Year Zero: Silent Death of Cambodia

The Khmer Rouge was over; the Democratic Kampuchea was overthrown. However, all the pains and tragedies were far from being finished, as clearly demonstrated in the documentary, Year zero: Silent death of Cambodia. Having seen so much extreme misery, especially, of the orphans of wars dying from treatable disease and starvation, it was heart-breaking. This, plus the reasons behind it (as it is shown in and can be inferred from the film), I have learned a few things.

First of all, I saw the importance of the existence of government in one country for the welfare of lives of people in that particular country. After the war, with the city restless of any exciting activities but with only the cries of pain from dying children short of food and nutritious substances to feed, Cambodia seemed like a country with no leaders, without government. If there were one, actions should have been taken, to ease down this awful situation. I could see that only a few voluntary foreigners were trying to do something, contributing what they had and making requests for international humanitarian aids, which went somehow ignored. While watching the documentary, I was asking, what on earth the government, who fought and overthrew the DK government, were doing; how could such a thing happened, seemingly with no-one in authority bothering to do anything?

Another thing I find quite remarkable from watching the documentary is the apathy of the world powers and the have’s toward the misery and hard times of the poor and the less powerful when the former’s involvement gives them no advantage. From the movie, during the famine and severe starvation among the victims of wars in Cambodia, less-than-enough humanitarian aids from the neighboring country Vietnam was the only international help to Cambodia; powerful countries such as the US and other European countries were apparently ignoring the tragedy. It was wholly a different story when the US was spending millions and millions of dollars to the Lon Nol government, seemingly under the reason that the US could ensure that Cambodia was not influenced by the communist ideology and going against the US’s democratic ideology. Therefore, the power countries were interested in the affairs of other countries when their involvement gave themselves benefits rather than when it is on the humanitarian basis like during the time right after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime.

Besides, something even more obvious in the film is the catastrophic effects of wars. Millions of innocent lives were taken away, leaving millions abandoned and living as orphans, and the country’s economic situations and everything reached their lowest points. These disasters are the inherent results of wars. That’s why making wars should not be an option at all.

However bad and adverse making wars are, sometimes they are unavoidable. Wars in Cambodia were somehow justifiable because they happened out of revolutions, and revolutions can be good if the government and those in leadership are awful. Hence, I think such unfortunately things befell this country mainly because of the bad governance. With good governance, there would not have been revolutions, wars would not have resulted, and such a drastic number of people would not have been forced into such unbelievably appalling misery.