"Khmer Rouge" or scary stories about Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide
“You talk about me like I’m some kind of Pol Pot,” the heroine of Lyudmila Gurchenko said offendedly in one popular Russian comedy. “Pol Potism”, “Pol Pot regime” - these expressions firmly entered the vocabulary of Soviet international journalists in the second half 1970s. However, this name thundered throughout the world in those years. In just under 4 years of his reign, more than 3,370,000 people were exterminated in Cambodia.
Common noun
In just a few years, the leader of the Khmer Rouge movement became one of the bloodiest dictators in human history, earning the title of “Asian Hitler.”
Little is known about the childhood of the Cambodian dictator, primarily because Pol Pot himself tried not to make this information public. Even about the date of his birth there is different information. According to one version, he was born on May 19, 1925 in the village of Prexbauw, into a peasant family. The eighth child of the peasant Pek Salot and his wife Sok Nem was given the name Salot Sar at birth.
Although Pol Pot’s family was a peasant family, it was not poor. The future dictator's cousin served in the royal court and was even the crown prince's concubine. Pol Pot's elder brother served at the royal court, and his sister danced in the royal ballet.
Salot Sara himself, at the age of nine, was sent to live with relatives in Phnom Penh. After several months spent in a Buddhist monastery as an altar boy, the boy entered a Catholic primary school, after which he continued his studies at Norodom Sihanouk College and then at Phnom Penh Technical School.
The Marxists by royal grant
In 1949, Salot Sar received a government scholarship for higher education in France and went to Paris, where he began to study radio electronics.
The post-war period was marked by a rapid growth in the popularity of left-wing parties and national liberation movements. In Paris, Cambodian students created a Marxist circle, of which Saloth Sar became a member.
In 1952, Saloth Sar, under the pseudonym Khmer Daom, published his first political article, “Monarchy or Democracy?” in a Cambodian student magazine in France. At the same time, the student joined the French Communist Party.
His passion for politics pushed his studies into the background, and in the same year Salot Sara was expelled from the university, after which he returned to his homeland.
In Cambodia, he settled with his older brother, began to look for connections with representatives of the Communist Party of Indochina, and soon attracted the attention of one of its coordinators in Cambodia, Pham Van Ba. Salot Sara was recruited to party work.
"The Politics of the Possible"
Pham Van Ba quite clearly described his new ally: “a young man of average abilities, but with ambitions and a thirst for power.” Salot Sara's ambitions and lust for power turned out to be much greater than his fellow fighters expected.
Salot Sar took a new pseudonym - Pol Pot, which is short for the French "politique potentielle" - "politics of the possible." Under this pseudonym he was destined to go down in world history.
In 1953, Cambodia gained independence from France. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was very popular and oriented towards China, became the ruler of the kingdom. In the war that followed in Vietnam, Cambodia formally adhered to neutrality, but units of North Vietnam and South Vietnamese partisans quite actively used the territory of the kingdom to locate their bases and warehouses. The Cambodian authorities preferred to turn a blind eye to this.
During this period, Cambodian communists operated quite freely in the country, and by 1963 Saloth Sar had risen from novice to party general secretary.
By that time, a serious split had emerged in the communist movement in Asia, associated with a sharp deterioration in relations between the USSR and China. The Cambodian Communist Party relied on Beijing, focusing on the policies of Comrade Mao Zedong.
Leader of the Khmer Rouge
Prince Norodom Sihanouk saw the growing influence of the Cambodian communists as a threat to his own power and began to change policy, reorienting from China to the United States.
In 1967, a peasant uprising broke out in the Cambodian province of Battambang, which was brutally suppressed by government troops and mobilized citizens.
After this, the Cambodian communists launched a guerrilla war against the Sihanouk government. The detachments of the so-called “Khmer Rouge” were formed for the most part from illiterate and illiterate young peasants, whom Pol Pot made his main support.
Very quickly, Pol Pot’s ideology began to move away not only from Marxism-Leninism, but even from Maoism. Coming from a peasant family himself, the leader of the Khmer Rouge formulated a much simpler program for his illiterate supporters - the path to a happy life lies through the rejection of modern Western values, through the destruction of cities that are carriers of a pernicious infection, and the “re-education of their inhabitants.”
Even Pol Pot’s comrades had no idea where such a program would lead their leader...
In 1970, the Americans contributed to strengthening the position of the Khmer Rouge. Considering that Prince Sihanouk, who had reoriented towards the United States, was not a reliable enough ally in the fight against the Vietnamese communists, Washington organized a coup, as a result of which Prime Minister Lon Nol came to power with strong pro-American views.
Lon Nol demanded that North Vietnam cease all military activities in Cambodia, threatening to use force otherwise. The North Vietnamese responded by striking first, so much so that they almost occupied Phnom Penh. To save his protege, US President Richard Nixon sent American units to Cambodia. The Lon Nol regime ultimately survived, but an unprecedented wave of anti-Americanism arose in the country, and the ranks of the Khmer Rouge began to grow by leaps and bounds.
Victory of the partisan army
The civil war in Cambodia flared up with renewed vigor. The Lon Nol regime was not popular and was supported only by American bayonets, Prince Sihanouk was deprived of real power and was in exile, and Pol Pot continued to gain strength.
By 1973, when the United States, having decided to end the Vietnam War, refused to further provide military support to the Lon Nol regime, the Khmer Rouge already controlled most of the country. Pol Pot already managed without his comrades in the Communist Party, which was relegated to the background. It was much easier for him not with educated experts in Marxism, but with illiterate fighters who believed only in Pol Pot and the Kalashnikov assault rifle.
In January 1975, the Khmer Rouge launched a decisive offensive against Phnom Penh. The troops loyal to Lon Nol could not withstand the blow of the 70,000-strong partisan army. In early April, American Marines began evacuating US citizens from the country, as well as high-ranking representatives of the pro-American regime. On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh.
"The city is the abode of vice"
Cambodia was renamed Kampuchea, but this was the most harmless of Pol Pot's reforms. “The city is an abode of vice; You can change people, but not cities. Working hard to uproot the jungle and grow rice, a person will finally understand the true meaning of life,” this was the main thesis of the Khmer Rouge leader who came to power.
It was decided to evict the city of Phnom Penh, with a population of two and a half million people, within three days. All its inhabitants, young and old, were sent to become peasants. No complaints about health conditions, lack of skills, etc. were accepted. Following Phnom Penh, other cities in Kampuchea suffered the same fate.
Only about 20 thousand people remained in the capital - the military, the administrative apparatus, as well as representatives of the punitive authorities who took up the task of identifying and eliminating the dissatisfied.
It was supposed to re-educate not only the inhabitants of the cities, but also those peasants who had been under the rule of Lon Nol for too long. It was decided to simply get rid of those who served the previous regime in the army and other government agencies.
Pol Pot launched a policy of isolating the country, and Moscow, Washington, and even Beijing, which was Pol Pot’s closest ally, had a very vague idea of what was actually happening in it. They simply refused to believe the information leaking out about hundreds of thousands of people who were executed, who died during relocation from cities and from backbreaking forced labor.
