The terrible dictatorship of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, which lasted from 1975 to 1979, cost the lives of millions of people in the country. The number of victims of the bloody dictator Pol Pot and his revolutionary gangs has not yet been accurately calculated: according to rough estimates, it ranged from 2 to 3 million people. And today the crimes of the Khmer Rouge horrify humanity.
Having come to power in 1975, Pol Pot declared a “zero year” in the country - the year the new era. New story had to start from scratch - by abandoning education and the conveniences of modern civilization. Cambodians were allowed only one type of labor - work in the fields. All citizens were expelled from the cities (more than 2 million people were expelled from Phnom Penh alone in one day) and sent to work in the villages. Those who refused were killed, and even more people died along the way from hunger and disease.
Today, the Tuol Sleng School, which housed the terrible torture prison S-21 during the Pol Pot dictatorship, has become one of the most popular and creepy museums in Phnom Penh. Over the years of its existence, tens of thousands of people passed through the prison, and only a few survived. People were tortured to extract confessions of crimes against the state, and when they broke down and signed, they were killed right there, at school, or at nearby training grounds - “killing fields.” There were also children among the prisoners: relatives of “enemies of the people” received the same punishment as their relatives.
DDT is a known insect control agent that is poisonous to humans. The Khmer Rouge actively used this latter property during mass executions. Pol Pot's fighters rarely shot “enemies of the people”: cartridges were in short supply. People were simply beaten to death - with sticks, shovels, hoes. Such executions were carried out en masse, the corpses were dumped into a pit, which, having been filled to the top, was generously filled with DDT - so that the mass graves did not emit toxic odors, and also to be sure that the undead people would still die from the poison.
As already mentioned, in order to save ammunition, the Khmer Rouge practiced the most cruel and sadistic types of executions. This also applies to the murders of very young children from families of “traitors,” who were killed along with adults. The soldiers simply took the child by the legs and smashed his head against a tree. Parents were forced to watch their children die, and only then were they executed. This tree on one of the “killing fields” became the site of the death of many children. Today here is a place of memory and sorrow.
Pol Pot lived long... and without remorse
Pol Pot became one of the sadistic dictators who managed to escape justice. After Vietnamese troops captured Kampuchea and overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, Pol Pot fled the country by helicopter. He showed up in Thailand, where long years lived, continuing to be the leader of the Khmer Rouge movement, which moved its activities abroad. He died only in 1998, at the age of 73. By official version, the cause of death was a heart attack, however, according to rumors, Pol Pot was killed by the Khmer Rouge themselves, tired of his many years of dictatorship.
After the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, more than 200 “killing fields” - places of mass executions - were found in Cambodia. They discovered more than 20 thousand mass graves, in which more than a million people were buried. Cambodia is a small country with an area of about 100 thousand square kilometers. Thus, there is practically no exaggeration in the statement that under Pol Pot Cambodia turned into one mass grave.
The Khmer Rouge were recognized masters of torture. In the S-21 prison, special torture beds were installed - people were chained to them and beaten half to death, and sometimes even burned alive. “Vivisections” were also popular, when executioners opened up a living person and removed his internal organs without anesthesia. Slow drowning and electric shocks were considered “ordinary” torture. And those who aroused the hatred of the prison administration were flayed alive by the executioners. In a word, it is impossible to imagine greater cruelty than Pol Pot’s executioners demonstrated.
After the overthrow of the Pol Pot dictatorship, only five of his henchmen were sentenced to criminal punishment. Three of them, including Pol Pot's closest associates Nuon Chea and Kiehu Samphan, received life sentences. Tens of thousands of murderers who killed people with hoes were not punished at all.
Bones are a common find
20 thousand mass graves in the “killing fields” were not enough to bury all the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime. As guides working in museums opened on the site of the former “killing fields” say, even now, 38 years later, after every rain in the vicinity of the places of mass executions, human bones and remains of clothes of those whose bodies the executioners were not even worthy of raking appear on the surface of the earth. to a mass grave.
It's hard to imagine, but today's Cambodian children know nothing about scary times Khmer Rouge dictatorship! By silent social agreement, this topic is not discussed in school, it is not discussed in families and in companies. Thus, the children, each of whom has relatives who died in those odes, know nothing about the wave of death and violence that swept their country almost four decades ago.
We have already mentioned that cartridges in the Khmer Rouge army were considered scarce resource, and they were not supposed to be spent on any enemies of the people. Defenseless civilians were most often slaughtered with hoes: the Khmer Rouge army consisted mostly of peasants, and they preferred the usual tools of agricultural labor. Clubs, sticks, pipe cuttings - everything was suitable as a murder weapon, and sometimes groups of people were wrapped in barbed wire and an electric current was passed through them - this saved not only ammunition, but also time.
Before you is Kaing Guek Eav, director of the terrible S-21 prison. He personally took part in the torture and murder of 16 thousand people. However, after the Khmer Rouge dictatorship was overthrown, he enjoyed life in freedom for about 30 years and was convicted only in 2009, at the age of 68, becoming the fifth Pol Pot henchman to be convicted of his atrocities. Kaing Guek Eak received a life sentence.
Why did Pol Pot commit a terrible genocide of his own people? No, he was not a sick maniac seeking big blood. Things were even worse: he was an ideological maniac. He was sure that in order to build an ideal society, people must return to their origins, to the beginning of their history, forgetting about all the achievements of civilization and acquired knowledge. And for this benefit, civilization should simply be destroyed, along with their carriers - scientists, engineers, teachers, as well as ordinary citizens who are accustomed to modern conveniences and do not want to give them up.
John Duerst, Kerry Hamill and Stuart Glass were citizens of Great Britain, New Zealand and Canada respectively. They were sailing on a yacht off the coast of Cambodia towards Singapore when they were boarded by a Khmer Rouge ship. Stuart Glass was killed on the spot, and Duerst and Hamill were sent to S-21 prison, where, after much torture, Duerst admitted that he was a CIA spy sent to Cambodia for sabotage. Both Western tourists were executed on one of the “killing fields.” In the photo - Kerry Hamill's brother, who visited Pol Pot after the overthrow of the dictatorship terrible prison where his brother died.
Some political analysts argue that little Cambodia has become just part of a larger geopolitical game. Pol Pot called Vietnam his main enemy (and after coming to power, he executed all the Vietnamese who found themselves in Cambodia). The United States, just before Pol Pot came to power, left Vietnam and was ready to support any enemy of its former enemies. In turn, the sympathies of the USSR were on the Vietnamese side - to spite America. If it were not for the enmity between the United States and Vietnam, it is quite possible that, with the support of world political heavyweights, the Khmer Rouge regime would have been overthrown much earlier or would not have reigned in Cambodia at all.
“You talk about me like I’m some kind of Pol Pot,” the heroine of Lyudmila Gurchenko said offendedly in one popular Russian comedy. “Pol Potism”, “Pol Pot regime” - these expressions firmly entered the vocabulary of Soviet international journalists in the second half 1970s. However, this name thundered throughout the world in those years. In just under 4 years of his reign, more than 3,370,000 people were exterminated in Cambodia.
Common noun
In just a few years, the leader of the Khmer Rouge movement became one of the most bloody dictators in the history of mankind, earning the title of “Asian Hitler”.
