Khmer Rouge
The Khmer Rouge (/kəˌmɛər ˈruːʒ/; French: [kmɛʁ ʁuʒ]; Khmer: ខ្មែរក្រហម, Khmêr Krâhâm [kʰmae krɑːhɑːm]; lit. 'Red Khmer') is the name that was popularly given to members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and by extension to the regime through which the CPK ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The name was coined in the 1960s by then Chief of State Norodom Sihanouk to describe his country's heterogeneous, communist-led dissidents, with whom he allied after his 1970 overthrow.[16]
This article is about the regime in general. For the political party of the Khmer Rouge regime, see Communist Party of Kampuchea. For nation of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge Regime, see Democratic Kampuchea.Khmer Rouge
June 1951 – March 1999
- 1951–1968 (political party)
- 1968–1975 (insurgency)
- 1975–1979 (government)
- 1977–1999 (insurgency)
- Cambodian Civil War:
- Cambodian–Vietnamese War:
- Cambodian Civil War:
- Cambodian–Vietnamese War:
Vietnam
FUNSK (1978–1979)- People's Republic of Kampuchea (1979–1989)
State of Cambodia (from 1989)
Laos
Albania[12]
Soviet Union
Bulgaria
Cuba
Czechoslovakia[13]
East Germany[14]
Hungary
Poland[15]
The Khmer Rouge army was slowly built up in the forests of eastern Cambodia during the late 1960s, supported by the North Vietnamese army, the Viet Cong, the Pathet Lao, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).[17][18][19][20] Although it originally fought against Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge changed its position and supported Sihanouk following the CCP's advice after he was overthrown in a 1970 coup by Lon Nol who established the pro-American Khmer Republic.[20][21] Despite a massive American bombing campaign (Operation Freedom Deal) against them, the Khmer Rouge won the Cambodian Civil War when they captured the Cambodian capital and overthrew the Khmer Republic in 1975. Following their victory, the Khmer Rouge, who were led by Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, and Khieu Samphan, immediately set about forcibly evacuating the country's major cities. In 1976, they renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea.
The Khmer Rouge regime was highly autocratic, totalitarian, and repressive. Many deaths resulted from the regime's social engineering policies and the "Moha Lout Plaoh", an imitation of China's Great Leap Forward which had caused the Great Chinese Famine.[17][22][23] The Khmer Rouge's attempts at agricultural reform through collectivization similarly led to widespread famine, while its insistence on absolute self-sufficiency, including the supply of medicine, led to the death of many thousands from treatable diseases such as malaria.[24]
The Khmer Rouge regime murdered hundreds of thousands of their perceived political opponents, and its racist emphasis on national purity resulted in the genocide of Cambodian minorities. Summary executions and torture were carried out by its cadres against perceived subversive elements, or during genocidal purges of its own ranks between 1975 and 1978.[25] Ultimately, the Cambodian genocide which took place under the Khmer Rouge regime led to the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people, around 25% of Cambodia's population.
In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge was largely supported and funded by the Chinese Communist Party, receiving approval from Mao Zedong; it is estimated that at least 90% of the foreign aid which was provided to the Khmer Rouge came from China.[a] The regime was removed from power in 1979 when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and quickly destroyed most of its forces. The Khmer Rouge then fled to Thailand, whose government saw them as a buffer force against the Communist Vietnamese. The Khmer Rouge continued to fight against the Vietnamese and the government of the new People's Republic of Kampuchea until the end of the war in 1989. The Cambodian governments-in-exile (including the Khmer Rouge) held onto Cambodia's United Nations seat (with considerable international support) until 1993, when the monarchy was restored and the name of the Cambodian state was changed to the Kingdom of Cambodia. A year later, thousands of Khmer Rouge guerrillas surrendered themselves in a government amnesty.[29]
In 1996, a new political party called the Democratic National Union Movement was formed by Ieng Sary, who was granted amnesty for his role as the deputy leader of the Khmer Rouge.[30] The organisation was largely dissolved by the mid-1990s and finally surrendered completely in 1999.[31] In 2014, two Khmer Rouge leaders, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, were jailed for life by a United Nations-backed court which found them guilty of crimes against humanity for their roles in the Khmer Rouge's genocidal campaign.