At the pinnacle of power
During this period, an extremely complicated political situation developed in Southeast Asia. The United States, having ended the Vietnam War, set a course for improving relations with China, taking advantage of the extremely strained relations between Beijing and Moscow. China, which supported the communists of North and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War, began to treat them extremely hostilely, because they were oriented toward Moscow. Pol Pot, who was focused on China, took up arms against Vietnam, despite the fact that until recently the Khmer Rouge viewed the Vietnamese as allies in a common struggle.
Pol Pot, abandoning internationalism, relied on nationalism, which was widespread among the Cambodian peasantry. Brutal persecution of ethnic minorities, primarily the Vietnamese, resulted in an armed conflict with a neighboring country.
In 1977, the Khmer Rouge began to penetrate into neighboring areas of Vietnam, carrying out bloody massacres against the local population. In April 1978, the Khmer Rouge occupied the Vietnamese village of Batyuk, destroying all its inhabitants, young and old. The massacre killed 3,000 people.
Pol Pot went wild. Feeling the support of Beijing behind him, he not only threatened to defeat Vietnam, but also threatened the entire “Warsaw Pact,” that is, the Warsaw Pact Organization led by the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, his policy forced former comrades and previously loyal military units to rebel, considering what was happening to be unjustified bloody madness. The riots were suppressed ruthlessly, the rebels were executed in the most brutal ways, but their numbers continued to grow.
Three million victims in less than four years
In December 1978, Vietnam decided it had enough. Units of the Vietnamese army invaded Kampuchea with the aim of overthrowing the Pol Pot regime. The offensive developed rapidly, and already on January 7, 1979, Phnom Penh fell. Power was transferred to the United Front for the National Salvation of Kampuchea, created in December 1978.
China tried to save its ally by invading Vietnam in February 1979. The fierce but short war ended in March with a tactical victory for Vietnam - the Chinese failed to return Pol Pot to power.
The Khmer Rouge, having suffered a serious defeat, retreated to the west of the country, to the Kampuchean-Thai border. They were saved from complete defeat by the support of China, Thailand and the United States. Each of these countries pursued its own interests - the Americans, for example, tried to prevent the strengthening of pro-Soviet Vietnam's position in the region, for the sake of this they preferred to turn a blind eye to the results of the activities of the Pol Pot regime.
And the results were truly impressive. In 3 years, 8 months and 20 days, the Khmer Rouge plunged the country into a medieval state. The protocol of the Commission for the Investigation of Crimes of the Pol Pot regime dated July 25, 1983 stated that between 1975 and 1978, 2,746,105 people died, of which 1,927,061 were peasants, 305,417 workers, employees and representatives of other professions, 48,359 representatives national minorities, 25,168 monks, about 100 writers and journalists, as well as several foreigners. Another 568,663 people were missing and either died in the jungle or were buried in mass graves. The total number of victims is estimated at 3,374,768.
In July 1979, the People's Revolutionary Tribunal was organized in Phnom Penh, which tried the leaders of the Khmer Rouge in absentia. On August 19, 1979, the tribunal found Pol Pot and his closest associate Ieng Sary guilty of genocide and sentenced them to death in absentia with confiscation of all property.
The Leader's Last Secrets
For Pol Pot himself, this verdict, however, meant nothing. He continued his guerrilla war against the new government of Kampuchea, hiding in the jungle. Little was known about the leader of the Khmer Rouge, and many believed that the man whose name had become a household name had long since died.
When processes of national reconciliation began in Kampuchea-Cambodia aimed at ending the long-term civil war, a new generation of Khmer Rouge leaders tried to relegate their odious “guru” to the background. There was a split in the movement, and Pol Pot, trying to maintain leadership, again decided to use terror to suppress disloyal elements.
In July 1997, on the orders of Pol Pot, his long-time ally, former Minister of Defense of Kampuchea Son Sen, was killed. Along with him, 13 members of his family were killed, including young children.
However, this time Pol Pot overestimated his influence. His comrades declared him a traitor and held his own trial, sentencing him to life imprisonment.
The Khmer Rouge's trial of its own leader sparked a final surge of interest in Pol Pot. In 1998, prominent leaders of the movement agreed to lay down their arms and surrender to the new Cambodian authorities.
But Pol Pot was not among them. He died on April 15, 1998. Representatives of the Khmer Rouge said that the former leader's heart failed him. There is, however, a version that he was poisoned.
The Cambodian authorities sought from the Khmer Rouge to hand over the body in order to make sure that Pol Pot was really dead and to establish all the circumstances of his death, but the corpse was hastily cremated.
The leader of the Khmer Rouge took his last secrets with him...
An entire people, with its ancient cultural traditions and reverence for faith, was brutally mutilated by a Marxist fanatic. Pol Pot, with the silent connivance of the whole world, turned a prosperous country into a huge cemetery.
Imagine that a government comes to power and announces a ban on money. And not only for money: commerce, industry, banks are prohibited - everything that brings wealth. The new government declares by decree that society is again becoming agrarian, as it was in the Middle Ages.
Residents of cities and towns are forcibly relocated to the countryside, where they will engage exclusively in peasant labor. But family members cannot live together: children should not fall under the influence of the “bourgeois ideas” of their parents. Therefore, the children are taken away and raised in the spirit of loyalty to the new regime.
No books until adulthood. The books are no longer needed, so they are burned, and children from the age of seven work for the Khmer Rouge state.
An eighteen-hour working day is established for the new agrarian class, hard labor is combined with “re-education” in the spirit of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism under the leadership of the new masters. Dissidents who sympathize with the old order do not have the right to life.
The intelligentsia, teachers, university professors, and literate people in general are subject to extermination, since they can read materials hostile to the ideas of Marxism-Leninism and spread seditious ideology among workers re-educated in the peasant field. The clergy, politicians of all stripes, except those who share the views of the ruling party, people who made a fortune under the previous authorities are no longer needed - they are also destroyed. Trade and telephone communications are curtailed, temples are destroyed, bicycles, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, holidays, love and kindness are cancelled. In the best case - labor for the purpose of "re-education", otherwise - torture, torment, degradation, in the worst case - death.
This nightmare scenario is not the sophisticated figment of a science fiction writer's fevered imagination. It represents the horrific reality of life in Cambodia, where the murderous dictator Pol Pot turned back the clock, destroying civilization in an attempt to realize his twisted vision of a classless society. His “killing fields” were littered with the corpses of those who did not fit into the framework of the new world formed by him and his bloodthirsty minions. During the rule of Pol Pot's regime, about three million people died in Cambodia - the same number as the unfortunate victims who perished in the gas chambers of the Nazi death factory Auschwitz during the Second World War.
The Khmer regime collapsed when it finally lost its mind and went to war against neighboring Vietnam.
In 1978, Vietnamese troops went on the offensive, and large groups of the Khmer Rouge came over to their side. In December 1978, Vietnamese troops completely occupied Cambodia. One of the former high-ranking commanders, Heng Samrin, headed the pro-Vietnamese government of the proclaimed People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK).
The overthrow of the Pol Pot regime caused sharp discontent in the PRC. After weeks of continuous border skirmishes, the Chinese army invaded Vietnam on February 17, 1979. Having suffered heavy losses, the Chinese advanced only 50 km into Vietnam. A month later, the Vietnamese-Chinese conflict ended. Neither side achieved decisive results.
