Khmer Rouge

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Khmer Rouge (Cambodian for “Red Khmer”) was a Communist regime that ruled Cambodia from April 1975 to January 1979. The group, led by Pol Pot, was formally the Communist Party of Kampuchea. In trying to reach its ambitious agricultural production goals and to protect itself against opposition, the regime worked large numbers of people to death and slaughtered its perceived opponents. Characterized by extreme brutality, the regime was responsible for the deaths through slaughter, starvation, overwork, and disease of 1 to 1.7 million Cambodians of a pre-1975 population of 7 or 8 million.

Under the Khmer Rouge, the cities were emptied; industry virtually halted; money, markets, and religion extinguished; and the entire populace sent out to agricultural labor camps in the countryside. Despite the regime’s notional commitment to creating a classless society, in practice, people were divided into “base people,” those who had been under the Khmer Rouge before April 1975 and “new people,” those who came under the regime’s control only with the final victory. New people suffered particularly in the austere rural labor conditions. Food was inadequate, the work schedule was harsh, and medical facilities and medicine were almost nonexistent. Gradually, the family unit was broken up; from 1977 dining was communalized.

The regime slaughtered officials from the old regime, intellectuals (which included teachers), Buddhist monks, and uncovered “enemies.” The Santebal internal security service kept meticulous records of the tortures and executions in which it engaged, Phnom Penh’s S-21/Tuol Sleng facility being the pinnacle of the regime’s torture camps. Failures to achieve the regime’s unrealistic economic goals were blamed on internal and external conspirators. Confessions of sabotage were wrung from Cambodians who were forced to name their accomplices, drawing more innocents into the regime’s web of terror. Cambodia’s numerous mass grave sites have come to be known as the Killing Fields.

Khmer Rouge thought placed particular attention to the idea of Khmer purity. Non-Khmer Cambodians of Vietnamese, Cham (Muslim), or Chinese descent faced particular threats. The young were considered especially pure by the Khmer Rouge, as they had not been tainted by the attitudes of the past (Pol Pot’s Little Red Book cites the following Khmer Rouge slogan: “Clay is molded while it is soft”). Society was supposed to start afresh from the “year zero.”

Heavily influenced by the ideas of Mao Zedong of China, Cambodia’s Communist leaders believed they could substitute human willpower for other economic inputs, thus carrying out a “super great leap forward” and revolutionizing agricultural production. The need to continually write one’s autobiography and correct errors of thought were also borrowed from the Chinese Communists. Self-reliance was a core value and, with the exception of supporter China, the regime was effectively closed to the outside world.

In 1979, the Khmer Rouge was ousted from power by a Vietnamese invasion. The regime’s remnants fled to the Thai border and continued to control territory and followers into the 1990s. A United Nations (UN)–organized election in 1993 marginalized the group, which boycotted the polls. By 1996–1997, primarily through defections to the new government, the Khmer Rouge was virtually nonexistent. A show trial of Pol Pot was held in the Khmer Rouge–controlled zone of Cambodia in 1997, and the former leader was put under house arrest. He died in April 1998. In conjunction with the UN, Cambodia agreed in 2003 to set up a mixed Cambodian/international tribunal to bring remaining top Khmer Rouge leaders to justice for their crimes while in power, including Ta Mok, known as “the Butcher,” and Comrade Duch, the head of the S-21 camp.

SEE ALSO Communism; Genocide; Killing Fields; Military Regimes; Pol Pot; Underclass; United Nations

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chanda, Nayan. 1986. Brother Enemy: The War after the War. New York: Collier.

Chandler, David. 1999. Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Chandler, David. 1999. Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kiernan, Ben. 1985. How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930–1975. London: Verso.

Kiernan, Ben. 1996. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Locard, Henri. 2004. Pol Pot’s Little Red Book: The Sayings of Angkar. Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books.

Ponchaud, Francois. 1978. Cambodia: Year Zero. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston.

Schanberg, Sidney. 1980. The Death and Life of Dith Pran. New York: Penguin.

Shawcross, William. 1979. Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Paige Johnson Tan