Cambodia Genocide

 

I did not join the resistance movement to kill people, to kill the nation. Look at me now. Am I a savage person? My conscience is clear.

Pol Pot

 

Cambodia is a country in Southeast Asia that was once the centre of the ancient kingdom of Khmer. Its present day capital is Phnom Penh, and in 1953, it gained independence after nearly 100 years of French rule. In April 1975, the Communist forces of the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, began a brutal four-year regime in Cambodia, which resulted in the deaths of 25 per cent of the country’s population.

Cambodia was no stranger to violence; in 1964 the USA entered the Vietnam war, and Cambodia became part of the battlefield. During the following four years, Cambodia lost almost 750,000 civilians when B-52 bombers used napalm and dart cluster-bombs in an effort to destroy suspected North Vietnamese supply lines.

 

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge

 

The Khmer Rouge were fanatical communists that were determined to create the most perfect form of communism in the world. They were a small guerilla movement, which started in 1970, under the leadership of Pol Pot.

Pol Pot was born in 1925 and, at the age of 20, travelled to Paris to study electronics. During this time he became obsessed with Marxism and started to neglect his studies. He failed to gain a scholarship and returned to Cambodia in 1953, immediately joining an underground communist movement.

Shortly after his return, Cambodia gained independence from France and came under the rule of a royal monarch, Prince Sihanouk. By 1962, Pol Pot had become leader of the communist movement and, in order to avoid the wrath of Sihanouk, who did not agree with his politics, he fled into the jungle. Pol Pot formed a new communist movement, which he called the Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians), and waged a war against the government of Sihanouk. Under the rule of Sihanouk, Cambodia had managed to maintain neutrality in the Vietnamese war by offering favours to both sides, but his prime minister, Lon Nol, did not have the same views as the prince and planned to take over his sovereignty.

 

The Military Coup

 

In 1970, Prince Sihanouk was deposed in a military coup that was organized by Lon Nol and the then acting prime minister, Prince Sirik Matak. In early March, Lon Nol organized anti-Vietnam demonstrations across Cambodia and ordered the Vietnamese to leave immediately or they would face an attack. On March 12, thousands of people marched into Phnom Penh, raiding the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong embassies. The next day, Matak cancelled the secret smuggling deals that Sihanouk had set up via the port of Sihanoukville.

At the time Sihanouk was away in France. When he heard the news he was furious, threatening to have his two ministers arrested. However, instead of returning to Cambodia to sort out the mess, Sihanouk travelled to Moscow and ignored the further actions of the two men. Lon Nol and Sirik Matak managed to convince the National Assembly to remove Sihanouk from power, which had the effect of ending Cambodia’s neutrality. Both the USA and Vietnam were delighted by the change of government and felt that Lon Nol would be a far better man to deal with than his predecessor.

Sihanouk, however, was not prepared to leave quietly, and he retaliated by joining forces with his former enemy, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. They set about opposing Cambodia’s new military government. In the same year, the USA invaded Cambodia to drive the North Vietnamese out of their border camps. However, their mission failed because, rather than drive them out of Cambodia, they drove them deeper into the country where they allied themselves with the Khmer Rouge.

 

Support for Pol Pot

 

Cambodia became the target for US bombing raids from 1969 until 1973, killing more than 150,000 peasants. The peasants fled in panic from the countryside and settled in the capital of Phnom Penh, which resulted in both economic and military destabilization. This was good news for Pol Pot, who was now receiving a lot of support, and by 1975 he had an estimated force of over 700,000 men.

The USA withdrew their troops from Vietnam in 1975 and Cambodia, which was now plagued by a corrupt government, also lost its American support. Pol Pot and his army took advantage of the situation and marched into Phnom Penh on April 17 and took control of the capital, and effectively the whole of Cambodia. With military victory over the Lon Nol government and absolute power in their hands, the Khmer Rouge wasted no time in building their ‘utopia’.

 

The Genocide

 

Within days of overthrowing the government, Pol Pot started a radical campaign to reconstruct Cambodia, modelling it on Mao Tse-Tung’s Cultural Revolution, which he had witnessed first-hand during a previous visit to China. He declared that he was about to ‘purify’ Cambodian society and banished any Western culture, city life, religion and any form of foreign influences. Embassies were closed and foreigners were forced to leave; Newspaper offices and television stations were shut down; radios and bicycles were confiscated; the use of the telephone and mail were curtailed; money was forbidden; and health care was eliminated – in fact Cambodia was completely shut off from the remainder of the world. Pol Pot’s intention was to create an extreme form of peasant communism, in which the population would all work together as labourers in a huge coalition of collective farmers.

