A good history of a bad story - from the PP Post

While Mondulkiri’s highland people were at first hailed as ‘base people’ by the Khmer Rouge, life under the Democratic Kampuchea regime soon became a nightmare that left their numbers decimated and their culture in tatters.

“The Khmer Rouge were dishonest people. They did good to us at the beginning and did bad to us at the end,” Keb Bunthy, a 58-year-old Phnong villager in Mondulkiri’s Koh Nhek district, said this week.

The largely untold story of the ethnic minorities of the Mondulkiri highlands under the Khmer Rouge is one of betrayal and tragedy. At first celebrated as “base people” by Pol Pot’s cadres, they were ultimately subjected to relocation, politically motivated killings and suppression of spiritual practices, which experts say shape highlander identity to this day.
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