Cambodian genocide
The Cambodian genocide[a] was the systematic persecution and killing of Cambodian citizens[b] by the Khmer Rouge under the leadership of Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea, Pol Pot. It resulted in the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people from 1975 to 1979, nearly 25% of Cambodia's population in 1975 (c. 7.8 million).[3][4][5][6][7]
Cambodian genocide
Democratic Kampuchea (Modern-day Cambodia)
17 April 1975 – 7 January 1979 (3 years, 8 months and 20 days)
Cambodia's previous military and political leadership, business leaders, journalists, students, doctors, lawyers, intellectuals, Buddhists, Chams, Thais, Muslims, Chinese Cambodians, Christian Cambodians, Vietnamese Cambodians
1.2 to 2.8 million[1]
- Communism (including Maoism and agrarian socialism)
- Year Zero
- Khmer ethnonationalism (including anti-Cham, Vietnamese, Chinese and Thai sentiment)
- Anti-Christian sentiment
- Anti-Buddhism
- Islamophobia
- State atheism
- Anti-intellectualism
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had long been supported by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its chairman, Mao Zedong;[c] it is estimated that at least 90% of the foreign aid which the Khmer Rouge received came from China, including at least US$1 billion in interest-free economic and military aid in 1975 alone.[13][14][15] After it seized power in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge wanted to turn the country into an agrarian socialist republic, founded on the policies of ultra-Maoism and influenced by the Cultural Revolution.[d] Pol Pot and other Khmer Rouge officials met with Mao in Beijing in June 1975, receiving approval and advice, while high-ranking CCP officials such as Politburo Standing Committee member Zhang Chunqiao later visited Cambodia to offer help.[e] To fulfill its goals, the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities and forced Cambodians to relocate to labor camps in the countryside, where mass executions, forced labor, physical abuse, malnutrition, and disease were rampant.[20][21] In 1976, the Khmer Rouge renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea.
The massacres ended when the Vietnamese military invaded in 1978 and toppled the Khmer Rouge regime.[22] By January 1979, 1.5 to 2 million people had died due to the Khmer Rouge's policies, including 200,000–300,000 Chinese Cambodians, 90,000–500,000[f] Cambodian Cham (who are mostly Muslim),[26][27][28] and 20,000 Vietnamese Cambodians.[29][30] 20,000 people passed through the Security Prison 21, one of the 196 prisons the Khmer Rouge operated,[5][31] and only seven adults survived.[32] The prisoners were taken to the Killing Fields, where they were executed (often with pickaxes, to save bullets)[33] and buried in mass graves. Abduction and indoctrination of children was widespread, and many were persuaded or forced to commit atrocities.[34] As of 2009, the Documentation Center of Cambodia has mapped 23,745 mass graves containing approximately 1.3 million suspected victims of execution. Direct execution is believed to account for up to 60% of the genocide's death toll,[35] with other victims succumbing to starvation, exhaustion, or disease.
The genocide triggered a second outflow of refugees, many of whom escaped to neighboring Thailand and, to a lesser extent, Vietnam.[36] In 2003, by agreement[37] between the Cambodian government and the United Nations, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia (Khmer Rouge Tribunal) were established to try the members of the Khmer Rouge leadership responsible for the Cambodian genocide. Trials began in 2009.[38] On 26 July 2010, the Trial Chamber convicted Kang Kek Iew for crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The Supreme Court Chamber increased his sentence to life imprisonment. Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were tried and convicted in 2014 of crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. On 28 March 2019, the Trial Chamber found Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan guilty of crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and genocide of the Vietnamese ethnic, national and racial group. The Chamber additionally convicted Nuon Chea of genocide of the Cham ethnic and religious group under the doctrine of superior responsibility.[2] Both Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan were sentenced to terms of life imprisonment.[39]
Ideology[edit]
Ideology played an important role in the genocide. Pol Pot was influenced by Marxism–Leninism and he wanted to transform Cambodia into an entirely self-sufficient agrarian socialist society that would be free from foreign influences. Stalin's work has been described as a "crucial formative influence" on his thought. Also heavily influential was Mao's work, particularly On New Democracy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of his favorite authors, according to historian David Chandler. In the mid-1960s, Pol Pot reformulated his ideas about Marxism–Leninism to suit the Cambodian situation with goals such as bringing Cambodia back to an alleged mythic past of the powerful Khmer Empire, eradicating influences he viewed as "corrupting", such as foreign aid and Western culture, as well as restoring Cambodia's agrarian society.[89]
Pol Pot's strong belief that Cambodia needed to be transformed into an agrarian utopia stemmed from his experience in Cambodia's rural northeast—where he developed an affinity for the agrarian self-sufficiency of the area's isolated tribes—while the Khmer Rouge gained power.[90] Attempts to implement these goals (formed upon the observations of small, rural communes) into a larger society were key factors in the ensuing genocide.[91][92] One Khmer Rouge leader said that the killings were meant for the "purification of the populace."[93] The Khmer Rouge virtually forced Cambodia's entire population to divide itself into mobile work teams.[94] Michael Hunt has written that it was "an experiment in social mobilization unmatched in twentieth-century revolutions."[94] The Khmer Rouge used a forced labor regime, starvation, forced resettlement, land collectivization, and state terror to keep the population in line.[94] The Khmer Rouge's economic plan was named the "Maha Lout Ploh",[needs translation] a direct allusion to the "Great Leap Forward" of China that caused tens of millions of deaths in the Great Chinese Famine.[8][95]
