Cambodian genocide

• 1. Introduction

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  The Cambodian genocide left behind places like Security Prison 21, where about 20,000 people were held and only seven adults came out alive. It was one of 196 prisons run by the Khmer Rouge, the communist movement led by Pol Pot. Prisoners who did not survive were taken to sites known as the Killing Fields, where they were executed, often with pickaxes to save bullets, and buried in mass graves.

  From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge persecuted and killed Cambodian citizens on a vast scale. Victims were singled out by class, politics, ethnicity and faith, yet the killers and the killed were largely members of the same ethnic group.

  Behind those years lie questions that scholars and courts still argue over. How did a rural insurgency come to rule a country, and who armed it, trained it and praised it? What picture of a perfect society drove its leaders to such extremes? Whom did the regime hunt, and how did they die? Do historians agree that the word genocide fits? And why did trials of the surviving leaders begin only decades after the regime fell?

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• 2. Road to Power

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  In 1968 the Khmer Rouge officially launched an insurgency across all of Cambodia. North Vietnam had not been told of the decision in advance. Its forces nevertheless gave the rebels shelter and weapons, which made the insurgency hard for the Cambodian army to counter. King Norodom Sihanouk did very little to stop it for two years, and the movement grew until it openly called itself the Communist Party of Kampuchea.

  In 1970 Premier Lon Nol deposed Sihanouk with the backing of the National Assembly and set up the pro-American Khmer Republic. Sihanouk was in exile in Beijing. On the advice of the Chinese Communist Party, he allied himself with the Khmer Rouge and became the nominal head of a Khmer Rouge-dominated government-in-exile, known by its French acronym GRUNK.

  On the 29th of March 1970, North Vietnam launched an offensive against the Cambodian army. Soviet archives show that it came at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge, after negotiations with Nuon Chea. North Vietnamese troops came within 15 miles of Phnom Penh before being pushed back. By June they had swept government forces from the entire northeastern third of the country, then handed the new territory to local insurgents.

  Sihanouk's visits to the rebels in the field changed the scale of the movement. Its ranks swelled from 6,000 to 50,000 fighters. Many of the new recruits were apolitical peasants who fought in support of the king and understood little about communism.

  Operation Menu, an American bombing campaign, began on the 18th of March 1969, and a far larger campaign against the Khmer Rouge ran from 1970 to 1973. Estimates of the deaths it caused range from 30,000 to 500,000, and they are hard to separate from the wider civil war. Ben Kiernan attributes 50,000 to 150,000 deaths to the bombing. Marek Sliwinski puts it at 17% of civil war deaths, because the raids fell on thinly populated border areas.

  Historians disagree about how much the bombing fed the Khmer Rouge. Ben Kiernan argues that the group "would not have won power without U.S. economic and military destabilization of Cambodia." He adds that it used the devastation as recruitment propaganda. David Chandler writes that the bombing broke the Communist encirclement of Phnom Penh, as the Americans wanted, but also sped the collapse of rural society. Craig Etcheson agrees that it helped recruitment but disputes that it was a primary cause of the Khmer Rouge victory.

  The civil war's own death toll is contested too. Sihanouk used a figure of 600,000, and Elizabeth Becker reported more than a million, but other researchers could not corroborate such numbers. Patrick Heuveline places the toll at around 300,000 or less. By 1975, with American support gone, Lon Nol's government was running out of ammunition. On the 17th of April 1975, the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh and the civil war ended.

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• 3. Foreign Backers

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  From November 1965 to February 1966, Chinese Communist Party officials including Chen Boda and Zhang Chunqiao trained Pol Pot on the Chinese revolution, class conflict and the Communist International. He also met Deng Xiaoping and Peng Zhen. Of everything he heard, he was most impressed by Kang Sheng's lecture on how to carry out a political purge.

