The roots of evil: The origins of genocide and other group violence

by Ervin Staub

  He described Vietnam and Cambodia as two cultures in irreconcilable conflict. In the 1860s the Cambodian king, Ang Duong, asking for French help, referred to the Vietnamese as traditional enemies. The main reason Cambodia accepted the French protectorate was a wish to be protected from Vietnam. One reason for Sihanouk’s overthrow was his apparent support for Vietnam in the war. Upon gaining power Lon Nol expressed intense anti-Vietnamese sentiments, insisting that the Vietnamese were racially inferior to Cambodians. His rise to power was followed by murderous attacks on Vietnamese in Cambodia. In 1970 Pol Pot described Vietnam as the traditional enemy.

  Cultural devaluation can be directed at another nation as well as a subgroup of society. An ideology of antagonism (see Chapter 16) may evolve, a way of thinking that represents the other (accurately or inaccurately) as an extreme threat and gives rise to the motivation to diminish or overcome or even exterminate the other. Such an ideology of antagonism motivated the actions of the Khmer Rouge toward Vietnam.

  Cultural self-concept. The Khmer Rouge had a sense of superiority, combined with underlying feelings of inferiority and vulnerability. This arose from a combination of long past glory, recent history, and present circumstances.

  Cambodia had once been a great and powerful empire. Angkor was rich and had conquered large territories. According to some writers its wealth was due to highly advanced agricultural techniques, especially irrigation systems that increased rice-growing capacity.32 A symbol of this past greatness was Angkor Wat, a magnificant complex of temples and other buildings. The French enlarged the memory of past greatness by beginning the restoration of Angkor Wat and writing the history of the empire that created it. According to one writer, “By the time their work was halted in the 1960s, the French had proved the Khmers ranked with the Romans and Greeks as unrivaled artists and innovators of the ancient world.”33 Each of Cambodia’s four national flags since 1970 “has featured a stylized representation of Ankor Wat’s three towers.”34

  Pol Pot (or Saloth Sar as he was originally known) and his associates were strong nationalists from the start, and this may have gained them support early in the civil war.35 Their identification with the past greatness of Cambodia, combined with their success in the war against the United States, the giant, may have led them to believe that Cambodia could bring about a total transformation without any external support. With proper guidance, they thought, the people could accomplish anything. That the past greatness of Cambodia was rooted in agriculture probably contributed to their nearly complete reliance on agriculture in creating the new Cambodia.

  On the other hand, for several centuries, Cambodia had been dependent on external powers and suffering at their hands. This, together with mistrust of all outsiders and many Cambodians, made the Khmer Rouge feel weak and vulnerable. The small size of their army added to their insecurity. Their divided identity, their lack of integration of feelings of strength and weakness, interfered with a realistic assessment of themselves and their circumstances. This was one cause of their violent and self-defeating policies, including constant purges of communists.

  A tradition of violence in Cambodia. Chou Ta-Kuan described the brutal penal system of Angkor in the thirteenth century. People convicted of serious crimes were buried alive; lesser crimes were punished by the amputation of toes, fingers, and arms. When a new king was proclaimed, all his brothers were mutilated. At the beginning of large construction projects Khmers of low status were ritually decapitated. People believed they could gain power by cutting off parts of another person’s body – genitals, organs, or head.36

  The Issarak, the anti-French freedom fighters, were also extremely violent. Bun Chan Mol was the political leader of a group carrying out executions in the 1940s. He wrote in his 1973 book, Charit Khmer (Khmer mores), that he left the Issarak in 1949 because he could not restrain the brutality of his men, their gratuitous use of torture, and their pleasure in violence.37 They were suspicious of everyone, including their leaders. Banditry was also long practiced in Cambodia, sometimes the Issarak a cover for it.

