More praise for How Pol Pot Came to Power
“The leading historians of the period, Michael Vickery (Cambodia 1975–1982) and Ben Kiernan (How
Pol Pot Came to Power), have both demonstrated … the gradations and variations in hardship and
terror.”
—Barbara Crossette, New York Times Book Review
“This is the story of the rise of the most terrible revolutionary movement in history, the Khmer
Rouge…. It is a monumental piece of research, scrupulously documented and based mainly on
original sources.”
—Chris Mullin, Tribune
“Kiernan’s work on recent events in Cambodia is well-known and respected; the book should be read
by those who wish to be informed.”
—Judith M. Jacob, British Book News
“An immensely complex history, … likely to be as nearly definitive an account as possible.”—Philip
Windsor, The Listener
“Valuable…. Mr. Kiernan is a meticulous Australian scholar.”—Alexander MacLeod, BBC World
Service
“An invaluable source of information on Khmer communism.”—Bangkok Post
“A book that will remain for a long time a standard reference.”—Economic Times (India)
“A major tour de force.”—Review of the Asian Studies Association of Australia
“The mass of evidence brought to bear makes the main lines of the argument convincing [and] gives a
tremendous richness to the story.”—Journal of Contemporary Asia
Books and monographs by Ben Kiernan
The Samlaut Rebellion and its Aftermath, 1967–70
Peasants and Politics in Kampuchea, 1942–1981 (coauthor)
Cambodia: The Eastern Zone Massacres
Burchett: Reporting the Other Side of the World, 1939–1983 (editor)
Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations, and the International
Community (editor)
The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979
Le Génocide au Cambodge, 1975–1979: race, idéologie et pouvoir
Conflict and Change in Cambodia (editor)
The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (coeditor)
How Pol Pot Came to Power
How Pol Pot Came To Power
Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930–1975
Second Edition
BEN KIERNAN
Second Edition published 2004 by Yale University Press. First published 1985 by Verso.
Copyright © 1985 by Ben Kiernan
Preface to the Second Edition copyright © 2004 by Ben Kiernan
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that
copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the
public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2004106436
ISBN 978-0-300-10262-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on
Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
for Joan and Peter
The Story of El Salvador
The Silence of Hiroshima
Destruction of Cambodia
Short memory, must have a short memory.
Midnight Oil, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
Contents
Preface to the Second Edition
Introduction
1. The Origins of Khmer Politics: Kampuchea between the Wars
2. Contending Colonialisms: 1940–49
3. Contending Nationalisms: 1949–52
4. Stalemate: 1952–54
5. International Supervision
6. The Changing of the Vanguard: ‘Political Struggle’, 1955–66
7. The First Civil War, 1967–70
8. Contending Communisms: The Second Civil War, 1970–75
Epilogue
Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations
Index
Preface to the Second Edition
Before World War Two, Cambodia was a highly taxed, relatively quiet corner of the French colonial
empire. Eighty percent of its population comprised ethnic Khmer, Buddhist, rice-growing peasants.
Ethnic and religious minorities made up nearly a fifth of its population. Vietnamese, Chinese, and
Muslim Chams worked mostly in rubber plantations or as clerks, shopkeepers, and fisherfolk, and
twenty other small ethnolinguistic groups lived in the hills and forests. This book charts the
emergence within that traditional society of a Cambodian nationalist movement in the 1930s and
1940s, and the formation of a local communist party in 1951.
Cambodia won its independence from France in 1954. A decade later, a new, younger leadership
took charge of the renamed Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and launched an armed insurgency
in 1967. The Vietnam War spilled over into Cambodia in 1970, and the CPK took power there five
years later. How Pol Pot Came to Power, the first of two books on twentieth-century Cambodian
history, takes the story up to the CPK’s victory in 1975. The sequel, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power
and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979 (2d ed., Yale University Press, 2002),
details the rule of the CPK, its crimes against humanity, and its assaults on domestic dissidents and
neighboring states, leading to its overthrow by the Vietnamese army.
Colonialism and Nationalism
A French missionary wrote in 1751, ‘The Cambodians have massacred all the Cochinchinese
[Vietnamese] that they could find in the country’. The Khmer king, the missionary reported, ‘gave
orders or permission to massacre all the Cochinchinese who could be found, and this order was
executed very precisely and very cruelly; this massacre lasted a month and a half; only about twenty
women and children were spared; no one knows the number of deaths, and it would be very difficult to
find out, for the massacre was general from Cahon to Ha-tien, with the exception of a few who were
able to escape through the forest or fled by sea to Ha-tien’. Of the ‘numerous’ Vietnamese in
Cambodia before 1751, no survivors could be found.1
This racial massacre was in part a response to southern Vietnamese expansion into ‘Cochinchina’,
the Mekong Delta region, which Cambodians had ruled until the eighteenth century. Khmers still call
it Lower Cambodia (Kampuchea Krom). In 1978, Pol Pot’s regime returned to this history in an antiVietnamese Black Book.2 It told of a Khmer king who, in order to marry a Vietnamese princess in
1623, gave up the Khmer town of Prey Nokor, which would later become Saigon. Denouncing this
‘sordid use of Vietnamese girls’, the Black Book explained: ‘The French called Kampuchea Krom
“Cochinchine”. This name is made up of the Vietnamese words Co-Chin-Xin. “Co” means “Miss”,
“Chin” is the name of a girl, and “Xin” means “ask for”. Thus, “Co-Chin-Xin” means “Miss Chin asks
for”’.3 In fact, ‘Cochin’ is simply a French rendering of the Chinese term for Vietnam (Giao-chi). The
suffix ‘China’ distinguished it from Cochin in India.
Contrary to CPK revisionism, Khmer royal chronicles depict Vietnamese-Cambodian relations as
being reasonably cordial as late as the seventeenth century.4 The Khmer term yuon (
) fairly
accurately reproduced the name Vietnamese used for themselves (yueh, ‘Viet’). But the Black Book
asserts that ‘Yuon is the name given by Kampuchea’s people to the Vietnamese since the epoch of
Angkor and it means “savage” ‘. Pol Pot’s regime mythologised its conflict with Hanoi in a millennial
ethnic epic. In 1977, in his major public speech, Pol Pot urged his people to ‘prevent the constant loss
of Cambodia’s territory’.5 Ironically, this sense of omnipresent threat and precarious national
survival, common among Cambodian nationalists, was fueled as much by twentieth-century expansion
as by millennial decline.
The map of modern Cambodia was fully drawn only in the decade before World War One. In 1907,
France obliged Thailand to ‘return’ Cambodia’s entire northwest quadrant, now the provinces of
Battambang, Siemreap, Oddar Meanchey, and Preah Vihear, which had been ruled from Bangkok since
1794. The French restored more territory to Cambodia in 1914, in an exchange with their other colony,
Cochinchina.6 The return of the northwest territories, including the medieval temples of Angkor, had a
major impact on Cambodian elite nationalism. King Sisowath (r. 1904–27) welcomed their recovery
with a prominent commemorative monument in Phnom Penh. (See map A below.)
