Introduction
For years, Cambodia has been a country in turmoil. The reigns of Prince Sihanouk and Lon Nol were marked by crisis, including an internal coup and the Vietnam War. The situation finally reached its breaking point when the evacuation of the city of Phnom Penh began on April 17, 1975. This event ushered in a new rule by the Khmer Rouge, headed up by the tyrannical Pol Pot. The three years of Khmer Rouge rule would be marked by forced labor, torture, starvation, pestilence, and eventually the deaths of nearly two million people. This proved to be one of the most severe genocides the world had ever seen.
Many
things led to this point. Cambodia was part of a larger battle in the Cold War.
Because of the country’s proximity to Vietnam and the sometimes-sympathetic
action taken by its leaders toward the Vietnamese, Cambodia became entangled in
the Vietnam conflict. The United States had taken a strong role in this
particular aspect of the Cold War and thus reacted harshly to Cambodia’s
interference. In fact, the United States’ policy toward Cambodia played a major
role in bringing Pol Pot to power. Explaining the events leading up to this
overthrow help explain how and why such a massacre was able to occur.
The Khmer Empire began almost 1,000 years ago. The empire began to collapse in the fifteenth century as it was threatened by the Thai Empire. The area once controlled by the Khmers slowly fell to Siam, Thai, and Vietnamese conquerors. The intervening rulers upheld the Cambodian aristocracy. This modus operandi was preserved until French forces took up a protectorate role in 1884. After France fell to Hitler in 1940, Japan attempted to retake the Angkor and Battambang provinces of Cambodia. Both Japan and China signed agreements with the Vichy government in France to take control of parts of Cambodia. After the World War II ended, France took an active role in reestablishing control in Cambodia. At the time, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam was supporting the Communist Cambodian resistance. Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia signed an agreement in 1946 “to rule an internally autonomous Cambodian state within the French Union until France could establish the promised Indochina federation” (Haas, Genocide, 9). As the federation failed to occur, Sihanouk established a democratic state, with a constitution, elections, parliament, and political parties. These various parties fought for control in the elections of 1946, with the resistance groups forming the United Issarak Front (UIF).
Meanwhile, China and Russian were swiftly acknowledging the Communist party in Vietnam as the sovereign power of the state while the United States was maintaining its adamant support of France in Vietnam. Since France’s focus was indeed Vietnam, Sihanouk was left to rule Cambodia without resources or support. After the Korean War ended, Sihanouk asserted that Cambodia was a sovereign, non-aligned state. However, at the same time, the Communist Party was growing, as new members joined after being educated in France. Sihanouk relinquished power to his father and ran in elections required by the Geneva Accords. His party won the election, and, in 1960, he was named head of state.
North Vietnam began to supply Communist factions in South Vietnam in 1959. Sihanouk gave the North Vietnamese government permission to have a supply route to the South via Cambodia. This was known as the Ho Chi Minh trail. Sihanouk further ingratiated himself to the Communists by severing ties with South Vietnam and refusing US aid. The US began to cross the Cambodian border in pursuit of the Vietcong. Though Sihanouk lodged many complaints with different international organizations, the United States kept up its actions, going so far as to gun down two Cambodian villages. Saloth Sar, leader of the Worker’s Party of Kampuchea, attempted to gain support from China and North Korea, but both countries refused, fearing that an insurrection would disrupt the use of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. As South Vietnam’s US-supported government became weaker, the US feared that all of Southeast Asia could fall prey to Communism. To thwart this, the United States sent forces into Vietnam. Sihanouk sought to maintain his country’s borders while officially recognizing the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
The election of President Nixon in the United States in 1968 led to a new involvement for Cambodia in the Vietnam War. Taking a more aggressive approach in hopes of ending the war, Nixon ordered mass bombings of Vietcong bases inside Cambodia. As Sihanouk began to fear that China, North Vietnam, and the Soviet Union were aiding Cambodian Communists, he reopened diplomatic relations with the United States. While Sihanouk was on vacation, General Lon Nol started anti-Vietnamese riots, leading to a coup d’état. The United States decided it would be in its interests to work with the new government, so the Lon Nol administration was allowed to stay. North Vietnam also attempted to work with the new government, asking only that the Ho Chi Minh Trail be left intact. Lon Nol refused. Both Lon Nol’s army and US troops were fighting against the North Vietnamese in Cambodia, lending the Cambodian Communist party to at last form an alliance with North Vietnam. Saloth Sar, who had taken the name of Pol Pot, refused actual aid from the Vietnamese but did allow Chinese supplies to be brought to Cambodia through Vietnam. The ousted Sihanouk was then cajoled into forming an alliance with Pol Pot, who used Sihanouk as a prop. The two men urged Cambodians to fight against the government of Lon Nol, marking the beginning of Pol Pot’s rise to power.
