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. Its 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.
{ 14 } Comments
A good post, but expressing this view can be met with indignation. Those who are not that aware of the history of the region, of what gave rise to the Khmer Rouge and also what they wanted to create while in power, will just shout out accusations of being a holocaust denier or something. They killed people who wore glasses, and piled up skulls, and that’s it.
I think that while there is a case to deny the label of ‘Genocide’ in a technical and legal framework, in ‘common sense’ or even ‘laymans’ terms it is difficult to reconcile so many deliberate murders and policies that led to deaths with any other term.
The UN Genocide convention defines the term as ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’ – but as highlighted, KR victims were persecuted largely on political grounds. For me, it is a superficial difference, particularly since there seems agreement that political enemies were only excluded to keep Stalin’s USSR as a signatory to the original convention. Change the word to “Politocide”, replace “national, ethnical, racial or religious group” with “political group”, and keep the definition and you have something that fits DK rather well.
Adding to this, a lot of the political groupings were as arbitrary criteria for persecution as race or ethnicity, in the sense that those allocated to those groups had very limited control over their allocation – middle and upper peasants, semi-proletariats, these were labels applied from outside by the KR. In real life terms these people were just struggling to make a living and to improve the standard of life of their families.
The only exception to this, it could be argued, is the “base” and “new” people split, with refugees having the choice to flee to the cities or flee to the KR communes before April 17th. But then, what sort of a choice is that? And besides, taking the approach that base people were defined as such because they chose to not support the KR takes the KR’s analysis at face value and legitimises it, looking at the situation from their point of view, their own logic as it were. Not that I am accusing you of doing this Pineapple, I just think that in a legal framework, yes, DK was not Genocidal, but this is only because the wording of the law is and always will be flawed. In terms of the “spirit” of the law, in my opinion the Cambodian situation is pretty clear cut.
As for the sentence I personally was disappointed as I think it sends out a message of impotence and may seriously undermine the court. Thet Sambath of the PPP has a different opinion, as expressed here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2010/jul/27/khmer-rouge-war-crimes-sentence?intcmp=239 I think its an interesting view that to nail the 4 “old guards” as you put it, you need one of their hatchet-men on side.
Finally, I’m sure you will have come across this already but I only recently discovered the Enemies of the People film, to be released here in the UK in October. I absolutely can’t wait, for me Nuon Chea was always surrounded with the most mystery and the hardest to gain access to in terms of the documents I have come across. Perhaps this film will spread some light for future scholars, particularly if Sambath publishes the transcripts of all the interviews that did not make it into the feature.
link here for reference: http://enemiesofthepeoplemovie.com/watch-clip/
Thanks for the considered comment. I will reply tomorrow, unfortunately I’m going to be busy for the rest of today.
Firstly, as for Nuon Chea, his behaviour was really evasive in the last documentary I saw him participate in, that being Pol Pot – The Journey to the Killing Fields, a programme for the BBC Timewatch series back in 2004/5, which also featured brilliant footage of an eerily empty Phnom Penh taken from the Yugoslav journalist Nikola Vitorivic’s film Kampucija 1978:
(You can see the destroyed National Bank building.)
You should have a look at the French archives. Some interesting and official DK film to be found there.
I understand what you say about the problems of semantics and when it is related to something so clearly abhorrent as that which happened in Cambodia from April 17 1975, that it can come across as making excuses for the Khmer Rouge. The politocide, or even democide labels are persuasive, and anyway some workable definition has to be used to somehow categorise crimes and if convicted, then fit the punishment accordingly. But my problem with the genocide label is that Democratic Kampuchea and its policy, even though there was a general agreement on the rural-based rationale for carrying out at least the first stages of their social revolution, there was a lot of variation on how this generally agreed policy was interpreted and implemented at the local level in the various zones of the country. Despite the outward impression of uniformity, the situation was troubled and fragmented internally.