  In 1970 Pol Pot happened to be visiting Beijing when Lon Nol overthrew Sihanouk. On the party's advice, the Khmer Rouge changed its position and created the National United Front of Kampuchea to support the deposed king. In that year alone, the Chinese reportedly gave the Front 400 tons of military aid. In April 1974, Sihanouk, Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan met Mao Zedong in Beijing. Mao backed many Khmer Rouge policies but did not want Sihanouk sidelined after victory.

  In June 1975, Pol Pot and other Khmer Rouge officials sat down with Mao in Beijing. Mao lectured them on his Theory of Continuing Revolution under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. He recommended two articles by Yao Wenyuan and sent Pol Pot more than 30 books by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Mao told his guests, "China is not qualified to criticize you." Pol Pot answered, "We will follow your words in the future."

  One voice in Beijing struck a different note. In August 1975, Premier Zhou Enlai warned Sihanouk, Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary against radical movement toward communism, pointing to the mistakes of China's Great Leap Forward. Sihanouk later recalled that Khieu Samphan and Ieng Thirith responded only with "an incredulous and superior smile."

  During the genocide, China was the regime's largest military and economic supporter. At least 90% of its foreign aid came from China. In 1975 alone, China gave US$1 billion in interest-free economic and military aid, described as the biggest aid China had ever given to any one country. It also supplied more than 15,000 military advisers. Internal crises in 1976 then limited Beijing's influence over Khmer Rouge policy.

  Mao died in September 1976, and China entered a two-year transition that ended with Deng Xiaoping as paramount leader in December 1978. In July 1977, Pol Pot visited China, where CCP chairman Hua Guofeng welcomed him and the People's Daily called him the "Comrade from Cambodia." He toured the farming model of Dazhai. Its leader, Vice Premier Chen Yonggui, visited Cambodia that December. In 1978, Defense Minister Son Sen won Chinese approval for military aid.

  When Vietnamese forces toppled the regime in January 1979, China condemned the invasion and kept supporting the Khmer Rouge. Early in 1979, China invaded Vietnam in retaliation. Deng told President Jimmy Carter about the attack beforehand, during a visit just after the two countries established formal relations on the 1st of January 1979. Carter tried and failed to talk him out of it. A conversation with Singapore's prime minister Lee Kuan Yew persuaded Deng to limit the scale and length of the war.

  The Khmer Rouge kept Cambodia's seat at the United Nations until 1982. A Khmer Rouge-dominated coalition, the CGDK, then held it until 1993, long after the Cold War ended, thanks to backing from China, Thailand, other Southeast Asian states, the United States and some Western countries. China trained Khmer Rouge soldiers on its own soil from 1979 to at least 1986, kept advisers with the troops as late as 1990, and supplied at least $1 billion in military aid during the 1980s. There are allegations of American support aimed at weakening Vietnam. Britain's Special Air Service trained non-Khmer Rouge CGDK soldiers in Thailand from 1985 to 1989. After the 1991 Paris Peace Accords, Thailand still let the group trade and cross its border, though it denied passing on direct military support.

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• 4. Ideology of Purity

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  Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of Pol Pot's favorite authors, according to the historian David Chandler. Stalin's writings were a crucial formative influence on him, and Mao's booklet On New Democracy was especially important. In the mid-1960s he bent Marxism-Leninism to fit Cambodia. He wanted to return the country to a mythical past of a mighty Khmer Empire, root out corrupting influences such as foreign aid and Western culture, and restore a farming society.

  Cambodia's rural northeast shaped his dream of an agrarian utopia. There he developed an affinity for the self-sufficiency of the area's isolated tribes. Trying to apply the lessons of small rural communes to an entire society was a key factor in the genocide. One Khmer Rouge leader said the killings were meant for the "purification of the populace."

  After seizing power in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge set out to build a self-sufficient agrarian socialist republic, free of foreign influence. It emptied the cities and marched Cambodians to labor camps in the countryside. There, mass executions, forced labor, physical abuse, torture, malnutrition and disease were rampant. In 1976 the regime renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea.

