directly responsible for the war between Cambodia and Vietnam (the Third Indochina War), and Pol Pot's genocide. The target were the Vietnamese, of whom 4M were killed in the Second Indochina War by the US.

Answer 3

The Khmer Rouge got here to ability by way of Richard Nixon's bombings of Cambodia (for the period of his idiotic escalation of the Vietnam conflict in the call of "ending" it). They were the most murderous of the communist regimes (and pondering the atrocities dedicated with assistance from the Stalinists and Maoists, between others, it extremely is putting forward something). They murdered anybody whom they considered to be "bourgeois," which blanketed those who did not opt to wasteland the cities to be slaves of the Khmer Rouge in the rural parts of Cambodia.

Answer 4

Everyone who opposed the political party, Khmer Rouge. Killing Fields was an excellent film on this subject.

Answer 5

Anybody who had an education, was studying or teaching. Keep the people ignorant and they are easier to control. Every right wing government knows and employs this practice.

Answer 6

The target was those deemed as "unsympathic" or "adversarial" to Pol Pot and his regime. However, the methods he employed to "curb" the spread of this involved everyone in the country. Additionally, it wasn't just Cambodians who suffered at Pol Pot's hands. Villagers living in Thailand, Laos, and especially Vietnam suffered serious atrocities because their villages were at or near the Cambodian border.

"Western historians claim that the motives were political, based on deep-rooted resentment of the cities. The Khmer Rouge was determined to turn the country into a nation of peasants in which the corruption and "parasitism" of city life would be completely uprooted. In addition, Pol Pot wanted to break up the "enemy spy organizations" that allegedly were based in the urban areas. Finally, it seems that Pol Pot and his hard-line associates on the KCP Political Bureau used the forced evacuations to gain control of the city's population and to weaken the position of their factional rivals within the communist party.

One of the Khmer Rouge's first acts was to move most of the urban population into the countryside. They told the residents that they would move only about "two or three kilometers" outside the city and would return in "two or three days." Other witnesses report being told that the evacuation was because of the threat of United States bombing and that they did not have to lock their houses since the Khmer Rouge would "take care of everything" until they returned. The roads out of the city were clogged with evacuees. Phnom Penh—the population of which, numbering 2.5 million people, included as many as 1.5 million wartime refugees living with relatives or in urban center—was soon nearly empty. Similar evacuations occurred at Battambang, Kampong Cham, Siem Reap, Kampong Thom, and throughout the country's other towns and cities. The conditions of the evacuation and the treatment of the people involved depended often on which military units and commanders were conducting the specific operations.

Even Phnom Penh's hospitals were emptied of their patients. The Khmer Rouge provided transportation for some of the aged and the disabled, and they set up stockpiles of food outside the city for the refugees; however, the supplies were inadequate to sustain the hundreds of thousands of people on the road. Even seriously injured hospital patients, many without any means of conveyance, were summarily forced to leave regardless of their condition. According to Khieu Samphan, the removal of Phnom Penh's population resulted in 2,000 to 3,000 deaths. The foreign community, about 800 persons, was quarantined in the French embassy compound, and by the end of the month the foreigners were taken by truck to the Thai border. Khmer women who were married to foreigners were allowed to accompany their husbands, but Khmer men were not permitted to leave with their foreign wives.

Aside from the alleged threat of U.S. air strikes, the Khmer Rouge justified the evacuations in terms of the impossibility of transporting sufficient food to feed an urban population of between 2 and 3 million people. Lack of adequate transportation meant that, instead of bringing food to the people (tons of it lay in storehouses in the port city of Kampong Saom, now known as Sihanoukville, according to Father François Ponchaud), the people had to be brought to (and had to grow) the food."

"Like Joseph Stalin in the late 1920s and in the 1930s, Pol Pot initiated a purge of his opponents, both imagined and real. In terms of the number of people liquidated in relation to the total population, the Khmer Rouge terror was far bloodier than Stalin's. Through the 1970s, and especially after mid-1975, the party was shaken by factional struggles. There were even armed attempts to topple Pol Pot. The resultant purges reached a crest in 1977 and 1978 when hundreds of thousands of people, including some of the most important KCP leaders, were executed."

"Incidents escalated along all of Cambodia's borders. Khmer Rouge forces attacked villages in the border areas of Thailand near Aranyaprathet. Brutal murders of Thai villagers, including women and children, were the first widely reported concrete evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities. There were also incidents along the Lao border. At approximately the same time, villages in Vietnam's border areas underwent renewed attacks. In turn, Vietnam launched air strikes against Cambodia. In September, border fighting resulted in as many as 1,000 Vietnamese civilian casualties."

"Massacres of ethnic Vietnamese and of their sympathizers by the Khmer Rouge intensified in the Eastern Zone after the May 1978 revolt."