Survivor guilt or survivor's guilt (but also survivor syndrome, survivor's syndrome, survivor disorder and survivor's disorder) happens when individuals feel guilty after they survive a near death or traumatic event when their loved ones perished. It can cause similar depressive symptoms associated with PTSD.
Niederlande first introduced the term to describe the feeling of
punishment many of the Holocaust survivors felt for surviving their
loved ones.The experience and manifestation of survivor's guilt will depend on an individual's psychological profile. When the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV
(DSM-IV) was published, survivor guilt was removed as a recognized
specific diagnosis, and redefined as a significant symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). History of survivor guilt outlines similar symptoms among many
groups and individuals that experience tragic situations. Other patterns
of guilt are found in medical aid groups
who lose patients and place blame on themselves. Examples of traumatic
events involve situations where an individual feels intense feeling of
guilt after a loved one has past. War and the losing of a loved one due
to traumatic events are closely related to feelings of depression and anxiety, that can later lead to PTSD. Suicidal thoughts are related to intense feelings of anxiety and depression from guilt related to traumatic events.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
People that have a lasting fear or other mental health issues after traumatizing events may be experiencing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Almost all people experience some type of traumatic event throughout
their lifetime, and a percentage (5.6%) will be diagnosed with PTSD.
Symptoms include: unwillingly reliving a traumatic event, avoiding
situations that are a reminder of the event, feelings of intense
distress that affects everyday activities, feeling of fear and horror when there is no threat, etc.,. An individual whose everyday activities are hindered due to recalling a traumatic event may be experiencing PTSD.
History
A mass grave in a concentration camp from the Holocaust. Survivors of such traumatic events may experience feelings of guilt or wonder whether they deserved to survive.
Survivor syndrome was first identified during the 1960s. Several
therapists recognized similar if not identical conditions among Holocaust survivors. Similar signs and symptoms have been recognized in survivors of traumatic situations including combat, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, air-crashes and wide-ranging job layoffs.
A variant form has been found among rescue and emergency services
personnel who blame themselves for doing too little to help those in
danger, and among therapists, who may feel a form of guilt in the face
of their patients' suffering.
Stephen Joseph, a psychologist at the University of Warwick, has studied the survivors of the capsizing of the MS Herald of Free Enterprise
which killed 193 of the 459 passengers. His studies showed that 60
percent of the survivors suffered from survivor guilt. Joseph went on to
say:
There were three types:
first, there was guilt about staying alive while others died;
second, there was guilt about the things they failed to do –
these people often suffered post-traumatic 'intrusions' as they relived
the event again and again;
third, there were feelings of guilt about what they did do,
such as scrambling over others to escape. These people usually wanted to
avoid thinking about the catastrophe. They didn't want to be reminded
of what really happened.
Sufferers sometimes blame themselves for the deaths of others,
including those who died while rescuing the survivor or whom the
survivor tried unsuccessfully to save.
Survivor syndrome
Trousers from a concentration camp uniform owned by Shimson Kleuger,
interned in three KZ camps. Kleuger increasingly isolated himself in
the family mansion, likely as a result of trauma left by the experiences
of the Holocaust.
Survivor syndrome, also known as concentration camp syndrome (or KZ syndrome on account of the German term Konzentrationslager),
are terms which have been used to describe the reactions and behaviors
of people who have survived massive and adverse events, such as the Holocaust, or the Rape of Nanjing.
In 1949, Eddy de Wind, a Dutch psychiatrist and survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp,
introduced the term "concentration camp syndrome" regarding the
psychological consequences of persecution, describing the "pathological
after-effects" unique to former prisoners of Nazi concentration and extermination camps. The subsequently well-documented syndrome among Holocaust survivors includes anxiety and depression, intellectual impairment, social withdrawal, sleep disturbance and nightmares, physical complaints and mood swings
with loss of drive. Several studies have examined the "chronic and
progressive" nature of the condition, with symptoms increasing in
intensity as survivors age.
Commonly such survivors feel guilty that they have survived the
trauma and others – such as their family, friends, and colleagues – did
not.
Both conditions, along with other descriptive syndromes covering a range of traumatic events are now subsumed under post-traumatic stress disorder.
AIDS survivor syndrome
AIDS
survivor syndrome refers to the psychological effects of living with
the long-term trajectory of the AIDS epidemic and includes survivor's
guilt, depression, and feelings of being forgotten in contemporary discussions concerning HIV. While AIDS survivor syndrome has not been recognized as a pathologizable illness by the NIH (as of December 2017), scientific research and publications are available that address this issue.
Examples
Waylon Jennings
American musician Waylon Jennings was a guitarist for Buddy Holly's band and initially had a seat on the ill-fated aircraft on February 3, 1959, which would later come to be known as "the day the music died". Jennings, however, gave up his seat to the sick J.P. "Big Bopper" Richardson,
only to later learn of the plane's crash. When Holly learned that
Jennings was not going to fly, he said, "Well, I hope your ol' bus
freezes up." Jennings responded, "Well, I hope your ol' plane crashes."
This exchange of words, though made in jest at the time, haunted
Jennings for the rest of his life.
On February 14, 2018, Nikolas Cruz went into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida,
and shot randomly at students and staff, killing 17 people and injuring
17 others. Sydney Aiello, whose close friend was killed, struggled with
survivor's guilt, and was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress
disorder. On March 17, 2019, Aiello died by suicide at the age of 19. Less than a week later, on March 23, Coral Springs
police announced that Calvin Desir, a juvenile male student from
Stoneman Douglas, had been found dead as a result of an apparent
suicide.
Stephen Whittle
Stephen Whittle was a Liverpool F.C. fan who had bought a ticket for the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest F.C.
on 15 April 1989, but sold his ticket to a friend due to work reasons.
The friend (whom he and his family have chosen to leave unidentified)
was one of the 97 victims of the human crush
at that game. Whittle became unable to go to football matches due to
his guilt and related feeling of responsibility for his friend's death,
and died by suicide on 26 February 2011, almost 22 years after the
ill-fated match.
The War-Related Poetry of Charles Causley
The British poet, broadcaster and teacher Charles Causley
(1917-2003) served at sea and on land in the Royal Navy for most of the
Second World War. Afterwards, he trained and worked as a teacher in Launceston, Cornwall,
and (in his spare time and after retiring) wrote hundreds of poems for
adults and children, between 1951 and 2000. One strong theme running
through his work is his own sense of survivor's guilt -- a feeling in
part triggered by the death of a friend who left Launceston for the war
on the same train in 1940, but was later lost in action in the North
Sea. For instance, Causley tells of how, when walking through the town
centre years later, he would cross the road in order to avoid coming
face-to-face with that friend's mother.
