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→Aftermath
More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.
More than 3 million people fled Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos as “boat people,” about half of whom have been resettled by the United States.
R.J. Rummel, an analyst of political killings, eloquently summarized life under the Khmer Rouge as follows:
<blockquote>
The United States had supported and supplied the Cambodian military government of General Lon Nol. But the American Congress ended all aid to him with the withdrawal of the United States from the Vietnam War in 1973. After successive retreats, Lon Nol could no longer even defend the capital, Phnom Penh, against the Khmer Rouge guerrillas. The Cambodian army then declared a cease-fire and laid down its arms. On April 17, 1975, a rag-tag bunch of solemn, black-pajama-clad teenagers with red scarves and Mao caps, carrying arms of all descriptions, walked or were trucked from different directions into Phnom Penh. They were part of an army of 68,000 Khmer Rouge guerrillas that had achieved victory for a Communist Party of only 14,000 members against an army of about 200,000 men.
At first, the people hardly knew what to make of these victorious guerrillas. After all, the war was over, the killing had stopped, and people who had chafed under the Lon Nol government were relieved and happy. Many intellectuals and middle-class Cambodians were disgusted with the everyday corruption of the government, and were willing to try anything that brought change, even Communism. The Khmer Rouge was cheered, and there were public and private celebrations.
But before the people could settle down and enjoy a few days of peace, the Khmer Rouge began doing the unimaginable: they turned their weapons on the 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 inhabitants of the capital and with angry yelling, shouting, hand-waving, threats of immediate death, and actual shooting, demanded that everyone get out of the city. In this and all other newly occupied cities and towns, their order to evacuate was implacable. Including those in other cities and towns elsewhere, the Khmer Forge kicked into a largely unprepared countryside near 4,240,000 urban Cambodians and refugees, even the sick, infirm and aged. Even for those on the operating table or in labor with child, the order was absolute: "Go! Go! You must leave!"
Families evacuated any way possible, carrying what few possessions they could grab. The wealthy or middle-class rode out in cars, soon to be abandoned, or stolen from them by the Khmer Rouge. Some left on heavily loaded motor scooters or bicycles, which would also soon be confiscated. The vast multitude of pathetic urbanites and refugees only had their feet, and formed barely moving lines extending for miles. Some ill or infirm hobbled along; some thrown from hospitals crawled along on hands and knees. According to a British journalist who, from the safety of the French embassy, watched the slowly moving mass of evacuees, the Khmer Rouge was "tipping out patients [from the hospitals] like garbage into the streets.... Bandaged men and women hobbled by the embassy. Wives pushed wounded soldier husbands on hospital beds on wheels, some with serum drips still attached. In five years of war, this is the greatest caravan of human misery I have seen."
Failure to evacuate meant death. Failure to begin evacuation promptly enough meant death. Failure of anyone in the mass of humanity that clogged the roads out of a city and in the neighboring countryside to obey Khmer Rouge orders meant death. Failure to give the Khmer Rouge what they wanted--whether car, motor scooter, bicycle, watch, or whatever--meant death.
The direction the people exited the city depended on the side they were on when they received the evacuation order. The Khmer Rouge told refugees to return to their home village; but for the mass and particularly the urbanites, where they went after evacuation and what village the Khmer Rouge eventually settled them in depended on the whim of the soldiers and cadre along the way. People were jumbled together, trudging along for days or weeks, usually with whatever clothes, covering, and provisions they could snatch at the last moment. Many had minimal supplies, since they had believed the Khmer Rouge who, to minimize disorder, told them that the evacuation would only be for a few days. The very young and old, and those already sick, injured, or infirm soon died on the roads or trails. One of these trudging millions, a medical doctor named Vann Hay, said that every 200 meters he saw a dead child.
Including those killed outright, the toll from this outrageous and bloody evacuation is in dispute. Whether 40,000 to 80,000 evacuees were murdered or died, as one scholar sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge claimed, or 280,000 to 400,000 as the CIA estimated, the sheer horror of this urban expulsion is undeniable.
Primarily, this was done as a matter of ideology. The Khmer Rouge saw the city as the home of foreign ideas, capitalists, and their supportive bourgeoisie intellectuals; and as thoroughly corrupt and requiring a thorough cleansing. And those the Khmer Rouge believed the city had corrupted, its professionals, business people, public officials, teachers, writers, and workers, must either be eliminated or reeducated and purified. And to the Khmer Rouge, the best way of remaking those "corrupted minds" that they allowed to survive was to make them work in the fields along side pure peasants. Consider the slogans broadcast over Radio Phnom Penh and given at meetings at the time: "what is infected must be cut out.... What is rotten must be removed.... What is too long must be shortened and made the right length.... It isn't enough to cut down a bad plant, it must be uprooted." This inhuman expulsion was an opening salvo in the Khmer Rouge campaign to utterly remake Cambodian culture and society, and to construct pure Communism forthwith. Pol Pot and a few henchmen, who organized and loosely commanded the Khmer Rouge, planned all this.
