Why did pol-pot kill people in Cambodia?

[Dimitri Molotov]

my friend is doing a project for school about the Cambodian genocide, so far he knows he but people in camps and killed intellectuals, but what were his other motives? who did he kill? why did he kill them? thank you comrades, i thought this would be a good place to go for an answer.
:)

[scarletghoul]

Just gotta say it can't really be classed as genocide. There was a lot of killing, but 'genocide' has a specific meaning that is not applicable here.

I'll reply in full to the specific questions later

[Blackscare]

Actually, everything you said is a lie cooked up by the western media.


The goal of the Khemer Rouge was to give every man, woman, and child a free poppy seed lemon muffin. They almost succeeded, too, but the Vietnamese, being mini-imperialist donut lovers, invaded to put the free muffining to an end. I know this because Pol Pot said it in an interview in the 1990s.

"Year Zero" actually refers to the goal of achieving a time when there would be "zero" lack of muffins in all of Kampuchea.


Pol Pot was really just a nice guy.

[IronEastBloc]

there is a user on here named "milk". he/she is really knowledgeable about this stuff and can tell you. sorry I cannot do so myself.

[Kayser_Soso]

my friend is doing a project for school about the Cambodian genocide, so far he knows he but people in camps and killed intellectuals, but what were his other motives? who did he kill? why did he kill them? thank you comrades, i thought this would be a good place to go for an answer.
:)


The ideology of the Khmer Rouge was in fact a nationalist, almost primitivist ideology which glorified traditional commune style living and farming. It's hard to say at what point they abandoned Marxism but it was definintely before the revolution was complete, as is evident from Democratic Kampuchea's Constitution. Ieng Sary, another important figure in their leadership, also declared they were not Communists. Apparently they also persecuted Cambodian Communists during the revolution.

Their goal was to remove foreign influences from Cambodia, right down to foreign languages.

[redSHARP]

I would argue it was a genocide. The causality reports of the ethnic groups, chinese, chams (spelling?), Laotians, and vietmanese, was near complete. Pol Pots policy clearly out lined a Khmer ruled empire that was reminiscent of the old Khmer empire. Other ethnic groups were seen as outsiders and by 1970's any non-Khmer party members were purged or exiled.

[Rêve Rouge]

Well, Pol Pot I believe had some good ideas (in the very beginning of his studies in France). But something just didn't click right in his head. I always wonder why also. milk gives a good analysis on the goals, ideas and motives of Pol Pot. But why he and his regime became so corrupt, we may never know.

[MarxSchmarx]

Actually, everything you said is a lie cooked up by the western media.


The goal of the Khemer Rouge was to give every man, woman, and child a free poppy seed lemon muffin. They almost succeeded, too, but the Vietnamese, being mini-imperialist donut lovers, invaded to put the free muffining to an end. I know this because Pol Pot said it in an interview in the 1990s.

"Year Zero" actually refers to the goal of achieving a time when there would be "zero" lack of muffins in all of Kampuchea.

Pol Pot was really just a nice guy.

This is your verbal warning for trolling.

As far as the subject at hand,my very limited recollection was that the Khmer Rouge ruled more by committee, and that a lot of the atrocities were implemented by the Khmer Rouge leadership as a whole rather than micromanaged and directed personally from Pol Pot.

Also in some instances calling Democratic Kampuchea a genocidal regime is accurate. THe Khmer Rouge systematically sought to ethnically cleanse the Laotians, Chinese and Vietnamese in Cambodia and tribal minorities were forcibly broken up, with their languages and customs banned.

By the numbers, the fact that these victims are outnumbered by several factors by Cambodian victims shows just how despicable that regime was.

[milk]

my friend is doing a project for school about the Cambodian genocide, so far he knows he but people in camps and killed intellectuals, but what were his other motives? who did he kill? why did he kill them? thank you comrades, i thought this would be a good place to go for an answer.
:)

Well, I can help you out, but firstly, it is very complicated, so rather than an overarching attempt to explain the DK regime then I suggest that, while offering a general overview (Who were the Khmer Rouge? When did they come to power? How did they come to power? What were their policies?), to give context, then your friend should concentrate on one, maybe two specific things? This is a high school project, yes? Not undergraduate course work or the like, and the size of it is going to be pretty limited (as in word length) I presume.