There was never a central government directive for rural cadre to ‘exterminate’ all towns people or those who had chosen the enemy camp by fleeing to the urban areas the Lon Nol government controlled, or those identified with whatever sociological labels that were, as you say, arbitrarily applied to those who were seen to be on the wrong side of the 1970-75 war. There was a directive to execute, upon identification, officers of the Lon Nol military (with a clear reason following a bitter war) and high-level civil servants of the republican government, but with regard to the opposing army, this was not always carried out. This is also not to deny that killings separate to this did happen on a large scale against those seen to be enemies (i.e. those who did not join the Khmer Rouge rural cooperatives during the war), but it would be best to look at how the Communists’ poor-peasant orientation was able to harness peasant resentment or hatred of the towns and transform it into a political force, and can be blamed for allowing such abuses to occur perpetrated by regional cadre, even if they were not always desired, or rather, were not official government policy. And the incidences of a revengist attitude expressed by the base peasantry indulging in a little schadenfreude when seeing the urban evacuees struggle to adjust to rural life. The DK government actually had a three-part formal system of hierarchy – of full-rights, candidate and depositee statuses – which the state was to use in allowing those placed into each category, varying levels of access to political participation, and a share of resources, but you’re right that for the most part, in practice, there was the two-part distinction of old and new people. Creating artificial social divisions by fiat, cutting the feet to fit the shoes.
A general picture of DK can be seen, but we have two themes at play which complicate matters: regional variation and level of central government control of the implementation of policy locally. There were significant regional variations, some of them objective and temporal (bad weather conditions, lack of prior development) or subjective (cadre interpretation of policy and its implementation, their quality, education-level and experience in positions of authority, the CPK purge waves, massacres etc) which either positively or adversely affected the populations of certain areas whether cadre, soldier or labourer. Most deaths were caused through the want of a better word enslavement and the overwork or neglect, lack of medical treatment etc of the labouring population, and who were to build this new infrastructure required for the mass production of rice. Then there is the centralisation drive, never completed, of which the regional administrations were subject, and the terror used as the principal method for subordinating them to the central government. The starvation was through incompetency and the impossible pace with which the revolution was driven. I’m not making excuses for Khmer Rouge policy, for irrational ideological or political considerations were placed above more practicable solutions to the problems faced by the government. It is evident that the Pol Pot line disregarded the skills and education of ‘new’ people which was undeniably important for the success of the rapid development they wanted to make happen. And let’s be clear here, this change was to be brought about involuntarily for a large part of the labouring population. It was forced. I’m not agreeing with that, but I think it is important to look from the Khmer Rouge point of view in order to better understand why they made the disastrous choices they did. They (The Party Centre at least) wanted to transform Cambodia into a modern and abundant country within a compressed timescale. Had the regime survived, then it perhaps would have resembled yet another variation of a Communist-ruled ‘socialist’ state using an official and approximated Marxist-Leninist ideology, and with, in our terms, an unacceptable level of repression. But this is ‘what if ‘stuff, because they never got past first base. I am still not convinced genocide is the right term to describe the rapid degeneration of their revolution. It does offer to people, however, a way to get a sense of scale, an appreciation of the enormity of the death and suffering caused by the DK government. With my admittedly limited understanding of international law (complete and utter dilettante), the gross crimes of the Khmer Rouge, of which there were many, fit somewhere on the sliding scale of ‘crimes against humanity.’
I’ve missed out quite a bit, it’s not easy for me to be concise anyway, and the Khmer Rouge phenomenon is multi factorial and very complicated. I didn’t ignore your pointing to the new film on the Khmer Rouge and Nuon Chea. I’ll definitely seek it out, it looks like a brilliant and moving piece of film. And about the trials, it is disappointing it took so long, they are into old age and the sentencing they will inevitably receive (if they live that long) won’t have quite the impact on their lives as a punishment than had they been younger, deprived of liberty. But Cold War expediency meant justice could be put on the shelf, while the shameful isolation of Cambodia during its PRK period saw the Khmer Rouge as acceptable partners to the UN member states who were determined to weaken Moscow .
Firstly, there is no suggestion of anyone being an apologist for the KR on this blog, nor that anyone has been offering excuses for their brutal regime so don’t worry about that. I completely take the point that if Polito/Democide labels are more appropriate then for the sake of accuracy of course it should be used. I also agree that “the G word” gives a sense of scale and the enormity of death and suffering – that was a much better way of phrasing my original “laymans” understanding point.