They collectivized peasants everywhere--95 to 97 percent of the population eventually forced into collective farms--and expected evacuees and peasants to work solely for the communist revolution. They forbid all political, civil, or human rights. They prohibited travel without a pass from village to village. They forced Cambodians to eat and sleep in communes, and ordered even young children to work in the fields. In some regions, they made peasants work from about 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 or 10:00 p.m., with time off only for "political education." They closed permanently all primary, secondary, and technical schools, as well as colleges and universities. They shut down all hospitals and automatically murdered Western-trained medical doctors. They prohibited sex between the unmarried, and in some places, they threatened boys and girls with death for as little as holding hands. Also at risk of death, unauthorized contact was forbidden even between those married. The Khmer Rouge allowed no appeals, no courts, no judges, no trials, and no law. They eliminated all money, businesses, books, and newspapers. They banned music. They eliminated practicing lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, scientists, and all other professionals, because whatever truths these professions contained, the peasant could pick up through experience.
This is all incredible and some details on this may help its digestion. Just consider how the Khmer Rouge controlled personal relations. They made showing love to a relative or laughing with them dangerous, since they might perceive this as showing less dedication to, or poking fun at, the Great Revolution. It was even dangerous to use some term of endearment, such as "honey," "sweetheart," or "dearest," for a loved one. The doctor Haing Ngor tried to so refer to his wife, for example, and a spy overheard and reported him for this, as well as the fact that he had eaten food he picked in the forest, instead of bringing it into the village for communal eating. The local head cadre interrogated him about these sins, and told him, "The chhlop [informers] say that you call your wife 'sweet.' We have no 'sweethearts' here. That is forbidden." Soldiers then took him to a prison where cadre severally tortured him, cut off his finger, and sliced his ankle with a hatchet. He barely survived.
This deadly communist revolution created pitiful human dilemmas. Think about what this same doctor Haing Ngor went through when his wife suffered life-threatening complications during childbirth. To help her deliver her baby would mean death, since the Khmer Rouge forbid husbands from delivering their wive's babies. In any case, to use his medical skills to save her would in effect tell the cadre that he was a doctor, and would result in his death, and possibly that of his wife and newborn child. To do nothing might mean their death anyway; still, if he did nothing, the wife might pull through. He chose to do nothing, and perhaps he could do nothing anyway since he had no proper medical instruments. Mother and baby soon both died, then, leaving a gaping wound in his heart that never healed.
But even if Ngor's child had been born, he could not have kept it for long. The Khmer Rouge took children away from their parents and made them live and work in labor brigades. If the children died of fatigue or disease, the cadre were good enough to inform their parents; then, what emotion the parents showed could mean their life or death. If they wept or displayed extreme unhappiness, this showed a bourgeois sentimentality--after all, their children had sacrificed themselves for the Great Revolution and the parents should be proud, not unhappy. Similarly, a wife expressing grief over an executed husband--an enemy of the Great Revolution--was explicitly criticizing the Khmer Rouge. This unforgivable act of bourgeois sentimentality could mean her death.
Throughout Cambodia, fear was a normal condition of life. The Khmer Rouge systematically massacred people because of past positions, associations, or relatives. When the cadre discovered someone who had been a top military man under a previous government, a former government official or bureaucrat, a business executive or high monk, they and their whole families, including babies, were murdered, sometimes after extended torture. This root-and-branch extermination of the tainted even reached down to cousins of cousins of former soldiers. For instance, Khmer Rouge cadre came to believe that the villagers of Kauk Lon really were former Lon Nol officers, customs officials and police agents. Troops then forced every villager--about 360 men, women, and children--to march into a nearby forest. As they walked among the trees, waiting soldiers ambushed and machine-gunned them all down. Similar slaughter often awaited those who had had any relations with the West or Vietnam, even sometimes the Soviet Union, or who had ever opposed the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge even might execute those found with Western property, such as books, or those who spoke French or English--even those who had been schooled beyond the seventh grade. Even in some areas wearing glasses was a capital offense.
Not only did the Khmer Rouge run amok massacring their people, but also everywhere the Khmer Rouge tried to destroy the very heart of peasant life. Hinayana Buddhism had been a state religion, and the priesthood of monks with their saffron robes was a central part of Cambodian culture. Some 90 percent of Cambodians believed in some form of Buddhism. Many received a rudimentary schooling from the monks, and many young people became monks for part of their lives. The Khmer Rouge could not allow so powerful an institution to stand and therefore set out with vigor to destroy it. They exterminated all leading monks and either murdered or defrocked the lesser ones. One estimate is that out of 40,000 to 60,000 monks only 800 to 1,000 survived to carry on their religion. We do know that of 2,680 monks in eight monasteries, merely seventy were alive in 1979. As for the Buddhist temples that populated the landscape of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge destroyed 95 percent of them, and turned the few remaining into warehouses or allocated them for some other degrading use. Amazingly, in the very short span of a year or so, the small gang of Khmer Rouge wiped out the center of Cambodian culture, its spiritual incarnation, its institutions.