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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
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. The organisation was largely dissolved by the mid-1990s and finally surrendered completely in 1999. 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.
Since the deterioration in relations between the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and Democratic Kampuchea,
the Vietnamese government no longer recognize the legitimacy of the
Khmer Rouge, and as a result, they call the Khmer Rouge the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique (Vietnamese: Tập đoàn Pol Pot-Ieng Sary) or the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary reactionary clique (Vietnamese: Tập đoàn phản động Pol Pot-Ieng Sary).
Ideology
Influence of Communist thought
Khmer Rouge clothing, consisting of a red krama, black outfit and shoes made of tires.
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, ranging from interpreting it as the "purest" Marxist–Leninist movement to characterising it as an anti-Marxist "peasant revolution". The first interpretation has been criticized by historian Ben Kiernan, who asserts that it comes from a "convenient anti-communist perspective". Its leaders and theorists, most of whom had been exposed to the heavily Stalinist outlook of the French Communist Party during the 1950s, 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; however, the Khmer Rouge displayed these characteristics in a more extreme form.
Additionally, non-Khmers, who comprised a significant part of the
supposedly favored segment of the peasantry, were singled out because of
their race.
According to Ben Kiernan, this was "neither a communist proletarian
revolution that privileged the working class, nor a peasant revolution
that favored all farmers".
While the CPK described itself as the "number 1 Communist state" once it was in power, some communist regimes, such as Vietnam, saw it as a Maoist deviation from orthodox Marxism.According to author Rebecca Gidley, the Khmer Rouge "almost immediately
erred by implementing a Maoist doctrine rather than following the
Marxist–Leninist prescriptions."
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.
In 1981, following the Cambodian–Vietnamese War, in an attempt to get
foreign support, the Khmer Rouge officially renounced communism.
Khmer nationalism
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. 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.
Some historians such as Ben Kiernan have stated that the importance the
regime gave to race overshadowed its conceptions of class.
The Khmer Rouge targeted particular groups of people, among them Buddhist monks, ethnic minorities, and educated elites.
Once in power, the Khmer Rouge explicitly targeted the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Cham minority and even their partially Khmer offspring.
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.
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".
Autarky
Khmer Rouge bullet holes left at Angkor Wat temple
The Khmer Rouge's economic policy, which was largely based on the plans of Khieu Samphan, focused on the achievement of national self-reliance through an initial phase of agricultural collectivism.
This would then be used as a route to achieve rapid social
transformation and industrial and technological development without
assistance from foreign powers, a process which the party characterised
as a "Super Great Leap Forward".
The party's General Secretary Pol Pot strongly influenced the propagation of the policy of autarky.
He was reportedly impressed with the self-sufficient manner in which
the mountain tribes of Cambodia lived, which the party believed was a
form of primitive communism.
Khmer Rouge theory developed the concept that the nation should take
"agriculture as the basic factor and use the fruits of agriculture to
build industry".
In 1975, Khmer Rouge representatives to China said that Pol Pot's
belief was that the collectivisation of agriculture was capable of
"[creating] a complete communist society without wasting time on the
intermediate steps". Society was accordingly classified into peasant "base people" (ប្រជាជនមូលដ្ឋានprâchéachôn mulôdthan), who would be the bulwark of the transformation; and urban "new people" (ប្រជាជនថ្មីprâchéachôn thmei),
who were to be reeducated or liquidated. The focus of the Khmer Rouge
leadership on the peasantry as the base of the revolution was according
to Michael Vickery a product of their status as "petty-bourgeois radicals who had been overcome by peasantist romanticism".
The opposition of the peasantry and the urban population in Khmer Rouge
ideology was heightened by the structure of the Cambodian rural economy,
where small farmers and peasants had historically suffered from
indebtedness to urban money-lenders rather than suffering from
indebtedness to landlords.
The policy of evacuating major towns, as well as providing a reserve of
easily exploitable agricultural labour, was likely viewed positively by
the Khmer Rouge's peasant supporters as removing the source of their
debts.
Relationship to religion
Democratic Kampuchea was an atheist state,
although its constitution stated that everyone had freedom of religion,
or not to hold a religion. However, it specified that what it termed
"reactionary religion" would not be permitted. While in practice religious activity was not tolerated, the relationship of the CPK to the majority Cambodian Theravada Buddhism was complex; several key figures in its history such as Tou Samouth and Ta Mok were former monks, along with many lower level cadres, who often proved some of the strictest disciplinarians.
While there was extreme harassment of Buddhist institutions, there was a
tendency for the CPK regime to internalise and reconfigure the
symbolism and language of Cambodian Buddhism so that many revolutionary slogans mimicked the formulae learned by young monks during their training.
Some cadres who had previously been monks interpreted their change of
vocation as a simple movement from a lower to a higher religion,
mirroring attitudes around the growth of Cao Dai in the 1920s.
Buddhist laity seem not to have been singled out for persecution, although traditional belief in the tutelary spirits, or neak ta, rapidly eroded as people were forcibly moved from their home areas.The position with Buddhist monks was more complicated: as with Islam,
many religious leaders were killed whereas many ordinary monks were
sent to remote monasteries where they were subjected to hard physical
labour.
The same division between rural and urban populations was seen in the
regime's treatment of monks. For instance, those from urban monasteries
were classified as "new monks" and sent to rural areas to live alongside
"base monks" of peasant background, who were classified as "proper and
revolutionary". Monks were not ordered to defrock until as late as 1977 in Kratié Province,
where many monks found that they reverted to the status of lay
peasantry as the agricultural work they were allocated to involved
regular breaches of monastic rules.
While there is evidence of widespread vandalism of Buddhist
monasteries, many more than were initially thought survived the Khmer
Rouge years in fair condition, as did most Khmer historical monuments,
and it is possible that stories of their near-total destruction were
propaganda issued by the successor People's Republic of Kampuchea. Nevertheless, it has been estimated that nearly 25,000 Buddhist monks were killed by the regime.
