A Cambodian communist guerrilla force. It gained control in 1975 and, led by Pol Pot, set about a drastic transformation of Democratic Kampuchea, involving mass forced evacuation from the towns to the countryside, the creation of agricultural co-operatives, and the execution of thousands of bourgeois elements. More than 90% of Cambodia's traditional artists, performers, and scholars were murdered. In 1979, Vietnam invaded, and the Khmer Rouge withdrew to the Thai border region. Following the Vietnamese withdrawal in 1989, they mounted a major offensive, especially in the W and S provinces. The Paris Conference on Cambodia brought about a ceasefire (1991) and an international peace plan launched by the UN, which led to elections in 1993. However, the Khmer Rouge refused to take part in the elections or to become part of the new political system, and tension remained, with continued fighting between government troops and guerrillas. The organization was banned in 1994. In addition to Pol Pot, senior Khmer Rouge personnel included the deputy leader Ieng Sary (1930 ), guerrilla commander Son Sen (193097), and the leader of Khmer Rouge delegations at international conferences, Khieu Samphan (1931 ).
The Khmer Rouge (Khmer: ) was the extremist Communist organization that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The term "Khmer Rouge," meaning "Red Khmer" in French, was coined by Cambodian head of state Norodom Sihanouk and was later adopted in English. It was used to refer to a succession of communist parties in Cambodia which evolved into the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and later the Party of Democratic Kampuchea.
The Khmer Rouge regime is remembered mainly for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people although some claim the toll to be as high as 3 million (from an estimated 1972 population of 7.1 million) under its regime, through execution, starvation and forced labor. Although directly responsible for the death of about 750,000, the policies of the Khmer Rouge led, mainly through starvation and displacement, to the death of over 1 million people.
The Khmer Rouge regime was removed from power in 1979 as a result of an invasion by Vietnam. In 1996, following a peace agreement, the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot formally dissolved the organisation. With the death in custody of Ta Mok (The Butcher) in July 2006, Khang Khek Ieu, also known as "Duch," remains the only member of the regime currently imprisoned awaiting trial in the Extraordinary Chambers currently being established to try certain former officials of the Pol Pot regime.
Origins of the Khmer Rouge
The Cambodian Left: The Early Phases
The history of the communist movement in Cambodia can be divided into six phases: the emergence of the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), whose members were almost exclusively Vietnamese, before World War II; the ten-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 (Pol Pot after 1976) and other future Khmer Rouge leaders gained control of its apparatus; the revolutionary struggle from the initiation of the Khmer Rouge insurgency in 1967-68 to the fall of the Lon Nol government in April 1975; 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.
Much of the movement's history has been shrouded in mystery, largely because successive purges, especially during the Democratic Kampuchea period, have left so few survivors to recount their experiences. One thing is evident, however, the tension between Khmer and Vietnamese was a major theme in the movement's development. In the three decades between the end of World War II and the Khmer Rouge victory, the appeal of communism to Western educated intellectuals (and to a lesser extent its more inchoate attraction for poor peasants) was tempered by the apprehension that the much stronger Vietnamese movement was using communism as an ideological rationale for dominating the Khmer. Khmer Rouge literature in the 1970s frequently referred to the Vietnamese as yuon (barbarian), a term dating from the Angkorian period.
In 1930 Ho Chi Minh founded the Vietnamese Communist Party by unifying three smaller communist movements that had emerged in Tonkin, in Annam, and in Cochinchina during the late 1920s.
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 April 17, 1950 (twenty-five years to the day before the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh), the first nationwide congress of the Khmer Issarak groups convened, and the United Issarak Front was established.
In 1951 the ICP was reorganized into three national units--the Vietnam Workers' Party, the Lao Itsala, and the KPRP. 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 version 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. 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. Sihanouk habitually labeled 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.
During the mid-1950s, KPRP factions, the "urban committee" (headed by Tou Samouth), and the "rural committee" (headed by Sieu Heng), emerged.
The Paris Student Group
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 Sihanouk and Lon Nol from 1968 until 1975, and established the regime of Democratic Kampuchea.
Pol Pot, who rose to the leadership of the communist movement in the 1960s, was born in 1928 (some sources say in 1925) in Kampong Thum Province, north of Phnom Penh.
Another member of the Paris student group was Ieng Sary.
