The Cambodian Killing Fields still shock many today at the sheer brutality of the event. Pol pot as many communist regime leaders did killed many innocent people. The US historically has tried with failures to end a communist regime such as the failed invasion of Cuba in the Bay of Pigs event and even the CIA planning to kill Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar.
Can you turn back the clock on the modern world? If you had the will, and the power, would it be possible to create a society with no intellectuals? No new ideas? No influence whatsoever from a time after the 20th century?
What would it take to create that old world within the new?
Well, in 1976, Cambodian dictator Pol Pot believed that it was possible to do just that. But first, anyone who stood in the way would have to die. And by the time he was done, millions of his own people would suffer for his dream.
Little is known about Pol Pot’s personal life. But we do know he was born sometime between 1925 and 1928 in rural Cambodia. His father, a prosperous farmer, named his son Saloth Sar.
Like neighboring Vietnam, Cambodia was a French Colony at the time. And like Vietnam, many idealistic young people in Cambodia were attracted to Communism as a way to both secure their independence and order the new state once they achieved it.
Sar was no exception. And in many way’s his life mirrors that of Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam. Like Minh, Sar spent time in Paris and eventually returned to his native country to take a leading role in Cambodia’s communist party. It was during his struggle against Cambodia’s government, that he adopted the name Pol Pot as a nom de guerre.
With the fall of South Vietnam and the withdrawal of American forces from the country, Pot seized the moment to establish his own communist dictatorship in Cambodia with the help of the Vietnamese.
But unlike other communist regimes that promised to pull their people into an age of wealth and progress, Pol promised the people of Cambodia the opposite. It was, Pol believed, the modern world that prevented a true communist society from taking hold in Cambodia. Instead, he wanted to create a society based on simple farmers. They would be ideologically pure, happy in their simplicity, and dedicated completely to Pol Pot’s regime, the Khmer Rouge.
Pot began by collectivizing the farms. Not only would this help establish a communist society, but it ensured that Pol Pot and his Khmer rouge would have total control over the food supply of Cambodia.
Next, Pot began the process of remaking the people. Everyone was classified according to how reliable Pot considered them to be. At the top were the farmers, who were uneducated, and in Pot’s opinion, that meant they were free of dangerous foreign ideas.
And at the bottom were the intellectuals, professors, or people involved in business. They were considered to be untrustworthy or intellectually compromised. These people were at first subjected to state control.
These people were pulled from the cities they lived in and dumped into collective farms in the countryside. There they were forced to work long hours for no pay, subsisting on very little to eat.
But with time, Pot decided that many of these intellectuals couldn’t be reformed into the Cambodians he wanted. Instead, they would have to die.
The Khmer Rouge created an extensive police network dedicated to rooting out intellectual contagion. Thousands were pulled into converted schools for long hours of brutal torture. There, they were forced to name others who would themselves be pulled in.
Killing fields were established, where hundreds of people were lined up and shot, their bodies dumped into mass graves.
A popular expression began that the Khmer Rouge would tell people they considered a threat to the state.
“To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss,” they said.
It took very little to be labeled an enemy of the state and targeted for death. All religions were outlawed in Cambodia. Anyone found practicing a religious faith could be killed. Having attended the wrong school could get you killed as well. Even wearing glasses was considered a sign of being well-read, and was enough to send many people to the killing fields.
In just four years, it’s estimated that the Khmer Rouge killed between 1-2 million people, almost a quarter of everyone in Cambodia at the time the Pol Pot came to power.
And Pot’s genocidal reign may have continued had it not been, ironically, for Vietnam.
By 1977, relations with Vietnam had soured, largely because of fanatical Khmer Rouge units sparking border clashes and small-scale incursions across the border in a fight over disputed territory.
Finally, in September, the Vietnamese had enough. Crack Vietnamese units, hardened in their war against the Americans, attacked over the border into Cambodia.
By 1988, Cambodians in the eastern part of the country were in full rebellion.
Vietnamese troops followed, and the Khmer Rouge troops quickly collapsed. By May, Pot was reduced to making last ditch appeals to the people over the radio, calling on them to “exterminate 50 million Vietnamese.”
But Pot was finished. He fled to the border with Thailand, where he tried to hold together the remnants of the Khmer Rouge. He spent the next decade giving interviews where he claimed that he bore no responsibility for what happened. It had been his subordinates, acting without his knowledge who carried out the genocidal massacres.
Finally, in 1998, Pot heard over the radio that the Khmer Rouge had agreed to hand him over to an international tribunal. According to his wife, he died of a heart attack that night.
We may never know the true toll of Pot’s crimes, but even today, mass graves are being uncovered in Cambodia. And Pot will go down in history as one of the worst mass murders of all time.
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