  The Khmer Rouge forced virtually the entire population into mobile work teams. Michael Hunt called it "an experiment in social mobilization unmatched in twentieth-century revolutions." The regime relied on forced labor, starvation, forced resettlement, land collectivization and state terror. Its economic plan was named the Maha Lout Ploh, a direct allusion to China's Great Leap Forward, which caused tens of millions of deaths in the Great Chinese Famine.

  Kenneth Quinn was stationed on the South Vietnamese border for nine months between 1973 and 1974 as a US State Department Foreign Service officer. He interviewed countless Cambodian refugees who had escaped the Khmer Rouge. He then wrote a 40-page report that circulated through the American government, and he is widely acknowledged as the first person to report on the regime's genocidal policies. The report compared the Khmer Rouge to the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

  Quinn later offered his own explanation. A small group of alienated intellectuals, enraged by what they saw as a corrupt society, wanted a pure socialist order as fast as possible. They recruited very young, poor and envious cadres, taught them brutal methods learned from Stalinist mentors, and used them to destroy Khmer cultural foundations.

  Ben Kiernan compares the Cambodian genocide with the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. He argues that each was unique but shared common features, with racism central to all three regimes. Each targeted religious minorities, tried to expand into a supposed historic heartland, and idealized its ethnic peasantry as the true national class. In Cambodia, that ideal left no place for anyone outside the peasant mold.

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• 5. Enemies of the Revolution

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  Wearing glasses or speaking several languages could be enough to get a Cambodian killed. The regime feared that anyone who seemed intellectual might rebel. It arrested and executed people suspected of ties to the former government or to foreign governments, along with professionals, intellectuals, Buddhist monks and ethnic minorities. Purges swept through the old military and political leadership, and through business leaders, journalists, students, doctors and lawyers.

  Because the perpetrators and victims were largely of the same ethnic group, the term autogenocide was coined. Samuel Totten reports that 25% of the urban Khmer population, or 500,000 people, died under the Khmer Rouge. So did 16% of the rural Khmer population, or 825,000 people. The British sociologist Martin Shaw called it "the purest genocide of the Cold War era."

  Minorities faced a separate assault. By decree, the regime banned the existence of more than 20 minority groups, which made up 15% of the population. It forcibly relocated these groups and banned their languages. Ethnic Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese and Cham, and Cambodian Christians, were all persecuted.

  Officially, the Khmer Rouge blamed the Cham and the Vietnamese for the country's ills. It first ordered ethnic Vietnamese to leave, then massacred many of them as they were being deported. The remaining 20,000 were prevented from fleeing, and much of that group was also executed. Radio Phnom Penh called on Cambodians to "exterminate the 50 million Vietnamese." Cross-border raids killed an estimated 30,000 Vietnamese civilians. In April 1978, at Ba Chuc, the Khmer Rouge killed 3,157 villagers. That massacre drew an urgent Vietnamese response and set off the Cambodian-Vietnamese War, which ended the regime.

  In 1975 Cambodia had 425,000 ethnic Chinese, but by the end of 1979 only about 200,000 remained. Some 170,000 fled to Vietnam, and others were repatriated. The Chinese were mostly city dwellers, which made them easy targets of the evacuation to farms. They were stereotyped as traders and moneylenders tied to capitalism, and the regime killed them on the justification that they had exploited Cambodians. One description calls their fate the worst disaster ever to befall an ethnic Chinese community in Southeast Asia. The government in Beijing did not protest, even as it condemned Vietnam's mistreatment of ethnic Chinese there.

  Under Pol Pot, an ardent Marxist atheist, Democratic Kampuchea was officially an atheist state. Catherine Wessinger writes that only communist Albania and North Korea matched its persecution of religion. All faiths were banned, and it is estimated that up to 50,000 Buddhist monks were massacred.

