How is it the Khmer Rouge could seize

power on the fatal 17th April 1975

The Khmer Rouge Trap

• Much more humane, practical vision of Ministry of Foreign affairs; daily life under DK: children, food, re-education, KR newspeak.

• Another view SS who is a “political beast & therefore not a man”. In SS’s memoirs his wife (on the side-lines), but great heroine.

• Estranged couple and personal tragedy, rejection of any responsibility for what happened to her: a believer. 1882 photos. Rejection of 1991 letter through Japanese journalist. “I wished to be civil party to the Tribunal: my wish was rejected” (414)

I - The weight of the past

• 1 – What was the rôle of the myth of Angkor – if

any ?

• So Hong (Saloth Ban) & Angkor-Mont Meru

the centre of the Universe.

• Angkor being in Siam till 1907. 1431. Lovèk

near Oudong. King Ang Chan (1516–66) chose

Lovèk as his official capital and erected his

palace there in 1553. Captured by Siamese in

1594. Capital relocated to Oudong in 1618.

Ne Win, Thiounn Prasith, Khieu Samphân

Khoy Thuon, Wang Shangrong, Chinese deputy, Ieng Sary, Zhang Chunqiao, Pol Pot, Geng Biao, Director of

International links at the CPC Central Committee, Son Sen, Sun Hao, Chinese Eùbassador, Siet Chêt,

Emblem of Democratic Kampuchea

All manner of political regimes in the past century

• 1904-1947, colonial protectorate, with the King as de facto constitutional monarch and the Résident supérieur as de facto PM.

• 1947-1955: a budding democracy with the first constitution and the Democratic Party.

• 1955-1970: and autocratic one-party system with the Sangkum Party and Sihanouk as the autocrat.

• 1970-75: Second attempt at establishing democracy, but the ineptitude of Lon Nol and the violence of the Vietminh invasion, plus the rise of the KR turned the regime in one more autocracy.

• 1975-1979: a ultra-Maoist totalitarian communist regime.

• 1979-1991: a Vietnamo-Soviet type of communist protectorate.

• 1991-1997: third attempt to bringing democracy to Cambodia with UNTAC.

• 1997-2014: one more autocratic regime along with a de facto one Party-State under Hun Sen who will have been soon PM for 30 years. Today 4th Attempt ? : One-party system or 2-party system ?

2 - Was it because of French colonisation and

French culture ?

• The Indochinese Federation – Colonisation : exploitation Young Cambodians are taught at school.

• The Vietnamese in the French administration in Cambodia.

• The Vichy regime: youth movement, personality cult, cult of the nation, idealization of peasants

• 25% of the French voted for the PCF during the post-WW2 years

I – 1 -External causes: France

• France: At the time of the creation of the revolutionary

movement, many were ex Khmer-Vietminh, like Nuon

Chea, Ta Mok, Mat Ly, Chea Sim, Heng Samrin, Yun

Yat, Ney Sarann, Koy Thuon, Kaè Pauk, Sao Phoem,

etc. Others had been students in France, but not in

universities or came back with no higher education

diplomas: Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, with two

exceptions Khieu Samphân, and Ieng Thirith. All the

others were only marginal to the regime: Thiounn

Mumm & his brothers (Thioeun, Thumm Prasith)

Suong Sikoeun, and none among the decision makers.

For the latter, everything came from France was a

model, like the US today – including the fast food.

Communism was an ideal. Robespierre a hero.

5 – Was it because of Sihanouk’s political choices ?

• His Vichy education

• His refusal to join SEATO & ASEAN,

• His abdication to seize all political powers,

• His establishment of one-party State,

• His nationalisation programme,

• His use of Jeunesse Socialiste Royale Khmère (JSRK)

• His own personality cult,

• His choosing Beijing in 1970. & 1979 again.

2 - External causes: Vietnam

• The Cold War, along with Lenin could make his October 1917 coup because of WWI, similarly the KR entered PPenh because of the Second Indochinese War: war is the matrix, origin of all upheavals & revolutions.

• From the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) 1930: Christopher Goscha, Stephen Morris & Steve Heder tell the whole story.

• The Vietminh routed the inexperienced Lon Nol army in 1971-2, making it possible to handle to The KR marge swathes of rural Cambodia. Only from 1973 did the civil war really become a civil one.

