Khmer Rouge

• 1. Introduction

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  The Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh on the 17th of April 1975, and within hours the city's residents were told to leave. They would be gone, the cadres said, for only two or three days, moved just two or three kilometers because of the threat of American bombing. Nobody needed to lock a door. The ruling body would take care of everything until they returned. They never returned. Those marches into the countryside killed thousands of children, elderly people and the sick before the new society had even begun. Between 1975 and 1979, somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million people died, roughly a quarter of Cambodia's population. The name itself was an accident of language. King Norodom Sihanouk coined the French phrase Khmers rouges, red Khmers, in the 1960s to describe his country's communist dissidents. How did a small circle of students who studied in Paris come to empty a nation's cities? Why did they abolish money, close the schools, and try to grow rice on land worked by people who had never farmed? And why did the men who built the deadliest regime of their era spend two more decades fighting in the forests after they lost power?

• 2. The Paris Circle

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  During the 1950s, Khmer students in Paris ran their own communist movement, almost entirely cut off from the struggling party back home. From their ranks came the men and women who would later command Democratic Kampuchea. Pol Pot, whose original name was Saloth Sar, went to Paris in 1949 to study radio electronics. He failed to obtain a degree. According to the Jesuit priest François Ponchaud, he instead acquired a taste for the classics of French literature and an interest in the writings of Karl Marx. Ieng Sary, a Chinese-Khmer from South Vietnam, attended the elite Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh before studying commerce and politics at Sciences Po. Khieu Samphan and Hou Yuon both earned doctorates from the University of Paris, where Samphan studied economics and politics and Hou Yuon studied economics and law. Most came from landowner or civil servant families. An older sister of Pol Pot had been a concubine at the court of King Monivong. Between 1949 and 1951, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary joined the French Communist Party. In 1951 the two men traveled to East Berlin for a youth festival, a trip later seen as a turning point in their thinking. There they met Khmers fighting alongside the Viet Minh and judged them too subservient to the Vietnamese. They became convinced that only a tightly disciplined party and a readiness for armed struggle could win a revolution. Inside the Khmer Students Association, which counted some two hundred members, they ran a secret body called the Cercle Marxiste, organized into cells of three to six people, most of whom knew nothing of the wider structure. In 1952 Pol Pot, Hou Yuon, Ieng Sary and others sent an open letter to Sihanouk calling him the strangler of infant democracy. The doctoral theses written by Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan would later become cornerstones of state policy.

• 3. Seizing The Apparatus

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  In late September 1960, twenty-one leaders of the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party held a secret congress in a vacant room of the Phnom Penh railroad station. Tou Samouth, who favored cooperation with Sihanouk, was elected general secretary of the party, which renamed itself the Workers' Party of Kampuchea. Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were named to the Political Bureau in the third and fifth positions. The name change carried meaning. By calling itself a workers' party, the Cambodian movement claimed equal status with the Vietnam Workers' Party. On the 20th of July 1962, Tou Samouth was murdered by the Cambodian government. At the party's second congress in February 1963, Pol Pot was chosen to succeed him as general secretary. Samouth's allies Nuon Chea and Keo Meas were removed from the Central Committee and replaced by Son Sen and Vorn Vet. From then on Pol Pot and his Paris comrades controlled the party center, edging out older veterans they considered too pro-Vietnamese. In July 1963 Pol Pot and most of the central committee left the capital to build an insurgent base in Ratanakiri Province. He had narrowly escaped a list of 34 leftists summoned by Sihanouk to join the government and sign statements naming the prince as the only possible leader. Pol Pot and Chou Chet were the only two who got away. From November 1965 to February 1966 Pol Pot received training from senior Chinese Communist Party officials, including Chen Boda and Zhang Chunqiao. He was particularly impressed by a lecture on political purge delivered by Kang Sheng. In September 1966 the party quietly changed its name again, to the Communist Party of Kampuchea, a secret kept even from lower ranking members for years.

• 4. The Road To Power

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  In 1968 the Khmer Rouge was officially formed, and its forces launched a national insurgency across Cambodia. North Vietnam had not been told of the decision, yet its forces provided shelter and weapons once the fighting began. The turning point came in 1970, when Premier Lon Nol deposed Sihanouk with the support of the National Assembly and established the pro-American Khmer Republic. Sihanouk, exiled in Beijing, took the advice of the Chinese Communist Party and allied with the very dissidents he had once named. He became the nominal head of a Khmer Rouge dominated government-in-exile known by its French acronym GRUNK. In 1970 alone the Chinese reportedly gave 400 tons of military aid to the United Front. On the 29th of March 1970, North Vietnamese forces launched an offensive at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge, reaching within 15 miles of Phnom Penh before being pushed back. After winning territory, the North Vietnamese handed it to local insurgents. When Sihanouk showed his support by visiting the rebels in the field, their ranks swelled from 6,000 to 50,000 fighters. Many recruits were apolitical peasants who fought for their king, not for communism, which they barely understood. Despite a massive American bombing campaign, Operation Freedom Deal, the Khmer Rouge by 1973 held de facto control over most of Cambodian territory, though only a minority of its people. Historian Ben Kiernan argues the movement would not have won power without United States destabilization of Cambodia, using the bombing's devastation as recruitment propaganda. By 1975 the Lon Nol government was running out of ammunition, and its collapse was only a matter of time.