Cambodian nationalist attention then focussed on other, longer-lost, Khmer-speaking areas: Surin
and Buriram provinces of Thailand, whose ethnic Khmer majority still call themselves Upper
Cambodians (khmaer loeu), and Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, with its khmaer krom minority. The gains
of 1907–14 encouraged Cambodia in the 1940s to petition its French protector to ‘return’ Kampuchea
Krom from Vietnam.7 (See map B below.)
Restoration of the northwest provinces came only through French colonial power. Cambodia had
little capacity to defend them from Thailand, which did not renounce its claim, maintaining ties with
Khmers who had grown up there during a century of Thai rule. In World War Two, with Japanese
support, Bangkok attacked and again seized northwest Cambodia. Thailand had to return the territories
once again in 1946, but the lesson to Khmer nationalists was one of vulnerability. Territorial
diminution became the nationalist nightmare.
Nationalism and Genocide
Yet Khmer Rouge nationalism differs from the mainstream Cambodian variety. The CPK leaders came
to define Cambodians who did not accept its leadership in an anti-Vietnamese crusade as ‘traitors’,
even as ‘Khmer bodies with Vietnamese minds’ (kbal yuon khluon khmaer). Fellow citizens were seen
as surrogate foreigners. Massive Khmer Rouge brutality in the repression of such ‘treason’, and of
most ethnic minorities, targeted these groups for genocide. Victims of the Khmer Rouge racial and
territorial offensive fell on both sides of the borders and battle lines, including members of both
ethnic groups as well as others. This was a very specific ‘ultranationalism’.
In Nations and Nationalism, Ernest Gellner schematized agrarian societies, ‘agro-literate polities’
like Cambodia, before the age of nationalism. He found them characterized, first, by a ‘major chasm’
between the ‘little tradition’, the unwritten folk culture of the cultivators, and the ‘great tradition’, the
literate ‘high culture’ of the ruling text-oriented ‘clerisy’. Second, this clerisy or ‘warrior-scribe
ruling class’ was ‘trans-ethnic and even trans-political’, ‘easily exportable’ across broad world
regions.8 The crusaders, the ulama, and the mandarinate played such roles in Christendom and the
Islamic and Confucian worlds, respectively. Benedict Anderson, in his study Imagined Communities,
notes also that prenationalist elites were defined by their ‘pilgrimages’ abroad. In the Cambodian
case, he cites the name ‘Kampuchea’, a prenationalist dynasticism derived not from any Khmer ethnic
or popular term but by reference to a foreign cultural model: Kambuja is an Indian toponym. Indie
culture provided the ‘sacred language’ of Cambodia’s premodern high culture.9
Map A: Cambodia after the March 11, 1941, annexation of the northwest provinces by Thailand. [Source: Cambodge, Ministry of
Information, Phnom Penh, 1961, p. 50].
Map B: Kampuchea Krom (Vietnam’s Mekong Delta): percentages of the population of Khmer origin, c. 1960. [Source: Cambodge,
Ministry of Information, Phnom Penh, 1961, p. 50].
In this cultural schema, Marxists, too, could be known for their pilgrimages abroad. International
communism might find a place as the exportable sacred language of a bilingual clerisy. But whereas
communism also imposes its culture vertically and intensively on the masses, the extensive cultural
reach of premodern traditional clerisies lacked comparable depth. That came only in the process of
nationalism.
To Gellner, ‘the secret of nationalism’ is that ‘a high culture pervades the whole of society’ and
‘defines it’. This occurs, as part of the new division of labour required for industrial society, in the
form of mass literacy in a ‘national language’ through a state education system. Social mobility and
interchangeability of roles require a general education for all rather than lifelong skill training for
some (the specialists in prenationalist agrarian societies). To quote Gellner, ‘In the industrial world,
high cultures prevail, but they need a state not a church, and they need a state each’.10
The process of nationalism, therefore, is twofold: the lateral constriction of previously transethnic
high cultures within new state boundaries, and their vertical intensification downwards, obliterating
and replacing the folk culture and ‘little traditions’ of the masses. In this process the medium is the
message.11 The words of nationalism are not important. What matters is that everyone within a polity
or culture hears or reads them. Newspaper readerships are the seedbeds of nations, schools the
hothouses.
Anderson locates the rise of nationalism in ‘print-capitalism’ rather than in the general industrial
division of labor. ‘The book was the first modern-style mass-produced industrial commodity’.
Anticolonial novels, describing common experiences under foreign rule, are the clarion calls of most
nationalisms. ‘Print-language … invents nationalism’.12 Furthermore, the study of languages and
philology opens new vistas on history, as modernity is contrasted, not, as before, mingled with
antiquity. As a linear conception of history emerges, so does the nation as a homogeneous,
simultaneous community with a past (and a future), to which it is connected by a recognisable but
changing language.13
Philology is thus the midwife of nationalism. Its father is the expansion of state bureaucracies in
the nineteenth century, requiring a mass education system. Previously ‘marginalised vernacular-based
coalitions of the educated’ move to center stage, employed for their skill in what now becomes the
language of state to induct the lower classes into political life.14
Anderson distinguishes such popular or vernacular nationalism based on ethnic awakening, from
‘official nationalism’, a reaction to it by threatened traditional ruling groups. They attempt to preempt
vernacular movements by officially proclaiming a nationalism from above. Print-capitalism ‘egged
into self-naturalisation every dynasty positioned to do so’. They harnessed nationalism to more
traditional worldviews. Anderson argues that postwar Asian and African cases were ‘a blend of
popular and official nationalisms’.15
‘Official nationalism’ indeed describes the Cambodian experience. The French had crowned
eighteen-year-old King Norodom Sihanouk in 1941. Under Japanese influence in 1945, Sihanouk
proclaimed the ‘Kingdom of Kampuchea’, using the state’s dynastic Khmer-language title.16 He
quickly turned to welcome the returning French, but in 1953 he jumped onto the anticolonial
bandwagon. Off-loading the grassroots independence (Issarak) forces, the king seized the reins
himself, holding now to the nationalist course. French forces left the country to him in 1954. Sihanouk
had become a nationalist with a foreign policy of neutrality, but his nationalism was official, not
vernacular. He eclipsed the Issarak preference for the colloquial ethnic name for the country, srok
Khmer (‘Khmerland’ in English-language publications).17 Kampuchea, despite its dynastic, Indic
origin, survived to occupy the new nationalist framework.18
Sihanouk’s late leap came in time to head off a vernacular nationalist revolution, only because of
the latter’s very recent development in Cambodia. In the mid—twentieth century, Gellner’s industrial
division of labour was notably absent from this overwhelmingly agrarian society. Almost as hard to
find were Anderson’s ingredients of vernacular nationalism: newspapers, mass education, mass
communications, and a national civil service. Largely landlocked since the eighteenth century,
Cambodia had long been insulated from such modernizing change. As a French Protectorate from
1863, it became neither a direct colony modernized by the metropole nor an independent nation
exchanging influence with its neighbours. French Indo-China not only divided Khmers from Thais and
created a French-speaking elite, but also ruled Cambodians and Vietnamese separately. The first
Khmer-language newspaper began publication as late as 1936. In the case of other nationalisms, the
first Greek newspaper had appeared in 1784, Thai in 1864, Vietnamese in 1901, Burmese in 1911. The
popularly based ‘imagined community’ of Khmers was only seventeen years old when its nationalism
was appropriated by a still-colonial monarchy in 1953–54.
