khmer rouge

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khmer rouge (dict)

The Khmer Rouge (Khmer: Khmaey Krahom French: Khmers Rouges) (Also known as: Communist Party of Kampuchea, CPK, Khmer Communist party, National Army of Democratic Kampuchea, PDK and by the official names Communist Party of Cambodia then later Party of Democratic Kampuchea) were a Communist organization which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The Khmer Rouge is generally remembered for its rule in which an estimated 1.7 million people died. In terms of the number of people killed in relation to the total population, it was one of the most violent regimes of the 20th century. None of the Khmer Rouge leaders have been tried since their rule ended.

Establishment

The Indochinese Communist Party was founded in 1931, and a separate Cambodian Communist Party was founded in 1951, although later the Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, insisted that the party was founded in 1960. In its early years the party remained a subordinate to the Communist Party of Vietnam. From the mid 1960s the Cambodian Communists conducted a low-level insurgency along the Vietnamese border, mainly in support of the Vietnamese Communists in their war with the United States. In the 1970s the Party became known as as the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and in the 1980s and 1990s as the Party of Democratic Kampuchea, but it became commonly known by the French name Khmer Rouge. Khmer Rouge was originally a name given by Norodom Sihanouk in the 1950s to describe this wing of Cambodian politics. The Standing Committee of the Khmer Rouge's Central Committee ("Party Center") during its period of power consisted of:

Pol Pot (Saloth Sar) "Brother number 1" the effective leader of the movement, General secretary since February 1963 (dead)
Nuon Chea "Brother number 2" Prime Minister (alive)
Ieng Sary "Brother number 3" Deputy Prime Minister (Pol Pot's brother-in-law) (alive)
Khieu Samphan President of the Khmer Rouge (alive)
Ta Mok (Chhit Chhoeun) "Brother number 7" (alive)
Son Sen Defense Minister (dead), also;
Yun Yat (dead), Ke Pauk "Brother number 13" Former secretary of the Nothern zone (dead) and Ieng Thirith (alive).

The leadership of the Khmer Rouge was largely unchanged between the 1960s and the mid-1990s. The Khmer Rouge leaders were mostly from middle-class families and had been educated at French universities. The great majority of Khmer Rouge fighters were from poor peasant families and many were conscripted. The Khmer Rouge was funded with small arms, explosives, military weapons and support from China, and had approximately 8,000 guerillas.

Political ideology

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. The Khmer Rouge were dedicated to establishing Cambodia as a socialist state. They carried out a radical program that included closing schools, hospitals and factories, abolishing banking, finance and currency, outlawing all religions, confiscating all private property and relocating people from urban areas to collective farms where forced labor was widespread. The purpose of this policy was to turn Cambodians into "new people" (Khmer: monou thmey) through agricultural labour. It resulted in massive Cambodian deaths through executions, work exhaustion and starvation. The Khmer Rouge's defenders have justified such actions by claiming that the country was on the verge of mass starvation as a result of U.S. bombing campaigns, and that it was impossible to transport sufficient food to feed an urban population of between 2 and 3 million people. This required evacuating the cities to the countryside so that people could become self-sufficient. In fact the motive for the policy was primarily ideological.

Rise of the Khmer Rouge

On March 18, 1970, Cambodia's neutralist ruler, then Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was deposed while out of the country by a coup d'tat, widely believed to have been organised by the United States, which brought General Lon Nol to power. With American financial support, Lon Nol attempted to fight the Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge insurgency they were supporting. American bombing 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, in exile in Beijing, was also strong in rural areas, and he urged resistance against Lon Nol's regime. By 1973 the Khmer Rouge exercised de facto control over the majority of Cambodian territory, although only a minority of its population. On April 17 1975 the Khmer Rouge armies succeeded in capturing and evacuating Phnom Penh and immediately renaming the country to Democratic Kampuchea. The Khmer Rouge soldiers told residents that they would move only about "two or three kilometers" outside the city and would return in "two or three days." Some witnesses report as being told that the evacuation was because of the threat of an American bombing and that they did not have to lock their houses since the Khmer Rouge would "take care of everything" until they returned. The roads out of the city were full of evacuees. Phnom Penh, then with a population of 2.5 million people, was soon to be emptied. Similar evacuations had occurred at other towns and cities. The promises that people who were forced into the countryside would be allowed to return home were never kept.

