Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen asked his cabinet ministers to have a moment of silence before Friday's cabinet meeting to remember the people who had died under the Khmer Rouge regime, according to officials who attended the cabinet meeting and who asked not to be identified.
The Cambodian People's Party (CPP) have chosen May 20th to remember the day the Khmer Rouge started to implement radical policies that led to the death of an estimated 1.7 million people.
Every year, CPP commemorates the May 20th by holding religious ceremonies all over Cambodia.
The Khmer Rouge were in power from April 1975 to January 1979 when the invading Vietnamese troops drove them out of power.
When they were in power, the Khmer Rouge evacuated the cities and forced people to work in the rice fields with very little to eat. As a result, almost 2 million people died of starvation, diseases, and mass killings