This new wave of postvictory forced evacuations came just as the rice, which would have fed half a million Cambodians, was ripening; and these evacuations were not confined to areas near the Viet Namese border. Some commentators have bent over backwards to justify these Communist policies, as can be seen in this quote from Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, by Gareth Porter and George C. Hildebrand:
...only the revolutionary left in Cambodia had the will and capability to resolve [the food] problem....The National United Front of Kampuchea [NUFK, KR, KK or Angkar Leou]...with only its own resources, not only fed its own people but also the more than 3 million people living in GKR [Government of Kampuchean Republic, or Lon Nol’s regime] enclaves at the close of the war....By the summer of 1975 the NUFK had successfully dealt with Cambodia’s postwar food problem....
The stark contrast in determination to meet the most elementary human needs clearly reflects the social and political character of the NUFK and the GKR. The Lon Nol side had no commitment...for the prevention of famine....NUFK...had from the beginning an ideological and political commitment to bring about the development of Cambodia’s economy and raise the living standards of Cambodia’s people. Moreover, its...political success clearly depended not on vast quantities of aid from abroad but on its ability to assure a minimum diet under the most difficult conditions. The NUFK was able to produce sufficient food only by adopting revolutionary forms of organization, which permitted the mobilization of the Cambodian people...an achievement completely beyond the capabilities of the old society. Then, through careful management of centralized food stocks at the village level, the NUFK was able to feed its people, its soldiers, and the refugees.
In the aftermath of the Cambodian war, however, the U.S. government had a significant stake in attempting to deny the NUFK’s success....
Cambodia is only the latest victim of the enforcement of an ideology that demands that social revolutions be portrayed as negatively as possible, rather than as responses to real human needs which the existing social and economic structure was incapable of meeting. In Cambodia...the systematic process of myth making must be seen as an attempt to justify the massive death machine which was turned against a defenseless population in a vain effort to crush their revolution. The lessons of the Cambodian experience, moreover, have a significance that goes far beyond Cambodia itself. We hope that they will not be lost to the American people in the rewriting of history that is already taking place.
In light of the third mass relocation in which an estimated half million people were expelled from areas they had cultivated for six months, expelled just prior to the ripening of the crop and “deported” for no food reason (those in the West were moved east, those in the East moved west), to areas which not only had no surplus but which already had shortfalls; in light of the thousands of confirmed reports of soldiers confiscating most of the harvest for shipment to Center granaries (not in villages, and little was ever shipped back); in light of the documented policy to break the bonds of the people with everything past (in Pol Pot’s words, “to make an additional, total and permanent break from the old culture”), a policy which included the purposeful denial of sufficient sustenance to the masses; in light of the systematic and ruthless elimination of all previous authority and the total uprooting of all towns—not a reprisal reaction by local cadre to the horrors they’d endured, but exact, deliberate, long-formulated policies and plans originating from the high command; in light of all this, it is absurd to see these evacuations and executions as anything other than willful, malicious mass murder in the name of cultural revolution.
In addition to the October-November deportations, there was a new wave of killings. Radio orders went out to all “exterminators” that the new regime “no longer needed” certain classes of people. All former government soldiers, civil servants, teachers and students, and their families, were to be “weeded out” (because many had learned to hide their backgrounds) and eliminated.
Another wave of killings reportedly began in January 1976. The methods of Angkar Leou were so inquisitorial that KK troops, many who had been primarily Sihanoukists (Rumdoah), defected en masse. The “era of happiness” promised them if they achieved victory proved to be a lie. Bloodshed and tensions remained high or increased in every area of the country. Only the Party hierarchy prospered. Defectors became prisoners of war. Local controllers received the following order: “Prisoners of war are no longer required by Angkar Leou. Local controllers will dispose of them as they see fit. These are the wishes of Angkar Leou.”
