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Cambodia 1975-79 - Year Zero / Killing Fields

Beginning in the late 1960's, and lasting into the early 1970's, the United States unofficially, secretly, and yet, in reality, openly carpet-bombed Cambodia with B-52s. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed throughout Cambodia, in the hope of eradicating the communist guerrillas and their military sanctuaries. The red Khmers or "Khmer Rouge" were pushed farther into the interior and border areas of the country. However, when the United States abandoned the Vietnam effort in 1975, the Khmer Rouge stormed Phnom Penh and cut off the entire country from the world's media.

From 1975 to 1978, Cambodia was governed by ideological pro-Chinese communists known as the Khmer Rouge ("Red Khmer"), who gained a reputation for extreme brutality. Over a period of less than four years -- the Khmer Rouge systematically tortured, starved, and eradicated millions of fellow Cambodians. On 17 April 1975 the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, captured the city of Phnom Penh and so took complete control of Cambodia, renaming Cambodia, the Republic of Democratic Kampuchea. It was, they declared, year zero.

No one was safe, not if you were a Cham Muslim or a Vietnamese, or a Buddhist monks or a city dweller, not if you had a diploma or wore eye glasses, especially those appearing to be educated. All of these people and many others -- along with their families - were murdered. Solid estimates of the numbers who died between 1975 and 1979 are not available, but it is likely that hundreds of thousands were brutally executed by the regime. Hundreds of thousands more died of starvation and disease (both under the Khmer Rouge and during the Vietnamese invasion in 1978). Estimates of the dead range from 1 to 3 million, out of a 1975 population estimated at 7.3 million. The most commonly accepted number killed under the Khmer Rouge is two million. Even Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge ruler, claimed that 10% of the population died (that is, about 750,000 of 7-8 million), and other estimates were higher. Many of these deaths were from hunger, disease, war, torture, and forced work, but there were also mass executions.

Author David Chandler, in A History of Cambodia, says, "The Khmer Rouge period can be divided into four phases. The first lasted from the capture of Phnom Penh in April 1975 until the beginning of 1976, when a constitution was proclaimed and a new wave of migration was set in motion. During this period the peoples only hope for rescue or salvation were the clandestine radio broadcasts out of Phnom Penh. The second phase lasted until September 1976. The prominent activity during this phase was the radical behavior from a mixture of individuals in the new government. The mixture included those who studied in France (Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Sary's wife Ieng Thirith, Hu Nim, Thiounn Thioenn, and Son Sen) and younger militants who had never left Cambodia (Vorn Vet, Khek Pen, and Chhim Samauk). The third phase was marked by additional purges and by a shift toward blaming Cambodia's difficulties and counterrevolutionary activity on Vietnam. The fourth phase of Khmer Rouge activity was marked by a Vietnamese military offensive against Cambodia."

Pol Pot said, "If our people can make Angkor, we can make anything." His victory in 1975 was of "greater significance than the Angkor period." Stalinism and Maoism offered the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) the political means to rival this medieval model and restore the rural tradition of an imagined era when, Pol Pot claimed, "our society used to be good and clean." Maoism reinforced a Khmer Rouge fetish for rural life. In the 1960s, Prince Sihanouk's regime denounced Khmer Rouge rebels for "inciting people to boycott schools and hospitals and leave the towns." Rebels said of Sihanouk, "Let him break the soil like us for once." In his memoirs the former CPK head of state, Khieu Samphan, recalled meeting guerrilla commander Mok in the jungle. His account suggests Samphan was mesmerized by a rural romance.

The Khmer Rouge began a multi-process cleansing of the country to enforce Pol Pot's strong communist and traditional Maoist beliefs. He strove to create an equal, uneducated, farming society out of Cambodia. Pol Pot wanted to conduct his radical experiment to create an equal utopia for all people. Pol Pot began by declaring that the year was the year zero and that the "old society" was to be "purified." Ideas such as capitalism, education, western culture, city life, and religion were to be extinguished in an extreme form of peasant communism. The first step in this purification process was to expel anything foreign.