[Unclebananahead]

A lot of the people killed were so-called 'new people,' or people from cities who were evacuated or forced (not sure exactly which one, but I tend to lean towards forced in their case) to the countryside to be incorporated into agricultural communes. Apparently the KR regarded the 'new people' as reactionary and culturally impure, as opposed to the 'old people' or rural folk, who they thought had an advanced consciousness, or something like that. All quite bizzarre and contrary to Marxist thought if you ask me.

[milk]

The ideology of the Khmer Rouge was in fact a nationalist, almost primitivist ideology which glorified traditional commune style living and farming. It's hard to say at what point they abandoned Marxism but it was definintely before the revolution was complete

They made un-Marxist choices, but then, that was due to the country being unsuitable at that time for the revolution they thought they were making; a socialist revolution. They were nationalists, but in a traditional and Communist context this is nothing remarkable about the Cambodians, and regarding the Vietnamese in particular. The former is a continuation of a long-held tradition of anti-Vietnamese chauvinism, and the latter was ironically partly from the Vietnamese themselves, with their earlier organisation of a Cambodian Communist movement during the early 1950s. By creating separate national parties (in Laos and Cambodia under the guidance of a big brother Vietnamese party), socialism could only ever be defined by them within those national boundaries. The Vietnamese had an idealised vision of a Vietnam-led Indochinese federation of socialist states. And the later geopolitical considerations of the Vietnamese when fighting a war against the United States, would eventually be at odds with a Khmer Rouge armed movement.

And they were never primitivist, but modernisers with an unrealised ambition to modernise and industrialise the country. They never broke away from their own version of a rural-based 'war communism.' A model that they thought would help them make a great leap into modernity.

[milk]

I would argue it was a genocide. The causality reports of the ethnic groups, chinese, chams (spelling?), Laotians, and vietmanese, was near complete. Pol Pots policy clearly out lined a Khmer ruled empire that was reminiscent of the old Khmer empire. Other ethnic groups were seen as outsiders and by 1970's any non-Khmer party members were purged or exiled.

Angkor was a public relations tool, and an intellectual and nationalist rallying point, something used by other Cambodians, whether they be nationalist guerrillas before the Khmer Rouge movement was born, and also the Lon Nol government they fought against during the 1970s.

The Angkor period was never a blueprint to be followed, a model to be applied. The Angkor Kings were never mentioned by name in DK government publications. There have been interesting parallels found between the rule of a certain Angkor King (Jayavarmam VII) and the DK regime, explored by David P. Chandler, but that is all they are, of surface interest.

With the grandiose tradition of Angkor behind them, they could present themselves as a people belonging to a country with a glorious heritage, and not in reality a small, desperately poor country unable to escape its immediate surroundings.

[Gravedigger01]

Pol Pot (like Hitler) believed that he was creating a utopian country. He was increasingly agitated that people in urban area's were often more western than people in rural areas. So , hegot everybody to move into rural area's and then he began sculpting his perfect race by killing off intellectuals and other people who were deemed "too westernised"

[chegitz guevara]

Most of the people who died in Cambodia weren't deliberately killed, but died as the result of stupid policies being carried out during a drought. Much of what has been mentioned before is correct, but the bulk of deaths occurred because the government was preparing for a war with Vietnam, and began hording rice, just when rice production began falling due to drought.

I would also mention that most of those executed by the government were party members themselves. The number one crime for which people were executed was extra marital sex, according to Michael Vickery.

[Palingenisis]

Pol Pot (like Hitler) believed that he was creating a utopian country. He was increasingly agitated that people in urban area's were often more western than people in rural areas. So , hegot everybody to move into rural area's and then he began sculpting his perfect race by killing off intellectuals and other people who were deemed "too westernised"

You are confusing Pol Pot with Khmer Rouge peasant cadres. The CPK wasnt anti-intellectual as such (and some of them worse glasses even!).

Also the clearing out of the urban centres was pretty much due to the mass bombing that had been going on. It was more a product of necesscity than idealogy.

[milk]

Also the clearing out of the urban centres was pretty much due to the mass bombing that had been going on. It was more a product of necesscity than idealogy.

It was both. If the Khmer Rouge had taken a more gradualist approach, in restarting agricultural production in order to improve and stabilise the food situation and build it up to a self-sufficient then abundant level, didn't so drastically view the entire genuinely urban sector of the country as enemies (aside from peasant refugees), provided incentives that would see such people volunteer in reconstruction efforts instead of being coerced, and also were more open when it came to aid and loans form other countries, then things might not have been as bad as they became. These are hypotheticals though, but what did happen should not be viewed in abstraction to the general situation the country found itself in: a devastating war. The country was faced with a dire set of circumstances after that war, and for whichever government took power at the time, no matter the political colouration, Cambodia could only have been some kind of Hell. Khmer Rouge hubris when it came to their own never-realised developmental model (in terms of mobilisation, a Khmer version of war communism in part using warped lessons of the self-reliance doctrine and the Great Leap Forward) ensured that things got much worse, however.