Usually the colonial need for ‘armies of clerks’, bilingual and able to help run a colonial state,
eventually fosters their nationalist yearning for an independent one.19 In Cambodia, however, the
French tended to recruit clerical staff from Vietnam.20 Khmers who managed to get a modern
education (mostly those born in Cochinchina, a colony subject to metropolitan French law) still could
not obtain bureaucratic positions outside the Protectorate of Cambodia. Even the few Khmers who
studied at Hanoi University afterwards had to compete with Vietnamese for posts in Phnom Penh.
Khmer career paths stopped at the Vietnamese border. The colonial administrative ceiling stunted the
growth of a nationalist constituency while the compressed colonial education system threatened to
asphyxiate Khmer vernacular culture.
Yet it was not French rule that created the divisions between Khmers and Vietnamese; these
predated colonialism, as did instances of grassroots cooperation. Nor did France simply enforce an
existing ethnic divide. Colonial power fossilized the relationship, separating the two nations in a new
way. Cambodia’s separate Protectorate not only preserved the Khmer ruling elite, but its suppression
of the growth of popular Khmer culture also later offered that elite the opportunity to stage a
comeback on the shoulders of a still youthful anti-French vernacular nationalism. Shut out by French
policy from an Indochinese high culture and partly excluded even from Cambodia’s colonial state
service, the Khmer vernacular movement emerged late on the political stage and felt its way only
slowly towards cooperation with a far advanced Vietnamese nationalist counterpart. In its
adolescence, the Khmer independence cause could be effectively hijacked by a royal official
nationalism.
From 1955, Sihanouk’s regime frequently banned Khmer newspapers, harassed their editors, and
suppressed nearly all Khmer-language books exploring history, politics, economics, and even
literature.21 It trained another generation of students in the French medium, still divorced from their
country’s recent history and much of its vernacular culture. Sihanouk’s overthrow in 1970 released a
brief outpouring of Khmer political and historical publications, including memoirs of Issaraks and
other dissidents. The delayed awakening was symbolised by the choice of the new, ethnic name for the
country, ‘Khmer Republic’, recalling the Issarak vernacular nationalism.
But Cambodian soil remained fertile for a new species of official nationalism. The Khmer Rouge
hybrid already sprouting in the sixties grafted the worldview of a prenationalist, traditional hierarchy
onto the Khmer Rouge variant of international communism. The result was a neodynastic
internationalism, complete with communist clerisy—the palace-raised, Paris-educated CPK leaders
like Pol Pot, who with their warlord commanders comprised a classic ‘warrior-scribe ruling class’.
Their victory in 1975 was a triumph of communism in the garb of official nationalism, symbolised by
the return to the dynastic name for the country. ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ (DK) combined
prenationalist tradition with international communist usage. The term proclaimed a ‘democratic’
dynasty, in the communist sense of a collective institution, a new monarchy of the educated elite
spurned by Sihanouk’s kingdom. It was natural enough, then, for the CPK to be known as the remote,
mysterious Angkar (‘the Organization’), and yet to become a personalized institution that watches
movies and can be spoken to unless it is ‘busy working’.22 It could even order massacres of
Vietnamese, as the Khmer king did in 1751.
Thus the CPK inherited the official dynastic variant of nationalism as it guided Cambodia back onto
a collision course with Vietnam.23 As a usurpation, official nationalism is naturally tempted to
capitalize on foreign hostility to garner needed domestic support. Vernacular nationalism is more
compatible with a self-confident assertion of membership in a fraternity of nations. Contrast
vernacular nationalism with the view of the CPK in 1976: ‘The enemy will continue to exist for 10, 20,
or 30 years … The national struggle … will be continuous’.24 This admits no concept of a family of
coexisting nations, but suggests mutually conflicting nationhoods competing for the same terrain.
After thirty years of that, the enemy nation may no longer ‘exist’.
Just as Sihanouk’s official nationalism ‘naturalised’ his ‘transnational’ dynastic and colonial traits,
Pol Pot’s regime naturalised its Stalinist-internationalist political formation. If nationalism is the
domestication of a transethnic tradition, the CPK likewise forced international communism into its own
national straightjacket. It immediately severed Cambodia’s relations with both the USSR and capitalist
states, then in turn broke with Albania, Vietnam, Cuba, and Laos. Some CPK cadres even described
China as an enemy. And if nationalism makes a high culture ‘pervade the whole of society’, the
Khmer Rouge now imposed their ideology and culture downwards on the mass of Cambodia’s people.
The DK applied Leninist categories designed for communists, such as ‘full rights’ and ‘candidate’
Party members, to the whole population, who were divided into ‘full-rights people’, ‘candidates’, and
‘deportees’. The entire nation was subjected to the internal bureaucratic procedures and brutal purges
of a Stalinist Communist Party. The DK regime even nationally policed sexual abstention, in another
vertical imposition on the masses of a code for Party members—or traditionally, for the Buddhist
monkhood. CPK enforcement of its transnational ‘sacred language’ included the imposition on the
population of terminology derived from Pali, the Indic language of Buddhism formerly the specialty
of monks. The country was divided into new administrative zones, their names drawn not from the
Khmer vernacular but from Pali (e.g., phumipeak niredey, ‘Southwest Zone’). The CPK imposed
traditional Pali high-culture terms, even for ‘boys’ (komara) and ‘girls’ (komarey).25 It suppressed
more modern terms of the urban Khmer vernacular, such as nyam (‘eat, dine’), which was banned in
favour of the rural hop.