  Referring to David Chandler’s dissertation on life in nineteenth-century Cambodia, Vickery writes:

  Patterns of extreme violence against people defined as enemies, however arbitrarily, have very long roots in Cambodia. As a scholar specializing in 19th-century Cambodia has expressed it: “it is difficult to overstress the atmosphere of physical danger and the currents of insecurity and random violence that run through the chronicles and, obviously through so much of Cambodian life in this period. The chronicles are filled with references to public executions, ambushes, torture, village-burnings and forced emigrations.” Although fighting was localized and forces small, “invaders and defenders destroyed the villages they fought for and the landscapes they moved across.” “Prisoners were tortured and killed.. .as a matter of course.”38

  David Chandler also stated, in testimony before a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives, that the “frequency of locally-led rebellions in the nineteenth century – against the Thai, the Vietnamese, the French and local officials suggests that Cambodian peasants were not as peaceable as their own mythology, reinforced by the French, would lead us to believe.”39

  Violence by various rebel groups continued in rural areas during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The Khmer Rouge moved from politics to guerrilla war in 1968. The Sihanouk government’s actions during the Samlaut peasant rebellion I have already described. One scholar on Cambodia, Ben Kiernan, writes:

  During 1968 in Kompong Cham, the Provincial Governor Nhiem Thein organized witch-hunts for suspected Communists. According to a witness, provincial officials were ordered to take part in beating innocent peasants to death. According to another witness, in Prey Totoeng (a village in Hu Nim’s former electoral district) two young children accused of being messengers for the guerrillas had their heads sawn off with palm fronds. Also in 1968, 40 schoolteachers accused of subversive activities were, on Sihanouk’s orders, bound hand and foot and thrown from a cliff at Bokor in Kampot.40

  Kiernan further notes that in a May 1968 speech Sihanouk described what happened to captured communists thus: “I...had them roasted. When you roast a duck you normally eat it. But when we roasted these fellows, we had to feed them to the vultures. We had to do so to ensure our society.”41 Communist violence, which became rampant in occupied territories after 1970, was also increasing: in mid-1969, communists publicly executed government-appointed officials in five villages.

  Vickery points out that peasant revolutions have often been extremely violent and cites the examples of Spain, Russia, and Vietnam.42 He means to show that the excesses of Pol Pot were results of a Cambodian tradition of violence and “poor-peasant” frustration, rather than Marxism-Leninism.43 However, the ideology of Marxism-Leninism and some of the practices of communist countries also contributed: they influenced Cambodian communist ideology and offered models for action. These models included Stalin’s brutal collectivization of the peasantry and his later purges, the early Yugoslav purges, and the excesses of the Cultural Revolution in China.

  Experiential and intellectual sources of ideology and fanaticism

  Out of these cultural roots, combined with personal experience, members of the Pol Pot group developed their destructive ideology. For example, their deep-seated view of Vietnam as hereditary enemy may have been confirmed when Vietnam, in the late 1960s, not wanting to antagonize Sihanouk, refused material help to the Cambodian communists. In fact, when the Cambodian communists began to arm themselves in 1967-68, North Vietnam discouraged them. This was frequently cited after 1975 as evidence of North Vietnamese ill will. Although the Vietnamese provided essential military help after Lon Nol came to power, the past was not forgotten. The hatred of North Vietnam grew with the Paris peace accord of January 27, 1973, which ended the war between the United States and North Vietnam. The Khmer communists saw it as a sellout and refused to be part of it. The U.S. bombers, called off Vietnamese targets, concentrat
ed their bombing on the Khmer communists. The Khmer Rouge ordered the Vietcong and Vietminh out of the country.

  There were other reasons for mistrust of all outsiders, even communists. In order to maintain friendly relations with Sihanouk, China provided his government with military equipment that was used against the Khmer Rouge. Even the Soviet Union sold Sihanouk arms. It seemed that the whole world, communists and imperialists, were enemies of the Khmer Rouge. In addition, Pol Pot and his associates were victims of brutal repression by the supposedly democratic government of Sihanouk’s Cambodia. Being forced to live in the forests was traditionally regarded as a disgrace, and this may have been another source of frustration and anger.44

  The Khmer Rouge ideology also had intellectual sources, some of which are traced by Craig Etcheson.45 The writings of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Lin Piao, and Mao Tse-tung had led the Pol Pot group to accept the need for a communist revolution. Lenin and others convinced them that a vanguard party could create a revolution that “leaped” the stage of mature capitalism originally described by Marx as a prerequisite for communist revolution. Mao persuaded them that a people’s war was necessary to crush such “national-democratic” structures of oppression as police, courts, labor unions, myths, and religion. Soviet writings convinced them that socialism could evolve in one country before the emergence of a unified global communism.

