By the way, Cambodia is a small country in Southeast Asia just west of Vietnam and south of Thailand. It is one of the poorest nations in that area, though recently it has begun to make a resurgence through foreign investments and economic advances, and a thriving tourism trade.
I was a senior in high school when the Vietnam War came to an end in April of 1975. At the time, I was not a fan of our military involvement in the region. But the US still had a military draft, and I was soon to come of age to be eligible for possible involuntary recruitment and service into the US military. It was heavy on my mind what I would do if I should ever be drafted. Other young Americans who had been drafted had refused to serve (sometimes as a “contentious objector”), or went to Canada to avoid the draft. The draft was a lottery then, and many of my classmates had their draft numbers come up. But I was lucky, and the draft was stopped just a couple of months before I turned 18.
During the Vietnam War, Cambodia had become a major chess piece in the conflict, subject to partial occupation by Vietnamese communist troops followed by extensive bombings of the Cambodian countryside by American aircraft pursing those troops. American financial and military support in Cambodia during the waning years of the war helped keep in place a corrupt military government that further suppressed the Cambodian population. Eventually this gave rise to a new insurgent group called the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge quickly gained strength, and by April 1975 they controlled major portions of Cambodia. Within days of the last American troops leaving Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge marched into the Cambodian capital of Phnom Phen to take complete control of the country.
What happened next in Cambodia is partially chronicled in the Oscar-winning film, The Killing Fields. Immediately after taking control, the Khmer Rouge emptied all of the major cities, and forced the entire population into rural work camps. The stated purpose was to turn the country into an agrarian utopia based on the communist revolutionary model. They turned Cambodian society upside-down by placing the poor, working class farmers who made up the bulk of the Khmer Rouge army in charge, and branded anyone else as “enemies of the revolution” until proven otherwise. The killings began immediately. During the four years the Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia two million people were killed (one third of the population), many outright by the leaders, but also through starvation, disease and war.
The Khmer Rouge was in power during the same time I was a college student at South Dakota State University. The truth about the Khmer Rouge came out while I continued my education at Purdue University through 1982. This was a formative time for me. One intellectual curiosity I had was trying to understand the human capacity to inflict pain and suffering upon their fellow man. I had already read about Hitler and the Nazis, and everything I could find on serial killers. The history of the Khmer Rouge became, to me, a story of how an entire country was turned into a bunch of serial killers.
The Khmer Rouge Leadership
The Khmer Rouge was supervised by a small band of communist counter-revolutionaries who, at first, remained hidden both inside and outside of the country. As a result, few people outside of Cambodia had any idea of what was going on inside. The leaders referred to themselves as Angkar, the omnipotent overseer of the Khmer revolution. The decisions and judgments of Angkar were considered always wise and perfect, and, therefore, never to be questioned. Eventually the leaders did reveal themselves; but even then, the Khmer Rouge’s top leader, Brother Number 1, Pol Pot, was not revealed until much later.
Pol Pot
This disconnect between the leadership and their decisions quickly caught up with them. Their attempts to convert Cambodia into the “rice basket” of Asia through highly productive rice farming was an abysmal failure. The leaders blamed the failures on enemies within, and became increasingly paranoid. They also started to pick fights with their larger and much stronger neighbor, Vietnam. Eventually Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, and installed a puppet government. But the Khmer Rouge remained a powerful force in Cambodia for decades afterward. Some of the top Khmer Rouge leaders who are still alive today are finally being prosecuted in a War Crimes Tribunal.
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