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Khmer Rouge

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File:Ac.khmerrouge.jpg
Photos from the Khmer Rouge regime's archives showing a few of their hundreds of thousands of victims (Photos on display at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh
The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh
Skulls of Khmer Rouge victims at the "killing fields" site at Choeung Ek

The Khmer Rouge (Khmer: ) was a communist organization that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The term "Khmer Rouge," meaning "Red Khmer" in French, was coined by Cambodian head of state Norodom Sihanouk and was later adopted in English. It was used to refer to a succession of leftist parties in Cambodia which evolved into the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and later the Party of Democratic Kampuchea. The organization was also known as the Communist Party of Kampuchea, the Khmer Communist Party and the National Army of Democratic Kampuchea.

The Khmer Rouge regime is remembered mainly for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people (from an estimated 1972 population of 7.1 million), through execution, starvation and forced labor. In terms of the number of people killed as a proportion of the population of the country it ruled, it was one of the most lethal regimes of the 20th century — on par with the regimes of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

The Khmer Rouge regime was removed from power in 1979 as a result of an invasion by Vietnam. It survived into the 1990s as a resistance movement operating in western Cambodia from bases in Thailand. In 1996, following a peace agreement, the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot formally dissolved the organisation. Only two Khmer Rouge leaders, Ta Mok and Khang Khek Leu, also known as "Duch," have been arrested, and, as of April 2006, they are currently imprisoned awaiting trial in the Extraordinary Chambers currently being established to try remaining leaders of the Pol Pot regime.

Path to power

The Indochinese Communist Party was founded in 1931. In 1951, the People's Revolutionary Party of Cambodia was formed under Vietnamese supervision. The party was initially a Vietnamese front organization with little Cambodian participation. While the party was internally communist, its ideology was not revealed to outsiders. In 1959, a party congress was held for the first time without the presence of Vietnamese. The party reorganized itself and for the first time publicly declared itself to be socialist in ideology. The Khmer Rouge and most Cambodians date the origin of the Communist Party to this event.

In 1966 the name of the party was changed in secret to the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). Only the inner party were informed of the new name. The Vietnamese and lower level party members were not told. The party leadership endorsed armed struggle against the government, then led by Norodom Sihanouk. In 1967, several small-scale attempts at insurgency were made by the CPK but they had little success.

In 1968, the Khmer Rouge forces launched a national insurgency across Cambodia. Though North Vietnam had not been informed of the decision, its forces provided shelter and weapons to the Khmer Rouge after the insurgency started. Vietnamese support for the insurgency made it impossible for the Cambodian military to effectively counter it. For the next two years the insurgency grew as Sihanouk did very little to stop it. As the insurgency grew stronger, the party finally openly declared itself to be the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK).

The Khmer Rouge was able to take power only as a result of the situation created by the Cambodian coup of 1970, in which Premier Lon Nol with the support of the National Assembly, deposed Sihanouk. Sihanouk, in exile in Beijing, made an alliance with the Khmer Rouge and became the nominal head of a Khmer Rouge-dominated government-in-exile backed by the People's Republic of China. Sihanouk's popular support in rural Cambodia allowed the Khmer Rouge to extend its power and influence to the point that by 1973 it exercised de facto control over the majority of Cambodian territory, although only a minority of its population. Many people in Cambodia who helped the Khmer Rouge against the Lon Nol government thought they were fighting for the restoration of Sihanouk.

When the U.S. Congress suspended aid to Cambodia in 1973, the Khmer Rouge made sweeping gains in the country. By 1975, with the Lon Nol government running out of ammunition, it was clear that it was only a matter of time before the government would collapse. On April 17, 1975 the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh.

The ideology of the Khmer Rouge evolved over time. In the early days, it was an orthodox communist party and looked to the Vietnamese Communists for guidance. After 1960, it became progressively more Maoist but also developed its own unique political ideas. By the 1970s the ideology of the Khmer Rouge combined an extreme form of Maoism with the anti-colonialist ideas of the European left, which its leaders had acquired during their education in French universities in the 1950s. The Khmer Rouge leaders were also privately very resentful of what they saw as the arrogant attitude of the Vietnamese, and were determined to establish a form of communism very different to the Vietnamese model.