3 - Mao’s China • Some historians and mainly Sihanouk claimed that the Chinese

advised the Khmer Rouge not to repeat their mistakes and tread carefully the road to communism.

• Andrew Mertha in forthcoming Brothers in Arms: the present day Chinese embassy claims that Chinese aid was purely humanitarian: medicines, rice and hoes to cultivate rice. He sides with those who minimize Maoist influence.

• Sihanouk boasts having been a very intimate friend with Zhou Enlai. Very urbane, diplomatic and clever. What he fails to mention is that Zhou never opposed any of the most radical policies of Mao. Quite the opposite; e. g. during the Great Leap Forward, or Great Famine (Hungry Ghosts of Jasper Becker or Mao’s Great Famine of Frank Dikötter), Zhou insisted that quotas established with Soviet Union should be met, and therefore was pushing for greater requisitions: starvation of the people mattered less that the demands of the State.

Yinghong Cheng, 2009, Honolulu Univ. Press

IV - The Global Impact of the Communist New Man

• The development of the Cambodian communist movement

was from the very beginning overshadowed by Chinese

communism, especially by the Cultural Revolution’s influence.

Pol Pot visited China several times during the Cultural

Revolution, and his longest visit, in 1965 on the eve of the

CR, lasted for three months. Zhang Chunqiao, Chen Boda,

and Yao Wenyuan 1931-2005, the most aggressive Maoist CR

ideologues, explained to him the essence of Maoist

revolutionary ideology, especially the necessity of the CR.

• Seeking advice for Cambodian socialism, Pol Pot met with

Mao in person in June 1975. Mao told him that China was

“unqualified” to guide or criticize the Khmer Rouge,

• because “we are now a capitalist country without capitalists, as

Lenin once said”.

Decisively

Throw Out

the Wang

Hongwen,

Zhang-Jiang

Qing-Yao

Anti-Party

Clique!"

• Mao told him that this was so because China had

preserved many institutions that protected social

inequality. Pol Pot may well have taken this to mean

that Mao was acknowledging that China had not

solved the problem of preventing revisionism or

capitalist restoration and that the CR was

encountering significant resistance.

• Some new materials reveal that it was Zhang

Chunqiao, the theoretical mastermind of the Gang

of Four (the most radical Maoist ideologues), who

drafted the constitution for Cambodia’s new regime

during Pol Pot’s 1975 visit.

• The constitution was promulgated in 1977, at the peak of the Khmer Rouge’s social experiment.

• Pol Pot once again visited China in 1977. During that visit, although Mao had died and the Gang of Four had been purged, Pol Pot made a high profile pilgrimage to Dazhai, the collective model of the Chinese new man, accompanied by Chen Yonggui, the Maoist model for peasants.

• Pol Pot’s visit apparently signified his support of the Maoist Cultural Revolution line, which was being abandoned by the post-Mao CCP leadership. In those circumstances, Dazhai became the link between the remaining Maoists in China and the extremist Maoists outside China.

• Chen Yonggui, sensing the prospect that Maoist theory and

practice would be denounced altogether, developed a close

ideological affinity with the Khmer Rouge. He visited

Cambodia in 1978. Many Khmer Rouge members actually did

not know his name, but they were all very impressed by the

legend of the Chinese new men in Dazhai, so they simply told

each other, “Dazhai is coming.”

• Accompanied by Pol Pot wherever he went, Chen was very

excited to see the Khmer Rouge’s extremist policies in pushing

the country into communism. Later, when he returned to

China, he told his close friends with a sigh: “Marx, Lenin, and

Mao, they all failed to accomplish communism, but in

Cambodia they made it.” He added that “how they jumped to

communism is worth our study.”

• This historical context may help better understand the new

man question in the Khmer Rouge regime. The Khmer Rouge

coined the terms “new people” and “base people.” The new

people were also called “the April 17 people”, referring to

those who had lived in the major cities until the Khmer Rouge

entered in April 1975. By comparison, people who had lived in

the Khmer Rouge’s “liberated areas” were called base people,

because they had been re-educated to some extent and thus

were treated less harshly.

Therefore in this case the term “New pPeople” indicated the

status of people who were still to be reshaped. These

Cambodian “New People” were shortly afterward forced to

evacuate the cities and walk to the countryside, where they were

subject to “thought reform” combined with heavy labour. The

result was that millions perished from exposure, exhaustion,

malnutrition, disease, and mass murders.