The repression of Islam
(practised by the country's Cham minority) was extensive. Islamic
religious leaders were executed, although some Cham Muslims appear to
have been told they could continue devotions in private as long as it
did not interfere with work quotas. Mat Ly, a Cham who served as the deputy minister of agriculture under the People's Republic of Kampuchea,
stated that Khmer Rouge troops had perpetrated a number of massacres in
Cham villages in the Central and Eastern zones where the residents had
refused to give up Islamic customs. While François Ponchaud stated that Christians were invariably taken away and killed with the accusation of having links with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, at least some cadres appear to have regarded it as preferable to the "feudal" class-based Buddhism. Nevertheless, it remained deeply suspect to the regime thanks to its close links to French colonialism; Phnom Penh cathedral was razed along with other places of worship.
Interpretations
In
analysing the Khmer Rouge regime, scholars place it within historical
context. The Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975 through the Cambodian Civil War, where the United States had supported the opposing regime of Lon Nol and heavily bombed Cambodia,
primarily targeting communist Vietnamese troops who were allied to the
Khmer Rouge, but it gave the Khmer Rouge's leadership a justification to
eliminate the pro-Vietnamese faction within the group. The Cambodian genocide was stopped with the Khmer Rouge's overthrow in 1979 by Communist Vietnam. There have been allegations of United States support for the Khmer Rouge following their overthrow and the United Nations General Assembly voted to continue recognising Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea. Communism in South East Asia was deeply divided, as China supported the Khmer Rouge, while the Soviet Union and Vietnam opposed it.
There are three interpretations of the Khmer Rouge: totalitarianism, revisionism, and postrevisionism. Historian Ben Kiernan describes their rule as totalitarian but places it within the context of "xenophobic European nationalism", from which came their agrarianism and the establishment of a Great Cambodia, rather than communism or Marxism. Pol Pot's biographers David P. Chandler and Philip Short place more emphasis on their ideological heritage of communism; it was not easy to apply Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin's ideas to Cambodia, and communism was chosen as a way to get rid of French colonialism and transform the feudal society.
Another interpretation, as proposed by historian Michael Vickery, is
that of a bottom-up, left-wing peasant revolution with the Khmer Rouge
as the revolutionaries.
The Khmer Rouge was an intellectual group with a middle-class
background and a romanticised sympathy for rural poor people but with
little to no awareness that their radical policies would lead to such
violence; according to this view, the applicability of genocide is rejected and the violence was an unintentional consequence that was beyond the Khmer Rouge's control.
For Vickery, communist ideology does not explain the violence any more
than those closer to the peasants', such as agrarianism, populism, and nationalism.
Vickery wrote of communisms, as different communist factions were
opposed to each other and fought against each other, resulting in
further escalation of violence.
A synthesis of both interpretations rejects the totalitarian
theory in favor of a bottom-up perspective, which emphasises that the
peasants did not have revolutionary ambitions.
According to this perspective, the Khmer Rouge was able to effectively
manipulate the peasants to mobilise them towards collective goals that
they did not understand, or where the revolutionaries had no desire to
create a new society, which would require a certain level of support and
understanding that the Khmer Rouge was not able to win over, but were
mainly motivated to tear down the old one and violence became an end in
itself.
History
Origins
Early history
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.
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.
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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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 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, 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.
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. Hou Yuon studied economics and law; Son Sen studied education and literature; and Hu Nim studied law. 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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
Path to power and reign
KPRP Second Congress
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
The region where 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 1965, Pol Pot made a visit of several months to
North Vietnam and China.
From the 1950s on, Pol Pot had made frequent visits to the People's
Republic of China, receiving political and military training—especially
on the theory of dictatorship of the proletariat—from the personnel of the CCP.From November 1965 to February 1966, Pol Pot received training from high-ranking CCP officials such as Chen Boda and Zhang Chunqiao, on topics such as the communist revolution in China, class conflicts, and Communist International. Pol Pot was particularly impressed by the lecture on political purge by Kang Sheng.
This experience had enhanced his prestige when he returned to the WPK's
"liberated areas". Despite friendly relations between Sihanouk and the
Chinese, the latter kept Pol Pot's visit a secret from Sihanouk.
In September 1966, the WPK changed its name to the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK).
The change in the name of the party was a closely guarded secret. Lower
ranking members of the party and even the Vietnamese were not told of
it and neither was the membership until many years later. The party
leadership endorsed armed struggle against the government, then led by
Sihanouk. In 1968, the Khmer Rouge was officially formed, and its 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. Vietnamese
support for the insurgency made it impossible for the Cambodian military
to effectively counter it. For the next two years, the insurgency grew
as Sihanouk did very little to stop it. As the insurgency grew stronger,
the party finally openly declared itself to be the Communist Party of
Kampuchea.
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. Premier Lon Nol deposed Sihanouk with the support of the National Assembly.
Sihanouk, who was in exile in Beijing, made an alliance with the Khmer
Rouge on the advice of CCP, and became the nominal head of a Khmer
Rouge–dominated government-in-exile (known by its French acronym GRUNK) backed by China. In 1970 alone, the Chinese reportedly gave 400 tons of military aid to the United Front.
Although thoroughly aware of the weakness of Lon Nol's forces and loath
to commit American military force to the new conflict in any form other
than air power, the Nixon administration supported the newly proclaimed Khmer Republic.
On 29 March 1970, the North Vietnamese launched an offensive
against the Cambodian army. Documents uncovered from the Soviet Union
archives revealed that the invasion was launched at the explicit request
of the Khmer Rouge following negotiations with Nuon Chea.
A force of North Vietnamese quickly overran large parts of eastern
Cambodia reaching to within 15 miles (24 km) of Phnom Penh before being
pushed back. By June, three months after the removal of Sihanouk, they
had swept government forces from the entire northeastern third of the
country. After defeating those forces, the North Vietnamese turned the
newly won territories over to the local insurgents. The Khmer Rouge also
established "liberated" areas in the south and the southwestern parts
of the country, where they operated independently of the North
Vietnamese.
After Sihanouk showed his support for the Khmer Rouge by visiting
them in the field, their ranks swelled from 6,000 to 50,000 fighters.
Many of the new recruits for the Khmer Rouge were apolitical peasants
who fought in support of the king, not for communism, of which they had
little understanding.
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.
By 1975, with the Lon Nol government running out of ammunition, it was
clear that it was only a matter of time before the government would
collapse. On 17 April 1975, there was the Fall of Phnom Penh, as the Khmer Rouge captured the capital.
