The Kampuchean Graveyard

“The Khmer Rouge doesn’t eat rice,” said Tuon Chay, “they eat ideology.” He knew what he was talking about. As a commander in General Lon Nol’s army he fought a losing civil war against the Khmer Rouge from 1970 to 1975; then he watched the Khmer Rouge rule Kampuchea with a bloody hand from 1975 to 1979; then as a guerrilla commander he fought in a coalition with the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese occupiers of Cambodia during the 1980s.

The ideological fare consumed by the Khmer Rouge was inspired by the recipe books of revolutionaries such as Rousseau, Robespierre, Marx, Lenin and Stalin, and dished up by contemporary revolutionaries of Peking and Hanoi, but first and foremost by revolutionaries of Paris.

In 1949 a mild-mannered Cambodian student called Saloth Sar arrived in Paris to further his studies. By 1951 he had joined the French Communist Party, as was the fashion of the time, and was meeting regularly with a circle of young Cambodian communists, who became the nucleus of the Khmer Rouge. In 1960 the Khmer Rouge founded the Communist Party of Kampuchea. By 1975 the communists controlled the whole country, and Saloth Sar was “Brother Number One”.

In 1976 the country was renamed Democratic Kampuchea and Saloth Sar, better known by then as Pol Pot, decided to apply revolutionary theory more thoroughly than any of his predecessors. He was, he boasted, going to build “socialism without a model”:

We do not wish to copy anyone; we shall use the experience gained in the course of the liberation struggle. There are no schools, faculties or universities in the traditional sense, although they did exist in our country prior to liberation, because we wish to do away with all vestiges of the past. There is no money, no commerce, as the state takes care of provisioning all its citizens … We evacuated the cities; we resettled the inhabitants in the rural areas where the living conditions could be provided for this segment of the population of new Cambodia.[i]

During the three years, eight months and twenty days of Pol Pot’s model society its population declined from nearly eight to barely six million people. The Vietnamese who invaded and colonised Cambodia in 1979 estimated that Pol Pot’s regime was directly responsible for the deaths of over 3 million between 1975 and 1979; but their calculations are suspect. Historian Ben Kiernan belatedly estimated the death toll to be about 1.7 million, including over half a million by violent means, the rest by starvation or related ailments. Demographic analyst Marek Sliwinski calculated that about 2 million died, at least half of them by violent means; and most commentators accept this rounded estimate. Historian William Rubinstein calculated that Pol Pot was directly responsible for “the highest percentage of mass killing ever inflicted by a government against its own people in modern times, and probably in history”. The tasks of uncovering killing fields, tracing perpetrators, identifying victims, finding survivors and calculating the death toll progresses slowly.[ii]

Up until 1978 Western Marxists held high hopes for the Kampuchean experiment, as it applied their cherished theories and expressed their hatred of capitalism, so they were loath to let this last purest communist hope die. Intellectuals such as Ben Kiernan in Australia, Noam Chomsky in America, Samir Amin in France, and Malcolm Caldwell in England, assumed the role of Pol Pot’s “useful idiots”, to use the ascription attributed to Lenin.

Ben Kiernan had two sources of information about the state of affairs inside Democratic Kampuchea: the reports of more than 23,000 Cambodians who had escaped to Thailand by 1978, and Khmer Rouge radio broadcasts. He decided that since “neither of them is necessarily reliable” he would give them equal consideration.

The refugees reported mass starvation, the Khmer Rouge reported that peasant control over the land and irrigation projects had doubled or tripled production of rice in most areas. So Kiernan concluded that great progress had been made, but that in the north-west, from where the refugees escaped to Thailand, local factors had caused some starvation.