The Khmer Rouge in power

File:Kr4.JPG
Some of the Khmer Rouge leadership during their period in power. Pol Pot is at left. (Photo on display at the Tuol Sleng)
"You will get many lashes and electrocutions": Sign displaying "rules" at Tuol Sleng

The leadership of the Khmer Rouge was largely unchanged between the 1960s and the mid-1990s. The Khmer Rouge leaders were mostly from middle-class families and had been educated at French universities.

The Standing Committee of the Khmer Rouge's Central Committee ("Party Center") during its period of power consisted of:

  • Pol Pot (Saloth Sar) "Brother number 1" the effective leader of the movement, General Secretary from 1963 until his death in 1998
  • Nuon Chea "Brother number 2" Prime Minister (alive)
  • Ieng Sary "Brother number 3" Deputy Prime Minister (Pol Pot's brother-in-law) (alive)
  • Ta Mok (Chhit Chhoeun) "Brother number 4" Final Khmer Rouge leader, Southwest Regional Secretary (alive)
  • Khieu Samphan "Brother number 5" President of the Khmer Rouge (alive)
  • Son Sen Defense Minister (dead), also;
  • Yun Yat (dead)
  • Ke Pauk "Brother number 13" Former secretary of the Northern zone (dead)
  • Ieng Thirith (alive).

In power, the Khmer Rouge carried out a radical program that included isolating the country from foreign influence, closing schools, hospitals and factories, abolishing banking, finance and currency, outlawing all religions, confiscating all private property and relocating people from urban areas to collective farms where forced labor was widespread. The purpose of this policy was to turn Cambodians into "new people" through agricultural labor. These actions resulted in massive deaths through executions, work exhaustion, illness, and starvation.

In Phnom Penh and other cities, the Khmer Rouge told residents that they would be moved only about "two or three kilometers" outside the city and would return in "two or three days." Some witnesses say they were told that the evacuation was because of the "threat of American bombing" and that they did not have to lock their houses since the Khmer Rouge would "take care of everything" until they returned.

The Khmer Rouge attempted to turn Cambodia into a classless society by depopulating cities and forcing the urban population into agricultural communes. The entire population was forced to become farmers in labour camps. During their four years in power, the Khmer Rouge overworked and starved the population, at the same time executing selected groups (including intellectuals) and killing many others for even minor breaches of rules.

Cambodians were expected to produce three tons of rice per hectare; before the Khmer Rouge era, the average was only one ton per hectare. The Khmer Rouge forced people to work for 12 hours non-stop, without adequate rest or food. They did not believe in western medicine but instead favoured traditional peasant medicine; many died as a result. Family relationships not sanctioned by the state were also banned, and family members could be put to death for communicating with each other.

The Khmer language has a complex system of usages to define speakers' rank and social status. During the rule of the Khmer Rouge, these usages were abolished. People were encouraged to call each other "friend" or "comrade" (Khmer: miet), and to avoid traditional signs of deference such as bowing or folding the hands in salutation, known as samphea. Language was transformed in other ways. The Khmer Rouge invented new terms. People were told to "forge" (Khmer: lot dam) a new revolutionary character, that they were the "instruments" (Khmer: opokar) of the ruling body known as "Angkar" (Organization), and that nostalgia for prerevolutionary times (Khmer: choeu stek arom, or "memory sickness") could result in execution.

Many Cambodians crossed the border into Thailand to seek asylum. From there, they were transported to refugee camps such as Khao-I-Dang, the only camp allowing resettlement in countries such as the United States, France, Canada, and Australia.

