Power discusses several issues of human rights and genocide since the Essay

Power discusses several issues of human rights and genocide since the 1970s. Select one of these issues---Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, or Kosovo, and explain what - Essay Example Other than communist China, the international community was disturbed by Vietnamese involvement. The real issues, like in other genocide cases since 1970, was not the genocide, but of varying agendas by individual countries. When the Khmer Rouge came to power, the first order was to empty all cities. The goal was to create an agricultural based society with all members living in rural areas. The flaw to Pol Pot’s plan was he expected this change to happen overnight. The young, old, sick, dying, man, woman, and everyone else had to leave the city (Chandler, 2000: 95). This alone created casualties. Some city residents only had ten minutes (Kiernan, 2002: 38). The residents that refused, no matter if sick or unable to leave, were killed. All the urban population had to relocate to the countryside in a matter of weeks. The second type of casualties occurred in the countryside. The old people, rural people, and the new people, urban people had a distinctive line drawn between them. Rural people were given larger rations of food, easier work details, and local positions of power. The urban people were given less food, harder work details, and no power at all. The urban people were not prepared for a hard rural life. Most of these people were scholars, businesspeople, doctors, lawyers, and so forth. Much of the real genocide occurred through starvation. The urban people were not given enough to eat, and did not have the skills to survive like their rural counterparts. The last set of casualties was due to arrest, deliberate torture, and assassination. Urban people were subject to arrest by the Khmer Rouge. Areas like S-21 were used to detain suspect people (Chandler, 2000: 7). These prisons obtained confessions through torture, and then the victim was murdered. Few people ever came back from a Khmer Rouge prison. Estimates of the deaths in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge vary from 1.5 million up to 5 million Cambodians (Kiernan, 2002: