article_snippet.sent: On April 17, 1975 -- 40 years ago today -- life as Cambodian-American Ly Sivhong knew it was shattered when Cambodian-American Ly Sivhong hometown, the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, fell to the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime of the Communist Party of Kampuchea.
article_snippet.sent: Cambodian-American Ly Sivhong never saw them again, nor learned what happened to them.
article_snippet.sent: The urban evacuation marked the first phase in the Khmer Rouge's revolutionary program of social engineering, intended to establish a new order -- free of money, family ties, religion, education, property and foreign influence.
article_snippet.sent: For decades after the Khmer Rouge were driven from Phnom Penh by Soviet-backed Vietnamese forces in January 1979, the regime's crimes were seldom spoken about, let alone attempts made to seek redress for victims.
article_snippet.sent: Far from being snuffed out by the Vietnamese invasion, the Khmer Rouge existed for another two decades.
article_snippet.sent: After fleeing the capital in 1979, Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge supporters established a stronghold in the west.
article_snippet.sent: Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot and his supporters continued as an insurgent guerrilla force and became part of a government-in-exile that, until 1990, was recognized by the U.N. as the U.S.'s only legitimate representative.
article_snippet.sent: Craig Etcheson, a Cambodia expert at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University, said that "for many years, there was a virtual taboo on even speaking of the Khmer Rouge, as if the very words were ... a malevolent spirit lurking in the corner of every room.
article_snippet.sent: the Khmer Rouge attempts to reboot society at "Year Zero" had involved a concentrated effort to exterminate the country's educated classes -- doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, merchants and clergy.
article_snippet.sent: Nearly two generations of young Cambodian men grew up learning little more than how to kill," said Etcheson.
article_snippet.sent: Even today, said Uk, young Cambodians are not taught about the genocide in high school.
article_snippet.sent: Some were even skeptical that the Khmer Rouge crimes -- the systematic butchery of the "killing fields" -- had really occurred, she added.
article_snippet.sent: (the Khmer Rouge top leader, Pol Pot, died in 1998, having never faced charges.)
article_snippet.sent: Uk said the U.S. has seen a wave of Khmer Rouge memoirs, written by former cadres wanting to argue a wave of Khmer Rouge memoirs, written by former cadres wanting to argue their case before they die case before a wave of Khmer Rouge memoirs, written by former cadres wanting to argue their case before they die die.
article_snippet.sent: There's a lot of people who want to tell the world a wave of Khmer Rouge memoirs, written by former cadres wanting to argue their case before they die've been fooled by a grand idea of a revolution which went bad," she said.
article_snippet.sent: his told an interviewer from France's Le Monde last year that his believed that Khmer Rouge dictator Pol Pot's prescriptions for Cambodia were sound.
article_snippet.sent: I remain convinced that the Marxist analysis made by Pol Pot of the socioeconomic situation of Cambodia, a poor and sparsely populated country, was correct," his said.
highlights_snippet.sent: Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, fell to the genocidal Khmer Rouge 40 years ago today .
  