It was this defeat that became the starting point for China's modernization.
Between 1975 and 1978, the death toll was 2,746,105 people, including 1,927,061 peasants, 25,168 monks, 48,359 representatives of national minorities, 305,417 workers, employees and representatives of other professions, about 100 writers and journalists, a number of foreign citizens, as well as old people and children. 568,663 people were missing and either died in the jungle or were buried in mass graves similar to those discovered near Kampong Chhnang Airport, near Siem Reap and along the slopes of the Dangrek Range. These 3,374,768 people were killed by hoes, clubs, burned by wives, buried alive, cut into pieces, stabbed to death with sharp sugar palm leaves, poisoned, electrocuted, tortured with nails pulled out, crushed by tractor tracks , thrown to be eaten by crocodiles, their livers were cut out, which served as food for the executioners, small children were quartered alive, thrown into the air and impaled on bayonets, beaten against tree trunks, women were raped and impaled on stakes.
The Pol Pot regime left behind 141,848 disabled people, more than 200 thousand orphans, numerous widows who could not find their families. The survivors were deprived of strength, unable to reproduce, and in a state of poverty and complete physical exhaustion. A large number of young people lost their happiness as a result of forced marriages carried out by the Pol Potites on a massive scale.
634,522 buildings were destroyed, of which 5,857 were schools, as well as 796 hospitals, medical stations and laboratories, 1,968 churches were destroyed or turned into warehouses or prisons. 108 mosques were also destroyed. The Polpotites destroyed a countless number of agricultural tools, as well as 1,507,416 heads of cattle.At the same time, part of the country's population - the poor peasantry not affected by repression - is nostalgic for the times of the Khmer Rouge regime. Thus, approximately a third of students named Pol Pot the most outstanding person in the history of Cambodia.
Like continents
Where Pol Pot won...
(A Fo Ming)
The year 1968 was rich in political events. The Prague Spring, student unrest in Paris, the Vietnam War, and the intensification of the Kurdish-Iranian conflict were only part of what was happening. But the most terrible event was the creation in Cambodia Maoist movement of the Khmer Rouge. According to the most conservative estimates, this is, at first glance, an ordinary event on a local scale. cost Cambodia 3 million lives(Cambodia's population was previously 7 million).
It would seem that what could be more peaceful than an agrarian ideology? However, given the foundations of this ideology - a harsh, uncompromising interpretation of Maoism, hatred of the modern way of life, the perception of cities as the focus of evil - one can guess that the Khmer Rouge in its aspirations (and even more so in its actions; but more on that later) were very far from from peaceful farmers.
The number of the Khmer Rouge reached 30,000 people and grew mainly due to street teenagers who hated the West, city dwellers as accomplices of the West and the entire modern way of life, as well as peasants from the poor eastern regions of the country.
7 years passed from the birth of the Khmer Rouge movement to their coming to power. One should not assume that the regime change took place without bloodshed—for five of these seven years, there was a civil war in the country. The pro-American government of General Lol Nol resisted as much as possible, but was overthrown. April 17, 1975 became a dark day in the history of Cambodia. On this day, Phnom Penh, the capital, was captured by the armed forces of the Khmer Rouge, who established a special dictatorial regime. The head of the state was “Brother Number One,” the General Secretary of the Communist Party Salot Sar (better known under the party nickname Pol Pot). The people, tired of poverty, corruption and American bombing of the areas bordering Vietnam, enthusiastically greeted the “liberators”...
But the joy was short-lived. It soon gave way to horror. The beginning of a “revolutionary experiment” was announced, with the goal of “building a 100% communist society” - a society consisting of hardworking peasants, completely independent of external factors. The state of Cambodia ceased to exist. In its place a new one arose - Democratic Kampuchea - which received the dubious historical reputation of one of the most terrible regimes in the history of mankind...
The first stage of the experiment included the eviction of all city dwellers to the countryside, the abolition of commodity-money relations, a ban on education (including the liquidation of schools, especially universities), a complete ban on religions and the repression of religious figures, a ban on foreign languages, the elimination of officials and the military of the old regime (no, not the elimination of positions - the destruction of the people themselves).
On the very first day of the new government, more than 2 million people were evicted from the capital - all residents of Phnom Penh. Empty-handed, without things, food or medicine, the doomed townspeople set out on foot on a terrible journey, the end of which not everyone managed to reach. Disobedience or delay was punishable by execution on the spot (taking into account the fate of those who were still able to reach new habitats, we can consider that the first victims of the regime were significantly lucky). There were no exceptions for the elderly, the disabled, pregnant women or small children. The Mekong suffered its first bloody sacrifice - about half a million Cambodians died on the banks and during the crossing.
Agricultural concentration camps began to be created throughout the country - the so-called “highest forms of cooperatives” - where the urban population was herded for “labor education”. It consisted in the fact that people had to cultivate the land with primitive tools, and sometimes by hand, working for 12–16 hours without breaks or days off, with strict restrictions on food (in some areas the daily ration of an adult was one bowl of rice), in unsanitary conditions. The new authorities demanded the delivery of 3 tons of rice per hectare, although it had never been possible to obtain more than a ton before. Exhausting labor, hunger, and unsanitary conditions meant almost inevitable death.
The machine of terror demanded new victims. The entire society was permeated with a network of spies and informers. Almost any person could end up in prison on the slightest suspicion - collaboration with the old regime, connections with the intelligence of the USSR, Vietnam or Thailand, hostility to the new government... Not only ordinary citizens, but also the Khmer Rouge themselves were accused “- the ruling party periodically needed “purges”. About half a million Cambodians were executed during the reign of Pol Pot alone on charges of betrayal of the homeland and the revolution. There were not enough places in prisons (and there were more than two hundred of them in Democratic Kampuchea). The most terrible, main prison of Democratic Kampuchea - S-21, or Tuol Sleng - was located in the building of one of the capital's schools. Not only were prisoners held there, but brutal interrogations and mass executions were also carried out. No one came out from there. Only after the fall of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship were the few surviving prisoners released...
The prisoners were in constant fear. Crowding, hunger, unsanitary conditions, a complete ban on communication with each other and with the guards broke the will to resist, and daily interrogations using inhuman torture forced prisoners to confess to all conceivable and unimaginable crimes against the regime. Based on their “testimonies,” new arrests took place, and there was no chance of breaking this terrible chain.
Mass executions were carried out on the prison grounds every day. Now the condemned were no longer shot - ammunition had to be saved - as a rule, they were simply beaten to death with hoes. Soon the prison cemetery overflowed, and the bodies of the executed began to be taken out of the city. The “frugality” of the regime was also manifested in the fact that even its own wounded soldiers were subject to destruction - so as not to waste medicine on them...
Even the prison guards were kept in constant fear. For the slightest offense - such as talking to a prisoner or trying to lean against the wall while on duty - the guard himself could end up in the same cell.
Pol Pot's regime lasted just under four years.
He left behind a completely depleted population, including 142,000 disabled people, 200,000 orphans, and numerous widows. The country was in ruins. Over 600,000 buildings were destroyed, including almost 6,000 schools, about 1,000 hospitals and medical institutions, 1,968 churches (some of them were converted into warehouses, pigsties, prisons...). The country lost almost all agricultural equipment. Domestic animals also became victims of the regime - Poltpotovites destroyed one and a half million heads of livestock.
