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Former Khmer Rouge prison chief of S-21, Kaing Guek Eav (C),
better known as "Duch", stands in the dock of the court room at the
Extraodinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in Phnom Penh. Cambodia's
UN-backed genocide tribunal will on begin February 17, 2009.
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During America’s Viet Nam War
Khmer guerrillas launched a revolt against the Cambodian government. In
1969, President Richard Nixon authorized the secret bombing of Cambodia (with
whom we were not at war). Over 250,000 Cambodians were killed in
these bombings which continued until 1973. On April 17, 1975 the Khmer
Rouge marched into Phnom Penh and turned the calendars back to what they called
Year Zero. During that period the cities
were emptied of people who were then forced to work in the country’s rice
fields. The Khmer Rouge killed
everyone who could speak a foreign language, who wore glasses, who was a
professional (teachers, lawyers, doctors, dancers, artists, writers, business
men, accountants, reporters, publishers, college-educated, professors), or whom
they didn’t like.
The Khmer Rouge period, from 1975 until 1979,
refers to the rule of Cambodia by the communist forces of Pol Pot, who renamed
the country Democratic Kampuchea and embarked on one of the most brutal and
radical restructurings ever known. Their four-year reign saw the death of
millions through political execution, famine and forced labour, with the era
often referred to as genocide or holocaust.
The Communist Party of
Kampuchea (CPK), otherwise known as the Khmer Rouge, took control of Cambodia
on April 17, 1975. The CPK created the state of Democratic Kampuchea in 1976
and ruled the country until January 1979. The party’s existence was kept secret
until 1977, and no one outside the CPK knew who its leaders were (the leaders
called themselves “Angkar Padevat”).
While the Khmer Rouge was in
power, they set up policies that disregarded human life and produced repression
and massacres on a massive scale. They turned the country into a huge detention
center, which later became a graveyard for nearly two million people, including
their own members and even some senior leaders.
Khmer Rouge killed nearly two million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979,
spreading like a virus from the jungles until they controlled the entire
country, only to systematically dismantle and destroy it in the name of a
Communist agrarian ideal. Today, more than 30 years after Vietnamese soldiers
removed the Khmer Rouge from power, the first genocide trials will start — a
bittersweet note of progress in an impoverished nation still struggling to
rehabilitate its crippled economic and human resources.
Ideology and Year Zero
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| Millions were slaughtered in the Killing Fields |
Upon taking the capital, the Khmer Rouge
launched a savage reformation of Cambodian society. The entire city was
evacuated and forced to march into the countryside where they were to put to
work for 15 hours a day as members of the new agrarian utopia. The Khmer Rouge
proclaimed this Year Zero, and calendars, currency and government services were
all abolished. Disobedience brought immediate execution, with women, children,
the elderly and infirm beaten to death.
The Khmer Rouge’s Marxist/Leninist/Maoist
interpretation of communism believed a classless society would be created
through the systematic elimination of all social classes except for the ‘old
people’ or peasants who work the land. They claimed Cambodia should return to
an ideological ‘golden age’ where all members would be agricultural workers
rather than educated urban citizens who had been corrupted by the West.
Children were seen as the embodiment of the
revolution, their young minds easily moulded, conditioned and indoctrinated.
From the age of eight, all youths were separated from their families and placed
in labour camps where they were taught that Angkar (the organisation) was their
true parent. Encouraged to denounce their parents, child-soldiers were taught
to obey orders and to kill.
Civil and political rights were abolished.
Factories, hospitals and educational facilities were shut down. Lawyers,
teachers, engineers, doctors and qualified professionals were considered a
threat to the new regime. Execution was meted out for the most trivial of
offences, such as wearing glasses or having clean fingernails – a sign of
elitism. For the Khmer Rouge, the only acceptable lifestyle was that of
ignorant agricultural workers.
Religion was banned, as were music and radios,
with thousands of years of traditional lost forever. Money was abolished and
every aspect of life subject to arbitrary regulation.
By instigating ‘Year Zero’ the Khmer Rouge
aimed to create a society centred upon on their rural idyll, where all citizens
pledged loyalty to Angkar in such a way that prohibited personal, community or
religious allegiances. For four years, Cambodia was a prison without walls.
