Cambodia marks 40 years since evacuation of Phnom Penh

Cambodia on Friday will mark 40 years since the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh, ending a civil war but heralding a terror that left a quarter of the population dead and turned the capital into a ghost town. A memorial service for regime survivors at the most notorious of the of so-called “Killing Fields” on the capital’s outskirts - Cheung Ek - will begin commemorations of the April 17, 1975 triumph of the communist hardliners over the US-backed republican army of Lon Nol. By the time Pol Pot’s tyrannical rule was ousted four years later, an estimated two million Cambodians had been killed by execution, starvation or overwork as the Khmer Rouge drove the country back to “Year Zero” in a madcap agrarian peasant revolution.

Now we are at peace, happy, but I will never forget the suffering. We had nothing to eat, we had no freedom during the regime: three years, eight months and 20 days.

85-year-old torture survivor Chum Mey

In 2010, a UN-backed war crimes court sentenced former Tuol Sleng prison chief Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, to 30 years in prison - later increased on appeal to life - for overseeing the deaths of 15,000 people. He was the first person to be held accountable for the regime’s crimes. Last August the two most senior surviving Khmer Rouge leaders - Nuon Chea, 88, known as “Brother Number Two”, and former head of state Khieu Samphan, 83 - were given life sentences for crimes against humanity. Both have appealed. Their two-year trial focused on the forced evacuation of Cambodians from Phnom Penh into rural labour camps as well as murders at one execution site.

Cambodia Asia-Pacific