The Khmer Rouge in power

From 1975, The Khmer Rouge attempted to turn Cambodia into an absolutely classless society by depopulating cities and forcing the urban population into agricultural communes. The entire population were forced to become farmers in labour camps, without any time for transition of power. During their rule of four years, the Khmer Rouge overworked and starved the population, at the same time executing selected groups (including intellectuals) and killing many others for even minor breaches of rules. During the rule of the Khmer Rouge, Cambodians were expected to produce three tons of rice per hectare; before the Khmer Rouge era the average was one ton per hectare. The Khmer Rouge forced people to work for 12 hours non-stop, without adequate rest or food. The Khmer Rouge did not believe in western medicine but instead favoured traditional peasant medicine; many died as a result. Family relationships were also banned, and family members could be put to death for communicating with each other. Society in Cambodia was strictly equal. The Khmer language has a complex system of usages to define speakers' rank and social status. During the rule of the Khmer Rouge, these usages were abandoned. People were however, encouraged to call each other "friend," or "comrade" (Khmer: "miet"), and to avoid traditional signs of deference such as bowing or folding the hands in salutation. Language was transformed in other ways. The Khmer Rouge invented new terms. People were told they must "forge" (Khmer: "lot dam") a new revolutionary character, that they were the "instruments" (Khmer: "opokar") of the Angkar (Organization, not to be confused with Angkor), and that nostalgia for prerevolutionary times (Khmer: "choeu stek arom", or "memory sickness") could result in their receiving Angkar's "invitation."

Killings and torture

The Khmer Rouge regime arrested and eventually executed anyone suspected of connections with the former government or with foreign governments, professionals, intellectuals as well as ordinary Khmer people who breached their rules. Ethnic Vietnamese, Cambodian Christians, Muslims and the Buddhist monkhood were also targets of persecution. Since China was the Khmer Rouge regime's only diplomatic ally, the Chinese community was not molested, but many Chinese left the country because of the suppression of private business. Examples of the killings and torture by the Khmer Rouge can be seen at S-21 (now Tuol Sleng Museum). Operated by "Duch" (Khang Khek Leu), 200,000 people were executed at this high school turned prison camp. 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 and Khieu Samphan gave a figure of 800,000 and 1 million respectively. An estimate of 1.5 million (from a total population of about 7 million in 1975) seems a reasonable consensus. In 1962, the last census before Cambodia was engulfed by war, the population of the country was 5.7 million. A decade later, in 1972, the population was estimated to 7.1 million. Using Amnesty International figure of 1.4 million deaths, about 20 percent of the population would have died between 1975 and 1978.

Fall of the Khmer Rouge

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. The U.S. and other western governments, along with China, continued to recognise "Democratic Kampuchea" as the government of Cambodia, in order to signal their disapproval of the Vietnamese occupation of the country, which was backed by the Soviet Union. China launched a punitive invasion of northern Vietnam. The U.S. channelled some support to the Khmer Rouge resistance in western Cambodia via surrogates in Thailand, while the Thai military provided them with intelligence. While eastern and central Cambodia were firmly under the control of Vietnam and its Cambodian allies by 1980, the western part of the country continued to be a battlefield through the 1980s, with millions of landmines sown across the countryside. After a decade of inconclusive conflict, 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.

Recovery and Trials

Since 1990 Cambodia has gradually recovered, demographically and economically, from the Khmer Rouge regime, although the psychological scars affect many Cambodian families and emigre communities. Although the current government teaches about Khmer Rouge atrocities in the schools, Cambodia has a very young population and by 2005 three-quarters of Cambodians were too young to remember the Khmer Rouge years. When the Vietnamese defeated the Khmer Rouge, Duch attempted to destroy the documents at Tuol Sleng. However, he left over 100,000 pages of documentation of Tuol Sleng. Another 100,000 pages of documents were left behind at Son Sen's (presumed) residence. In 1997, Cambodia established a Khmer Rouge Trial Task Force to create a legal and judicial structure to try the remaining leaders for war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. As of March 2005, international funding through the Group of Interested States and United Nations logistical support has been promised to support any trials. For many years critics doubted any war criminals would be brought to justice. Some observers attributed the slow progress to the presence of former Khmer Rouge members in the current government, and fears of renewed violence by Khmer Rouge supporters.