Communist Crimes in Cambodia
The inhabitants of Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia, famous for its beautiful Khmer architecture like the Royal palace and the Silver Pagoda, its floor covered by five tons of silver, and its tranquil riverside walks, were terrified when the unsmiling, teen-aged boys and girls of the Khmer Rouge jungle army, wearing black uniforms and sweat-stained checked scarves, marched into the city on the morning of 17 April 1975, firing their weapons into the air and ordering them to leave the city immediately.
The soldiers said that everyone has to leave because the Americans are going to bomb the city, but that they can return after a night or two. About three million people took to the road. Not even the sick or wounded were allowed to stay in the hospitals. Some were carried by their friends, while others were pushed on their beds, their plasma and IV bumping along.
The soldiers had lied.
During the Vietnam War, fought between communist North Vietnam and the capitalist South, who were backed by the United States of America, Cambodia declared that they were neutral. Yet, the Viet Cong, a South Vietnamese communist guerrilla group, used the country as a sanctuary. Parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of roads and trails that ran from North Vietnam to South Vietnam, used by the commies to infiltrate their troops and to supply the Vietcong, also ran through the country.
The Khmer Rouge were Cambodian communists, led by Saloth Sar, later called Pol Pot, who was inspired by the writings of the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong.
Saloth Sar was born on the 19th of May 1925 into a large and reasonably well-off family. His brother later said that “Pot was a lovely child.” He did so well academically that in 1949, he earned a scholarship to study radio electricity in Paris, that beautiful city where radical French left-wing revolutionaries stormed the Bastille, a fortress and political prison, on the 14th of July 1789, instigating a reign of terror during which they captured and beheaded their king and queen, and cut off the heads of more than 17,000 people with guillotines.
Like other Asian Marxist leaders, including Ho Chi Minh, the future president of North Vietnam, Saloth Sar developed an intense interest in far-left politics while studying in Paris, where leftist European intellectuals taught Marxism-Leninism. He became a passionate communist. The core group who founded the Khmer Rouge almost all studied in Paris, which seems to have been a hotbed of revolutionaries in those days.
These men were inspired by the French Revolution. Suong Sikoeun, an assistant of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, a co-founder and senior member of the Khmer Rouge explained: “I was very influenced by the French Revolution, and in particular by Robespierre. It was only a step from there to becoming a Communist. Robespierre is my hero. Robespierre and Pol Pot: both of them share the qualities of determination and integrity.”
Maximilien Fran?ois Marie Isidore de Robespierre was a French lawyer who became one of the most prominent leaders of the French Revolution. Eventually the revolutionaries turned on each other and he too was executed with the guillotine.
Pol Pot was so busy with politics that he failed his examinations. He returned to Cambodia in 1953 and taught history, geography, and French literature at a private school in Phnom Penh. He was described as a timid, sensitive man who loved to read French poetry, was well-liked by his students, and was a warmhearted and enthusiastic propagator of the revolution. He helped organize the Communist underground movement in Cambodia.
The Khmer Rouge was founded in 1951 as part of Ho Chi Minh’s Indochinese Communist Party, which was centered in Vietnam. In 1963, Pol Pot became its general secretary. As a politician, he had several of his old comrades-in-arms arrested, including people who thought they were his close friends. He never answered their pleas for mercy, ordered that they be tortured in horrific ways, and eventually, he had them killed.
Ieng Sary, Pol Pot’s brother-in-law, later described him as a megalomaniac: “Pol Pot thought he was an incomparable genius in military and economic affairs, in hygiene, in song-writing, in music and dance, in cookery, in fashion, and in everything else, even in the art of lying. Pol Pot thought that he was above everyone else on the whole planet. He was a god on Earth.” This is similar to how people described the communist dictator who ruled over the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin.
In March 1967, a civil war broke out in Cambodia between the government forces and the communists. North Vietnam backed the Khmer Rouge by supplying arms and military advisers and giving them training in camps inside Vietnam.
In the early years, the Khmer Rouge fought a guerrilla war from the jungle. The ordinary Cambodian civilians called them the peap prey, which means “forest army.”In 1970, General Lon Nol overthrew the regime of King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia in a coup d’état, which is when members of the military illegally seizes control of its own government, and he established a Khmer republic.