The new government sought to restructure Cambodian society completely. Remnants of the old society were abolished and Buddhism suppressed. Agriculture was collectivized, and the surviving part of the industrial base was abandoned or placed under state control. Cambodia had neither a currency nor a banking system. The regime controlled every aspect of life and reduced everyone to the level of abject obedience through terror. Torture centers were established, and detailed records were kept of the thousands murdered there. Public executions of those considered unreliable or with links to the previous government were common. Few succeeded in escaping the military patrols and fleeing the country.

Many of those forced to evacuate the cities were resettled in new villages, which lacked food, agricultural implements, and medical care. Many starved before the first harvest, and hunger and malnutrition--bordering on starvation--were constant during those years. Those who resisted or who questioned orders were immediately executed, as were most military and civilian leaders of the former regime who failed to disguise their pasts. The use of foreign language was prohibited. Newspapers and televisions were shut down and any mode of transportation was confiscated. Embassies, libraries, and schools were closed and eliminated. Money was forbidden and all businesses were shut down. Religion and health care were nonexistent; Cambodia was sealed off from the entire world.

Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge thought that educated and "high achieving" members of society were a threat and should be killed. Liquidation of all non-communist leaders began immediately and eventually encompassed not only military and political leaders, but also monks, teachers, people who wore glasses, and anyone else judged to be a "new person" or corrupted by capitalism. The cities were totally emptied of all residents, who then were put to work on agricultural communes. Families were separated according the needs of working units and a deliberate effort was made to replace traditional relationships and structures such as family, village, and Buddhism with absolute obedience to the communist party or Angka. This campaign was lit by the flames of hate and was not suppressed until it had reached virtually everyone.

As it expanded through Cambodia's countryside, the CPK divided Khmer society into "classes." In theory the working class was "the leader," but in practice "the three lower layers of peasants" formed "the base" of the Party's rural revolution. The victorious CPK acknowledged: "Concretely, we did not rely on the forces of the workers. they did not become the vanguard. In concrete fact there were only the peasants." The CPK's main vision remained rural.

Samphan claimed: "The poor and lower middle peasants are content. So are the middle peasants." Pol Pot added: "People from the former poor and lower middle peasant classes are overwhelmingly content . because now they can eat all year round and become middle peasants." That seemed to be the Party's view of the future. It went beyond even Maoism when it announced that the countryside itself, not the urban proletariat, comprised the vanguard of the revolution: "We have evacuated the people from the cities which is our class struggle." In crushing "enemies," CPK cadres resorted to agricultural metaphors such as "pull up the grass, dig up the roots," and proclaimed that victims' corpses would be used for "fertiliser."

Cut off from the outside world, Cambodia then came into a dark era, or year zero society, as all national infrastructures were completely eradicated. Khmer Rouge soldiers stood guard at all times with machine guns ready to shoot. They were only allowed one rest period a day and only got one small tin of rice over two days. The whole country was stricken with people dying of overwork and malnutrition. Ten to fifteen families lived together in small hut-like houses.

Phnom Penh is the Mekong River's largest city. Its population fluctuated wildly during the 1970s and 1980s; from an estimated 1.2 million in 1971 it swelled with war refugees to 2 million or more by 1975, when it was forcibly evacuated to almost nothing by the victorious Khmer Rouge communists. From 1978 (the last year of the Khmer Rouge regime) to 1987, Phnom Penh's population grew from about 50,000 to 700,000. Because of the extreme instability in these decades, data on Cambodia are often fragmentary and contradictory.

Just a few weeks after taking power, the radical Khmer Rouge forced the whole population of the capital city and provincial towns to leave at gunpoint for the countryside. During this movement, almost 20,000 people died. Once in the countryside, everyone was forced into mobile teams and worked as slaves in the fields from 12 to 15 hours a day. Work in the fields began at 4 a.m. and ended at 10 p.m.