• The Chinese influence in the Cambodian process of

remaking people is apparent in many Khmer Rouge

policies. Thought reform was one of them.

• The “New People,” who were separated from their

families, sent to the countryside, and forced to engage

in intensive ideological studies combined with

backbreaking work, were frequently asked questions

such as these: “Are you still thinking of your family?

Are you really with the revolution? Do you really feel

happy when you work, or is work just something you

have to do?”

• But the Khmer Rouge went much further, driven by

the “lesson” taken from China’s development.

• Altered by Mao’s apocalyptic words and having witnessed the

loss of momentum of China’s revolutionary fanaticism in the

mid-1970s and the halt of its Cultural Revolution, the Khmer

Rouge concluded that the Chinese failure in perpetuating

revolution was caused by their preservation of all old social

institutions, even though they had made tremendous efforts to

reform them.

• The old social institutions consisted of family, money, market,

education, and most of all, the space containing all of them—

the cities. As the Khmer Rouge deduced, they were major

elements of the old social environment, and the Chinese

experience had proven that they were essentially

unchangeable. The Khmer Rouge thus abolished those

institutions—instead of reforming them—from the moment

the KR entered the cities, in order to create a totally new social

environment for the sake of the New Man.

• One result of dismantling these institutions was that it helped

recruit young followers, some even teenagers, for the Khmer

Rouge, because now they had no school to attend or family to

be part of. Many Khmer Rouge soldiers were alarmingly

young, often under fifteen years old, and the AK-47s they

carried seemed larger than the soldiers themselves. But these

young recruits often proved to be the most ferocious and

ruthless combatants and executioners.

• Yet even this aspect of the Khmer Rouge case has a Chinese

precedent: in the history of Chinese communism, there were

numerous hong xiao gui (Little Red Devils) who were much

younger than the age of maturity but proved to be the most

loyal members of the movement. Recruited by the Party in the

late 1920s and early 1930s, and without family or formal

education, many of them survived the wars and went on to

bear the stars and bars of generals in the 1950s.

• By destroying these institutions, the Khmer Rouge believed

they would avoid the pitfall of Maoist revolution, just as Mao

had believed that by launching the Cultural Revolution and

other political campaigns, the revisionism that had overtaken

the Soviet Union ten years earlier would have no chance in

China. Just as the Chinese and Cubans despised the Russians

for their corruption by material incentives, some of the

Khmer Rouge became critical of the Chinese.

• One example was their disapproving attitude toward the

Chinese experts working in Cambodia, who used the foreign

currency they were paid during their service to buy household

electronics at customs when they returned to China.

Additionally, when a Chinese engineer asked how much the

construction of a reservoir had cost, the Khmer Rouge

answered proudly: “That was made by our people. In

Cambodia we do not use money.”

4 - The two lines • In the 1970s, Mao’s last years, was the years of 2

strategies: the headlong pursuit of demented policies with the “Gang of Four” or the more pragmatic approach to the economy of a Deng Xiaoping. Who had the upper hand and who escorted the KR leaders in their journey or long re-education in China ?

• Duch gave the answer at the Tribunal, 30 April 2009: the slogan of “the super Great Leap Forward”. And that was when the country started to make 10 steps when china had only made on. Pol Pot’s theory was more radical that the Cultural revolution and more cruel than the Gang of Four”.

6 - The chain of power: the decision makers

& the technicians

• Which China are we talking about? That of the radicals? That of the pragmatist? That of the thousands of experts who staffed all technical services under DK? Or that of the decision makers at the time, and Mao himself ?

• Mao died just half way through the DK regime, but radical ideas prevailed with his successor Hua Guofeng till late 1978 and the return of Deng. Is not this a curious coincidence that the KR regime collapsed with the collapse of the diehard Maoists in China ?

7 - Mao « the Supreme guide » • Pol Pot: « Chairman Mao had personally led the famous Cultural

Revolution and succeeded in smashing counter-revolutionaries and anti-socialist headquarters of Liu Shaoqi, Lin Piao and Deng Xiaoping.”

• His works “summed up the experiences of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, they illuminate Marxist-Leninist literature and are immortal”. (FBIS, 20 Sept 1976)

• Chinese experts in their thousands: military, irrigation and agriculture, communication and railways, health. Well-paid, well-fed, well-housed. Lived apart. Aware people were suffering and helped when Angkar did not see. Kompong Som oil refinery problems. Gone through the Cultural Revolution and some the Great Leap Forward. Submission and loyalism.