The United States dropped more than 540,000 tons of explosives aimed at the North Vietnamese insurgents who were traveling along the Ho Chi Minh trail and the Khmer Rouge, slowing the progress of the communists, but angering ordinary Cambodians, driving many of them to join the communist cause. The Khmer Rouge grew from a few thousand to more than thirty thousand fighters by 1973, by which time it controlled about a third of the country.
Until the middle of the civil war, the Khmer Rouge completely depended on North Vietnam for help. However, in 1973 they broke with the North Vietnamese communists who were offended when the Kampuchean Communist Party refused to join the peace negotiations in Paris. The North Vietnamese drastically reduced their aid to Pol Pot’s plans. After the break with Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge began to rewrite history, insisting that they had been founded in 1960, independently from the Vietnamese communists. From this time, Vietnamese troops and the Khmer Rouge sporadically shot at each other.
The Khmer Rouge also showed glimpses of what was to come. They drove the government forces from the city of Kratie, and completely emptied it of its population, and in 1973, they destroyed mosques and banned prayers in the parts that they conquered. They forcibly separated young people from their families. When the Khmer Rouge captured the ancient royal capital, Oudong, in 1974, they massacred tens of thousands of people.
When the United States withdrew from Vietnam, the South Vietnamese government in Saigon collapsed, and the Khmer Rouge moved to take control of Cambodia. Only about 60,000 Khmer Rouge soldiers, less than one percent of the population, overcame about 200,000 demoralized Republican soldiers, and ousted the American-supported government of Lon Nol in 1975. Pol Pot became prime minister of the new Khmer Rouge regime. Under his leadership, they turned Cambodia into hell on Earth.
Within a few days the communists executed the senior government officials and military leaders of the Lon Nol government who surrendered to them. They set out to obliterate all traces of the old society, smashing Buddhist statues, burning religious books, razing some temples or turning them into animal pens or filling them with dung, since communists hate religion. To their fanatical minds nobody must serve something higher than the communist state.
The Khmer Rouge declared that 1975 is “Year Zero”, the dawning of a new age, and they renamed Cambodia Democratic Kampuchea. As in the case of other places with the word “democratic” in their name, for example The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the German Democratic Republic (former East Germany), this was a bad omen, since these countries are often anything but democratic. Citizens were allowed to vote in an election that had only one person on the ballot.
The country was ruled by a shadowy group called Angkar, which means “organization.” They were called the “mother-father” of the people. In their great wisdom, they declared that they were making a new start in human history. Even thought the great Chinese communist model was falling to pieces before their eyes, the Khmer Rouge not only wanted to imitate Mao’s Great Leap Forward, but to surpass it, showing that although they claim to eschew competition, socialists can be very competitive with each other. Pol Pot believed that he knew better and would beat Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Mao, all of them. The Khmer Rouge tried to implement total Communism in one fell swoop. They thought the only thing needed was enough willpower, and they would create heaven on Earth.
They hated urban life, seeing it as morally corrupt, and they called Phnom Penh “the great prostitute on the Mekong,” which referred to the river on which the capital was situated; they idealized the peasantry, so they ordered that all the cities must be emptied within twenty-four hours. One of the reasons given to the Khmer Rouge themselves was that there was supposedly a secret plan by the American CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency, tasked with gathering foreign intelligence, and Lon Nol’s government to corrupt the young, victorious soldiers and soften their fighting spirit with wine, women, song, and money. During the journey to their new destinations, which often lasted several weeks, no one received any food or medical assistance from the Khmer Rouge. It caused about ten thousand people among the old, the sick, and the infirm to die. Some people, even whole families, committed suicide.
The new regime also pursued an aggressive foreign policy.
On the 4th of May, 1975, little more than two weeks after they took over, Khmer rouge soldiers assaulted Vietnamese territory, Phu Quoc Island which lies in the gulf of Thailand. They invaded another Vietnamese island, Poulo Panjang, six days later, burning homes and deporting the Vietnamese population, who were never seen again. A Khmer Rouge gunboat also seized the Mayaguez, an American freighter ship. This was a stupid move, since the Americans retaliated with air strikes, destroying seventeen Cambodian aircraft, seriously damaging the airbase at Ream as well as port facilities, sinking several gunboats.
The USA recovered their cargo ship and its thirty-nine crewmembers, but during the rescue operation, they lost the lives of forty-one Marines and airmen.
The Khmer Rouge’s internal policies were no less ruthless and foolish.
