Cambodia In Agony

Khmer Rouge is the French term for Red Khmer, referring to a radical Cambodian communist. The Khmer Rouge members were part of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (PKK) established in 1951. It changed its name to KCP in 1963 with its most important figure being Pol Pot (aka Saloth Sar) and Ieng Sary. However, the anti-leftist campaign throughout the 60s under the government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk convinced party leaders that they should go underground.

            A peasant uprising in Samlaut District of Battambang Province in early 1967 provided the spark for the KCP to rise up and resist the government. In Battambang, many peasants suffered from severe economic dislocation associated with ever-widening disparities in wealth. Pressure on the peasants in this area increased late in 1966 when the government decided to build a sugar refinery at Kompong Kol near Samlaut. Expropriating land needed for the project, provincial officials failed to compensate adequately the affected peasants. This failure led to a rapid rise in local tensions, and set the fuse for the outbreak of conflict. Finally, the entire region rose up in rebellion. Peasants near Samlaut overran a government garrison, seized the arms stored there, and then disappeared into the jungle.[1] The Communist party leaders in faraway northeast did not know the attack was going to occur, but undoubtedly the local radicals, exasperated by the government’s behavior, encouraged the people to revolt.[2]

            Prime Minister Lon Nol, acting as head of state while Sihanouk was in France, suppressed the rebellion without mercy. Moreover, the government accused the Communist Party of being responsible for this rebellion and therefore should be destroyed. Facing the repression, Communist-led forces frequently clashed with Sihanouk’s army, militia, and police in early 1968. Real action got underway January 17, 1968, when newly formed guerrilla units, or the Revolutionary Army of the KCP and Khmer Rouge, attacked a government post at Bay Bamram near Battambang City. The number of Khmer Rouge members increased through 1968-1970. By 1970, Pol Pot publicly claimed that the party forces had 4,000 regular troops and 50,000 guerrillas.[3] The Khmer Rouge could grow because many poor peasants volunteered to join. They believed that the Khmer Rouge could help them fight against the government which had been so oppressive. Besides that, the Khmer Rouge increased its power by ambushing small government units and stealing their weapons.[4]

           In 1970, Lt. General Lon Nol led a coup to overthrow Sihanouk. Sihanouk therefore allied with the Khmer Rouge to fight against Lon Nol, and the civil war began. Lon Nol was assisted militarily and financially by the United States, while the Vietnamese gave advice and assistance on military strategies to the Khmer Rouge. When the United States stopped its assistance to Lon Nol in 1975, Lon Nol became a paper tiger. On April 17, 1975, after five years of war, the Khmer Rouge and the KCP finally capped their twenty-four-year history with a stunning Communist victory over the Lon Nol government.

            Thousands of Phnom Penh residents celebrated in the streets as the victorious Khmer Rouge troops entered the capital. The joyful celebration, however, was not because the people of Phnom Penh were supporters of the Khmer Rouge. Instead, they felt great relief that the five-year civil war had finally come to an end. The joy of the residents quickly turned to fear as they noticed the Khmer Rouge troops were not celebrating with them. Embittered and toughened after years of brutal civil war, the Khmer Rouge marched through the boulevards of Phnom Penh with icy stares on their faces. The troops soon began to order people to abandon their homes and leave Phnom Penh. They were forced to migrate to the countryside. By mid-afternoon on that day, hundreds of thousands of people were on the move. No exceptions were made, because all residents, young and old, had to evacuate the city of Phnom Penh as quickly as possible.

            April 17, 1975, known as the Year Zero, marked the birth of the Democratic Kampuchea and the onset of the Khmer Rouge regime under Pol Pot in Cambodia. This was also the beginning of the reign of terror. Out of 7.3 million Cambodians said to be alive on April 1975, less than 6 million remained to greet the Vietnamese occupiers in the waning days of 1978.[5] In 1977 and 1978 worldwide attention was called to the massive deaths among the Cambodian population: they were executed for a variety of causes, starved, worked to death, or felled by untreated disease.