Perhaps the most incomprehensible thing in the history of Democratic Kampuchea is its recognition at the international level. This state was officially recognized by the UN, Albania and the DPRK. The leadership of the Soviet Union invited Pol Pot to Moscow, which also meant recognition of the legitimacy of the power of the Khmer Rouge - if not de jure, then de facto. The Pol Pot members themselves maintained foreign policy ties only with North Korea, China, Romania, Albania and France. Almost all embassies and consulates on the territory of Democratic Kampuchea were closed, with the exception of the representative offices of the aforementioned North Korea, China, Romania, as well as Cuba and Laos.
The personality of the dictator himself is no less astonishing upon closer examination (by the way, the names and portraits of the country's leaders - Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Ta Mok, Khieu Samphan - were a closely guarded secret for the population; they were simply called - Brother No. 1, Brother No. 2 and so on). Salot Sar was born on May 19, 1925. The son of a wealthy peasant, he had the opportunity to receive a good education. At first he studied at a Buddhist monastery in the capital, then at a French Catholic mission school. In 1949, having received a government scholarship, he went to study in France. There he became imbued with the ideas of Marxism. Salot Sar and Ieng Sari joined the Marxist circle, and in 1952 - the French Communist Party. His article “Monarchy or Democracy” was published in a magazine published by Cambodian students, where he first outlined his political views. As a student, Salot Sar was interested not only in politics, but also in French classical literature, especially the works of Rousseau. In 1953, he returned to his homeland, worked at the university for several years, but then devoted himself entirely to politics. In the early 60s. he headed a radical leftist organization (the one that by 1968 would take shape in the Khmer Rouge movement), and in 1963, the Communist Party of Cambodia. Victory in the civil war led Pol Pot to a short-lived bloody triumph...
The end of the Vietnam War in 1975 led to a sharp deterioration in relations with Cambodia. The first border incidents provoked by the Kampuchean side occurred already in May 1975. And in 1977, after a short lull, there was a new surge of aggression from Democratic Kampuchea. Many civilians in Vietnamese border villages became victims of the Khmer Rouge who crossed the border. In April 1978, the population of the village of Bachuk was completely destroyed - 3,000 Vietnamese civilians. This could not go unpunished, and Vietnam had to carry out a series of military raids into the territory of Democratic Kampuchea. And in December of the same year, a full-scale invasion began with the aim of overthrowing the power of Pol Pot. The country, exhausted by the bloody dictatorship, could not offer any significant resistance, and on January 7, 1979, Phnom Penh fell. Power was transferred to Heng Samrin, head of the United Front for National Salvation of Kampuchea.
Pol Pot had to flee the capital two hours before the Vietnamese army appeared. However, flight for him did not mean final defeat - he hid in a secret military base and, together with his loyal followers, created the National Liberation Front of the Khmer People. The difficult jungle on the border with Thailand became the location of the Khmer Rouge for the next two decades.
By mid-year, the Vietnamese army controlled all major cities in Cambodia. To support the weak government of Heng Samrin, Vietnam kept a military contingent of about 170-180 thousand troops in Cambodia for 10 years. By the end of the 80s. the state of Cambodia and its army became so strong that it could do without the help of Vietnam. In September 1989, the complete withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodian territory was carried out. Only Vietnamese military advisers remained in the country. However, the war between the Cambodian government and the Khmer Rouge guerrilla units continued for almost 10 years. The militants enjoyed significant financial support from the United States and China, which allowed them to resist for such a long time. The losses of the Vietnamese army during its 10 years in Cambodia amounted to about 25,000 troops.
In 1991, a peace treaty was signed between the government and the remnants of the Khmer Rouge, some of the units surrendered and received an amnesty. In 1997, the remaining Khmer Rouge created the National Solidarity Party. Former associates held a show trial over Pol Pot. He was placed under house arrest, and the following year he died under very strange circumstances. It is still unknown whether his death was natural or not. The body was put on fire, and none of the closest associates was present. Pol Pot's modest grave was not razed to the ground only out of fear that the spirit of the dictator would take revenge on those who disturbed him.
But even after the death of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge movement did not cease to exist. Back in 2005, militants were active in the provinces of Ratanakiri and Stung Traeng.
Many Pol Pot supporters were put on trial. Among them were Ieng Sary (Brother No. 3), the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Democratic Kampuchea, and the former head of the S-21 prison, Kang Kek Yeu (Duch). The latter left the Khmer Rouge movement in the 1980s and converted to Christianity. At his trial, he pleaded guilty to the deaths of 15,000 people and asked for forgiveness from the relatives of the victims...
In July 2006, the last leader of the Khmer Rouge, Ta Mok (Brother No. 4), died. Brother No. 2, Nuon Chea, was arrested on September 19, 2007, on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. A few weeks later, the remaining surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge movement were arrested. They are currently undergoing trials.
An entire people, with its ancient cultural traditions and reverence for faith, was brutally mutilated by a Marxist fanatic. Pol Pot, with the silent connivance of the whole world, turned a prosperous country into a huge cemetery...Imagine that a government comes to power and announces a ban on money. And not only for money: commerce, industry, banks are prohibited - everything that brings wealth. The new government declares by decree that society is again becoming agrarian, as it was in the Middle Ages. Residents of cities and towns are forcibly relocated to the countryside, where they will engage exclusively in peasant labor. But family members cannot live together: children should not fall under the influence of the “bourgeois ideas” of their parents. Therefore, the children are taken away and raised in the spirit of loyalty to the new regime. No books until adulthood. The books are no longer needed, so they are burned, and children from the age of seven work for the Khmer Rouge state.
An eighteen-hour working day is established for the new agrarian class, hard labor is combined with “re-education” in the spirit of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism under the leadership of the new masters. Dissidents who sympathize with the old order do not have the right to life. The intelligentsia, teachers, university professors, and literate people in general are subject to extermination, since they can read materials hostile to the ideas of Marxism-Leninism and spread seditious ideology among workers re-educated in the peasant field. The clergy, politicians of all stripes, except those who share the views of the ruling party, people who made a fortune under the previous authorities are no longer needed - they are also destroyed. Trade and telephone communications are curtailed, temples are destroyed, bicycles, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, holidays, love and kindness are cancelled. In the best case - labor for the purpose of "re-education", otherwise - torture, torment, degradation, in the worst case - death.
This nightmare scenario is not the sophisticated figment of a science fiction writer's fevered imagination. It represents the horrific reality of life in Cambodia, where the murderous dictator Pol Pot turned back the clock, destroying civilization in an attempt to realize his twisted vision of a classless society. His “killing fields” were littered with the corpses of those who did not fit into the framework of the new world formed by him and his bloodthirsty minions. During the Pol Pot regime, about three million people died in Cambodia - the same number as the unfortunate victims who perished in the gas chambers of the Nazi death factory Auschwitz during the Second World War. Life under Sex Pot was unbearable, and as a result of the tragedy that took place on the soil of this ancient country in Southeast Asia, its long-suffering population came up with a new eerie name for Cambodia - the Land of the Walking Dead.
