Death Among A Wonderland of Beauty

Cambodia is one of the most fascinating countries I have been to because of the history, the people, the government, and the poverty.  Only 30 years ago, 1975 the Khmer Rouge communist party came in to Phrom Penh and took over Cambodia under the dictatorship of Po Palt.  This was  a Cambodian Genocide with over 2 million people dying within 4 years. 

Po Palt wanted equality among the communities and he wanted people to become better themselves as farmers.  He sent them to villages to work to death, starved, and brutally executed.  It is not like the Holocaust where people were put in gas chambers or killed with bullets.  Cambodians were killed by axe and tortured to death because they did not want to waste bullets.  And this only happened 35 years ago, which is fairly recent. 

I am reading about it in the book And then they Killed my Father.  In fact, I can not even finish the book because it makes me so upset and walking down the streets of Phrom Penh where it all happened, I feel haunted. 

Overtime, things have improved, but people still suffer the consequences of this life changing genocide.  Many amputees walk the streets as they lost their legs in the mine fields of the regime.  It is tragic and frustrating to read about people because it makes absolutely no sense.  At least in the Holocaust, there were basic principles that they had followed.  Doctors, teachers, students-innocent human beings just wiped out by an insane individual-tragic.