Between
April 1975 and January 1979, that means, during just a couple
of years, an estimated 1,5-2 million in total starved to death,
perished or (summarily) executed in Cambodia. In the end, Khmer
Rouge was toppled by the Vietnamese troops entering the Cambodian
territory and Pol Pot and his guerilla force fleed to continue
their power struggle with a low-intensity warfare strategy backed
by China, U.S. and Thailand. Finally he passed away in 1998. In
this article, we concentrate on those historical moments and delve
into details to get a clearer picture of what had happened in
Cambodia and on. Finally we will consider the main as well as
potential responses to the events and get some morals from this
tragic story.
After
a bloody civil war, Khmer Rouge entered the capital city Phnom
Phen and overthrown whatever left in the name of political power
by April 1975. Here are the actions taken by the new regime:
- Evacuation of the cities,
- Collectivization of economic production and consumption,
- Confiscation and sometimes burning of books,
- The ban on Buddhism and other forms of religious worship,
- The curtailment of freedom of speech, travel, residence, and
occupational choice,
- Disappearance of formal education,
- Abolishment of money, markets, and courts,
- Elimination of the male-female differentials and endorsement
of women’s participation to all spheres of social life,
-Forced separation of children from their families to educate
the ‘New Human of Communism’,
- Communalization of property (Hinton, 1998)
- The ban on usage of foreign languages (van Schaack, 1997)
- Junking of cars including ambulances, and refrigrators, washing
machines, TV sets, telephones and typewriters.
Genocide or Politicide?
Though what had happened in Cambodia has been named as a genocide
most of the time, some reservations are due: Genocide is a direct
consequence of the emergence of nation states. The definition
of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Genocide Convention
is “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part,
a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such.” Thus the
legal definition of genocide does not cover all mass murders by
states’ hands. In that sense, Cambodian history does not count
as an instance of genocide: People were executed for reasons other
than those stated in Article II (cf. van Schaack, 1997). Some
commentators attributed the narrow scope of the definition to
Soviet Union’s intervention. Sovyet Union had feared that he could
be indicted by a wide scope definition. Actually, that is part
of the story: It was not only Soviet Union but also delegates
from Latin America and Egypt -usually violent towards political
dissidents- that objected to a state-mass-murder definition of
Article II. They had objected because they had noticed that they
could be sued for whatever they did to the dissidents (van Schaack,
1997). The definition of Article II does not cover even the massacres
perpetrated by Nazis towards socialists, communists and homosexuals.
Furthermore, the way genocide is defined Article II leads to providing
a pretext for mass murder: States harsh on political dissidents
may escape the charges by pointing out that the state mass murder
is not due to nationality, ethnicity, race or religion issues
but because political dissidents pose a real threat to the continuity
of the states at issue. That was in fact the pretext in the Indonesian
mass murder of the members of Indonesian Communist Party where
around one million party members were massacred in Indonesia between
1965 and 1966. They were conceived as the ‘internal enemies’ as
usual.
That is why, researchers on genocide are quite reluctant to endorse
the definition in its Article II formulation. They prefer to redefine
genocide to cover the events reminiscent of what had happened
in Cambodia (1975-1979) (cf. Chalk, & Jonassohn, 1990). Another
line of researchers kept the definition of Article II untouched
and coined terms for other kinds of mass murders: Politicide is
defined as “killings of people in groups targeted because of organized
political opposition” (Fein, 1993). Likewise, democide is “state
mass murder”.
Yet the Cambodian massacres also involved ethnic annihilation,
although this was not the main tenor of the democide: almost all
the Vietnamese, half of the Chinese, nearly half of the Lao and
Cham people of Cambodia were massacred between 1975-1979 (Fein,
1993).
The problems of definition resurfaces again when the contrasts
are drawn between ‘state sponsored mass murders’, ‘state terrorism’
and other shade of state violence. Krain (1997) considers genocide
and politicide as the subclass of the state sponsored mass murders,
while defines state terrorism as violent state actions aiming
at inflicting fear among the people. The latter does not necessitate
mass killings while the former is defined right in terms of mass
murders.
Why in Cambodia?
Why such a large-scale massacre had taken place in Cambodia? Hinton
(1998) as an anthropologist who conducted field work in Cambodia
of the early 1990s considers the cultural values such as face
and honor exerting their affect forcefully on the lower chain
of command in the Cambodian army commanded by Pol Pot, though
he admits that culture could not provide a full picture of the
reasons between why the mass murder had taken place in Cambodia.
Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that subordination to superiors
is one of the foundational norms in Cambodia resembling much of
the East Asian societies.
This hierarchical fragmentation of societal space is explicitly
encoded in Cambodian language like Thai language: There are unique
words to address different strata. One can even state that “speaking
Cambodian is paying respects.” Even for quotidien activities such
as eating and drinking, different words are employed depending
on the social status of the speaker and hearer. Indeed, one of
the revolutions implemented by the Khmer Rouge regime was the
elimination of the words denoting power differentials and replacement
of them by words such as ‘comrade’ and ‘brother’ and rural and
urban colloquial equivalents of words denoting the quotidien activities
couched in socially asymmetric manners. Even the patronizing speech
between parents and children had been transformed to be in terms
of ‘comrade mother’ and ‘comrade father’ (Hinton, 1998).
Krain (1997) offers a structural analysis of genocides and politicides
and proposes that five factors together lead to a higher possibility
of genocides or politicides: External war, civil war, extraconstitutional
change, a history of decolonization, centralization of political
power in a small number of institutions, the level of ethnic homogeneity
in an aggressor state, and marginalization of state within the
world economy.
Pol Pot as the Scapegoat: An Earlier
Version of Saddam
The most prevalent reaction to the Cambodian events was condemning
Pol Pot and his so-called ‘ideology’. The assumption was that
communism was responsible for the violent acts of Cambodian state.
The advocators of this position have been quite keen to publicize
the remnants of the old bloody regime. The torture instruments,
photos taken and other documents have been exhibited to confirm
what kind of an evil Pol Pot was and his ideology of course included.
However, it seems a Freudian farce is going on here: Those who
condemn Pol Pot and his ‘ideology’ were not that old uncle keeping
his promises to humanity and carry the torch of human rights in
his administration. Though the death toll is high, the Cambodian
mass murder was not an unprecendented massacre and nobody and
no institution can guarantee it would not happen again in an any
area of human geography. The number of victims due to the American
adventure of colonialism in the preceding century and a simple
five year period of this century is not less than Cambodian mass
murder in total. Likewise, the state murder as the legitimatization
instrument in Latin America is not less fierce and bloody. Furthermore,
the government preceding Khmer Rouge regime was also notorious
in its handling political dissidents by harassment, torture, mysterious
murders and disappearances. Finally, it is not coincidence that
after the demise of Khmer Rouge rule, the followers of Pol Pot
got financial and logistic support from U.S. and China since they
fought against Vietnam. One could not forget the complicity of
U.S. in the tragedies of Cambodian history including the by then
unprecedented, heavy bombing by U.S. Airforce between 1969 and
1973 -not to mention U.S.’s other crimes. An estimated number
of three-quarters of a million Cambodian peasants had died due
to heavy bombing. The intensity of the bombing had far exceeded
that of Japan in total.
It is clear that the responsibility far exceeds
Cambodian culture, communism and Pol Pot. If it were to be the
certain elements in Cambodian culture, keeping in mind that those
elements are prevalent in almost all of East Asian cultures, there
had to be mass murders everywhere in East Asia and nowhere else.
But even a cursory look at recent political history points out
that the state mass murders are neither peculiar to East Asia
nor all states of East Asia. Ditto for communism: If it were to
be due to communism, in no countries other than communist ones
would we observe mass murders. This is not the case. Finally,
the demonization of Pol Pot is essentially mistaken not because
Pol Pot was an angel in hide, but mass murders are not an act
of a single individual. This focus on individuals in explaining
historical events is particularly endemic to European and American
scholarships and unfortunately transferred to most of the scholars
in search of alternative historiographies. Such explanations portrayed
Hitler, Saddam, Bush or Stalin as psychopaths acting against their
respective society’s will. This approach has continually gained
power due to the paternalistic unconscious tendencies of people
a la Freud. This the-leader-leads-the-crowds understanding of
history often misses the responsibility of political bodies in
authority as well as the circumstances carrying political bodies
to leading positions: Pol Pot had not usurped the power alone,
there was a communist party as well as an army. The members of
these two key organizations were not less responsible than Pol
Pot alone. To put it clearer, a certain kind of ideology cross-cutting
communism and Americanism is responsible and the name of it is
not less familiar: Despotism, i.e. people for state rather than
the reverse.
