On April 17, 1975, Phnom Penh was captured by the Khmer Rouge, "Democratic Kampuchea" was proclaimed, and Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was living in exile, was installed as head of state.
Most of the town's inhabitants rejoiced at the end of the fighting and greeted the invading troops with jubilation. A large part of the fighters consisted of child soldiers, who at that time knew nothing else than a life as soldiers.
The mood quickly changed when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge began to establish a regime of terror. On April 4, 1976, Norodom Sihanouk was deposed as head of state and placed under house arrest for his criticism of the Khmer Rouge's course, Khieu Samphan was appointed the new head of state, and Pol Pot was named head of government.
Secrecy
One peculiarity of rule in Cambodia that distinguished it from the other dictatorships was the complete secrecy of the party and leading officials. They hid behind an ostensible organization called angka (short for angka padevat, "revolutionary organization"). Pol Pot made his first public appearance only about a year after taking power in March 1976, as a "rubber plantation worker". Pol Pot had no biography of himself published, there were no collections of texts and only a few photos of him. Many Cambodians only learned of the identity of their head of government after his fall.
Ideology and reality
Pol Pot adhered to communist ideas as a young man and joined the Communist Party of Cambodia at the age of 18 and the French Communist Party a little later, when he was a student in Paris. He saw the causes of Cambodia's poverty, apart from the corruption of the Lon Nol regime, precisely in the difference between town and country. So he believed he had to strengthen the peasantry and destroy everything urban.
Although the Khmer Rouge were oriented towards Maoism, they showed clear differences in ideological orientation to the People's Republic of China. Central elements of communism, such as industrial progress, mechanization, and the proletariat as the bearer of revolution, were absent, whereas the peasantry was glorified and the leadership acted in extreme secrecy, even when it held state power. Because of these characteristics, the rule of the Khmer Rouge was also referred to by the political catchword Stone Age Communism.
The immediate deportation of the urban population to the rice fields of the country turned Phnom Penh, which had previously had over two million inhabitants, into a ghost town within a few days, and the provincial capitals were also depopulated. During this "long march", which lasted up to a month, thousands of people (especially the elderly and children) died due to the hardships.
Soon every survivor was transformed into a worker and forced to wear a black uniform that would eliminate all individuality. Khmer Rouge spokesmen proclaimed the beginning of a new revolutionary age in which every form of oppression and tyranny would be abolished.
In the first months of this revolutionary era, the country was transformed into a gigantic labor and prison camp. Daily working hours of twelve hours or more were not uncommon, and the workers' every move was so monitored that almost everyone had to fear for their lives. Anyone late for work could be executed on suspicion of sabotage. Talking while working was forbidden.
Money was abolished, books were burned, teachers, merchants and almost the entire intellectual elite of the country were murdered in order to implement the agrarian communism that Pol Pot had in mind. The intended shift of economic activity to the countryside brought it to a complete standstill, as industrial and service enterprises - banks, hospitals, schools - were also closed.
Furthermore, the Khmer Rouge banned all religious practice. In the course of its efforts to eradicate religion, the Pol Pot regime had hundreds of Buddhist monasteries, Christian churches and mosques destroyed.
In 1976, Pol Pot drew up a four-year plan that was supposed to eliminate all class differences and lead the country into a "prosperous communist future. Cambodia's agricultural productivity was to be tripled in order to obtain the necessary foreign currency through food exports. But this goal was not achieved, as the economic infrastructure was largely destroyed and agricultural workers were largely left without tools.
Food supplies also collapsed due to misplanning and mismanagement. Fearing reprisals, local leaders falsified crop reports. The yield was nevertheless taken away. Food shortages and forced labor, as well as lack of medical care, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Many of the responsible leaders were imprisoned for sabotaging the Four-Year Plan and perished.