DK’s policy of national ‘self-reliance’ highlighted the dilemma of forcing the internationalcommunist square peg into the nationalist round hole. Self-reliance is a common nationalist theme.26
But DK pursued it together with communism, a unique amalgam of ‘communism in one country’. It
repressed ‘privateness’ (kar ekachun) in all fields and abolished domestic markets and wages. The
eschewing of overseas markets further limited national income and incentives to produce. This
required the state to drive the individual producer harder than ever before in history. Collectives
reinforced central control but could not be allowed to mediate. The ironic trend was for national selfreliance to degenerate into enforced ‘individual self-reliance’, i.e., personalized performance targets
for each worker.
The same process of involution applied to the concept of race, another transnational factor now
compressed within national boundaries. As ethnic Khmers in neighbouring countries showed little
interest in the DK project, their role, like that of the international communist movement, was thrown
back onto the domestic Cambodian population: to supply food and cannon fodder for the army that
would ‘liberate’ Kampuchea Krom from the Vietnamese. With the exchange of the international for
the national arena, minorities within the country became ‘enemies’, and new purportedly racial
categories divided the Khmer population, such as ‘Khmer bodies with Vietnamese minds’.
Two transnational ideologies—one traditional and colonial, the other modern and communist—
provided the high culture from which DK’s racist ultranationalism derived. In a process similar in
structure (not in implementation) to the making of nationalism elsewhere, this combination of
transnational cultures was constricted within national boundaries and forcibly imposed upon the
Cambodian population. The Khmer Rouge forced their variants of communism and traditional racism
on Cambodia with greater intensity and penetration than in any other modern case. This unique
historical amalgam played a large role in the hierarchical DK conception of its international relations
and in the related violence against both Cambodia’s minorities and its Khmer majority.
The Rise of Communism
The communist path to power took a nationalist route. Following Japan’s defeat in 1945, the
reimposition of French colonial control in Vietnam and Cambodia provoked armed resistance in both
countries from communist-led Viet Minh and nationalist Khmer Issarak forces.27 French
intransigence and protracted anticolonial conflict in the two countries fostered the emergence by 1951
of a Vietnamese-sponsored Cambodian communist movement, the Khmer People’s Revolutionary
Party (KPRP), which won increasing though not unchallenged preeminence among the Issarak
nationalists contesting French control of their country, KPRP members, led by former Buddhist monks,
slowly gained leadership of the nationwide Khmer Issarak Association or Unified Issarak Front (UIF).
The movement adopted for its flag a silhouette of Angkor Wat’s five towers on a red background. One
faction of the independence movement initially called itself ‘Democratic Kampuchea’, later the
official name of the Khmer Rouge state.28 An anti-KPRP grouping used for its flag a three-towered
Angkor motif, the future flag of DK. Members of another anticommunist splinter group carried out
racist massacres of ethnic Vietnamese in 1949 and of Cham Muslims in 1952. Saloth Sar, then a
student in Paris calling himself the Original Khmer, returned home in 1953 and briefly served in the
communist-led Issarak ranks. He later assumed the nom de guerre Pol Pot.
The First Indo-China War culminated in the French defeat by Viet Minh forces at Dien Bien Phu in
1954. The settlement afforded Cambodia full independence under the then-king, Norodom Sihanouk,
who soon adopted a foreign policy of Cold War neutrality. His choice was partly a domestic
accommodation, an implicit acknowledgement both of the communists’ role in the war for
Cambodia’s independence and of their potential to disrupt a more pro-Western regime. Neutrality was
also a foreign policy strategy to keep Cambodia out of the escalating conflict in neighboring Vietnam.
It worked for over a decade. Sihanouk’s foreign policy of independence appealed to moderate
nationalists and appeased veteran communists, while his autocracy stifled dissent and co-opted most
of Cambodia’s political spectrum into a one-party kingdom. Those radicals of left and right
dissatisfied with Sihanouk’s policies had to bide their time, head for the hills, or leave for Vietnam or
Thailand. Half of Cambodia’s veteran communists took up exile in Hanoi. Most remaining grassroots
leftists were either mollified by Sihanouk’s advocacy of peace and neutrality, jailed by his police, or
disappeared, like the underground Cambodian communist leader Tou Samouth, who was mysteriously
killed in 1962. A group of Paris-trained militants headed by Saloth Sar, Ieng Sary, and Son Sen
immediately assumed the central leadership of the demobilized KPRP. They quietly slipped away from
their teaching jobs in the capital. The party’s veteran leadership, largely from rural and Buddhist
backgrounds, pro-Vietnamese though relatively moderate, was replaced by younger, urban, Frencheducated, anti-Vietnamese extremists. From the jungles of the remote northeast, the new party
leadership planned an armed rebellion against Sihanouk’s independent regime, ignoring his neutral
nationalism and labeling him a US puppet. Civil war loomed as the regime sensed the threat and
moved with renewed vigor against all leftists, driving aboveground moderates into the arms of the
younger militants now leading the party. Following them into underground opposition came a new
cohort of disgruntled youth who had benefited from Sihanouk’s rapid postindependence expansion of
educational opportunities, but were unable to secure commensurate employment in a fragile economy
that registered real growth only in 1963–65 and remained plagued by corruption.
Once the United States escalated the Vietnam War in 1964–65, Cambodia had little hope of
remaining an oasis of peace. Its frontiers became increasingly porous and vulnerable. By 1966,
rampant smuggling of Cambodian rice across the border to both sides in the Vietnam conflict
bankrupted the Sihanouk regime by depriving it of export duties, the government’s main source of
revenue. Cambodia was drawn further into the war by waves of ethnic Khmer refugees fleeing
Saigon’s persecution, Vietnamese communists seeking neutral sanctuary, anticommunist troops in
‘hot pursuit’, and us special forces incursions and jet-fighter raids. Then in 1969, President Richard
Nixon ordered extensive B-52 bombing raids of border areas of the country.
Worse, in 1967 civil war broke out in the countryside. Pol Pot’s newly renamed Communist Party
of Kampuchea (CPK) mounted a limited domestic insurgency and provoked military reaction. In
combination with this, Sihanouk’s regime was unable to handle the impact of the Vietnam War,
especially the economic crisis and the presence of Vietnamese communist sanctuaries. General Lon
Nol overthrew him on March 18, 1970. In exile in Beijing, Sihanouk quickly joined forces with the
Khmer Rouge, led by the CPK with Saloth Sar now using the code name Pol. In Phnom Penh, the
Kingdom of Cambodia became the Khmer Republic (1970–75), with Lon Nol as president. His army
quickly massacred thousands of the country’s ethnic Vietnamese residents.29 Three hundred thousand
more fled across the border into Vietnam, setting a precedent for intensified ‘ethnic cleansing’ by the
Khmer Rouge.30
Both sides in the Vietnam conflict now treated Cambodia as a theater of their ground and air war.