Little is known about the childhood of the Cambodian dictator, primarily because Pol Pot himself tried not to make this information public. Even the date of his birth is available various information. According to one version, he was born on May 19, 1925 in the village of Prexbauw, into a peasant family. The eighth child of the peasant Pek Salot and his wife Sok Nem was given the name Salot Sar at birth.
Although Pol Pot’s family was a peasant family, it was not poor. The future dictator's cousin served under royal court and was even the crown prince's concubine. Pol Pot's elder brother served at the royal court, and his sister danced in the royal ballet.
Salot Sara himself, at the age of nine, was sent to live with relatives in Phnom Penh. After several months spent in a Buddhist monastery as an altar boy, the boy entered a Catholic primary school, after which he continued his studies at Norodom Sihanouk College, and then at Technical school Phnom Penh.
The Marxists by royal grant
In 1949, Salot Sar received government scholarship for higher education in France and went to Paris, where he began to study radio electronics.
The post-war period was marked rapid growth popularity of left parties and national liberation movements. In Paris, Cambodian students created a Marxist circle, of which Saloth Sar became a member.
In 1952, Saloth Sar, under the pseudonym Khmer Daom, published his first political article, “Monarchy or Democracy?” in a Cambodian student magazine in France. At the same time, the student joined the French Communist Party.
His passion for politics pushed his studies into the background, and in the same year Salot Sara was expelled from the university, after which he returned to his homeland.
In Cambodia, he settled with his older brother, began to look for connections with representatives of the Communist Party of Indochina, and soon attracted the attention of one of its coordinators in Cambodia, Pham Van Ba. Salot Sara was recruited to party work.
"The Politics of the Possible"
Pham Van Ba quite clearly described his new ally: “a young man of average abilities, but with ambitions and a thirst for power.” Salot Sara's ambitions and lust for power turned out to be much greater than his fellow fighters expected.
Salot Sar took a new pseudonym - Pol Pot, which is short for the French "politique potentielle" - "politics of the possible." Under this pseudonym he was destined to go down in world history.
In 1953, Cambodia gained independence from France. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was very popular and oriented toward China, became the ruler of the kingdom. In the war that followed in Vietnam, Cambodia formally adhered to neutrality, but units of North Vietnam and South Vietnamese partisans quite actively used the territory of the kingdom to locate their bases and warehouses. The Cambodian authorities preferred to turn a blind eye to this.
During this period, Cambodian communists operated quite freely in the country, and Salot Sar by 1963 had gone from novice to Secretary General parties.
By that time, a serious split had emerged in the communist movement in Asia, associated with a sharp deterioration in relations between the USSR and China. The Cambodian Communist Party relied on Beijing, focusing on the policies of Comrade Mao Zedong.
Leader of the Khmer Rouge
Prince Norodom Sihanouk saw the growing influence of Cambodian communists as a threat own power and began to change policy, reorienting from China to the United States.
In 1967, a peasant uprising broke out in the Cambodian province of Battambang, which was brutally suppressed by government troops and mobilized citizens.
After this, the Cambodian communists launched a guerrilla war against the Sihanouk government. The detachments of the so-called “Khmer Rouge” were formed for the most part from illiterate and illiterate young peasants, whom Pol Pot made his main support.
Very quickly, Pol Pot’s ideology began to move away not only from Marxism-Leninism, but even from Maoism. Coming from a peasant family himself, the leader of the Khmer Rouge formulated a much simpler program for his illiterate supporters - the path to happy life lies through the rejection of modern Western values, through the destruction of cities that are carriers of a pernicious infection, and the “re-education of their inhabitants.”
Even Pol Pot’s comrades had no idea where such a program would lead their leader...
In 1970, the Americans contributed to strengthening the position of the Khmer Rouge. Considering that Prince Sihanouk, who had reoriented towards the United States, was not a reliable enough ally in the fight against the Vietnamese communists, Washington organized a coup, as a result of which Prime Minister Lon Nol came to power with strong pro-American views.
Lon Nol demanded that North Vietnam cease all military activities in Cambodia, threatening to use force otherwise. The North Vietnamese responded by striking first, so much so that they almost occupied Phnom Penh. To save his protege, US President Richard Nixon sent American units to Cambodia. The Lon Nol regime ultimately survived, but an unprecedented wave of anti-Americanism arose in the country, and the ranks of the Khmer Rouge began to grow by leaps and bounds.
Victory of the partisan army
The civil war in Cambodia broke out with new strength. The Lon Nol regime was not popular and was supported only by American bayonets, Prince Sihanouk was deprived of real power and was in exile, and Pol Pot continued to gain strength.
By 1973, when the United States, having decided to end the Vietnam War, refused to further provide military support to the Lon Nol regime, the Khmer Rouge already controlled most of the country. Pol Pot already managed without his comrades in the Communist Party, which was relegated to the background. It was much easier for him not with educated experts in Marxism, but with illiterate fighters who believed only in Pol Pot and the Kalashnikov assault rifle.
In January 1975, the Khmer Rouge launched a decisive offensive against Phnom Penh. The troops loyal to Lon Nol could not withstand the blow of the 70,000-strong partisan army. At the beginning of April, American Marines began evacuating US citizens from the country, as well as high-ranking representatives of the pro-American regime. On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh.
"The city is the abode of vice"
Cambodia was renamed Kampuchea, but this was the most harmless of Pol Pot's reforms. “The city is an abode of vice; You can change people, but not cities. Working hard to uproot the jungle and grow rice, a person will finally understand true meaning life,” was the main thesis of the Khmer Rouge leader who came to power.
It was decided to evict the city of Phnom Penh, with a population of two and a half million people, within three days. All its inhabitants, young and old, were sent to become peasants. No complaints about health conditions, lack of skills, etc. were accepted. Following Phnom Penh, other cities in Kampuchea suffered the same fate.
Only about 20 thousand people remained in the capital - the military, the administrative apparatus, as well as representatives of the punitive authorities who took up the task of identifying and eliminating the dissatisfied.
It was supposed to re-educate not only the inhabitants of the cities, but also those peasants who had been under the rule of Lon Nol for too long. It was decided to simply get rid of those who served the previous regime in the army and other government agencies.
Pol Pot launched a policy of isolating the country, and Moscow, Washington, and even Beijing, which was Pol Pot’s closest ally, had a very vague idea of what was actually happening in it. In the information leaking out about hundreds of thousands of those who were shot, who died during the resettlement from cities and from unbearable forced labor, simply refused to believe.
At the pinnacle of power
During this period in South-East Asia it was extremely confusing political situation. The United States, having ended the Vietnam War, set a course for improving relations with China, taking advantage of the extremely strained relations between Beijing and Moscow. China, during Vietnam War who supported the communists of North and South Vietnam, began to treat them extremely hostilely, because they were oriented toward Moscow. Pol Pot, who was focused on China, took up arms against Vietnam, despite the fact that until recently the Khmer Rouge viewed the Vietnamese as allies in a common struggle.
Pol Pot, abandoning internationalism, relied on nationalism, which was widespread among the Cambodian peasantry. Brutal persecution of ethnic minorities, especially the Vietnamese, resulted in armed conflict with a neighboring country.
In 1977, the Khmer Rouge began to penetrate into neighboring areas of Vietnam, carrying out bloody massacres against the local population. In April 1978, the Khmer Rouge occupied the Vietnamese village of Batyuk, destroying all its inhabitants, young and old. The massacre killed 3,000 people.
