Khmer Rouge
The Khmer Rouge or Khmers Rouges ("Red Khmers") was the French name, also widely used in the English-speaking world, for the Communist organization which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The organization's official names were Communist Party of Cambodia and later the Party of Democratic Kampuchea. The Khmer Rouge is generally remembered for its violent rule in which approximately 1.5 million people died.
Rise to power
The Communist Party of Cambodia was founded in the early 1950s, although in its early years it remained subordinate to the Communist Party of Vietnam. In the 1970s the Party adopted the name "Party of Democratic Kampuchea," ("Kampuchea" being an alternative spelling of Cambodia), but became commonly known by the French name Khmer Rouge.
Between AD 802 and 1970, Cambodia was a hereditary monarchy. On March 18, 1970, Cambodia's ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk was deposed while out of the country by a coup d'état that brought General Lon Nol to power. According to Frank Snepp, the CIA's chief political analyst in Vietnam at the time, the CIA believed that if Lon Nol came to power, "He would welcome the United States with open arms and we would accomplish everything." The U.S. was quick to establish cordial relations with Nol's government, previously frustrated with Sihanouk's policy of neutrality while North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong units were operating out of Cambodia. With American financial support, Nol attempted to fight off the North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge insurgency they were supporting. However, U.S.-led bombing of NVA and VC units in Cambodia and the subsequent Cambodian casualties made Lon Nol's government unpopular, and caused support for the Khmer Rouge to grow, particularly in the countryside. Support for Sihanouk, who had been exiled to Beijing, was also strong in rural areas, and the King expressed support for resistance against Nol's regime. Eventually the Khmer Rouge exercised de facto control over the majority of Cambodian territory.
On April 17 1975 the Khmer Rouge armies captured Phnom Penh and overthrew Lon Nol's regime, renaming the country Democratic Kampuchea. The Standing Committee of the Khmer Rouge's Central Committee ("Party Center") during its period of power comprised Pol Pot (the effective leader of the movement), Nuon Chea, Ta Mok, Khieu Samphan, Ke Pauk, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Yun Yat, and Ieng Thirith. The leadership of the Khmer Rouge was largely unchanged between the 1960s and the mid-1990s.
Khmer Rouge rule
The ideology of the Khmer Rouge combined an extreme, somewhat revised form of Maoism with the anti-colonialist ideas of the European Left, which its leaders had acquired during their education in French universities in the 1950s. To this was added resentment against the Cambodian Communists' long subordination to the Vietnamese.
When the Khmer Rouge came to power they were determined immediately to create a classless society by force. They carried out a radical program that included closing schools, hospitals and factories, abolishing banking and currency, outlawing religion, confiscating private property, and relocating people from urban areas to collective farms where forced labor was widespread. The Khmer Rouge justified such actions by claiming that the country was on the verge of mass starvation as a result of American bombing campaigns, and that this required evacuating the cities to the countryside so that people could become self-sufficient. This policy, known as "Year Zero", resulted in massive Cambodian deaths through executions, work exhaustion and starvation. The Khmer Rouge regime immediately set out to kill anyone suspected of connections with the former government, as well as professionals, intellectuals, and ethnic Vietnamese.
Events under the Khmer Rouge shocked journalists and commentators in Western countries. The party was accused of genocide and autogenocide, the latter term being created specifically to describe Cambodia.
The exact number of people who died as a result of the Khmer Rouge's policies is debated. The Vietnamese-installed regime that succeeded the Khmer Rouge claimed that 3.3 million had died. The CIA estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 people were executed by the Khmer Rouge, but executions represented only a minority of the death toll, which mostly came from starvation. Three sources, United States Department of State, Amnesty International and the Yale Cambodian Genocide Project, give estimates of the total death toll as 1.2 million, 1.4 million and 1.7 million respectively. 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. An estimate of 1.5 million (from a total population of about 7 million in 1975) seems a reasonable consensus. While the U.S. bombing campaign against Cambodia in the Vietnam War had a significant impact on the country's population, historians generally attribute the majority of deaths under the Khmer Rouge to their revolutionary program and refusal to accept international aid.
Decline and fall
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 widespread defections of Khmer Rouge activists, who formed the core of the post-Khmer Rouge government. The Khmer Rouge retreated to the west and continued to control an area near the Thai border for many years, unofficially protected by elements of the Thai Army and funded by smuggled diamonds and timber. In 1985 Khieu Samphan officially succeeded Pol Pot as head of the Khmer Rouge.
There have been allegations that the U.S. and the United Kingdom supported the Khmer Rouge after their downfall because of the recent Cold War battle in Vietnam. Leftist Australian journalist John Pilger has accused the Reagan and Thatcher administrations of propping up the Khmer Rouge in Thailand. [1] U.S. President Ronald Reagan had publicly condemned the Khmer Rouge as responsible for the death of one-third of the Cambodian population, and opposition to the new regime was not limited to the organization. However, the Khmer Rouge did play a significant role in resistance against the Vietnamese-installed government led by Heng Samarin.
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 1998. 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. With the capture of Ta Mok in March 1999, the Khmer Rouge effectively ceased to exist.
Five years later, however, trials of the leaders remain stalled and it is highly unlikely that any of them will be brought to justice. Young Cambodians remain largely ignorant of the atrocities committed less than a quarter of a century ago. Many records of the Khmer Rouge were destroyed. Some observers believe that the slow progress of Khmer Rouge trials is in large part due to the fact that many members of the current government were former officials of the Khmer Rouge and may be implicated in crimes. There is also a fear of renewed violence if the former leaders of the Khmer Rouge are tried.
See also
External links
- PBS Frontline/World: Pol Pot's Shadow
- Yale Cambodian Genocide Program
- Ben Kiernan. "The Demography of Genocide: Cambodia and East Timor" (Critical Asian Studies, 35:4, 2003) [in .pdf format]
- R. J. Rummel's calculations for Cambodian genocide figures
- Sharp, Bruce (2004). Averaging Wrong Answers: Noam Chomsky and the Cambodia Controversy
- The Khmer Rouge Canon 1975-1979: The Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia
- Digital Archive of Cambodian Holocaust Survivors