Vietnamese and Cambodian communist forces spread across the country, as did us and South
Vietnamese troops, each side attempting to outflank and avoid encirclement by the other. Lon Nol’s
Republic soon lost control of most of the countryside, and us ground troops withdrew in mid-1970. On
December 9, Nixon insisted to Henry Kissinger, according to their telephone transcripts record, that
‘every goddamn thing that can fly goes into Cambodia and hits every target that is open’. Kissinger
ordered ‘a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves’.31
Saigon forces occupied eastern Cambodia until 1972. Most Vietnamese communist units withdrew
from Cambodia in 1973 after the Paris Agreement in late January, us aerial bombardments continued
until August 1973. Since 1969, American aircraft had dropped over half a million tons of bombs on
Cambodia’s countryside, killing over one hundred thousand peasants and driving many survivors into
the ranks of the Khmer Rouge.
Henry Kissinger has revealed in his book Ending the Vietnam War (2003) that he requested an
estimate of the Cambodian civilian casualties of the us bombing from the Historical Office of the us
Secretary of Defense (OSD). The office, he writes, ‘gave me an estimate of 50,000 based on the
tonnage of bombs delivered over a period of four and a half years’. Kissinger cites this OSD figure in a
footnote leading to an endnote quoting two paragraphs excerpted from an unnamed, undated memo
‘on civilian casualties in Cambodia’. Kissinger omits to quote the actual passage containing the
estimate of 50,000, but his endnote quotes the OSD as stating that ‘B-52 area bombers accounted for a
much higher proportion of bomb tonnage in Cambodia than in North Vietnam—two-thirds in
Cambodia versus a quarter in North Vietnam. During 1969–73 in Cambodia, it was difficult for
reporters in Phnom Penh to estimate the proportion of civilian casualties caused by air operations.
There is no doubt that most of those casualties occurred in 1973. Reporters in Phnom Penh could see
that many nearby villages had been destroyed by bombing. According to the American air
commander, General Vogt, those villages had already been vacated by civilians fleeing into the city …
The worst error occurred at Neak Luong, when more than a hundred civilians were killed’.32 Many
similar incidents went unreported. The unverified official estimate of 50,000 dead may be regarded as
a minimum, in a possible range of 50,000–150,000 Cambodian civilians killed by us bombing from
1969 to 1973.33
Compounding its humanitarian devastation, the bombing had a political effect. On May 2, 1973, the
Directorate of Operations of the us Central Intelligence Agency reported the results of its
investigations in Kandal province:
1. Khmer Insurgent (KI [Khmer Rouge]) cadre have begun an intensified proselyting [sic] campaign among ethnic
Cambodian residents in the area of Chrouy Snao, Kaoh Thorn district, Kandal province, Cambodia, in an effort to recruit
young men and women for KI military organizations. They are using damage caused by B-52 strikes as the main theme of
their propaganda. The cadre tell the people that the Government of Lon Nol has requested the airstrikes and is responsible for
the damage and the ‘suffering of innocent villagers’ in order to keep himself in power. The only way to stop ‘the massive
destruction of the country’ is to remove Lon Nol and return Prince Sihanouk to power. The proselyting cadres tell the people
that the quickest way to accomplish this is to strengthen KI forces so they will be able to defeat Lon Nol and stop the
bombing.
2. This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of a number of young men for KI forces. Residents around Chrouy
Snao say that the propaganda campaign has been effective with refugees and in areas of Kaoh Thom and Leuk Dek districts
which have been subject to B-52 strikes.34
Congress ended the us bombardment in August 1973. The opposing Cambodian armies fought out
the last two years of the war, with continuing large-scale us military assistance to the Republican
forces based in the cities and sporadic Vietnamese aid to the Khmer Rouge, who dominated the rural
areas, which they called their ‘bases’ (moultanh). After initial urban euphoria, the Khmer Republic
had become mired in corruption and the increasingly narrow military dictatorship of Lon Nol and his
brother Lon Non. In the countryside, portending the genocide to come, the Khmer Rouge central
leadership attacked its Vietnamese allies as early as 1970, killed nearly all the one thousand Khmer
communist returnees from Hanoi, and in 1973–74 stepped up violence against ethnic Vietnamese
civilians. It also purged and killed ethnic Thai and other minority members of CPK regional
committees, banned an allied group of ethnic Cham Muslim revolutionaries, and instigated severe
repression of local Muslim communities.
On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, deported its two million residents into
the countryside, and established a new state, formally renamed Democratic Kampuchea (DK) the
following January. Pol Pot headed the regime as CPK Secretary-General and DK Prime Minister, with
other members of the CPK party ‘Center’ (mocchim) in Phnom Penh: Nuon Chea (Deputy CPK
Secretary), Vorn Vet, Ieng Sary, and Son Sen (Deputy Prime Ministers), the increasingly powerful
military chiefs, Chhit Choeun (alias Mok) and Ke Pauk, and the DK head of state, Khieu Samphan.
The ‘last battle’ of the war began on May 12, 1975, when the new regime’s naval forces
temporarily seized the us cargo ship Mayaguez. Two days later, Kissinger urged President Ford to
order both B-52 bombing and carrier strikes on Cambodia. ‘My recommendation is to do it
ferociously. We should not just hit mobile targets, but others as well’. Continuing doubts about who
was now running Cambodia caused Ford to demur: ‘Massive strikes would constitute overkill’. He
limited the final us bombardment of the country to four carrier-based sorties.35
The Genocide, 1975–79
The new DK regime labeled the conquered urban populations ‘new people’ (neak thmei). New people
were driven from the capital in all directions. The Khmer Rouge forcibly settled them among the rural
‘base people’ (neak moultanh) who had lived in the countryside during the 1970–75 war, and put them
to work in agricultural labour camps without wages, rights, or leisure time. Before the rice harvest in
late 1975, the Khmer Rouge again rounded up 800,000 of the urban deportees in various regions and
dispatched them to the Northwest Zone, doubling its population. Tens of thousands died of starvation
during 1976, while the regime began exporting rice. Meanwhile, it hunted down, rounded up, and
killed thousands of defeated Khmer Republic officials, army officers, and, increasingly, soldiers,
schoolteachers, and alleged ‘pacification agents’ (santec sampoan) who in most cases had merely
protested the repression or just the rigorous living conditions imposed on them. In 1976–77, the CPK
Center and its secret security apparatus, the Santebal, conducted massive new purges of the Northern
and Northwest Zone CPK administrations, arresting and killing large numbers of peasant base people
related to the purged local officials. Starvation and repression escalated in 1977 and especially in
1978. By early 1979, approximately 650,000 or one-quarter of the Khmer new people and 675,000
Khmer base people (15 percent) had perished from execution, starvation, overwork, disease, and
denial of medical care.
