Cambodia, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge
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Ending War Crimes, Chasing the War Criminals 95 10 The Killing Fields – Cambodia, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge In the 20th century two massacres of hundreds of thousands people compete for sec- ond place after Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, Poles, homosexuals and gypsies. One is Cambodia and the other is Rwanda. But Cambodia, where the deaths were between a million and a half and two million and the executions around 500,000, carried out by Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, probably wins this ugly contest. “Khmer Rouge” was the name the Cambodian king, Norodom Sihanouk, gave to his communist opponents in the 1960s. Their official name was the Com- munist Party of Democratic Kampuchea (CPK) which took control of Cambodia in April 1975. They ruled until 1979 when they were overthrown by their neighbour, Vietnam. A week after they took power they forced as many as two million people living in the capital Phnom Penh to leave the city and work in the countryside. Thousands died during the evacuation. It was carried out in a hurried, ruthless and merciless way, forcing the inhabitants to leave behind all their possessions. Even hospital patients were forced to leave their beds and join the exodus. Chil- dren got separated from their parents, many old and sick died on the road and pregnant women gave birth with no professional assistance. The vast majority of doctors and teachers were killed. No wonder that this pogrom became known as “The Killing Fields”. (A very good feature film was made of this.) The Khmer Rouge believed this was a levelling process that would turn the country into a rural, classless society. They abolished money, free markets, normal schooling, foreign clothing styles, religious practices and traditional cul- ture. Public schools, Buddhist pagodas, mosques, churches, universities, shops and government buildings were shut or turned into prisons, stables, re-educa- tion camps and granaries. There was no public or private transportation, no private property and no non-revolutionary entertainment. People had to wear black costumes, work more than 12 hours a day and be married in mass ceremo- nies with partners chosen by the party. Showing affection to family members was forbidden. Intellectuals – often singled out because they wore glasses – were executed. If more than three people gathered together to have a conversation they could be accused of being enemies and arrested, even executed. 96 Jonathan Power The Khmer Rouge leadership kept itself in the shadows and very few knew the names of its leaders. It only came to an end when in 1977 clashes broke out on the border be- tween Cambodia and Vietnam. In December 1978, Vietnamese troops and the forces of the United Front for the National Salvation of Kampuchea fought their way into Phnom Penh, which they captured in early January 1979. The Khmer Rouge then fled westward and re-established their forces in Thai territory, posing as refugees. Relief agencies, including UNICEF, were taken in and fed them, enabling them to fight another day. The US, still reeling from its defeat in the hands of North Vietnam, acted on the old adage “My enemy’s enemy is my friend”. It persuaded the UN to give the Khmer Rouge Cambodia’s seat in the General Assembly. From 1979 to 1990 it recognised it as the only legitimate representative of Cambodia. Every Western European country voted the same way as the US with the exception of Sweden. The Soviet bloc voted against. (There are cases of a country going unrecognised – as with the US refusing to give diplomatic recognition to Angola in the 1980s.) Even after that terrible farce was brought to a close, the Khmer Rouge con- tinued to exist until 1999 by which time its leaders had either died, been arrested by the Vietnamese-backed government or defected to it – like Hun Sen, now the prime minister. At the same time as the US and Europe were supporting the Khmer Rouge regime’s seat in the UN, many left-wing intellectuals and activists in the West were also giving them support. They saw them as a clean communist broom sweeping out the old order. *** The story of Cambodia’s travails did not begin with the Khmer Rouge. It began in 1970 when a pro-American junta headed by General Lon Nol deposed King Siha- nouk, a neutralist who had succeeded in keeping his country out of the Vietnam War by making concessions to both sides. He allowed the Americans to secretly bomb the North Vietnamese who made use of sanctuaries in Cambodia. Lon Nol himself was later overthrown by the Khmer Rouge. With Sihanouk deposed, Lon Nol threw his weight behind the US. Cambo- dia became a pawn in the Cold War with the US at first supporting Lon Nol and later, along with China, supporting the Khmer Rouge. The Soviet Union contin- ued to support the North Vietnamese. Without this US support, argues Sydney Schanberg who was the New York Times’ correspondent in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge which was no serious threat in 1970, “being a motley collection of ineffec- tual guerrilla bands, totalling at the most 3,000, could never have grown into a murderous force of 70,000”. The US bombed Khmer Rouge and Viet Cong targets in the countryside on a daily basis. Since most of the raids were by giant, eight engined B-52s, each carrying about 25 tons of bombs and thus laying down huge carpets of destruc-.