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In the case of such a secretive regime as Pol Pot’s
Democratic Kampuchea (DK), access to accurate information about the period for
historical study can be challenging. Many questions remain unanswered regarding
what really happened between the closed borders of Cambodia between April 1975
and January 1979, but studies such as Ben Kiernan’s into the Khmer Rouge era
provide valuable sources of information. The
Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 is
the culmination of extensive research on the part of the Australian historian and
author of Blood and Soil: A World History
of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (Yale University Press,
2007); it draws upon evidence of five hundred interviews with survivors of the
Cambodian genocide as collected by Kiernan himself. With this information,
Kiernan offers two key arguments that form the basis of this work: that Khmer
Rouge conceptions of race overshadowed those of class; and that the regime
struggled for top-down domination.
Based on his own evidence and that of other historians,
Kiernan estimates that 1.7 million Cambodians, ethnic minorities and citizens
of neighbouring countries were killed in the period in which Pol Pot’s Khmer
Rouge held power over Cambodia in a regime that he describes as an “amalgam of
communism and racism”. Cities were emptied and the population relocated to the
countryside to work on an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful national
project of dam- and canal-construction to increase dry-season crop yields.
Under a regime that “probably exerted more power over its citizens than any
other state in world history”, control was maintained by uprooting and dispersing
communities and by assigning individualised work targets in a communal setting.
“The CPK [Communist Party of Kampuchea] atomized its citizens to assure maximum
social control”, Kiernan argues.
During this period, all aspects of the country’s pre-revolution
past were effectively nullified; nineteen seventy-five was renamed Year Zero by
the new government and those who had been educated, lived in cities or were
ethnic minorities were particularly targeted. Cambodia became an agrarian
society in which preferential treatment was given to those who were peasants (the
‘base’ people) with no relation to city-dwellers (the ‘new’ people). In May
1979, Heng Samrin, Khmer Rouge defector and chairman of the People’s Republic
of Kampuchea, established after the Vietnamese overthrow of DK, revealed to the
outside world how citizens under Pol Pot had been classified as ‘full rights’, ‘candidates’
and ‘deportees’ in relation to their background, family and ethnicity and their
subsequent perceived eligibility for ‘rights’. Furthermore, Kiernan was the
first writer to note in print how deportees from Eastern Cambodia, where
rebellions against the regime had occurred, were forced to wear blue when
relocated to distinguish them for execution.
Besides the devastating death toll (believed to be over 20%
of Cambodia’s 1975 population), family life, culture and society was decimated
with lasting impacts. The third edition of this book, published 2008, includes
a preface that takes the story up to the ongoing tribunal by the Extraordinary
Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) to try former leaders of the Khmer
Rouge. Established in 1999, the UN-sponsored tribunal found five former leaders
guilty of crimes against humanity in July 2007. However, the KR figurehead Pol
Pot died as a free man in 1998 and in March 2013, DK deputy prime minister,
minister of foreign affairs and Number Three in the party hierarchy Ieng Sary
died of natural causes before he could be found guilty of the genocide crimes
he was charged with in 2009. Justice is coming slowly for Cambodians, and the surviving
pioneers of the genocide are becoming very old. Fortunately, studies such as
Kiernan’s and work by DC-CAM, the largest resource base for information on the
Khmer Rouge era, are increasing global awareness of the devastating events of
Cambodia’s recent history. Notably, it was Kiernan who founded the
award-winning Cambodian Genocide Programme at Yale University which was to
become DC-CAM, the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, now based in Phnom Penh.
Kiernan’s interest in Cambodia is far-reaching. He first
visited the country in his early twenties, before the expulsion of all
foreigners in 1975. He has subsequently learnt Khmer and written several books
on the subject of the Cambodian genocide. The
Pol Pot Regime is an incredibly detailed work that covers the functioning
of the CPK party and state- from government to regional and district levels-
living conditions under the regime, the persecution of ethnic minorities,
rebellions against the regime and Democratic Kampuchea’s foreign relations. The
quantity of information available is impressive and Kiernan’s arguments are
convincing. Particularly interesting for me is his assertion that the Khmer
Rouge were primarily motivated by racial, and not class, distinctions: “Non-Khmers,
who comprised a significant part of the supposedly favoured segment of the
peasantry, were singled out for persecution because of their race. This was
neither a communist proletarian revolution that favoured the working class nor
a peasant revolution that favoured all farmers”. He denounces the claims of
other historians that the revolution was peasant-led, favouring the view that
the revolution initially held peasant support, but often out of “fear”.
For the purpose of my project, this was perhaps not the best
choice of reading for information on Pol Pot’s Cambodia. This is a very
academic book and was not easy to read; it took me a long time to get through. I
would not recommend it as introductory reading to Khmer Rouge history, only to
those who are studying this period in depth. Nonetheless, I gathered a great
deal of information from this book and reading it gave me an appreciation of
the value of the information Kiernan has collected in the context of such
information being difficult to come across and to confirm. Finally, I find the
arguments that Kiernan has produced to be well reported and convincing,
particularly as they seem to have been drawn from a large pool of extensive and
reliable evidence. He has done well to explain the functioning of a regime that
was at the same time so devastatingly brutal and curiously self-destructive.
More: read my reviews of two women's memoirs of the Khmer Rouge period and its aftermath:
To The End of Hell by Denise Affonco
After They Killed Our Father by Luong Ung
More: read my reviews of two women's memoirs of the Khmer Rouge period and its aftermath:
To The End of Hell by Denise Affonco
After They Killed Our Father by Luong Ung
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