The severe Khmer Rouge repression of the majority Khmer rural population was accompanied by
intensified violence against ethnic minorities, even among the base people, escalating the patterns of
1973–75. Over half the ethnic Chinese, a quarter of a million people, perished in the countryside in
1975–79, the worst human disaster ever to befall the large ethnic Chinese community of Southeast
Asia.36 In 1975 the Khmer Rouge expelled from Cambodia over 100,000 more Vietnamese residents
and ferociously repressed a Cham Muslim rebellion along the Mekong River.37 Pol Pot himself then
ordered the deportation of 150,000 Chams living on the east bank of the Mekong and their forced
dispersal throughout the Northern and Northwest Zones. In November 1975, a Khmer Rouge official
in the Eastern Zone complained to Pol Pot of his inability to implement ‘the dispersal strategy
according to the decision that you, Brother, had discussed with us’. Officials in the Northern Zone, he
complained, ‘absolutely refused to accept Islamic people’, preferring ‘only pure Khmer people’.38 In a
message to Pol Pot two months later, Northern Zone leader Ke Pauk listed ‘enemies’ such as ‘Islamic
people’.39 Deportations of Chams began again in 1976, and by early 1979 approximately 100,000 of
the country’s Cham population of 250,000 in 1975 had been killed or worked to death. The 10,000
Vietnamese residents remaining in the country were all hunted down and murdered in 1977 and 1978.
Oral evidence suggests that the ethnic Thai and Lao minorities were also subjected to genocidal
persecution.40
The Cham rebellion of 1975 was followed in 1978 by another serious uprising in the Eastern Zone,
led this time by ethnic Khmer. From late 1976, the Pol Pot regime had accelerated its violent internal
purges of the Cambodian regional administrations. The Santebal and the CPK Center’s own armed
forces subjected all five regions of the Eastern Zone to concerted large-scale arrests and massacres of
local CPK officials and soldiers. In May 1978, these reached a crescendo, and provoked a mutiny by
units of the zone’s armed forces. The rebels, led by Heng Samrin and Chea Sim, held out for several
months before retreating across the Vietnamese border, where they requested assistance and joined
earlier rebels and Khmer Rouge defectors like Hun Sen. Meanwhile, from early 1977, Phnom Penh
had also mounted cross-border attacks on Thailand, Laos, and especially Vietnam. Hanoi was ready to
intervene. On December 25, 1978, 150,000 Vietnamese troops launched a multipronged assault and
took Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979. The Khmer Rouge were driven to the Thai border, where they
received assistance from Thailand, China, and the United States. Cambodians meanwhile welcomed
the end of the genocide. The Peoples Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) was established, headed by Heng
Samrin, Chea Sim, and Hun Sen. Hun Sen became Prime Minister in 1985. Vietnamese troops
withdrew in 1989, when the regime was renamed the State of Cambodia.
Conflict, Diplomacy, and Recovery, 1979–2003
On December 6, 1975, us President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited
President Suharto of Indonesia in Jakarta. Ford told Suharto that ‘despite the severe setback of
Vietnam’ seven months earlier, ‘the United States intends to continue a strong interest in and
influence in the Pacific, Southeast Asia and Asia … we hope to expand this influence’. Suharto asked
if the United States believed that Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam would ‘be incorporated into one
country’. Ford replied, ‘The unification of Vietnam has come more quickly than we anticipated. There
is, however, resistance in Cambodia to the influence of Hanoi. We are willing to move slowly in our
relations with Cambodia, hoping perhaps to slow down the North Vietnamese influence although we
find the Cambodian government very difficult’. Kissinger then explained Beijing’s similar strategy:
‘The Chinese want to use Cambodia to balance off” Vietnam… . We don’t like Cambodia, for the
government in many ways is worse than Vietnam, but we would like it to be independent. We don’t
discourage Thailand or China from drawing closer to Cambodia’.41
Thus, for such geopolitical reasons, while the Cambodian genocide progressed, Washington,
Beijing, and Bangkok all supported the continued independent existence of the Khmer Rouge regime.
They kept up this support after 1979. Beijing maintained its alliance with the Khmer Rouge. For
twenty years following his overthrow, Pol Pot also benefited from sanctuary in Thailand.
When Vietnam ousted the Khmer Rouge in January 1979, most of the world lined up in
confrontational Cold War positions. Hanoi’s intervention was seen as having created ‘the Cambodian
problem’ rather than or despite having stopped a genocide. China, the United States, and the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean), all supported Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in various ways
and opposed attempts to bring them to justice. Protracted legal inquiries found no state in the world
willing to file a case against DK in the International Court of Justice. With us support, the Khmer
Rouge held on to Cambodia’s seat in the United Nations, representing their victims for another
fourteen years. France was the only major Western country that even abstained on the seating issue,
though Paris did not cast a vote against DK. While the latter remained a UN member state, the Khmer
Rouge were openly accountable for their crimes, but instead international aid poured into their coffers,
abetting their war to retake power while an international embargo targeted their PRK opponents in
Phnom Penh.42 This enforced isolation of Cambodia, and the human rights abuses of the wartime oneparty PRK regime, constrained and marred its acknowledged achievements in restoring normality and
reconstructing the country’s economy, administration, cultural life, and education system.43
From 1979 to 1982 the Khmer Rouge continued to hold Cambodia’s UN seat alone, still using the
name Democratic Kampuchea. Then Sihanouk and a onetime Prime Minister, Son Sann, led two
smaller non-communist parties into a Khmer Rouge-dominated ‘Coalition Government of Democratic
Kampuchea’ (CGDK)—in reality neither a coalition, nor a government, nor democratic, nor in
Cambodia. With Sihanouk now the nominal CGDK leader, the Khmer Rouge flag flew over New York
until 1992. Governments were not alone in prolonging Khmer Rouge influence. In the 1980s, the
American Bar Association, Law Asia, and the International Commission of jurists all rejected
invitations to send jurists to Cambodia to investigate the crimes of the Khmer Rouge and initiate legal
action. Only the Australian branch of the International Commission of Jurists showed interest.
Neighboring Thailand provided key support to the Khmer Rouge: sanctuary along the border, secret
military supplies, and diplomatic aid.44 In 1985, Thailand’s foreign minister described Pol Pot’s
deputy, Son Sen, as a ‘very good man’. In 1991, General Suchinda Krapayoon, after seizing power in
Thailand, proclaimed Pol Pot a ‘nice guy’. The Thai politician Anand Panyarachun told Khieu
Samphan, ‘Sixteen years ago I was also accused of being a communist. Now they have picked me as
prime minister. In any society there are always hard-liners and soft-liners, and society changes its
attitudes toward them as time passes by’. After meeting with Pol Pot in 1991, Suchinda pleaded to the
media that Pol Pot had no intention of regaining power and it was time to treat him ‘fairly’.
