Khmer Rouge
Khmer Rouge is the name that was popularly given to members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, and by extension to Democratic Kampuchea, which ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The name was coined in the 1960s by Norodom Sihanouk to describe his country's heterogeneous, communist-led dissidents, with whom he allied after the 1970 Cambodian coup d'état.
The Kampuchea Revolutionary Army was slowly built up in the forests of eastern Cambodia during the late 1960s, supported by the People's Army of Vietnam, the Viet Cong, the Pathet Lao, and the Chinese Communist Party. Although it originally fought against Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge changed its position and supported Sihanouk following the CCP's advice after he was overthrown in a 1970 coup d'état by Lon Nol who established the pro-American Khmer Republic. Despite a massive American bombing campaign against them, the Khmer Rouge won the Cambodian Civil War when they captured the Cambodian capital and overthrew the Khmer Republic in 1975. Following their victory, the Khmer Rouge—who were led by Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, and Khieu Samphan—immediately set about forcibly evacuating the country's major cities. In 1976, they renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea.
The Khmer Rouge regime was highly autocratic, totalitarian, and repressive. Many deaths resulted from the regime's social engineering policies and the "Moha Lout Plaoh", an imitation of China's Great Leap Forward which had caused the Great Chinese Famine. The Khmer Rouge's attempts at agricultural reform through collectivization similarly led to widespread famine, while its insistence on absolute self-sufficiency, including the supply of medicine, led to the death of many thousands from treatable diseases, such as malaria.
The Khmer Rouge regime murdered hundreds of thousands of their perceived political opponents, and their racist emphasis on national purity resulted in the genocide of Cambodian minorities. Its cadres summarily executed and tortured perceived subversive elements, or they killed them during genocidal purges of their own ranks between 1975 and 1979. Ultimately, the Cambodian genocide which took place under the Khmer Rouge regime led to the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people, around 25% of Cambodia's population.
In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge was largely supported and funded by the CCP, receiving approval from CCP Chairman Mao Zedong; it is estimated that at least 90% of the foreign aid which was provided to the Khmer Rouge came from China. The regime was removed from power in 1979 when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and quickly destroyed most of its forces. The Khmer Rouge then fled to Thailand, whose government saw them as a buffer force against the Communist Party of Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge continued to fight against the Vietnamese and the government of the new People's Republic of Kampuchea until the end of the war in 1989. The Cambodian governments-in-exile held onto Cambodia's United Nations seat until 1993, when the monarchy was restored and the name of the Cambodian state was changed to the Kingdom of Cambodia. A year later, thousands of Khmer Rouge guerrillas surrendered themselves in a government amnesty.
In 1996, a new political party called the Democratic National Union Movement was formed by Ieng Sary, who was granted amnesty, despite his role as the deputy leader of the Khmer Rouge, in exchange for his defection and his role in persuading other Khmer Rouge fighters to surrender. This move helped to further dissolve the Khmer Rouge organization and was a calculated political decision to end the ongoing civil war by incorporating former resistance leaders. The Khmer Rouge was largely dissolved by the mid-1990s and finally surrendered completely in 1999. Ieng Sary was arrested in 2007 and was charged with crimes against humanity but died of heart failure before the case against him could be brought to a verdict. In 2014, two Khmer Rouge leaders, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, were jailed for life by the United Nations-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, which found them guilty of crimes against humanity for their roles in the Khmer Rouge's genocidal campaign.
Etymology
The term Khmers rouges, French for red Khmers, was coined by King Norodom Sihanouk and it was later adopted by English speakers. It was used to refer to a succession of communist parties in Cambodia which evolved into the Communist Party of Kampuchea and later the Party of Democratic Kampuchea. Its military was known successively as the Kampuchean Revolutionary Army and the National Army of Democratic Kampuchea.Since the deterioration in relations between Vietnam and Democratic Kampuchea, the Vietnamese government no longer recognize the legitimacy of the Khmer Rouge, and as a result, they call the Khmer Rouge the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique or the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary reactionary clique.