Pol Pot went wild. Feeling the support of Beijing behind him, he not only threatened to defeat Vietnam, but also threatened the entire “Warsaw Pact”, that is, the Organization Warsaw Pact led by the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, his policy forced former comrades and previously loyal military units to rebel, considering what was happening to be unjustified bloody madness. The riots were suppressed ruthlessly, the rebels were executed in the most brutal ways, but their numbers continued to grow.
Three million victims in less than four years
In December 1978, Vietnam decided it had enough. Units of the Vietnamese army invaded Kampuchea with the aim of overthrowing the Pol Pot regime. The offensive developed rapidly, and already on January 7, 1979, Phnom Penh fell. Power was transferred to the United Front for the National Salvation of Kampuchea, created in December 1978.
China tried to save its ally by invading Vietnam in February 1979. The fierce but short war ended in March with a tactical victory for Vietnam - the Chinese failed to return Pol Pot to power.
The Khmer Rouge, having suffered a serious defeat, retreated to the west of the country, to the Kampuchean-Thai border. From complete defeat they were saved by the support of China, Thailand and the United States. Each of these countries pursued its own interests - the Americans, for example, tried to prevent the strengthening of pro-Soviet Vietnam's position in the region, for the sake of this they preferred to turn a blind eye to the results of the activities of the Pol Pot regime.
And the results were truly impressive. In 3 years, 8 months and 20 days, the Khmer Rouge plunged the country into a medieval state. The protocol of the Commission for the Investigation of Crimes of the Pol Pot regime dated July 25, 1983 stated that between 1975 and 1978, 2,746,105 people died, of which 1,927,061 were peasants, 305,417 workers, employees and representatives of other professions, 48,359 representatives national minorities, 25,168 monks, about 100 writers and journalists, as well as several foreigners. Another 568,663 people were missing and either died in the jungle or were buried in mass graves. The total number of victims is estimated at 3,374,768.
In July 1979, the People's Revolutionary Tribunal was organized in Phnom Penh, which tried the leaders of the Khmer Rouge in absentia. On August 19, 1979, the tribunal found Pol Pot and his closest associate Ieng Sary guilty of genocide and sentenced them in absentia to death penalty with confiscation of all property.
The Leader's Last Secrets
For Pol Pot himself, this verdict, however, meant nothing. He continued his guerrilla war against the new government of Kampuchea, hiding in the jungle. Little was known about the leader of the Khmer Rouge, and many believed that the man whose name had become a household name had long since died.
When processes of national reconciliation began in Kampuchea-Cambodia aimed at ending the long-term civil war, a new generation of Khmer Rouge leaders tried to relegate their odious “guru” to the background. There was a split in the movement, and Pol Pot, trying to maintain leadership, again decided to use terror to suppress disloyal elements.
In July 1997, on the orders of Pol Pot, his long-time ally, former Minister of Defense of Kampuchea Son Sen, was killed. Along with him, 13 members of his family were killed, including young children.
However, this time Pol Pot overestimated his influence. His comrades declared him a traitor and held his own trial, sentencing him to life imprisonment.
The Khmer Rouge's trial of its own leader sparked a final surge of interest in Pol Pot. In 1998, prominent leaders of the movement agreed to lay down their arms and surrender to the new Cambodian authorities.
But Pol Pot was not among them. He died on April 15, 1998. Representatives of the Khmer Rouge stated that former leader heart failed. There is, however, a version that he was poisoned.
The Cambodian authorities sought from the Khmer Rouge to hand over the body in order to make sure that Pol Pot was really dead and to establish all the circumstances of his death, but the corpse was hastily cremated.
The leader of the Khmer Rouge took his last secrets with him...
The Khmer Rouge was only credited with the ideology of communism
Recently, a Cambodian court rejected an appeal and issued a final verdict in the case. former boss prisons under the Khmer Rouge regime, which oversaw the executions of thousands of people in the 1970s. According to the BBC, Kang Kek Yeew, known as Comrade Duch, was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2010 for crimes against humanity. He admitted that he personally supervised the torture and execution of thousands of men, women and children at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison. The defense and prosecution appealed the court verdict: prosecutors advocated toughening the punishment.
Duch's lawyers, on the contrary, argued that he was a junior official, carrying out orders on pain of death, and should be released. Who is really responsible for the Cambodian genocide? Everyone answered as usual: communist-Maoists...
In fact, Pol Pot was never a communist. Apologists for capitalism have an incessant craving for inventing “evidence” of how terrible communism is. IN last years one of their favorite tales concerns massacres in Cambodia by the supposedly “communist” Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot. Many articles, a couple of books and at least one big movie“The Killing Fields” is dedicated to the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot has almost replaced Joseph Stalin as No. 1 on the historical capitalist hate list.
But there is a significant difference. Comrade Stalin was a great communist. Pol Pot was never a communist. Some new books by Western experts on Cambodia, based on evidence obtained after the fall of Pol Pot, show this clearly. These books should be used with caution: their authors are either pro-Vietnam revisionists (Michael Vickery, Chandler, Thion) or liberal imperialists (Shawcross). The facts they reveal are of value, not their opinions and analysis of these facts, distorted by their anti-communist views.
Pol Pot (real name Salot Sar) (May 19, 1925 - April 15, 1998) in his youth
“The Khmer Rouge” (the Khmers are the main ethnic group of Cambodia) is the nickname given to the peasant rebels led by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (the original name of Cambodia). To understand how the CCP turned into a group of anti-communist murderers, it is important to look a little back into history.
A History of the Cambodian Left. In 1951, the old Indochinese Communist Party, dominated by Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese in general, split into Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian groups. Like the entire world communist movement of the time, these groups were overwhelmed by nationalism and sought compromise with the “progressive” (anti-colonialist) capitalists.
In the mid-1950s, old PCI members allied with many militant nationalist students returning from France, including future Khmer Rouge leaders Pol Pot (real name Saloth Sar), Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan. The Communist Party of Kampuchea was formed by two such groups in 1960, but its existence was kept secret until 1977, that is for a long time after she seized power. Obviously, this was an unprincipled concession to the anti-communism of the nationalists from former students. When anti-communism is not fought against, it grows, as we will see.
Repression by Sihanouk's monarchical government soon forced the party underground. Most of the communists of the former ICP left the fight, returning to North Vietnam. Only Pol Pot's nationalist group remained.
When a peasant revolt began in 1967 in the Samlaut region near the Thai border, Pol Pot's group joined in. Never being communists in anything but name, they adopted the line they considered most suitable for attracting the peasants - all city residents, including specialists, teachers and workers, were declared enemies...
Ieng Sari is another leader...
A romantic attachment to the peasantry as a class has long characterized bourgeois radicals. In Russia, Lenin's earliest speeches (1895) were directed against the Narodniks, the so-called “friends of the people.” The petty-bourgeois populists worshiped peasant “communalism” in words, but practiced bloody terrorism. Vickery finds another close similarity between the Khmer Rouge and the Antonov and Tambov peasant revolts in western Russia during the Civil War, which were directed at communists and monarchists with equal vigor and heartbreaking reprisals.