  The regime also turned on its own. In 1978, Pol Pot sent units from the Southwest Zone into the Eastern Military Zone to wipe out supposed hidden traitors contaminated by the Vietnamese. So Phim committed suicide, and his deputy Heng Samrin defected to Vietnam. The massacres in the Eastern Zone were the most serious of the entire regime.

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• 6. The Cham

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  In 1977, at a Khmer Rouge meeting in Sector 41 of Kampong Cham province, officials announced a plan to "smash enemies of the revolution." The plan declared that the enemies were many, but "our biggest enemy are Cham," and called for destroying all the Cham people before 1980. Pol Pot sent more telegrams than usual to local governments in 1978 and 1979, hastily demanding that the Cham be eradicated. Ben Kiernan calls it the fiercest extermination campaign of the regime. Cham are Cambodia's mostly Muslim minority, and Islam was branded alien to the new communist order.

  The Cham had once been close to the movement. A Cham elder named Sos Man joined the Indochina Communist Party in the 1950s and rose to the rank of major. In 1970 he returned to the Eastern Zone, joined the Communist Party of Kampuchea, and co-founded the Eastern Zone Islamic Movement with his son Mat Ly. The Khmer Rouge leadership tolerated that movement between 1970 and 1975.

  By 1972 the restrictions had begun, first in the Southwest. Cham women had to keep their hair short, men could not wear the sarong, and the daily prayers were forbidden. The Cham were renamed Islamic Khmers to cut them off from their heritage. They were dispersed from their villages to work as peasants, so that no Cham community could re-form.

  Resistance followed. In October 1973, Cham in the Eastern Zone beat the drums that call the faithful to prayer, and the regime answered with blanket arrests of leaders and religious teachers. In February 1974, Cham fishermen in Region 31 protested a rule forcing them to sell their catch cheaply to a cooperative. Soldiers fired on them, killing and wounding more than 100. A rebellion broke out in Region 21 in December 1974 and was forcefully put down.

  Not every Cham account matches this picture. Some local accounts deny any oppression before 1975 and describe the Khmer Rouge as heroes who brought food and supported the peasantry. Some Cham even served as soldiers. This matters legally. The tribunal's jurisdiction covers only the period from the 17th of April 1975 to the 6th of January 1979, so earlier abuses were not prosecuted.

  After Pol Pot consolidated power at the end of 1975, persecution turned harsher and hit all Cham. In June or July 1975, authorities in Region 21 tried to seize every Qur'an and impose short haircuts on Cham women. A mass demonstration followed, and soldiers shot at the crowd. Cham refugees in Malaysia reported that thirteen leading figures had been killed in June 1975, some for leading prayers instead of attending a party meeting. By mid-1976, minorities could pledge loyalty only to the Khmer nationality and religion. Speaking Cham was forbidden, communal meals were compulsory, and Muslims were forced to raise and eat pigs.

  According to Cham sources, 132 mosques were destroyed, and Cham children were taken from their parents to be raised as Khmers. Whole villages were exterminated. A Khmer Rouge order dated 1979 declared that the Cham nation no longer existed on Kampuchean soil, and that its nationality, language, customs and beliefs must be abolished immediately. Samuel Totten and Paul Bartrop estimate that the overthrow of the regime in 1979 alone prevented the complete destruction of the Cham.

  Kiernan traces the hatred partly to colonial myths. French scholars proposed that the real Cham were extinct and labeled the survivors Malays. After independence they were called Islamic Khmers, an equally inaccurate label. Kiernan writes that the Cham suffered from two myths, one exaggerating the glory of their empire and the other exaggerating their plight. The Cham have survived. Michael Vickery believes about 185,000 lived in Cambodia in the mid-1980s. But only 20 of the 113 most prominent Cham clergy survived the regime.