Insider tip – The 1985 movie, The Killing Fields, is
the definitive tale of Cambodia during the time of the Khmer Rouge. Though shot
in Thailand, it is an essential, if chilling, viewing for its portrayal of the
chaos that unfolded starring a real victim of the regime in the leading role.
The regime was ultimately deposed by the
Vietnamese in 1979 after cross-border excursions by the Khmer Rouge left many
civilians dead. They staged a show trial of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary and installed
a new ‘friendly’ government that included the current Prime Minister Hun Sen.
The exact number of deaths at the hands of the Khmer Rouge remains unknown. The
Vietnamese claim as many as four million, though historians and researchers
place the figure between one and two million.
Today, a chilling reminder of torture methods
can be found at Phnom Penh’s Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (S-21), where ‘Comrade
Duch’ ran a barbaric operation that processed some 17,000 victims on their way
to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. Duch remains the only member of the Khmer
Rouge to be found guilty of crimes against humanity.
Who is Pol Pot?
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Pol
Pot ranks alongside Hitler & Stalin for genocide
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Born in 1925 to a wealthy Kampong Thom farming
family, Saloth Sar (also known as Pol Pot or Brother Number One) first entered
political activism in 1946 when he joined the Indochinese Communist Party in
efforts to oust the French. He received a scholarship to study in Paris where
he developed his radical Marxist thought, which would later become the
principles of extreme Maoism.
Upon returning to Phnom Penh in 1954, he
taught geography and history at a private school and joined the Kampuchean
People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP), which later became Workers’ Party of
Kampuchea (WPK). Assuming command of the WPK in 1964, he embarked on tours of
Vietnam and China, where he developed closer ties to the communist Marxism.
In 1975 he renamed Cambodia the Democratic
Republic of Kampuchea, and became Prime Minister and the official Cambodian
head of state a year later, overseeing the hateful reign of a nation
effectively cut off from the outside world. He fled to Thailand and the jungle
borders after the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, and officially resigned
from the party in 1985, though he maintained an active role in coordinating
guerrilla movements.
He was arrested by ‘Brother Number Five’ Ta
Mok in 1997 and sentenced to life imprisonment by a ‘people’s tribunal’, which
critics denounced as a yet another show trial to appease the international
community. He died in 1998, allegedly of heart failure, while under house
arrest. His modest grave can be visited in Ang Long Veng.
The Rise of the Khmer Rouge
The Cambodian communist
movement emerged from the country’s struggle against French colonization 1940s,
and was influenced by the Vietnamese. Fueled by the first Indochina War in the
1950s, and during the next 20 years, the movement took roots and began to grow.
The Khmer Rouge or ‘Red Khmer’ – a term coined by one-time ally King Sihanouk – developed under the guidance of Pol Pot in the Cambodian jungles during the 1960s, where followers had fled to escape persecution by right-wing security forces. It advocated a radical communist revolution that would purge Cambodia of Western influence and create a solely agrarian society. During the Vietnam War, with the aid of North Vietnamese communist forces, the Khmer Rouge began widespread insurgencies against government forces to take control of a third of the country by 1970.
In March 1970, Marshal Lon Nol,
a Cambodian politician who had previously served as prime minister, and his
pro-American associates staged a successful coup to depose Prince Sihanouk as
head of state. At this time, the Khmer Rouge had gained members and was
positioned to become a major player in the civil war due to its alliance with
Sihanouk. Their army was led by Pol Pot, who was appointed CPK’s party
secretary and leader in 1963. Pol Pot, born in Cambodia as Solath Sar, spent
time in France and became a member of the French Communist Party. Upon
returning to Cambodia in 1953, he joined a clandestine communist movement and
began his rise up the ranks to become one of the world’s most infamous
dictators.
Aided by the Vietnamese, the
Khmer Rouge began to defeat Lon Nol’s forces on the battlefields. By the end of
1972, the Vietnamese withdrew from Cambodia and turned the major
responsibilities for the war over to the CPK.
From January to August 1973,
the Khmer Republic government, with assistance from the US, dropped about half
a million tons of bombs on Cambodia, which may have killed as many as 300,000
people. Many who resented the bombings or had lost family members joined the
Khmer Rouge’s revolution.
By early 1973, about 85 percent
of Cambodian territory was in the hands of the Khmer Rouge, and the Lon Nol
army was almost unable to go on the offensive. However, with US assistance, it
was able to continue fighting the Khmer Rouge for two more years.
