In The Sorrow of War, Kien mentions that there is another war going on in Cambodia, but that he chooses not to enlist to fight in it. In this section of the ClassicNote, we will look at the Cambodian genocide to contextualize the region’s turmoil, which persisted even after the war against the Americans was over.
The Khmer Rouge came to power under Pol Pot, a Marxist leader, in 1975, and lasted until 1979. The origins of the Khmer Rouge date to the 1960s; they were the armed wing of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (Cambodia). They were based in the remote areas of the jungle and mountain regions and did not gain popularity until a right-wing military coup in 1970, at which point the Khmer Rouge entered into a coalition with the toppled head of state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, and began accruing support.
A civil war ensued and raged for the next five years, with the military up against Prince Norodom and the Khmer Rouge. The latter gained territory in the countryside and were able to press their influence and move to take over Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, in 1975. Instead of putting Prince Norodom in power, they appointed Pol Pot as head of the nation.
The Khmer Rouge planned to institute an agrarian utopia, as Pol Pot admired the self-sufficient tribes in the rural northeast of the country. The nation would have a “master race” and start at “Year Zero,” which meant the people were isolated from the rest of the world, cities were depleted, money and private property and religion were abolished, and people had to live in rural collectives. Intellectuals were targeted and killed.
The regime was incredibly brutal. Estimates suggest two million people (nearly a quarter of the population) died as a result of targeted killings, starvation, disease, or overwork in work camps. The History Place sums up this era: “[Pol Pot] began by declaring, ‘This is Year Zero,’ and that society was about to be ‘purified.’ Capitalism, Western culture, city life, religion, and all foreign influences were to be extinguished in favor of an extreme form of peasant Communism. All foreigners were thus expelled, embassies closed, and any foreign economic or medical assistance was refused. The use of foreign languages was banned. Newspapers and television stations were shut down, radios and bicycles confiscated, and mail and telephone usage curtailed. Money was forbidden. All businesses were shuttered, religion banned, education halted, health care eliminated, and parental authority revoked. Thus Cambodia was sealed off from the outside world. All of Cambodia's cities were then forcibly evacuated. At Phnom Penh, two million inhabitants were evacuated on foot into the countryside at gunpoint. As many as 20,000 died along the way. Millions of Cambodians accustomed to city life were now forced into slave labor in Pol Pot's ‘killing fields’ where they soon began dying from overwork, malnutrition, and disease, on a diet of one tin of rice (180 grams) per person every two days.”
Vietnamese forces invaded in 1979 and overthrew the Khmer Rouge rule; they did so because they were frustrated with the frequent border clashes. Pol Pot and his fighters remained as insurgent force in remote areas, but Vietnam retained control of Cambodia until the 1980s. In 1993, Prince Norodom returned to rule, though he is now part of a constitutional monarchy.