During the civil war, unparalleled atrocities were executed on both sides. While the civil war was brutal, its estimated death toll has been revised downwards over time.
The relationship between the massive carpet bombing
of Cambodia by the United States and the growth of the Khmer Rouge, in
terms of recruitment and popular support, has been a matter of interest
to historians. Some scholars, including Michael Ignatieff, Adam Jones and Greg Grandin,
have cited the United States intervention and bombing campaign
(spanning 1965–1973) as a significant factor which led to increased
support for the Khmer Rouge among the Cambodian peasantry.
According to Ben Kiernan, the Khmer Rouge "would not have won
power without U.S. economic and military destabilization of Cambodia.
... It used the bombing's devastation and massacre of civilians as
recruitment propaganda and as an excuse for its brutal, radical policies and its purge of moderate communists and Sihanoukists."
Pol Pot biographer David P. Chandler writes that the bombing "had the
effect the Americans wanted – it broke the Communist encirclement of
Phnom Penh", but it also accelerated the collapse of rural society and
increased social polarization. Peter Rodman and Michael Lind claim that the United States intervention saved the Lon Nol regime from collapse in 1970 and 1973.
Craig Etcheson acknowledged that U.S. intervention increased
recruitment for the Khmer Rouge but disputed that it was a primary cause
of the Khmer Rouge victory. William Shawcross
writes that the United States bombing and ground incursion plunged
Cambodia into the chaos that Sihanouk had worked for years to avoid.
By 1973, Vietnamese support of the Khmer Rouge had largely disappeared.
On the other hand, the CCP largely "armed and trained" the Khmer Rouge,
including Pol Pot, both during the Cambodian Civil War and the years
afterward. In 1970 alone, the Chinese reportedly gave 400 tons of military aid to the National United Front of Kampuchea formed by Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge.
1975–1993
In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power in Cambodia, and in January 1976, Democratic Kampuchea was established. During the Cambodian genocide,
the CCP was the main international patron of the Khmer Rouge, supplying
"more than 15,000 military advisers" and most of its external aid. It is estimated that at least 90% of the foreign aid to Khmer Rouge came from China, with 1975 alone seeing US$1
billion in interest-free economic and military aid and US$20 million
gift, which was "the biggest aid ever given to any one country by
China". In June 1975, Pol Pot and other officials of Khmer Rouge met with Mao Zedong in Beijing,
receiving Mao's approval and advice; in addition, Mao also taught Pot
his "Theory of Continuing Revolution under the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat" (无产阶级专政下继续革命理论). High-ranking CCP officials such as Zhang Chunqiao later visited Cambodia to offer help.
Democratic Kampuchea was overthrown by the Vietnamese army in January 1979, and the Khmer Rouge fled to Thailand.
However, to counter the power of the Soviet Union and Vietnam, a group
of countries including China, the United States, Thailand as well as
some Western countries supported the Khmer Rouge-dominated Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea to continue holding Cambodia's seat in the United Nations, which was held until 1993, after the Cold War had ended.
In 2009, China defended its past ties with previous Cambodian
governments, including that of Democratic Kampuchea or Khmer Rouge,
which at the time had a legal seat at the United Nations and foreign
relations with more than 70 countries.
The
governing structure of Democratic Kampuchea was split between the state
presidium headed by Khieu Samphan, the cabinet headed by Pol Pot (who
was also Democratic Kampuchea's prime minister) and the party's own
Politburo and Central Committee. All were complicated by a number of
political factions which existed in 1975. The leadership of the Party
Centre, the faction which was headed by Pol Pot, remained largely
unchanged from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s. Its leaders were mostly
from middle-class families and had been educated at French
universities.
The second significant faction was made up of men who had been active
in the pre-1960 party and had stronger links to Vietnam as a result;
government documents show that there were several major shifts in power
between factions during the period in which the regime was in control.
In 1975–1976, there were several powerful regional Khmer Rouge
leaders who maintained their own armies and had different party
backgrounds than the members of the Pol Pot clique, particularly So Phim and Nhim Ros, both of whom were vice presidents of the state presidium and members of the Politburo and Central Committee respectively.
A possible military coup attempt was made in May 1976, and its leader
was a senior Eastern Zone cadre named Chan Chakrey, who had been
appointed deputy secretary of the army's General Staff.
A reorganisation that occurred in September 1976, during which Pol Pot
was demoted in the state presidium, was later presented as an attempted
pro-Vietnamese coup by the Party Center.
Over the next two years, So Phim, Nhim Ros, Vorn Vet and many other
figures who had been associated with the pre-1960 party were arrested
and executed.
Phim's execution was followed by that of the majority of the cadres and
much of the population of the Eastern Zone that he had controlled.
The Party Centre, lacking much in the way of their own military
resources, accomplished their seizure of power by forming an alliance
with Southwestern Zone leader Ta Mok and Pok, head of the North Zone's
troops. Both men were of a purely peasant background and were therefore
natural allies of the strongly peasant ideology of the Pol Pot faction.
The Standing Committee of the Khmer Rouge's Central Committee during its period of power consisted of the following:
Pol Pot (Saloth Sar), "Brother number 1", General Secretary from
1963 until his death in 1998 and effectively the leader of the
movement.
Nuon Chea (Long Bunruot), "Brother number 2", Prime Minister. High status made him Pol Pot's "right hand man".
Ieng Sary (Pol Pot's brother-in-law), "Brother number 3", Deputy Prime Minister.
Khieu Samphan, "Brother number 4", President of Democratic Kampuchea.
Ta Mok (Chhit Chhoeun), "Brother number 5", Southwest Regional Secretary.
Son Sen, "Brother number 89", Defence Minister, superior of Kang Kek Iew and executed on Pol Pot's orders for treason.
Yun Yat, wife of Son Sen, former Information Minister, executed with Son Sen.
Ke Pauk, "Brother number 13", former secretary of the Northern zone.
Ieng Thirith, sister-in-law of Pol Pot and wife of Ieng Sary, former Social Affairs Minister.
Life under the Khmer Rouge
The
Khmer Rouge carried out a radical program that included isolating the
country from all foreign influences, closing schools, hospitals and some
factories, abolishing banking, finance and currency, and collectivising
agriculture. Khmer Rouge theorists, who developed the ideas of Hou Yuon
and Khieu Samphan, believed that an initial period of self-imposed
economic isolation and national self-sufficiency would stimulate the
rebirth of the crafts as well as the rebirth of the country's latent
industrial capability.
