Abstract
The conducted research will be narrating about the bloody revolution, in terms of genocide that took place during the years of 1975-1979 in Cambodia, and was carried out by the Khmer Rouge regime in pursuit of the economic stability and self-reliability of the country. Planned as a peaceful revolution, it rapidly turned to be aggressive and bloody as soon as the Khmer Rouge regime gained power and was able to control and manipulate huge masses of people using fear, tortures, and death as their primary methods, which resulted in the extermination of up to two million people (21 to 24% of the overall population of Cambodia at that time period).
What is revolting in this situation is the complete inability of authorities on different levels (Cambodian as well as worldwide justice) to prosecute the responsible ones, thus, leaving them without punishment, and being able to continue ruling the country.
Introduction
Before the events occurred, Cambodia was a great country that covered a big part of Southeast Asia; which had its own Khmer culture that was influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism. Agricultural conditions in this country were better than in countries neighbors before the revolution, as land was equally distributed among most of peasant families, thus most of them had some land in their ownership; a factor that allowed Cambodia to be more successful in agriculture than any other close country.
After several years of peace as an independent country, Cambodia got involved in a Vietnam War that resulted in the secret bombing from the U.S. Air Force in 1969 the main purpose of which was eliminating the Vietnamese communist bases. These bombings led to the anti-Vietnamese Lon Nol government declaring power in Cambodia. Overthrown Prince Sihanouk that went into self-imposed exile began to negotiate a coalition with the communist-backed Khmer Rouge who fought a civil war with the U.S.-backed Lon Nol government.
In 1975 the United States withdrew from Vietnam, and on April 17th of that year Khmer Rouge forces defeated Lon Nol’s forces and stepped into Phnom Penh, finally securing control over Cambodia after many years of struggle. Good thing from the beginning turned out to be a major crime against humanity in this country, as people got subjected to four years of the brutal inhumane regime led by Pol Pot under which an estimated up to two million Cambodians either were murdered or died.
The history of genocide
Five years prior to the Khmer Rouge regime, in 1970, Prince Sihanouk got overthrown by his government, and as a result the newly formed Cambodian government was absolutely opposed to North Vietnam keeping the troops on Cambodian, thus demanding for those troops to be removed. Seeking for supporters to gain back control, Prince Sihanouk found Khmer Rouge and both forged a coalition against the Cambodian government. Receiving support from North Vietnam and the Soviet Union, as well as from China, the Khmer Rouge had successfully gained control over the whole country in just five years.
After the power was gained, the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot initiated the overall transformations by relocating more than two million city people from all urban centers to the rural areas.
The city dwellers were scattered throughout the countryside, kept in rigidly controlled conditions to break down old pre-revolutionary life patterns only for them to fulfill Pol Pot’s dream of an agricultural society with high productivity. In the process of relocating people the inhabitants of the Eastern zone of Cambodia were wearing a blue and white version of the traditional Khmer scarf, while all other citizens were wearing the red and white or yellow and white versions; those who wore blue scarves were shipped to other areas of Cambodia, they were given not enough food, forced to work hard until their death. That was done because of their closeness to only Vietnam. People anyhow associated with the former government were summarily targeted for execution by the thousands. People from upper social, people with foreign contacts class, as well as intellectuals, students, teachers, doctors (basically anyone who showed signs of education) were treated with special contempt or even killed.
Even though North Vietnam was supporting the Khmer Rouge regime that eventually helped it gain power in Cambodia, right after the revolution took place 150,000 Vietnamese people were either expelled, and approximately 10,000 Vietnamese people that failed to flee the country were killed; any other left in Cambodia or people with any links to Vietnam were immediately executed as well. It must be noted that among the victims of the regime were people, who fought loyally in Pol Pot’s army during the revolution.
Perceived as a threat to a unified Khmer culture, ethnic minorities equally became deliberately targeted for execution or massive mistreatment. Such minorities as hill tribes, Chinese, and the Cham Muslims were either killed or forced to abandon their traditional ways of life. Later they could be forced to hard labor that was almost the same with slavery, methods from which people were simply dying of malnutrition, exhaustion and diseases.
According to the plan of relieving Cambodia of any religion meant targeting thousands of Khmer Buddhist monks, as well as priests of other religions. Although Buddhist religion managed to survive the Khmer Rouge period, half of the monks were murdered, and with them an enormous amount of valuable manuscripts and artifacts from history and culture of the country was either destroyed or lost forever. As for the other religions, those did not turn out to be that lucky: only one single Christian priest survived this horrific period. Moreover, during the Khmer Rouge religion, money, and personal possessions got banned, and anyone who tried to hold on to those were immediately punished, usually executed.
Probably the most horrifying part of the Khmer Rouge regime is the brutal methods that were inflicted on the poor people of Cambodia. There are two primary methods of this brutality: the 200 of Killing Fields that are located all over the country and Tuol Sleng (the infamous prison where, out of almost 14,000 prisoners less than a dozen managed to survive. The Killing Fields were the places where the bodies of those, who died of unbelievably hard work conditions (poor feeding and a constant threat of being executed) in the fields and in agricultural communes were buried. People were made work hard to produce huge amounts of rice, being given very little to eat; families were split up on purpose, with children being taught to monitor their parents.
