Quotes About Khmer Rouge

My second TV assignment ever was to go to Cambodia to look at the state of the country in the dying days of the Khmer Rouge. I was naive, awkward, and not very good at writing to pictures.

Operating from 1975 to 1979, S-21 became the most infamous of 196 such prison camps the Khmer Rouge established throughout Cambodia, primarily because so many of its prisoners were the purged party loyal - and because Duch's methods were so stunningly brutal.

Over the next 1,364 days, the Khmer Rouge, seeking to obliterate the social classes and create an agrarian society of peasants, was responsible for killing, starving, or working to death about two million Cambodians, out of a population of eight million. Accounting for the percentage of people destroyed, Pol Pot's Communist regime was the most murderous in the modern age.

I am lucky to be a film director. I can create, express. It proves that I am still alive and the Khmer Rouge did not succeed in destroying me.

When the Khmer Rouge reached Phnom Penh, the first thing they did was to evacuate the population. Then they took over. The point of a revolution is to bring justice to the people, so even if you don't have proof of sabotage, you manufacture it.

I'd have to, if on Sunday I wanted to run off with some slack-jawed Suzy, some invertebrate, a post-pubescent wasteoid who imagines the Khmer Rouge to be makeup and Guerrilla Warfare to be that rivalry which occurs between apes.

The Khmer Rouge is in the casino business now!' Casinos? Run by the most vicious, hard-core Commie mass murderers in history? Well, why not check it out?

Part of the Khmer Rouge project was not only to destroy individual people, but to destroy the very notion of the individual. I want to simply rebuild the stories of people - it's part of my fight against the Khmer Rouge agenda.

Long time I been on my own, but now really I'm alone. I survive the killing, the starving, all the hate of the Khmer Rouge, but I think maybe now I will die of this, of broken heart.

The Khmer Rouge can't destroy me. I still have my imagination and am capable of making films. I am not locked up.

The trial organized with U.N. participation of some kind will be for crimes committed by Khmer Rouge leaders from 1975 to 1979. That's it.

Going to Cambodia to cover the genocide trials, I did read a lot about the Khmer Rouge; I read a lot about the country and its history.

The Nazis and the Khmer Rouge went to great lengths to hide their crimes against humanity. Instead, ISIS posts its many crimes on social media for global distribution with seemingly no thoughts for the consequences.

For us, Cambodia was an election amid minor eruptions of political violence from a decrepit Khmer Rouge, just dangerous enough to add an edge to the otherwise bacchanalian proceedings. We thought Somalia would be similarly exultant, but instead we're inserted directly into combat. This is a hot war. It's hard to make peace in a society of nomadic warriors who like to fight, and twenty thousand UN and U.S. soldiers are failing.

The lake was part of one of those insane irrigation schemes leading nowhere, built by forced labor under the Khmer Rouge. Judging by the height of the dam, a lot of Cambodians must have died during the construction.

Radio messages report rampant rumors of Khmer Rouge attacks. There is a curfew imposed at dusk. Every corner along the main road is occupied by tanks and armored personnel carriers, soldiers everywhere. The road to Vietnam is crawling with military, and everyone is nervous. But rather than being afraid to go outside, I find it thrilling. I've stepped into a TV show and any misadventure can be undone with a flick of the remote.

At daybreak on the first day, thousands of Cambodians are already calmly waiting outside my polling station. They squat on the ground, silent and patient. We didn't expect this at all. We thought they would fail to understand how democracy works. We thought they would be afraid of the Khmer Rouge. We thought they would passively accept their fate. We were wrong.

The Khmer Rouge tried to delete everything. They tried to erase our past, our personality, our land, our sentiment. What we tried to do in 'The Missing Picture' was to reconstruct our identity, to bring it back to the people through cinema.

Orwell's words aptly describe the Khmer Rouge: "Big Brother is watching you." Even on the streets of Portland I look over my shoulder. And here I am on these survivors' doorstep, asking them to reveal difficult memories. The Khmer Rouge are a continent away, and yet they are not. Psychologically, they are parasites, like tapeworms that slumber within you, living passively until something stirs them to life. I was asking these subjects to wake those parasites.

At daybreak on the first day, thousands of Cambodians are already calmly waiting outside my polling station. They squat on the ground, silent and patient. We didn't expect this at all. We thought they would fail to understand how democracy works. We thought they would be afraid of the Khmer Rouge. We thought they would passively accept their fate. We were wrong.

What the Khmer Rouge had in store was a radical agrarian revolution, one with the professed aim of completely renovating society while giving the peasants a better life, of evening the rewards and feeding the hungry, of bringing a rational and utilitarian nation-state into being.

As the Khmer Rouge were about to take over, Noam Chomsky wrote that their advent heralded a Cambodian liberation, "a new era of economic development and social justice." The new era turned out to be the killing-fields that took the lives of two million Cambodians.

The war in Vietnam spread to Cambodia when the United States bombed Cambodia's borders to try to destroy the North Vietnamese bases. The bombings destroyed many villages and killed many people, allowing the Khmer Rouge to gain support from the peasants and farmers. In 1970, Prince Sihanouk was overthrown by his top general, Lon Nol. The United States-backed Lon Nol government was corrupt and weak and was easily defeated by the Khmer Rouge.

By early 1979, the border area is a dead-eyed, stinking hell. He signs on as an aid worker with the Red Cross and they give him a stipend and a room. In January, the Vietnamese Communists crossed the Cambodian border, swept the Khmer Rouge aside, and took Phnom Penh in less than two weeks. The refugees wash up in their black clothes, so debilitated and disturbed that Hiroji thinks he is walking through an exhumed cemetery, they are more soil and sickness than human beings.