Indeed, there was no central directive to begin the systematic murdering of groups of people, no smoking gun as it were. But in the “Decisions of the Central Committee Regarding a Number of Questions” from March 1976 the authority to kill anyone of a lower rank or status is clearly delineated – This is not the same thing, but the centre must have expected it to be used and for the policy to be enacted fervently. As the regime wore on, more and more central documents call for diligence in smashing enemies, and with the centralisation drive this only increased as the purges snowballed. Remember too that those less sympathetic to the Pol Pot line and more reluctant to sweep away both domesticated and foreign Vietnamese were the ones who lost their positions to more ruthless cadres, such as So Phim. In other words, as Pol Pot’s group spread their influence, so too the characteristics and policies spread that approach a closer (that is not to say complete) approximation of genocide.
As for the tripartite separation of rights among the population, according to Burglar, Vickery and Lavoix, the allocation to one of these groups was dependent on class, although I have no doubt that base/new would also have come into consideration. This is as good a point as any to reference the KR biography questionnaires, to demonstrate exactly what criteria were important to the KR, and to show how arbitrary many of their selections were: http://www.yale.edu/cgp/questionnaire.html bearing in mind this was (one of?) the questionnaire(s) that was used to ensnare networks of “dissidents”.
I completely agree that to understand the situation you have to understand the beast. I also like the idea of peasant resentment being harnessed and directed, the way you speak has strong resonance with resource mobilisation theory of social movements, both by transferring moral/social beliefs into political action, and also in establishing a new political climate that, as you say, allows for the abuses to go unpunished. The problem with such an approach is that it admits degrees of responsibility, that some people are more responsible than others, some more involved than others, those better able or better placed to resist these influences. I am of the opinion that this description would be far more accurate and dynamic one for the period, but the real question then lies in where the system ends and the individual begins, in where participation is sought or coercion is forced. This is another reason why the Enemies of the People film I linked looks so interesting, because Sambath interviews many low level cadres and footsoldiers also. Of course the sources aren’t without their flaws, in the clip you see what I imagine to be a stock response “We were terrified for our own lives and were drunk off our faces when murdering” as defence, thus renouncing responsibility and blaming the omnipotent “system”. Still, should provide an interesting insight.
Well, thanks for replying, and on the subject of zonal differences, it is significant that you mentioned So Phim, the Eastern Zone being the most obvious area for talking about regional variation, and also due it its location, a place that would at times represent some of the best conditions in DK and also some of the worst – you know that one of, if not the biggest single atrocity committed by the Pol Potists happened from May 1978, with the dispersal and murder over a six month period of a hundred thousand people, as part of the massive purge of the regional administration. Indeed the Eastern Zone was different in character, yes, and in matters of regional variaton were less extreme in implementing the same polices and had at one time a less antagonistic attitude towards the Vietnamese than the Khmer Rouge in other parts of the country.
Earlier when I talked about the formal system of hierarchy involving a trichotomy, I am aware of the fact that the full-rights designation was only for one class, the base peasantry, and its assumed vanguard in the CPK leading a whole social stratum (in Cambodia’s case being the agricultural labouring class instead of an industrial proletariat) and exercising on its behalf a dictatorship over all other social groups in all domains during a transition to ‘socialism.’ Of course this can be seen to have little to do with Marx, or Lenin for that matter, but it is partly rooted in Russian and then Chinese experience. Burglar went into some detail regarding this three-part system, and it becomes quite complicated, so my point earlier was rather in agreement with you and to see a general picture of what happened in practice (this two-part distinction of ‘old’ and ‘new’ people). Despite the formal system, people could be generally placed into one or the other camp. The former were the base peasantry, and those who had suffered and bled for the revolution were to be its main beneficiaries as it entered a new stage. He also talked about a basic level of Khmer Rouge organisation among themselves being two-fold: that is, civilian and military, kamaphilbal (actually meaning cadre) and yothea (soldier). The military was not part of the general cooperative system, they had their own villages, cultivated their own land and had little or no contact with both old and new people except as upholders of order. By preventing relations developing between the army and the people, the CPK could maintain more effective control of the population and had in their hands are more executive apparatus.