            This essay attempts to demonstrate how Pol Pot was responsible for the large number of deaths among the Cambodians during his regime from 1975 to 1979. First, it will discuss how Pol Pot assumed the Khmer Rouge leadership. Then, it will seek to understand Pol Pot’s ideological roots, because they motivated him to consolidate his regime, and they shaped his political plans for Cambodia. After that, the paper will elaborate on the methods Pol Pot used to accomplish his political goal and the results. At the end, this paper will discuss the consequences of the massacres.

Pol Pot – The Real Power of the Khmer Rouge

            During the Khmer Rouge regime, Angkor, the organization consisting of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge, embodied an effective and invisible power to which everyone in Cambodia owed total obedience.[6] Although Angkor appeared to be collective leadership of Khmer Rouge leaders, the real power was in the hands of Pol Pot and his closest allies such as Ieng Sary, Khieu Ponnary, Khieu Samphan, and Son Sen in the Central Committee. These people were actually the relatives of Pol Pot. Ieng Sary was the brother-in-law of Pol Pot, Khieu Ponnary was Pol Pot’s wife, and the others were also related to Pol Pot. What made Pol Pot the most dominant figure in the Khmer Rouge ?

            Pseudonym for Saloth Sar, Pol Pot was born into a prosperous peasant family that enjoyed the patronage of the Cambodian court in 1925. Pol Pot was educated in Phnom Penh and Kompong Cham. In 1949, because of his fluency in French and palace connections, Pol Pot was awarded a scholarship to study electrical technology in Paris. After repeatedly failing his examinations, Pol Pot joined the French Communist Party and learned the Communist ideologies. In 1953, he returned to Cambodia and served in the anti-French guerilla forces headed by the Vietnamese. After the independence of Cambodia in 1954, Pol Pot taught in a private school in Phnom Penh, but he also engaged in the underground communist movement led by the PKK. He enjoyed the conspiratorial rituals of underground politics and dreamed of seizing power.[7] 

Pol Pot was always the most important figure of the PKK. In 1963, Pol Pot became secretary of the Central Committee of the party. During the civil war period, he was undoubtedly responsible for strategic decisions, such as rejecting the 1972 cease-fire proposed by North Vietnam and the Khmer Republic, the “strategic storming attacks” on Phnom Penh in 1973-1974, and the final assault on the capital the following years.[8] There were six major military regions (northwest, west, south, east, northeast, and special) dominated by the Khmer Rouge during the civil war. However, only the northeast was securely controlled by forces loyal to the Stalinist or Pol Pot’s faction.[9] By the time of the “liberation” of Phnom Penh in April 1975, the Stalinists had succeeded in placing their young cadres totally committed to the politbureau and its directives dominated by the Stalinists of the Central Committee into the political infrastructure of the party in most regions.

            When the civil war was over, Pol Pot was named prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea. When he stepped up to govern Democratic Kampuchea, he had become the most dominant figure in Cambodia.

 
Pol Pot’s Ideological Roots

            When Pol Pot came to power, he decided to consolidate his regime and began a total revolution to transform Cambodian society. In fact, his behavior and politcal ideologies were shaped by different politcal philosophies, such as Stalinism and Maoism. Therefore, in order to understand the behavior of Pol Pot, it is necessary to realize the political philosophies that influenced him.     

Pol Pot studied Communism in France during the 1950s. Since he was a student of Communism, he learned the basic values of Marxism and Leninism there. However, Pol Pot was also influenced by other communist leaders at that time, and Pol Pot combined their philosphies to form his own political ideology and behavior.

When Pol Pot arrived in France in 1949, Stalin was still the world Communist leader. Pol Pot and his fellow students learned their socialism from the French Communist Party in its most Stalinist period.[10] Hence, Pol Pot learned a lot about Stalinism at that time.

