Cambodian Genocide: Who was Pol Pot?
Cambodian Genocide: Who was Pol Pot?
In the 2000s, I visited Tuol Song or Hill of Poisonous Trees. The walls of this old school, located on a hilltop, were adorned with pictures of Cambodians tortured to death. While I was looking at their gloomy faces, the laughter of an American girl disturbed my focus. The contrast between the suffering of the victims and her cheerfulness filled my eyes with tears.
The man responsible for the gruesome Cambodian genocide was Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot. Sar was an average student at best. He only received a scholarship to study radio electronics in Paris because his cousin was one of the king’s consorts. In 1949, Sar sailed from Saigon to France. As expected, he failed the first end-of-year exams but was allowed to retake them and narrowly passed. At the time, socialist ideology was taking Europe by storm due to Soviet victory in World War II. Sar began meeting his friends in secret to discuss Marxist principles and Cambodian independence. He later admitted that he didn’t understand Karl Marx’s books but found Stalin and Mao’s novels easier to absorb. He also said that Peter Kropotkin’s book — The Great French Revolution — left its mark on him. Sar learned from the books that to sustain the revolution, one must ally with both the intellectuals and the working class and that communist society must embody absolute equality.
After decades of being under French control, Indochina fell under Japanese rule during World War II. Although the French took back the region after the war, Indochina’s independence movements grew strong enough to fight back. By the 1950s, France was about to lose Vietnam to the People’s Army of Vietnam led by Ho Chi Minh. In Cambodia, King Norodom Sihanouk led an international campaign to end colonial rule. Various political movements backed by the C.I.A and the Soviet were operating in Indochina against the French, who was trying to hold onto its colonies while fighting communists at home. In Paris, the Cambodian student body was looking for a volunteer to return to his country to check which rebel group was worth allying. Sar, who just failed for the second time in the final exams and lost his scholarship, volunteered to return to Cambodia. He landed in Saigon in 1953, three years after his departure. Sar spent several months with the guerrillas on the Vietnam-Cambodia border before returning to Phnom Penh. Thus, he informed his friends in Paris that the Khmer Việt Minh, a mixed Vietnamese and Cambodian guerrilla group, was the most promising resistance group. He selected this group because the Khmer Việt Minh had aligned with the Việt Minh, and thus the international Marxist-Leninist movement.
The Cambodian student union took his recommendation and joined the Khmer Việt Minh. However, they soon realized that the organization was run and numerically dominated by the Vietnamese, while the Cambodians were mainly given unskilled tasks. Sâr was sent to grow cassava and work in the canteen. There he learned little Vietnamese, and with a little French he learned in Paris, rose to become a secretary of a district commander. In June 1953, after France refused King Sihanouk’s demands for independence, he urged his subjects to fight against colonial rule, resulting in a defection of many Cambodian soldiers. Conflict with Vietnam left France unable to control the push for independence. Thus, they relinquished sovereignty over Cambodia in November 1953 before a full-blown civil war.
In 1954, the Khmer Việt Minh members retreated to North Vietnam, but Sar and his friends traveled to Phnom Penh. On the way to the capital, he passed by many remote villages. He was impressed with the Agrarian economy of the villages that barely used cash. After settling in Phnom Penh, Sar and his friends formed a Communist Party to compete in the 1955 election. King Norodom Sihanouk passed his throne to his father and established a party of his own. Due to his popularity as a national hero who secured Cambodia’s independence, his party won all 91 seats of the new parliament. The hope of the communists to become a significant political opposition faded. The North Vietnamese saw the Sihanouk government as a neutral regime, not allied with the United States. They believed that it would be a barrier against capitalist expansion to southern Vietnam. Therefore the North Vietnamese asked the Cambodian communists not to dispute and go underground. Although unqualified to teach, Sar gained employment teaching history, geography, and French literature at a private school. His pupils recall him as a likable teacher.
For seven years, the communist stayed in the shadows. Finally, at a 1959 conference, they established the Kampuchean Labour Party, based on the Marxist-Leninist model of democratic centralism. Sar became part of a four-person General Affair Committee leading the party. At the same time, King Sihanouk began to eliminate the radical left parties in his country. During the political purge, Samouth, the Labor Party leader, was captured, tortured, and killed. The two other members of the General Affair Committee retired from politics to save their lives. Sar was left alone to lead his party. In 1962, Sihanouk invited 34 left-wing leaders, including Sar, to form a new government. Sar feared that it was a trap, so he fled to the Viet Cong camp near the Vietnamese border. There Sar became a full-time revolutionary.