The poor peasants enjoyed better status than they had previously, by the fiat of the regime, were very much aware of it vis-a-vis the new people but when in a situation of great upheaval, as cadre without much or any formal education, they also lacked the skills and experience to act without arbitrainess and with leniency in dealing with pressure while in postions of power. Thion has noted that one of the developments working in Pol Pot’s favour for achieving wide-reaching power, was his influence on the CPK’s committee for the revolutionary army, which in turn controlled the Party’s political-military training schools, some of them located in the Central Zone and Southwest Zone, where his major ally Ta Mok was secretary. From there (phumipeak niredey), rigidly-trained and obedient teenage cadres from poor peasant backgrounds were to be used during the purification of the recalcitrant regional administrations. These boys and girls were more loyal to the central government and were even more inflexible in dealing with real or perceived deviations from the Pol Pot line.
After the Khmer Rouge won their pyrrhic victory what was the Pol Pot line? “All power to the poor and lower middle peasants.” But in practice this meant only under the control of the CPK, and meant an all-out effort to direct unskilled human labour power, with minimum capital input, to build irrigation works for the mass production of rice, at what in reality came to be barely subsistence levels. There are other specifics, and that from April 1975, aside from the evacuation of Cambodia’s urban populations and their incorporation into the cooperative system, the more radical policies and the setting of their pace by the Pol Pot line were yet to kick in: full-steam ahead with primitive accumulation even at the expense of their support base (the poor peasantry) for an investment surplus; abolishment of all religious institutions and the defrocking of the monks for the purpose of agricultural labour; getting rid of markets and related to that the abandonment rather than abolishment of the money system; strengthening the borders and making preparations for conflict with Vietnam which would cause future complications with the Eastern Zone; and given the confidence of Pol Pot and rather than ease or gradually place them into the new work regime, the cooperatives the urban evacuees were driven to were to be immediately transformed into ‘high-level’ ones – that is, like those which had been set up since the war.
In 1975, after victory, Pol Pot’s (at that time) limited power seemed to be going into something of an eclipse, but by 1976, terrible revenge would befall those seen to be his enemies in the Party, after an alleged coup attempt to oust him. You mentioned the March 1976 Questions, and yes, you’re right, the very first Question to be resolved by the central committee was The Authority to Smash (People) Inside and Outside the Ranks. The document’s short length sketched the need for a framework through which the various arms of the state apparatus could carry out what we could term political murder, or to use their own language a “smashing” (kamtech) of enemies. Also, further documents revealed the influence of Marxism-Leninism and particularly Maoism, and declared the revolution had passed the democratic stage (conforming to the vulgar Marxist five-phase mode of societal evolution made orthodox by the Soviets) and that they were at the stage of ‘building socialism.’ There was talk of the need to foster an adequate consciousness among the population in the cooperatives, so as to participate fully in the CPK’s own Great Leap Forward, and that in their tasks in building this socialism, the correct consciousness needed to be encouraged and strengthened. Also it was after the earlier mentioned coup attempt, and the publication of another document in December of that year called Report of Activities of the Party Centre According to the General Political Tasks of 1976, in which Pol Pot talked of a “sickness” within the Party and of the “microbes” which had infected the organism. Here is where the emphasis on vigilance to defend the revolution becomes more officially pronounced with the already-begun intra-party terror. It was also clear from this that political consciousness was more important to the CPK than “objective factors” in carrying out their development. And so, failure in achieving the Centre’s targets for the comprehensive development plan was seen to be more and more the work of political subversion and dissent. This of course would come to consume the Party, and adversely affected the labouring population when, as you say, they would be made subject to the changes brought about by the purges of the zonal administrations and the replacement of unreliables with those who would implement the Pol Pot line ‘correctly,’ with its increasingly impossible demands.
I know that it’s impossible to talk here about everything that fed into Khmer-Vietnamese Communist relations, and the history of emnity (a mixture of disagreement on national and Indochina-wide objectives during the war which engulfed the whole region, played out alongside more traditional or ancient rivalries), but internal economic failure during the DK years came to be blamed on Vietnamese infiltration of the Cambodian Revolution, something which fed the paranoia-fuelled terror. A fear of the country being swallowed up by more powerful neighbours is a recurring theme for Cambodians given the different historical situations or political colouration in which this fear is expressed. The irrationalism of the some of the Pol Pot line and its implications for the country’s reconstruction brought further disaster to an already ruined country. It enslaved a people for sure, and the murder of so many of them is linked not just to peasant schadenfreude spilling over, but the “snowballing” as you put it, of the attempted restructuring of the state. I am open to persuasion, and I’m very sure my own unqualified opinion could be flattened by any of the academics were they to post here (Laura Summers put me in my place not so long ago). For a lot of people with a passing interest in DK, the different themes at play have often been rolled into one narrative which is not only simple but erroneous: that between April 1975 and the Vietnamese invasion, it was uniform terror and extermination; destruction for destruction’s sake, killing for killing’s sake, from beginning to end. On the subject of Party-directed peasant violence, or peasant impunity to abuse those encouraged to be seen as ‘enemies’ (Khmang) then urban-rural antagonisms and their violent potential etc were existing in Cambodia prior to Khmer Rouge influence, indeed independent of it. There are aspects of what could be termed Pol Potism, which were already present there in Cambodian society in embryo, long before DK. The violence and anti-urban sentiments weren’t Khmer Rouge innovations, although they transformed them into a political force, and this narrow poor peasant orientation, distilled through a very warped version of Maoism, would be problematic for their simultaneous ambition to modernise and industrialise the country.