Still the Center was able to further consolidate its power. A new security apparatus emerged. Total class warfare was declared. Now, according to Pol Pot, came the “Second Revolution.” Murder waves swept Democratic Kampuchea as the Glorious 17th of April Independence and Victory Day was celebrated. Efforts to weed out the last vestiges of the three mountains of previous power intensified. Kampuchea lay mutilated. The Center now decreed the New and Glorious Constitution of Democratic Kampuchea. This document included the following clauses:
Article 12
Every citizen of Kampuchea is guaranteed a living. All...working people have the right to work. There is absolutely no unemployment in Democratic Kampuchea. [Read that to mean Kampuchea is a slave state.]
Article 20
Every citizen of Kampuchea has the right to worship according to any religion and the right not to worship according to any religion.
All reactionary religions that are detrimental to Democratic Kampuchea and the Kampuchean people are strictly forbidden. [Not a single religion, including Buddhism, escaped being called reactionary.]
Khmer reaction to this ruthlessness was increased resistance. Some documents refer to the time, for different reasons from those of Pol Pot, as a second revolution. Bou Thong, who was KK minister of defense, led Krahom Regiment 703 in an uprising in Ratanakiri Province against Pol Pot’s local forces. Hun Sen and Ouk Boun Chheoum participated in another abortive revolt in Eastern Zone 203. All the above, along with Heng Samrin and many more, fled from Kampuchea to Viet Nam. In 1977 they became the core of a new KVM. In addition, Joint Voluntary Agency workers in refugee camps in Thailand in 1977 reported that a “lot” of former Khmer military men left the camps and joined resistance forces in Cambodia to fight the Khmer Rouge. Along with many old Rumdoah troops, these men became the base of the KPNLF (Khmer People’s National Liberation Front) still on the border.
Still the worst was yet to come.
The main product of the second famine was the total loss of faith by “peasants” in Angkar. Ahgkar had promised “more work and more food” but it had delivered “more work, more food produced, less distributed.” Dispirited, most people worked at just above a “to-be-disappeared” level. And there are numerous reports of entire sangkats escaping into the forest only to be massacred by KK ambushes. Without firearms, against those with firearms, fleeing is resistance. It is well documented that moderates within the Communist Party plotted to oust the hard core over the bloodletting.
In history there is power. Kampuchean Communists knew this. For them history was a main point of attack. That was the reasoning behind their “divide and conquer, divide again and again, and control” philosophy, the justification behind their complete atomization of society, behind their total iconoclastic assault on all remembrance.
After the first and second deportations, the sacking of libraries, the decimation of the monarchy and the Buddhist church, the leaders saw that the people still had not been broken, had not remade themselves in the image of Angkar. Ethos lives in people’s minds, in repeated cultural myths. And in those myths lay the moral distinctions and moral truth’s of Khmer society. Communist policy decrees that if the myths and the history are destroyed, then lost in that iconoclastic debris will be the moral foundation of the society; lost will be the role models that children and adults strive to emulate. What remained was remembrance.
The famines, purges and deportations w
ere purposeful. Starvation was policy. The methods adopted were designed to destroy the family structure. In the words of exiled Czech writer Milan Kundera, the totalitarian aim is “the destruction of memory.” To that objective the Center of Angkar Leou employed Stalinist methods of overwork and undernutrition combined with Maoist attacks on culture and family. Children became the property of Angkar Leou. The second mass deportation was followed by a third, and the third, in some areas, by a fourth. With each move, with each abandonment of an old area, the people were coerced to restart one step further removed from old familiarities. In many areas the 1976-77 harvest was bountiful. But the people did not see the food. The preharvest famine did not abate. In some areas the crop was minimal, and even this was not shared. Exactly what happened to this rice from more paddy area than Cambodia had ever had is not known. Some speculate that the grain was secretly exported to China in exchange for arms, or for money which Pol Pot and Ieng Sary deposited in Swiss bank accounts. There is no verification of this, yet there is verification of similar detours. In 1978 the United States gave 10,000 tons of rice to Laos to avert famine there. The food was confiscated by Viet Namese overlords and kept from the Lao; much of it was sent to Hanoi.