To this peasant hostility towards the cities, the Pol Pot faction added a fierce hatred towards any Vietnamese that reached the point of racism. Hatred of Vietnam is a nationalistic feeling among the Cambodian elite, who remembered the conflicts of past centuries between the Vietnamese and Cambodian kings and the expulsion of Cambodians from the current Vietnamese Mekong Delta region by the Vietnamese rulers.
In 1970, the pro-state Lon Nol military overthrew Sihanouk. US rulers began massive bombing campaigns against North Vietnamese troops and supply lines in northeastern Cambodia. The bombings killed many thousands of peasants and truly destroyed village life.
As hatred of the United States and the Lon Nol government grew, peasants flocked to the Khmer Rouge army. But after returning from North Vietnam to join the movement, old PCI members found themselves under suspicion and sometimes even killed by Pol Pot's group. So the CCP, which took power in April 1975, was a close alliance of two separate groups. The pro-Vietnamese members of the PCI and the Pol Pot faction had different zones of influence, the latter being stronger in the east, near Vietnam. Their soldiers even wore different uniforms...
"Comrade Duch" aka Kang Kek Yeu
The beginning of massacres. Although anti-communist scribblers portray the evacuation of cities in April 1975 as an atrocity, even bourgeois scholars recognize it as necessary (e.g. Zasloff and Brown in Problems of Communism, January-February 1979, a magazine published by the US State Department and dedicated to anti-communist propaganda under "scientific" angle). For example, the capital Phnom Penh grew to 2 million from about 600 thousand due to peasants fleeing US bombing. As in South Vietnam, the US completely destroyed Agriculture to destroy the village in which the Khmer Rouge flourished. Phnom Penh was supplied only by massive food imports from the United States, which abruptly stopped with the fall of Lon Nol. If urban population had not been evacuated, it would have simply died of starvation!
From 1975 until early 1977, no group in the CCP had true dominance. Anti-Communist "experts" like John Barron and Anthony Paul or Francois Ponchaud give the impression that the entire period 1975-1979 was filled with executions. Based on reports from survivors and hundreds of interviews with refugees and those who remained in the country, Vickery revealed a different picture. Although there were isolated cases of brutality against former townspeople in areas held by Pol Pot supporters, there were no mass executions until 1977, when Pol Pot consolidated his grip on power.
A bloody purge of all those suspected of pro-Vietnamese or insufficiently “pro-peasant” sentiments began. In 1978, the remaining pro-Vietnamese forces in the CPC staged a rebellion that was brutally defeated. Pol Pot's government then proceeded to exterminate everyone who supported the group, plus many ethnic Vietnamese in Eastern Cambodia. This led to the Vietnamese invasion in 1979. The Khmer Rouge had no support other than their army, and the Vietnamese easily established a puppet regime defeated the PCI faction that rules Kampuchea to this day.
The Khmer Rouge did not like cities...
US rulers killed more Cambodians than the Khmer Rouge. How many people were killed in these massacres? The US media, following Dith Pran of the New York Times (on whose words the film The Killing Fields is based), claims three million. When it comes to “communists,” numbers less than a million do not satisfy bourgeois authors. Vickery shows that 300 thousand - still a terrifying number - is the approximate upper possible limit. In contrast, Zasloff and Brown write of the "heavy toll" that "extensive US bombing and the intensity of the war" caused after 1975, and argue that Khmer Rouge claims of US bombing deaths ranging from 600,000 to "more than a million" deserve trust. When it came to genocide, Pol Pot's comrades were amateurs next to the US imperialists...
Anti-communism of the Pol Pot regime. No matter how many victims there are, however, this is not the work of “communists” of any kind, even Soviet or Chinese style revisionists, but of anti-communists.
Not every group that calls itself “communist” is so. For example, Vietnamese, Soviet, Chinese and other relics of the old communist movement- just thinly disguised capitalists. They only hypocritically serve Marxism-Leninism, the working class, proletarian internationalism and the need to build a classless society.
On the contrary, Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge and the CCP openly rejected the very idea of communism! This is illustrated by quotes from Khmer Rouge leaders from Vickery and Chandler. Regarding communism: “We are not communists... We are revolutionaries” who do not “belong to the generally accepted groups of communists in Indochina” (Ieng Sary).
Regarding Marxism-Leninism: “The first public recognition that this “revolutionary organization” had a Marxist-Leninist orientation took place at the memorial ceremony for Mao Zedong in Phnom Penh on September 18, 1976.” (Chandler, p. 55, note 28) ... The Kampuchean representatives “claim that the CPC is a Marxist-Leninist party, but say nothing about the writings of these two” (Chandler).
On the need for a revolutionary party: “The most striking feature of the idea of revolution supported by the Khmer communists... was that it was not expressed. In the 1960s, opposition to government policies and appeals to anti-imperialism constituted the platform of the left wing... In fact, the revolution and the existence of a revolutionary party were not only belittled in propaganda, they were completely hidden truths, revealed only to the enlightened few who could reach high positions in the apparatus", i.e. mostly radicals from former students (Tion).
They colorfully celebrated victories
This was the case until September 27, 1977, when the existence of the "Communist Party" was even publicly revealed in a speech by Pol Pot (Chandler).
Regarding the working class: “Although tiny, it existed, scattered in the cities. But instead of cultivating it, the Khmer communists set about eliminating it as a decadent legacy of the past...” (Thion).
From all this we can conclude the following:
Pol Pot's comrades were not communists. In this sense they were no different from the Soviet, Vietnamese and Chinese revisionists, Ronald Reagan or any capitalist. Unlike the Soviet, Vietnamese, Chinese revisionists, pseudo-communists, Pol Pot's comrades boasted that they were not communists. The influence of the pro-Vietnamese faction led to the use of some Marxist terminology, at least until 1977. After this, the Khmer Rouge rejected any talk of communism.
Pol Pot also sometimes called themselves communists in 1975-1977, in an attempt to obtain Chinese aid. For example: “...Pol Pot's tribute to the critical role played by Mao Zedong thought in the Cambodian revolution, contained in a Beijing speech on September 29, 1977, was not distributed on Phnom Penh radio” (Chandler).
Mao and the Chinese Communist Party won millions of peasants over to the communist, worker-class line, while the Pol Potites tried to win over the peasantry to the anti-worker, anarchist line. Why China - and, just as importantly, the US - is loved by Pol Pot's comrades is their genuine hostility to Vietnam, and not false praise of Mao Zedong.
Pol Pot grew old, but still died “with a banner”...
The Khmer Rouge today are US-backed anti-communists. To weaken pro-Soviet Vietnam, the US ruling class is now supporting a coalition of Cambodian rebel forces, in which Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge is the strongest component. For the US bosses, it is only a minor problem that the group they are currently keeping afloat is the same one they accuse of “communist” genocide! In response, the Khmer Rouge calls for “democratic elections” and reformed capitalism.
For the global working class, the lessons of Pol Pot's experience are clear:
Communism is not replaced by the struggle against imperialism and capitalism. The Khmer Rouge tried to build a “new kind” of revolution based on petty-bourgeois radicalism. Instead, they plunged Kampuchea into a nightmare;
You can't believe anything the media and the US ruling class say about communism! The capitalists are not at all concerned about the hundreds and thousands killed. If this were not the case, why would they continue to support Pol Pot?
