Morbid Fact Du Jour For December 3, 2013

Today’s Brutal Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Between 1975 and 1979, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge attempted to eradicate all traces of “westernization” from their country, killing intellectuals, professionals and those who’d ever had contact with foreigners, and rounding up the remaining citizens into forced-labor camps where they were starved, tortured, worked to death or killed outright. Scores of them at a time were murdered in the so-called killing fields, usually by being hacked with farm tools.
Even children were not spared. Enter the Chankiri tree, or killing tree. This was a tree, any tree, where babies and children would be dashed against and killed. This was done to prevent them from growing up and avenging the deaths of their parents.  The Khmer Rouge soldiers, mostly young peasant men and women, were often observed to laugh as they swung the babies against the tree trunks; not to have laughed would have been interpreted as a sign of sympathy and made the killers themselves targets.

Culled From: Wikipedia
Submitted by: Aimee

I had thought that a chankiri tree was a specific type of tree, chosen perhaps for some symbolic reason, but apparently not; apparently any tree would do. – Aimee