The Problem of Legitimization
and The Need for Distinguishing Economic and Political Ideologies
Accordingly,
we get the idea that it is necessary to draw a line between economic
ideologies and political ideologies. The problem of legitimization
is immanent. It is a grave problem even in ‘participatory democracies’
where the citizens can be bribed to vote for a certain party.
A sack of rice or grain would do the trick. The legitimization
of a theocracy lasts as long as the ummah or sons of Yehuda follow
the official faith in its desecularized form. The communist societies
are not immune to the problem at issue: At least some of the steps
taken by the revolutionary governments could be unwarranted. And
finally, a royal regime would potentially confront with charges
of acting as a biological oligarchy. Those are political considerations.
All states would have dissidents, but how the state welcomes them
is not an economic issue. Free expression does not contradict
with an economically communist state, but yes it does with a politically
communist state where all the citizens are expected to pay respect
to communism alienated from its original causes, taking the place
of the older institutions such as religions and customs that had
been supposed to be eradicated by the revolution. What needs to
be eliminated is not religion or customs but its certain elements
rendering citizens to sheeps.
Economic considerations would not need so much legimitization
in essence, once the meaning of human rights and its relevance
for economic policies are grasped: at the basic level, a society
is a just society where nobody dies because of the astronomical
bills of private hospitals, nobody is illiterate since the right
for universal preschool, primary and secondary education has been
denied and nobody is unable to receive higher education solely
because of economic disadvantages. Surely, this list has to be
extended to cover basic rights of citizens such as transportation,
telecommunication and free or cheap shelter excluding any act
of harassment or sanction to the renter of a house or office by
the owner solely due to the force emanating from ownership. The
list can be extended twice or more times and we are in no position
to claim that this is a comprehensive list, and clearly, it cannot
be such in a work on Cambodian political history. However, the
humble need for such a list undergirds the necessity of drawing
a line between economic and political ideologies. This leads to
the possibility that a state can be a kingdom politically but
socialist, even communist economically. A forgotten page of history
is in similar lines: Sihanouk the King of Cambodia preceding the
Khmer Rouge regime had supported Vietkong forces and Cambodian
communist insurgents combating against American imperialists (cf.
Willmott, 1981). He is known as the endorser of a Buddhist socialism.
The Soviet experience has showed that the reverse is also possible:
Economic equality is distinct from political equality. Even in
the peak of the Soviet Revolution where the ideal of classless
society was quite near, the assymetry between political elites
in the name of communist elders and the outsiders –i.e. those
huge masses other than the members of the communist party- couldn’t
be and maybe willingly wasn’t eliminated. Thus, essentially, the
Soviet society was a communist society economically and resembled
kingdoms politically. A similar play took seen in Cambodia: a
hierarchy was formed between the villagers (‘old people’) and
the ex-residents of evacuated cities (‘new people’). They were
subject to different unwritten laws: for instance, old people
stealing potatoes were warned, the new people committing the same
‘crime’ were sentenced to death and summarily executed (Hinton,
1998). Not to mention the asymmetry between Khmer Rouge members
and others.
There have been two responses to the Soviet failure: One party
has said that the Soviet experience did not exemplify a truely
communist state -the proclamation of a communist state notwithstanding.
Thus they save the face of communism and it still stays as a hope
for poor masses. Another party considered the failure as the failure
of communism as a political program to eliminate social classes.
The responses to Cambodian mass murder along the leftist milieus
can be conceived accordingly: One party thought for a long time
that the news of massacres is a propaganda effort of American
evil resembling what they had done in Korea and Vietnam –preceding
Iraq. This same party had not believed the misdeeds of Stalin
for a long time as if they were the lost Japanese soldiers found
a half century after the end of the second allocation war in the
small Phillipine islands hiding and not believing that the war
was over in their blind obedience to the Japanese Sun-God emperor.
However, a grain of doubt is of course necessary upon measuring
the news broadcasted by political power centers in the midst of
so many information and disinformation campaigns.
Another party, noticing that Khmer Rouge was affiliated with Beijing
and actually implementing a Maoist program of evacuating cities
to establish a peasant state and was obviously inspired by Mao’s
Great Leap Forward and keeping in mind that People’s Republic
of China was the only foreign state that Khmer Rouge had contacts
with, attributed the violence to Maoist obscure politics harboring
counter-revolutionary tendencies: Khmer Rouge saw cities as the
origin of inequality -missing the real reasons. Convergingly,
Willmott (1981) claims that the class analysis of the Kampuchean
Communist Party was mistaken and that was why the party had not
expected any dissatisfaction with their evacuation programs and
alike. A third party that was fully Stalinist attributed it to
the resistance of the reactionary society that was sung lullabies
of sacred kingdom and addicted to the opium of religion.