I’ll give more thought to the biographical approach of the Khmer Rouge, either as a political tool to weed out enemies of the people or as a method by which to carry out Maoist-inspired ‘thought reform,’ and answer later.
If the USSR were not wanting politocide to be be part of the UN Convention then why have the US and other non-Socialist countries had such an aversion to the convention, and in their support of other governments who have not only been against Soviet-style Socialism but even liberal democracy, murdering thousands of their own citizens?
Indeed.
I tend to agree with the Pineapple. This is a very contentious piece of semantics, but if we have words with meanings, such as genocide has, then we are perfectly at liberty to discuss whether a set of events constitutes such a definition.
The most compelling argument in favour of DK being culpable of genocide in my experience is Kiernan’s ‘The Pol Pot Regime’. However, most other works (including those of Kiernan) describe a confusing, uneven, locally influenced and ever changing set of circumstances in DK which are not always controlled by the centre. To then claim that the party centre deliberately & successfully perpetrated a genocide would be counter intuitive to the overall confusion and broadly for that reason I reject the G word in the context of DK.
Well, with some irony, given his disgrace regarding historical revisionism and the Holocaust of the European Jews, Serge Thion did explain the situation in DK quite well:
“at no time between 1975 and the end of 1978 were the central authorities close to having complete control over the national economy, the state power system, the army, the party, and possibly even the state security office, S-21. All of these were riddled with political factions, military brotherhoods, regional powers, personal networks, all contending for influence and the purging of rival forces. The state never stood on its feet.”
I’m not sure about what he says about S-21. I thought Duch was reporting to Son Sen and for a short time to Nuon Chea. As for Santebal offices across the country, yes I agree, it would appear they varied a lot according to the personal accounts.
It’s certainly very confusing though. I’m waiting for someone to write the definitive book on KR party factions and how it all played out. ‘How Pol Pot Came to Power’ is good for the period up to 1975, but rest needs pulling together.
Could be just the thing to keep you busy Pineapple!
I’d say I want to see how the Party and Govenment apparatus functioned. Who exactly decided and how the orders were submitted and how the actions were taken. In Ke Pauk autobiography there’s a hint to this, when Vorn Vet got arrested they ask Ke Pauk and Ta Mok wait in the building of Central Committee “to see the movie” and there was an arrest of Vorn Vet.
The quote “Pol Pot told me to stay waiting to see a movie. I was wondering of what was going on. I decided to stay in the building of the Central Committee. To my amazement, at one in the morning, they captured Ta Keu and Vorn Vet. After that Pol Pot questioned me whether I saw the movie. I had thought it was a motion picture. In fact, it was the scene of arresting Ta Keu and Vorn Vet. They accused Vorn Vet of working with both China and Vietnam and that he wanted to become the prime minister”.
It’s not clear whether they stayed in the Central Committee building for just a short time after the assemble or for the long period. Anyways it’s interesting whose troops conducted the arrest. Were they of S21, did they tell Duch who is coming to S21? All of the functionaries of CPK had bodyguards so the arrest had to be conducted in such way so not to evoke suspicion from them. Who organized all this? I haven’t seen the good study on this subject yet.
I could be wrong, but that’s the after 1976 ‘coup’ attempt is it not? And the unexplained incidences of a grenade exploding near the palace and machine gunfire near the ministers’ compound. Pol Pot resigned as prime minister for a still not fully explained reason. Only to come back with revenge on his mind.
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