![]() (Pran escaped, later moving to the U.S., where he died in 2008.) Most foreigners were allowed to leave the country, but the French were forced to surrender the Cambodians, including Schanberg’s research assistant Dith Pran, to all but certain death. But at the gate I heard echoes from “The Killing Fields,” a 1984 movie based on a celebrated New York Times Magazine article by Sydney Schanberg, about the fate of foreign nationals and officials from the fallen regime who sought shelter at the embassy when the communists took possession of Phnom Penh. The walled compound has been reconstructed since 1975. On my way into Phnom Penh from the airport my car passed the French Embassy on Monivong Boulevard. The mass evacuation of Phnom Penh, a Khmer Rouge “extraordinary measure” intended to expedite the country’s transformation into an agrarian communist state, took the lives of 20,000 people and left the capital a ghost town. People welcomed the Khmer Rouge, never imagining that in a matter of days they would be herded onto roads with only what they could carry. Food, housing and medical supplies were scarce. Even now, travelers usually visit Cambodia for one reason: to see Angkor, a vast complex of Hindu and Buddhist temples built by the Khmer Empire, which ruled most of Southeast Asia from about 800 to 1400.īy that time, war refugees from the provinces had streamed into the city, swelling the population from 600,000 to as many as 3 million. Tourists are a different matter, especially those who do not remember or may never have known what happened in Cambodia in the 1970s. In a country where almost everyone lost family members - and in many cases entire families - no one needs to be reminded about the catastrophe. ![]() While United Nations-backed war crimes trials of surviving Khmer Rouge henchmen drag on in Phnom Penh, and another strongman, Hun Sen, also considered oppressive, rules the country, the Cambodian people go about their business. He died of a reported heart attack in 1998, with his revolution collapsed around him. In life, he was a cipher, known only to a handful of confederates. Reporting from Anlong Veng, Cambodia - -Ī muddy, weed-choked field in the hills of northern Cambodia is the last resting place of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, chief instigator of a communist regime that enslaved a nation, dismantled its social and cultural institutions and took the lives of 2 million or more people.
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