These men were perhaps the most educated leaders in the history of Asian communism. Three of the Paris group forged a bond that survived years of revolutionary struggle and intraparty strife, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary married Khieu Ponnary and Khieu Thirith (also known as Ieng Thirith), purportedly relatives of Khieu Samphan.
The intellectual ferment of Paris must have been a dizzying experience for young Khmers fresh from Phnom Penh or the provinces. At some time between 1949 and 1951, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary joined the French Communist Party, the most tightly disciplined and Stalinist of Western Europe's communist movements. 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. In 1956, however, Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan helped to establish a new group, the Khmer Students' Union.
The doctoral dissertations written by Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan express basic themes that were later to become the cornerstones of the policy adopted by Democratic Kampuchea.
Path to power
KPRP Second Congress
After returning to Cambodia in 1953, Pol Pot threw himself into party work. 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.
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. however, 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.
On July 20, 1962, Tou Samouth was murdered by the Cambodian government. In February 1963, at the WPK's second congress, Pol Pot was chosen to succeed Tou Samouth as the party's general secretary.
In July 1963, Pol Pot and most of the central committee left Phnom Penh to establish an insurgent base in Rotanokiri (Ratanakiri) Province in the northeast. Pol Pot had shortly before been put on a list of thirty four leftists who were summoned by Sihanouk to join the government and sign statements saying Sihanouk was the only possible leader for the country.
From enemy to ally: Sihanouk and the GRUNK
The region Pol Pot and the others moved to was inhabited by tribal minorities, the Khmer Loeu, whose rough treatment (including resettlement and forced assimilation) at the hands of the central government made them willing recruits for a guerrilla struggle.
In 1968, the Khmer Rouge forces launched a national insurgency across Cambodia. Though North Vietnam had not been informed of the decision, its forces provided shelter and weapons to the Khmer Rouge after the insurgency started.
The political appeal of the Khmer Rouge was increased as a result of the situation created by the removal of Sihanouk as head of state in 1970. Sihanouk, in exile in Beijing, made an alliance with the Khmer Rouge and became the nominal head of a Khmer Rouge-dominated government-in-exile (known by its French acronym, GRUNK) backed by the People's Republic of China. Sihanouk's popular support in rural Cambodia allowed the Khmer Rouge to extend its power and influence to the point that by 1973 it exercised de facto control over the majority of Cambodian territory, although only a minority of its population. Many people in Cambodia who helped the Khmer Rouge against the Lon Nol government thought they were fighting for the restoration of Sihanouk.
When the U.S. Congress suspended aid to Cambodia in 1973, the Khmer Rouge made sweeping gains in the country. On April 17, 1975 the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh.
The ideology of the Khmer Rouge evolved over time. The students, including future party leader Pol Pot, had been heavily influenced by the example of the French Communist Party (PCF). After 1960, the Khmer Rouge developed its own unique political ideas. For example, contrary to most Marxist doctrine, the Khmer Rouge considered the farmers in the countryside to be the proletariat and the true representatives of the working class. By the 1970s, the ideology of the Khmer Rouge combined its own ideas with the anti-colonialist ideas of the French Communist Party, which its leaders had acquired during their education in French universities in the 1950s. The Khmer Rouge leaders were also privately very resentful of what they saw as the arrogant attitude of the Vietnamese, and were determined to establish a form of communism very different to the Vietnamese model.
The Khmer Rouge in power
The leadership of the Khmer Rouge was largely unchanged between the 1960s and the mid-1990s. The Khmer Rouge leaders were mostly from middle-class families and had been educated at French universities.
The Standing Committee of the Khmer Rouge's Central Committee ("Party Center") during its period of power consisted of:
Pol Pot (Saloth Sar) "Brother number 1" the effective leader of the movement, General Secretary from 1963 until his death in 1998 Nuon Chea "Brother number 2" Prime Minister (alive) Ieng Sary "Brother number 3" Deputy Prime Minister (Pol Pot's brother-in-law) (alive) Ta Mok (Chhit Chhoeun) "Brother number 4" Final Khmer Rouge leader, Southwest Regional Secretary (died in custody awaiting trial for genocide, July 21, 2006) Khieu Samphan "Brother number 5" President of the Khmer Rouge (alive) Son Sen Defense Minister (dead) Yun Yat (dead) Ke Pauk "Brother number 13" Former secretary of the Northern zone (dead) Ieng Thirith (alive).In power, the Khmer Rouge carried out a radical program that included isolating the country from foreign influence, closing schools, hospitals and factories, abolishing banking, finance and currency, outlawing all religions, confiscating all private property and relocating people from urban areas to collective farms where forced labor was widespread.