‘I do not understand why some people want to remove Pol Pot’, said China’s Deng Xiaoping in
1984. ‘It is true that he made some mistakes in the past but now he is leading the fight against the
Vietnamese aggressors’. China provided the Khmer Rouge forces with $100 million in weapons per
annum all through the 1980s, according to us intelligence. A Chinese shipment in mid-1990 violated a
promise to cut weapons deliveries to the Khmer Rouge in return for Vietnam’s withdrawal from
Cambodia in 1989.
China’s position enjoyed us support. In 1979, national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski
continued Kissinger’s earlier policy. As he later revealed, ‘I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol
Pot. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could’. According to
Brzezinski, the United States ‘winked, semi-publicly’ at Chinese and Thai aid to the Khmer Rouge.45
At the same time, US officials pushed through international aid to Khmer Rouge-controlled camps on
the Thai border.46
In the 1980s, us Secretary of State George Shultz opposed efforts to investigate or indict the Khmer
Rouge for genocide or other crimes against humanity. Shultz described as ‘stupid’ Australian Foreign
Minister Bill Hayden’s efforts in 1983 to encourage dialogue over Cambodia, and in 1986 he declined
to support Hayden’s proposal for an international tribunal. On a visit to Thailand, Shultz warned
against peace talks with Vietnam, telling the Asean countries ‘to be extremely cautious in formulating
peace proposals for Kampuchea because Vietnam might one day accept them’.47 The first Bush
administration even took a hard line against Thailand after the advent of an elected prime minister
there in 1988. The United States saw Bangkok’s new policy—turning Indo-China into a marketplace
rather than a battlefield, by engagement with Vietnam and Cambodia—as a defection from the
position of Beijing and Washington. The Far Eastern Economic Review reported that in 1989, us
‘officials warned that if Thailand abandoned the Cambodian resistance and its leader Sihanouk for the
sake of doing business with Phnom Penh it would have to pay a price’.48 Secretary of State James A.
Baker proposed that the Khmer Rouge be included in the future government of Cambodia.49
International negotiations on Cambodia began in 1988 in Jakarta, in a regional forum that involved
all the Southeast Asian countries. But the next year the talks were expanded to include the Great
Powers, and the venue was moved to Paris. China’s involvement brought its DK protege to center
stage. Any agreement now required unanimity, giving the Khmer Rouge a veto and time to rebuild
their military power. According to briefings Pol Pot gave his commanders in 1988, he deliberately set
out to delay elections. Khieu Samphan added, ‘The outside world keeps demanding a political end to
the war in Kampuchea. I could end the war now if I wanted, because the outside world is waiting for
me. But I am buying time to give you, comrades, the opportunity to carry out all the tasks. If it doesn’t
end politically and ends militarily, that’s good’.
Diplomatic criticism of the Khmer Rouge genocide abated. At the first Jakarta Informal Meeting
(JIM) on July 28, 1988, the Indonesian chairman’s final communiqué had noted the Southeast Asian
consensus on preventing a return to ‘the genocidal policies and practices of the Pol Pot regime’. But
on November 3, 1989, the UN General Assembly watered this down to ‘the universally condemned
policies and practices of the recent past’. An Australian proposal of February 1990, on which the UN
peace plan was to be based, referred only to ‘the human rights abuses of a recent past’. The final UN
Plan’s further obfuscation, in August 1990, vaguely nodded at ‘the policies and practices of the past’.
Pol Pot would enjoy ‘the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities to participate in the electoral
process’ as other Cambodians.
In August 1990, the UN’S Human Rights Sub-commission prepared to consider a draft resolution
referring to ‘the atrocities reaching the level of genocide committed in particular during the period of
Khmer Rouge rule’, and calling on all states to ‘detect, arrest, extradite, or bring to trial those who had
been responsible for crimes against humanity committed in Cambodia, and prevent the return to
governmental positions of those who were responsible for genocidal actions during the period 1975 to
1978’. However, the chair of the Human Rights Sub-commission, the Yugoslav diplomat Danilo Turk,
dropped this text from the agenda after speakers said that it would ‘render a disservice to the United
Nations’.50 A year later, however, the UN Sub-commission did pass a resolution noting ‘the duty of the
international community to prevent the recurrence of genocide in Cambodia’ and ‘to take all
necessary preventive measures to avoid conditions that could create for the Cambodian people the risk
of new crimes against humanity’.51 Thus in 1991 an official international forum finally acknowledged
the Khmer Rouge genocide.52
Also in 1991, Indonesia and France, cochairs of the Paris International Conference on Cambodia,
accepted the Phnom Penh government’s proposal that the final Agreement stipulate that the new
Cambodian constitution should be ‘consistent with the provisions of… the UN Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of Crimes of Genocide’.53 But the Great Powers rejected this, and the
Paris Agreement on Cambodia was signed in October 1991 without reference to the convention or any
mention of genocide. The UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) allowed the Khmer Rouge
to return to Phnom Penh. Khieu Samphan and Son Sen joined the Supreme National Council, a body
temporarily enshrining Cambodian sovereignty. Before returning to the capital, Son Sen read through
the Genocide Convention of 1948 and underlined passages that might be used to prosecute him,
including the definition of the crime and sections asserting that ‘whether committed in time of peace
or in time of war, [genocide] is a crime under international law’.54
Though they profited from the 1991 Agreement’s protections and concessions, the Khmer Rouge
declined to abide by it. They refused to implement the cease-fire, disarm their troops, or demobilize.
They refused any UN presence in their zones of control, which they expanded by force while the other
Cambodian parties generally respected the cease-fire. This territorial expansion allowed the Khmer
Rouge to harvest valuable timber for sale to Thailand, while the dollar influx accompanying the UN’S
arrival in the urban areas nourished a new epidemic of corruption there.
The Khmer Rouge also boycotted the UN-organized election of 1993 and tried to sabotage it, killing
peacekeepers from Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Japan, and even China.55 They failed to prevent the election
and continued their military campaign against the new Cambodian government, a coalition of the
royalists headed by Sihanouk’s son Norodom Ranariddh and the former communists led by Hun Sen.
Sihanouk was once again crowned king, and the country was re-named the Kingdom of Cambodia. In
1994, its National Assembly formally outlawed the Khmer Rouge.
International action finally began to build against them too. In the same year, the us Congress
passed the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act, making it us policy to bring the perpetrators to justice.