8 - Travellers & decision makers

• Pol Pot made number of travels and stays in china where he soon felt quite at home: late 1965, 1970, 1975, 1976, 1977.. Some stays secret, some public. Whom did he meet? What revolutionary places did he visit? What tactical, strategic, ideological training did he undergo ?

• 21 June 1975: fully approved PP’s radical plans?

• Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, Son Sen, Keo Meas, Sit Chhê, Ney Sarann, Sao Phoem and their children or trainees of every description

• In 1965 PP met Chen Boda (Mao’s secretary) & Zhang Chunqiao, a rising Shanghai leader . Kang Sheng ? Head of CPC International Liaison Department & Mao’s security chief.

• Approval of launching the People’s war in 1968. Unlike Vietnam

9 - A few Chinese radicals who came to DK

or/and had contacts with KR leadership

• Kang Sheng (1898-1975)

• Mao Zedong (1893-1976)

• Zhang Chun-qiao, (1917-2005)

• Chen Yonggui, (1915-1986), connu aussi sous les

noms de Chen Yung-kuei, M. Dazai ou, en

khmer, Ta Chay,

• Hua Guofeng (1921-2008)

• Wang Dong Xing ( 1916-1996)

Sihanouk triumphant in Beijing on 11 April 1973, after « the success of

his inspection tour of liberated zones in March: Zou En-lai, PM, Li Sien

Nien Finance Minister, Zhang Chunqiao & Norodom Yuvaneath (1943).

The leader of the “Gang of four,” Zhang Chunqiao, escorts

Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Princess Monique & Ieng Sary

to a banquet in Beijing

L

Jeldres

Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review

E-Journal No. 4 (September 2012) • (http://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-4)

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61!

Kissinger and to several ambassadors in Beijing. He tried to induce French president Georges

Pompidou to raise the issue of Cambodia, and of his friend Sihanouk, with the Americans.

However, Zhou’s failing health and internal political developments in China worked against

his efforts to see his friend Sihanouk at the helm of a coalition in Cambodia. While the full

record from the Chinese archives is yet to be declassified, it is known that the leader of the

so-called “Gang of Four,” Zhang Chunqiao, had taken a particular interest in Cambodia and,

having established close links with the Khmer Rouge, had secretly visited Cambodia. He also

helped to draft the new constitution of Democratic Kampuchea and opposed any negotiated

settlement of the Cambodian conflict.22

Figure 6. The leader of the “Gang of Four,” Zhang Chunqiao, who had taken a personal

interest in the Cambodian issue, escorts Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Princess Monique, and

Ieng Sary, a Khmer Rouge leader, to a banquet in Beijing, date unknown. Source: Private

collection of the author.

On August 26, 1975, Zhou Enlai received Norodom Sihanouk and his wife,

accompanied by a Khmer Rouge delegation composed of Khieu Samphan and Madame Ieng

Sary, at the hospital. Zhou was still fully lucid but much weakened by his illness and the

treatment. This did not, however, prevent him from telling the Khmer Rouge leaders present

at the hospital that “we the Chinese Communists must bear the distressing consequences of

our own mistakes. We take the liberty of advising you not to attempt to reach the final stages

of Communism with one great leap forward. You must proceed with much caution and

proceed slowly with wisdom on the path leading to Communism.”23

He also urged them to

Khoy Thuon, Wang Shangrong, Chinese deputy, Ieng Sary, Zhang Chunqiao, Pol Pot, Geng Biao, Director of

International links at the CPC Central Committee, Son Sen, Sun Hao, Chinese Eùbassador, Siet Chêt,

14 - Zhang Chunqiao

• Zhang Chunqiao found enthusiastic disciples among the leaders of Angkar, and Pol Pot could declare after that visit : «There is a continuous, non-stop struggle between revolution and counter-revolution. We must keep to the standpoint that there will be enemies 10 years, 20 years, 30 years in the near future … Are these enemies strong or not? That does not depend on them. It depends on us. If we constantly take absolute measures, they will be scattered and smashed to bits » (Short, p. 357)

16 - Chen Yonggui - Dazhai – Ta Chay (1915-

1986)

17 - Ta Chai • Slogan : «Learn from Dazhai» was drummed into

the Chinese people from to time of the Great Leap Forward to that of the Cultural Revolution. « Implement Mao’s thoughts! » «Move mountains to create fields! », « Work diligently and ardently to turn your village into a Dazhai within 3 years ! ».