In Phnom Penh and other cities, the Khmer Rouge told residents that they would be moved only about "two or three kilometers" outside the city and would return in "two or three days." Some witnesses say they were told that the evacuation was because of the "threat of American bombing" and that they did not have to lock their houses since the Khmer Rouge would "take care of everything" until they returned. These were not the first evacuations of civilian populations by the Khmer Rouge.
The Khmer Rouge attempted to turn Cambodia into a classless society by depopulating cities and forcing the urban population into agricultural communes. During their four years in power, the Khmer Rouge overworked and starved the population, at the same time executing selected groups (including intellectuals) and killing many others for even minor breaches of rules.
Cambodians were expected to produce three tons of rice per hectare; before the Khmer Rouge era, the average was only one ton per hectare. The Khmer Rouge forced people to work for 12 hours non-stop, without adequate rest or food.
The Khmer language has a complex system of usages to define speakers' rank and social status. During the rule of the Khmer Rouge, these usages were abolished. People were encouraged to call each other 'friend' or 'comrade' (Khmer: miet), and to avoid traditional signs of deference such as bowing or folding the hands in salutation, known as samphea. The Khmer Rouge invented new terms. People were told to 'forge' (Khmer: lot dam) a new revolutionary character, that they were the 'instruments' (Khmer: opokar) of the ruling body known as 'Angkar' (pronounced ahngkah; meaning 'The Organization'), and that nostalgia for prerevolutionary times (Khmer: choeu stek arom, or 'memory sickness') could result in execution.
Many Cambodians crossed the border into Thailand to seek asylum.
Killings and torture
The Khmer Rouge government arrested, tortured and eventually executed anyone suspected of belonging to several categories of supposed "enemies":
anyone with connections to the former government or with foreign governments professionals and intellectuals - in practice this included almost everyone with an education, or even people wearing glasses (which, in regime logic, suggested that they read a lot) ethnic Vietnamese, Cambodian Christians, Jews, Muslims and the Buddhist monkhood "economic sabotage" for which many of the former urban dwellers (who had not starved to death in the first place) were deemed to be guilty of by virtue of their lack of agricultural ability.Today, examples of the torture methods used by the Khmer Rouge can be seen at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
Number of deaths
The exact number of people who died as a result of the Khmer Rouge's policies is debated as is the cause of death among those who died. Access to the country during Khmer Rouge rule and during Vietnamese rule was very limited. The Vietnamese-installed regime that succeeded the Khmer Rouge claimed that 3.3 million had died. While modern research has located mass graves from the Khmer Rouge era all over Cambodia, the causes of death of the people in the graves is open to dispute and interpretation.
The United States Department of State and the State Department funded Yale Cambodian Genocide Project give estimates of the total death toll as 1.2 million and 1.7 million respectively. Former Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot gave a figure of 800,000.
In 1962, the last complete census before Cambodia was engulfed by war, the population of the country was 7.1 million.
Fall of the Khmer Rouge
In December 1978, after several years of border conflict as well as a flood of refugees into Vietnam, Pol Pot, afraid of being attacked by Vietnam, made a preemptive assault by invading Vietnam and looting villages that were close to the Cambodian border. Without the Soviet support, China and the United States came to aid the Khmer regime. As a result of this aggression, Vietnamese troops stopped the Cambodian advance and invaded Cambodia, capturing Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979 and deposing the Khmer Rouge regime. Despite Cambodians' traditional fear of Vietnamese domination, the Vietnamese invaders were assisted by the defections of Khmer Rouge activists, who formed the core of the post-Khmer Rouge government. The new government was mainly filled with Khmer Rouge members who opposed and survived Pol Pot's tyranny. The Khmer Rouge retreated to the west and continued to control an area near the Thai border for the next decade, unofficially protected by elements of the Thai Army and funded by smuggled diamonds and timber.
Despite their removal from power in Cambodia, the KR retained their seat at the UN.
The People's Republic of China launched a punitive invasion of northern Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge, still led by Pol Pot and the most capable militarily of the three rebel groups, received extensive military aid from China and intelligence from the Thai military.
