{"id":413,"date":"2007-03-27T07:28:39","date_gmt":"2007-03-27T06:28:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=413"},"modified":"2007-03-27T07:28:39","modified_gmt":"2007-03-27T06:28:39","slug":"forgotten-world-72-cambodia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=413","title":{"rendered":"Forgotten world (72): Cambodia"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cambodia\">Cambodia<\/a> gained full independence from the French in 1953. Following a five-year civil war in which the Americans backed General Lol Non, the Communist Khmer Rouge took power in 1975 and, over the next 3 years 8 months and 20 days, a massive collectivisation programme resulted in the death of maybe 2.5 million of the 7 million population through forced labour, starvation and massacre (another million are believed to have fled abroad).<br \/>\nThe Khmer Rouge regime was overthrown by the intervention of Vietnamese troops with UN-sponsored elections following in 1993. However, Vietnamese still have a right of entry to Cambodia and there is much resentment by Cambodians about Vietnam&#8217;s influence in the country. The Khmer Rouge period is still raw in people&#8217;s minds and indeed the current Prime Minister Samdech Hun Sen is a former Khmer Rouge commander who subsequently went on to oppose them. The population is up from a mere 3.5M in 1979 to over 13M today.<br \/>\nThe country remains one of the world&#8217;s poorest with GDP per head barely $300 (\u00a3154). The economy is mainly agrarian and more than 30% of the people live below the poverty line. Average government spending on health services annually is just \u00a31-\u00a32 per person.<br \/>\nI made <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/Indochina.html#Cambodia\">a visit<\/a> to to the country in March 2006.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cambodia gained full independence from the French in 1953. Following a five-year civil war in which the Americans backed General Lol Non, the Communist Khmer Rouge took power in 1975 and, over the next 3 years 8 months and 20 days, a massive collectivisation programme resulted in the death of maybe 2.5 million of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}