Mass murder
At the same time, so-called mass purges were carried out. Those suspected of collaborating with foreigners were murdered along with their spouses and children. It was not only Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge who blamed minorities, especially Vietnamese and foreigners, for Cambodia's plight. The Vietnamese were not only unpopular because they had brought the war to Cambodia, but also because they - brought into the country by the French for administrative duties during the period of French colonial rule in Indochina - were for many a symbol of foreign domination of the country. In addition, the Khmer Rouge claimed the Mekong Delta (Kampuchea Krom) for Cambodia, which had fallen to Vietnam as Cochinchina under French colonial rule.
The "bourgeoisie" was "abolished", and to be a "bourgeois" it was often enough to be able to read or speak a foreign language (especially French). Under the Khmer Rouge dictatorship, opposition figures such as monarchists and supporters of the Lon Nol regime and their spouses and children were killed en masse, as were those communists who had returned to Cambodia from Vietnam shortly before the takeover.
During the four-year reign of terror, an estimated 1.7 to 2.2 million people were killed in death camps or perished in forced labor in the rice fields (out of a total population of just over seven million, representing one-quarter to over 30%). In the notorious "Security Prison 21" in Phnom Penh, run by Kaing Guek Eav, known by his pseudonym "Duch" (also "Dëuch" or "Deuch"), seven prisoners survived out of a total of 15,000 to 30,000. Those who did not die of torture there were killed on the Killing Fields outside the city gates.
The mass cleansing is also referred to as autogenocide, as the government's extermination measures targeted its own people. Also affected by mass killings were members of the Vietnamese minority, the indigenous Muslim Cham and the hill tribes. The rights of these and other ethnic groups were fundamentally disregarded by the Pol Pot regime. A Democratic Kampuchea government document published in 1977 stated that minorities accounted for only 1% of the population, when in fact they accounted for 20%. Thus, the hill tribes were referred to as "Khmer Loeu" (German: "upper Khmer") and the Cham as "Islamic Khmer." While David P. Chandler and Michael Vickery, in their works on the recent history of Cambodia, classified the Pol Pot regime as chauvinistic but did not speak of genocide in this context, Ben Kiernan was the first historian to explicitly refer to the Khmer Rouge's minority policies as ethnic cleansing. In addition to the Cham and Vietnamese, the Chinese minority was also a victim of the Khmer Rouge, decimating the number of ethnic Chinese from 430,000 to 215,000. In this case, the cause of the genocide is not so much the racism of the KPK leadership as the social structure of the Chinese population group: Since the Chinese lived predominantly in the cities and were often wealthier and more educated than the average population, they were especially likely to be deported to the countryside as New People. Since, unlike many Khmer among the New People who came from villages or had relatives there, they were unaccustomed to hard field work and the privations, they were particularly likely to die of debilitation or disease. Many Chinese were also identified as middle-class intellectuals and murdered. The mass murders of the Vietnamese and Cham were explicitly described as genocide in the later criminal trial of members of the Khmer Rouge.
Reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities continued to generate debate until their removal. The reports by John Barron and Anthony Paul, as well as Father François Ponchaud, who was the first to write about mass killings in Cambodia in his 1977 book Cambodge - année zéro, were portrayed by Western leftists such as media critic Noam Chomsky as not objective. The attention given in the press to the reported human rights violations from Cambodia was disproportionate to the atrocities committed by the Americans in Cambodia and Vietnam, Chomsky and Edward S. Herman wrote in The Nation on June 6, 1977. Chomsky rejected the accusations that his criticism at the time amounted to a relativization of the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror. Rather, he said, his criticism should be seen as a refutation of the portrayal of Cambodia as a "meek country" that was suddenly thrust into the abyss by the Khmer Rouge in 1975.
Casualty figures
To date, several mass graves with a total of approximately 1.39 million bodies have been discovered, excavated and evaluated in the country. Various studies differ in their estimation of the total number of victims between 740,000 and 3,000,000. Most range between 1.4 million and 2.2 million, whereby half of the causes of death are assumed to be executions (such as by shooting, beating to death, decapitation with field hoes and suffocation with plastic bags; small children were crushed on trees) and the other half death through lack of food and disease.