In December 1981, the New York Times Magazine published a story in which the author recounts how he visited the Khmer Rouge, the “freedom fighters” waging the War of Independence against the Vietnamese occupiers. Jones, the author of this story, stated that he saw Pol Pot directing the fight, a heroic figure silhouetted against the sky.
A common monument to communist anti-communists...
The editors believe that it was good to print this without the verification usually undertaken when an article by an unknown author is given. It turned out that Jones did all this while sitting on the Spanish coast! The newspaper was so eager to believe a story that turned the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot - whom they had already called a mass murderer guilty of genocide - into an anti-communist hero that they dumped it in print! Nothing could demonstrate more clearly the readiness of the liberal ruling class take under the wing of any fascist killer who can help them in the fight against communism.
Based on Internet materials prepared by Konstantin Khitsenko
During the Cold War, US authorities and intelligence agencies resorted to new tricks. For example, they themselves created pseudo-communist regimes to split and discredit the socialist bloc.
This is on the one hand, on the other, the militarists did their best to build an alliance with China and set it up against the USSR. This is how the United States gained an ally in the socialist camp.
And the real pseudo-communist regime was the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia
In 1969 there was coup d'etat, as a result of which head of state Norodom Sihanouk was removed from power.
South Vietnamese and American troops appeared in the country.
This caused discontent among the Cambodians, which the Khmer Rouge took advantage of and began an active armed struggle, relying on China. For some time they enjoyed quite serious support from the population, and in 1975 they came to power.
Cambodia
One of scary stories 20th century, sometimes cited as justification for international violence, is the story of the Cambodian Pol Pot.
“Pol Pot” sounds very similar to “Phnom Penh,” the name of the capital of Cambodia, but it is a pseudonym, and a completely European one at that. This is short for Potential Politics. Every politician must be able to see the potential and turn the possible into the real. Yes, every person should be able to do this!
Pol Pot came to power in Cambodia in 1976, and in 1979 the Vietnamese army entered Cambodia and overthrew him. The world community was presented with photographs depicting the crimes of Pol Pot.
Democratic Kampuchea was partially recognized state— it was recognized by the People's Republic of China, Albania and the DPRK.
The USSR initially de facto recognized the revolutionary government of the Khmer Rouge, and Pol Pot made an official visit to Moscow. Despite the fact that during the revolution the Soviet embassy was destroyed, and diplomats were preparing to be shot, the USSR embassy was later evacuated.
Pol Pot
Subsequently, Democratic Kampuchea was not classified as a socialist country or a country with a socialist orientation in the USSR.
Democratic Kampuchea was almost completely isolated from the outside world. Full diplomatic contacts were maintained only with China, Albania and North Korea, partial - with Romania, France and Yugoslavia.
The essence of the regime was revealed later, and at first in the West the Khmer Rouge regime was called communist, like other socialist countries, and was criticized mainly for the murder of British journalist Malcolm Caldwell in Kampuchea in 1978.
However, irritated by the recent victory of Vietnam, Western countries viewed the pro-Chinese Pol Pot regime as a counterweight to the expansion of Vietnam (and its main ally the USSR), therefore, without establishing formal diplomatic relations with the regime, they considered it the only legitimate regime in Cambodia even after the overthrow of the Pol Pot regime.
It was the Pol Potites who represented Cambodia at the UN (since 1982 - formally as part of the “Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea”) until the creation of a transitional administration under the auspices of the UN in 1992.
Horror
Firstly, the number - out of seven million people, either a million or three died.
Secondly, quality - everything is completely irrational, cities were destroyed, the economy was abolished, some kind of direct group insanity and suicide. And this is the country of meek Buddhists!
Yes, if such satanic potentials lie in people, we need an international gendarme, and the more gendarme, the better!
Polpotovites are compared with totalitarian sect, whose leaders have some kind of supernatural hypnotizing abilities, so there is only one way out - death to them!
The good news is that Cambodians have a very bad reputation among surrounding nations - they are vengeful and evil people.
A modern tourist from Russia does not even suspect this.
So a modern American, coming to Russia, sees an unfortunate country whose population suffered terribly from communism.
He does not know what the Chechens and Ukrainians think about these sufferers, and which of these sufferers was the executioner in communist times- and the executioners are alive, alive, they have medical service at the highest level.
People go to Cambodia to see the famous Angkor Wat - a gigantic temple city, in comparison with which Hagia Sophia or Cologne Cathedral are just toys. So, Angkor Wat is a monument to a huge and by no means bloodless empire.
Of course, this is a thousand years ago. In the present, for a Cambodian - more precisely, for a Khmer - there is murder greatest sin. And in parallel there is the concept of the greatest shame. Humiliated man He must not only take revenge on the offender - he must make sure that he can no longer harm him.
Ideally, destroy all the relatives of the offender. This is called "phchankh pkhchal", analogous to the Russian term for victory over Hitler: "complete and final surrender." Boon Chan Mol described this using boxing as an example:
“If a person knocks down an opponent, he will not stand quietly next to him. On the contrary, he... will beat the enemy until he loses consciousness, and perhaps dies. … Otherwise, the loser, in turn, will not accept defeat” (Quoted in Lifton, 2004, 69).
This is completely contrary to modern European ideas about “fair play”. This also contradicts Cambodian ideas about fair play, rest assured.
But honesty is honesty, and life is life - or should I say, death is death? Is it necessary to give examples of how impeccably honest aristocrats at the card table or on the golf course calmly deceived “strangers”? By the way, historians agree that in 1863 the French deceived the Cambodian king into agreeing to a protectorate - he did not really understand what it was. But the Czechs understood very well when Hitler declared the Czech Republic a “protectorate of Bohemia” in 1938.
Did the French occupation matter for the Cambodian tragedy? And for the tragedy of Vietnam?
European colonialism has one thing in common: while talking about the need to “civilize,” development was hampered. This is called paternalism: under the pretext of education, to mutilate a child, turning him into an infantile sadomasochist for life.
By the way, this is often done in relation to to your own child, not to someone else's. God had mercy on the French - freedom flourished and continues to flourish in France itself. But in Russia, for example, under communist slogans, this is exactly how they mutilated each other. As Nestor the Chronicler would sarcastically add, “even to this day.”
The French, by the way, forced King Norodom I to declare state religion Cambodia is Christianity instead of Buddhism.
According to the American historian Ben Kernan (who created a center for the study of the Cambodian genocide at Yale University), the French “mummified” the country, fencing off external influences- especially from Vietnamese and communist. Archaic monarchy, archaic social structure and archaic economy. As a result, Cambodia gained independence primarily due to the victory of the Vietnamese communists over French troops.
By the way, it is to the French – French archaeologists – that the peasants of Cambodia owe their troubles under Pol Pot.
The fact is that these scientists suggested that the flourishing of Cambodia (of which Ankgor Wat is a monument) was the result of skillful irrigation organized by the state.
Pol Pot knew this theory and tried to put it into practice. He did not ruin agriculture, he improved it. I didn’t feel the difference between theory and truth. But is it only dictators who make such mistakes?
The French are not the first and, unfortunately, not the last “progressors” in the history of Cambodia. In 1953, the country became independent, but the king (Norodom II Sihanouk, the great-nephew of the first) also treated the people in a completely fatherly manner. As a result, even in comparison with Vietnam, Cambodia was a very backward country. In a peasant country, the unit of society was the family, not village community like in Vietnam.
