THE KHMER ROUGE - A HISTORY ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THEIR TAKE OVER -APRIL 17, 1975

A story that deserves our attention today more than ever

MY ARTICLE WAS PUBLISHED IN THE FRENCH MAGAZINE “HISTORIA” IN A SPECIAL EDITION DEVOTED ENTIRELY TO CAMBODIA.

( Here is the article in the original English before translated into French.)

By Elizabeth Becker

Cambodia nearly escaped the Vietnam War.

Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the country’s gifted leader, calculated that Cambodia could best survive the simmering Vietnam War by claiming neutrality, to become the Switzerland of Southeast Asia. For fifteen years he succeeded. The country of elegant Angkor temples and a welcoming culture became a peaceful if shaky oasis.

But the Vietnam War did not respect borders. Cambodia was surrounded by fighting: Vietnam to the east, Laos to the North, and Thailand to the West with American war planes stationed at its bases. Each year the war escaladed, fighting spilled over and pressure built on Sihanouk and Cambodia. If the US had withdrawn earlier or the 1968 peace talks had succeeded, this story would have had a far different ending.

But the Vietnam War did come to Cambodia in 1970. The unlikely victors were the Khmer Rouge, a small communist party that had been pushed aside by Sihanouk’s neutrality. These embittered Cambodian communists were determined to prove they were the world’s best revolutionaries despite their miserable treatment by Sihanouk and their supposed communist allies. Their nightmare of a revolution led to genocide and destroyed the country in less than four years.

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The 1954 Geneva Conference ended French colonial rule of Indochina but temporarily divided Vietnam into communist North and capitalist South pending a national election that never happened. The communists of Laos were given authority over several provinces.

Only Cambodia remained a unified country.

The country’s communist movement was left out in the cold, the first of the poisonous grievances that would fuel Khmer Rouge fanaticism.

Prince Sihanouk understood his country’s good fortune. As prime minister he joined the new non-aligned movement and became a neutral on the Vietnam War.

Neutrality paid dividends. The belligerent parties wanted to win Sihanouk’s allegiance. The United States gave Cambodia a significant aid package, including military support. China and North Vietnam held off supporting a Cambodian communist insurgency that would have threatened the Prince. He used the American aid to build his army and his secret police crushed most of nascent Cambodian communist movement without fear of foreign reprisals.

This was a disaster for Cambodia’s communists who deeply resented being pushed aside by China and North Vietnam. In 1960 they founded the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Solath Sar, a Cambodian who had studied in Paris, became its chairman. He would later adopt the name Pol Pot.

He was one of the French-educated leftists and secret communists who mixed in Phnom Penh society. Pol Pot’s sister-in-law was a popular educator. Three of the party’s top theorists were activists whose writings were cogent Marxist arguments for radical economic and social change. They were devoid of any suggestion of the reign of terror that became the Khmer Rouge signature.

Sihanouk’s neutrality was tested in 1963 when President NGO DINH Diem of South Vietnam was assassinated following the CIA approved coup d’etat. The Prince was horrified by America’s treatment of its ally and renounced US aid and broke off relations with the U.S.

In 1965 the US deployed American troops to fight in South Vietnam, raising the stakes precipitously. Sihanouk allowed North Vietnam to supply communists in the South by expanding the Ho Chi Minh trail inside Cambodia’s border. At the same time the Prince cracked down on Cambodian communists, whom he dubbed the Khmer Rouge, saying he did not want a revolution in his own country. Quietly, the K.R. fled Phnom Penh for the hinterlands and in 1967 launched a revolution. Still, North Vietnam and China preferred to keep Sihanouk in power and withheld support for a Khmer Rouge uprising.

This time events broke in Pol Pot’s favor.

American public opinion had swung against the war. The U.S. was not winning the war even with the most powerful military in the world. The cost in American lives and treasure was becoming intolerable. Richard M. Nixon was elected President in 1968 promising peace.

Instead, he ordered the secret bombing of the Ho Chi Trail, convinced by American military commanders this would be a decisive blow to the communists. It was not.

Unsettled by the endless war, public opinion in Cambodia turned against Sihanouk. On March 18, 1970, a center-right coalition of rivals who despised the Prince’s coziness with North Vietnam and China, staged a coup d’etat. Led by General Lon Nol, the new government ordered all Vietnamese communists to leave the country. As expected, the U.S. pledged full support to the new Khmer Republic.

Neutrality was dead. The door to war was opened.

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Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge finally had the support of China and North Vietnam for their insurgency.

Even Sihanouk joined them! The Prince went into exile in Beijing where the Chinese brokered a deal making him the figurehead of the Cambodian resistance. Throughout the war the real leaders hid behind Sihanouk’s reassuring presence, disguising the true nature of the Khmer Rouge.

The U.S. Army with their South Vietnamese allies invaded Cambodia in April 1970, expanding the Cambodian campaign the Vietnam War. They fought North Vietnamese troops along the Eastern border, hoping to send them back to their own country.

The operation backfired. The N.V.A. spread across Cambodia and within one year controlled half of the country, giving the Khmer Rouge breathing space to build up their army. The poorly trained troops of the new Khmer Republic mounted two major campaigns that failed to dislodge the NVA.

It was the American troops that were forced to withdraw from Cambodia by the U.S. Congress which was furious that Nixon had expanded the war into Cambodia.

The U.S. signed the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973 which required the U.S. to withdraw from Vietnam and the Vietnamese from Cambodia.

