Fifty years after fall of Phnom Penh, history weighs on Cambodian politics

Skulls are placed behind glass at a memorial made with the bones of more than 8,000 victims of the Khmer Rouge regime at Choeung Ek, one of the 'killing fields' in Cambodia [File: Damir Sagolj/Reuters]

Fifty years after the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge rebel army, the events of April 17, 1975 continue to cast a long shadow over Cambodia and its political system.

Emerging from the bloodshed and chaos of the spreading war in neighbouring Vietnam, Pol Pot’s radical peasant movement rose up and defeated the United States-backed regime of General Lon Nol.