• 5. Burning The Old Grass

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  We must burn the old grass so that new grass can grow, one Khmer Rouge activist declared, capturing the regime's aim to break completely with Cambodia's past. The goal was a communist society built through the immediate abolition of money, trade and private property. The new order was to be perfectly egalitarian, achieved by leveling down. Society would be brought to the level of the rural poor and built up from there. Anything inaccessible to the general public was deemed bourgeois and destroyed. Hou Yuon, the movement's leading economic theorist, divided economies into natural and commodity types, and by his calculations rice producers received only 26 percent of the profits. This reasoning fed the regime's hostility toward cities, seen as parasites on the countryside, with even the urban working class treated as privileged. Society was sorted into two classes. The peasant base people would carry the revolution, while the urban new people were to be reeducated or liquidated. On arrival at their assigned villages, evacuees wrote brief autobiographical essays. Their answers about life under the Khmer Republic decided their fate. Military officers and elite professionals were usually sent for reeducation, which in practice meant immediate execution or a labor camp. Cambodians were ordered to produce three tons of rice per hectare, where the average before the regime had been one ton. The lack of farming knowledge among former city dwellers made famine inevitable. Picking wild fruit was treated as private enterprise and punished with death. The leadership called this drive a Super Great Leap Forward, modeled on the Chinese policy that had caused the Great Chinese Famine.

• 6. A Revolution Of Race

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  Ben Kiernan, the historian, has argued that the importance the regime gave to race overshadowed its conceptions of class. The Khmer Rouge combined an idealization of the Khmer Empire, which lasted from 802 to 1431, with an existential fear that the Cambodian state might be erased, as it had been during past Vietnamese and Siamese intervention. Anti-Vietnamese feeling ran deep, sharpened by the spillover of fighters during the war next door. Once in power, the regime explicitly targeted the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Cham minority, and even their partly Khmer children. The same logic reached inside the party, where senior figures of non-Khmer ethnicity were removed from the leadership despite long revolutionary records, and were often killed. Religion fared no better in an officially atheist state. Nearly 25,000 Buddhist monks were estimated to have been killed, though many monasteries and historical monuments survived in fair condition. The repression of Islam, practiced by the Cham, was extensive, and Islamic religious leaders were executed. The Khmer Rouge forced Muslims to eat pork, which they regard as forbidden, and many who refused were killed. According to François Ponchaud, Christians were taken away and killed on the accusation of links to the United States Central Intelligence Agency, and Phnom Penh cathedral was razed. When two former leaders were finally convicted of genocide, it was for the treatment of the Vietnamese and the Cham, whose combined death toll of roughly 100,000 people was about 5 percent of the wider total. The vast majority who died were ethnic Khmer, killed on political rather than ethnic grounds.

• 7. The Machinery Of Fear

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  The Santebal, the regime's security apparatus, arrested, tortured and executed anyone suspected of belonging to its categories of enemies. Those categories were vast. They included people with ties to former governments, professionals and intellectuals, almost everyone with an education or a foreign language, and economic saboteurs. Among the artists executed were the singers Ros Serey Sothea, Pan Ron and Sinn Sisamouth. The Santebal established over 150 prisons, the most notorious being Tuol Sleng, a former high school turned interrogation center for the highest-value prisoners. It was run by the commander Khang Khek Ieu, known as Comrade Duch. According to Ben Kiernan, all but seven of the twenty thousand Tuol Sleng prisoners were executed. Several of its rooms are now lined with thousands of black-and-white photographs of the prisoners. The killing reached the party itself in waves of purges. Hou Yuon was among the first senior leaders to be eliminated, executed in late 1975 or early 1976. Keo Meas, tasked with writing a history of the party, was arrested over a dispute about its founding date, and under torture confessed the date was chosen to undermine the party. As war with Vietnam approached, even bullets grew scarce, and executions were often carried out with hoes, machetes and pickaxes. The regime classified its targets with a chilling vocabulary, warning that nostalgia for the past, a memory sickness, could itself be fatal.

• 8. The Long Retreat

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  Vietnam invaded Cambodia in January 1979 and quickly destroyed most of the regime's forces. The Khmer Rouge fled to Thailand, whose government saw them as a buffer against the Communist Party of Vietnam. There the movement kept fighting against the Vietnamese and the new People's Republic of Kampuchea until the war ended in 1989. The world did not let go of them easily. To counter the Soviet Union and Vietnam, a group of countries including China, the United States and Thailand backed the Khmer Rouge dominated coalition that held Cambodia's United Nations seat until 1993. In that year the monarchy was restored and the state became the Kingdom of Cambodia. A year later thousands of guerrillas surrendered under a government amnesty. In 1996 Ieng Sary, the deputy leader, formed a new party, the Democratic National Union Movement, and was granted amnesty in exchange for his defection and for persuading other fighters to lay down arms. The organization was largely dissolved by the mid-1990s and surrendered completely in 1999. Justice came slowly and incompletely. Ieng Sary was arrested in 2007 and charged with crimes against humanity, but died of heart failure before any verdict. On the 7th of August 2014, the United Nations-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia jailed Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan for life. The Cambodian judge Nil Nonn said there was evidence of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population. In November 2018 the same two men were convicted of genocide against the Vietnamese, with Nuon Chea also found guilty of genocide against the Cham, the only such convictions the regime's leaders ever faced.