The Khmer Rouge took over the fighting and with surprising speed captured new ground in an offensive that threatened the capitol. Alarmed, the Nixon Administration took advantage of a legal loophole and launched a massive air campaign, dropping 257,000 tons of bombs over rural Cambodia in six months. The bombing did block the Khmer Rouge offensive but its long-term effects haunted both sides.

The Khmer Rouge told themselves that surviving the relentless bombing was proof of their invincibility. It confirmed the extreme vision of revolution the party developed in the hinterlands after fleeing Phnom Penh. Now known as Angka (Organization), the party had relied on peasants who appreciated the movement for treating them as equals and not coolies. Others balked at the Angka’s harsh and arbitrary wartime discipline.

Soon the Cambodian government was on its knees, a victim of its own corruption and incompetence as well as the Khmer Rouge army.

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On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge soldiers entered Phnom Penh prepared to execute the revolution of extreme purity and self-sufficiency formed by the deprivations of war.

The city’s exhausted citizens cheered the soldiers in black pajamas but not for long. The soldiers lied and claimed American war planes were returning to bomb the city and ordered everyone out at once.

This inhuman subterfuge allowed 68,000 soldiers to disarm and subdue two million people in a few days. Soldiers emptied hospitals, throwing out the wounded, disabled and dying. They cleared out homes, schools, every building in the city, herding crowds of confused and frightened people out to the highways leading to the countryside.

Along the roads soldiers at checkpoints captured and killed anyone of authority or stature from the defeated society: soldiers, intellectuals, businessmen, officials, doctors, monks. They were considered class enemies that needed to be destroyed.

The city people, now known as ‘new people’ were sent to farms and villages renamed ‘cooperatives.’ Peasants who joined the party before 1975 controlled these rural labor camps and were known as the ‘old people.’ They gave the new people primitive lodging and sent them out to work on meager rations and little rest.

Everyone did manual labor whether in rice fields or construction sites. There was no rest or relaxation. No sport, dances, music, movies, games, prays at pagodas, mosques or churches. Only unpaid hard labor.

Pot Pot arrived in Phnom Penh one week after the evacuation. He surveyed the abandoned city; the shuttered markets and homes, schools, libraries, businesses and banks, artisan workshops and public offices. In one stroke, his revolution had eliminated Cambodia’s culturally rich society, which the Party deemed reactionary.

From then on, Phnom Penh would only be home to Party members and trusted workers. The revolution was composed only of peasants, workers and soldiers. Professionals were eliminated as part of the enemy classes.

In his victory speech, Pol Pot marveled at his own brilliance. He boasted of Cambodia’s total victory and made the outrageous claim that Cambodia was the first country to defeat American imperialism. “To win such a big victory in just five years is extremely fast.”

This was rewriting history with delusions of the highest order. With the same hubris, Pol Pot promised a radical revolution as rapid as this victory.

Cambodia was renamed Democratic Kampuchea. The Party owned everything and controlled everything. Citizens were denied all basic rights and freedoms. In the name of self-sufficiency, the Khmer Rouge continued its wartime isolation and cut off the country off from the rest of the world.

With little experience governing, the Khmer Rouge proved singularly incompetent at organizing the country and fulfilling goals.

They tried to jump start the economy with impossible demands. Farmers were told to reap harvests large enough to feed Cambodia and export overseas; to build irrigation systems without expertise or equipment. When the harvests failed or dam collapsed, they blamed the peasant and the workers who were arbitrarily declared guilty of traitorous behavior and killed.

Angka was always blameless.

According to Pol Pot, the revolution was the “work of God, for it is too imposing for mere humans.”

How did Cambodians live through this? Mey Komphot, an urbane banker, survived by hiding his past and profession but nearly went mad. He witnessed the secret police hauling off innocent people to certain death and as one of the new people he was treated like a work animal. One night, he told himself: “It is one thing to suffer to live, another to suffer only to die. I decided to give it two years. If nothing had changed, I would commit suicide.” With that dark promise, Komphot kept himself alive.

The economy continued to flounder. People were being worked to death – sent to fields with little to eat, no medical care and little rest. Cambodia didn’t recover food self-sufficiency or build a new light industrial base.

Order was maintained through fear, violence and arbitrary arrests.

Pol Pot’s paranoia mounted. His police were ordered to uncover the traitors and spies responsible for the growing catastrophe. The Party expanded its nightmare web of terror, adding torture centers where victims were forced to write insane confessions and then murdered.

Suspects now included Khmer Rouge cadre. Huot Bophana, the wife of a cadre, was arrested for the crime of writing love letters to her husband. She was taken to the regime’s torture center at Tuol Sleng, a former school. A woman of rare courage she was tortured over weeks and executed in 1977. Years later she became a national hero.

By 1978 the Khmer Rouge faced an existential threat. They had challenged the Vietnamese over a dispute on their common border and sparked a low-level war. Vietnam countered with plans for a major offensive.

Pol Pot stepped up his search for traitors helping Vietnam, ordering the arrest of thousands in purges of whole regions. Pol Pot was reaching the endgame of authoritarianism when the party destroys itself as Vietnam prepared for war.

Vietnam’s superior army easily overran Khmer Rouge forces in two weeks, reaching Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979 and throwing out Pol Pot’s government. By then nearly two million Cambodians – one-fourth of the population - had died of disease, starvation or murder in less than four years.

Cold War politics allowed Pol Pot to avoid imprisonment. He died in his sleep in 1998. Two senior Khmer Rouge leaders were convicted of genocide in 2018. The head of Tuol Sleng torture center was convicted of crimes against humanity in 2010. Cambodia has yet to recover from the legacy of Democratic Kampuchea.