April
17, 1975 ended five years of foreign interventions, bombardment, and civil war
in Cambodia. On this date, Phnom Penh, a major city in Cambodia, fell to the
communist forces.
Two incidents defined the movement; the first
was the overthrow of King Sihanouk in absentia by US-backed Lon Nol in 1970,
with Sihanouk exiling himself in China and establishing a partnership with the
Khmer Rouge who worshiped the extreme Marxism under Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
The second was the ‘secret’ bombing campaign by President Nixon that saw more
bombs dropped on Cambodia (a nation the US was never officially at war with) in
a bid to flush out Viet Cong than were used in all of the Second World War.
Both of these actions sparked a five-year
civil war, from 1970 to 1975, that drove the disenchanted population into the
welcoming arms of the Khmer Rouge. The bombings in Cambodia by the US
eventually forced the Vietnamese out, with the Khmer Rouge filling the power
vacuum created. In April 1975, just two weeks before the fall of Saigon, the
Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh from the pro-US regime and proclaimed the
Kampuchean People’s Republic.
Life in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge Regime
A few days after they took
power in 1975, the Khmer Rouge forced perhaps two million people in Phnom Penh
and other cities into the countryside to undertake agricultural work. Thousands
of people died during the evacuations.
The Khmer Rouge also began to
implement their radical Maoist and Marxist-Leninist transformation program at
this time. They wanted to transform Cambodia into a rural, classless society in
which there were no rich people, no poor people, and no exploitation. To
accomplish this, they abolished money, free markets, normal schooling, private
property, foreign clothing styles, religious practices, and traditional Khmer
culture. Public schools, pagodas, mosques, churches, universities, shops and
government buildings were shut or turned into prisons, stables, reeducation
camps and granaries. There was no public or private transportation, no private
property, and no non-revolutionary entertainment. Leisure activities were
severely restricted. People throughout the country, including the leaders of
the CPK, had to wear black costumes, which were their traditional revolutionary
clothes.
During this time, everyone was
deprived of their basic rights. People were not allowed to go outside their
cooperative. The regime would not allow anyone to gather and hold discussions.
If three people gathered and talked, they could be accused of being enemies and
arrested or executed.
Family relationships were also
heavily criticized. People were forbidden to show even the slightest affection,
humor or pity. The Khmer Rouge asked all Cambodians to believe, obey and
respect only Angkar Padevat, which was to be everyone’s “mother and father.”
The Khmer Rouge claimed that
only pure people were qualified to build the revolution. Soon after seizing
power, they arrested and killed thousands of soldiers, military officers and
civil servants from the Khmer Republic regime led by Marshal Lon Nol, whom they
did not regard as “pure.” Over the next three years, they executed hundreds of
thousands of intellectuals; city residents; minority people such as the Cham,
Vietnamese and Chinese; and many of their own soldiers and party members, who
were accused of being traitors. Many were held in prisons, where they were
detained, interrogated, tortured and executed. The most important prison in
Cambodia, known as S-21, held approximately 14,000 prisoners while in
operation. Only about 12 survived.
Under the terms of the CPK’s
1976 “Four-Year Plan,” Cambodians were expected to produce three tons of rice
per hectare throughout the country. This meant that people had to grow and
harvest rice all 12 months of the year. In most regions, the Khmer Rouge forced
people to work more than 12 hours a day without rest or adequate food.
Fall of the Khmer Rouge
By the end of 1977, clashes
broke out between Cambodia and Vietnam. Tens of thousands of people were sent
to fight and thousands were killed.
In December 1978, Vietnamese
troops fought their way into Cambodia. They captured Phnom Penh on January 7,
1979. The Khmer Rouge leaders then fled to the west and reestablished their
forces in Thai territory, aided by China and Thailand. The United Nations voted
to give the resistance movement against communists, which included the Khmer
Rouge, a seat in its General Assembly. From 1979 to 1990, it recognized them as
the only legitimate representative of Cambodia.
In 1982, the Khmer Rouge formed
a coalition with Prince Sihanouk, who was exiled in China after the Cambodian
Civil War, and the non-communist leader Son Sann to create the Triparty
Coalition Government. In Phnom Penh, on the other hand, Vietnam helped to
create a new government – the People?s Republic of Kampuchea – led by Heng
Samrin.
The Khmer Rouge continued to
exist until 1999 when all of its leaders had defected to the Royal Government
of Cambodia, been arrested, or had died. But their legacy remains.