            Stalinism shaped Pol Pot’s ideology on the role of the leadership and party discipline. Pol Pot was familiar with Stalin’s writings, especially his widely circulated History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It took a conspiratorial view of Soviet history and stressed the important role played by Stalin, who controlled the party and the nation but seldom mingled with ordinary people.[11] Moreover, Stalin also stressed that without a solidly built and solidly directed Party, no theory could be applied and the enemies of socialism would profit from the occasions to replace the leadership.[12]

            Pol Pot learned a lot from Stalinism about the use of violence and terror to destroy opposition and suspicious party members. Between 1929 and 1936 in the Soviet Union, the Kulaks were exterminated wholesale with their families; whole regions suffered famines caused both by nature and the government…estimates of deaths were put at more than 10 million men, women and children.[13] Besides that, during the Great Purge about abut two-thirds of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee was liquidated, with about half the corps was arrested.[14]

            During his study in France, Pol Pot spent a month in Yugoslavia as a manual laborer in 1950. Pol Pot witnessed the social mobilization and public works on such a large scale in Yugoslavia under Tito. That summer, Yugoslavia was sufferring from a severe drought and famine. However, Yugoslavia was able to meet these challenges by mobilizing the people’s revolutionary will to overcome the difficulties. Pol Pot was impressed by the strength of all the Yugoslavs, united around their leaders, that gave them the chance of gaining successive victories, knowing that it was a question of national survival.[15] The scene in Yugoslavia made Pol Pot believe that human power and sacrifice would help the nation to overcome all difficulties, and national interest was the most important thing for the country.

            Pol Pot was also deeply influenced by another communist leader in China, Mao Zedong, because almost every element of the radical Cambodian revolution had an antecedent in Mao’s China.[16] Understanding what Mao sought to accomplish in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution illuminated Pol Pot’s goal for Cambodia. In his eulogy, after Mao’s death, Pol Pot indicated his close affinity to Mao’s teaching. He described Mao as “the most eminent teacher since Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin”.[17]

            The aim of the Great Leap Forward in China was to put emphasis on rice and irrigation to increase agricultural production. In this way the Chinese government would be able to feed its population well and achieve the goal of self-reliance. During the Great Leap Forward era, selfish individualism was eliminated. All citizens lived in large production communes organized along military and industrial lines. Peasants did not work their own individual plots of land, but instead became part of production brigades assigned to do specific jobs. All private properties were confiscated. In 1957, Mao initiated the Hsiafang movement in which millions of city people poured into the village to work in the new communes for the new agricultural program, which included the construction of canals and dams.[18] Mao believed the agricultural production would increase tremendously in this way. Although the Great Leap Forward was a great economic failure, Pol Pot still blindly took it as a model for his economic plan in Cambodia during his regime.

            Pol Pot visited China in the early phase of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. During the Cultural Revolution, China continued its emphasis on the idea of self-reliance, and it was also the period of anti-Westernism. Mao emphasized the idea of class warfare and the importance of poor peasants often in this period. More importantly, those opposed and deviated from Mao ideology were eliminated or re-educated.

The Cultural Revolution epitomized the intentional, systematic use of violence to achieve revolutionary ends.[19] Mao saw intellectuals as the opponents of his revolution because he believed that they would rise up to challenge the authority. He stated that if people were stupid they could be easily forced to hard labor, but if they were intellegent, they could not be easily forced.[20] To uproot the “opponents” of the revolution, Mao turned to Red Guards from distant places, who were then sent into communes, factories, or universities. With no stake in the preservation of the status quo, they were uninhibited in their attacks on institutional infrastructure.[21]

Consolidation of Power

            When Pol Pot became the prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea, he must have felt as if his destiny had been fulfilled. He had gained everything he had dreamed of when he first became a communist in 1952. He may have felt invincible; he may also have been frightened by what lay ahead of him.[22] To secure his position, he eliminated all opposition to his rule. By doing that, the Khmer Rouge was able to carry out its radical reforms without any dissenting views. Thus a series of executions ensued, contributing to the mounting numbers of death caused by Pol Pot. The main targets of the purge were the former offcials of the Lon Nol government, the New People – townspeople and peasants who lived in areas of the country beyond the control of the Khmer Rouge until April 1975 - the intellectuals, and the suspicious party members within the Khmer Rouge.