Killings and torture

File:Cambodia-demography.png
Number of inhabitants between 1961 and 2001 in thousands. Note the decrease during the Khmer Rouge years (1975-1979). FAO Data, Demographics of Cambodia

The Khmer Rouge regime arrested, tortured and eventually executed anyone suspected of belonging to several categories of supposed "enemies":

  • anyone with connections to the former government or with foreign governments
  • professionals and intellectuals - in practice this included almost everyone with an education, or even people wearing glasses
  • ethnic Vietnamese, Cambodian Christians, Muslims and the Buddhist monkhood

Today, examples of the torture methods used by the Khmer Rouge can be seen at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The museum occupies the former grounds of a high school turned prison camp that was operated by Khang Khek Leu, more commonly known as "Comrade Duch". Some 200,000 people passed through this centre before they were taken to sites (also known as The Killing Fields), outside Phnom Penh such as Choeung Ek where most were executed and buried in mass graves.

Number of deaths

The exact number of people who died as a result of the Khmer Rouge's policies is debated as is the cause of death among those who died. Access to the country during Khmer Rouge rule and during Vietnamese rule was very limited. The Vietnamese-installed regime that succeeded the Khmer Rouge claimed that 3.3 million had died. The CIA in a 1980 report estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 people were executed by the Khmer Rouge while blaming many other deaths on the Vietnamese invasion. It should be noted that the CIA had almost no access to Cambodia when that report was written. Neither the CIA report or Vietnamese claims are considered credible sources by modern historians. While modern research has located mass graves from the Khmer Rouge era all over Cambodia, the causes of death of the people in the graves is open to dispute and interpretation. Modern estimates of executions range from 250,000 to 1,500,000 [1].

The United States Department of State and the State Department funded Yale Cambodian Genocide Project give estimates of the total death toll as 1.2 million and 1.7 million respectively. Amnesty International gives estimates of the total death toll as 1.4 million. R. J. Rummel, an analyst of historical political killings, gives a figure of 2 million. Former Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot gave a figure of 800,000. Khieu Samphan said 1 million had died.

In 1962, the last complete census before Cambodia was engulfed by war, the population of the country was 5.7 million. A decade later, in 1972, the population was estimated at 7.1 million. Using Amnesty International's estimate of 1.4 million deaths, about 20 percent of the population would have died between 1975 and 1978.

Fall of the Khmer Rouge

In December 1978, after several years of border conflict and a flood of refugees into Vietnam, Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia, capturing Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979 and deposing the Khmer Rouge regime. Despite Cambodians' traditional fear of Vietnamese domination, the Vietnamese invaders were assisted by widespread defections of Khmer Rouge activists, who formed the core of the post-Khmer Rouge government. The new government was still a Khmer Rouge government full of people who had carried out Pol Pot's orders before the Vietnam invasion. The Khmer Rouge retreated to the west and continued to control an area near the Thai border for the next decade, unofficially protected by elements of the Thai Army and funded by smuggled diamonds and timber.

China launched a punitive invasion of northern Vietnam. During the '80s, the U.S. gave military and humanitarian support to the republican KPNLF and royalist ANS insurgent groups. The Khmer Rouge, still led by Pol Pot and the most capable militarily of the three rebel groups, received extensive military aid from China and intelligence from the Thai military. While eastern and central Cambodia were firmly under the control of Vietnam and its Cambodian allies by 1980, the western part of the country continued to be a battlefield through the 1980s, with millions of landmines sown across the countryside.

Pol Pot relinquished his Khmer Rouge leadership post to Khieu Samphan in 1985, but he continued to be the driving force behind the Khmer Rouge insurgency, giving speeches to his followers. Some journalists [2] commented that despite the international community's near-universal condemnation of the Khmer Rouge's brutal rule, a sizable number of Cambodians in KR-controlled areas seemed to genuinely support Pol Pot.