Even though Cambodia had better agricultural conditions than its neighbors, and the land was equally distributed among most of peasant families, the number of people that had a rural debt and eventually became landless was constantly increasing and went from 4% of the farming population in 1950 to 20% in 1970. Thus a new class of rootless emerged alongside a landowning middle class. Therefore the growing gulf between city and countryside has been accepted as the major factor for the Khmer Rouge regime. On the contrary to the countryside, the cities were not predominantly Khmer, including large number of ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese people. Many rural people considered cities to be the seats of arbitrary, even foreign, political and economic power. But this factor alone could not have caused such a bloody regime to take place, and moreover, to turn against the peasantry in such large numbers.
The real roots of the Cambodian genocide must be searched in the Maoist political and economic beliefs of the Khmer Rouge leading figures. The most significant figures of regime studied in Paris in the 1950s and became members of the communist movement, where they managed to synthesize their own political and economic model of the future development of Cambodia.
The Khmer Rouge leadership blamed Cambodia for lacking development of the economy that of the developed countries and saw self-reliance as the key to the independent stable future. For this goal to be achieved, the Khmer Rouge leaders proposed a plan of producing huge quantities of rice for export that could generate enough profits to make Cambodia self-reliant and not dominated by the industrialized countries. Under the influence of the Marxist writings the leaders believed that cities were parasites on the countryside, that only labor value was true value, that cities extracted surplus value from the rural areas. The method that was proposed in order to achieve such a goal was to move huge numbers of peasants who supported social revolution to reduce rents and eliminate usury. Thus, their blind faith in the higher cause combined with a unique communist theory allowed them to sacrifice any principles standing in the way of achieving the end goal. As a result, the leadership came to the conclusion that only a small part of the existing population was necessary to build the new society, the conclusion that turned the idea of a mass movement for the sake of social revolution into the violent revolution.
Another factor that greatly contributed to the establishment of the bloody regime was the quick spread of education in Cambodia in the 1960s, and this is after the education was completely neglected under French colonial rule. What is more surprising is that educated young people, who were often unable to find work after graduating from high school, were then recruited by the Khmer Rouge in the 1960s, were thus drifted into political dissidence.
While these factors contributing to the Khmer Rouge ideological framework might seem fairly primitive, they indeed formed the foundation for the Cambodian genocide.
Questioning the genocide
Before any conclusions on the question of whether the actual genocide took place in Cambodia during those years, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide must be clarified. The Genocide Convention states that: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Taking into account the above information it must be must be establish that genocide did indeed take place during that period of time. Even though the executions in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge were not as systematic, but there are no doubts that there was some semblance of order to the chaos.
Path to accountability
Following the Khmer Rouge regime, there actually were neither no serious nor effective official processes of accountability passed on the legislative level in Cambodia, even though the numerous initiatives were proposed multiple countries as well as Cambodian government itself. The People’s Revolutionary Tribunal of Khmer Rouge leaders that took place in Phnom Penh in August 1979, sentence those guilty of genocide to, but the decision was never recognized on the international level and was never carried out due to the process objections to the trial procedures and the diplomatic isolation of the PRK regime.
Even thought the UN played an important role in the process of peace rebuilding in Cambodia, the issues of justice and reconciliation still did not get addressed in the Paris Peace Agreement of October 1991. The final agreement did not prevent the Khmer Rouge from taking part in the Cambodian elections, nor did result in the office loss by officials of the Khmer Rouge associated with the genocide.
What is even more revolting is that the Khmer Rouge was able to sustain its power in some towns such as Pailin near the Thai border; the Khmer Rouge continued its activities for the next 2 decades until the organization was officially disbanded in 1998 after the death, the defections, and the imprisonment of the Khmer Rouge leadership.
The implementation of the Cambodia Genocide Justice Act in the US in April 1994 and the Cambodian government’s act to outlaw the Khmer Rouge in July 1994 became the start points on the long path towards accountability, which turned out to be a continuous story of frustration spread by the international community and genocide survivors, which is finally about to come to an end as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia decides to start prosecutions. The only remaining question at this point is whether the ECCC will be able to assure justice for genocide in Cambodia and end the culture of impunity in the process of the mass atrocities committed under the Khmer Rouge regime that has been occupying the mind of Cambodian society for at least the past 30 years.
Conclusion
Thirty years after the events took place, the legacy that is left can fully reveal the horrifying human capacity for torturing and killing fellow citizens, without a guilty conscience, when the right conditions are present.
The Khmer Rouge regime left after itself the legacy of nearly 20,000 mass graves and almost 200 secret prison torture centers across the whole Cambodia, with an estimated number of over 700,000 people to have been murdered during those four years of the horrific genocide, and with approximately one million people that died of hunger and diseases caused by inhuman hard working conditions on the rise fields. The violence with which the genocide was committed in Cambodia is particularly disturbing due to the methods used to murder people: 53% were killed by the pick or hammer crushing their skulls, 29% got shot, 6% were hanged or strangled, 5% got their throats slit, 5% got beaten to death, and 2% were executed in public by as to set an example for others.9
Works Cited
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