Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra feature stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write a 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: United Nations Pushes for Justice in Cambodia: 05/09/05
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june05/cambodia_5-09.html

Initiating Questions:

1. Has anyone heard of "The Killing Fields"? What does that mean?

2. Where is Cambodia? What do you know about the country?

3. When a government kills millions of its own people, who should decide the fate of the country's rulers?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. Who were the Khmer Rouge? What was their philosophy?

After years of bombings and devastation, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975 and renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea, rejecting capitalism and seeking to get rid of any person seen as an intellectual: teachers, civil servants, religious leaders.

Peasants were held up as the ideal citizens, cities were emptied and everyone was forced to live in the countryside.

To begin Cambodian society anew, the Khmer Rouge declared that it was Year Zero. They eliminated money and private property, banned religion and tried to sever all family ties.

2. What was the ultimate result of rule by the Khmer Rouge?

In four years, two million people or one-fourth of the population, were executed, starved, tortured or worked to death during what came to be known as "the killing fields."
"We were knowingly walked toward our death just like cattle that were being herded toward a slaughter house," Ranachith Yimsut, who was 15-years old in 1977, told The Digital Archive of Cambodian Holocaust Survivors in 1992.

3. What has happened to the Khmer Rouge?

When the Khmer Rouge lost power to the Vietnamese in 1979, Pol Pot fled Phnom Penh, the capital. For 13 years there was fighting between various factions that didn't end until a peace agreement in 1991. U.N.-backed elections were held in 1993 and national elections again in 1998.

Pol Pot died in the jungles of Cambodia in 1998 and the Khmer Rouge finally surrendered. But many former Khmer Rouge officers and soldiers have blended back into society. Even the current prime minister, Hun Sen, was a former Khmer Rouge officer.

4. How is the United Nations involved in Cambodia?

The United Nations is trying to collect enough money to put on trial leaders of the violent communist movement led by Pol Pot, who took power of the Southeast Asian country in 1975 with the goal of creating a radical new society.

Secretary-general Kofi Annan said international donors could bring justice to the Cambodian people.

"You can send a message that the international community will do its part to ensure that, however late, and however imperfect, impunity will not remain unchallenged, and a measure of justice will be done. That will be a precious and important gift to Cambodia," he said.

5. When and how did the U.S. support Pol Pot's regime?

During the war with Vietnam the U.S. secretly bombed Cambodia and supported Pol Pot's regime because it was anti-Vietnamese.

This support continued in various forms - including recognition of the Khmer Rouge in the United Nations and food aid to the group -- throughout the administrations of former presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

President Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said later of Cambodia and Pol Pot, "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot.... Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could."

6. Will the U.S. participate in a Cambodian tribunal?

Today, due to an unrelated dispute over international tribunals, the United States is not expected to take part in the Cambodian effort, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice could still authorize U.S. participation in the attempt to bring the Khmer Rouge leaders to justice.

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. For more than thirty years no one has been held responsible for the death and torture of millions of Cambodians and other ethnic minorities. Do you think putting old men who participated in the crimes on trial will help the country or reopen old wounds? Explain your reasoning.

2. Research the detailed negotiations that led to the draft United Nations agreement to begin a tribunal in Cambodia. Who has a stake in the tribunal? What is their position and perspective on the tribunal? What do they have to gain or lose by having or not having a tribunal?

[http://www.yale.edu/cgp/chron_v3.html One source is the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University.]

3. What other countries have held international tribunals following atrocious acts against humanity? What was the outcome? Explain your answer.

Write a 300-500 word essay on either of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra (extra@newshour.org). Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.