I am calling this the Killing Fields because this is the way most Americans know about what happened here. I am not doing a travel blog on this day – I took only two photographs – only of memorials – out of respect for the victims. Rather I want to reflect on what I learned – what this means to us – and what we should all be concerned about for the future.
First: A Simple Version of a Complex Story —After World War II, the French tried to reassert their control over French Indochina and were defeated by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu, negotiating their withdrawal at the Geneva Conference in 1954. This left four independent nations with no stable governance and an Indochinese communist party on the move with 3 branches: Viet Minh, Pathet Lao, and Khmer Rouge.
The Rise of the Khmer Rouge: In Cambodia, the French-endorsed King (Sihanouk) abdicated in favor of his father and formed a socialist party that won elections, creating a father-son King and Prime Minister. With a royalist regime firmly in place, the leftists were driven out of Phnom Penh and retreated to the forests. While the Viet Minh followed the Russian path, the Khmer Rouge followed the Maoist model toward an agrarian utopia – they took up the cause of the farmers and over time strengthened their hold on the rural areas under their leader Pol Pot (an assumed name – short for “political potential”). They preached a message targeting the educated elite as “enemies of the people” and promising to improve life for the peasants.
In the 1960s, the U.S. stepped into the Vietnam civil war on the side of South Vietnam and launched a secret war in Cambodia that included heavy bombing of large parts of the country. Sihanouk tried to play a neutral role – aligning with the North Vietnamese, and allowing the Russians and Chinese to ship supplies to the Viet Cong across Cambodia.
In 1970, one of Sihanouk’s generals, Lon Nol, deposed him while he was on a visit to North Korea. Sihanouk allied with Pol Pot to fight Lon Nol, and built widespread support for the Khmer Rouge in the population.
When the US withdrew from SE Asia after the Paris Accords, the North Vietnamese crossed the 17th parallel and entered Saigon in April 1975. At the same time, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh.
The Pol Pot Regime: At first they were welcomed, but within days it became clear that a tough new Maoist regime had taken over. The hard core of the Khmer Rouge arrived in town and started rounding up the Lon Nol people and the educated elite. The calendar was reset at Year Zero – the beginning of a new era. Phnom Penh was emptied out, as institutions (government offices, monasteries, schools, hospitals) were closed, government officials and professionals were arrested, and the rest of the urban population was sent out to various rural regions and given jobs on the farms. Buddhism, education, health care, money, and other essential institutions were eliminated, schools, hospitals, or other empty buildings were converted to prisons or government use. Even Buddhist monks were sent to work in the fields in forced labor gangs.
The regime set up a system of oppression and cruelty masked by euphemisms and set about eliminating everyone with an education or who resisted the regime. People were taken from their homes and sent to “Re-education Centers” [prisons] for interrogations. Once their re-education was complete, they might be selected to go to a “Training Center” for a new job [the killing fields] where they would be brutally slain and thrown in an open pit. The regime operated 196 prisons and 343 killing fields.
Those who were not killed in the killing fields died of starvation. In the forced labor camps, workers got a bowl of rice porridge (basically starch-thickened water) in the morning and another at night. Workers worked from sunrise to sunset. Families were broken up — men, women, and children were housed separately in the camps.
Interrogations were used to root out anyone with an education for “re-education.” Individuals detained would be asked for detailed information on all family members including distant relatives that could be used to identify anyone with education, a skill, or a talent. If you gave false information you would be tortured until you gave the answers they wanted. If you gave them what they wanted, your reward would be go on to the “Training Center.”
The Vietnamese Invasion: Slowly the population was starving to death. The Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1979 and quickly routed Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, who disappeared into the forests to continue a guerrilla campaign.
When the smoke cleared on 5 years of Pol Pot’s rule, 3 million of Cambodia’s 1975 population of 7 million were dead (half from starvation and half from the killing fields), development was stymied and the economy was gutted — having lost all but 15% of its educated and skilled workforce.
The Paris Accords of 1991 worked out an agreement among all parties that remains in place today. The Vietnamese left, Sihanouk was re-instated as King, with a democratically-elected National Assembly that returns the communist Khmer Rouge (now called the People’s Democratic Party) to power every 5 years in fraudulent elections. The government declared a general amnesty in 1998, and today, some of those serving in government positions are people who had senior positions in the Pol Pot regime. Five people were singled out to be skapegoated for war crimes. Today only one of those cases has resulted in an imprisonment
What does this all mean for us? — Cambodia’s experience with vicious and cruel despotism is a particularly important lesson for us in our current political situation. We think this kind of experience is far away from us, but it is not. It can happen to us and the warning signs are already firmly in place. Look for the parallels:
Tyrants are simple-minded people who find a weak vein in society and cleverly exploit it for their own glory and gain. The time to stop them is before they can build momentum, because once their mechanism is in place, people are not only afraid to take action, but the apparatus is set up to expose them and strike them down if they talk about it. In Cambodia, no one could risk talking to anyone else (especially children and spouses) for fear that they would get hauled in for an interrogation.
The success of a tyrant is built on first targeting a population subgroup as “enemies of the people,” and then inciting the rest of the population to hate them and take action against them. Pol Pot made anyone educated an “enemy of the people.” He created his following among the rural and uneducated poor who resented the power of the elite and the neglect the elite had shown for their plight. In doing this, he also hamstrung any resistance — anyone who came forward with a contrary view or statement of fact would be, by definition, educated and would be arrested. It also helped Pol Pot fill his ranks of followers and soldiers with children, teenagers, and the uneducated who could be easily trained to hate and be vicious and cruel. Young people were chosen as executioners and those executioners who showed any hesitation or remorse were killed.
Revolutions eventually burn themselves out because those who are loyal to the leader start killing each other off as more and more of them fail the increasingly high bar of the Tyrant’s personal loyalty test. But not before they reap a lot of destruction. In Cambodia, huge numbers of party and military leaders were purged and killed. Pol Pot eventually turned on and killed his top leadership and closest associates, many of whom had been classmates of his in school.
The damage that is done to a society is devastating and long-lasting. The Pol Pot regime gutted Cambodia’s skilled workforce and destroyed its economy. Despite the fact that this happened more than 40 years ago, the scars are visible today. Since then, the population has grown from 4 million to 16 million — most of these still quite young. Very few remain who lived through this time, yet a pall remaining from this episode hangs over the economy and the people. Cambodia is underdeveloped relative to its neighbors, and the mood we sense from the population seems more one of resignation to their situation than energy to bring change for a better future. We can only hope that Cambodia’s young people will turn this around.