In Phnom Penh, they blew up the National bank and completely destroyed the Catholic cathedral, even hauling away piles of bricks, trying to obliterate all signs of it. They abolished money within a week, arguing that if there is no money, there is no capitalism. They collectivized all land under the state.
The Khmer Rouge called former city dwellers “new people” and they set them apart from the peasantry, repeatedly moved them around, and decimated them. The regime wanted many of them to die from the depravations so that they could get rid of what they described as “useless mouths.”
Everyone who was educated, including doctors or lawyers, everyone who spoke foreign languages, or wore glasses, were considered enemies of the people and were summarily executed, along with their families. The Khmer Rouge despised religion. The vast majority of Cambodians were Buddhists, and there were more than eighty thousand monks in the country who were now forced to renounce their vows and marry, or face execution. Many monks refused and the commies killed as many as forty to sixty thousand of them. After four years there were only about a thousand monks left in Cambodia. Members of minority religions, Muslims and Christians, and ethnic minorities, Chinese and Vietnamese, were also hunted down and murdered. The communists burned Korans and razed mosques, or used them for granaries or animal pens.
The commies killed people on a whim: if they deemed you did not work hard enough, if you stole food to keep from starving, even if you cried.
They marched thousands of people to nearby meadows and simply clubbed them to death. Many executioners, to save bullets, used the blade of a hoe, evoking the image of the French guillotine, or they beat their victims to death with a pick-axe handle. They hanged others or asphyxiated them with plastic bags. Alternatively, they tied people together, blindfolded them, and led them to a field, where they stuffed the mouths of the men, women, old folk, and children, with rags and grass to prevent them from screaming and then cut their throats like animals.
The Khmer killers threw the bodies in pits called “killing fields.” In each of the provinces that have been investigated, more than 1,000 burial grounds have been found; and there are twenty provinces.
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge wanted to change human nature itself. They dismissed the idea that human life had any value. One slogan that they constantly repeated was “Losing you is not a loss, and keeping you is no gain.” They wanted to crush anyone who showed exceptional qualities or the slightest sign of an independent spirit, all individualism had to be stamped out.
To achieve their goals, they turned the country for all practical purposes into a slave-labor camp.
The Angkar regulated every moment of people’s lives. They forbade all public displays of affection, arguments, insults, complaints, and tears. People were killed for crying. They were forced to blindly obey all figures of authority. Unless they were close family, men and women were expected to stand at least three meters apart when they talked to each other. Only arranged marriages approved by the Khmer Rouge were allowed. Sex outside marriage was punishable by death. The birth rate fell to nearly zero. If they caught anyone drinking alcoholic beverages, like fermented palm juice, the commies killed them.
They forbade women from wearing sarongs and they forced the ladies to cut off their hair. The Khmer Rouge ordered all Cambodians to wear black clothes.
All education, all freedom of movement, and all trade stopped. The 1976 constitution of Democratic Kampuchea specified that the first right of all citizens was the right to work, and work they did, for twelve hours every day, getting two hours to eat, three hours of rest, and seven hours of sleep. At times, when there was a competition between villages to see who can produce the most, the people were forced to work from four in the morning until eleven at night. The fittest worked the hardest and often died first.
On communes, people ate in collective canteens, sharing the same shitty thin rice soup, which contained about four teaspoons of rice per person. The Khmer soldiers always ate first, despite their pretensions of asceticism. They were mostly sadistic brutes, many of them women, who tried to outdo each other in cruelty.
The government tried to break up families and recruited children to spy on their parents.
People who got sick and went to the hospitals got half as much food as those who worked, prompting Henri Locard, a French historian who became an expert on the reign of the Khmer Rouge to say that “the purpose of the hospitals was more to eliminate the population than to cure to it.”
The Angkar seems to have decided early on that the normal fate of a prisoner was to perish. Conditions in the prisons were so bad that many guards died as well. Sometimes as many as thirty prisoners were crammed into a cell designed for two or three. There were no toilets or washing facilities. As a result of harsh treatment, a starvation diet, and widespread disease, most of the prisoners and all the children died quickly. The average life expectancy under these conditions was three months.
The cruelty of the Khmer Rouge regime was compounded by their incompetence. They rejected technology, technicians, and common sense. They even killed men and women to make fertilizer. Often, when you pulled out manioc roots, you would pull up a human bone that the roots had grown down into. Not surprisingly, agriculture collapsed, which led to famine. On the black market, a 250-gram box of rice was sometimes sold for as much as 100 dollars. It suited the Khmer Rouge who argued that the hungrier the people are, the less likely they are to run away, the less likely they are to argue, and the more likely their sex drive will disappear, yet the people would always kiss the hand, the hand of the Angkar, who feeds them.