Etymology[edit]
The term Khmers rouges, French for red Khmers, was coined by King Norodom Sihanouk and it was later adopted by English speakers (in the form of the corrupted version Khmer Rouge).[32]: 100 It was used to refer to a succession of communist parties in Cambodia which evolved into the Communist Party of Kampuchea and later the Party of Democratic Kampuchea. Its military was known successively as the Kampuchean Revolutionary Army and the National Army of Democratic Kampuchea.[33]
Since the deterioration in relations between the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and Democratic Kampuchea, the Vietnamese communism authorities no longer recognize the legitimacy of the Khmer Rouge, and as a result, they call the Khmer Rouge the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary group (Vietnamese: Tập đoàn Pol Pot-Ieng Sary[34]) or they call the Khmer Rouge the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary reactionary group (Vietnamese: Tập đoàn phản động Pol Pot-Ieng Sary[35]).
Ideology[edit]
Influence of Communist thought[edit]
The movement's ideology was shaped by a power struggle during 1976 in which the so-called Party Centre led by Pol Pot defeated other regional elements of its leadership. The Party Centre's ideology combined elements of Communism with a strongly xenophobic form of Khmer nationalism. Partly because of its secrecy and changes in how it presented itself, academic interpretations of its political position vary widely,[27]: 25 ranging from interpreting it as the "purest" Marxist–Leninist movement to characterising it as an anti-Marxist "peasant revolution".[27]: 26 The first interpretation has been criticized by historian Ben Kiernan, who asserts that it comes from a "convenient anti-communist perspective".[27]: 26 Its leaders and theorists, most of whom had been exposed to the heavily Stalinist outlook of the French Communist Party during the 1950s,[36]: 249 developed a distinctive and eclectic "post-Leninist" ideology that drew on elements of Stalinism, Maoism and the postcolonial theory of Frantz Fanon.[36]: 244 In the early 1970s, the Khmer Rouge looked to the model of Enver Hoxha's Albania which they believed was the most advanced communist state then in existence.[27]: 25
Many of the regime's characteristics—such as its focus on the rural peasantry rather than the urban proletariat as the bulwark of revolution, its emphasis on Great Leap Forward-type initiatives, its desire to abolish personal interest in human behaviour, its promotion of communal living and eating, and its focus on perceived common sense over technical knowledge—appear to have been heavily influenced by Maoist ideology;[36]: 244 however, the Khmer Rouge displayed these characteristics in a more extreme form.[36]: 244 Additionally, non-Khmers, who comprised a significant part of the supposedly favored segment of the peasantry, were singled out because of their race.[27]: 26 According to Ben Kiernan, this was "neither a communist proletarian revolution that privileged the working class, nor a peasant revolution that favored all farmers".[27]: 26
While the CPK described itself as the "number 1 Communist state" once it was in power,[27]: 25 some communist regimes, such as Vietnam, saw it as a Maoist deviation from orthodox Marxism.[27]: 26 According to author Rebecca Gidley, the Khmer Rouge "almost immediately erred by implementing a Maoist doctrine rather than following the Marxist–Leninist prescriptions."[37] The Maoist and Khmer Rouge belief that human willpower could overcome material and historical conditions was strongly at odds with mainstream Marxism, which emphasised historical materialism and the idea of history as inevitable progression toward communism.[27]: 27 In 1981, following the Cambodian–Vietnamese War, in an attempt to get foreign support, the Khmer Rouge officially renounced communism.[2][38]
Khmer nationalism[edit]
One of the regime's main characteristics was its Khmer nationalism, which combined an idealisation of the Angkor Empire (802–1431) and the Late Middle Period of Cambodia (1431–1863) with an existential fear for the survival of the Cambodian state, which had historically been liquidated during periods of Vietnamese and Siamese intervention.[39] The spillover of Vietnamese fighters from the Vietnamese–American War further aggravated anti-Vietnamese sentiments: the Khmer Republic under Lon Nol, overthrown by the Khmer Rouge, had promoted Mon-Khmer nationalism and was responsible for several anti-Vietnamese pogroms during the 1970s.[40] Some historians such as Ben Kiernan have stated that the importance the regime gave to race overshadowed its conceptions of class.[27]: 26
The Khmer Rouge targeted particular groups of people, among them Buddhist monks, ethnic minorities, and educated elites.[41]
Once in power, the Khmer Rouge explicitly targeted the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Cham minority and even their partially Khmer offspring.[42] The same attitude extended to the party's own ranks, as senior CPK figures of non-Khmer ethnicity were removed from the leadership despite extensive revolutionary experience and were often killed.[27]: 26