Pol Pot relinquished his Khmer Rouge leadership post to Khieu Samphan in 1985, but he continued to be the driving force behind the Khmer Rouge insurgency, giving speeches to his followers. Some journalists commented that despite the international community's near-universal condemnation of the Khmer Rouge's brutal rule, a sizable number of Cambodians in KR-controlled areas seemed to genuinely support Pol Pot.
After a decade of inconclusive conflict, all Cambodian political factions signed a treaty in 1991 calling for elections and disarmament. But, in 1992 the Khmer Rouge resumed fighting, and the following year, rejected the results of the elections. Factional fighting in 1997 led to Pol Pot's trial and imprisonment by the Khmer Rouge itself. On December 29, 1998 the remaining leaders of the Khmer Rouge apologised for the deaths in the 1970s. In December 1999, Ta Mok and the remaining leaders surrendered and the Khmer Rouge effectively ceased to exist. Most of the remaining Khmer Rouge leaders live in the Pailin area or are hidden in Phnom Penh.
Recovery and trials
Since 1990 Cambodia has gradually recovered, demographically and economically, from the Khmer Rouge regime, although the psychological scars affect many Cambodian families and émigré communities. Although the current government teaches about Khmer Rouge atrocities in the schools, Cambodia has a very young population and by 2005 three-quarters of Cambodians were too young to remember the Khmer Rouge years. The younger generations would only know the Khmer Rouge through word-of-mouth from parents and elders.
In 1997, Cambodia established a Khmer Rouge Trial Task Force to create a legal and judicial structure to try the remaining leaders for war crimes and other crimes against humanity, but progress was slow, mainly because the Cambodian government of ex-Khmer Rouge cadre Hun Sen, despite its origins in the Vietnamese-backed regime of the 1980s, was reluctant to bring the Khmer Rouge leaders to trial.
Nonetheless, the task force began its work and took possession of two buildings on the grounds of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF) High Command headquarters in Kandal province just on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. In March 2006 the Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, nominated seven judges for a trial of the Khmer Rouge leaders.
In May 2006 Justice Minister Ang Vong Vathana announced that Cambodia's highest judicial body approved 30 Cambodian and U.N. judges to preside over the long-awaited genocide tribunal for surviving Khmer Rouge leaders.
Dissenting views
Linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky along with Edward Herman, and senior historian Michael Vickery argued in the late 1970s that the U.S. media exaggerated the number of deaths incurred in the initial revolutionary phase as part of a broader propaganda campaign to deflect criticism and scrutiny of U.S. military involvement in Indo-China. In a letter to the editor of the Harvard international Review historian Michael Vickery wrote that "writing as one of the three or four most experienced students of recent Cambodian history who have carried out extensive interviewing of Cambodians who lived through the Pol Pot years, I find that Chomsky and Herman were fully justified in their skepticism of mainline propaganda, and that little in the Cambodia section of their book requires revision in the light of more recent information - on the contrary, their approach is for the most part validated by careful analysis of the much larger body of material available today." Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide." On the other hand, Herman and Chomsky's views on Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge have been frequently criticized.
Supporters
A group of supporters of the Khmer Rouge, called "Group for the Study of the Theories of Pol Pot" was established in Cambodia in 2002.
It has published several pamplets in the Khmer language, as well as some in the English language.
It's website contains a number of documents related to the Khmer Rouge translated into English.
According to the group, the claims of genocide against the Khmer Rouge are false, and were created by enemies of Cambodia. They also argue that Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was the closest thing to a perfect society in human history.
For this reason, they seek to "understand the ideology of Brother Number 1, so that they can be used to achieve Year Zero on world scale".
Further reading
Among the very few western scholars who know the Khmer language and have published works about Cambodia are Ben Kiernan, David P. http://sidharta.com/books/index.jsp?uid=67 Elizabeth Becker: When the War Was over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy: The War After the War (Collier, New York, 1986) (very comprehensively footnoted) David P. Evan Gottesman: Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge: Inside the politics of Nation Building Henry Kamm: Cambodia: Report from a Stricken Land Ben Kiernan: The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79; Loung Ung: First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers Chanrithy Him: When Broken Glass Floats Michael Vickery: Cambodia 1975-1982 Carol Wagner: Soul Survivors: Stories of Women and Children in Cambodia
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