            As part of the campaign to destroy urban life, the Khmer Rouge began an effort to identify – and in many instance execute – political leaders, military officers, and civil servants from the republican government. Some were killed at their offices; others were identified at check points along the march routes outside of Phnom Penh; still others surrendered and were taken out in large groups to be killed. In some instances the spouses and children of the officials were killed alongside their husbands and fathers.[23]

            Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regarded the Khmer Republic of Lon Nol as corrupt. They believed that a person spoiled by a corrupt regime cannot be reformed, but must be physically eliminated from the brotherhood of the pure. The old regime must be destroyed; the enemy must be utterly crushed; what is infected must be cut out; what is rotten must be removed.[24] Moreover, by eliminating all the former Lon Nol officials, the Khmer Rouge could prevent their taking revenge.

            Although most townspeople did not engage in the operation of the Khmer Republic of Lon Nol, Pol Pot still regarded these people his possible opposition. In his mind, since these people lived in town, they were polluted by Western ideologies and capitalism, which were against his ideology. Those people were therefore also corrupt..

In 1977, Pol Pot told the public that the new people were the counterrevolutionaries who were unfit to live in Cambodia. These counterrevolutionary elements which betrayed and tried to sabotage the revolution were not to be regarded as his people. They were to be regarded as enemies of Democratic Cambodia, of the Cambodian revolution, and of the Cambodian people. Hence, the “oppressive, blood-sucking and bone-gnawing regime of the traitorous Lon Nol clique” had to be destroyed utterly in order for a new revolutionary Cambodia to be born.[25] Even though many new people were not executed immediately when Pol Pot took over the regime, Pol Pot used indirect ways to eliminate the new people by offering them a near-starvation diet and forcing them to work to the point of exhaustion.

            Since Pol Pot and his closest lieutenants and advisors were almost all scholars and teachers, it would seem an enigma that a revolution with such clear roots in the intellectual community would turn so viciously on its own kind. Yet, it may be that Pol Pot and his ideological companions perceived the academic world as an inherent threat: if it had produced them, it could also produce a new dissident group to overthrow them. In fact, Pol Pot and his closest allies were the intellectuals who overthrew the Khmer Republic of Lon Nol, and they understood that intellectuals could pose a threat to the ruling power. Intellectuals had to be eliminated in order to carry out radical reforms smoothly and end all opposition to the Khmer Rouge regime.

Also, since Mao and his Cultural Revolution deeply influenced Pol Pot, it motivated him to follow Mao’s way in executing so many intellectuals during the rule of the Khmer Rouge.

            During the Khmer Rouge regime, executions of intellectuals were widespread. In the words of Lea Kong Thy, a former high school student in Sisophon, “I saw with my own eyes the execution of 20 former students of Sisophon High School. They were taken into field … and killed with a blow from a stave at the back of the head. Their hands were tied behind their back with a strip of red cloth. No official explanation was given. Perhaps they were killed because intellectuals are difficult to order about and go in for subersive activities.” In another incident, a medical orderly from the same area named Pho Chanta said he helped bury the bodies of nine teachers from a school at Sisophon who had been executed in August 1975, confirming this type of systematic killings of intellectuals.[26]

            A select number of Khmer Rouge cadres and their families met a terrible fate inside Khmer Rouge interrogation centers. The most infamous of these centers, codenamed S-21, was located in the abandoned suburban Phnom Penh high school of Tuol Sleng. Tuol Sleng’s reputation was brutally accurate: the sole purpose of S-21 was to extract confessions from former Khmer Rouge cadres and other political prisoners. The methods of extracting confessions at Tuol Sleng were cruel and barbaric. Prisoners were tortured with battery powered electric shocks, searing hot metal prods, knives and other terrifying implements. All in all, it is estimated that some 20,000 important party officers and cadres were executed at S-21, many by mean of torture.[27] What inspired Pol Pot to eliminate the party members who had fought with him on the same side during the civil war ?

