The Cambodian Genocide

WHERE AND WHEN:

The Cambodian genocide was perpetrated between 1975 and 1978.

Cambodia is a South-East Asian country bordering on Vietnam. Colonized by the French, in 1953 it became an independent state led by prince Norodom Sihanouk, overthrown in 1970 by a coup led by the US-backed general Lol Non. After a tough campaign against the Communists and the Vietnamese present in the country, in 1975 power passed into the hands of the Khmer Rouge, a small Leninist guerilla group especially popular in the rural areas of the north, which proclaimed the Republic of Democratic Kampuchea. Up until that moment, 80% of the population had consisted of ethnic Khmers. The main minorities were: Buddhist monks (approximately 60,000), Cham Muslims (approximately 100,000), Catholics, the Vietnamese and the Chinese who had almost total control of trade

SCALE OF THE KILLINGS:

Due to the lack of documentation, the final death toll is still not clear, but the genocide is reckoned to have had between 1,500,000 and 1,800,000 victims. Considering that at that time Cambodia had approximately 7,500,000 inhabitants, the average death rate recorded between 1975 and 1978 accounted for 20% to 29% of the population.
Driven by the need to find new "objective enemies", the Khmer Rouge murdered according to two main criteria: the town/countryside dichotomy and, to a lesser degree, the time factor, which distinguished between "new" and "old citizens".
Jointly, these two criteria accounted for a death rate of around 40% among town dwellers, while the rate in the countryside was around 10%.
The first category to be targeted were the alleged political opponents: the leaders of the previous regime and army officers (82.6%), the police (66.7%) and above all magistrates, 99% of whom were assasinated. As far as the minorities were concerned, 84% of all Cambodia’s Buddhist monks were killed, along with 33.7% of Cham Muslims, 48.6% of the country’s Catholics, 38.4% of the Chinese population and 37.5% of the Vietnamese.

THE PERPETRATORS:

Responsibility for the genocide project and its implementation lies within the Khmer Rouge movement and in particular with the so-called "Big Brothers", a group of some 20-25 men with common experiences and studies, identifiable in four main stages:

the time they spent in France in the 1950s, which shaped their ideological convictions
the period of opposition to prince Sihanouk,
years spent underground in the Cambodian jungle, where they fled after the Lol Non government charged them with high treason on account of their communist ideas,
their experience of the salient moments of the Chinese cultural revolution.

The leading "Big Brothers" were Pol Pot (Brother Number One), Leng Sary, Son Sen, Hou Youn, Hu Nim, Khieu Samphan and Duch, director of the notorious S-21 camp, Democratic Kampuchea’s main prison.
Executioners were recruited from among the poorly educated lower and middle cadres of the Communist Party, along with 60,000 very young soldier-peasants hand picked because they had not been "contaminated" by urban capitalism or by the imperialist education system.

PLANNING:

The Cambodian Communist Party differed from other south-east Asian communist parties in that it was extremely isolated and segregated: a very small party in numerical terms, fearful of being easily eliminated by its opponents.
These three factors drove the Khmer Rouge to impose the tightest possible control over every sphere of society, to the exclusion of absolutely all political debate and individual space. The genocide was perpetrated within a tight time frame and with even more radical methods than those of the Maoist and Stalinist models.
The plans were laid during the time the "Big Brothers" went underground in the jungle; there they developed an orthodox version of Communism founded on an exasperated anti-urban and anti-town dweller vision and an unrealistic economic plan based essentially on rice growing. The consequence of this physical, geographical and ideological isolation was decisive in the evolution of Pol Pot’s thinking and in his political line once he came to power. In reality, there was no linear or consistent planning, because, far more rapidly than in other totalitarian Communist regimes, the "objective enemy" was constantly being re-defined. There was, however, a strategic extermination plan with a "sociological" basis, which applied socio-territorial criteria and town vs. country and bourgeois vs. peasant dichotomies to identify the enemy.

IDEOLOGICAL REASONS:

The "Big Brothers" had absorbed Communist ideology during their studies in Paris and their contacts with the PcF (the French Communist Party).
The PcF was a party with strong Stalinist leanings, inspired by an anti-social attitude, by the conviction that the political struggle was based exclusively on the amicus/hostis relationship and by the fundamental value attributed to violence as a solution. Precisely when the Khmer Rouge movement was taking power in Cambodia, the spread of the Chinese cultural revolution (1966-75) accentuated the value of permanaent revolution and of access to power for the poorest of the poor. In addition, the Khmer Rouge regime used the concept of race as a propaganda pretext to better justify their persecution of "enemies of the people". The instrumental aspect of this approach is clearly highlighted by the fact that even ethnic Khmers were the indiscriminate victims of the genocide.
Hatred of the ruling class in towns and cities, the symbol of a corrupt and oppressive economy, ideally linked to the West and to imperialism, was a powerful detonator.

METHODS OF EXECUTION:

First the Khmer Rouge eliminated elements linked to the old regime, contaminated by capitalism. It is important to note the "sanitizing" aspect of the Cambodian genocide, borrowed from the Soviet example: Leninist mass terror was intended to purify Russian lands, eliminating all "harmful insects". In this sense the killings can be interpreted as an attempt to eradicate the "bourgeois tumor" from Khmer society.
Then they proceeded to deport hundreds of thousands of town and city dwellers to the countryside, both to re-educate them (releasing them from their bourgeois habits and from the cancer of commerce), and also to launch the illusory economic plan that was based on the primitive "grain of rice economy". The greatest number of deaths occurred during the exhausting forced marches from the towns to the country, but even those who survived found no better fate in the labour camps, situated in unhealthy, malaria-ridden areas where they literally starved to death. In Cambodia, as in other totalitarian regimes, an "archipelago of concentration camps" was set up, the main "re-education" camp of which – known as S-21 -, was directed with incredible ferocity by "Big Brother" Duch, who forced prisoners to confess their alleged crimes by torturing them cruelly and mercilessly before finishing them off. general.