In their desire to radically transform Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge emulated both contemporary Communist China and the Khmer "golden age" of the 11th-13th centuries-- both of which utilized irrigation. Canals around China's Yangtze River delta harnessed rainy-season floodwaters, carrying them out to the surrounding lowlands where in the dry season people lifted the water up into their rice fields.12 Historical and archeological documents also indicate a local irrigation system in the twelfth-century Khmer state, possibly storing and distributing water so that rice could be grown year-round, two or more crops per year. The Khmer Rouge set out to build a system of canals, ditches and dikes. Citizens, including the evacuated city-dwellers, were forced to work in the countryside growing rice and building these irrigation works, with rigid work quotas and hard, slavelike conditions.

The Khmer Rouge built irrigation works along the 1-km gridlines of their military maps, ignoring hills, villages, and other topography. It is claimed that some canals actually did more harm than good, disrupting natural water supplies and encouraging erosion. It appears that each district had to dig a certain amount of ditches, whether needed or not. Workers had rigid daily quotas, so that some finished early and some could never finish.22 There were rigid decisions about which varieties of rice were acceptable, diminishing the diversity of varieties which had adapted to local conditions.

There is disagreement whether this sacrifice and coercion even succeeded in irrigating Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge have been criticized for applying inappropriate models from the beginning. In emulating the Chinese system, for example, they ignored the amount of human labor needed to lift the water up to the fields. Where one square kilometer of Yangtze River lowlands may support 1500 laborers, the Mekong uplands may support only 300. Many projects were headed by loyal party leaders with no technical skills. Teachers, technicians, and other skilled (usually urban) professionals were hated by the Khmer Rouge as corrupting urban influences, and many were executed. There were reports of many ditches collapsing when it rained. It is likely that by the end of the Khmer Rouge regime, expertise had improved, but the post-Khmer Rouge government had to devote considerable resources to repairing irrigation works. One official said 80% of the projects had been poorly constructed, though it varied by region.

Cambodia was a major rice-exporting nation in the 1960's during a period of political stabilityfollowing independence from the French in 1953. In MY 1964/65 rice exports exceeded500,000 tons and Cambodia was considered one of the rice bowls of South East Asia. The encouraging production trend of increasing yields and growing area was reversed when the country became embroiled in the war against communism. By 1975, when Phnom Penh, the country's capital, finally fell to the communist Khmer Rouge, the rice-growing area had declined by 77 percent and rice production had decreased 84 percent from the 1970 level. During the Pol Pot (Khmer Rouge) era (1975-1979) the country was further devastated through mass dislocation of the population and persecution of intellectuals and agriculturalists. As a result, Cambodia faced annual rice shortfalls of 100-200,000 tons per annum during the 1980's. Cambodia missed the wave of the green revolution almost totally. In the 1980's, nearly all Cambodian farmers continued to use traditional farming practices as they had for over a thousand years. Pol Pot's policy of dislocating farmers from their homelands also resulted in the loss of many traditional rice varieties.

Territorial expansionism accompanied the agrarian cult. The regime launched attacks against all Cambodia's neighbors: Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. The cost in Cambodian lives is unknown, but according to Hanoi, the Khmer Rouge killed approximately 30,000 Vietnamese civilians and soldiers in nearly two years of cross-border raids. Pol Pot aimed to "stir up national hatred and class hatred for the aggressive Vietnamese enemy." Attacks into Vietnam would "kill the enemy at will, and the contemptible Vietnamese will surely shriek like monkeys screeching all over the forest." Cambodia declared an expanded maritime frontier, and projected territorial changes in "Lower Cambodia" (Kampuchea Krom), land lost to Vietnam since the early nineteenth century. Many CPK officials announced their goal to "retake Kampuchea Krom."

After the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December l978, on 7 January 1979, the revolutionary army of the National Front for Solidarity and Liberation of Cambodia defeated the Khmer Rouge regime and then proclaimed the country as the People's Republic of Kampuchea and later the State of Cambodia in 1989. The end of the Khmer Rouge period was followed by a civil war. The Khmer Rouge became one of the three components of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea that contested the Vietnamese presence and the Hanoi-installed regime of the People's Republic of Kampuchea. That war finally ended in 1998, when the Khmer Rouge political and military structures were dismantled.