The refugees reported mass brutality; the Khmer Rouge reported that postwar reprisals lasted only a few weeks, then cadres were taught to “love, respect and serve the people and the workers” and never to “touch the people’s possessions, not even a tiny chilli that belongs to the people, or a cup of rice”. So Kiernan concluded that while the Khmer Rouge strove to protect and nurture the people, difficulties in exercising control over every province had allowed local tensions to escalate into isolated incidents of postwar brutality “despite orders to the contrary from Phnom Penh”; and that:

Those cadres who ensure peasant co-operation with their policies through force, rather than through persuasion or promised benefits, are in this sense “fish out of water”, as well as fish swimming against the ebb-tide of Cambodian history, … although this relationship between “fish” and “water” might be expected to change as central control is established and the benefits of the large scale irrigation program are reaped.[iii]

In December 1976 Kiernan enthused that throughout most of Kampuchea “the stage seems set for the construction of a new society in which there are neither rich nor poor”. But by the end of 1978, after communist Vietnam became the avowed enemy of the Khmer Rouge, Kiernan had changed his assessment and started to deplore yet another noble experiment that had gone wrong due to Western aggression and local idiosyncrasies.

Noam Chomsky was a prominent apologist for the Khmer Rouge and its Western cheerleaders throughout the 1970s. He rejected reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities and failures as “Distortions at Fourth Hand”, privately calling them a “flood of lies”. When the flood became a sea of eyewitness accounts that even he couldn’t linguistically analyse his way around he started to move ground on the atrocities, but not on American culpability. For Chomsky, anything bad in Kampuchea was America’s fault, but the communists had done good anyway. After the Cataclysm, which Chomsky co-authored with Edward Herman, described Pol Pot’s achievements thus:

With the economy in ruins, the foreign aid that kept much of the population alive terminated, and the artificial colonial implantations no longer functioning, it was a condition of survival to turn (or return) the populations to productive work. The victors in Cambodia undertook drastic and often brutal measures to accomplish this task, simply forcing the urban population into the countryside where they were compelled to live the lives of poor peasants, now organized in a decentralized system of communes. At heavy cost, these measures appear to have overcome the dire and destructive consequences of the US war by 1978.[iv]

Malcolm Caldwell was a most enthusiastic Pol Pot supporter and Kampuchea advocate. Even as the Vietnamese prepared to invade the collapsing country Caldwell wrote:

[The] Kampuchean Revolution will appear more and more clearly as one of the most significant early indications of the great and necessary change beginning to convulse the world in the later 20th Century and shifting from a disaster-bound course to one holding out promise of a better future for all. In the meantime we can surely rejoice that the people of Kampuchea are assured now of steadily rising living standards while those of their still “free world” neighbors continue to deteriorate.[v]

This report was published after Caldwell’s visit to Phnom Penh in December 1978, by which time the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea had been reduced by purges to just five men: Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ta Mok, Ieng Sary and Son Sen. No Khmer Rouge officer outside this cell dared to act without its direction, or even to probe into how dire their situation was. Consequently the Vietnamese conquest of Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979, took many Khmer Rouge officials by surprise. The commandant of the S-21 prison had to flee in such a hurry that he had no time to destroy the records of his horrible crimes or the thousands of confessions that he had extracted from tortured prisoners before they were murdered. This incriminating evidence fell into the hands of the Vietnamese and, in due course, into the consciousness of the world.[vi]

During the weeks that followed the Vietnamese occupation of Phnom Penh the most unlikely set of circumstances converged to conceive the most unholy alliance in resistance to the Vietnamese occupation of Kampuchea. Prince Sihanouk managed to escape the clutches of his Khmer Rouge minders to seek political asylum in America or France, but ended up in China. The Chinese backed Sihanouk’s claim to be the rightful head of state of Kampuchea, and backed the Khmer Rouge’s claim to be the most effective fighting force against the Vietnamese. Thailand agreed to be a covert conduit through which arms and supplies could be funnelled to the Khmer Rouge guerrillas. The United Nations passed a resolution condemning the Vietnamese invasion (only the USSR and Czechoslovakia dissented). Both China and America recognised Democratic Kampuchea rather than the People’s Republic of Kampuchea; which meant that they tacitly backed the Khmer Rouge in preference to the Vietnamese as rulers of Kampuchea. This in turn heightened tensions between China and its northern and southern neighbours, the Soviet Union and Vietnam.[vii]

In February 1979 China launched a devastating offensive into Vietnam and then withdrew before the USSR could be of any help to its ally. But this punishment did not have the desired effect on the occupiers of Kampuchea. In fact, the Vietnamese intensified their offensive against the Khmer Rouge, and by March they had driven its guerrillas to the country’s periphery and some of them across the border into Thailand.[viii]

During April and May tens of thousands of Cambodians escaped to Thailand. But in June the Thai army forced many of them back into Kampuchea, where many died. Later that year UNICEF and the Red Cross set up refugee camps along the border and by the end of 1979 there were over half a million Cambodian refugees in Thailand.