  All members of the central group led by Pol Pot had been students in Paris together and members of the Stalinist French Communist Party and communist study groups. They continued to work together, which created many opportunities to influence each other and evolve a coherent ideology. Etcheson argues that they must have been influenced by the thinking of French revolutionaries. Robespierre led the Reign of Terror with the maxim that a revolution has no constant laws but must adjust to changing circumstances. A group of radical leftists who called themselves the Conspiracy of Equals published a manifesto in 1796 asserting the principle that the revolutionary end justifies all means. The ideology of the Pol Pot groups seems to have contained all these ideas, although their sources are necessarily conjectural.

  Vickery points to a source closer to home, the thinking of Son Ngoc Thanh.46 This complex man was an anticolonialist enemy of the French, a collaborator of the Japanese during their brief occupation of Cambodia, and probably a CIA collaborator while he was opposing Sihanouk from the forests of Cambodia. He was the first modern anti-French nationalist, a left-leaning political thinker and leader of efforts to modernize and democratize Cambodia. He spoke of developing the people’s will to serve the nation without concern for personal interest and rank, suppressing moral evils, eliminating oppression, and using the land fully.

  Utopian thinking was another influence. Vickery writes:

  DK Cambodia first of all bears unmistakable similarities to a Utopia as, for example, envisaged by Thomas More: the rigidly egalitarian communism, identical clothes and houses, the latter of which are changed regularly; identical fixed working hours, mass lectures, communal farms and communal dining halls, shifting of children out of families, strict rules on sexual morality, no money, and contempt for gold....

  In the real world, Utopian features have often been combined with violence; and the particularly violent aspects of the DK revolution manifest echoes of Bakunin’s anarchist program: “universal revolution, simultaneously social, philosophical, economic and political, so that of the present order of things.. .not a stone will be left standing"; “death to rulers, exploiters and guardians of all kinds, we seek to destroy all states and all churches along with their institutions and laws.” Along with that the youth were to abandon universities, academies, schools, “and go among the people,” and were advised to “not bother at this moment with learning,” for “the people know themselves, and better than we do, what they need.” All “means of social existence” were to be concentrated in the hands of “Our Committee” [Angka Loeu] with physical labor proclaimed compulsory for everyone, the alternatives being work or death. As in Utopia all property would be communal and communal eating and sleeping the norm.47

  Vickery also points to the examples of certain other revolutions. Yugoslavia too had an indigenous communist movement with indigenous leaders who tried to limit outside influence. The Yugoslav communists too acted violently against former enemies and had ambitions for great, immediate change. Pol Pot visited Yugoslavia in 1950, a seemingly incongruous act for a Stalinist given Yugoslavia’s rejection of Soviet influence. The Great Leap Forward in China in 1958-60 could also serve as a model. In its ideology the peasant masses were the source of true revolution, backwardness was an advantage for the success of revolution, and it was necessary to eliminate differences between town and country, peasant and worker, mental activity and manual labor. The Great Leap Forward also built huge irrigation and water conservation projects, with masses of peasants performing labor under military discipline.48 Others have argued that the Chinese Cultural Revolution also had influence.49

  Some early elements of the ideology were also apparent in doctoral dissertations by the Pol Pot group in France. Hou Youn, the intellectual founder of the revolution, argued in his 1955 thesis that peasant masses are the real creators of a nation’s wealth.50 In his later writing he states, “Our purpose is to transform and develop the rural economy based on establishing the peasant as the key to the organization of production.”51 Khieu Samphan’s 1959 thesis held that only by ending its dependency on the outside world could Cambodia develop into an industrial society.52 The nationalism of the Pol Pot (then still Saloth Sar) group was also apparent very early. For example, they denounced the king in an open letter in 1952, complaining (incorrectly) that he had renounced territorial claims to former Cambodian possessions.