            In fact, not all the Khmer Rouge members supported Pol Pot. Pol Pot’s draconian ideologies and policies inspired attempts to overthrow his rule. These in turn led Pol Pot to initiate violent, far-reaching, purges of the party.

           In 1976, plots against Pol Pot were numerous. For example, the members responsible for transportation of water in the northern zone organized a series of attempts agasint the regime. Khoy Thuon, unable to assure security in the zone that he led, was transferred to Phnom Penh. Then, when Pol Pot learned that Khoy Thuon was implicated in a conspiracy against the party and unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate him by using the Cambodian black pepper, Khoy Thuon was killed along with three hundred people who were in league with him.[28]  

On September 27, 1976, Pol Pot was replaced by one of his closest allies, Nuon Chea, as acting Prime Minister. Pol Pot used his ill health as a reason to step down suddenly. However, according to David Chandler, it is believed that Pol Pot resigned to confuse and encourage enemies in the party who could be crushed once they came into the open.[29] It would appear that the coup nearly succeeded with Pol Pot’s deposition in September, but he returned the following month and took brutal revenge began to fall on his enemies.

After the coup d’e`tat in 1976, Pol Pot did not want it to happen again. He believed the only way to prevent it was to kill all suspicious enemies and traitors within the party, just as Stalin did in the Soviet Union during the 30s. Over the next two years, the extended purge on enemies within the party continued, and many important Khmer Rouge party members along with their family members were arrested and executed at Tuol Sleng S-21. Their confessions were recorded in documents, and because of the confessions, more ‘conspiracies’ against Pol Pot were found out. By the middle of 1977, S-21 gained momentum and became impossible to stop. Its document fed the leadership’s paranoia. Documents led to more arrests, arrests produced more documents, and so on.[30]

Pol Pot’s Goals For The New Society

            When the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, Pol Pot and his closest allies began their total revolution against Sihanouk and the Lon Nol regime. Pol Pot wanted to build socialism quickly, he wanted his country to change quickly, and he wanted his people to be glorious quickly.[31] In order to achieve his political goals, namely self-reliance and modern agriculture, as quickly as possible, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge pushed their total revolution to the most extreme stage. Instead of bringing peace to Cambodia, there was an almost immediate escalation of the level of violence, as Pol Pot moved to impose on all Khmer a radical economic and social system.

            Pol Pot strongly believed in self reliance, and he had a very strong national pride. As Prince Sihanouk stated in October 1975, Pol Pot and other Khmer Rouge leaders were “ultra-nationalists”.[32] Pol Pot believed that Cambodia should be self-sufficient and not rely on other countries. The Khmer Rouge elites regarded Sihanouk and Lon Nol policies as failures. They stated that Sihanouk’s ouster in March 1970 was due to his policy of appeasing the Vietnamese communists. He had allowed the Vietnamese to dominate eastern Cambodia and given them access to the port of Kompong Som. The Khmer Rouge argued that this policy failed and that national sovereignty had been abridged. The Khmer Rouge leadership feared that Cambodia would be colonized by Vietnam after the United States was expelled from Indochina, and this was why their ideological pronouncements placed so much emphasis on sovereignty and complete reliance.[33]

            Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge leaders despised the way Lon Nol relied on the aid given by the United States. They regarded Lon Nol as having lost all sense of national soul and identity by “begging” from the United States. According to Pol Pot, each year Cambodia produced nothing, and the clique begged for everything, including rice, salt, wheat flour, and even firewood.[34]

            Khmer Rouge experience during the civl war made them embrace the idea of self reliance fervently. First, they saw the Westerners as enemies, and Cambodia should not receive any aid from them. Besides that, Pol Pot and other Khmer Rouge elite propagated a myth that victory in the civil war was an example of the virtue of near-total self reliance. In a speech to their people when they came to power, the leaders showed their determination to achieve the goal of total sovereignty and self reliance.