With the help of China and the complicity of Thailand and the US, the Khmer Rouge rebuilt its strength, and by the middle of 1980 it boasted 40,000 men. It declared that it was “abandoning the socialist revolution” in order to defeat the Vietnamese invaders. Its soldiers discarded their black pyjama-like attire and donned jungle-green uniforms courtesy of their Chinese patrons, cadres donned white shirts and dark trousers, and Pol Pot bought safari suits from a Bangkok tailor. He banned wanton executions, sought alliances with and aid from the West, and by the end of 1981 had officially dissolved the Communist Party of Kampuchea. But this was not the end of the tyranny of the Khmer Rouge.[ix]

In June 1982 the disparate groups fighting the Vietnamese occupiers coalesced into the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, with Sihanouk as its head of state. The three main parties to the coalition were: Sihanouk’s FUNCINPEC party, Son Sann’s KPNLF party, and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. This discordant coalition summoned up enough momentum to conduct a guerrilla war against the Vietnamese occupiers, but nowhere near enough to win it.

In September 1989, seven months after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan and two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Vietnam withdrew its occupational forces from Kampuchea, leaving Prime Minister Hun Sen in control. On June 26, 1991, the three factions of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea joined with Hun Sen to form a Supreme National Council to rule Kampuchea pending elections. On October 23 an Agreement on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodian Conflict was signed in Paris. An ambitious United Nations peacekeeping force (UNTAC) was deployed to maintain order.

The UN’s white vehicles and soldiers with blue helmets reminded Buddhist scholars of a prophecy that a ferocious war would end when a white elephant in blue armour restored peace. Sihanouk returned to Phnom Penh, where he and his son, Norodom Ranariddh, sided with Hun Sen and denounced Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge controlled about 20 per cent of the country and a revenue stream from the export of timber and gems, but only about 5 per cent of the country’s population.

In 1993 the UN supervised an election. Pol Pot boycotted it, Norodom Ranariddh’s party won fifty-eight seats, Hun Sen’s fifty-one, and Son Sann’s ten. But when Hun Sen refused to step down as Prime Minister a compromised arrangement was cobbled together to govern the new Kingdom of Cambodia. Norodom Sihanouk was made King of a constitutional monarchy, which was to be governed by a 120-seat assembly led by two prime ministers: Norodom Ranariddh and Hun Sen. Pol Pot’s guerrilla insurgency remained a threat, but his attempts to reimpose spartan discipline on his men only increased defections, and government forces gradually gained the upper hand.[xi]

By 1994 the Khmer Rouge was dying, and so was Pol Pot. He took to drinking whisky and cognac, watching traditional dancing girls, reminiscing to his daughter and listening to an aide reading a Khmer translation of Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot by David Chandler. Deng Xiaoping had lectured him on the need to change his ways in order to win the hearts and minds of his countrymen; but Pol Pot was too addicted to the methods of his heyday of horror. He allowed his men to bludgeon peasants to death and torture prisoners in “re-education” establishments, and when, in 1994, three young backpackers (a Frenchman, an Englishman and Australian, David Wilson) were kidnapped and ransom wasn’t forthcoming, they were murdered.[xii]

In 1997, after suffering mutinies and high-ranking defections, Pol Pot decided once again to find a scapegoat close to home. He had Son Sen, his wife, and seventeen of his near relatives murdered. It was one ruthless purge too many. Ta Mok staged a mutiny and Pol Pot and his family were placed under house arrest. In July the new leaders of the Khmer Rouge invited the American journalist Nate Thayer to witness the renunciation of its past ideology, and its newly discovered commitment to liberal democratic values. After the customary show trial Pol Pot was sentenced to permanent house arrest, and three of his commanders were executed. But defections from the Khmer Rouge continued, and so did its retreats.[xiii]

On April 15, 1998, Pol Pot died, apparently of heart failure. His wife and daughter gave him a Buddhist cremation on a pile of rubbish and car tyres. Within a month the Khmer Rouge’s propaganda radio fell silent and the remnants of its troops surrendered or sought sanctuary in refugee camps. Only Ta Mok remained defiant, even after he was arrested in 1999.[xiv]

The elections of 1993 and 1998 did not deliver stable governance, and neither did the election of 2003. In 2004 Sihanouk abdicated and was replaced by Prince Norodom Sihamoni. Power brokers collaborated to form factions, factions to form parties, parties to form governments. But compromises hid frictions that could fracture any level of government and burst into revolt or repression.