Most peasants did not even remember the names of their grandfathers. Rural Cambodia and urban Cambodia differed not only economically, but even ethnically: Vietnamese and Chinese predominated in the cities. Thanks to the French - the traditional system of schools led by Buddhist monks was dilapidated, and a new system was not created.
True, universities appeared under Norodom II, but at the same time the impoverishment of the peasantry began. In 1950, there were 4% of landless peasants in Cambodia, in 1970 - 20%.
And these 20% were ready to deal with the remaining 80% in the name of justice and goodness. “The Cambodian Communist Party in 1954 consisted primarily of peasants, Buddhists, moderates and pro-Vietnamese people. By 1970, it was led by French-educated urbanites, anti-Vietnamese radicals” (Kiernan 1998, 14).
Yes, Pol Pot hated the Vietnamese - he even hated the Khmers who came into contact with the Vietnamese, and this is a whole million people in South Vietnam. The Vietnamese liberating Cambodia from the monster is a beautiful picture. Only the monster came to power, among other things, thanks to the support of the Vietnamese.
The delights of the regime
In 1970, Norodom was overthrown by a general who was even more conservative and, most importantly, pro-American. A classic example of a “good son of a bitch.”
What did the Americans need in Cambodia? Vietnamese! The Americans fought against communist North Vietnam, and they fought so hard that the Vietnamese fled to Cambodia. What was even more outrageous - from the point of view of the American generals - was that Cambodian peasants were selling rice to the Vietnamese. This had to be stopped.
Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians and Russians to death in 1928-1933. Mao starved 13 million Chinese people to death between 1959 and 1961 alone. How many Cambodians died from American bombings? It was enough for Cambodians to hate the cities - they bombed Cambodian villages, and in the cities there was a regime that did not protest against these bombings and considered them to help in the fight against the communists.
To the credit of the Americans, they are trying to find out how much harm they have caused. The number is hundreds of thousands, at the very least. In any case, already in 1966 the king spoke about hundreds of thousands of dead. Kernan's conclusion:
“would never have come to power if Cambodia had not been destabilized - economically and militarily - by the United States. This destabilization began in 1966 when America invaded neighboring Vietnam and reached its peak in 1969-1973 with the carpet bombing of Cambodia by American B-52 aircraft. It was perhaps main factor in the success of Pol Pot"
“Economic destabilization” is Fig. Thanks to the king's policies, in the mid-1960s, Cambodian peasants began to harvest record rice harvests.
For the first time since 1955, rice exports began. For an agricultural country, this was the beginning of prosperity.
And then the Vietnam War began. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese stopped sowing and started shooting, and Cambodian peasants sold rice to both warring parties - selling without paying taxes, the border was nearby and it was the border of the warring country. No taxes - no prosperity.
However, what money and smuggling! American intelligence agencies organized 1,835 raids into Cambodian territory, to a depth of 30 kilometers - these were special forces dressed as “Viet Cong”. The operation was named poetically - “Daniel Boone”. Only the legendary Boone planted trees, and these killed (“terrorized”) the peasants. The goal was the same as the bombing - to deprive the Vietnamese soldiers of at least temporary shelter.
The bombing was stopped by the US Congress in 1973. In 2000, the US President, visiting Vietnam, declassified data on the bombings as a sign of reconciliation - to facilitate the search for unexploded bombs.
The figure turned out to be greater than previously thought - and Cambodia's share included 2,756,941 tons of bombs, a quarter of a million sorties, and more than a hundred thousand bombed villages. Not kilograms, but tons, half of them - in the last six months - 1073. Of course, the mortality rate from bombing is not as high as those who bombed would like, but napalm was also used...
The most remarkable thing - and little known - is that the United States supported the Pol Pot regime. The old imperial principle of “divide and conquer” is to pit the Cambodian communists against the Vietnamese ones. Capitalist America behaved exactly like communist Vietnam - for Cambodia against Vietnam.
As Kissinger put it about the Pol Pot regime:
“The Chinese want to use Cambodia against Vietnam... We don’t like Cambodia, whose government is in many ways worse than the Vietnamese, but we prefer to see it independent.”
Pol Pot was supported by China and the United States until his overthrow by the Vietnamese. In 1984, Deng Xiaoping stated:
"I don't understand why some people want to kill Pol Pot. He made some mistakes in the past, but now he is leading the fight against the Vietnamese aggressors."
In the 1980s, China gave Pol Pot workers $100 million annually.
USA – less, from 17 to 32 million.
While the Vietnamese occupied Cambodia (until 1989), the United States blocked aid to the Cambodians from international organizations, demanding that the money go to the “legitimate government” in the jungle to Pol Pot.
The CIA officially stated that in 1977-1979 Pol Pot did not kill people, that there were only half a million victims (yes, half a million is a more common figure than one and a half million, although the difference, of course, is not qualitative).
So the common myth that during the tragedy no one knew what was happening in Cambodia is a lie. They knew it very well, but they covered it up.
It was the United States that insisted that Pol Pot representatives represent Cambodia at the UN. In the 2000s, the US government refused to participate in financing the trial of the still living Pol Pot leaders. No matter how they begin to emphasize that in the 1980s, American “military advisers” helped them.
Pol Pot apparently did not kill as many people as is sometimes written in the tabloids. Not three million, but one and a half, not half the population, but a fifth. On the eve of his victory, there were 7.7 million people in the country, after the victory over him - 6 or 6.7 million.
Is it fair to place Pol Pot's crimes in the Black Book of Communism? But the Vietnamese who liberated the Cambodians from Pol Pot are also communists?
Ideologically, Pol Pot was just as far from communism. His main ideal was completely Platonic (unfortunately, not Platonic) - a strong state.
The vertical of power was brought to its maximum - which, in fact, led to the downfall of Pol Pot. People simply stopped obeying. Therefore, the invasion of Vietnam was unsuccessful, and the retaliatory intervention of the Vietnamese met almost no resistance.
The destruction of cities, which is very strange for Europeans, is explained precisely by the desire to eliminate any possibility of opposition. This is where the deep role of cities—polises, burgs, etc.—comes to light. - in the liberation of man. This is, first of all, not an economic role, but an informational one.
US intelligence agent
So, Pol Pot is not a protege of the USSR at all, but of transnational forces and the United States. Moreover, judging by the positive policy, it was Henry Kissinger who supervised him.
Pol Pot was originally his protege in difficult game. Like the genocide in Rwanda, this is a development of methods of mind control and population reduction.
This version is confirmed by other studies. Thus, the American historian and journalist J. Anderson, based on data from the early 1990s. claimed that
« The CIA... supports the remnants of Pol Pot's gangs".
Other foreign sources also report that “under US pressure international organization In the mid-1990s, the World Food Program donated $12 million worth of food to Thailand specifically for the Khmer Rouge, who were responsible for the extermination of 2.5 million people during the 4 years of Pol Pot’s rule (1975-1978).
In addition, America, Germany and Sweden supply Pol Pot’s followers with weapons through Thailand and Singapore.” These data and opinions are also not refuted by anyone...
But in fact: Pol Pot in 1979-1998, until his death - that is, for almost 20 years - was not somewhere, but... on former base The US CIA in the hard-to-reach area of the Cambodian-Thai border actually has the rights of extraterritoriality (!).