A Vietnamese official called the Khmer Rouge leaders "Hitlerite-fascists", while the General Secretary of the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party, Pen Sovan, referred to the Khmer Rouge as a "draconian, dictatorial and fascist regime".[37]
Origins[edit]
Early history[edit]
The history of the communist movement in Cambodia can be divided into six phases, namely the emergence before World War II of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), whose members were almost exclusively Vietnamese; the 10-year struggle for independence from the French, when a separate Cambodian communist party, the Kampuchean (or Khmer) People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP), was established under Vietnamese auspices; the period following the Second Party Congress of the KPRP in 1960, when Saloth Sar gained control of its apparatus; the revolutionary struggle from the initiation of the Khmer Rouge insurgency in 1967–1968 to the fall of the Lon Nol government in April 1975; the Democratic Kampuchea regime from April 1975 to January 1979; and the period following the Third Party Congress of the KPRP in January 1979, when Hanoi effectively assumed control over Cambodia's government and communist party.[52]
In 1930, Ho Chi Minh founded the Communist Party of Vietnam by unifying three smaller communist movements that had emerged in northern, central and southern Vietnam during the late 1920s. The party was renamed the Indochinese Communist Party, ostensibly so it could include revolutionaries from Cambodia and Laos. Almost without exception, all of the earliest party members were Vietnamese. By the end of World War II, a handful of Cambodians had joined its ranks, but their influence on the Indochinese communist movement as well as their influence on developments within Cambodia was negligible.[53]
Viet Minh units occasionally made forays into Cambodian bases during their war against the French and in conjunction with the leftist government that ruled Thailand until 1947. The Viet Minh encouraged the formation of armed, left-wing Khmer Issarak bands. On 17 April 1950, the first nationwide congress of the Khmer Issarak groups convened, and the United Issarak Front was established. Its leader was Son Ngoc Minh, and a third of its leadership consisted of members of the ICP. According to the historian David P. Chandler, the leftist Issarak groups aided by the Viet Minh occupied a sixth of Cambodia's territory by 1952, and on the eve of the Geneva Conference in 1954, they controlled as much as one half of the country.[23]: 180–1 In 1951, the ICP was reorganized into three national units, namely the Vietnam Workers' Party, the Lao Issara, and the Kampuchean or Khmer People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP). According to a document issued after the reorganization, the Vietnam Workers' Party would continue to "supervise" the smaller Laotian and Cambodian movements. Most KPRP leaders and rank-and-file seem to have been either Khmer Krom or ethnic Vietnamese living in Cambodia.
According to Democratic Kampuchea's perspective of party history, the Viet Minh's failure to negotiate a political role for the KPRP at the 1954 Geneva Conference represented a betrayal of the Cambodian movement, which still controlled large areas of the countryside, and which commanded at least 5,000 armed men. Following the conference, about 1,000 members of the KPRP, including Son Ngoc Minh, made a Long March into North Vietnam, where they remained in exile.[53] In late 1954, those who stayed in Cambodia founded a legal political party, the Pracheachon Party, which participated in the 1955 and the 1958 National Assembly elections. In the September 1955 election, it won about 4% of the vote but did not secure a seat in the legislature.[54] Members of the Pracheachon were subject to harassment and arrests because the party remained outside Sihanouk's political organization, Sangkum. Government attacks prevented it from participating in the 1962 election and drove it underground. Sihanouk habitually labelled local leftists the Khmer Rouge, a term that later came to signify the party and the state headed by Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan and their associates.[52]
During the mid-1950s, KPRP factions, the "urban committee" (headed by Tou Samouth) and the "rural committee" (headed by Sieu Heng), emerged. In very general terms, these groups espoused divergent revolutionary lines. The prevalent "urban" line endorsed by North Vietnam recognized that Sihanouk by virtue of his success in winning independence from the French was a genuine national leader whose neutralism and deep distrust of the United States made him a valuable asset in Hanoi's struggle to "liberate" South Vietnam.[55] Advocates of this line hoped that the prince could be persuaded to distance himself from the right-wing and to adopt leftist policies. The other line, supported for the most part by rural cadres who were familiar with the harsh realities of the countryside, advocated an immediate struggle to overthrow the "feudalist" Sihanouk.[56]