The task of tracking the evolution and dissolution of all the political bodies that played a part in the sorry story of Kampuchea invokes a scene from The Life of Brian in which the Peoples Front of Judea is planning action to rid the country of the Romans, just as soon as they rid it of the Judean People’s Front, the Popular Front, the Judean Popular People’s Front and the Campaign for a Free Galilee. Except that in Kampuchea there was a much larger menagerie of political packs, with names so long that they had to be abbreviated into acronyms. The best way to track their roles is to ask not what they were for, but whom they were for.

In hindsight, the cacophony of bodies vying for power in Kampuchea may be seen as means to the ends of just three dominant players: Norodom Sihanouk, Pol Pot and Hun Sen. Pol Pot ruled Democratic Kampuchea from 1975 to 1979 and remained unrepentant until the day he died in 1998. Norodom Sihanouk lost power in 1970 then consorted with every side against every other side until, in 1993, he regained his crown, which he wore until he abdicated in favour of his son, Norodom Sihamoni, in 2004. Hun Sen began his career with the Khmer Rouge then fled to Vietnam in 1977, then collaborated with the Vietnamese when they invaded Kampuchea in December 1978 to set up a client state. From 1985 when he became Prime Minister, Hun Sen began to wrest control of the country and set it on a decentralised course that was neither Vietnamese nor Khmer Rouge, although still communist. Then, in 1993 Hun Sen and Norodom Sihanouk’s son, Norodom Ranariddh, became joint rulers of the Kingdom of Cambodia.[xv]

The Khmer Rouge died in ignominy in 1998, but its henchmen and apologists live on— some of them in high places. In 2006 a long-overdue tribunal made up of local and international officials was convened in Phnom Penh to try Khmer Rouge murderers. Four years later it delivered its first verdict. Comrade Deuch, the commandant of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison, was sentenced to thirty-five years in jail—which amounted to less than one day for each of his victims, most of whom had been tortured hideously before being executed. Deuch (sometimes spelt Douch or Duch) started serving his sentence in 2010, by which time it had been reduced to nineteen years, but he appealed. He told the court that he had converted to Christianity and admitted his crimes and been forgiven; but that he should never have been convicted because he was just following orders. In 2012 his appeal failed and his sentence was increased to life in prison. The tribunal is considering cases against four high-ranking Khmer Rouge leaders, but Hun Sen has shown a distinct lack of political will to prosecute such cases.[xvi]

In 2008 Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party won a clear majority in the National Assembly, making this former Khmer Rouge Deputy Commander the Prime Minister who now governs the country in his own right. Heng Samrin, the chairman of the national assembly, is also ex-Khmer Rouge, as is Chea Sim, the president of the senate, and several other members of the Cambodian government. They have yet to unequivocally repudiate their Khmer Rouge past.[xvii]

In 1998, Ben Kiernan was made the founding director of Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program. Noam Chomsky continues to this day to attract adoring audiences as an apologist of anti-American despots. Malcolm Caldwell was Pol Pot’s guest in Phnom Penh in December 1978 when, under mysterious circumstances, he was murdered.[xviii]

Whether Pol Pot’s apologists were flagrant propagandists or naive ideologues, their enthusiastic endorsement of his experiment was a slap in the face of every slave struggling to survive in his fields of mud and blood; the delayed recognition of his atrocities was a dereliction of scholarship; and the evasion of all the verdicts of all the communist experiments was the twentieth century’s treason of the intellectuals.

John Dawson is a Melbourne writer. The above is an edited version of the epilogue of his book Surviving Angkar: Memories of Life and Death in Pol Pot’s Kampuchea, published by Connor Court in September.