Evacuation of the cities
In
Phnom Penh and other cities, the Khmer Rouge told residents that they
would be moved only about "two or three kilometers" away from the city
and would return in "two or three days". Some witnesses said they were
told that the evacuation was because of the "threat of American bombing"
and they were also told that they did not have to lock their houses
since the Khmer Rouge would "take care of everything" until they
returned. If people refused to evacuate, they would immediately be
killed and their homes would be burned to the ground. The evacuees were
sent on long marches to the countryside, which killed thousands of
children, elderly people and sick people.
These were not the first evacuations of civilian populations by the
Khmer Rouge because similar evacuations of populations without
possessions had been occurring on a smaller scale since the early 1970s.
On arrival at the villages to which they had been assigned,
evacuees were required to write brief autobiographical essays. The
essay's content, particularly with regard to the subject's activity
during the Khmer Republic regime, was used to determine their fate.
Military officers and those occupying elite professional roles were
usually sent for reeducation, which in practice meant immediate
execution or confinement in a labour camp.
Those with specialist technical skills often found themselves sent back
to cities to restart production in factories which had been interrupted
by the takeover. The remaining displaced urban population ("new people"), as part of the regime's drive to increase food production, were placed into agricultural communes
alongside the peasant "base people" or "old people". The latter's
holdings were collectivised. Cambodians were expected to produce three
tons of rice per hectare, whereas before the Khmer Rouge era the average
was one ton per hectare.
The lack of agricultural knowledge on the part of the former city dwellers made famine
inevitable. The rural peasantry were often unsympathetic, or they were
too frightened to assist them. Such acts as picking wild fruit or
berries were seen as "private enterprise" and punished with death.
Labourers were forced to work long shifts without adequate rest or food,
resulting in many deaths through exhaustion, illness and starvation.
Workers were executed for attempting to escape from the communes, for
breaching minor rules, or after being denounced by colleagues. If
caught, offenders were taken off to a distant forest or field after
sunset and killed.
Unwilling to import Western medicines, the regime turned to traditional
medicine instead and placed medical care in the hands of cadres who
were only given rudimentary training. The famine, forced labour and lack
of access to appropriate services led to a high number of deaths.
Economic policies
Khmer
Rouge economic policies took a similarly extreme course. Officially,
trade was restricted to bartering between communes, a policy which the
regime developed in order to enforce self-reliance. Banks were raided, and all currency and records were destroyed by fire, thus eliminating any claim to funds.
After 1976, the regime reinstated discussion of export in the period
after the disastrous effects of its planning began to become apparent. Commercial fishing was banned in 1976.
Family relations
Rooms of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum contain thousands of photos taken by the Khmer Rouge of their victims.
The regulations made by the Angkar (អង្គការ, The Organisation, which
was the ruling body) also had effects on the traditional Cambodian
family unit. The regime was primarily interested in increasing the young
population and one of the strictest regulations prohibited sex outside marriage which was punishable by execution. The Khmer Rouge followed a morality based on an idealised conception of the attitudes of prewar rural Cambodia.
Marriage required permission from the authorities, and the Khmer Rouge
were strict, giving permission to marry only to people of the same class
and level of education. Such rules were applied even more strictly to
party cadres.
While some refugees spoke of families being deliberately broken up,
this appears to have referred mainly to the traditional Cambodian
extended family unit, which the regime actively sought to destroy in
favour of small nuclear units of parents and children.
The regime promoted arranged marriages,
particularly between party cadres. While some academics such as Michael
Vickery have noted that arranged marriages were also a feature of rural
Cambodia prior to 1975, those conducted by the Khmer Rouge regime often
involved people unfamiliar to each other.
As well as reflecting the Khmer Rouge obsession with production and
reproduction, such marriages were designed to increase people's
dependency on the regime by undermining existing family and other
loyalties.
It is often concluded that the Khmer Rouge regime promoted functional illiteracy.
This statement is not completely incorrect, but it is quite inaccurate.
The Khmer Rouge wanted to "eliminate all traces of Cambodia's
imperialist past", and its previous culture was one of them. The Khmer
Rouge did not want the Cambodian people to be completely ignorant, and primary education
was provided to them. Nevertheless, the Khmer Rouge's policies
dramatically reduced the Cambodian population's cultural inflow as well
as its knowledge and creativity. The Khmer Rouge's goal was to gain full
control of all of the information that the Cambodian people received
and spread revolutionary culture among the masses.
Education came to a "virtual standstill" in Democratic Kampuchea.
Irrespective of central policies, most local cadres considered higher
education useless and as a result, they were suspicious of those who had
received it. The regime abolished all literary schooling above primary grades, ostensibly focusing on basic literacy instead.
In practice, primary schools were not set up in many areas because of
the extreme disruptions which had been caused by the regime's takeover,
and most ordinary people, especially "new people", felt that their
children were taught nothing worthwhile in those schools which still
existed. The exception was the Eastern Zone, which until 1976 was run by
cadres who were closely connected with Vietnam rather than the Party
Centre, where a more organised system seems to have existed under which
children were given extra rations, taught by teachers who were drawn
from the "base people" and given a limited number of official textbooks.
Beyond primary education, technical courses were taught in factories to students who were drawn from the favoured "base people".
There was a general reluctance to increase people's education in
Democratic Kampuchea, and in some districts, cadres were known to kill
people who boasted about their educational accomplishments, and it was
considered bad form for people to allude to any special technical
training.
Based on a speech which Pol Pot made in 1978, it appears that he may
have ultimately envisaged that illiterate students with approved poor
peasant backgrounds could become trained engineers within ten years by
doing a lot of targeted studying along with a lot of practical work.
Language reforms
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" (មិត្ត; mitt) and to avoid traditional signs of deference such as bowing or folding the hands in salutation, known as sampeah.
Language was also transformed in other ways. The Khmer Rouge invented
new terms. In keeping with the regime's theories on Khmer identity, the
majority of new words were coined with reference to Pali or Sanskrit terms, while Chinese and Vietnamese-language borrowings were discouraged. People were told to "forge" (លត់ដំ; lot dam) a new revolutionary character, that they were the "instruments" (ឧបករណ៍; opokar) of the ruling body known as Angkar (អង្គការ, The Organisation) and that nostalgia for pre-revolutionary times (ឈឺសតិអារម្មណ៍; chheu satek arom, or "memory sickness") could result in execution.
