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The "Killing Tree" |
You may have heard about the Cambodian genocide in passing but never known the true extent of what happened. The film "The Killing Fields", based on the book of the same title, gained some attention but not nearly enough.
There are many reasons why the Cambodian genocide isn’t something that is widely known. Why it has become an unspoken genocide.
But who is to blame?
Is it us, the world, who choose to be ignorant of the suffering of others?
Was it the generation, who didn’t want to see anymore bad things after the Vietnam War?
Was it our leaders, who chose not to care?
Or was it the media who thought the slaughter of a quarter of a nation’s population wasn’t worth their precious time?
When reading the newspaper how many of you skip straight to the sport section? The lifestyle section? Skipping over the world news section. We are bombarded by images of war and destruction all day from these far away countries...Afghanistan...Sudan...Libya. It is hard to feel empathy when you do not know anyone over there. When you probably couldn’t even find them on the globe before it was shown on the nightly news. In 1975, the Vietnam War had just ended. Australia for the first time had been shown a war on television, and they didn’t like it. The realities of war were realised and you know what, they weren’t pretty. So the last thing the public wanted was to see more death and destruction. So they ignored it because they could.
Generations of Cambodians gone and forgotten by the world. Our generation, the one born after the Vietnam War still have little to no idea about it. Yes, we know about Rwanda, Sudan even Armenia but we do not know that a quarter of a country’s population was wiped out in four years. But we do care. This is a change. Genocide and other atrocities against the human race is now something that is discussed openly and discussed passionately. No longer are we happy to have things swept under the rug by our politicians and the media- we want it all out in the open in the hope that change can be made, and if the mainstream media won’t give it to us than there are other ways for us to get it!
