Next week sees the 50th anniversary of the fall of its capital Phnom Penh on 17th April 1975, setting the stage for one of the most barbaric regimes in modern history.
By mid-afternoon on that fateful day the whole population of this elegant city was being forced into the countryside by Cambodian rebel leader Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge army. Sidney Schanberg of the New York Times captured the brutality of those hours as patients in hospital, some still with saline drips attached to their arms, were pulled from their beds and thrust into the melée. There was no mercy.
It is a sombre anniversary, calling for reflection on the human condition. , for Cambodia is by no means the only country which has seen unspeakable brutality. Our minds go to another auto-genocide with an April anniversary, to Rwanda where, in 1994, 800,000 people died in arm-to-arm conflict in a hundred days. And as the 80th anniversary of VE Day draws near, we dare not forget Hitler, or the cost of Western freedom.
