Pol Pot

Pol Pot (b. presumably 19 May 1925 or 1928 as Saloth Sar in Kompong Thom Province, Cambodia; † 15 April 1998 in Anlong Veng) was a communist Cambodian politician and dictator (1975-1979) and, until 1997, the political and military leader of the Khmer Rouge as "Brother No. 1".

He was born Saloth Sar and came into contact with communism while studying abroad in Paris. Back home, he joined the conspiratorial Communist Party of Indochina (KPI), which was controlled by the Việt Minh, and worked as a teacher. In 1962 he became first secretary of what would become the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPC), and the following year fled political persecution at the hands of Lon Nol to the border area with Vietnam, where he finally shed his name and was referred to as "Brother Number One" or "Uncle Secretary". For the next seven years, Pol Pot lived underground and was heavily influenced by Maoism through a trip to China. During the Cambodian Civil War, the communist militias led by Pol Pot gave rise to the Khmer Rouge, which gained increasing numbers of recruits due to discontent, particularly among the rural population, over the massive American area bombardment of Operation MENU.

In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh and, as perceived enemies of the revolution, deported the urban population to the countryside, where they were forced to work as new people in the workers-and-peasants state. Still hiding behind the front organization angkar padevat, also known as angka, the Communists proclaimed Democratic Kampuchea in January 1976 and elected Pol Pot as prime minister. Radical collectivism and political cleansing under his rule led to the establishment of torture prisons such as Tuol Sleng and the Killing Fields. Constant skirmishes with Vietnam eventually resulted in open warfare that ended in the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia, forcing Pol Pot into exile in Thailand. Pol Pot's rule set in motion the Cambodian genocide in which, depending on the estimate, between 750,000 and more than 2 million died from execution, forced labor, starvation, and inadequate medical care out of a total population of about 8 million. The Khmer Rouge Tribunal is still investigating the crimes committed under Pol Pot, behind which historians suspect class-struggle but also racist motives, and categorises the persecution of the minorities as genocide.

Based mainly in Thailand, Pol Pot waged a guerrilla war against the Vietnamese occupation forces and the puppet state of the People's Republic of Kampuchea installed and supported by them. After the Vietnamese withdrew in 1989, the Paris Peace Treaty was signed in October 1991, ending the second civil war. Pol Pot was replaced as leader by Ta Mok in June 1997 and died, presumably by suicide, in Anlong Veng on April 15, 1998.

Beliefs and views

Based on eyewitnesses who describe him as a calm, confident, and persuasive speaker, and writings by Pol Pot that lack biographical details, it is difficult to fathom exactly what his personal motives were. A typical Cambodian of his time, he was brought up with a deeply rooted understanding of hierarchy and was deeply suspicious of foreign influence in Cambodia. From Buddhism, Pol Pot adopted beliefs in self-discipline, personal transformation, and enlightenment. Through French colonial schools and study in Paris, he became familiar with the concepts of democracy, imperialism, revolution, especially appreciated Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and eventually became a follower of Marxism-Leninism, taking guidance from Stalin's History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1938) and later Mao's writings. As a teacher, he enjoyed a high moral standing following the tradition of Buddhist monks and Hindu Brahmins, and was considered an authority to the end. From his time in the CPI, he adopted the tactics of secret party organization and warfare. After 1965, Pol Pot became more and more oriented towards the methods of Maoism and the Cultural Revolution. Pol Pot modeled his communism on the Chinese way without abandoning Cambodia's independence. According to biographer David P. Chandler, this context can explain Pol Pot's political career but hardly satisfactorily illuminate the motivation for his reign of terror, with phenomena such as Killing Fields and mass displacement. Historical models for Pol Pot's radical collectivization from 1975 to 1979 likely included the Great Leap Forward and Soviet policies in Ukraine during the 1930s, culminating in the Holodomor.