Khieu Samphan, chairman of the State Presidium, explained it all. Questioned about a million deaths in his country he said, “It’s incredible how concerned you Westerners are about war criminals.” It could have been Joseph Stalin decades earlier expounding, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.”
Why? Why did those bastards do it? Why did they wish to erase the cultural memory of all Kampucheans? What drives the dictator?
Some have suggested that the war taught the Krahom to fight with skill and ferocity and to govern only by force. Some have postulated that early humiliations of Pol Pot and/or Khieu Samphan produced massive vengeance which became infectious, which was taught and spread—a form of posttraumatic stress elevated to the utmost ruthlessness. Some have said there was no cult of personality, only Angkar Leou. Why, Mister Pol Pot? Why, Mister Ieng Sary? Why, Mister Son Sen? You were devious, calculating and cruel—was that a manifestation of your “purity of purpose,” your desire for pure communism in a pure Khmer land?
Columnist William Pfaff once wrote: “It is dangerous to sentimentalize about the principled revolutionary, because more often than not principles end by rationalizing crimes as acts of principled necessity.”
And what crimes. In Democratic Kampuchea, “Purge followed purge but the ‘enemy’ [of the state] grew ever more elusive, and ever more powerful in the party’s mind,” wrote Elizabeth Becker, in When the War Was Over. Early postvictory killing periods were purges of the old order. Later purges were more specific. Prostitution was “eliminated” by killing all the prostitutes (or any woman who could have been one). The favored method was to bury the woman to her neck, then slowly insert a bayonet into her throat. At Wat Ek in Battambang Province, 2,000 imprisoned “educated impure” (teachers) were murdered. Another 1,000 were killed in a second camp to the east. Ethnic Chinese were segregated and subjected to the harshest conditions and tightest security in Cambodia at a camp named Phum Chen Yuom (“village where the Chinese cry”). There, Pol Pot’s machine systematically slaughtered “many” of Cambodia’s 425,000 (1970 estimate) Chinese.
In July 1976, Koy Thoun, minister of commerce, once commander of the Northern Corridor Army and secretary of the northern zone, was arrested because of economic failures. He was interrogated and tortured into confessing a nonexistent network of disloyal conspirators. All who had ever served under him became suspect. Following his elimination the northern zone political and military cadre were “purified” by eastern zone troops. In the northwest zone, crop failures were blamed on zonal leaders. The Southwest Army was brought in to disappear the controllers, chiefs, enforcers, yotheas and mekongs. Peasants were gathered in mass meetings and told their hardships had been the results of enemies who had now been killed. Everything would get better. Nothing changed.
Some areas experienced two, three or four purges of local cadre. An entire village in Siem Reap Province was massacred to celebrate the second anniversary of the KK victory (17 April 1977) because the village had been Lon Nol’s birth place. Three hundred and fifty families, about 2,000 people, were murdered because “they were of the same blood as Lon Nol.” Their names were recorded and displayed at the anniversary celebrations. Widespread purges followed. For the “first” time there was open opposition to the cadre of the Center. Again the nation was in limited civil war. Soldiers battled soldiers, and peasants joined in taking advantage of the upheavals to avenge the deaths of loved ones. For months there were massive retaliatory killings. The eastern zone suffered perhaps the “bloodiest” purge (how could anything be bloodier than the murder of all cadre, as was reported?) for not defeating the People’s Army of Viet Nam in the growing border war. Perhaps the deaths went deeper than cadre level. The Center reportedly feared that the Gray Vulture-Army of the Eastern Zone was secretly allied with the Viet Namese. Defectors or “potential” defectors were purged. Rich peasants who had become Communist soldiers were eliminated; yotheas (no matter what their combat record) who came from “rich” backgrounds and Party members who had “improper” backgrounds were killed.
Pol Pot, the head of state, has been quoted as explaining the killings thus: “We cannot feel sorry for the million lives that have been wasted. The Party is strong because of it.”