Ideology
Influence of Communist thought
The movement's ideology was shaped by a power struggle during 1976 in which the so-called Party Centre, which was led by Pol Pot, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, defeated other regional elements of its leadership. The Party Centre's ideology combined elements of communism with a strongly xenophobic form of Khmer nationalism. Partly because of its secrecy and partly because of changes in how it presented itself, academic interpretations of its political position vary widely, ranging from interpreting it as the "purest" Marxist–Leninist movement to characterising it as an anti-Marxist "peasant revolution". The first interpretation has been criticized by historian Ben Kiernan, who asserts that it comes from a "convenient anti-communist perspective". Its leaders and theorists, most of whom had been exposed to the heavily Stalinist outlook of the French Communist Party during the 1950s, developed a distinctive and eclectic "post-Leninist" ideology that drew on elements of Stalinism, Maoism and the postcolonial theory of Frantz Fanon. In the early 1970s, the Khmer Rouge looked to the model of Enver Hoxha's Albania, which they believed was the most advanced communist state which was then in existence.Many of the regime's characteristics—such as its focus on the rural peasantry rather than the urban proletariat as the bulwark of revolution, its emphasis on Great Leap Forward-type initiatives, its desire to abolish personal interest in human behaviour, its promotion of communal living and eating, and its focus on perceived common sense over technical knowledge—appear to have been heavily influenced by Maoist ideology; however, the Khmer Rouge displayed these characteristics in a more extreme form. Additionally, non-Khmers, who constituted a significant part of the supposedly favored segment of the peasantry, were singled out because of their race. According to Ben Kiernan, this was "neither a communist proletarian revolution that privileged the working class, nor a peasant revolution that favored all farmers".
While the CPK described itself as the "number 1 Communist state" once it was in power, some communist regimes, such as Vietnam, saw it as a Maoist deviation from orthodox Marxism. According to author Rebecca Gidley, the Khmer Rouge "almost immediately erred by implementing a Maoist doctrine rather than following the Marxist–Leninist prescriptions." The Maoist and Khmer Rouge belief that human willpower could overcome material and historical conditions was strongly at odds with mainstream Marxism, which emphasised historical materialism and the idea of history as inevitable progression toward communism. In 1981, following the Cambodian–Vietnamese War, in an attempt to get foreign support, the Khmer Rouge officially renounced communism.
Khmer nationalism
One of the regime's main characteristics was its form of Khmer nationalism, which combined an idealisation of the Khmer Empire and the late Middle Period of Cambodia with an existential fear for the survival of the Cambodian state, which had historically been liquidated during periods of Vietnamese and Siamese intervention. The spillover of Vietnamese fighters from the Vietnamese–American War further aggravated anti-Vietnamese sentiments: the Khmer Republic under Lon Nol, overthrown by the Khmer Rouge, had promoted Mon-Khmer nationalism and was responsible for several anti-Vietnamese pogroms during the 1970s. Some historians such as Ben Kiernan have stated that the importance which the regime gave to race overshadowed its conceptions of class.The Khmer Rouge targeted particular groups of people, among them Buddhist monks, ethnic minorities, and educated elites.
Once in power, the Khmer Rouge explicitly targeted the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Cham minority and even their partially Khmer offspring. The same attitude extended to the party's own ranks, as senior CPK figures of non-Khmer ethnicity were removed from the leadership despite extensive revolutionary experience and were often killed.
A Vietnamese official called the Khmer Rouge leaders "Hitlerite-fascists", while the General Secretary of the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party, Pen Sovan, referred to the Khmer Rouge as a "draconian, dictatorial and fascist regime".
Economy
The goal of Khmer Rouge was to create a communist society through the complete and immediate abolition of money, trade and private property. The new society was to be perfectly egalitarian, which required homogeneity, which Khmer Rouge sought to achieve through the destruction of existing social structures and the uniformisation of the newly emerging socialist society. To this end, the creation of a "new society" that would completely break with the existing traditions and cultural heritage of Cambodia was also considered necessary. One of the Khmer Rouge activists stated: "We must burn the old grass so that new grass can grow." For Khmer Rouge, egalitarianism also included the concept of "levelling down"—Cambodian society was to be brought to the level of the rural poor and develop from there; anything that was inaccessible to the general public was considered bourgeois and a luxury that had to be destroyed.The leading economic theorist of Khmer Rouge, Hou Yuon, distinguished two types of economic systems: "natural" and "commodity" ; in the agricultural conditions of Cambodia, the "commodity" economy was considered a parasite on the "natural" economy—according to Youn's calculations, rice producers received only 26% of the profits. This formed the basis of Khmer Rouge's hostility towards cities, as urban areas were seen as playing a parasitic role in the pre-industrial society of Cambodia, and even the urban working class was considered a relatively privileged group. Khmer Rouge instead postulated socialism built on agrarianism—the poorest peasants, organized into production cooperatives, were considered the main and in fact the only force of the revolution; one of the Khmer Rouge's slogans was "agriculture is the basis for further industrial expansion"—the economy was to be based on agriculture, with the development of industry postponed for the future. The Cambodian economy was also supposed to be self-sufficient along the principle of "reliance on one's own strength", which Khmer Rouge considered necessary to ensure the independence of the Cambodian revolution from imperialism and neo-colonialism, even if this entailed technological regression.