Cambodian students wearing all black and wielding bamboo clubs and wooden rifles staged a dramatic re-enactment on Tuesday of a genocide that killed two million people in the 1970s.
A quarter of Cambodia’s population died of starvation, forced labour or torture or were slaughtered in mass killings under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979.
The Khmer Rouge atrocities are commemorated at museums and sites including Choeung Ek, a notorious former “Killing Field” in Phnom Penh, where an annual Day of Remembrance event is held.
Hundreds gathered at Choeung Ek, where about 15,000 people died between 1975 and 1979, holding prayers in front of a display of victims’ skulls.
Students brandishing mock weapons then acted out slitting victims’ throats, shooting or clubbing them in a re-enactment of Khmer Rouge attacks on civilians.
Some attendees cried at the confrontingly vivid re-enactment.
“My tears fell when I watched the performance,” attendee and survivor Chruok Sam, 70, told AFP.
He lost 12 family members under the Khmer Rouge and said the performance showed “exactly the same” as what he had experienced in 1975.
He hoped the re-enactment would help young generations learn more about what he called “the most heinous and cruel regime on Earth”.
Another survivor, 63-year-old Em Ry, said she was still scared and had never been able to forget Pol Pot’s time in power.
She was forced to work all day and only ate a “spoonful of corn”, she said, and lost several family members including her grandmother.
Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was at the opening of a new cement plant in central Kampong Speu province, urged people not to forget the past.
“We must move on, but we cannot forget our painful past,” he said.
Cambodia marked the 50th anniversary last month of the Khmer Rouge’s bloody march into Phnom Penh.
A special tribunal sponsored by the United Nations convicted three key Khmer Rouge figures before ceasing operations in 2022. Other former cadres still live freely.
Pol Pot, nicknamed “Brother Number One”, died in 1998 before he was brought to trial.