The historical context of the adolescent Pol Pot in the 1930s and 1940s was a severe crisis of national identity among educated Cambodians. On the one hand, the exploration that began with Henri Mouton idealized Angkor as an earlier advanced civilization before a fascinated global public. On the other side was a nation weak by comparison, which had been widely divided between Vietnam and Siam from 1863 onwards even before it became a French protectorate, and was going through ever more crises. While in Vietnam the Communist Party of Vietnam and ViệtMinh under Hồ Chí Minh visibly became a power in the struggle for independence, in Cambodia it remained with a major protest in the capital in July 1942. In the French-Thai War, Cambodia again lost territory to Siam, including Angkor, and in September 1941 the Japanese occupied the country, which after a few months of independence under Son Ngoc Thanh was again taken by France from September 1945. State independence was therefore a central leitmotif for Pol Pot, as it was for the Khmer Rouge as a whole. In the end, when they alone had won the Cambodian Civil War, fought for their independence and humiliated America, Pol Pot, mostly isolated from the outside world, firmly believed in the uniqueness and superiority of their revolution, especially in comparison to that in Vietnam and Laos. With Vietnam in particular, cultural differences were great and strained relations had existed for centuries, while patronage by Hanoi in the struggle for independence and the civil war had increasingly been perceived as paternalism and weakening. Angkor itself was thus cited as a historical example of the glorious destiny of the Khmer Rouge, as done by Pol Pot in 1977: "If our people were capable of building Angkor, we can achieve anything."

Samphan's 1959 dissertation The Economy of Cambodia and the Problems of its Industrialization provides insights into the social structure analysis of the party leadership around Pol Pot. According to Samphan, the impoverishment of the peasants, who predominantly practiced subsistence farming, was caused by colonially influenced large landowners and lenders who exploited them in order to benefit from capitalist goods and foreign luxury articles. Following Samir Amin's theories, Samphan sees Cambodia's poverty as due to its peripheral location in the world capitalist system and competitive pressures. The profits of the few industrial value-added islands in the country are siphoned off by foreigners. Arguing along the lines of the dependency theory, Samphan sees the prosperity of Europe and North America as being based on the underdevelopment of the exploited states. As a solution, he advocates the disengagement of national production from the world capitalist system, a reorganization of wealth, and planned restructuring of the country. This Marxist class analysis was combined by Pol Pot's Paris circle with a theory of national weakening based on the ideas of their former mentor Vannsak. The latter saw the original Khmer culture as damaged by thousands of years of outside influences, the most important of which were Hinduism and Buddhism. The original Khmer people had been deformed into the slave people of Cambodia by these foreign cultures, occupation by Vietnam and Siam, French colonialism, capitalism and American imperialism. Pol Pot believed that the Khmer had lived in an era of "primitive communism" whose power, dormant among alien strata, could be reignited in the peasantry and transformed into a modern, industrialized, and homogeneous nation-state.

Historical assessment and person

Reports of Pol Pot's reign of terror in Cambodia, a country that had been heavily isolated, began to reach the outside world in 1977, starting with François Ponchaud's book Cambodge année zéro. Supporters of the far left outside the country viewed these accounts with scepticism in part because they suspected an anti-communist agenda behind them. After Pol Pot's fall, however, most of the testimonies cited by Ponchaud were confirmed. Estimates of the total number of victims vary widely, with Ben Kiernan of Yale University's Genocide Studies Program suggesting that more than 1.6 million out of nearly eight million Cambodians were killed. A conservative estimate by Michael Vickery based on population statistics by Angus Maddison puts the figure at 750,000. Chandler cites 800,000 to one million victims as the lower limit, but does not count the dead of the war against Vietnam. He cites as probable that more than a million people died in that autogenocide as a result of mass displacement, i.e. starvation, overwork and inadequate medical care. More than 100,000 other Cambodians were executed as enemies of the state. Many of these executions, especially in the countryside, were due to impulsive overreactions by young party cadres, while the killings in Tuol Sleng and other torture prisons were planned. Tens of thousands of additional Cambodians died in the war with Vietnam. Demographer Marek Sliwinski and statistical analyses by Vincent Heuveline and Bruce Sharp put the death toll at over two million. Former Prime Minister Lon Nol later spoke of 2.5 million dead, and Pen Sovan, the first general secretary of the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party, cited 3.1 million victims, reflecting Hanoi's official position. American political scientist Rudolph Joseph Rummel refers to the Khmer Rouge tyranny as a democide and gives a casualty figure of 2.85 million for the period from 1975 to 1987. Current estimates, based on the work of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, put the number of victims at between 1.6 million and 2.2 million.