The decision to evacuate the capital was never out of humanitarian considerations though. It was a political/ideological decision, as provincial urban centres had been evacuated before they captured Phnom Penh. During the war, the urban areas had become beleaguered fortresses surrounded by a Khmer Rouge sea in the countryside; they were places where the enemy was concentrated, those who had sent the planes. But when it came to Phnom Penh, with the various zonal forces that moved in on April 17, 1975, there were evident differences on the method and degree of which the same policy was to be carried out.

To look at it from another angle, the decision to evacuate the towns and cities was a popular move concerning their revolutionary constituency, the base peasantry. Urban Cambodia traditionally operated as the base from which various layers of an old, established and corrupt bureaucracy connected to the royal court, changed a little in form but not fundamentally by French colonialism (which brought its own bureaucratic and government structures), extracted surplus from the majority agricultural labouring class in multi-formed ways, but the main one being usury and indebtedness. Unlike other societies, Cambodian towns and cities didn't create wealth, but consumed it, squeezing the peasantry as much as possible for the purposes of elite personal luxury consumption. In evacuating the towns and destroying such government structures and current markets, at a stroke it wiped out all peasant debt. But on the whole, the peasants were not happy with the ridding of markets altogether, and were not happy about the strict and militarised collectivisation of social life in the rural areas.

To place this policy of forced migration into context, it's really not a unique event in the country's recent history and in living memory, and the difference, in April 1975, was that it involved the country's comfortable classes. We could talk about the hundreds of thousands, perhaps up to a million peasants, who were forcibly moved by the colonial powers during the First Indochina War; about the plans to forcibly move hundreds of thousands in the 1960s, to make way for never-built project dams; and about the migration of yet more to the country's urban areas, by way of saturation bombing raids in the 1970s. It is perhaps worthwhile to place DK in the context of a society well-acquainted with severe disruption, violence and death before the Khmer Rouge came to power. Such things were not Khmer Rouge innovations, and although they are responsible for the violence of the DK years, and that the scale of such a thing may have been unprecedented than in other periods of the country's past, on another level it was unremarkable.

[Dimitri Molotov]

thank you everyone who helped me, i really appreciate it:D

[milk]

Pol Pots policy clearly out lined a Khmer ruled empire that was reminiscent of the old Khmer empire.

To add a little more on one of the common misunderstandings about Khmer Rouge aims, mentioned above (that they were wanting to recreate the social balance experienced during the time of the Khmer Empire), as has already been said, the parallels found between the reign of King Jayavarman VII (1178-1220) and the CPK during the Democratic Kampuchea years (1975-1979), while striking, are not evidence of Khmer Rouge policy being developed in linear fashion from that period.

During Jayavarman's reign from 12th century, the Empire was ruled by a more or less invisible directorate (the Organisation or Angkar of DK), which dictated the activities of the King’s subjects. During this period, the population was mobilised and put to work on large-scale infrastructure projects, in order to produce surpluses for the exclusive use of their invisible rulers, who had mobilised them using a set of ideas held by a chosen few and not fully understood by most (Mayhayana Buddhism, or Communism from 1975), and which had also been used as the justification for destroying pre-existing society and rebuilding it anew. Indeed, society was felt to have died and been reborn at the end of a devastating war. Jayavarman's warriors had defeated the Chams during a major conflict (1177 -1191). The Khmer Rouge had fought a brutal five-year civil war (1970-1975) against the Khmer Republic of Lon Nol, backed up by the awesome airstrike power of the USAF, something that ruined the infrastructure of the country.

And not just during the rule of this Builder-King, there was the state control of a large and sophisticated irrigation system, built by slave labour, which could circumvent the changes in the seasons and allow up to three good rice harvests a year, something central to the success of the old Empire.

In the short period of DK, the government set about, full-steam ahead, with their own infrastructural development, which saw as the first stage of draft industrialisation, the building of a countrywide irrigation system under centralised state control, intended for the mass production of rice. However, Prince Norodom Sihanouk during the Sangkum years also toyed with the idea of transforming agricultural practices and better harnessing water power through irrigation, to help rice production in a country which has had some of the poorest yields in the region.