Crimes against humanity
Skulls of Khmer Rouge victimsRemains
of victims of the Khmer Rouge in the Kampong Trach Cave, Kiry Seila
Hills, Rung Tik (Water Cave), or Rung Khmao (Dead Cave)
Acting through the Santebal,
the Khmer Rouge arrested, tortured and eventually executed anyone who
was suspected of belonging to several categories of supposed enemies:
People with connections to former Cambodian governments, either those of the Khmer Republic or the Sangkum, to the Khmer Republic military, or to foreign governments.
Professionals and intellectuals, including almost everyone with an
education and people who understood a foreign language. Many artists,
including musicians, writers, and filmmakers were executed including Ros Serey Sothea, Pan Ron and Sinn Sisamouth.
Ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese, ethnic Thai and other minorities in the Eastern Highlands, Cambodian Christians (most of whom were Catholic), Muslims and senior Buddhist monks. The Roman Catholic cathedral of Phnom Penh was razed. The Khmer Rouge forced Muslims to eat pork, which they regard as forbidden (ḥarām). Many of those who refused were killed. Christian clergy and Muslim imams were executed.
"Economic saboteurs" as many former urban dwellers were deemed guilty of sabotage because of their lack of agricultural ability.
Party cadres who had fallen under political suspicion: the regime
tortured and executed thousands of party members during its purges.
The Santebal established over 150 prisons for political opponents; Tuol Sleng is a former high school that was turned into the Santebal headquarters and interrogation center for the highest value political prisoners. Tuol Sleng was operated by the Santebal commander Khang Khek Ieu, more commonly known as Comrade Duch, together with his subordinates Mam Nai and Tang Sin Hean.According to Ben Kiernan, "all but seven of the twenty thousand Tuol Sleng prisoners" were executed.
The buildings of Tuol Sleng have been preserved as they were left when
the Khmer Rouge were driven out in 1979. Several of the rooms are now
lined with thousands of black-and-white photographs of prisoners that
were taken by the Khmer Rouge.
On 7 August 2014, when sentencing two former Khmer Rouge leaders
to life imprisonment, Cambodian judge Nil Nonn said there was evidence
of "a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population
of Cambodia". He said the leaders, Nuon Chea, the regime's chief
ideologue and former deputy to late leader Pol Pot and Khieu Samphan,
the former head of state, together in a "joint criminal enterprise"
were involved in murder, extermination, political persecution and other
inhumane acts related to the mass eviction of city-dwellers, and
executions of enemy soldiers.
In November 2018, the trial convicted Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan of
crimes against humanity and genocide against the Vietnamese, while Nuon
Chea was also found guilty of genocide relating to the Chams.
Number of deaths
According
to a 2001 academic source, the most widely accepted estimates of excess
deaths under the Khmer Rouge range from 1.5 million to 2 million,
although figures as low as 1 million and as high as 3 million have been
cited; conventionally accepted estimates of executions range from
500,000 to 1 million, "a third to one half of excess mortality during
the period".
A 2013 academic source (citing research from 2009) indicates that
execution may have accounted for as much as 60% of the total, with
23,745 mass graves containing approximately 1.3 million suspected
victims of execution.
Historian Ben Kiernan estimates that 1.671 million to
1.871 million Cambodians died as a result of Khmer Rouge policy, or
between 21% and 24% of Cambodia's 1975 population.
A study by French demographer Marek Sliwinski calculated nearly
2 million unnatural deaths under the Khmer Rouge out of a 1975 Cambodian
population of 7.8 million; 33.5% of Cambodian men died under the Khmer
Rouge compared to 15.7% of Cambodian women. Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia
(DC-Cam) suggests that the death toll was between 2 million and
2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After five
years of researching mass grave sites, he estimated that they contained
1.38 million suspected victims of execution.
Although considerably higher than earlier and more widely accepted
estimates of Khmer Rouge executions, Etcheson argues that these numbers
are plausible, given the nature of the mass grave and DC-Cam's methods,
which are more likely to produce an under-count of bodies rather than an
over-estimate.
Demographer Patrick Heuveline estimated that between 1.17 million and
3.42 million Cambodians died unnatural deaths between 1970 and 1979,
with between 150,000 and 300,000 of those deaths occurring during the
civil war. Heuveline's central estimate is 2.52 million excess deaths,
of which 1.4 million were the direct result of violence.
Despite being based on a house-to-house survey of Cambodians, the
estimate of 3.3 million deaths promulgated by the Khmer Rouge's
successor regime, the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), is generally
considered to be an exaggeration; among other methodological errors,
the PRK authorities added the estimated number of victims that had been
found in the partially-exhumed mass graves to the raw survey results,
meaning that some victims would have been double-counted.
An additional 300,000 Cambodians starved to death between 1979 and
1980, largely as a result of the after-effects of Khmer Rouge policy.
Genocide
While
the period from 1975 to 1979 is commonly associated with the phrase
"the Cambodian genocide", scholars debate whether the legal definition
of the crime can be applied generally.While two former leaders were convicted of genocide, this was for
treatment of ethnic and religious minorities, the Vietnamese and Cham.
The death toll of these two groups, approximately 100,000 people, is
roughly 5% of the generally accepted total of two million. The treatment
of these groups can be seen to fall under the legal definition of
genocide, as they were targeted on the basis of their religion or
ethnicity. The vast majority of deaths were of the Khmer ethnic group,
which was not a target of the Khmer Rouge. The deaths occurring as a
result of targeting these Khmer, whether it was the "new people" or
enemies of the regime, was based on political distinctions rather than
ethnic or religious. In an interview conducted in 2018, historian David
P. Chandler states that crimes against humanity was the term that best
fit the atrocities of the regime and that some attempts to characterise
the majority of the killings as genocide was flawed and at times
politicised.
Internal power struggles and purges
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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. Khoy Thoun confessed to having been recruited by the CIA in 1958.The center also ordered troops from the eastern and central zones to
purge the northern zone killing or arresting numerous cadres.
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.
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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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 and the soldiers then killed his family.
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.
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.