The tragedy of Cambodia is a consequence of the Vietnam War, which first broke out in the ruins of French colonialism and then escalated into conflict with the Americans. Fifty-three thousand Cambodians died on the battlefields. From 1969 to 1973, American B-52 bombers used carpet bombing to drop as many tons of explosives on this tiny country as were dropped on Germany during the last two years of World War II. Vietnamese fighters - the Viet Cong - used the impenetrable jungles of the neighboring country to set up military camps and bases during operations against the Americans. American planes bombed these strong points.
Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia's ruler and heir to its religious and cultural traditions, renounced his royal title ten years before the outbreak of the Vietnam War but remained head of state. He tried to lead the country along the path of neutrality, balancing between warring countries and conflicting ideologies. Sihanouk became king of Cambodia, a French protectorate, back in 1941, but abdicated the throne in 1955. However, then, after free elections, he returned to lead the country as head of state.
During the escalation of the Vietnam War from 1966 to 1969, Sihanouk fell out of favor with the political leadership in Washington for not taking decisive action against arms smuggling and the establishment of Vietnamese guerrilla camps in the Cambodian jungle. However, he was also quite mild in his criticism of punitive air raids carried out by the United States.
On March 18, 1970, while Sihanouk was in Moscow, his prime minister, General Lon Nol, with the support of the White House, carried out a coup d'état, returning Cambodia to its ancient name Khmer. The United States recognized the Khmer Republic, but within a month it invaded it. Sihanouk found himself in exile in Beijing. And here the ex-king made a choice, entering into an alliance with the devil himself.
Little is known about Pol Pot. This is a man with the appearance of a handsome old man and the heart of a bloody tyrant. It was with this monster that Sihanouk teamed up. Together with the leader of the Khmer Rouge, they vowed to merge their forces together for the common goal of defeating American troops.
Pol Pot, who grew up in a peasant family in the Cambodian province of Kampong Khom and received his primary education in a Buddhist monastery, was a monk for two years. In the fifties he studied electronics in Paris and, like many students of that time, became involved in the leftist movement. Here Pol Pot heard - it is still unknown whether they met - about another student, Khieu Samphan, whose controversial but exciting plans for an "agrarian revolution" fueled Pol Pot's great power ambitions.
According to Samphan's theory, Cambodia, in order to achieve progress, had to turn back, renounce capitalist exploitation, the fattening leaders nurtured by the French colonial rulers, and abandon devalued bourgeois values and ideals. Samphan's perverted theory stated that people should live in the fields, and all temptations of modern life should be destroyed. If Pol Pot had, say, been hit by a car at that time, this theory would probably have died out in coffee shops and bars without crossing the boundaries of the Parisian boulevards. However, she was destined to become a monstrous reality.
From 1970 to 1975, Pol Pot's "revolutionary army" became a powerful force in Cambodia, controlling vast agricultural areas. On April 17, 1975, the dictator's dream of power became a reality: his troops, marching under red flags, entered the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. A few hours after the coup, Pol Pot called a special meeting of his new cabinet and announced that the country would henceforth be called Kampuchea. The dictator outlined a bold plan for building a new society and said that its implementation would take only a few days. Pol Pot announced the evacuation of all cities under the leadership of newly appointed regional and zonal leaders, ordered the closure of all markets, the destruction of churches and the dispersal of all religious communities. Having received his education abroad, he hated educated people and ordered the execution of all teachers, professors and even kindergarten teachers.
The first to die were high-ranking members of the cabinet and functionaries of the Lon Nol regime. They were followed by the officer corps of the old army. Everyone was buried in mass graves. At the same time, doctors were killed because of their “education.” All religious communities were destroyed - they were considered “reactionary”. Then the evacuation of cities and villages began.
Pol Pot's perverted dream of turning back time and forcing his people to live in a Marxist agrarian society was helped by his deputy Ieng Sari. In his policy of destruction, Pol Pot used the term "getting out of sight." “They removed” - they destroyed thousands and thousands of women and men, old people and babies.
Buddhist temples were desecrated or turned into soldiers' brothels, or even simply slaughterhouses. As a result of the terror, out of sixty thousand monks, only three thousand returned to the destroyed temples and holy monasteries.
Pol Pot's decree effectively eradicated ethnic minorities. Using Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese was punishable by death. A purely Khmer society was proclaimed. The forced eradication of ethnic groups was especially hard on the Chan people. Their ancestors - people from what is now Vietnam - inhabited the ancient Kingdom of Champa. The Chans migrated to Cambodia in the 17th century! century and were engaged in fishing along the banks of Cambodian rivers and lakes. They professed Islam and were the most significant ethnic group in modern Cambodia, preserving the purity of their language, national cuisine, clothing, hairstyles, religious and ritual traditions.
Young fanatics from the Khmer Rouge attacked the vats like locusts. Their settlements were burned, the inhabitants were driven into swamps infested with mosquitoes. People were forcibly forced to eat pork, which was strictly prohibited by their religion, and the clergy were mercilessly destroyed. If the slightest resistance was shown, entire communities were exterminated, and the corpses were thrown into huge pits and covered with lime. Of the two hundred thousand Chans, less than half remained alive.
Those who survived the beginning of the campaign of terror later realized that instant death was better than hellish torment under the new regime.
"Bourgeois" criminals
According to Pol Pot, the older generation was spoiled by feudal and bourgeois views, infected with “sympathies” for Western democracies, which he declared alien to the national way of life. The urban population was driven from their habitable places to labor camps, where hundreds of thousands of people were tortured to death by backbreaking labor.
People were killed for even trying to speak French - the biggest crime in the eyes of the Khmer Rouge, as this was considered a manifestation of nostalgia for the country's colonial past.
In huge camps with no amenities other than a straw mat for sleeping and a bowl of rice at the end of the working day, in conditions that even prisoners of Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War would not have envied, traders, teachers, entrepreneurs worked, the only survivors because they managed to hide their professions, as well as thousands of other citizens.
These camps were organized in such a way as to, through “natural selection,” get rid of the old and sick, pregnant women and young children.
People died in hundreds and thousands from disease, hunger and exhaustion, under the batons of cruel overseers.
Without medical assistance other than traditional herbal treatments, the life expectancy of prisoners in these camps was depressingly short.
At dawn, men were marched in formation into the malarial swamps, where they cleared the jungle for twelve hours a day in an unsuccessful attempt to reclaim new cropland from them. At sunset, again in formation, urged on by the bayonets of the guards, people returned to the camp to their cup of rice, gruel and a piece of dried fish. Then, despite terrible fatigue, they still had to go through political classes on Marxist ideology, during which incorrigible “bourgeois elements” were identified and punished, and the rest, like parrots, kept repeating phrases about the joys of life in the new state. Every ten working days there was a long-awaited day off, for which twelve hours of ideological classes were planned. Wives lived separately from their husbands. Their children began working at the age of seven or were placed at the disposal of childless party functionaries, who raised them to be fanatical “fighters of the revolution.”
From time to time, huge bonfires made of books were made in city squares. Crowds of unfortunate tortured people were driven to these bonfires, who were forced to chant memorized phrases in chorus, while the flames devoured the masterpieces of world civilization. “Lessons of hatred” were organized when people were flogged in front of portraits of the leaders of the old regime. It was an ominous world of horror and hopelessness.