            We must understand the true nature and results of our revolution. When we won the victory over the U.S. imperialists, did we have any plane? … We were victorious over the U.S. imperialists…leaders of imperialists in the world. Did we have any planes then? No, and we had neither naval vessels nor armored vehicles…This army had no planes, tanks, or artillery pieces and was short of ammunition, however, our fight was crowned with success.[35]

            Because of these reasons, the Khmer Rouge believed that being self-reliant was the first step to making Cambodia strong and protecting Cambodian sovereignty from any outside threat. Pol Pot did not allow any foreign aid which would affect his political line.

            The first step toward self-reliance was to increase rice production because it was the backbone for the future industrial development in Cambodia. In the words of the Khmer Rouge, “Rice is the basic crop of our people as well as the basis of new Cambodia’s economy. If we have plenty of rice, we have plenty of everything. Our people can eat their fill and we can export it for hard currency. The more rice we produce the greater potential we have for export. The more we export, the better we can afford to buy equipment, machines, and other instruments necessary for building our industry and communication lines and for rapidly changing our agriculture.”[36] Moreover, Pol Pot stated that health services and social action also would rely on agriculture, because the most important medicine to prevent sickness is food. If there were enough to eat, there would be little sickness.[37]

            The Khmer Rouge therefore strongly focused on rice production, and the Cambodians were organized to build infrastructure such as canals, dikes, and reservoirs to improve the agricultural system in Cambodia. During Sihanouk’s regime from 1952-1969, rice production was less than 1.2 tons per hectare.[38] The Khmer Rouge determined to raise the rice production to three tons per hectare in a year.[39] In order to achieve his goal of self reliance and modern agriculture, Pol Pot evacuated the cities and forced all the townspeople to leave and migrate to the countryside. With the total mobilization of the nation’s labor resources, including the townspeople, Pol Pot expected the agricultural production to increase quickly. In order to make the people obey the policies of the Angkor, terror was used to fight agaisnt any opposition and ensure total obedience from the people.

            Pol Pot believed that everyone should put national interest as the priority in life, and everyone should sacrifice himself or herself for the country. Although the townspeople did not have any experience in farming, Pol Pot still saw them as a potential working force to help the nation to achieve its goal as quickly as possible. Therefore, they were forced to work between fifteen to eighteen hours a day under the supervision of the yothea.[40] They could be asked to do any kind of work: growing rice, building canals, dikes, and reservoirs.[41]

            The section above showed that violence was the way Pol Pot used to eliminate the former Lon Nol officials and the intellecuals, but Pol Pot also used violence to force the mass to work and obey his orders. Prior to total victory of the civil war, violence against the population was usually held to a minimum to maintain popular support for the revolution’s military effort. Once victory was achieved, however, Pol Pot resorted to fear and terror to control his people.

            The lives of the Cambodians under Pol Pot regime reflected how he used violence and cruelty to rule his compatriots. Cambodians suffered from extensive working hours and extreme hunger, and they sacrificed their lives in working on the rice fields and building an infrastructure to benefit the state. However, the Cambodians were treated like slaves, and they were maltreated by the Khmer Rouge. Those who failed to accomplish their work or cried and complained were not forgiven, but tortured and executed by the yothea. In Pol Pot’s view, if the people complained of being hungry, they were actually complaining. This was opposition to him, and therefore these people had to be destroyed. Koui Shali, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, described the violence and cruelty of the Khmer Rouge.

            I was hungry, and I constantly wanted to eat. But I didn’t dare to eat secretly, because fruit in the trees and fish in the river and frogs in the fields – all belonged to the ‘commune’, and private individuals were strictly forbidden to use them. Those who were accused of ‘seeking food for themselves’ or ‘stealing property of the commune’ were beaten up or starved. In my village once it happened that a girl found a frog, fried it in a fire and was about to eat it. But she ‘was caught red-handed’ by the leaders. The frog was wrested from the girl’s hands and she was beaten up. She cried bitterly. And the louder she cried, the stronger the beating. When she stopped crying, she was freed, but she was already dead.[42]