Photo images of the Ba Chúc massacre at a Vietnamese museum, as the massacre was one of the events that prompted the 1978 Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea
Fearing that Vietnam would attack Cambodia, Pol Pot ordered a
pre-emptive invasion of Vietnam on 18 April 1978. His Khmer Rouge forces
crossed the border and looted nearby villages, mostly in the border
town of Ba Chúc. Of the 3,157 civilians who had lived in Ba Chúc, only two survived the massacre. These Khmer Rouge forces were repelled by the Vietnamese.
After several years of border conflict and after a flood of
refugees fled from Kampuchea, relations between Kampuchea and Vietnam
collapsed by December 1978. On 25 December 1978, the Vietnamese armed
forces along with the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation, an organization founded by Heng Samrin that included many dissatisfied former Khmer Rouge members,
invaded Cambodia and captured Phnom Penh on 7 January 1979. Despite a
traditional Cambodian fear of Vietnamese domination, defecting Khmer
Rouge activists assisted the Vietnamese and with Vietnam's approval,
they became the core of the new People's Republic of Kampuchea. The new
government was quickly dismissed as a "puppet government" by the Khmer Rouge and China.
At the same time, the Khmer Rouge retreated west and it continued
to control certain areas near the Thai border for the next decade. These included Phnom Malai, the mountainous areas near Pailin in the Cardamom Mountains and Anlong Veng in the Dângrêk Mountains.
These Khmer Rouge bases were not self-sufficient and were funded by
diamond and timber smuggling, military assistance from China channeled
by means of the Thai military, and food smuggled from markets across the
border in Thailand.
Despite its deposal, the Khmer Rouge retained its United Nations seat, which was occupied by Thiounn Prasith, an old companion of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary
from their student days in Paris and one of the 21 attendees at the
1960 KPRP Second Congress. The seat was retained under the name
Democratic Kampuchea until 1982 and then it was retained under the name
Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea. Western governments voted
in favor of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea retaining
Cambodia's seat in the organization over the newly installed
Vietnamese-backed People's Republic of Kampuchea, even though it
included the Khmer Rouge. In 1988, Margaret Thatcher
stated: "So, you'll find that the more reasonable ones of the Khmer
Rouge will have to play some part in the future government, but only a
minority part. I share your utter horror that these terrible things went
on in Kampuchea". On the contrary, Sweden changed its vote in the United Nations
and it withdrew its support for the Khmer Rouge after many Swedish
citizens wrote letters to their elected representatives in which they
demanded a policy change towards Pol Pot's regime.
The origin of the international proxy war between the US and the Soviet Union dates back to the origin of the Cambodian Civil War. The Kingdom of Cambodia was supported by the United States, the Khmer Republic (that eventually took over after the removal of Prince Sihanouk)
and South Vietnam. The other side, the National United Front of
Kampuchea, was supported by the Khmer Rouge, North-Vietnam, China and
the Soviet Union.
Cambodia became an instrument for the superpowers, the United States
and the Soviet Union. The measures that the US employed in Cambodia were
seen as preventative acts which were supposed to stop the communists.
These preventative acts included the deployment of military troops and
the establishment of other institutions like the UNTAC.
Vietnam's victory was supported by the Soviet Union and had
significant ramifications for the region. The People's Republic of China
launched a punitive invasion of northern Vietnam but then retreated, with both sides claiming victory. China, the United States and the ASEAN countries sponsored the creation and the military operations of a Cambodian government in exile, known as the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, which included the Khmer Rouge, the republican Khmer People's National Liberation Front and the royalist Funcinpec Party.
Eastern and central Cambodia were firmly under the control of
Vietnam and its Cambodian allies by 1980, while the western part of the
country continued to be a battlefield throughout the 1980s, and millions
of land mines
were sown across the countryside. The Khmer Rouge, still led by Pol
Pot, was the strongest of the three rebel groups in the Coalition
Government, which received extensive military aid from China, Britain
and the United States and intelligence from the Thai military. Great
Britain and the United States in particular gave aid to the two
non-Khmer Rouge members of the coalition.
In an attempt to broaden its support base, the Khmer Rouge formed the Patriotic and Democratic Front of the Great National Union of Kampuchea in 1979. In 1981, the Khmer Rouge went so far as to officially renounce communism and somewhat moved their ideological emphasis to nationalism and anti-Vietnamese
rhetoric instead. Some analysts argue that this change meant little in
practice because according to historian Kelvin Rowley, the "CPK
propaganda had always relied on nationalist rather than revolutionary
appeals".
Pol Pot relinquished the Khmer Rouge leadership to Khieu Samphan in
1985; however, he continued to be the driving force behind the Khmer
Rouge insurgency, giving speeches to his followers. Journalist Nate Thayer,
who spent some time with the Khmer Rouge during that period, commented
that despite the international community's near-universal condemnation
of the Khmer Rouge's brutal rule a considerable number of Cambodians in
Khmer Rouge-controlled areas seemed genuinely to support Pol Pot.
While Vietnam proposed to withdraw from Cambodia in return for a
political settlement that would exclude the Khmer Rouge from power, the
rebel coalition government as well as ASEAN, China and the United
States, insisted that such a condition was unacceptable.
Nevertheless, Vietnam declared in 1985 that it would complete the
withdrawal of its forces from Cambodia by 1990 and it did so in 1989,
having allowed the Cambodian People's Party government that it had
installed there to consolidate its rule and gain sufficient military
strength.
Photos of the victims of the Khmer Rouge
After a decade of inconclusive conflict, the pro-Vietnamese Cambodian
government and the rebel coalition signed a treaty in 1991 calling for
elections and disarmament. However, the Khmer Rouge resumed fighting in
1992, boycotted the election and in the following year rejected its
results. It began fighting the Cambodian coalition government which
included the former Vietnamese-backed communists (headed by Hun Sen) as
well as the Khmer Rouge's former non-communist and monarchist allies
(notably Prince Rannaridh).
Ieng Sary led a mass defection from the Khmer Rouge in 1996, with
half of its remaining soldiers (about 4,000) switching to the
government side and Ieng Sary becoming leader of Pailin Province.
A conflict between the two main participants in the ruling coalition
caused in 1997 Prince Rannaridh to seek support from some of the Khmer
Rouge leaders while refusing to have any dealings with Pol Pot.
This resulted in bloody factional fighting among the Khmer Rouge
leaders, ultimately leading to Pol Pot's trial and imprisonment by the
Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot died in April 1998. Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea surrendered in December 1998. On 29 December 1998, leaders of the Khmer Rouge apologised for the 1970s genocide.