Paris student group[edit]
During the 1950s, Khmer students in Paris organized their own communist movement which had little, if any, connection to the hard-pressed party in their homeland. From their ranks came the men and women who returned home and took command of the party apparatus during the 1960s, led an effective insurgency against Lon Nol from 1968 until 1975 and established the regime of Democratic Kampuchea.[57] Pol Pot, who rose to the leadership of the communist movement in the 1960s, attended a technical high school in the capital and then went to Paris in 1949 to study radio electronics (other sources say he attended a school for fax machines and also studied civil engineering). Described by one source as a "determined, rather plodding organizer", Pol Pot failed to obtain a degree, but according to Jesuit priest Father François Ponchaud he acquired a taste for the classics of French literature as well as an interest in the writings of Karl Marx.[58]
Another member of the Paris student group was Ieng Sary, a Chinese-Khmer from South Vietnam. He attended the elite Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh before beginning courses in commerce and politics at the Paris Institute of Political Science (more widely known as Sciences Po) in France. Khieu Samphan specialized in economics and politics during his time in Paris.[59] Hou Yuon studied economics and law; Son Sen studied education and literature; and Hu Nim studied law.[60] Two members of the group, Khieu Samphan and Hou Yuon, earned doctorates from the University of Paris while Hu Nim obtained his degree from the University of Phnom Penh in 1965. Most came from landowner or civil servant families. Pol Pot and Hou Yuon may have been related to the royal family as an older sister of Pol Pot had been a concubine at the court of King Monivong. Pol Pot and Ieng Sary married Khieu Ponnary and Khieu Thirith, also known as Ieng Thirith, purportedly relatives of Khieu Samphan. These two well-educated women also played a central role in the regime of Democratic Kampuchea.[61]
At some time between 1949 and 1951, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary joined the French Communist Party. In 1951, the two men went to East Berlin to participate in a youth festival. This experience is considered to have been a turning point in their ideological development. Meeting with Khmers who were fighting with the Viet Minh (but subsequently judged them to be too subservient to the Vietnamese), they became convinced that only a tightly disciplined party organization and a readiness for armed struggle could achieve revolution. They transformed the Khmer Students Association (KSA), to which most of the 200 or so Khmer students in Paris belonged, into an organization for nationalist and leftist ideas.[62]
Inside the KSA and its successor organizations, there was a secret organization known as the Cercle Marxiste (Marxist circle). The organization was composed of cells of three to six members with most members knowing nothing about the overall structure of the organization. In 1952, Pol Pot, Hou Yuon, Ieng Sary and other leftists gained notoriety by sending an open letter to Sihanouk calling him the "strangler of infant democracy". A year later, the French authorities closed down the KSA, but Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan helped to establish in 1956 a new group, the Khmer Students Union. Inside, the group was still run by the Cercle Marxiste.[62]
The doctoral dissertations which were written by Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan express basic themes that would later become the cornerstones of the policy that was adopted by Democratic Kampuchea. The central role of the peasants in national development was espoused by Hou Yuon in his 1955 thesis, The Cambodian Peasants and Their Prospects for Modernization, which challenged the conventional view that urbanization and industrialization are necessary precursors of development.[32]: 63 The major argument in Khieu Samphan's 1959 thesis, Cambodia's Economy and Industrial Development, was that the country had to become self-reliant and end its economic dependency on the developed world. In its general contours, Samphan's work reflected the influence of a branch of the dependency theory school which blamed lack of development in the Third World on the economic domination of the industrialized nations.[32]: 63
Path to power and reign[edit]
KPRP Second Congress[edit]
After returning to Cambodia in 1953, Pol Pot threw himself into party work. At first, he went to join with forces allied to the Viet Minh operating in the rural areas of Kampong Cham Province. After the end of the war, he moved to Phnom Penh under Tou Samouth's "urban committee", where he became an important point of contact between above-ground parties of the left and the underground secret communist movement.[63]
