The G Word

Angkar
Two days ago, as the first set-piece trial backed by the UN came to an end, a former member of the Khmer Communist Party’s security service, the Santebal, Kaing Kek Iev alias Comrade Duch, was sentenced for his part in the torture and execution of thousands of men, women and children while head of the Democratic Kampuchean regime’s premier political prison, the Tuol Sleng unit of Office S-21. Elsewhere it has been said that this guy was a ‘senior’ cadre, and although indeed he is a significant catch, with his responsibility for what has become a symbol of Khmer Rouge inhumanity, he was in CPK terms a functionary, mere small-fry, and his old boss, DK minister for defence Son Sen, would have been a bigger fish. He was killed years ago, murdered by his own political movement back in 1997. He was in charge of the whole apparatus which, during the intra-party terror, acted as a meat grinder for those seen to be in the way of Pol Pot’s drive to centralise political and military power in the country.
On the subject of bigger fish, four other former Communist Party of Kampuchea members are due to stand trial. Firstly, there is Nuon Chea, a former law student at Thailand’s Thammasat University, rebel against the colonialist French and Pol Pot’s second in command, Brother Number Two. Secondly, there is Ieng Sary, a former Phnom Penh economics professor, DK foreign affairs minister and Pol Pot front man. Thirdly, there is Khieu Samphan, former National Assembly deputy during the old days of the Sangkum, and, as paper DK head of state, another Pol Pot front man. And lastly there is Khieu Thirith, or Ieng Thirith as Sary’s wife, a former head teacher of a private English-speaking school in Phnom Penh, and DK minister for social affairs. The UN and indeed Hun Sen’s government (himself, once upon a time a rather insignificant CPK cadre) will no doubt offer plaudits that at least a few of those responsible for the Cambodian genocide are, with their lives almost coming to an end, facing their day of justice. But here is where I have a little problem. Genocide.
This is not just any banal word, but a word that identifies in the minds of those not versed in international law (I’ll hold my hand up here too), the most heinous of crimes. And the ghastly things which will be given focus during the trials of these four, coming under this term of genocide, will be that which happened from the period of April 1975-January 1979. Indeed these four, shaky, palsied and pathetic people were part of the Khmer Rouge insurgent movement, then Communist government, which for three and a half years brought horrific disaster to Cambodia, and indeed in their own roles over thirty years ago are responsible for it, in their capacities as ministers either helping to formulate or enact policy, and even without a trial (of which their victims never had the privilege) many will say “guilty!” But in my unqualified opinion, on the charge of genocide, they are innocent. In unpopular circles this view is nearly as old as I am, but for five years the non-genocidal intent of Khmer Communist policy in Democratic Kampuchea has been aired to a non-academic and more mainstream audience in the afterword of British journalist and author Philip Short’s biography of Pol Pot, Anatomy of a Nightmare. I agree with him on that, although I disagree with his view of the Khmer Communists’ Marxism-Leninism being only skin-deep, for their vast and impossibly-paced infrastructural program was sincere in its ambition to modernise the country. These foundations were never completed with the well-known and horrendous loss of life, the unintended result of an envisioned series of planned stages that were supposed to transform Cambodia into a fully-functioning socialist state within two decades. This transformation of Cambodia, like the radical organisation made in their early years as an oppositional armed movement, was predicated on force, violence and terror, but their disastrous mismanagement of the economy was not genocide. Was treatment of the Cham Muslims, for example, that different to the overall insulation of the country’s population from what the Communists thought were rival and alternative value systems, incongruent with that which they wanted to create in all people through their participation in the simultaneous building of a new Kampuchea, a mental reforging into a pure ‘socialist’ Khmer? The only evidence which can be found with regard to the classic use of the term genocide is in government statements made against the Vietnamese, with such things as a May 10 1978 Radio Phnom Penh broadcast towards the end of the regime, which attempted to stir traditional anti-Vietnamese chauvinism when war was looming: “One of us must kill thirty Vietnamese […] So far, we have succeeded in implementing this slogan of one against thirty […] We need only two million troops to crush the fifty million Vietnamese, and we would still have six million people left.” And also during the mid-1990s, when anti-Vietnamese chauvinism was a raison d’etre they made it clear that all Vietnamese in the areas they controlled should be hunted down and killed, man, woman and child.