By 1999, most members had surrendered or been captured. In December
1999, Ta Mok and the remaining leaders surrendered, and the Khmer Rouge
effectively ceased to exist.
Legacy
Cambodia has been described as the black sheep of South East Asia because extremism is condoned in a country which is characterized by very weak economic growth and extensive poverty.
Both demographically and economically, Cambodia has gradually recovered
from the rule of the Khmer Rouge regime, but the psychological scars
affect many Cambodian families and they also affect many émigré
Cambodian communities. It is noteworthy that Cambodia has a very young
population, and by 2003, three-quarters of Cambodians were too young to
remember the Khmer Rouge era. Nonetheless, their generation is affected
by the traumas of the past.
Members of this younger generation may only know about the Khmer Rouge
through word of mouth from their parents and elders. In part, young
Cambodians lack knowledge about the Khmer Rouge because the Cambodian
government does not require educators to teach Cambodian children about
the Khmer Rouge's atrocities in Cambodian schools; however, Cambodia's Education Ministry started to teach Khmer Rouge history in high schools beginning in 2009.
The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia
(ECCC) was established as a Cambodian court with international
participation and assistance to bring to trial senior leaders and those
most responsible for crimes committed during the Khmer Rouge regime. As of 2020, there are three open cases.
ECCC's efforts for outreach toward both national and international
audience include public trial hearings, study tours, video screenings,
school lectures and video archives on the web site.
After claiming to feel great remorse for his part in Khmer Rouge
atrocities, Duch, head of Tuol Sleng where 16,000 men, women and
children were sent to their deaths, surprised the court in his trial on
27 November 2009 with a plea for his freedom. His Cambodian lawyer, Kar
Savuth, stunned the tribunal further by issuing the trial's first call
for an acquittal of his client even after his French lawyer denied
seeking such a verdict. On 26 July 2010, he was convicted and sentenced to thirty years imprisonment. Theary Seng
responded: "We hoped this tribunal would strike hard at impunity, but
if you can kill 14,000 people and serve only 19 years – 11 hours per
life taken – what is that? It's a joke", voicing concerns about
political interference.
In February 2012, Duch's sentence was increased to life imprisonment
following appeals by both the prosecution and defence. In dismissing the
defence's appeal, Judge Kong Srim
stated that "Duch's crimes were "undoubtedly among the worst in
recorded human history" and deserved "the highest penalty available".
Public trial hearings in Phnom Penh are open to the people of Cambodia over the age of 18 including foreigners.
In order to assist people's will to participate in the public hearings,
the court provides free bus transportation for groups of Cambodians who
want to visit the court. Since the commencement of Case 001 trial in 2009 through the end of 2011, 53,287 people participated in the public hearings.
ECCC also has hosted Study Tour Program to help villagers in rural
areas understand the history of the Khmer Rouge regime. The court
provides free transport for them to come to visit the court and meet
with court officials to learn about its work, in addition to visits to
the genocide museum and the killing fields.
ECCC also has visited villages to provide video screenings and school
lectures to promote their understanding of the trial proceedings. Furthermore, trials and transcripts are partially available with English translation on the ECCC's website.
Museums
Skulls displayed in the memorial tower
The Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide is a former high school building,
which was transformed into a torture, interrogation and execution center
between 1976 and 1979. The Khmer Rouge called the center S-21. Of the estimated 15,000 to 30,000 prisoners, only seven prisoners survived.
The Khmer Rouge photographed the vast majority of the inmates and left a
photographic archive, which enables visitors to see almost 6,000 S-21
portraits on the walls. Visitors can also learn how the inmates were tortured from the equipment and facilities exhibited in the buildings.
The Choeung Ek Killing Fields are located about 15 kilometers outside of Phnom Penh. Most of the prisoners who were held captive at S-21 were taken to the fields to be executed and deposited in one of the approximately 129 mass graves. It is estimated that the graves contain the remains of over 20,000 victims.
After the discovery of the site in 1979, the Vietnamese transformed the
site into a memorial and stored skulls and bones in an open-walled
wooden memorial pavilion. Eventually, these remains were showcased in the memorial's centerpiece stupa, or Buddhist shrine.
Publications
The Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), an independent research institute, published A History of Democratic Kampuchea 1975–1979, the nation's first textbook on the history of the Khmer Rouge. The 74-page textbook was approved by the government as a supplementary text in 2007.
The textbook is aiming at standardising and improving the information
students receive about the Khmer Rouge years because the
government-issued social studies textbook devotes eight or nine pages to
the period. The publication was a part of their genocide education
project that includes leading the design of a national genocide studies
curriculum with the Ministry of Education, training thousands of
teachers and 1,700 high schools on how to teach about genocide and
working with universities across Cambodia.
Youth for Peace, a Cambodian non-governmental organization
(NGO) that offers education in peace, leadership, conflict resolution
and reconciliation to Cambodia's youth, published a book titled Behind the Darkness:Taking Responsibility or Acting Under Orders?
in 2011. The book is unique in that instead of focusing on the victims
as most books do, it collects the stories of former Khmer Rouge, giving
insights into the functioning of the regime and approaching the question
of how such a regime could take place.
Dialogues
While the tribunal contributes to the memorialization
process at national level, some civil society groups promote
memorialization at community level. The International Center for
Conciliation (ICfC) began working in Cambodia in 2004 as a branch of the ICfC in Boston.
ICfC launched the Justice and History Outreach project in 2007 and has
worked in villages in rural Cambodia with the goal of creating mutual
understanding and empathy between victims and former members of the
Khmer Rouge.
Following the dialogues, villagers identify their own ways of
memorialization such as collecting stories to be transmitted to the
younger generations or building a memorial.
Through the process, some villagers are beginning to accept the
possibility of an alternative viewpoint to the traditional notions of
evil associated with anyone who worked for the Khmer Rouge regime.
Media coverage
Radio National Kampuchea as well as private radio stations broadcast programmes on the Khmer Rouge and trials.
ECCC has its own weekly radio program on RNK which provides an
opportunity for the public to interact with court officials and deepen
their understanding of cases.
Youth for Peace,
a Cambodian NGO that offers education in peace, leadership, conflict
resolution and reconciliation to Cambodian's youth, has broadcast the
weekly radio program, You Also Have a Chance since 2009.
Aiming at preventing the passing on of hatred and violence to future
generations, the program allows former Khmer Rouge to talk anonymously
about their past experience.
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