His comrades Ieng Sary and Hou Yuon became teachers at a new private high school, the Lycée Kambuboth, which Hou Yuon helped to establish. Khieu Samphan returned from Paris in 1959, taught as a member of the law faculty of the University of Phnom Penh, and started a left-wing French-language publication, L'Observateur. The paper soon acquired a reputation in Phnom Penh's small academic circle. The following year, the government closed the paper, and Sihanouk's police publicly humiliated Samphan by beating, undressing and photographing him in public; as Shawcross notes, "not the sort of humiliation that men forgive or forget".[64]: 92–100, 106–112 Yet the experience did not prevent Samphan from advocating cooperation with Sihanouk in order to promote a united front against United States activities in South Vietnam. Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim were forced to "work through the system" by joining the Sangkum and by accepting posts in the prince's government.[53]
In late September 1960, twenty-one leaders of the KPRP held a secret congress in a vacant room of the Phnom Penh railroad station. This pivotal event remains shrouded in mystery because its outcome has become an object of contention and considerable historical rewriting between pro-Vietnamese and anti-Vietnamese Khmer communist factions.[53] The question of cooperation with, or resistance to, Sihanouk was thoroughly discussed. Tou Samouth, who advocated a policy of cooperation, was elected general secretary of the KPRP that was renamed the Workers' Party of Kampuchea (WPK). His ally Nuon Chea, also known as Long Reth, became deputy general secretary, but Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were named to the Political Bureau to occupy the third and the fifth highest positions in the renamed party's hierarchy. The name change is significant. By calling itself a workers' party, the Cambodian movement claimed equal status with the Vietnam Workers' Party. The pro-Vietnamese regime of the People's Republic of Kampuchea implied in the 1980s that the September 1960 meeting was nothing more than the second congress of the KPRP.[53]
On 20 July 1962, Tou Samouth was murdered by the Cambodian government. At the WPK's second congress in February 1963, Pol Pot was chosen to succeed Tou Samouth as the party's 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 loyal comrades from his Paris student days controlled the party centre, edging out older veterans whom they considered excessively pro-Vietnamese.[1]: 241 In July 1963, Pol Pot and most of the central committee left Phnom Penh to establish an insurgent base in Ratanakiri Province in the northeast. Pol Pot had shortly before been put on a list of 34 leftists who were summoned by Sihanouk to join the government and sign statements saying Sihanouk was the only possible leader for the country. Pol Pot and Chou Chet were the only people on the list who escaped. All the others agreed to cooperate with the government and were afterward under 24-hour watch by the police.[62]
Internal power struggles and purges[edit]
Hou Yuon was one of the first senior leaders to be purged. The Khmer Rouge originally reported that he had been killed in the final battles for Phnom Penh, but he was apparently executed in late 1975 or early 1976.[32]: 202 In late 1975, numerous Cambodian intellectuals, professionals and students returned from overseas to support the revolution. These returnees were treated with suspicion and made to undergo reeducation, while some were sent straight to Tuol Sleng.[32]: 272 In 1976, the center announced the start of the socialist revolution and ordered the elimination of class enemies. This resulted in the expulsion and execution of numerous people within the party and army who were deemed to be of the wrong class.[32]: 265 In mid-1976, Ieng Thirith, minister of social affairs, inspected the northwestern zone. On her return to Phnom Penh, she reported that the zone's cadres were deliberately disobeying orders from the center, blaming enemy agents who were trying to undermine the revolution.[32]: 236 During 1976, troops formerly from the eastern zone demanded the right to marry without the party's approval. They were arrested and under interrogation implicated their commander who then implicated eastern zone cadres who were arrested and executed.[32]: 264
In September 1976, Keo Meas, who had been tasked with writing a history of the party, was arrested as a result of disputes over the foundation date of the party and its reliance on Vietnamese support. Under torture at Tuol Sleng, he confessed that the date chosen was part of a plot to undermine the party's legitimacy and was then executed.[32]: 268–9 In late 1976, with the Kampuchean economy underperforming, Pol Pot ordered a purge of the ministry of commerce, and Khoy Thoun and his subordinates who he had brought from the northern zone were arrested and tortured before being executed at Tuol Sleng.[32]: 221 Khoy Thoun confessed to having been recruited by the CIA in 1958.[32]: 282 The center also ordered troops from the eastern and central zones to purge the northern zone killing or arresting numerous cadres.[32]: 264–5
