Khmer Rouge

Flag of the Khmer Rouge

The Khmer Rouge (Khmer:

) was the Maoist-extremist 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) under its regime, through execution, starvation and forced labor. Although directly responsible for the death of about 750,000, the policies of the Khmer Rouge led, mainly through starvation and displacement, to the death of over 1 million people. 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.

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. With the death in custody of Ta Mok, The Butcher, in July 2006, Khang Khek Leu, also known as "Duch," remains the only member of the regime currently imprisoned awaiting trial in the Extraordinary Chambers currently being established to try certain former officials of the Pol Pot regime.

Path to Power

The Indochinese Communist Party was founded in 1930. 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 the 1950s and 1960s, the Khmer Rouge attempted to participate in politics. Members of the Khmer Rouge were involved in the Democratic and Pracheachon parties. The parties were suppressed by the police and army when their candidates stood for elections. In January 1962, the government of Cambodia rounded up most of the Parcheachon party leadership ahead of elections scheduled for June 1962. The publications of the party were also suppressed. This forced most of the Khmer Rouge leadership underground. In July 1962, the underground Khmer Rouge party secretary Ton Samouth was captured by the government and afterward was murdered without any legal process. The arrests and the death of Ton Samouth created a situation where Pol Pot became, by virtue of not being in prison, the defacto leader of the party. In March 1963, Pol Pot and the rest of the senior leadership of the party went into hiding after his name was published in a list of leftist suspects put together by the police for Sihanouk. He fled to the Vietnamese border region and made contact with Vietnamese units fighting against South Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge established a base in the area with the assistance of the Vietnamese.

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 Prince 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 political appeal of the Khmer Rouge was increased as a result of the situation created by the removal of Sihanouk as head of state in 1970. 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. It became more Stalinist and anti-intellectual when groups of students who had been studying in France returned to Cambodia. The students, including future party leader Pol Pot, had been heavily influenced by the example of the French Communist Party (PCF). After 1960, the Khmer Rouge became progressively more Maoist but also developed its own unique political ideas. For example, contrary to most Marxist doctrine, the Khmer Rouge considered the farmers in the countryside to be the proletarian and the true representatives of the working class. By the 1970s the ideology of the Khmer Rouge combined an extreme form of Maoism with the anti-colonialist ideas of the French Communist Party, 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

Some of the Khmer Rouge leadership during their period in power. Pol Pot is at left. (Photo on display at the 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 (died in custody awaiting trial for genocide, July 21, 2006)
*Khieu Samphan "Brother number 5" President of the Khmer Rouge (alive)
*Son Sen Defense Minister (dead)
*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.

The ideology of the Khmer Rouge has been characterised as using Stalinist means for Maoist ends. The ideology that the Khmer Rouge shared with Stalinism was the means of the mass execution and starvation of political opponents to the regime, but differed from Stalinism since it used these means to preserve the existing power structure rather than attempting a wholesale transformation of society. These goals of the Khmer Rouge were shared with revolutionary Maoism. However, revolutionary Maoist theory believed that class enemies and opponents of the regime could be reeducated and in theory reintegrated into the new social order, and therefore their physical elimination was unnecessary. Hence Maoist China did not use mass executions to further their goals, and in contrast to the Khmer Rouge allowed former opponents of the regime to rejoin the new order.

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. In any case, family members were often relocated to different parts of the country with all postal and telephone services abolished. The total lack of agricultural knowledge by the former city dwellers made famine inevitable. Rural dwellers were often unsympathetic or too frightened to assist them. Such acts as picking wild fruit or berries was seen as "private enterprise" for which the death penalty applied.

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' (pronounced ahngkah; meaning 'The Organization'), and that nostalgia for prerevolutionary times (Khmer: choeu stek arom, or 'memory sickness') could result in execution. Also, rural terms like Mae (mother) replaced urban terms like Mak.

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

Skulls of Khmer Rouge victims at the "Killing Fields" site at Choeung Ek

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 (which, in regime logic, suggested that they read a lot)
*ethnic Vietnamese, Cambodian Christians, Jews, Muslims and the Buddhist monkhood
*"economic sabotage" for which many of the former urban dwellers (who had not starved to death in the first place) were deemed to be guilty of by virtue of their lack of agricultural ability.

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 17,000 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. Of the thousands who entered the Tuol Sleng Centre (also known as S-21), only seven are known to have survived.

Number of deaths

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 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 nor 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. Contemporary estimates of executions range from 250,000 to 1,500,000.

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 7.1 million. A decade later, in 1972, the population was estimated at 5.7 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 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 [1] 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. Fundinernment 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. 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 the long-awaited genocide tribunal for surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. The judges were sworn in early July, with trials expected to start mid-2007.

Dissenting views

Some commentators on the political left maintain that the deaths in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge were proportionately similar to other "progressive revolutions" throughout the 20th century, including the liberation of France from Nazi occupation. Linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky, for example, has argued that the U.S. media exaggerated the number of deaths in Cambodia as part of a broader propaganda campaign to increase support for U.S. military involvement in Indo-China. Chomsky first articulated the view in his article Distortions at Fourth Hand [2], and later expanded the position in his book, After the Cataclysm: The Political Economy of Human Rights Volume Two, both co-authored with Edward Hermann. Chomsky's views on Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge have been frequently criticized. Bruce Sharp's article Averaging Wrong Answers: Noam Chomsky and the Cambodia Controversy [3] provides a detailed analysis of Chomsky and Hermann's account.

Gallery

Image:Tuolsleng1.JPG|The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom PenhImage:ac.khmerrouge.jpg|Photos of genocide victims, on display at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh..Image:Concentration camp rules.jpg|"If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge": A sign displaying rules and punishment at Tuol Sleng.