Cambodia’s 30 Year Anniversary of Pol Pot’s Fall

January 7, 2009 – 2:15 pm

Reuters article:

PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - Thousands of Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields" marked 30 years Wednesday since the fall of Pol Pot’s ultra-Maoist regime, blamed for the deaths of 1.7 million people.

Up to 80,000 people packed into the capital’s Olympic stadium for a rally organized by the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), descendant of the puppet government installed by Hanoi after its troops ousted Beijing-backed Pol Pot on January 7, 1979.

"We have always remembered those who sacrificed their lives to save us from genocide," aging CPP President and former guerrilla Chea Sim told the cheering crowd.

Despite international and domestic repugnance at the Khmer Rouge and their disastrous attempt to create an agrarian utopia, a significant minority of Cambodians mourn January 7 as the start of a 10-year occupation by their hated Vietnamese neighbors.

Political opponents of Prime Minister Hun Sen, a one-eyed former Khmer Rouge commander who has been in charge for the last 23 years, frequently label him a Vietnamese stooge, a charge he rebutted in typically blunt style this week.

"Whoever is against the day of victory is either Pol Pot or an animal," he told a crowd Tuesday at the inauguration of a bridge south of Phnom Penh, now a bustling city of 2.5 million far removed from the derelict ghost town of 1979.

Skyscrapers springing up on the banks of the Mekong, land prices rivaling Bangkok’s and a stock exchange planned for this year all attest to an economy shaking off its past, thanks to growing domestic and Asian investment over the past decade.

Entire article.