Ung’s family hid their true identities to protect themselves from persecution. They weren’t alone tens of thousands of other city dwellers were also fleeing. They piled into an old truck and made their way out of the city. The Khmer Rouge regime murdered hundreds of thousands of their perceived political opponents, and its racist emphasis on national purity resulted in the. The occupation set in motion a four-year campaign of genocide that would wipe out 2 million people a quarter of the country’s population. Within a few hours, she, her parents, her two sisters and her three brothers left their family home, never to return. Forty-five years ago to the day, a communist regime known as the Khmer Rouge conquered the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. When she went back inside the apartment, Ung witnessed her family throwing their possessions into suitcases. As they marched through the city, they hollered at people to leave its confines, or else they would be shot down. The soldiers were equipped with megaphones. 2Khmer Rouge animosity and military raids into Vietnam eventually led the Vietnamese to invade Cambodia in January 1979. The Khmer Rouge’s form of communism demanded that Cambodian citizens should all live simple, peasant lives off the land. This Communist rebel army had been fighting a civil war against Cambodia’s incumbent, democratic government – and the rebels had just won. Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge (radical communist regime) leader breathed his last in a remote jungle hideout along the Cambodia-Thailand border on April 15, 1998, leaving behind a legacy of brutality. Any personal initiative in finding food was severely punished. Her father later told her that they were the Khmer Rouge. The depth of the rift between the Khmer Rouge and North Vietnam became apparent when. Her father even drove a fancy Mazda sports car, a symbol of wealth and status that few in Cambodia at that time could afford.īut on that April day, from her family’s balcony, Ung saw a swarm of soldiers marching into the city.
Not only did they have the luxury of going to school six days a week, they also went to the cinema, ate out and regularly went shopping. The author and her siblings were fortunate. In contrast, Phnom Penh’s poor lived without modern conveniences in makeshift tents. They restarted our nation by resettling everyone and changing everything back to zero. Her father was a high-ranking military official and, as a result, the family could live in comparative luxury, several stories up in a modern apartment block. The Khmer Rouge said they were creating a utopian nation where everyone would be equal. Her middle-class family lived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city. There was nothing out of the ordinary to speak of – but by the end of the afternoon, her old life would be but a distant memory. She was playing with her friends on the balcony of her family’s apartment. The year was 1975, and she was five years old. Under the Marxist leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge tried to take Cambodia back to the Middle Ages, forcing.
For Loung Ung, the day that forever changed her life began like any other. The brutal regime, in power from 1975-1979, claimed the lives of up to two million people.
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