  From ideas of others and examples of other countries, from their own cultural background and their personal experiences, the Pol Pot group evolved a coherent ideology and believed that by fulfilling it they would create an ideal Cambodian society. This ideology was the primary guide to genocidal practices.

  Gaining followers: the tools of revolution and genocide

  The turmoil in Cambodia gave rise to many of the motivations that arise under difficult life conditions. Given the economic problems and decline in living standards, the bombing and war that ravaged the country, there had to be strong motivation for defense of the physical self. Political instability and violence, the loss of Sihanouk in 1970, physical dislocation, and social chaos also gave the Khmer peasants a deep need to protect their identity and to find new authority and guidance. With their customary ways of life destroyed, they needed a new world view. The communists threatened their lives for noncompliance and offered rewards for compliance, including the fulfillment of these needs.

  Three major influences on the peasants stand out. First, the overthrow of Sihanouk and his call for an uprising in support of the communists. Before 1968 the communists did not have sufficient support to win a war.53 Sihanouk’s call on the peasants to support the Khmer Rouge may have been decisive. The rebels used Sihanouk skillfully. He became head of the government in exile (established May 5, 1970) and thus, in name, the leader of the revolution. He was occasionally presented to the people. In actuality, he spent most of his time in Peking, and all real authority was in the hands of the Khmer Rouge.

  Second, the U.S. bombing “destabilized” the peasants and turned them against the Lon Nol government. They believed it was done at the request of the government, which they already regarded as corrupt and indifferent to their welfare. (In actuality, Cambodian officials constantly submitted vigorous protests to the United Nations before 1971.)54 The U.S. bombing also had another effect. There were many communist factions, and initially members of the Pol Pot group were not in the highest leadership positions. Although their cold-blooded determination might have brought them to power anyway, the bombing radicalized the peasants and made it easier for this radical group to gain their support. The bombing also further radicalized Pol Pot and his group. Finally, U.
S. bombs helped them in a more direct way. In 1973, in the first major independent offensive by the Khmer Rouge military (without the North Vietnamese army), the battalion of the Pol Pot faction held back while the others were decimated by a terrible pounding from the U.S. Air Force. When U.S. air power was withdrawn in August 15, 1973, the Pol Pot faction was dominant.55

  The third major influence on the peasants was exerted by the communists. They destroyed the traditional structures of life in territories they occupied, creating total dependence on themselves. They executed some and terrorized all, broke up extended families, forced peasants to move to new villages, and drove people from worksite to worksite under constant supervision. They erased many of the traditions in the occupied territories between 1970 and 1975 and many more after the victory in 1975. All this increased disorientation and susceptibility to the communist movement.

  Ith Sarin, a school inspector who joined the communists and then abandoned them and wrote a book about them, wrote that the communists understood and worked to enlarge the peasants’ deep dissatisfaction with the corruption, arrogance, cruelty, and incompetence of the Phnom Penh government.56 Having enhanced the needs created by difficult life conditions, the communists offered ways to fulfill them. In place of the authority of the king, they offered the authority of Angka Loeu (the “organization,” their central authority). They linked some of the traditions and myths of the culture to the new system. While they changed the village administrative system, they maintained and even strengthened certain traditional elements such as communal ownership and communal work. During the civil war, while they acted with severity and enforced discipline, they also worked together with the people, while maintaining a modest demeanor.57 They offered a movement and ideology that could provide connection, comprehension, and even inspiration, and they propagated it through an extensive program of political education. Like other totalitarian systems, they used songs to unite and energize people. They used myths and traditions to gain support, but once victorious, they vanquished the king and the vestiges of the old culture.