By 1978 Radio Phnom Penh broadcast: “The Party had flushed out the Khmer-Viet Namese running dogs of the aggressor, expansionist and annexationist Viet Namese enemies who have sneaked their way into the ranks of our Party....Our youths have basically smashed and wiped out those agents.”
Many of the politically purged were brought to Phnom Penh’s Tuol Sleng Incarceration Center—the headquarters of Angkar Leou’s Special Security Police. Of the 16,000 to 20,000 prisoners interrogated and tortured, four survived.
Then the killings got openly out of hand. More and more, cadre explained at education sessions the need to kill massive numbers of Khmer citizens. Of the 15,000 at Kok Moun Om, 10,000, it was announced, must be eliminated as enemies of the people. Within a year 6,000 had been murdered. Dare to object, dare to see, and you are next.
Still, that was not enough. Medical treatment reverted to the Dark Ages at best. Again this was purposeful. Had the leaders of Democratic Kampuchea desired, even just allowed it, medicine which could have stopped the epidemics which swept the land would have been donated by Western, Eastern, and/or third world sources. Yet all medical aid was contemptuously rejected. Only the Center’s desire for a total, rapid, fundamental and violent change in the values and myths of Khmer culture kept Kampucheans suffering. Cholera, dengue fever, dysentery, lung and brain fluke infections, tuberculosis, malaria, yaws, beri-beri, smallpox, leprosy, hookworm and fungal infections, typhoid and other diseases ravaged the population, which had been rendered so susceptible by the forced labor and enforced starvation. People died by the millions; of those under Pol Pot’s tyranny—between purges, starvation and disease—nearly one half died, were murdered, in less than four years. And there is no Nuremberg?! Such was the implementation of Communism in Democratic Kampuchea!
AFTERSHOCKS IN THE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF VIET NAM
In Viet Nam the situation, although not as serious, was still severe. The Aurora Foundation, after extensive study, concluded that 70,000 South Viet Namese had been executed within ninety days of Hanoi’s victory. An additional one to two million people were either sent to “reeducation facilities” (a euphemism for “concentration camps”) or sent to “new economic zones” to establish farming communes, often on unfarmable land. In the words of Truong Nhu Tang, a founder of the National Liberation Front, and the ex-minister of justice for the Viet Cong:
Unfortunately, when the war did end, North Viet Namese vindictiveness and fanaticism blossomed into a ferocious exercise of power. Hundreds of thousands of former officials and a
rmy officers of the Saigon regime were imprisoned in “reeducation” camps. Literally millions of ordinary citizens were forced to leave their homes and settle in the so-called new economic zones. A rigid authoritarianism settled down over the entire country—an authoritarianism supported by the 3d largest army in the world. Members of the former resistance are now filled with bitterness. For the first time in our history people have risked their lives to leave Viet Nam: large numbers of Viet Namese never tried to flee the country to escape French domination or the American intervention. The North Viet Namese Communists, survivors of protracted, blood-drenched campaigns against colonialism, interventionism and human repression, became in their turn colonialists, interventionists and architects of one of the world’s most rigid regimes, becoming at the same time dependent clients of the Soviet Union.
DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA VERSUS THE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF VIET NAM
Long before the fall of the respective capitals, KK and NVA troops had battled each other; with their victories and the need for consolidation, one would have expected a pause in the border conflict. Although there may have been an abatement in some areas, by mid-1975 the frequency of incidents had begun to grow. In an almost straight-line progression, those incidents increased for two years. PAVN troops outnumbered KK yotheas seven or eight to one. Hanoi used its superior numbers and firepower to roll forward and grind up vast tracts of the Srepok Forest, the Parrot’s Beak and the lower Mekong and Bassac floodplains. By May 1977 the fighting was heavy all along the front, with artillery in use by both sides and with the new PAVN air force bombing and strafing Khmer targets. Khmer communes in the East and Northeast which rested along the edge of the no-man’s-land were abandoned. By October 1977, 60,000 Cambodians (an unknown percentage of whom had Viet ancestry) had crossed the border and were being warehoused in camps in Viet Nam.
For the Sake of All Living Things Page 85