People stole food from pigs and caught rats to eat. Some turned to cannibalism. It seems that they only ate people who were already dead. One woman ate her sister. When they found out, they beat her to death in front of the whole village. Sometimes cannibalism was used as a punishment, for example, one Khmer Rouge deserter was forced to eat his own ears before he was killed.
To survive, people had to lie, cheat, steal, and turn their hearts to stone. The loss of all compassion and decency reflected the personality of Pol Pot, who never got back in touch with his family after he disappeared into the jungle in 1963, and even had his two brothers and his sister-in-law deported along with everyone else. Unlike many other dictators, Pol Pot remained obscure, and there did not develop a cult of personality around him, as in the case of Stalin, Mao, and Fidel Castro, the flamboyant Cuban dictator. It seems that he became increasingly paranoid over time. Everyone who came to see him was thoroughly searched, he constantly moved around to make it difficult for someone to target him, he suspected his cooks of trying to poison him, and he had an electrician killed who caused a power failure.
Another slogan of the Khmer Rouge was “We would rather kill ten friends than allow one enemy to live,” and kill their friends they did. Pol Pot and his cronies blamed the mounting economic and military failures on acts of sabotage by members of the party, which caused them to increase the terror. The leaders started to see traitors everywhere, with their warped logic succinctly expressed in the slogan: “One can always make a mistake and arrest the wrong person, but one should never let the wrong person go.” The movement began to purge itself of alleged traitors, and their prisons filled up with former members. Followers who had fallen out of favor were often buried up to their chests in a ditch filled with pieces of burning wood, or their heads were doused with gasoline and set on fire. They killed so many of their own that the party came close to destroying itself.
In one district, calling them “traitors collaborating with the CIA,”the communists killed 40,000 of the 70,000 inhabitants. The task of killing was so overwhelmingly large, that the Khmer Rouge forced ordinary people to help them carry out the massacres.
Because of the secrecy of the regime, news of the atrocities only got out slowly to the outside world. Those who tried to escape, usually started out when they were already weak, without a map or compass, having to walk long distances through a hostile jungle, it was almost tantamount to suicide.
Although both countries were commanded by communists, Cambodia and Vietnam were divided by ancient animosities, deep ideological differences, which were exacerbated because Cambodia was supported by China, while the Soviet Union backed the Vietnamese, both behemoths using these two smaller countries as proxies in their own rivalry to see who was the top dog in the communist cosmos, showing that communist solidarity was a lie, and that socialists can be extremely competitive.
After clashes on the border, communist Vietnam invaded Cambodia on the 25th of December 1978, and overthrew the Khmer Rouge government within two weeks, on the 7th of January 1979. The Khmer Rouge kept killing innocent people until the very large minute, but the Vietnamese invasion saved an incalculable number of lives.
China continued to support the Khmer Rouge after it was driven out of power. The USA and Thailand also kept on supporting the Khmer Rouge as a counterbalance to Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge held a seat in the United Nations until 1982, and their military forces continued to fight in border areas and from sanctuaries in Thailand until 1992, when the United Nations brokered a plan that included them in elections.
Although they ruled for only three years and eight months before they were overthrown, the Khmer Rouge caused the deaths of more than two million people, while new evidence suggests it may be even more than that, more than one in every four Cambodians, a bigger percentage of the population than anywhere else the communists unleashed their murderous cruelty.
In the last interview he ever gave to a newspaper, Pol Pot claimed that “only a few thousand Cambodians have died as a result of the application of our policy of bringing abundance to the people.” On 15 April 1998, he died in the jungle, in mysterious circumstances, without ever having been brought to a public trial.
The reign of the Khmer Rouge was perhaps the worst form of Communism anyone has ever seen, and their reign was one of the bloodiest in history.
What can we learn from this?
Communists are craven, cruel, killing bastards. We have to make the world and especially our children aware of what happened under the communist governments. In all schools, anti-communist education should be mandatory. We have to fight the communists with all our might, and we have to make sure that they never get power again, so that what took place in Cambodia, like the holocaust, can never ever reoccur. It is our God-given duty and we dare not fail.
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