In Phnom Penh, the hunt for left-wing activists continued. Many of Sar’s friends joined him in the jungle. In 1964, Sar left the Viet Cong camp to set up a base of his own, Camp 100, from which he supervised his revolutionary movement. There the party leadership assembled to condemn the de-Stalinization initiated by Khrushchev. Khrushchev’s liberal reforms continued to shock Asian communist leaders who saw him as a traitor to Marxism-Leninism. The Cambodian then decided that instead of the working class, which Marx intended to lead the revolution, the peasants should lead the rebellion. The workers who lived in the cities were thus declared enemies. In April 1965, Sar left for Hanoi to get the support of the Ho Chi Minh Government. The North Vietnamese, who were busy fighting Americans, sought to avoid a further military confrontation in Cambodia. Ho Chi Minh asked Sar to be patient. Pol Pot later claimed that he came to believe since then that the Vietnamese planned to take over Cambodia.
In November 1965, Sar flew from Hanoi to Beijing, where he met with Communist Party officials. He received lessons from the Chinese about class struggles and political persecution. Sar stayed in China during the height of the Cultural Revolution. He saw how the communists forced their ideology on the population. In February 1966, he flew back to Hanoi and, from there, he traveled to his base. Later that year, Sar changed the party name to the Communist Party of Kampuchea, finally revealing their true colors. At that time, Europeans started hearing about the Khmer Rouge — a term created by King Sihanouk to describe Cambodian communists. Sar and his comrades, who now led an army of 2,000 men, asked Ho Chi Minh to supply weapons. The Vietnamese leader again refused to help. Regardless, in 1968, the communist forces attacked a military base in southern Cambodia. The Royal Army responded by dropping bombs on every village that may have supported Sar’s army. A civil war broke out across the country after the angry villagers who lost their loved ones in the bombing joined Khmer Rogue.
In 1969, President Nixon approved the “Operation Menu,” top secret bombings in Cambodia. The bombings came from Nixon’s plan to prohibit North Vietnam from shipping supplies to South Vietnam through Cambodia. The American public was not informed of the bombings. Congress and many high-ranking military officials knew nothing of Operation Menu. Over 2.7 million tons of bombs were dropped on Cambodia despite that the Royal government declared neutrality. It almost doubled what the U.S. had used on Japan during World War 2, including bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs took a heavy toll on the rural population, who soon joined the Khmer Rouge to fight against American imperialism.
While King Sihanouk was in China meeting prime minister Zhou Enlai, pro-American general Lon Nol overthrew him back home. Sar, who was also in Beijing at that time, was persuaded by the Chinese to help the king. Sihanouk didn’t know that Sar led a Communist Party because he only heard of the party’s former name — Kampuchean Labour Party. The king established a government in exile in Beijing and declared his support for Sar’s party. Hundreds of thousands of peasants from all over Cambodia, who never heard of Sar, joined Khmer Rouge to fight for the king. Sar flew to Hanoi to meet Le Duan, the head of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Sar asked him to supply weapons to overthrow Lon Nol, but not soldiers. However, North Vietnamese used the excuse to invade Cambodia. Sar returned to his camp, where he had 12,000 soldiers. He changes his name to Pol Pot to hide his identity.
By the end of 1970, half of Cambodia’s territory was already under communist control with the North Vietnamese assistance. Around this time, Pol Pot set up the Khmer Rouge’s ideology. Like North Korea’s “Juche” concept, Pol Pot believed that Cambodia is an independent nation, so it must remain isolated from the outside world and rely solely on itself. He wished to transform the country into his unique vision of an agrarian utopia — where no one uses money, runs a private business, and owns a property. All citizens, including the leaders themselves, had to wear black costumes, which were the traditional revolutionary clothes. The lands were confiscated from the few wealthy farmers and distributed to the landless peasants, who were the majority. No one could go outside their farming cooperative. In the evening, the cooperative members would gather to learn about communism and have a discussion. The villagers would criticize themselves, slam each other, and punish those who contributed the least to the community. Punishments included torture and even execution.
In 1973 Pol Pot announced collectivization. From then on, there will be no more private property. The fields, agricultural equipment, and animals are the state property. Many villagers opposed the idea and slaughtered their animals so that they wouldn’t become community property. Some 60,000 Cambodians fled the communist-controlled areas, which by this time included much of the country. As time went on, Pol Pot took more extreme steps to establish communism. The execution of those considered enemies would occur every day. The bodies were thrown in the fields to serve as fertilizers. People eventually stopped using the term “I” and would often say “we” in conversations. Pol Pot’s Cambodia became a slave state. The regime banned all leisure activities and punished people for showing even the slightest affection, humor, or pity. Everyone would dress in uniforms, show no facial expression, and work to death in the rice fields.
Originally published at https://www.tripsatasia.com.