It was for most of its existence shrouded in secrecy and unexpressed, and the regime which culminated wasn’t around for long, so despite putting lots of different pieces together the puzzle of Khmer Communism will probably never be solved. To gain a half-decent understanding of what there is, however, then it would be very useful to disregard the primivitist agrarian utopia label that has been applied to the Khmer Rouge, and that’s been peddled for years. It’ll show up nothing of value. It does not adequately explain how Marxist choices have been made available to revolutionaries in the peripheries of the capitalist world, courtesy of the now-discredited Leninist voluntarism, and it is this imported idea, along with strong local influences, which is key to understanding the developmental model the Khmer Rouge chose, and sheds better light on how and why they failed. The ‘infobox,’ found at the BBC News website, says that the Khmer Rouge made an effort to create an agrarian utopia. How wrong can that be. Their peculiar interpretation of the Leninist paradigm was flawed, yes, and more specifically used the warped lessons of its Maoist variant, but as has already been established elsewhere, that regimes throughout the last century with varying degrees of accuracy, regarded themselves as applying Marxist principles is not altered by what they or anybody else may have said about the authenticity of their Marxism. Those from the ‘left’ who also make the claim that regimes established in Russia, China and even Cambodia were not genuine attempts at ‘socialism’ is absurd. That is utopian. It’s useless to try to pretend that the people in those Parties and regimes didn’t think that they were the genuine article. The outcome was very different to what the earlier socialist pioneers envisaged, and even to what members of the Bolshevised Communist Parties envisaged themselves, but it’s better to try to explain why those Parties and regimes ended up as they did than to take the utopian position that no attempts at establishing socialism have ever taken place.
But going back to the last Communist Party to win power in the twentieth century, and with it the Cambodian attempt to establish socialism, the use of the term genocide to describe it concerns only the three and a half years of the DK regime, and is primarily political, for it allows arguably the most radical movement in modern times, led by that mild-mannered tyrant Pol Pot, to be seen as an aberration, a special case which needs to be set aside and made subject to a separate justice, away from a sliding scale of crimes against humanity. A much more grey area, a broad definition of which the policy of the United States in Indochina since the 1960s could fall under. The term genocide was first used by the Vietnamese, after they toppled the DK regime in 1979, and were the first to make the horrors of DK analogous to those perpetrated by the Nazis in Europe. The Tuol Sleng prison complex was transformed into a ‘genocide’ museum, and portrayed as being something akin to a Nazi death camp. The still astonishing scale of German fascism’s attempt to exterminate a people from the face of a continent was indeed genocide, but the fourteen thousand or so victims of the Santebal, who were put through unimaginable humiliations before being “smashed” were part of a grim phenomenon recognisable in the purges of Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China. The arrest, torture, confession and disposal of swathes of Democratic Kampuchea’s ‘political class’ followed the same Stalinist pathology. The Vietnamese Communists, in their bid to rebuild the Cambodian state and the revolution to their own liking with the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, needed to distance themselves from the Khmer Communism of Pol Pot, calling it fascism. It’s excesses could never have come from Marxism-Leninism, and the wary population of Cambodia were not to mistake it for such, being as they were, saved from annihilation. Cambodia had suffered its very own holocaust.
Salvation Front propaganda posters declared The Worst is Over. That may be true, but it wasn’t the end of suffering for the Cambodian people, for the PRK found itself to be on the wrong side of the Cold War, and when they were driven from power, on the Thai-Cambodian border the Pol Potists would find their movement resurrected. Into the 1980s an attempt was made to whitewash or downplay DK atrocities while at the same time an attempt was made to portray the PRK as worse, with the revived rump of old DK getting a helping hand along with former enemies in their destabilising the isolated government in Phnom Penh. It wasn’t just China who offered support and funnelled money and weapons to the various borderland armed alliances the Khmer Rouge were involved in, but ASEAN member states including Lee Kwan Yew’s Singapore, with US backing. And it was US canvassing which ensured that it wasn’t a PRK delegate who sat in the UN chair for Cambodia, but a Khmer Rouge old-timer named Thiounn Prasith. As Short noted in his book, diplomats may have held their noses in public upon seeing Prasith, but out of sight, the stops were pulled out to deliberately isolate Cambodia because of the successor government’s links to that feared Vietnamese bridgehead for Russian influence in Indochina. They could be drawn into a protracted conflict, bled dry, and their Soviet backers also caught up in Afghanistan, could be further weakened. Then a more favourable political settlement could be made. Pol Pot was just the man for the job, and that his regime caused the deaths of 1.5 million people was a bit of an embarrassment to Washington, it was neither here nor there when it came to attacking Moscow by proxy, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, so too ended the rationale for keeping the Khmer Rouge politically and militarily alive. Now old friendships have revealed their flippant cyncism and we have the trials of a few old-guard Pol Potists. These people are responsible for the conditions which led to so many dying unnecessarily during those three and a half years, and have to answer why they saw it fit for those who lived, to do so in great fear, pain and suffering. I’m not arguing a simple case of ‘whataboutery,’ for genocide is very serious indeed, and with its meaning, it’s not just a word to be bandied about willy nilly, or to meet the objectives of political expediency. The view that if there had been no US involvement in Indochina, then there would been no Democratic Kampuchea may seem facile, but there is more than one grain of truth contained within it. But it’s not about the US now, it’s about them. What they did.