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge veterans were so cruel because they were brutalized during the civil war. Soldiers in all wars are taught to hate and to dehumanize their enemies. Those in the combat zone are othen possessed of a mad rage to destroy, and to avenge their fallen comrade. In any war, soldiers who have experienced terror often become possessed by fury. Blinded by the rage to destroy and supremely careless of consequences, they storm agaisnt the enemy until they are victorious, dead, or utterly exhausted. It is as if they are seized by a demon and are no longer in control of themselves.[43]

Pol Pot believed terror and violence was the way to achieve unanimous acquiescence in his political program and to destroy potential challenges to his rule.[44] Since he regarded violence as the major tool to accomplish his political goals, it became widespread during his regime.

Result of The Khmer Rouge Revolution

            Pol Pot wanted to accomplish his plan for Cambodia in the shortest time possible, and he pushed the revolution to the most extreme stage through violence. However, the total revolution led by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge was a disaster. Pol Pot did not accomplish his political goals for Cambodia through this total revolution. Instead, he was responsible for a massacre in Cambodia. According to Table 7.1 Death In Kampuchean War and Peace, approximately two millions people died from famines, disease, and execution from 1975-1979.[45]

            To achieve the goal of strict self reliance from 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge rejected foreign aid except for limited support from China. However, the Khmer Rouge did not apply “modern science” in their massive reconstruction projects. For them, communism and politics were the sciences that guided development. They were the modern students of Stalin and Mao, who believed backward countries could become modern states overnight by making people work very hard on huge projects.[46]

Unfortunately, when Pol Pot did not apply “modern science”, it simply brought disaster to his people. Without foreign aid, the country suffered devastatingly in times of poor harvest, famine, and epidemic.

            Pol Pot saw things as juxtaposition with limited logical thinking. He saw the Chinese could rely on themselves without any foreign aid, and he believed that his people could also do that. However, Pol Pot failed to apply logical thinking. China is a huge continent with abundant economic and human resources, and China could be self-sufficient. On the other hand, Cambodia is small, and its econmic resources is meager, and Cambodia would find it difficult to be self-sufficient.[47]

            Pol Pot totally ignored the variable factors affecting agricultural production in the country, and rice production never reached his expectation by trebling. A survivor explained, “Since 1975 there were restrictions on rice. In that year the harvest had been poor, and there was little grain in the countryside; for ten persons, we received two kampong per day [=50 grams per person].”[48] It showed that despite the Khmer Rouge emphasis on rice production, there was insufficient rice to feed the population, especially when rice production was damaged by bad weather and soil erosion. Also, due to the civil war, most of the rice fields were destroyed. Moreover, although Pol Pot increased the labor supply by forcing the townspeople to work on the rice fields, these people lacked any experience in manual labor and became ill and died. Meanwhile, the purge led by Pol Pot had eliminated many capable cadres and technicians that could guide the people to cultivate rice properly. For these reasons the rice production did not reach Pol Pot’s expectation at the end. [49]

            As mentioned above, the Khmer Rouge Rouge rejected imported food. To make matters worse, during nearly three years most of the inhabitants consumed practically no fats and very little protein – although Cambodia has one of world’s richest fishing grounds – and insufficient quantity of glucoside. Therefore, the alimentary deficiencies caused cases of edema, diarrhea, and generalized weakness.[50] When people did not have enough nutrition, they became weak, but they were not relieved of the exhausting working schedule. Most of them, especially the townspeople unused to manual labor, died when forced to building dikes, dams, and other infrastructure. In addition, those who complained of being hungry and tired were tortured by the yothea. Millions of Cambodian died from malnutrition, exhaustion, and execution.

 After The Massacre

            On Christmas day 1978, the third year of  Pol Pot regime, the Vietnamese launched a full-scale offensive against Kampuchea. They took control of Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979, bring the Pol Pot regime finally to an end. Five days later, the Vietnamese installed a new communist regime, the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), with Heng Samrin as the head of state. From 1979 to 1989, Cambodia was under the occupation of Vietnam.

