On September 11, 1982, the Cambodian authorities uncovered a fresh mass grave near Phnom Penh containing the remains of about 1,500 people, the Hanoi radio said . The radio, monitored here, said the grave contained the victims of the Pol Pot regime, which was overthrown by Vietnamese-backed Cambodian forces in January 1979. The Pol Pot regime was accused of killing hundreds of thousands of people during its four years in power.
The Killing Fields are a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge (pronounced as Kemer Roche) regime, during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Cambodian Civil War (1970–1975).
Analysis of 20,000 mass grave sites by the DC-Cam Mapping Program and Yale University indicate at least 1,386,734 victims of execution. Estimates of the total number of deaths resulting from Khmer Rouge policies, including disease and starvation, range from 1.7 to 2.5 million out of a 1975 population of roughly 8 million. In 1979, communist Vietnam invaded Democratic Kampuchea and toppled the Khmer Rouge regime.
The Khmer Rouge regime arrested and eventually executed almost everyone suspected of connections with the former government or with foreign governments, as well as professionals and intellectuals. Ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Thai, ethnic Chinese, ethnic Cham, Cambodian Christians, and the Buddhist monkhood were the demographic targets of persecution. As a result, Pol Pot is sometimes described as “the Hitler of Cambodia” and “a genocidal tyrant.” Martin Shaw described the Cambodian genocide as “the purest genocide of the Cold War era.”
Ben Kiernan estimates that about 1.7 million people were killed. Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a “most likely” figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching some 20,000 grave sites, he concludes that, “these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution.” A UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed. Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed, while Marek Sliwinski suggests that 1.8 million is a conservative figure.
The executed were buried in mass graves. In order to save ammunition, the executions were often carried out using poison, spades or sharpened bamboo sticks. In some cases the children and infants of adult victims were killed by having their heads bashed against the trunks of Chankiri trees. The rationale was “to stop them growing up and taking revenge for their parents’ deaths.” Some victims were required to dig their own graves; their weakness often meant that they were unable to dig very deep. The soldiers who carried out the executions were mostly young men or women from peasant families.
Decades later now, the discovery of a mass grave containing more than 30 skulls in northern Sri Lanka has fuelled speculation that there may be many more like it containing the remains of thousands who went missing during the island nation’s nearly three-decade war.
Sri Lanka is already under international pressure to address alleged wartime human rights violations. A failure to probe the discovery could fuel the anger of Western nations demanding an independent international investigation into suspected abuses.
The remains, which workers stumbled on as they dug up roadside paving for a water project, are yet to be identified. The first mass grave to be found in the former war zone, it is spread over an area measuring about 400 square feet (37 square meters) and is 5 feet deep.
“The bodies are buried in several layers. Unfortunately, the top layer of the bodies have been destroyed by the road construction work,” said Dhanajaya Waidyaratne, the Judicial Medical Officer in charge of the excavation.
More than 100,000 people were killed in the war between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the government military since it started in 1983 and thousands, are still unaccounted for or missing. A U.N. panel has said around 40,000 mainly Tamil civilians died in the ferocious final months of the conflict, but Sri Lanka has disputed that figure. Both sides committed atrocities, but army shelling killed most victims, it concluded.
Residents and a religious leader in Mannar say that the area was controlled mainly by the army from 1990. “This grave has grown-up people and children, and there are some holes in the skulls believed to be from gunshots,” the Catholic Bishop of Mannar, Rayappu Joseph, who went to inspect the mass grave and the skeletons, told Reuters.
“We don’t know who killed these people. This is an area that was held by army for a long time. Wherever there has been LTTE or army camps, we must dig.”
The Tamil National Alliance (TNA), which was voted to power in northern provincial polls last September, said the mass grave was the tip of an iceberg and there must be many more.
“The loss of lives, according to us, is between 75,000 to 150,000. Where are those remains?” TNA legislator M.A. Sumanthiran told Reuters. “They must be somewhere. If they were put into incinerators and destroyed, we don’t know. But we don’t think more than 100,000 would have been dealt with like that.”
“Unless there is real transparency in the forensic investigation, we’ll never be sure,” he said in an emailed comment. “But we know they won’t want to open a Pandora’s Box that would incriminate many senior figures.” This was the first mass grave found in the former conflict zone since the war ended over four years ago. Since the end of the military battles, Sri Lanka has faced international accusations of rights abuses by its troops. The UN Human Rights Council has passed two resolutions against Sri Lanka and a third one is expected in March.
If Pol Pot was called ‘Hitler of Cambodia’, Mahinda Rajapaksa can be called as ‘Pol Pot of Sri Lanka’!
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