Khmer Rouge

This weekend marked 40 years since the Khmer Rouge rolled into Phnom Penh. During the 44 months of Pol Pot’s rule over Cambodia a quarter of the population would die during his attempt at building a perfect society. For most Europeans, especially if you didn’t live during this period, I think knowledge on these atrocities is limited as we were more taught about history that we are directly involved with.

Over the next few posts I will be looking at Cambodia from my own experiences and what the role of dark tourism is in today’s tourism industry. I feel like this post should come with a warning. I will take a realistic view of the situation and to some this might be hard to comprehend. When I gave a presentation to my university class on orphanage tourism I made one of my classmates cry.

If you are interested in the subject and can’t wait for the next post you should consider reading this article, Cambodia Forty Years After Genocide.

I would like to encourage you also to use the tag The Academic Traveller if you are writing a post that discusses the influence of tourism or takes a serious look at the motivations of our travel decisions. Together we can build a topic that gets to the core issues and impacts of tourism.