They are just very interesting parallels, striking resemblances, on the surface. Nothing more. Again, this misunderstanding of the revolution, vulgarly repeated, misses the point that Angkor was seen only as an intellectual and nationalist rallying point, an indigenous source of pride, an example and apogee of past Khmer grandeur, showing that the Khmer people can be mobilised for greatness, can be done so again, and that economic miracles can be performed. Pol Pot publicly asserted that they wanted to surpass that past greatness: "If our people could build Angkor, they can do anything." And when it comes to that, it is better to look at their use of confused and not fully-understood politics and developmental models bequeathed to them from Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

See David P. Chandler’s Seeing Red: Perceptions of Cambodian History in Democratic Kampuchea, found in the Yale University volume, Revolution and its Aftermath in Kampuchea: Eight Essays (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Revolution-Its-Aftermath-Kampuchea-Southeast/dp/0938692054/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1291869940&sr=1-1-spell).

These parallels are explored further in Chandler's A History of Cambodia (http://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Cambodia-4th-David-Chandler/dp/0813343631/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1291869871&sr=8-1).

[YouSSR]

The singling out of Pol Pot as a genocidal maniac is doubly ironic because the United States killed millions more in Indochina which is simply ignored and the U.S. supported the Khmer Rouge as a counterbalance to the communist regime in Vietnam in 1978. Further, the genocidal regime of Pol Pot was used to justify imperial murder in South America in the 80s, which of course used the justification of preventing genocide (which is pretty much the #1 excuse the MSM uses to justify imperialism now).

Though Pol Pot undoubtedly killed a lot of people, allowing imperialists and capitalism apologists to frame the debate the way it has already been framed in this thread means you've already lost the battle.

[milk]

The writer of the OP should be aware when reading about Cambodian Communism and Democratic Kampuchea, is that there was and continues to be a fundamental disagreement as to whether the regime was actually genocidal in intent, in terms of saying that, generally, there are two academic views:

Firstly, the view presented by vulgar anti-communists, and (non-communist) academics like Ben Kiernan that it was.

Secondly, the view presented by others (e.g. Marxist scholar of Cambodian history Michael Vickery) that it wasn't, and that the term genocide is not only inaccurate but politically motivated, and that the excess deaths during the short-lived DK regime actually occurred because of incompetence and structural breakdown, along with a considerable minority (aimed at regional government and military structures) being the result of internal political divides.

This, mostly academic, debate still carries on today. Personally, I tend to go for the second one.

But even if the dire circumstances of post-April 1975 Cambodia could explain the drastic and brutal policy decisions early on, such as emptying the towns and cities, retributive violence, mass executions, mistreatment of former urbanites etc, in the latter half of the regime's short existence it was Khmer Rouge ideology alone (with the bloody internal struggles both political and personal) that drove the regime's disastrous direction. If I remember correctly, I think Vickery says it was in 1976, when Pol Pot and his central government allies started their attempt to restructure the weak state (the start of the purge waves and stepping up the pace of their infrastructural program). On this, I reject that the resulting bloody, structural collapse was genocide.

[milk]

the U.S. supported the Khmer Rouge as a counterbalance to the communist regime in Vietnam in 1978.

It's interesting how the term genocide has either been ignored or promoted over the years according to cynical political expediency, considering that during the UNTAC period of transition (1992–93) following the end of the Cold War situation in the region, the term genocide for officially describing what happened in DK was discouraged, with the need to get the borderland and (UN-supported) Khmer Rouge coalition government on board in any talks regarding the settling of a decade-long conflict.

The same government which certain member states of the UN had actively supported for their purpose of destabilising the Soviet-backed regime in Phnom Penh. If I remember correctly, at the time academics like Ben Kiernan and Michael Vickery mentioned above (and who also have, over the years, faced accusations of being Pol Pot apologists) were effectively barred from entering discussions in the country, for fear of them presenting anything which was critical of Democratic Kampuchea. Kiernan, too, was stopped from distributing anti-Khmer Rouge literature on the streets. Things changed after 1997, but by then, and even now, a lot of crocodile tears have been wept.

I think it was Vickery who pointed out that it was hypocrisy for people to bully, smear and shout down those willing to reconsider the commonly-believed version of events that occurred during the 1970s (viewing DK as an aberrational reign of pure evil and that the result was genocide), because the US and other member states of the UN had changed their minds about it when it suited them.