After a decade of inconclusive conflict, all Cambodian political factions signed a treaty in 1991 calling for elections and disarmament. But in 1992 the Khmer Rouge resumed fighting and the following year they rejected the results of the elections. There was a mass defection in 1996 when around half the remaining soldiers (about 4,000) left. Factional fighting in 1997 led to Pol Pot's trial and imprisonment by the Khmer Rouge itself. Pol Pot died in April 1998, and Khieu Samphan surrendered in December. On December 29, 1998 the remaining leaders of the Khmer Rouge apologised for the deaths in the 1970s. By 1999 most members had surrendered, or been captured. In December 1999, Ta Mok and the remaining leaders surrendered and the Khmer Rouge effectively ceased to exist. Most of the remaining Khmer Rouge leaders live in the Pailin area or are hidden in Phnom Penh.

Recovery and trials

Since 1990 Cambodia has gradually recovered, demographically and economically, from the Khmer Rouge regime, although the psychological scars affect many Cambodian families and émigré communities. Although the current government teaches about Khmer Rouge atrocities in the schools, Cambodia has a very young population and by 2005 three-quarters of Cambodians were too young to remember the Khmer Rouge years. The younger generations would only know the Khmer Rouge through word-of-mouth from parents and elders. In 1997, Cambodia established a Khmer Rouge Trial Task Force to create a legal and judicial structure to try the remaining leaders for war crimes and other crimes against humanity, but progress was slow, mainly because the Cambodian government of Hun Sen, despite its origins in the Vietnamese-backed regime of the 1980s, was reluctant to bring the Khmer Rouge leaders to trial. Funding shortfalls plagued the operation, and the government said that due to the poor economy and other financial commitments, it could only afford limited funding for the tribunal. Several countries, including India and Japan, came forward with extra funds, but by January, 2006, the full balance of funding was not yet in place.

Nonetheless, the task force began its work and took possession of two buildings on the grounds of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF) High Command headquarters in Kandal province just on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. The tribunal task force expects to spend the rest of 2006 training the judges and other tribunal members before the actual trial is to take place. [3]. In March 2006 the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, nominated seven judges for a trial of the Khmer Rouge leaders.

In May 2006 Justice Minister Ang Vong Vathana announced that Cambodia's highest judicial body approved 30 Cambodian and U.N. judges to preside over rgw long-awaited genocide tribunal for surviving Khmer Rouge leaders.

Notes

^ An article in The Third Indochina Conflict (1951) by David Elliott notes "It is evident that the Vietnamese did not regard the Kampuchean Party which was to be formed as a real Communist Party."

References

Further reading

Two of the very few western scholars who know the Khmer language and have published works about Cambodia are Ben Kiernan and David P. Chandler. Nayan Chanda, the Indochina correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review, is also very familiar with this period (through personal reporting, including many interviews with principals).

  • Elizabeth Becker: When the War Was over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution
  • Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy: The War After the War (Collier, New York, 1986) (very comprehensively footnoted)
  • David P. Chandler: A History of Cambodia (Westview Press 2000); ISBN 0813335116.
  • David P. Chandler: Brother Number One: A Political Biography (Westview Press 1999); ISBN 813335108.
  • David P. Chandler: Facing the Cambodian past: Selected essays, 1971-1994 (Silkworm Books 1996); ISBN 9747047748.
  • David P. Chandler, Ben Kiernan etc.: Revolution and Its Aftermath in Kampuchea: Eight Essays (Yale University Press 1983); ISBN 0938692054.
  • Evan Gottesman: Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge: Inside the politics of Nation Building
  • Henry Kamm: Cambodia: Report from a Stricken Land
  • Ben Kiernan: The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79; ISBN 0300096496.
  • Ben Kiernan: How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930-1975 (Yale University Press, Second Edition 2004); ISBN 0300102623.
  • Sharon May and Frank Stewart: In the Shadow of Angkor: Contemporary Writing from Cambodia
  • Haing Ngor and Roger Warner: Survival in the Killing Fields
  • Dith Pran (compiled by): Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors
  • William Shawcross: Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia
  • Jon Swain: River of Time; ISBN 0425168050.
  • Loung Ung: First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
  • Carol Wagner: Soul Survivors: Stories of Women and Children in Cambodia

See also

General

Genocide

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