The Polpotites broke off diplomatic relations with all countries, postal and telephone communications did not work, entry into and exit from the country was prohibited. The Cambodian people found themselves isolated from the rest of the world.
To intensify the fight against real and imaginary enemies, Pol Pot organized a sophisticated system of torture and execution in his prison camps. As during the Spanish Inquisition, the dictator and his minions proceeded from the premise that those who ended up in these damned places were guilty and all they had to do was admit their guilt. To convince its followers of the need for brutal measures to achieve the goals of “national revival,” the regime attached special political significance to torture.
Documents seized after the overthrow of Pol Pot show that Khmer security officers trained by Chinese instructors were guided by brutal, ideological principles in their activities. The Interrogation Guidelines S-21, one of the documents later submitted to the UN, stated: “The purpose of torture is to obtain an adequate response to it from the interrogated. Torture is not used for entertainment. Pain must be inflicted in such a way that
cause a quick reaction. Another goal is psychological breakdown and loss of will of the interrogated person. Torture should not be based on one's own anger or self-satisfaction. The victim must be beaten in such a way as to intimidate him, and not to beat him to death. Before starting torture, it is necessary to examine the health of the interrogated person and examine the instruments of torture. You should not try to kill the person being interrogated. During interrogation, political considerations are primary, causing pain is secondary. Therefore, you should never forget that you are engaged in political work. Even during interrogations, agitation and propaganda work should be constantly carried out. At the same time, it is necessary to avoid indecision and hesitation during torture, when it is possible to obtain answers to our questions from the enemy. We must remember that indecisiveness can slow down our work. In other words, in propaganda and educational work of this kind it is necessary to show determination, persistence, and categoricalness. We must engage in torture without first explaining the reasons or motives. Only then will the enemy be broken."
Among the numerous sophisticated methods of torture that the Khmer Rouge executioners resorted to, the most favorite were the notorious Chinese water torture, crucifixion, and strangulation with a plastic bag. Site S-21, which gave the document its name, was the most notorious camp in all of Cambodia. It was located in the northeast of the country. At least thirty thousand victims of the regime were tortured here. Only seven survived, and only because the administrative skills of the prisoners were needed by their owners to manage this terrible institution.
But torture was not the only weapon to intimidate the already frightened population of the country. There are many known cases when guards in camps caught prisoners, driven to despair by hunger, eating their dead comrades in misfortune. The punishment for this was terrible death. The culprits were buried up to their necks in the ground and left to slowly die from hunger and thirst, while their still living flesh was tormented by ants and other living creatures. The victims' heads were then cut off and displayed on stakes around the settlement. They hung a sign around their necks: “I am a traitor to the revolution!”
Dith Pran, a Cambodian translator for American journalist Sidney Schoenberg, lived through all the horrors of Pol Pot's rule. The inhuman ordeals he had to go through are documented in the film "The Killing Field", in which he
The suffering of the Cambodian people was revealed to the whole world for the first time in stunning nakedness. The heartbreaking tale of Pran's journey from a civilized childhood to a death camp left viewers horrified.
“In my prayers,” Pran said, “I asked the Almighty to save me from the unbearable torment that I was forced to endure. But some of my loved ones managed to flee the country and take refuge in America. For their sake I continued to live, but it was not life , but a nightmare."
Skull mounds
Pran was lucky enough to survive this bloody Asian nightmare and reunite with his family in San Francisco in 1979. But in the remote corners of a devastated country that has experienced a terrible tragedy, mass graves of nameless victims still remain, above which mounds of human skulls rise in silent reproach.
In the end, thanks to military power, and not morality and law, it was possible to stop the carnage and restore at least a semblance of common sense to the tormented land. To its credit, the UK protested against human rights abuses in 1978 following reports of rampant terror in Cambodia through intermediaries in Thailand, but this protest fell on deaf ears. Britain made a statement to the UN Commission on Human Rights, but a representative of the Khmer Rouge hysterically retorted: “The British imperialists have no right to talk about human rights. The whole world knows their barbaric essence. The leaders of Britain are drowning in luxury, while the proletariat has the right only for unemployment, illness and prostitution."
In December 1978, Vietnamese troops, who had been in conflict with the Khmer Rouge over disputed border areas for many years, entered Cambodia with several motorized infantry divisions supported by tanks. The country fell into such decline that, due to the lack of telephone communications, it was necessary to deliver combat messages on bicycles.
In early 1979, the Vietnamese occupied Phnom Penh. A few hours earlier, Pol Pot left the deserted capital in a white armored Mercedes. The bloody dictator hurried to his Chinese masters, who provided him with refuge, but did not support him in the fight against the heavily armed Viet Cong.
When the whole world became aware of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime and the devastation that reigned in the country, help rushed to Cambodia in a powerful stream. The Khmer Rouge, like the Nazis in their time, were very pedantic in recording their crimes. The investigation discovered journals in which daily executions and torture were recorded in great detail, hundreds of albums with photographs of those sentenced to execution, including the wives and children of intellectuals liquidated in the initial stages of the terror, and detailed documentation about the notorious “killing fields.” These fields, conceived as the basis of a labor utopia, a country without money and needs, in fact turned out to be mass graves of the day of burial of people crushed by the yoke of cruel tyranny.
Pol Pot, who seemed to have faded into oblivion, has recently re-emerged on the political horizon as a force vying for power in this long-suffering country. Like all tyrants, he claims that his subordinates made mistakes, that he faced resistance on all fronts, and that those killed were “enemies of the state.” Returning to Cambodia in 1981, at a secret meeting among his old friends near the Thai border, he declared that he had been too trusting: “My policy was correct. Overzealous regional commanders and local leaders perverted my orders. Accusations of massacres are vile lie. If we really destroyed people in such numbers, the people would have ceased to exist long ago."
Angel of Death
A "misunderstanding" at the cost of three million lives, almost a quarter of the country's population, is too innocent a word to describe what was done in the name of Pol Pot and on his orders. But, following the famous Nazi principle - the more monstrous the lie, the more people are able to believe it - Pol Pot is still eager for power and hopes to gather forces in the rural areas, which, in his opinion, are still loyal to him.
He has again become a major political figure and is waiting for an opportunity to reappear in the country as an angel of death, seeking revenge and completion of the previously begun work - his “great agrarian revolution.”
There is a growing movement in international circles to recognize the massacres committed in Cambodia as a crime against humanity - similar to Hitler's genocide against the Jews. There is a Cambodian Documentation Center in New York under the direction of Ieng Sam. Like former Nazi camp prisoner Simon Wiesenthal, who spent many years collecting evidence around the world against Nazi war criminals, Yeung Sam, a survivor of the campaign of terror, is amassing information about the atrocities of criminals in his country.
Here are his words: “Those most guilty of the Cambodian genocide - members of the cabinet of the Pol Pot regime, members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, military leaders of the Khmer Rouge, whose troops took part in the massacres, officials who supervised the executions and supervised the system of torture - continue active in Cambodia.Hiding out in the border areas, they wage a guerrilla war, seeking to return to power in Phnom Penh.
