abstract:People have been living within the area covered by the present-day country of Cambodia at least since the 5th millennium BCE. The ancient Kingdom of Funan occupied a wider area, and it was during that period that the culture became heavily influenced by Hinduism.
There is probably no society in the historyof mankind (with the possible exception ofCambodia and maybe ancient Sparta on small scales) that has been subject to more massive attempts at utopian experiments in social engineering: mass starvations, forced abortion and infanticide policies, ideological 180-degree mid-air gainers on the status of wealth creation, massive persecution of its most promising cultural and political revitalization movements, stop-start monetary policy.
Though the Cham themselves do not seem to be embracing extremism, they remain understandably given their history suspicious of outsiders (including Cambodia's government).
Whatever the real cause, Pol Pot's death marks the end of one chapter in Cambodia's convoluted modern history, even if it does not close the book on the Khmer Rouge.