And, we emphasize, there was not a single attempt on the part of the new Cambodian authorities to seize either this area, or at least Pol Pot himself. And for some reason the West did not have the desire to betray this figure to at least the Hague Tribunal...
Polpot’s troops, who found themselves on Thai territory since the 1980s, terrorizing Cambodia, did not obey either the laws or the Thai troops.
And these, we note, are many thousands of thugs, armed with American weapons. Moreover: the USA, Thailand and China in the 1980s - the first half of the 1990s jointly supported Pol Pot’s “Democratic Kampuchea” at the UN, preventing post-Pol Pot Cambodia from joining this structure
With the fall of the Jiang Qing group and the simultaneous return to power of Deng Xiaoping, Pol Pot returned to the position of prime minister. And soon, in November 1976, a new massacre of opponents of this figure began in Kampuchea. And since December 1976, supplies of American weapons to the Pol Pot regime through Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia began to increase.
The connections between Pol Pot and a number of his “associates” with the US CIA are noted, for example measures, in the book of the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry “The Vietnam-Kampuchea conflict: A Historical Record” (Hanoi, Foreign languages publishing House, 1979).
According to some Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian researchers, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai (Prime Minister of the People's Republic of China in 1949-1975) since the fall of 1975 sought to remove Pol Pot from the leadership of what was then Cambodia and take him to the People's Republic of China. In their opinion, many of Pol Pot's actions discredited socialism and China.
However, this intention of the PRC leaders was resisted not only by Deng Xiaoping (until April 1976, the third most powerful and influential figure in the ruling hierarchy of the then China), but also by influential structures in Thailand and the West, especially in the USA.
Henry Kissinger and Deng Xiao Ping, the US and China together supported the Pol Pot regime
But the American media in the 1980s were often full of reports about the “heroism” of Pol Pot’s fighters in the fight against Vietnamese “hegemony,” as well as the fact that everyone sympathized with Pol Pot’s “freedom fighters.” large quantity Cambodians."
Alas, even if Pol Pot was an “agent of influence” of the world government - the Bilderberg Club, then what can we say about many figures from Western countries whom Daniel Estulin mentions in his book?..
The choice of location, it seems, was not accidental: the financial and economic situation in Spain is close to that of Greece, and there are calls in the country to return the national currency and, in general, to “remember the experience of Caudillo Franco.”
That is, the nationally oriented policy of the late 1930s and mid-1970s, as a result of which Spain did not join NATO and the European Union, we emphasize, until the mid-1980s...
Results
For 4 years, the Khmer Rouge pursued a course towards a “one hundred percent pure socialist revolution” and the construction of a classless society.
Private property, religion, commodity-money relations, and most importantly, everyone who was associated with the previous regime - entrepreneurs, intellectuals, clergy - were subject to complete destruction. As a result, during their reign, the Khmer Rouge killed 1 million 700 thousand people.
Meanwhile, experts still disagree on who is responsible for what happened in Cambodia in the 70s.
A report from the first hearing of the trial of “Comrade Dudem” on March 31 was published in the Cambodian newspaper Phnom Pen Post. Its author is the famous military journalist, writer and documentarian who made a film about the events in Cambodia (“Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia, 1979) John Pilger.
Pol Pot was overthrown not by the democratic West, which covered him, but by socialist Vietnam, which did not recognize the criminal regime of Pol Pot
Vietnamese Army soldiers on captured M-113 armored personnel carriers in Kampuchea.
Pilger, in particular, claims that on the eve of the Khmer Rouge coming to power, American bombers killed 600 thousand Cambodians, and after the overthrow of the Khmers who came to power, their supporters in exile supported the British authorities.
Memory of tragic events 30 years ago is still alive in Cambodia.
“At the hotel where I stayed in Phnom Penh, women and children sat on one side of the room, men on the other, respecting the rules of etiquette. There was a festive atmosphere,” says Pilger.
But suddenly people rushed to the windows, crying. It turns out that the DJ played a song by Sin Sisamouth, a famous singer who, under Pol Pot's regime, was forced to dig his own grave and perform the Khmer Rouge anthem before he was executed. I came across many more reminders of those distant events.
One day, while traveling through the village of Neak Leung (on the Mekong River, southeast of Cambodia's capital), I passed through a field dotted with craters. I met a man who seemed to be beside himself with grief. His entire family, 13 people, were destroyed by American B-52 bombs. This happened in 1973, two years before Pol Pot came to power. According to some estimates, 600,000 Cambodians died the same way."
says Pilger's piece.
Pol Pot's comrades who died in battle
The only problem with the UN-backed trial against former Khmer Rouge leaders in Phnom Penh is that it only tried the killers of Sin Sisamouth, not the killers of the Neak Leung family, Pilger said. In his opinion, the “Cambodian Holocaust” took place in three stages. The genocide committed by Pol Pot is one of them. And only he has been preserved in history.
But Pol Pot would not have come to power if Henry Kissinger had not launched a military offensive in Cambodia.
In 1973, American B-52 bombers fired more bombs at central regions Cambodia than Japan during World War II, says Pilger.
Some studies prove that the American command imagined the political consequences of these bombings.
“The damage caused by B-52 fighters is the focus of (Khmer Rouge) propaganda,” the commander of the operation reported on May 2, 1973. "This strategy allowed us to gain a large number of youth and was effective among refugees (forced to leave their villages),” he added.
The Pol Pot regime fell in 1979 when the country was captured by Vietnamese troops and the Khmer Rouge lost Chinese support.
The British Special Air Service (SAS) trained the Khmer Rouge in the 1980s, says John Pilger.
"Neither Margaret Thatcher nor her ministers and senior officials who are retired today. They presided over the third phase of the Cambodian Holocaust, supporting the Khmer Rouge after they were driven out of Cambodia by the Vietnamese.
In 1979, the US and UK imposed a trade embargo on agonizing Cambodia because Vietnam, which had liberated it, had found itself in the wrong camp during the Cold War. Few campaigns run by the British Foreign Office have reached this level of cynicism," says Pilger.
All these facts need to be investigated and made public, the expert believes.
The crimes committed in Cambodia from April 17, 1975 to January 6, 1979 by the Khmer Rouge regime were already condemned in August 1979 by the People's Revolutionary Tribunal, supported by Vietnam and other countries of the communist bloc, notes the Phnom Pen Post. Pol Pot and Ieng Sari (the second person in the Khemrian Red government) were convicted and sentenced to death in absentia. However, this verdict was not recognized by the international community.
Other opinions about what happened in Cambodia were expressed on Radio Liberty by the vice-president of Radio Free Asia, Dan Sutherland, and the director of the genocide research program at Yale University, Ben Kiernan.
Dan Sutherland, vice president of Radio Free Asia, noted in particular: “The Khmer Rouge believed that whole line countries is trying to stage a coup against them.
They went so far as to begin to kill even their own personnel, and at a fairly high level, because they suspected them of connections with the CIA, the KGB and the Vietnamese communists. Some of those killed were accused of working for all these services combined,” the expert said.
This was one of the largest massacres of people in the 20th century.
And I still think about it, I go to Cambodia twice a year, I talk to people... Every Cambodian I meet has lost relatives, in the most terrible way. And if we talk about the trial, now all this information that they tried to hide will become known to people. It looks like the trial will take place, and perhaps it will give Cambodians some sense of justice. Although it took an unreasonably long time to organize this trial,” Sutherland said.
