Killing Fields (Cambodia)

In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge (KR), a communist guerilla force, was victorious in Cambodia's 5-year-long civil war under the leadership of a former schoolteacher using the pseudonym Pol Pot. Almost at once, and without explaining their rationale, the KR forcibly emptied Cambodia's towns and cities; abolished money, schools, private property, courts of law, and markets; forbade religious practices; expelled foreigners and closed embassies; and set almost everybody to work in the countryside growing food. The country's entire population was forced to relocate to agricultural labor camps, a process of resettlement and political retribution in which many died in what are today referred to as the “killing fields.” Everyone was forced to work 12 to 14 hours a day, every day. Children were separated from their parents to work in mobile groups or as soldiers and were encouraged to spy on adults. Buddhist monks and nuns were not allowed to practice their religion and were forced into labor brigades. Workers were fed one watery bowl of soup with a few grains of rice daily. Babies, children, adults, nonethnic Khmers, the educated urban elites, the handicapped, and the elderly were systematically killed. This was the central part of the KR plan—to preside over an extreme version of a radical Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolution.

Between April 1975 and the 1st week of 1979, at least 14,000 men, women, and children had been held at a location in Phnom Penh designated S-21, a high school converted into a secret prison. Many of them were KR soldiers or followers who had refused to obey the extreme orders of their leaders. Tortured or threatened with torture, few [Page 665]prisoners maintained their innocence for long. Considered guilty from the moment they arrived, thousands of men, women, and children were expected to confess their guilt in writing before they were taken off to be murdered. The KR had a paranoid fear of imagined enemies, and the search for them was a crucial ingredient of its bureaucratic practice. Because Cambodia's leaders subscribed to the Maoist doctrine of permanent revolution, counterrevolutionary “enemies” were continuously imagined, and purges were continuously needed to ensure the safety of the party center and to maintain the revolution's purity and momentum. Everyone held at S-21 was eventually killed; it was the regime's intent that their confessions would testify not only to their “crimes” but also to the party's omniscience and clairvoyance.

During the 3 years, 8 months, and 20 days of Pol Pot's rule, Cambodia faced its darkest days; an estimated 1.5–3 million Cambodians, some 20%–30% of the country's population, died by starvation, torture, or execution. Almost every Cambodian family lost at least one relative during this gruesome holocaust. The KR state of Democratic Kampuchea was toppled on December 25, 1978, after Vietnamese forces entered Phnom Penh to address the KR murder of hundreds of ethnic Vietnamese along the Vietnam-Cambodia border region. This, however, did not mean freedom for the people of Cambodia; instead, it set the stage for a two-decade-long war in Cambodia. The Vietnamese finally withdrew from Cambodia in 1989, leaving their client regime, the People's Republic of Kampuchea, to fend for itself against the KR and its allies. For 30 years, the KR haunted the Cambodian landscape and people through attempts to identify old KR leaders and charge them with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

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