Lon Nol’s government became increasingly unstable as corruption, revolts, and student demonstrations became more commonplace. Pol Pot refused to work with either Sihanouk or Lon Nol after the United States violated the Paris Peace Accords by continuing to bomb Cambodia. His party already had control of half of the population by 1973. A huge debate erupted on the world stage as different world leaders attempted to solve the leadership problem in Cambodia. China’s leader preferred working with Sihanouk, but Henry Kissinger of the United States insisted that Sihanouk negotiate with Lon Nol. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, President of France, realized the precariousness of Lon Nol’s regime and asked American President Gerald Ford to support Sihanouk as late as December 1974. The Americans refused. In early 1975, the reorganized Cambodian Communist party, now known as the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea, began its offensive against Lon Nol’s troops.
Rise of the Khmer Rouge
To understand the Khmer Rouge itself, it is important to understand the background of its most tangible leader, Pol Pot. While it is true that no one person governed the party and that Pol Pot was often removed from power by his associates, as in 1976 and 1979, his was the defining personality of the movement.
Like most of his fellow revolutionaries, Pol Pot took an assumed name while the movement was still underground in order to give a faceless, almost populist quality to the party. He was born Saloth Sar in the town of Kompong Thom in 1928. Strangely enough, Saloth was not born into the kind of world that he tried to create once empowered; rather, his family was a representation of the upper class that Saloth later tried to destroy. In fact, the Saloth family was directly related to the royal family in Cambodia. Unlike most Cambodian children, Saloth never worked in the fields, spending his time instead in a Catholic school. Later, he studied radioelectricity in Paris, where he first exhibited his communist and anti-Vietnamese bents. In fact, it was this humble beginning as part of the Parisian intelligentsia that brought the major players of the Cambodian genocide together (Kiernan 9-10). By April 17, 1975, Pol Pot and the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea had effectively taken control of the capital city of Phnom Penh. Yet the brand of Communism that Pol Pot’s rule brought with it was not the Soviet or Maoist forms seen elsewhere. Rather, the Cambodian Communists had a completely new way of bringing communism to the people.
The ideology of Pol Pot and his followers was not the ideology subscribed to by millions of communists in the Soviet Union or North Vietnam. Rather, it mirrored the ideas behind Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, while trying to avoid the lapses in pure communism that China eventually suffered. China had many problems with instituting Mao’s policies in their purist form. For instance, the peasant insisted on keeping individual plots of land, the cities were difficult to communize, and an intellectual class arose with the Chinese Communist Party. Pol Pot granted that there was Chinese influence in his party’s goals: “After summing up the concrete experiences of the world revolution, particularly under the guidance of Comrade Mao Tse-tung’s works, we have found a road conforming with the concrete conditions and social conditions in our country” (Quinn 220). There were other numerous instances when Pol Pot pledged his support of Chinese policies, and China remained one of Cambodia’s staunchest allies until almost the end of Pol Pot’s rule. Thus a brief analysis of Mao’s ideas serves to illuminate Pol Pot’s own strategies. According to Kenneth Quinn, Mao sough to “transform the peasant into a modern producer with a commitment to the collective good and the elimination of selfish individualism” (223). This revolution would require three steps on the part of the governing party. First, the previous ruling party and elite would have to be destroyed by a land reform program. Second, the reliance on land and individual plots would have to be broken by the establishment of cooperatives. Finally, labor and wages would have to be reconstituted to reflect the general impetus of the movement. While this movement failed in China, Cambodia harbored more opportunities for the plan to succeed with little resistance. Because of the lack of organization and support in the other political parties and the overwhelming devastation caused by US bombing, Pol Pot was assured a place as unchallenged leader of the people. To help ensure the success of his radical policies, he devised a system that would adopt the Maoist philosophy with two addenda of his own: relentless violence to force acceptance by the Cambodians and the complete eradication of cities.