More about tyrants
Pol Pot's soldiers fled to Thailand and they were welcomed
by the Thai's who feared a Vietnamese invasion. The Khmer Rouge continued a
guerrilla war against the Vietnamese. However the Vietnamese forces withdrew
from Cambodia in 1989.
Afterwards negotiations began among several different
parties. The result was the Paris Peace Accords of 1991. Communism was
abandoned in Cambodia and a provisional government ruled until 1993 when
elections were held and a constitution was framed. Sihanouk was made a
constitutional monarch.
However the Khmer Rouge refused to take part in the
elections and they continued their guerrilla war. Fortunately in 1996 Pol Pot's
second in command Ieng Sary defected in 1996. Many Khmer Rouge troops followed
him. Pol Pot himself died in 1998 and peace returned to Cambodia.
Conclusion
The
Khmer Rouge took root in Cambodia's northeastern jungles as early as the 1960s,
a guerrilla group driven by communist ideals that nipped the periphery of
government-controlled areas. The flash point came when Cambodia's leader,
Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was deposed in a military coup in 1970 and leaned on
the Khmer Rouge for support. The prince's imprimatur lent the movement
legitimacy, although while he would nominally serve as head of state, he spent
much of the Khmer Rouge's rule under house arrest. As the country descended
into civil war, the Khmer Rouge presented themselves as a party for peace and
succeeded in mobilizing support in the countryside.
The
pacifist talk belied a sinister agenda, one that would remain hidden to the
outside world for years. When the Khmer Rouge succeeded in capturing the
Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh in 1975, they evacuated the entire population
of the city — more than 2.5 million people — to camps in the countryside.
Similar evacuations took place every time the Khmer Rouge took over a new city.
Simultaneously,
the Khmer Rouge were planning the steps necessary for a radical shift to an
agrarian society. During the Khmer Rouge's nascent days, the movement's leader,
Pol Pot, had grown to admire the way the tribes on the outskirts of Cambodia's
jungles lived, free of Buddhism, money or education, and now he wanted to foist
the same philosophy on the entire nation. Pol Pot envisioned a Cambodia absent
of any social institutions like banks or religions or any modern technology. He
sought to triple agricultural production in a year, absent the manpower or
means necessary. On a visit to China in 1975, two Khmer Rouge members bragged
they would "be the first nation to create a completely Communist society
without wasting time on intermediate steps."
It
was deadly arrogance. With the cities emptied and the population under Khmer
Rouge control, Pol Pot's means of implementation was to begin exterminating
anyone who didn't fit this new ideal. He declared that he was turning Cambodia
— now renamed the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea — back to "Year
Zero," and intellectuals, businessmen, Buddhists and foreigners were all
purged. "What is rotten must be removed," read a popular Khmer Rouge
slogan at the time, and remove they did, often by execution but sometimes
simply by working people to death in the fields.
It's
impossible to tally the total number dead with any precision, but it is
generally assumed that the Khmer Rouge killed between one million and two
million people during their reign. Thousands more died of malnutrition or
disease, and the upper classes of Cambodian society were all but wiped out. The
killing continued unabated until Vietnamese troops, tired of border skirmishes
with the Khmer Rouge, invaded in 1979 and sent the Khmer Rouge back to the
jungles.
Pol
Pot continued to lead the Khmer Rouge as an insurgent movement until 1997, when
he was arrested and sentenced to house arrest by his own followers after
killing one of his closest advisers. He died in 1998 in a tiny jungle village,
never having faced charges.
Now,
five leaders of the Khmer Rouge will face charges in a tribunal backed by the
United Nations. The first, Kaing Guek Eav — known better by his nom de guerre,
Duch — ran the Tuol Sleng prison camp in Phnom Penh, where out of 17,000
Cambodians who were imprisoned, fewer than 20 survived. Pol Pot's
second-in-command, Nuon Chea, will also face charges, as well as the Khmer
Rouge's former foreign minister and head of state.
But
some are already questioning the integrity of the tribunal, which was tasked
only with bringing those "most responsible" for the genocide to
justice. Many victims' families say limiting the blame to these five alone is
not enough, and human rights experts say that more comprehensive trials may
help a country desperately in need of healing.
Reference
http://www.cambodiatribunal.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/history_Cambodian_History_khmer.pdf
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