  Whether the Cham deaths amount to genocide is the center of a scholarly dispute. Michael Vickery called many killings "largely the result of the spontaneous excesses of a vengeful, undisciplined peasant army," and put Cham victims at about 20,000, a figure Kiernan's research has since shown to be wrong. David Chandler argues that minorities were killed as enemies of the regime, not for their ethnicity. Stephen Heder likewise denied that racism drove the atrocities. Kiernan disagrees. Documents published by the Documentation Center of Cambodia show a centralized, bureaucratic killing effort, though with instances of indiscipline and spontaneity.

  Gregory Stanton concluded that the regime's mass killing and starvation were genocide under both the Genocide Convention and Raphael Lemkin's broader definition. His reasoning was that the regime intentionally destroyed a significant part of two ethnic groups, the Vietnamese and the Cham. Stanton would spend years trying to bring that argument before a court.

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• 7. Prisons and Children

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  Pol Pot summed up the reasoning for jailing whole families in a saying: "if you want to kill the grass, you also have to kill the roots." Women and children landed in prison beside their husbands because the regime feared revenge from relatives. People were jailed on suspicion alone, or because another prisoner named them under torture. Guards answered questions about why a person was there with one line: Angkar, the Communist Party of Kampuchea, never makes mistakes.

  The survivor Bou Meng described the torture in a book written with Huy Vannak. Prisoners were so desperate that they tried to take their own lives, even with spoons, so their hands were kept tied behind their backs. When a prisoner could give no further information, he was blindfolded and sent to the Killing Fields. There, killers worked at night with scythes, nails and hammers, while loudspeakers playing Democratic Kampuchea's propaganda music and generator noise covered the screams.

  Inside S-21, babies and children were taken from their mothers and relatives and sent to the Killing Fields, where they were killed at a site called the Chankiri Tree. Similar treatment is believed to have occurred in other prisons across the country. A few Westerners were also held, including the British teacher John Dawson Dewhirst, captured by the Khmer Rouge while he was on a yacht. A guard named Cheam Soeu said one Westerner was burned alive, but Kang Kek Iew, known as Duch, denied it. He said only that Pol Pot ordered the bodies burned after death.

  The Medical Faculty library in Phnom Penh was set on fire, and the regime killed or sent to farm work the doctors who had trained there. In their place it employed teenage medics with little or no training. Western medicine was forbidden as a capitalist invention, and Cambodia had to be self-sufficient, so these teenagers practiced on patients without proper anesthetics. A medic who worked inside S-21 said a 17-year-old girl's throat was slit and her abdomen pierced, over and over, before she was put in water overnight.

  At a hospital in Kampong Cham province, child medics cut out and rejoined the intestines of a living patient who had not consented, to study healing. The patient died after three days. At the same hospital, other regime-trained "physicians" opened the chest of a living person just to watch the heart beat, and the patient died at once. The regime also tested drugs, for instance by injecting coconut juice into living people, which is often lethal. A witness at the tribunal said he saw staff in Tbong Khmum province doing this at night to the wives of arrested cadres.

  Children were used as instruments of the terror, too. Thousands of conscripted children in their early teens were desensitized and taught to follow any order without hesitation, then made to commit mass murder and other atrocities. Many had fled the Khmer Rouge with no way to feed themselves and believed that joining the armed forces would let them survive. Local commanders frequently denied them any pay. They served mostly in unpaid support roles, such as carrying ammunition, and also as combatants. The Khmer Rouge kept using children extensively until at least 1998.

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• 8. Counting and Justice

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  Ben Kiernan estimates that between 1.671 million and 1.871 million Cambodians died because of Khmer Rouge policy, or 21% to 24% of the 1975 population. Marek Sliwinski calculated slightly fewer than 2 million unnatural deaths out of a population of 7.8 million. His figures show that 33.5% of Cambodian men died, compared with 15.7% of women. A 2001 academic source says the most widely accepted range for excess deaths is 1.5 million to 2 million, though estimates as low as 1 million and as high as 3 million have been cited.

