Pol Pot

POL POT

Pol Pot

Saloth Sar (May 19, 1925 – April 15, 1998), better known as Pol Pot, was the ruler of the Khmer Rouge and the Prime Minister of Cambodia (officially Democratic Kampuchea during his rule) from 1976 to 1979, having been de facto leader since mid-1975. During his time in power Pol Pot created an aggressive regime of agricultural reform, designed to create a utopian Communist society which was known for repressing intellectuals. Today the excesses of his government are widely blamed for causing the deaths of up to two million Cambodians.

Early life of Pol Pot

Saloth Sar was born in Prek Sbauv in what was then a part of French Indochina but which is now in the province of Kompong Thom, Cambodia (since 1925). In 1934 his parents sent him to Phnom Penh to be educated at Wat Botum Vaddei, a large Buddhist monastery. After a year there, he went to live with his brother and his brother's wife, and began attending the Ecole Miche. On his first attempt to pass the Certificat d'Etudes Primaires Complémentaires in 1941, he failed and was held back. He did not pass it until 1943. He also failed the entrance exam for Lycée Sisowath and so attended a junior middle school called Collège Preah Sihanouk at Kampong Cham in 1943. During his time there he was again a mediocre student, but enjoyed playing football and played the roneat (a bamboo xylophone). In 1947 he passed the end-of-year exams and was selected to attend Lycée Sisowath.

In 1949, he won a scholarship to study radio engineering in Paris. During his studies, he became a communist and joined the French Communist Party. In 1953, he returned to Cambodia.

At that time, a communist-led revolt was taking place against the French occupation of Indochina. The centre of this uprising was in Vietnam, but it also took place in Cambodia and Laos. Saloth Sar joined the Viet Minh, but found that they regarded only Vietnam of importance, not Laos or Cambodia. In 1954, the French left Indochina, but the Viet Minh also withdrew to North Vietnam, and King Norodom Sihanouk called elections. Sihanouk abdicated and formed a political party. Sihanouk swept away the communist opposition and gained all of the government seats.

Saloth Sar fled Sihanouk's secret police and spent seven years in hiding, training recruits. In the late 1960s, Sihanouk's head of internal security, Lon Nol, took action against the revolutionaries, known as the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Saloth Sar started an armed uprising against the government, supported by the People's Republic of China (PRC).

Prior to 1970, the Communist Party of Kampuchea was an insignificant factor in Cambodian politics. However, in 1970, the pro-western General Lon Nol overthrew Sihanouk, because the latter was seen as supporting the Viet Cong and North Vietnam.

In protest, Sihanouk threw his support to Saloth Sar's side. That same year, U.S. President Richard Nixon ordered a military incursion into Cambodia in order to destroy Viet Cong sanctuaries bordering on South Vietnam. Sihanouk's popularity, along with the U.S. incursion into Cambodia, drove many to Saloth Sar's side and soon Lon Nol's government controlled only the cities.

It has been argued that the Khmer Rouge may not have come to power without the destabilization of the Vietnam War, particularly of the American bombing campaigns to "clear out the Vietnamese sanctuaries" in Cambodia. William Shawcross argued this point in his 1979 book Sideshow. Others claim that Congressional cut-offs in aid and bombing were more responsible for the communist victory.

When the U.S. left Vietnam in 1973, the Viet Cong left Cambodia but the Khmer Rouge continued to fight with their backing. Unable to maintain any sort of control over the country, Lon Nol's government soon collapsed. On April 17, 1975, the Communist Party of Kampuchea took Phnom Penh and Lon Nol fled to the United States of America. Less than one month later, on May 12, 1975, Khmer Rouge naval forces operating in Cambodian territorial waters seized the U.S. merchant ship S.S. Mayaguez, the last American merchant ship to leave Vietnam, precipitating the Mayaguez Crisis. Saloth Sar changed his name to Pol Pot around this time, apparently to remain obscure.

Norodom Sihanouk was returned to power in 1975, but soon found himself side-lined by his more radical Communist colleagues, who had little interest in his plans of restoring the monarchy.

Democratic Kampuchea

Pol Pot's regime killed between 1.5 to 2.3 million people between 1975-1979. By some accounts, nearly one out of every eight Cambodians was murdered. The regime targeted Buddhist monks, Western educated intellectuals, people who appeared to be intelligent (for example, individuals with glasses), the crippled and lame, and ethnic minorities like (ethnic Laotians and Vietnamese).

Immediately after the fall of Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge began to implement radical communist reforms, and Sihanouk was placed in a purely figurehead role. The Khmer Rouge ordered the complete evacuation of Phnom Penh and all other major towns and cities. Those leaving were told that the evacuation was due to the threat of severe American bombing.

Dr. Gregory H. Stanton, wrote in the article "Blue Scarves and Yellow Stars: Classification and Symbolization in the Cambodian Genocide" : "Key officials of Pol Pot's regime had read André Gunder Frank's Marxist theory that cities are parasitic on the countryside, that only labor value is true value, that cities extract surplus value from the rural areas. Therefore immediately after they took power, the Khmer Rouge evacuated all the cities at gunpoint, including those who were not supposed to be moved, such as patients in hospitals and newborns.

In 1976 people were reclassified as full rights (base) people, candidates, and depositees -- so called because they included most of the new people who had been deposited from the cities into the communes. Depositees were marked for destruction. Their rations were reduced to two bowls of rice soup, or "juk" per day. This led to widespread starvation amongst the depositees.