            Although Pol Pot was finally deposed, and the nightmare of the Cambodians had come to an end, the massive death caused by Pol Pot during his regime had a huge impact on Cambodia. Even though the Cambodians could enjoy peace after his deposition, the lives of the Cambodians were in ruins, and the PRK faced major difficulties in helping Cambodia recover mainly because of the massive killings.

            After Vietnam occupied Cambodia, there was a continuous wave of Khmer refugess heading to Thailand. The reason behind the exodus was that many Khmers who had suffered under Pol Pot were afraid the Khmer Rouge would return in the future. Many of them were sick of Communism, and they did not believe the Communist Vietnam would be any better. Many Cambodians became wary, and they chose to leave Cambodia in order to avoid being victims of another tragedy in the future.[51] From 1979 to 1986, according to the United Nations, approximately two hundred thousand Khmer refugees departed from Thailand and resettled in other countries, most of them in the United States and France.[52]

            As the story of Cambodian’s tragedy was displayed on media worldwide, people all over the world were deeply moved. Enormous sums of money was raised by general public donation, the voluntary agencies, and the Western governments were delivered to Cambodia. In 1979-80 international aid donors responded to the country’s agricultural problems by importing over a million hoe heads, 5,000 small irrigation pumps, 1,300 power tillers, 55,000 tonnes of rice seeds and many thousands of tonnes of fertilizer.[53]

            Despite the foreign assistance, the PRK faced a formidable task of rebuilding. During Pol Pot regime, Cambodian had been uprooted, terrorized, weakened, and decimated. The emotional and psychological problems caused by the massacre affected the whole population. When Pol Pot was overthrown, many Cambodians still did not know whether relatives were dead or alive in another part of the country; whether they were killed or died under Pol Pot; or if they escaped. Orphan children, widows, and elderly people without relatives were left without family to care for them.[54] These orphan children and elderly people without relatives became a new social problem that the PRK had to deal with, along with the low morale among the Cambodians.

            A number of factors hindered the agricultural and economic recovery. Before 1969, Cambodia had enough people and animals to work the land for rice production, but by 1979 it lacked the labor force to produce sufficient food. The Khmer Rouge massacres left a weakened adult population consisting of a much higher percentage of women than men, with females making up sixty four percent of the adult population.[55] Until 1975, appoximately 1,600 people had been employed in the agricultural sectors as planners, technicians, or policy makers. By 1980, only 200 remained, of whom only 10 were graduates. Consequently, there were not enough technical experts to guide the agriculture programs and irrigation schemes. Hence, until 1986, the actual rice production still did not meet the required production to feed the population.[56] On the other hand, industrial recovery since 1979 was disappointingly slow. First, industry was long abandoned by Pol Pot during his regime, but more importantly, most industrial technicians and experts were eliminated by Pol Pot, so there were not enough professional people to carry out some useful technical plans to revitalize the industrial sector in Cambodia.

            The PRK also decided to restore formal education in Cambodia, but it was not an easy task. Of the 22,000 teachers in the country at the beginning of 1970, only 7,000 remained in 1979, and only 5,000 of them returned to teaching. Since then more than 50,000 teachers have been trained and retrained in the new teacher training centers located in each province. However, there was still a shortage of qualified teachers for higher, professional, and technical education. Thus secondary and higher education were still limited and only about 30% of secondary school students were able to continue with higher education either in Cambodia or abroad, usually in the USSR. It would take more than one generation to restore Cambodia’s professional and technical corps to meet the needs of the country.[57]

           Pol Pot, the man who was responsible for the massacre, repeated before his death on April 1998 that if he did not carry out the radical revolution in Cambodia in 1975, Cambodia would not be strong and it would be controlled by the the Vietnamese.[58] Before he died, Pol Pot still insisted he was right in what he had done, and he was never sorry about the deaths caused by his brutal policies. Pol Pot’s  massacre in Cambodia became part of a history of genocide in the twentieth century.

 
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