The Best of Cambodia & Laos

16
CAMBODIA IN DEPTH
2
LOOKING BACK
with suffering. Nixon and Kissinger were
Pol Pot’s greatest friends in terms of recruitment.
After 1970 Sihanouk, following the
dictum that “my enemy’s enemy is my
friend,” disastrously and naively threw in
his lot with the Khmer Rouge, visiting the
liberated zones and being photographed
with the Khmer Rouge leadership. He was
under pressure from China (as was Pol Pot)
and his bitterness knew no boundaries.
This was a disaster. Even with all the wriggling
and squirming that Sihanouk had
done to remain in power, he was still
revered by Khmers in the countryside and
now the Khmer Rouge had his blessing. In
his arrogance, Sihanouk thought he could
control the Khmer Rouge. It was to prove
to be very much the other way around. By
1973, the whole of Cambodia was engulfed
in savage fighting, and Phnom Penh was
bloated with refugees and was effectively
under siege. Pressure continued to build,
and the bombs continued to fall. Meanwhile,
the Lon Nol government didn’t aid
its own survival as the practices of brutality
and corruption became amplified to operatic
proportions.
AN UNBELIEVABLE
HORROR: THE KHMER
ROUGE YEARS
In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge won the
war and entered Phnom Penh. What was
to follow was one of the most brutal and
evil episodes in the history of Cambodia
and, indeed, the history of the whole of
mankind. On entering the city the Khmer
Rouge emptied Phnom Penh completely
and drove the entire population, including
the sick and the dying, into the countryside.
This was proclaimed to be “Year Zero.”
The Khmer Rouge turned Cambodia
into one large, starvation-driven, terrorized
work camp. Anyone thought to be
remotely associated with the old regime
was murdered. The Khmer Rouge would
torture and kill for acts as subversive as
wearing glasses or speaking in a foreign
language. Up to two million people died
as the result of torture, starvation, and
wholesale purges. People were interned
and slaughtered on an industrial scale.
“Confessions” were extracted from people
who generally had no idea why they had
been arrested in the first place. The enemies
of “Angkar”—or “the Organization”—were
tortured, starved, beaten, and
killed all over the country.
As the movement became more fractured,
more paranoid, and more collectively
delusional, the killing got worse.
The whole of the “Eastern Zone” became
suspicious to “Angkar” and thousands
were deported to the seemingly loyal
Southwestern Zone. The Easterners were
issued with blue kramas (traditional
Khmer checked scarves), with everyone
wearing a blue krama marked for death.
Today historians, journalists, and commentators
are still trying to understand
this horror. No one really does. The movement
was led by a clique of committed
leftists, the head of which was a soft-spoken
former teacher with royal connections.
His real name was Saloth Sar, but he
is known to the world now as Pol Pot (see
box on p. 18 for more about him). Many
of these leftists had been educated in Paris
and became part of a wider Communist
movement known as the “Circle Marxiste.”
As Sihanouk’s regime became more
brutal this group became more consolidated
and, after the Lon Nol coup, better
equipped and more effective. Their philosophy
was a weird mixture of mangled
Maoist thinking and traditional Khmer
xenophobic arrogance.
Some blame their brutalization on the
American bombing of the countryside.
This is far too simple and trite. The
Americans bombed Laos and Vietnam as
well, yet neither of those countries
descended into the carnage that ravaged
Cambodia. No one knows why, and
although there are UN trials in process,
that doesn’t mean the surviving Khmer