Ben Kiernan, director of the genocide research program at Yale University, spoke on RS about why it took so long to condemn the genocide in Cambodia:
“Cambodia was a victim of the Cold War in the sense that politics determined the relationship to law. The United States at that time pursued the main goal of forming an alliance with China in order to confront the Soviet Union.
For Cambodia this meant the following. The United States could not support the Vietnamese troops who entered Cambodia and stopped the Khmer Rouge genocide because the Khmer Rouge was supported by China. Moreover, China supported them at the United Nations.
And it is curious that a representative of the Khmer Rouge represented the country at the UN until 1993, although the Pol Pot regime had not been in power for a long time. In practice, this meant they could resist being judged," Kiernan said.
As a result, the US militarists and China carried out an inhumane experiment on the inhabitants of Cambodia, which was only interrupted by socialist Vietnam.
But this regime of Pol Pot is still unfairly considered socialist
The sixty-eighth year of the twentieth century went down in our history not only with loud protests in Western countries and the socialist camp, which undoubtedly shocked the world in their own way, but also with one, at first glance, very insignificant event, but very interesting and later very promoted from different sides.
In 1968, an unofficial movement took shape in Cambodia "Khmer Rouge", which initially consisted primarily of Khmers (Cambodians) who studied in France and there adopted elements of various left-wing ideologies. Then their ranks began to be replenished mainly by teenagers 12-15 years old from peasant families, who had lost their parents and hated the townspeople as “collaborators of the Americans.”
Their ideology, on the one hand, included abstract ideas of social justice and universal equality, on the other, a powerful rejection scientific progress and everything modern. They seriously believed that the salvation of the country would be getting rid of the evil of foreign civilization and a kind of “return to the roots.”
In a relatively stable environment, such a dubious group would have had little chance of coming to power, but in Cambodia in those years, many factors accumulated that facilitated the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power. We will mention only the main ones.
The Khmer people have long had hostility towards their neighbors - Vietnam and Thailand, on the one hand, due to constant wars with them, and on the other hand, towards Western countries, which turned Cambodia into a squirrel, spinning for the sake of various Western tycoons. The Khmer Rouge actively used this rejection to promote their ideas.
At the same time, the King of Cambodia Norodom Sihanouk, set the goal of creating friendly relations with the Soviet Union and receiving financial assistance from it. Cambodia of those years represented a state dominated capitalist relations with a large public sector and partially nationalized entrepreneurship. This type he presented the economic structure as purely socialist, which could not but impress the then leadership Soviet Union. Also, so that the USSR would not have doubts about the king’s friendly intentions, Sihanouk allowed Vietnamese troops free movement in Cambodia.
This, of course, caused a response from the United States and very soon, American B-52s literally bombed every kilometer of the country, which gave rise to powerful popular indignation. For comparison, the number of bombs during Operation Menu was comparable to the number of bombs dropped on Germany during the entire Second World War.
In 1970, Power was seized by an armed pro-American group led by General Lon Nol. Their actions, aimed at supporting the United States and creating the appearance of democratization, unwittingly contributed to an increase in popular support for their opponents - the Khmer Rouge movement, which successfully took the frontier abroad. In those years, the Khmer Rouge were distinguished by their particularly primitive aggressive closed structure and were one of the most opaque organizations in the world. Even the appearance of the leading figures of the movement was for a long time a strict secret, violation of which would result in inevitable death. This in turn had a negative impact later.
The result of this war was "great day April 17"- the entry of Khmer troops into Phnom Penh in 1975, greeted by the jubilation of the masses. But it didn't last long. The smiles of compatriots gave way to indignation when the sound of sirens sounded and a strict demand was made to move to the so-called. "agricultural communes"
Subsequent life was difficult. Many did not survive the long and hungry journey into the jungle; those who were lucky enough to get there had to settle down there. In organized "communes", military force was introduced organizational structure, people were sent to clear the jungle, cultivate rice, build dams, dig canals. Due to the lack of equipment, all work was done manually. Many people, not adapted to life in the jungle, simply died from hard work. Former doctors, chemists, journalists, engineers were forced to work outside their specialty, and had difficulty getting used to new conditions.
Some researchers Democratic Kampuchea they say that a few years after the creation of a relatively stable agricultural basis, steps were taken towards industrialization, and banknotes began to be reintroduced into circulation. However, these measures were unlikely to be any significant, since there was no special reflection in any data (with the exception of propaganda materials of the Palace of Culture).
During these years, anti-Vietnamese sentiment was particularly strong, both within the party and among the Khmer people. Therefore, precedents of purges of ethnic minorities in Kampuchea (mainly Cambodian Chams and Viets) began to become more frequent. Things even came to the point of armed clashes on the territory of Vietnam, which provoked a large-scale military conflict that ended with the defeat of the Khmer Rouge and the proclamation of a pro-Vietnamese People's Republic Kampuchea.
The pro-Vietnamese communists who came to power began a course towards industrialization and building a socialist state, however, the process of the final disintegration of the Soviet system, which was in full swing, provoked sharp restrictions financial assistance Vietnam and NRK from the USSR. Therefore, the process of building a socialist state ended as soon as it began. One of the most serious steps After its collapse, the private sector of the economy was legalized in the NRC in 1986. The final weakening of Vietnam could no longer allow the PRC to be kept under control, and in connection with this, Vietnamese troops were completely withdrawn from the PRC in 1989.
Pro-American forces began to actively take over the liberated country, and already in 1993 “democratic” elections were held, with quite expected results. As a result, the monarchy was returned and the same Norodom Sihanouk, who had previously promised that he would never take the royal throne again, was crowned. The country began to build peripheral capitalism, which we can still observe today.
Speaking about the defeat of the Khmer Rouge, I would like to say first of all about the lack of clear views in the party. It gave rise to a hodgepodge of anarcho-communist-nationalist prejudices, which did not allow adequate governance of the country. After April 17, the leadership of the PKK simply did not know what to do, and, in connection with this, chose to act “on the beaten path”, turning the country into one large partisan cooperative, although there was no one to fight with. A few years later, seeing the deplorable situation, they may have tried to get out of the crisis by starting an attempt to industrialize and get involved in military conflicts, but defeat in a military conflict put an end to this.
Why is the history of Kampuchea still relevant today?
Using the radical measures of the Khmer Rouge, as well as the official declaration of communist views, it is very convenient to transfer the shortcomings and excesses of the Khmer onto leftist views in general, in addition, inflating the concept of “killing fields”, finally demonizing the entire Red movement. On the other hand, occasionally there are lovers of the “hard and radical” who, on the contrary, defend the infallibility of Pol Pot and his supporters and invite us to step on the same rake today.
We must approach the Khmer Rouge objectively, although this is not always possible. Almost all historical research about them was compiled by interested parties: either these are materials from Thailand, the USA, Vietnam and the USSR, or these are propaganda materials from Democratic Kampuchea itself. Obviously, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but the question remains open: what is this middle closer to - to the “killing fields” or to the “new Angkor”? We may never find the answer to this question.
1. Samorodny O. Pol Pot. Cambodia - an empire on bones? - M.: Algorithm, 2013. - 320 p.
2. See Batuk massacre, attacks on Phu Quoc and Tho Chu islands