What Now?
No Khmer Rouge member has been punished for politicidal
acts. They have been even promoted to high rank governmental positions
in the so-called Cambodian ‘democracy’. U.S.? Of course, he would
not be punished. He is the legislator of the international law
and the sole arbiter of truth.
Chalk, F. ve Jonassohn, K. (1990). The history and sociology of
genocide: analyses and case studies. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press.
Fein, H. (1993). Revolutionary and anti-revolutionary
genocides: a comparison of state murders in Democratic Kampuchea,
1975 to 1979, and in Indonesia, 1965 to 1966. Comparative Studies
in Society and History, 35(4), 796-823.
Hinton, A. L. (1998). Why did you kill?: The
Cambodian genocide and the dark side of face and honor. The Journal
of Asian Studies, 57(1), 93-122.
Krain, M. (1997). State-sponsored mass murder:
the onset and severity of genocides and politicides. The Journal
of Conflict Resolution, 41(3), 331-360.
van Schaack, B. (1997). The crime of political
genocide: repairing the Genocide Convention’s blind spots. The
Yale Law Review, 106(7), 2259-2291.
Willmott, W. E. (1981). Analytical errors of
the Kampuchean Communist Party. Pacific Affairs, 54(2), 209-227.
After
a bloody civil war, Khmer Rouge entered the capital city Phnom
Phen and overthrown whatever left in the name of political power
by April 1975. Here are the actions taken by the new regime: 
The most prevalent reaction to the Cambodian events was condemning
Pol Pot and his so-called ‘ideology’. The assumption was that
communism was responsible for the violent acts of Cambodian state.
The advocators of this position have been quite keen to publicize
the remnants of the old bloody regime. The torture instruments,
photos taken and other documents have been exhibited to confirm
what kind of an evil Pol Pot was and his ideology of course included.
However, it seems a Freudian farce is going on here: Those who
condemn Pol Pot and his ‘ideology’ were not that old uncle keeping
his promises to humanity and carry the torch of human rights in
his administration. Though the death toll is high, the Cambodian
mass murder was not an unprecendented massacre and nobody and
no institution can guarantee it would not happen again in an any
area of human geography. The number of victims due to the American
adventure of colonialism in the preceding century and a simple
five year period of this century is not less than Cambodian mass
murder in total. Likewise, the state murder as the legitimatization
instrument in Latin America is not less fierce and bloody. Furthermore,
the government preceding Khmer Rouge regime was also notorious
in its handling political dissidents by harassment, torture, mysterious
murders and disappearances. Finally, it is not coincidence that
after the demise of Khmer Rouge rule, the followers of Pol Pot
got financial and logistic support from U.S. and China since they
fought against Vietnam. One could not forget the complicity of
U.S. in the tragedies of Cambodian history including the by then
unprecedented, heavy bombing by U.S. Airforce between 1969 and
1973 -not to mention U.S.’s other crimes. An estimated number
of three-quarters of a million Cambodian peasants had died due
to heavy bombing. The intensity of the bombing had far exceeded
that of Japan in total. 
Accordingly,
we get the idea that it is necessary to draw a line between economic
ideologies and political ideologies. The problem of legitimization
is immanent. It is a grave problem even in ‘participatory democracies’
where the citizens can be bribed to vote for a certain party.
A sack of rice or grain would do the trick. The legitimization
of a theocracy lasts as long as the ummah or sons of Yehuda follow
the official faith in its desecularized form. The communist societies
are not immune to the problem at issue: At least some of the steps
taken by the revolutionary governments could be unwarranted. And
finally, a royal regime would potentially confront with charges
of acting as a biological oligarchy. Those are political considerations.
All states would have dissidents, but how the state welcomes them
is not an economic issue. Free expression does not contradict
with an economically communist state, but yes it does with a politically
communist state where all the citizens are expected to pay respect
to communism alienated from its original causes, taking the place
of the older institutions such as religions and customs that had
been supposed to be eradicated by the revolution. What needs to
be eliminated is not religion or customs but its certain elements
rendering citizens to sheeps. 