At the end of 1976, following disappointing rice harvests in the northwestern zone, the party center ordered a purge of the zone. Troops from the western and southwestern zones were ordered into the northwestern zone. Over the next year, troops killed at least 40 senior cadre and numerous lower ranking leaders.[32]: 238–40
The chaos caused by this purge allowed many Khmers to escape the zone and try to seek refuge in Thailand, but was met with gunfire by the Thai army, who then raped the Khmer women and children while they were hiding near the border with their families. Only until the United Nations Border Relief Operation (UNBRO) on January 1, 1982, intervened to coordinate humanitarian assistance to Cambodian displaced persons along the Thai-Cambodian border.[32]: 308
In 1977, the center began purging the returnees, sending 148 to Tuol Sleng and continuing a purge of the ministry of foreign affairs where many returnees and intellectuals were suspected of spying for foreign powers.[32]: 274–5 In January, the center ordered eastern and southeastern zone troops to conduct cross-border raids into Vietnam. In March 1977, the center ordered So Phim, the eastern zone commander, to send his troops to the border; however, with class warfare purges underway in the eastern zone, many units staged a mutiny and fled into Vietnam. Among the troops defecting in this period was Hun Sen.[32]: 304–5 On 10 April 1977 Hu Nim and his wife were arrested. After three months of interrogation at Tuol Sleng, he confessed to working with the CIA to undermine the revolution following which he and his wife were executed.[32]: 275–6 In July 1977, Pol Pot and Duch sent So Phim a list of "traitors" in the eastern zone, many of whom were So Phim's trusted subordinates. So Phim disputed the list and refused to execute those listed, for the center this implicated So Phim as a traitor.[32]: 306 In October 1977, in order to secure the Thai border while focusing on confrontation with Vietnam, Nhim Ros, the northwestern zone leader, was blamed for clashes on the Thai border, acting on behalf of both the Vietnamese and the CIA.[32]: 305
In December 1977, the Vietnamese launched a punitive attack into eastern Cambodia, quickly routing the eastern zone troops including Heng Samrin's Division 4 and further convincing Pol Pot of So Phim's treachery. Son Sen was sent to the eastern zone with center zone troops to aid the defense. In January 1978, following the Vietnamese withdrawal, a purge of the eastern zone began. In March, So Phim called a secret meeting of his closest subordinates advising them that those who had been purged were not traitors and warning them to be wary. During the next month more than 400 eastern zone cadres were sent to Tuol Sleng while two eastern zone division commanders were replaced. During May eastern zone military leaders were called to meetings where they were arrested or killed. So Phim was called to a meeting by Son Sen but refused to attend, instead sending four messengers who failed to return. On 25 May, Son Sen sent two brigades of troops to attack the eastern zone and capture So Phim. Unable to believe he was being purged, So Phim went into hiding and attempted to contact Pol Pot by radio. A meeting was arranged, but instead of Pol Pot a group of center soldiers arrived, and So Phim committed suicide; the soldiers then killed his family.[32]: 311–2
Many of the surviving eastern zone leaders fled into the forests where they hid from and fought center zone troops. In October 1978, Chea Sim led a group of 300 people across the border into Vietnam, and the Vietnamese then launched a raid into the eastern zone that allowed Heng Samrin and his group of 2,000 to 3,000 soldiers and followers to seek refuge in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the center decided that the entire eastern zone was full of traitors and embarked on a large scale purge of the area, with over 10,000 killed by July 1978, while thousands were evacuated to other zones to prevent them from defecting to the Vietnamese. The center also stepped up purges nationwide, killing cadres and their families, "old people" and eastern zone evacuees who were regarded as having dubious loyalty.[32]: 312–4
In September 1978, a purge of the ministry of industry was begun, and in November Pol Pot ordered the arrest of Vorn Vet, the deputy premier for the economy, followed by his supporters. Vorn Vet had previously served as the secretary of the zone around Phnom Penh, had established the Santebal and been Duch's immediate superior. Under torture, Vorn Vet admitted to being an agent of the CIA and the Vietnamese. Unable to reach the borders, ministry of industry personnel who could escape the purge went into hiding in Phnom Penh.[32]: 324–5