• Not just manicured rice fields and plentiful crops, but entire irrigation networks in hilly and dry terrain. Magnificent dams, aqueducts spanning deep valleys, workshops;

• The whole based on the principle of self-sufficiency and self-help, with no financial or technical aid.

• A gigantic fraud: massive aid from Revolutionary Army.

18 - Dazhai in Shanxi province

Internal causes

• Political: impossible democracy with the 4 attempts to establish it : 1946-55, 1970 & 1991-97 & 2013.

• The rôle of Sihanouk

• The criminal incompetence of Lon Nol.

• Massive use by the KR of child soldiers and the indigenous peoples of the periphery.

• Khmer leaders have always « eaten the kingdom » rather than administer it. Gulf that separates the governors and the governed.

• Weak modern State, hence the temptation for total control on the part of the State.

• “That thirst for the most pompous titles, honours and powers has already caused many troubles in the kingdom” 30 June 1916 François Baudoin.

Prevailing violence

Cultural

Tension between submission to authorities and a violence that can burst out any time. But submission and the gentleness of the vast majority of the Khmer people leave those prepared to take advantage of power free to exploit the population.

An implicit caste system : big people/little people.

Extreme individualism. Collectivism could only be imposed through terror.

• Low level of education; prevailing superstitious beliefs: lynching of so-called sorcerers. No Age of Reason or Enlightenment. No Voltaire.

• Confusion of chauvinism/jingoism and fierce nationalism with patriotism and sense of public good and public service..

Cutural - 2

• Inferiority versus superiority complex of many.

• Tradition of the patronage system (khsaè) and nepotism leading to endemic corruption. Under DK not corruption of money but of absolute power. Could have contributed to the abolition of money

• Tradition of slavery: endemic in industry and home workshops . A Slave State, Philip Short. $100/month

• The myth of regaining a lost paradise: return to the grandeur of Angkor or the original communism of the ethnic indigenous groups of the Northeast. The future is in an imaginary past, not in constructing the years to come.

Religious • Ideology becomes a religion and an instrument of political control: Pol

Pot-Nuon Chea-ism is similar to the rules of a fundamentalist sect based

on Buddhism: generalisation of monastic rules to the entire population

who must all become ascetics and …

• - renounce all worldly possessions

• - renounce all family bonds

• - renounce all individual conscience and in the end one’s own self: the

dissolution of the individual, of the self in my collection of slogans.

• In order to merge into the Supreme being the Angkar-God, to empty

one’s mind and slavishly submit to all the diktats of the Party.

• According to Short, everywhere communism seized power, it has cast

itself into the mould of the dominant religion – Confucianism in China,

Buddhism in Cambodia..

• Declarations de Nuon Chea at the Tribunal & Theth Sambath. Kill

mankind in the name of humanity

In the end …

• .. The ingredients of the Khmer Rouge bomb were essentially an uncompromising Maoist ideology implemented to the extreme degree of its logic,

• a strong belief in the matchless greatness of Khmer civilisation able to achieve wonders,

• the necessity for the entire society to renounce all pleasures and attachments and become ascetics who withdraw from worldly enjoyments,

• and in the end a coterie of leaders prepared to see their dreams come true – whatever the human cost. (p. 242) together with thugs manipulated since childhood to murder indiscriminately and ruthlessly

Was it because the KR leadership was composed

of paranoid schizophrenics ?

• Were they crazy ? For power ?

• Paranoid schizophrenia is one of several types of schizophrenia, a chronic mental illness in which a person loses touch with reality (psychosis).

• delusion is a delusion of grandeur, or the “fixed, false belief that one possesses superior qualities such as genius, fame, omnipotence.

• believing that everyone is conspiring to poison or kill you: you see enemies everywhere. Poor emotional response.

Why the Khmer Rouge came to power ?

The revolutionary regime could come into existence only through the combination of three factors : the geopolitical context in Southeast and East Asia in the last phase of the Cold War: in particular the capital rôles played first by Communist Vietnam and next by Maoist China.

The existence of a coterie of ruthless politicians determined to exercise absolute power over their fellow citizens, together with the rôle of Sihanouk from 1970 to 1975.

Thirdly, the historical, political, religious and cultural environment in Cambodia itself.