The Khmer Rouge leadership boasted over their radio station that only one or two million people out of the population were needed to build the new agrarian communist utopia. As for the others, as their proverb put it, "if they survive, no gain; if they die, no loss. "

Hundreds of thousands of the new people, and later the depositees, were taken out, shackled, to dig their own mass graves. Then the Khmer Rouge soldiers beat them to death with iron bars and hoes or buried them alive. A Khmer Rouge extermination prison directive ordered, "Bullets are not to be wasted."

The Khmer Rouge also classified by religion and ethnic group. They abolished all religion and dispersed minority groups, forbidding them to speak their languages or to practice their customs.

According to Father Ponchaud's book Cambodia: Year Zero, "ever since 1972 the guerrilla fighters had been sending all the inhabitants of the villages and towns they occupied into the forest to live and often burning their homes so that they would have nothing to come back to." The Khmer Rouge refused offers of humanitarian aid, a decision which proved to be a humanitarian catastrophe, as millions died of starvation and brutal government inflicted overwork in the countryside.

Property became communal, and education was dispensed at communal schools. Pol Pot's regime was extremely harsh on political dissent and opposition. Torture was widespread. In some instances, throats were slit as prisoners were tied to metal bed frames.

Thousands of politicians and bureaucrats accused of association with previous governments were killed, while Phnom Penh was turned into a ghost city with many dying of starvation, illnesses, or execution. Land mines, which Pol Pot praised as his "perfect soldiers," were widely distributed around the countryside. The casualty list from the civil war, Pol Pot's consolidation of power, and the invasion by Vietnam is disputed. Credible Western and Eastern sources ^[1] put the death toll of the Khmer Rouge at 1.6 million. A specific source, such as a figure of three million deaths between 1975 and 1979 was given by the Vietnamese-sponsored Phnom Penh regime, the PRK. Father Ponchaud suggested 2.3 million—although this includes hundreds of thousands who died prior to the CPK takeover; the Yale Cambodian Genocide Project^[2] estimates 1.7 million; Amnesty International estimated 1.4 million; and the United States Department of State, 1.2 million. Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot, who could be expected to give underestimations, cited figures of 1 million and 800,000, respectively. The CIA estimated that there were 50,000 to 100,000 executions.

In 1976, Sihanouk was placed under house arrest, and Pol Pot became Prime Minister and the official Cambodian head of state, with colleague Khieu Samphan as President.

By 1978, the human catastrophe in Pol Pot's Cambodia was apparent. The regime's efforts to purge Vietnamese elements from Cambodia increased, resulting in raids into Vietnamese territory. In late 1978, in response to threats to its borders and the Vietnamese people, Vietnam invaded Cambodia to overthrow the Khmer Rouge.

The Cambodian army was easily defeated, and Pol Pot fled to the Thai border. In January 1979, Vietnam installed a puppet government under Heng Samrin, composed of Khmer Rouge who had fled to Vietnam to avoid the purges. Pol Pot retained a sufficient following to keep fighting in a small area in the west of the country. At this point the PRC, which had earlier supported Pol Pot, attacked, creating a brief Sino-Vietnam War.

Pol Pot espoused a radical mixture of ideologies, the so-called "Anka" Doctrine, adapted to Khmer nationalism. Envisaging a primitive egalitarian agrarianism, the Khmer Rouge favored a completely agrarian society to the point that all modern technological contrivances were banned. Pol Pot was quite the opponent of Soviet orthodoxy. Because he was anti-Soviet, the People's Republic of China considered him preferable to the pro-Vietnamese (therefore pro-Moscow) government. The Western powers took more or less the same line, offering diplomatic support to the Khmer Rouge after they were ousted from power by the Vietnamese in 1979.

Aftermath

The U.S. opposed an expansion of Vietnamese influence in Indochina, and in the mid-1980s supported insurgents opposed to the regime of Heng Samrin, approving $5 million in aid to the KPNLF of former prime minister Son Sann and the pro-Sihanouk ANS in 1985. Despite this, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge remained the best-trained and most capable of the three insurgent groups, who despite sharply divergent ideologies had formed the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK) alliance three years earlier. China continued to funnel extensive military aid to the Khmer Rouge, and critics of U.S. foreign policy claimed that the U.S. was indirectly sponsoring the Khmer Rouge due to its diplomatic recognition of the CGDK. ^[3] ^[4] ^[5]

Pol Pot officially resigned in 1985, but continued as de facto Khmer Rouge leader and dominant force within the anti-Heng alliance. Opponents of the Khmer Rouge claimed that they were sometimes acting in an inhumane manner in territory controlled by the alliance.

In 1989, Vietnam withdrew from Cambodia. Pol Pot refused to cooperate with the peace process, and kept fighting the new coalition government. The Khmer Rouge kept the government forces at bay until 1996, when the demoralized troops started deserting. Several important Khmer Rouge leaders also defected.

Pol Pot ordered the execution of his life-long right-hand man Son Sen and eleven members of his family on June 10, 1997 for wanting to make a settlement with the government (the news did not reach outside of Cambodia for three days). Pol Pot then fled his northern stronghold, but was later arrested by Khmer Rouge military Chief Ta Mok, and sentenced to lifelong house arrest. In April 1998, Ta Mok fled into the forest taking Pol Pot following a new government attack. A few days later, on April 15, 1998, Pol Pot died, reportedly of a heart attack. His body was burned in the Cambodian countryside, with several dozen Khmer Rouge in attendance. According to them, while his body burned, his right hand was raised high in a fist.