They were not brought to international legal responsibility for their crimes, and this is a tragic, monstrous injustice.
We, the survivors, remember how we were deprived of our families, how our relatives and friends were brutally killed. We witnessed how people died from exhaustion, unable to endure slave labor, and from the inhuman living conditions to which the Khmer Rouge doomed the Cambodian people.
We also saw Pol Pot's soldiers destroy our Buddhist temples, stop our children's schools, suppress our culture, and exterminate our ethnic minorities. It is difficult for us to understand why free, democratic states and nations do nothing to punish those responsible. Doesn't this issue cry out for justice?"
But there is still no fair solution to this issue.
In 1968, it was one of the parties to the civil war in Cambodia, in which North Vietnam, South Vietnam and the United States actively intervened. The number is about 30 thousand people. Initially, members of this movement were radical Khmers studying in France and Cambodia. The movement was filled mainly by teenagers 12-15 years old, who had lost their parents and hated the townspeople as “collaborators of the Americans.”
Encyclopedic YouTube
- Stop the policy of ruining the peasantry - the basis of Kampuchean society, end corruption and usury;
- Eliminate the eternal dependence of Kampuchea on foreign countries;
- To restore order in the country, for which first of all it is necessary to establish a strict political regime.
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✪ Khmer Rouge
✪ Who is Pol Pot (BRIEFLY)
✪ Dictators - Pol Pot / Barba
✪ The trial of Pol Pot (narrated by historian Alexey Kuznetsov)
Having come to power, the Pol Pot government set three tactical tasks that required immediate solutions:
Strategically, at the first stage, there was the eviction of city residents to the countryside, the liquidation of commodity-money relations, many institutions and services of the state, the social sphere and life support, the persecution of Buddhist monks and, in general, a complete ban on any religion, the physical destruction of officials and military personnel of the previous regime at all levels , former owners of plantations and large farms.
The entire population of the country was divided into three main categories. The first - the “main people” - included residents of the regions. The second part is the “new people” or “people of April 17th”. These are residents of cities and villages that were for a long time in territory temporarily occupied by the Americans or under the control of the puppet forces of Lon Nol. This part of the population had to undergo serious re-education. The third part is the intelligentsia, the reactionary clergy, persons who served in the state apparatus of previous regimes, officers and sergeants of Lonnol's army, revisionists who were trained in Hanoi. This category of the population had to be subjected to large-scale cleansing, in fact, total extermination. [ ]
All citizens were required to work. The entire country was turned into agricultural labor communes with 18-20 hour [ ] during the working day, in which the local poor and middle peasantry and people driven out of the cities in difficult conditions were engaged in low-skilled physical labor - mainly planting rice. The communes housed citizens who were taken out of cities during “evacuations due to the threat of an American offensive.”
Socialized children were isolated in concentration camps [ ], where they were supposed to instill love for the current regime and Pol Pot, and also make them hate their parents. Teenagers were taken into the Khmer Rouge army - they were given weapons and almost all local power remained with them. They patrolled the streets, supervised work on plantations, brutally tortured and exterminated people.
The systems of medicine, education, science and culture were “abolished” (completely destroyed). Hospitals, schools, universities, libraries, and all other cultural and scientific institutions were closed. Money, foreign languages, and foreign books were prohibited. It was forbidden to write or read anything except decrees and other documents of the command. Wearing glasses was considered unreliable and served as one of the charges, including executions.
Genocide
The long civil war, the invasion of Vietnam and the United States, massive bombing of Cambodian territory, the abundance of refugees and forcibly displaced persons, and the bias of witnesses make it difficult to assess the scale of civilian losses from the repressive activities of the Khmer Rouge. There are a variety of estimates: from tens of thousands to several millions.
According to Pol Pot's idea, to build a “bright future” the country needed “one million devoted people.” the remaining six-plus million inhabitants were subject to severe restrictions with re-education or physical destruction as “incapable” of re-education. For example, out of tens of thousands of people sent to one of the prisons, Tuol Sleng (now the genocide museum), only twelve are known to have survived - by a happy coincidence they simply did not have time to be shot. Today, one of the prisoners is the main witness in the trial of the Pol Pot regime.
The British imperialists have no right to talk about human rights. Their barbaric nature is well known to the whole world. The leaders of Britain wallow in luxury, while the proletariat has the right only to unemployment, disease and prostitution.
Representative of the Cambodian government to the UN Commission on Human Rights
From the indictment of the People's Revolutionary Tribunal of Kampuchea in the case of the “criminal clique of Pol Potites”:
"Polpot's people:
They beat their victims on the head with hoes, pickaxes, sticks, and iron rods; Using knives and sharp sugar palm leaves, they cut the throats of their victims, ripped open their stomachs, removed the liver, which they ate, and gall bladders, which were used to make “medicines”;
Using bulldozers, they crushed people, and also used explosives - to kill as many as possible at once;
They buried people alive and burned those they suspected of being involved in opposition to the regime; they gradually cut off their meat, dooming people to a slow death;
They threw children into the air, and then picked them up with bayonets, they tore off their limbs, smashed their heads against trees;
They threw people into ponds where they kept crocodiles, they hung people from trees by their arms or legs so that they would dangle in the air longer ... "
Protocol on the crimes of the Pol Pot - Ieng Sary - Khieu Samphan clique towards the Kampuchean people in the period 1975-1978
“1,160,307 people provided evidence of Pol Pot’s crimes. Between 1975 and 1978, the death toll was 2,746,105, including 1,927,061 peasants, 25,168 monks, 48,359 members of national minorities, 305,417 workers, employees and representatives of other professions, about 100 writers and journalists, a number foreign citizens, as well as old people and children. 568,663 people were missing and either died in the jungle or were buried in mass graves similar to those discovered near Kampong Chhnang Airport, near Siem Reap and along the slopes of the Dangrek Range. These 3,374,768 people were killed with hoes, clubs, burned, buried alive, cut into pieces, stabbed to death with sharp sugar palm leaves, poisoned, electrocuted, tortured with nails pulled out, crushed by tractor tracks, thrown to be eaten crocodiles, their livers were cut out, which served as food for the executioners, small children were quartered alive, thrown into the air and impaled on bayonets, beaten against tree trunks, women were raped and impaled on stakes. The Pol Pot regime left behind 141,848 disabled people, more than 200 thousand orphans, and numerous widows who could not find their families. The survivors were deprived of strength, unable to reproduce, and in a state of poverty and complete physical exhaustion. A large number of young people lost their happiness as a result of forced marriages carried out by the Pol Potites on a massive scale.
634,522 buildings were destroyed, of which 5,857 were schools, as well as 796 hospitals, medical stations and laboratories, 1,968 churches were destroyed or turned into warehouses or prisons. 108 mosques were also destroyed. The Polpotites destroyed a countless number of agricultural tools, as well as 1,507,416 heads of cattle.”
Persecution for religious beliefs
The constitution of Democratic Kampuchea stated: “Reactionary religions that harm Democratic Kampuchea and the Kampuchean people are strictly prohibited.” In accordance with this article of the constitution, persecution and mass extermination took place on religious grounds. One of the first to be killed was the supreme head of the Mahannikai Buddhist organization, Huot That, on April 18, 1975 in Prang Pagoda (Udong District, Kampong Speu Province). Only a few of the 82 thousand Buddhist bonzes managed to escape. Buddha statues and Buddhist books were destroyed, pagodas and temples were turned into warehouses, and not a single functioning pagoda remained out of the 2,800 that existed in the former Cambodia.