A doctoral dissertation written by Kenneth M. Quinn about the "origins of the radical Pol Pot regime"[96] is "widely acknowledged as the first person to report on the genocidal policies of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge."[97][98] While he was employed as a Foreign Service Officer for the U.S. State Department in Southeast Asia, Quinn was stationed at the South Vietnamese border for nine months between 1973–1974.[99] While there, Quinn "interviewed countless Cambodian refugees who had escaped the brutal clutches of the Khmer Rouge."[99] Based upon the compiled interviews and the atrocities he witnessed firsthand, Quinn wrote "a 40-page report about it, which was submitted throughout the U.S. government."[97] In the report, he wrote that the Khmer Rouge had "much in common with those of totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union."[100] Quinn has written of the Khmer Rouge that "[w]hat emerges as the explanation for the terror and violence that swept Cambodia during the 1970s is that a small group of alienated intellectuals, enraged by their perception of a totally corrupt society and imbued with a Maoist plan to create a pure socialist order in the shortest possible time, recruited extremely young, poor, and envious cadres, instructed them in harsh and brutal methods learned from Stalinist mentors, and used them to destroy physically the cultural underpinnings of the Khmer civilization and to impose a new society through purges, executions, and violence."[101]
Ben Kiernan has compared the Cambodian genocide to the Armenian genocide which was perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire during World War I and the Holocaust which was perpetrated by Nazi Germany during World War II. While each genocide was unique, they shared certain common features, and racism was a major part of the ideology of all three regimes. All three regimes targeted religious minorities and they also tried to use force in order to expand their rule into what they believed were their historic heartlands (the Khmer Empire, Turkestan, and Lebensraum, respectively), and all three regimes "idealized their ethnic peasantry as the true 'national' class, the ethnic soil from which the new state grew."[102]
Tuol Sleng genocide museum
Photo from genocide museum
Tuol Sleng
Tuol Sleng
Genocide museum
In the museum
The Khmer Rouge regime is also well known for practicing torturous medical experiments on prisoners. People were imprisoned and tortured merely on suspicion of opposing the regime or because other prisoners gave their names under torture. Whole families (including women and children) ended up in prisons and were tortured because the Khmer Rouge feared that if they did not do this, their intended victims' relatives would seek revenge. Pol Pot said, "if you want to kill the grass, you also have to kill the roots".[169] Most prisoners did not even know why they had been imprisoned and, if they dared to ask the prison guards, the guards would answer only by saying that Angkar (the Communist Party of Kampuchea) never makes mistakes, which meant that they must have done something illegal.[170]
There are many accounts of torture in both the S-21 records and the documents of the trial; as told by the survivor Bou Meng in his book (written by Huy Vannak), tortures were so atrocious and heinous that the prisoners tried in every way to commit suicide, even using spoons, and their hands were constantly tied behind their back to prevent them from committing suicide or trying to escape. When it was believed that they could not provide any further useful information, they were blindfolded and sent to the Killing Fields, which were mass graves where prisoners were killed at night with metal tools such as scythes or nails and hammers (since bullets were too expensive). Often times, their screams were covered with loudspeakers playing propaganda music of Democratic Kampuchea and noise from generator sets.
Inside S-21, a special treatment was given to babies and children; they were taken away from their mothers and relatives, and sent to the Killing Fields, where they were smashed against the so-called Chankiri Tree. A similar treatment is supposed to have been given to babies of other prisons like S-21, spread all over Democratic Kampuchea. S-21 also had a few Westerners who had been captured by the regime. One was the British teacher John Dawson Dewhirst, captured by the Khmer Rouge while he was on a yacht. One guard of S-21, Cheam Soeu, said that one of the Westerners had been burned alive, but Kang Kek Iew ("Comrade Duch") denied that. He said that Pol Pot asked him to burn their corpses (after death) and that "nobody would dare to violate my order".[171] Tortures were meant not only to force prisoners to confess but for the prison guards' amusement. They feared that they would themselves become prisoners if they treated the prisoners well.[172]
The previous doctors were killed or sent to the countryside to work as farmers during the Khmer Rouge and the library of the Medical Faculty in Phnom Penh was set on fire. The regime then employed child medics, who were just teenagers with no or very little training. They did not have any knowledge of Western medicine (which had been forbidden since it was considered a capitalist invention), and they had to practice their own medical experiments and make progress by themselves. They did not have Western medicines (since Cambodia, according to the Khmer Rouge, had to be self-sufficient) and all medical experiments were systematically conducted without proper anesthetics.[173] A medic who worked inside S-21 said that a 17-year-old girl had her throat slit and her abdomen pierced before being beaten and put into water for an entire night. This procedure was repeated many times and carried out without anesthetics.[174]
In a hospital of Kampong Cham province, child medics cut out the intestines of a living non-consenting person and joined their ends to study the healing process. The patient died after three days due to the "operation".[173] In the same hospital, other "physicians" trained by the Khmer Rouge opened the chest of a living person, just to see the heart beating. The operation resulted in the patient's immediate death.[173] Other testimonies, as well as Khmer Rouge policy, suggest that these were not isolated cases.[175][176][177] They also performed drug testing, for instance by injecting coconut juice into a living person's body and studying the effects. Coconut juice injection is often lethal.[173] Witness at Tribunal hearing also disclosed that in Tbong Khmum province, he saw a medical staff at the hospital carrying out experiments on the wives of arrested cadre at night, when it was quiet. The victims' bodies were cut open and injected with some liquid that other reports stated that the injection could be some form of coconut fluid.[177]
After Democratic Kampuchea[edit]
Commemoration[edit]
Although executions of public officials of the old regime had taken place after Phnom Penh fell, 20 May 1975 is commemorated in Cambodia as the date that the Khmer Rouge campaign against private citizens began[178] and 20 May is now observed annually as the "National Day of Remembrance" (Khmer: ទិវាជាតិនៃការចងចាំ, romanized: Tivea Cheate nei kar Changcham) and marked by a national holiday.[179]
