Remembering Cambodia’s genocide in a corner of Africa

Kigali, RWANDA- April 1975 was a cruel month for millions of Cambodians. Forty-nine years ago, on April 17, the Khmer Rouge finally captured Phnom Penh after a five-year civil war with the US-backed Lon Nol regime.

One million residents and another million refugees in the capital city initially felt a sense of jubilation that the war was finally over.

The Khmer Rouge had other ideas that didn’t include celebrating. They forcefully evacuated the city, a process that resulted in thousands of deaths, especially among the elderly and infirm, who walking in the blistering heat of April died along roadsides heading away from Phnom Penh.

The Khmer Rouge’s subsequent three years, eight months and 20 day disastrous reign of terror –under the leadership of Pol Pot – left around two million people dead from disease, starvation, overwork, and execution.

It was a catastrophe of epic proportions, one of the worst crimes against humanity in the 20^th century. Only an invasion by the Vietnamese military, along with Khmer Rouge defectors, in late 1978 forced Pol Pot and his henchmen from power.

There is no public institution in Phnom Penh that comprehensively tells the story of these horrors; there is no “Cambodian Genocide Museum.”

There are scattered monuments and memorials, gravesites and killing fields, but nothing that brings the entire story together, nor one that tries to educate people.

However, in a curious twist, 8,400 kilometers away in Rwanda there is a “Cambodian Corner” in the Kigali Genocide Memorial (KGM) that “remembers” the Khmer Rouge atrocities.

Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans also “remember” April as a cruel month. On April 7, 1994, Hutu extremists began a well-planned and systematic slaughter of ethnic Tutsis that