From 1975 to January 1979 All 60 thousand Cambodian Christians were killed, both priests and laity. All churches were looted and most were blown up. The head of the Muslims, Hari Roslos, and his assistants, Haji Suleiman and Haji Mat Suleiman, were brutally killed after torture. Of the 20 thousand Muslims living in Kampong Siem district (Kampong Cham province), not a single person remained alive. Of the 20 thousand Muslims in Kampong Meas district of the same province, only four people remained alive. All 114 mosques were destroyed and vandalized, some of them turned into pigsties, blown up with dynamite, or bulldozed.
Estimates of genocide
As a result of the repressions, according to various estimates, from 1 to 3 million people were killed - it is impossible to give an exact figure due to the lack of censuses; In terms of the ratio of the number of people killed to the total population, the Khmer Rouge regime is one of the most brutal regimes in human history.
The above official estimate by the government and the People's Revolutionary Tribunal of the People's Republic of Kampuchea puts the number of 2.75 million people killed by the crimes of the Khmer Rouge.
During the Khmer Rouge regime, many Western liberal intellectuals denied the genocide or argued that the number of victims was greatly exaggerated. After the Vietnamese invasion, when the facts of Pol Pot’s crimes began to be widely published in the Western press, many of them repented and reconsidered their point of view, but a turn in the other direction took place: now the conservative press began to downplay Pol Pot’s crimes, since in NATO countries he was considered a natural ally against socialist Vietnam, which won the war against the United States. In this regard, it was the Khmer Rouge that continued to represent Kampuchea at the UN until the early 1990s. (since 1982, a coalition government was represented at the UN, which, in addition to the Khmer Rouge, included supporters of Norodom Sihanouk and Son Sann).
Modern and foreign analysis of the Khmer Rouge policy, as a rule, also boils down to a statement of an extreme form of genocide of the Khmer people, although somewhat lower estimates of the number of victims are given. The World Bank puts the number of population losses for 1975-1980 at about half a million people. There are even lower estimates of casualties - for example, Milton Leitenberg claims that 80-100 thousand people were directly killed.
At the same time, part of the country's population - the poor peasantry not affected by repression - is nostalgic for the times of the Khmer Rouge regime. Thus, approximately a third of students named Pol Pot the most outstanding person in the history of Cambodia.
The Extraordinary Tribunal of Cambodia, founded in 2003 with UN support, prosecuted four of the most senior Khmer Rouge officials. Kang Kek Yeu has been sentenced and is accused of murdering 12,000 people in Tuol Sleng Prison. Only one of the 4 accused admitted his guilt.
The war with Vietnam and the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime
As a result of the civil war and the actions of the Khmer Rouge regime, the country fell into decay. Soon a war broke out with Vietnam, unleashed by the Khmer Rouge: already in May 1975, immediately after the end of hostilities in Vietnam, they carried out the first attack on Vietnamese territory (Phu Quoc Island), and subsequently periodically carried out such attacks, killing civilians Vietnamese population; for example, on the island of Tho Chu they killed 500 people.
In the areas bordering Vietnam (“Eastern Zone”), the head of the Sao Phim zone established a particularly brutal regime. As a result of the uprising that arose in May-June 1978, he committed suicide, and his relatives were killed. However, the uprising was brutally suppressed, during the reprisals more than 100 thousand local residents were killed (including the entire native village of Sao Phim), and the surviving participants fled to Vietnam.
The overthrow of the Pol Pot regime caused sharp discontent in the PRC. After weeks of continuous border skirmishes, the Chinese army invaded Vietnam on February 17, 1979. Having suffered heavy losses, the Chinese advanced only 50 km into Vietnam. A month later, the Vietnamese-Chinese conflict ended. Neither side achieved decisive results.
After the overthrow by Vietnamese troops, the Khmer Rouge, which continued to have the support of China, fought against the pro-Vietnamese-pro-Soviet government of Heng Samrin-Hun Sen.
In 1982, the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea was formed in exile ( CGDK), which represented Cambodia in the UN and other international organizations in place of both the Khmer Rouge regime and the People's Republic of Kampuchea that replaced it. The CGDK included Pol Pot's Party of Democratic Kampuchea, the pro-Western National Front for the Liberation of the Khmer People of ex-Prime Minister Son Sann and supporters of Prince Sihanouk from the FUNCINPEC party. The head of “Democratic Kampuchea” was Sihanouk, the prime minister was Son Sann, but the Khmer Rouge remained the most numerous and main fighting force of the coalition. Their National Army of Democratic Kampuchea was significantly superior to the Armed Forces of the Khmer People's National Liberation and the Sihanouk National Army.
Internal contradictions and decline of the movement
Despite the rigid hierarchy and repression, there were contradictions in the leadership of the Khmer Rouge from the very beginning.
In 1971-1975 the partisan movement in the southern and eastern regions of Cambodia was dominated not by the Khmer Rouge, but by their allied, but significantly more moderate in its views, the Khmer Rumdo movement, which supported Prince Sihanouk. Their uniform (Vietnamese style) differed from the Khmer Rouge clothing (black). By 1975, the Khmer Rumdo movement formally submitted to the Khmer Rouge, who soon began repressing their leaders. One of the first victims was Hu Yong, who was very popular among ordinary supporters and actively criticized excessive cruelty; he was killed a few months after the seizure of power. In September 1976, Pol Pot was forced to cede the post of prime minister to Nuon Chea, who, however, turned out to be his loyal ally, helped him suppress the putsch and a month later ceded his position to him again. In 1977, a member of Hu Nim's senior leadership was executed.
Despite the defeat of the Khmer Rumdo faction, mid-level figures continued to fight and became part of the pro-Vietnamese guerrilla movement, whose leader, Heng Samrin, was installed in power in Kampuchea after the victory of the Vietnamese troops.
In photographs of victims of the Tuol Sleng prison, many of them wear characteristic clothes and hairstyles of the Khmer Rouge, which also speaks of internal party repression.
Sometimes rumors of internal contradictions were deliberately spread by the regime. Thus, despite an active anti-Vietnamese policy immediately after coming to power, Nuon Chea managed to pose as a lobbyist for Vietnamese interests in the leadership of the Khmer Rouge and even receive financial assistance from Vietnam.
The expulsion of the Khmer Rouge and the formation of the Hun Sen government led to a change in Khmer Rouge rhetoric. Without much publicity, some former victims were rehabilitated, in particular Hu Yun, whose name began to be mentioned with positive epithets.
The agreement of Kampuchea leader Hun Sen to create a coalition government with the participation of the UN and the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from the country led to the fact that international recognition of his government increased, and the influence of the Khmer Rouge began to decline. In the late 1980s and early 1990s. Negotiations continued between the Khmer Rouge, the government of Kampuchea-Cambodia and other opposition forces, during which the Khmer Rouge initially set unacceptable conditions. In 1992, under the formal chairmanship