Certainly Pol Pot knew about what was going on in Tuol Sleng, and he was probably aware of the disastrous conditions in the countryside. He saw himself as a wartime leader and was unable to empathize with human suffering, but saw it as necessary for the survival of the party. Pol Pot later blamed "Cambodians with a Vietnamese spirit" for the excesses he had tried to minimize. Vietnam-occupied Cambodia put him on trial before the end of 1979, sentencing him and Ieng Sary to death in absentia in August of the same year. At the time, Pol Pot became a worldwide media sensation and was soon synonymous with genocide and chaos, embodying the worst fears of communism. Attempts by Western human rights activists in the 1980s to bring Pol Pot to the International Criminal Court failed because Thailand refused extradition and Beijing and Washington opposed it. The United States and China protected the Khmer Rouge because their anti-Vietnamese line meant they had no interest in stabilizing a Vietnam-dominated Cambodia. After the success of the film The Killing Fields - Screaming Land, the patronage of Pol Pot became increasingly troublesome for the United States, but was maintained against a background of realpolitik. The disgust with the Pol Pot regime was not shared by only a few leftist intellectuals in the Western world such as Noam Chomsky. The latter had sympathized with Khmer Rouge rule and concluded that the casualty figures were greatly exaggerated, that the testimonies of refugees in Thailand were not very credible, and that Pol Pot was not responsible for the killings. The Western press had focused its attention one-sidedly on the crimes in Democratic Kampuchea and had largely ignored the massacres during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. Chomsky received strong criticism for these remarks within the left, for example from Claude Roy, David Horowitz and Robert Manne.

In Germany, the discussion about the Pol Pot regime has never gone beyond striking ascriptions such as "ultra-nationalism" or "ultra-communism" from the respective political camps. Former supporters of the Khmer Rouge from the 1968 movement hardly reflect on their role at the time and condemn the Khmer Rouge as irrationally acting, pathological murderers who did not understand "true communism". With their nationalism and racism, the Cambodian cadres would have sullied the sophisticated Marxist thinking of organizations like the Socialist German Student League and the Communist League of West Germany (KBW). But there were still sympathizers in West Germany even after the fall of the Khmer Rouge and the mounting reports of their crimes. Joscha Schmierer, for example, published an address of solidarity to Pol Pot in April 1980. Schmierer had led a visiting delegation of the KBW to Democratic Kampuchea in 1978, and in his 2013 review of the book Pol Pot's Smile: A Swedish Journey through Khmer Rouge Cambodia by Peter Fröberg Idling, he claimed to have seen only progress at the time. They had been played the "ideal socialist model world" of a successful egalitarian-agrarian revolution. While parts of the radical left continued to support Pol Pot ideologically, Helmut Schmidt's government, for reasons of alliance policy, maintained that Pol Pot's regime was the only legitimate government in Cambodia. Due to the patterns of action formed by the Cold War, the Federal Republic, like other Western states, supported the guerrilla war of the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese, who were allied with the Soviet Union, and their puppet government in Phnom Penh. A real reappraisal of these events has hardly taken place in Germany so far.

During his reign, little filtered information about the person of Pol Pot leaked to the outside world, so he remained an enigma for a long time. According to Chandler, many publications about him are written in a lurid and passionate manner and contribute little to the understanding of his character. The pioneer of biographical accounts of Pol Pot since the early 1980s was primarily the Australian historian Ben Kiernan, who interviewed hundreds of Cambodians in Thai refugee camps and whose standard work The Pol Pot Regime was published in 1996. In addition to Pol Pot's few written testimonies, Chandler's biography drew mainly on interviews he and others had conducted since 1992 with contemporary witnesses, some of them from Pol Pot's close personal circle. In all of these testimonies, he was described as a sympathetic character and persuasive speaker, even by people who had lost close relatives due to the crimes of his regime. None of the Khmer Rouge defectors went on record to say that Pol Pot as a person had been causal in leaving the party. Chandler admits that for him the contradiction between Pol Pot's charisma and the genocide in Cambodia is ultimately unresolvable, so that his true personality with its motives continues to remain hidden behind a façade. Chandler views the Khmer Rouge phenomenon from a conventional anti-communist perspective, seeing it as the most uncompromising and fundamentalist Marxist-Leninist movement in history to date. Other interpretations exist, such as that of American historian Michael Vickery, who categorizes Democratic Kampuchea as an anti-Marxist peasant revolution. According to Kiernan, the Khmer Rouge were not so much driven by class struggle as by racism against ethnic minorities. Cham, Vietnamese, and Chinese were persecuted and murdered on the basis of their ethnicity, yet significant portions of the Khmer majority were attributed to these minorities. It was primarily on this argumentation that the Khmer Rouge Tribunal built the charge of genocide.

The years in hiding were on the one hand a sign of weakness, but on the other hand contributed to the mythical transfiguration of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In many Cambodian legends and myths, the hero who fled into the forest and returned after retreat and exile as a strengthened king, bandit or sage with magical powers is a common figure. Another popular belief, later used by the Khmer Rouge to spread terror, concerned the harmful effects in the form of disease and evil spirits attributed to the jungle.