  The share killed by execution is disputed. Conventional estimates run from 500,000 to 1 million. As of 2009, the Documentation Center of Cambodia had mapped 23,745 mass graves holding approximately 1.3 million suspected execution victims, suggesting executions may account for up to 60% of deaths. Craig Etcheson defended that figure as plausible, since the center's methods were more likely to undercount bodies than overcount them. Patrick Heuveline's central estimate is 2.52 million excess deaths from 1970 to 1979, with 1.4 million directly caused by violence. The successor government's figure of 3.3 million is considered an exaggeration, partly because it double-counted victims found in graves.

  Men made up 81% of all violent deaths in the period, and the killing of roughly 50-70% of working-age men shifted norms about the division of labor between the sexes. It correlates with present-day gains for women in the economy and in local elected office.

  On the 15th of July 1979, the Vietnamese-installed government of Cambodia passed a decree allowing the trial of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary for genocide. They were given an American defense lawyer, Hope Stevens, and were tried in absentia and convicted. The war continued as an insurgency against the Vietnamese occupation until 1989. When the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements were signed, the major powers agreed to avoid the word genocide, to bring the Khmer Rouge into the deal. Nearly every major Cambodian leader of 1991 had once allied with Pol Pot, so few wanted a trial. The United States avoided calling the atrocities genocide until 1989, saying it was counterproductive to peace, and approved a trial of Pol Pot only in 1997. There was speculation that a trial might also examine the American bombing.

  Gregory Stanton founded the Cambodian Genocide Project in 1982, after directing the Church World Service and CARE relief program in Phnom Penh in 1980. He wanted the Khmer Rouge, which still held Cambodia's UN seat, charged before the International Court of Justice. Australia's Foreign Minister Bill Hayden spoke in favor of bringing the case, but the US State Department urged the Australian prime minister to overrule him. Other countries that showed interest were quickly asked not to file. Stanton likened the Khmer Rouge-led resistance coalition to an alliance between a collie, a poodle and a wolf.

  Stanton, Kiernan, Sally Benson and Craig Etcheson then co-founded the Campaign to Oppose the Return of the Khmer Rouge. They drafted the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act, introduced by Senator Charles Robb, which set aside $800,000 and was signed by President Clinton in 1994. Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program won the contract to document the crimes, and with Youk Chang it founded the Documentation Center of Cambodia. Helen Jarvis discovered thousands of pages of detailed Khmer Rouge records of their own crimes.

  In 1997, Cambodia's co-prime ministers Norodom Ranariddh and Hun Sen wrote to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asking for help in setting up a tribunal. Cambodia's National Assembly passed legislation in January 2001, and an agreement with the United Nations was signed on the 6th of June 2003. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia was established in 2006. Its rules gave victims active participation, a first for an international tribunal. More than 350,000 Cambodians attended the trials in person, and in polls over two thirds supported the court.

  Pol Pot, Brother Number One, died before trials began. Duch, who ran the Tuol Sleng prison, admitted guilt to the journalists Nic Dunlop and Nate Thayer in 1999. At his trial in February and March 2009 he accepted responsibility. On the 26th of July 2010 he was found guilty and sentenced to 35 years. On the 3rd of February 2012 that sentence was replaced with life imprisonment, and he died of lung disease in September 2020.

  Nuon Chea, Brother Number Two, was arrested on the 19th of September 2007. He denied giving any order to mistreat or kill, but was convicted in 2014 and sentenced to life, and he later apologized to the victims. Ieng Sary, arrested on the 12th of November 2007 in an opulent Phnom Penh villa, died of heart failure in 2013 while his trial was under way. His wife Ieng Thirith was found unfit to stand trial on the 17th of November 2011. Khieu Samphan was arrested on the 19th of November 2007 and sentenced to life in 2014.

  On the 28th of March 2019, the court found Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan guilty of genocide against the Vietnamese, along with crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. Nuon Chea was also convicted of genocide against the Cham, under the doctrine of superior responsibility. Cambodia now marks the 20th of May each year as a National Day of Remembrance, the date the Khmer Rouge campaign against private citizens began.

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