The State Department commissioned legal studies and funded Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide
Program (www.yale.edu/cgp) to collect the historical evidence.56
The international climate was changing too. In 1993, in the first international implementation of
the Genocide Convention, the UN Security Council created the Ad Hoc International Criminal Tribunal
on the Former Yugoslavia. Slovenia’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Danilo Turk, who in 1990 as
a Yugoslav diplomat had deleted from the agenda of the Human Rights Sub-commission the draft
resolution condemning the Cambodian genocide, now insisted that ‘the international community could
not afford not to punish the perpetrators of the genocide of the Muslim people of Bosnia and
Herzegovina’.57 The next year, Turk found it ‘particularly discouraging that Radovan Karadzic and
Ratko Mladic, who were indicted for genocide and other crimes, had not been arrested and continued
to exert an influence in public life. That situation should not be allowed to continue’, he added.58
In August 1996, DK’s former deputy prime minister, Ieng Sary, defected to the coalition
government, bringing some Khmer Rouge units with him. Sary received a royal ‘pardon’ for his 1979
in absentia conviction for genocide, and amnesty from the 1994 law outlawing the KR, covering his
subsequent opposition to the government. For his new loyalty, Sary retained autonomous authority
over Pailin province.59 Other Khmer Rouge leaders soon jockeyed for similar treatment from Phnom
Penh. In June 1997, fearing further defections and possible betrayal, Pol Pot murdered Son Sen, his
defense and security chief from 1975 to 1979. As the last military forces loyal to Pol Pot fled their
jungle headquarters, they drove their trucks over the bodies of their final victims, including Son Sen,
his wife Yun Yat—former DK minister of culture—and their family. Mok, the rump Khmer Rouge
commander, turned in pursuit, arrested Pol Pot, and quickly subjected him to a show trial in the
jungle.
In July 1997, a joint appeal to the United Nations by the two Cambodian prime ministers, Hun Sen
and Norodom Ranariddh, called for the establishment of an international tribunal to judge the Khmer
Rouge. This was one of their last joint acts before their coalition government ruptured in an outbreak
of bloody fighting in Phnom Penh later that month. But it generated a response. The UN SecretaryGeneral’s Special Representative for Human Rights in Cambodia ushered a resolution through the
General Assembly condemning the Khmer Rouge genocide. A year later, the United Nations
commissioned a Group of Experts to examine the evidence. Danilo Turk, representing Slovenia on the
UN Security Council in 1998 and 1999, now expressed ‘serious concern’ about an ‘ethical vacuum’
concerning violations of humanitarian law.60
In March 1999, the UN Secretary-General released the Experts’ report. They found a prima facie
case that the Khmer Rouge regime had committed not only war crimes and crimes against humanity,
but also genocide and other violations of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, and they recommended
the creation of an international tribunal for Cambodia.61 Russia, France, Britain, and the United States
now all favored such a tribunal. China threatened a veto in the Security Council, but it could not veto
General Assembly resolutions. The United Nations commenced negotiations with Cambodia to set up
a mixed international/national tribunal. On February 1, 2000, Danilo Turk became UN Assistant
Secretary-General for Political Affairs, ‘with responsibilities for the Americas and Europe, Asia and
the Pacific’.62
Meanwhile, in March 1998, the former DK deputy army commander, Ke Pauk, led a new mutiny
against Mok and then defected to the government. The next month, as the various factions slugged it
out, Pol Pot died. He may have committed suicide in order to evade capture, us officials had been
negotiating with Mok’s forces to take custody of Pol Pot at the Thai border.
In December 1998, the top surviving Khmer Rouge leaders—Nuon Chea, formerly Deputy CPK
Secretary, and Khieu Samphan, former DK head of state—abandoned Mok’s border hideout and
surrendered to the Cambodian government. They said ‘Sorry’ for the crimes they had perpetrated.63
Alone in the jungle, Mok did not hold out long. Cambodian troops captured him in March 1999. And
the next month, Kang Khek lev, alias Deuch, the former Santebal chief and commandant of DK’s
notorious Tuol Sleng prison, was discovered by the British journalist Nic Dunlop and apprehended by
Cambodian police.
Thus the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders had all surrendered or been arrested. Phnom Penh
prepared initial charges of genocide against Mok, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan.64 Ieng Sary, not
immune from prosecution under international law but amnestied for his outlawed opposition to Phnom
Penh, hoped to escape justice. Ke Pauk died in 2002.65
In July 2001, Cambodia’s National Assembly and Senate enacted a ‘Law on the Establishment of
Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed during
the Period of Democratic Kampuchea’. The law was promulgated the next month. However, it did not
satisfy the United Nations, which ended three years of negotiations with Phnom Penh in February
2002. Six months later, under international pressure, the United Nations renewed its interest and
referred the case to the General Assembly. In June 2003, Cambodia and the UN signed a formal
agreement to establish a mixed tribunal. The Cambodian cabinet approved the agreement a week later.
As I write, there is hope that the Cambodian government and its imperfect judicial system will not be
left to try the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders without substantial international assistance and
inspection.
From 1863, Cambodia experienced eighty years of French colonial rule and four years of Japanese
occupation. Then, in the three decades following World War Two, Cambodia witnessed the return of
colonial power, the spread of nationalism, the birth and growth of a communist party, the achievement
of independence, the stifling of reform during a decade of peace, the rise of an armed domestic
insurgency, the encroachment of an international war, massive bombardment and civilian casualties,
pogroms and ethnic ‘cleansing’ of religious minorities. From 1975 to 1979, genocide took 1.7 million
lives. Then, after liberation from the Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodia survived a decade of foreign
occupation, international isolation, and guerrilla harassment. UN intervention and democratic
transition were followed by Cambodia’s defeat of the Khmer Rouge amid continuing internal political
confrontation. Whether legal accountability will resolve the country’s poverty and injustice remains to
be seen.
How Pol Pot Came to Power, written in the early 1980s, was first published in 1985. The text,
unaltered here, uses the Khmer term ‘Kampuchea’, which was then also the official English name of
the country in the United Nations. Proclaiming the ‘Kingdom of Kampuchea’ in 1945, Sihanouk had
used its Khmer-language name in both French and English. The vernacular ‘Khmaer’ came into
Western languages as ‘Khmer’, after its Thai pronunciation, ‘Khamen’. After 1954, for its foreignlanguage publications, the Sihanouk regime preferred the French term ‘Cambodge’ and English
‘Cambodia’ (ultimately derived from Sanskrit and the Thai ‘Kam-pucha’). In 1970–75, Lon Nol’s
Khmer Republic reintroduced the ethnic vernacular. But in 1976 the CPK, rejecting the names of both
enemy predecessor states, returned to ‘Kampuchea’, calling their new regime ‘Kampuchea
Démocratique’ (Democratic Kampuchea in English). The PRK leaders reinstituted a republic in 1979,
but retained the name ‘Kampuchea’ for a decade. Then came rapprochement with Sihanouk. The
recurring monarchy-republic divide was first side-stepped in 1989 with a new neutral name, the State
of Cambodia, then settled in 1993 with reproclamation of the Kingdom of Cambodia. Sihanouk was
crowned again, as he had been by the French in 1941. Hopefully his kingdom had outlived the legacy