This was an act of genocide within the larger Cambodian democide, and it was not the only one. In most if not all the country, simply being of Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, or Lao ancestry meant death. As part of a planned genocide campaign, the Khmer Rouge sought out and killed other minorities, such as the Moslem Cham. In the district of Kompong Xiem, for example, they demolished five Cham hamlets and reportedly massacred 20,000 that lived there; in the district of Koong Neas only four Cham apparently survived out of some 20,000. The cadre threw the Cham Grand Mufti, their spiritual leader, into boiling water and then hit him on the head with an iron bar. They beat another leader, the First Mufti, to death, tortured and disemboweled the Second Mufti, and murdered by starvation in prison the Chairman of the Islamic Association of Kampuchea (Cambodia). Overall, the Khmer Rouge annihilated nearly half--about 125,000--of all the Cambodian Cham.
As to the other minorities, the Khmer Rouge also slaughtered about 200,000 ethnic Chinese, almost half of those in Cambodia--a calamity for ethnic Chinese in this part of the world unequaled in modern times--additionally, they murdered 3,000 Protestants and 5,000 Catholics; around 150,000 ethnic Vietnamese (over half); and 12,000 ethnic Thai out of 20,000. One Cambodian peasant, Heng Chan, whose wife was of Vietnamese descent, lost not only his wife, but also five sons, three daughters, three grandchildren, and sixteen of his wife's relatives. In this genocide, the Khmer Rouge probably murdered 541,000 Chinese, Chams, Vietnamese, and other minorities.
As though this was not enough, by threat of death the Khmer Rouge forced ordinary Cambodians to labor to the point of life-endangering exhaustion, and fed them barely enough to keep them alive while further weakening their bodies through extreme malnutrition. The Khmer Rouge fed their hard laborers an average of 800 to 1,200 calories per day, where as for even light labor a worker requires an average of 1,800 calories at a minimum. Nor did the Khmer Rouge provide them with protection against the dangers of exposure and disease. Even Pol Pot admitted in 1976 that 80 percent of the peasants had malaria. In many places people died like fish in a heavily polluted stream. The horror is that people are not fish, but thinking, feeling, loving human beings.
As one would expect, in this hell the Khmer Rouge did not spare each other the fear of death either, but often executed their soldiers and cadre for infractions of minor rules. More important, as the Pol Pot gang maneuvered to consolidate its rule over Cambodia, the struggle for power at the top, and the paranoia of top leaders increased. Not only was there the usual despot's fear of an assassin's knife in the night, but an intensifying fear that dissident Khmer Rouge might destroy the communist revolution. Increasingly, the Pol Pot gang saw sabotage, and CIA, KGB, or Vietnamese operatives, behind all production failures and project delays.
Purge after purge of high and low Khmer Rouge followed. They increasingly filled the cells of the major security facility in Phnom Penh, Tuol Sleng, with communist officials and cadre. Pol Pot's gang had these people tortured until they fingered collaborators among higher-ups, who were then executed. Confessions were the aim of most torture, and the gang would even arrest, with all the lethal consequences, interrogators who were so crude as to kill their victims before getting a confession.
In sum, the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge was a giant forced labor and death camp, in which all suffered the torments of hell.
As wholesale murderers, the Khmer Rouge is in a class with the Rwandan Hutu government. For rapidly killing a high proportion of their population, they have no competitors. Not even Stalin or Mao could come close. Even Hitler might be shamed by the poor performance of his killers compared to Pol Pot's gang or the Hutu government.
</blockquote>
In 1981, Pol Pot made his famous declaration denying guilt for the brutalities committed by the organisation he led:
<blockquote>
Pol Pot said that he knows that many people in the country hate him and think he’s responsible for the killings. He said that he knows many people died. When he said this he nearly broke down and cried. He said he must accept responsibility because the line was too far to the left, and because he didn’t keep proper track of what was going on. He said he was like the master in a house he didn’t know what the kids were up to, and that he trusted people too much. For example, he allowed [one person] to take care of central committee business for him, [another person] to take care of intellectuals, and [a third person] to take care of political education.... These were the people to whom he felt very close, and he trusted them completely. Then in the end ... they made a mess of everything.... They would tell him things that were not true, that everything was fine, that this person or that was a traitor. In the end they were the real traitors. The major problem had been cadres formed by the Vietnamese.
</blockquote>
===Failure of US campaign to help the South===
===Failure of US campaign to help the South===