From Torment and Justice in Cambodia:
Between April 1975, when the KR overthrew the despised Lon Nol regime, and January 1979, when the Vietnamese invaded, the rulers of Democratic Kampuchea killed — by murder, starvation, and forced labor — 1.7 to two million people, close to a quarter of the entire population. In the torment they wreaked on a small country in such a short time, the KR ranks as possibly the most savage Communist Party to curse the twentieth century.In the name of revolutionary purity, the KR abolished private property, personal possessions, money, leisure, socializing, marriage (except in cadre-approved cases), religion, and all personal liberties. Democratic Kampuchea was a land of totalitarian rural communes. The day the KR took power, they evacuated the entire population of Phnom Penh in twenty-four hours, including infirm hospital patients whom family members had to push out of town in their beds, some trailing intravenous tubing and bags. By nightfall, the capital was almost empty. In the countryside, people slaved and starved to grow rice that went to China and hauled buckets of earth to build dams without engineers or technicians. The purges of counterrevolutionary elements began on Day Two of the revolution (on the roads out of Phnom Penh) and never let up, culminating in a frenzy of executions within the party itself in 1978.
How much have things improved?
There has been tremendous growth in much of Southeast Asia in the last twenty years, but Cambodian indices of development are barely holding stable or sliding. The rice diet is so lacking in protein that stunted growth in children is endemic. Basic public services are lacking: in Phnom Penh, there is no garbage collection, no visible police, and only a handful of traffic lights in a city of a half million. Schools are the exception. But while crowds of children parade to school in the morning in the uniforms and miraculously starched white shirts that across the world are a sign of hope for the future, hordes of poorer kids run the streets during school hours: scavenging for food, moving goods on their bicycles, hustling for street vendors, begging; in the country, herding cows. Increasingly, city kids are falling into a burgeoning sex market for foreign pedophiles.
How’s this for corruption?
In Phnom Penh, violence is recognizably urban, with a nasty spin. In 2003, Hun Sen’s nephew hit a pedestrian with his SUV and then opened fire with an AK-47 on the crowd that gathered, killing two people and wounding four. At the trial in camera, all charges were dropped.