Giving them little time to gather their belongings, and under the threat of death, the inhabitants of the towns and cities were forced to leave their homes. Regardless of their physical condition and age, every member of the population was press-ganged into leaving – not one single person was exempt from the mass exodus. Those who did not obey were murdered, and children not old enough to work were taken away from their parents and placed in separate labour camps. Factories, schools, hospitals and universities were all closed and professional people in any field – lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, scientists alike – were all murdered along with any members of their families.

Any form of religion was banned. Buddist monks were killed and their temples were destroyed. The slaughter of the population was so severe that even minor disabilities such as wearing glasses, was considered a weakness and the punishment was death. The main slogan for the Khmer Rouge was, To spare you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss.

Those who escaped the massacre were forced into labour camps, where they worked for no money and the minimum of rations. They were housed in despicable conditions and forced to work exceptionally long hours. Any form of personal relationship was discouraged, along with any signs of affection. Before long people became weak and sick from overwork and lack of nourishment, and as there was no medical assistance, most died a sad and lonely death.

Pol Pot’s new regime also targeted the minority groups, which included Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and anyone with ethnic ancestry. Almost half of the Chum Muslim population were killed, along with 8,000 Christians. There was no end to the extremes that Pol Pot and his murderous communist party would go to, and even some of the party’s own leaders lived in fear. The Khmer Rouge frequently interrogated their own members if they were suspected of even the slightest thought of treachery of sabotage, often ending in imprisonment and execution. It is estimated that the death toll during Pol Pot’s reign was as many as two million people.

 

Khmer Rouge in Retreat

 

On December 25, 1978, Vietnam launched a full-scale assault on Cambodia with the sole purpose of wiping out the Khmer Rouge and their evil leader. By January 7, 1979, Phnom Penh fell and Pol Pot was deposed. The remaining members of the Khmer Rouge, along with Pol Pot, retreated into Thailand.

The Vietnamese, now free to control, formed a puppet government (basically, one formed from foreign power), which included many members who had managed to defect from the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot’s strict regimes had left Cambodia in a poor economic state, and with no foreign aid and no professional people left alive, they struggled to bring the country into any sort of order.

The Khmer Rouge continued to oppose the new socialist government, but their organization was starting to crumble. Many of them had already defected to the new government, and many offered pleas to try to escape execution. The government did everything in their power to bring the leaders of the communist organization to justice and made plans for an international tribunal.

Pol Pot, who had managed to obtain assistance from US relief agencies, had amassed 20,000–40,000 guerillas and waged a war against the succession of Cambodian governments, which was to last for over 17 years. The recovery of Cambodia and its people was a long, hard struggle. Pol Pol eventually lost control of the Khmer Rouge in the 1990s, and was arrested. However, before they were able to bring him to trial under an international tribunal, Pol Pot died of a heart attack in April 1998, at the age of 73.

 

After the Genocide

 

From 1995 onwards mass graves were uncovered revealing just how extensive the atrocious massacre had been. The bones and skulls uncovered from the graves were preserved to create a potent memorial of what had happened, and the area became known as the ‘killing fields’. In Phnom Penh, the place where Pol Pot and his leaders carried out their acts of torture and murder, it is not only the skulls that are displayed, but also photographs of the victims are pinned to the walls.

The exceptional terror that the population of Cambodia had to endure was brought about by the atrocities of war. Because it was the war that equipped them with weapons and gave them the will to use them, turning them into an enormous army of bullies. It appears that as long as war is regarded as permissible, there will be an ongoing problem with regard to the act of genocide. It teaches people intolerance, bullying, violence, prejudice, hatred, victimization, fantacism and extremism, and on top of all this a hunger for power.

Cambodia has to rely on the strength of its people to overcome the evils of Pol Pot’s regime and now, over three decades later, it seems likely that at least some of the people responsible for the genocide will be brought to trial. Nine years have passed since Cambodia and the United Nations agreed to work together on the trials, and yet international prosecutors only started work at the beginning of July 2006. With the court proceedings themselves still many months away, the question which nows hangs in the balance is whether any of the remaining Khmer Rouge members, who are all elderly and many in ill health, will ever see the inside of a court room.

Apart from one of the leaders, Ta Mok, who recently died while in detention, most of the former members have been living freely in Cambodia, and campaigners are still fighting to make the authorities act before the culprits simply die off one by one, without having to pay for their crimes. Their are now many sceptics among the Cambodian people as to whether the eventual trials will prove to be a meaningful event, because it is so long after the event.