These two steps had their roots in the French education that many of the Khmer Rouge elite received. Instead of following the traditional non-violent methods that permeate Cambodian culture, leaders of the Khmer Rouge such as Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, and Khieu Samphan embraced the more Western approach of using violence as a means of coercion. The teachings of George Sorel also provided some background to the actions of the Khmer Rouge elite. Just as Sorel suggested, the elite group created a separate society for themselves, they espoused an abhorrence for the society they replaced, and they maintained a fanatical sense of their own righteousness and purity.
The actual institutionalization of these ideas took a method closer to Stalin’s than to Mao’s. There exist a number of similarities between the ways Stalin took and kept control and the way that Pol Pot did the same. Both men acted swiftly to de-privatize the agricultural sectors in their respective countries. Like wise, both used massive amounts of violence to eliminate whole classes of people. In Pol Pot’s case, he concentrated on removing components of the old society to ensure conformity in the new one. Another similarity is the use of party purges to maintain the purity of the party itself. For instance, Pol Pot’s “Gang of Six” (Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Khieu Ponnary, Ieng Thirith, and Yun Yat) became notorious for regular executions of the top members of the party. To carry out these plans, the Paris-trained elites turned to the poorest and youngest group of Cambodian society and trained them to love war and cruelty. Sihanouk himself attributed the success of the Khmer Rouge to their recruitment methods of the children from the poor mountain and forest regions of the country. Pol Pot used these youths to betray people who were not sympathetic to their cause and to execute these people without question or remorse.
Atrocities Committed by the Pol Pot Regime
The genocide committed by Pol Pot centered on the last two parts of his program to take power. By eradicating the cities and using massive amounts of violence, Pol Pot succeeded in exterminating almost 2 million – or one-fifth of Cambodia’s total population – in less that four years.
The genocide began when the Khmer Rouge first rolled into Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. Lon Nol had been defeated on April 1, and his forces had been instructed to surrender at 9:00 on April 17. Though many of the Lon Nol’s forces surrendered peaceably, many were executed that day as the new administration began purging any factions hostile to its radical ideas. The same day, soldiers in charge of different parts of the city began to evacuate their sections. They told the residents that they feared a mass bombing by the United States. Within days, they had almost completely shut down the capital city.
In the first few days after Cambodia became Democratic Kampuchea, all cities were evacuated, hospitals cleared, schools closed, factories emptied, money abolished, monasteries shut, libraries scattered. For nearly four years freedom of press, of movement, of worship, or organization, and of association, and of discussion all completely disappeared. So did everyday family life. A whole nation was kidnapped and then besieged from within (Kiernan 8).
The inhabitants were forced to walk out into the fields with nothing but the clothes they had on. Those in hospitals that could not walk were shot. In most cases, people were expected to walk for at least a week. The roads leading to the fields were lined with bodies of the elderly or children that had died of sickness along the way.
The evacuations of Pursat and Sisophon began on April 17. The major port city of Kompong Som fell on April 18. Battambang, after a bit of bloodshed and confusion, was evacuated on April 24. According to Kiernan, Pol Pot issued an eight-point plan to achieve the goals of Democratic Kampuchea:
1. Evacuate people from all towns.
2. Abolish all markets.
3. Abolish Lon Nol regime currency and withhold the revolutionary currency that had been printed.
4. Defrock all Buddhist monks and put them to work growing rice.
5. Execute all leaders of the Lon Nol regime beginning with the top leaders.
6. Establish high-level cooperatives throughout the country, with communal eating.
7. Expel the entire Vietnamese minority population.
8. Dispatch troops to the borders, particularly the Vietnamese border. (55)