There is a real discomfort in writing this blog and sharing these photos. Learning about Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime, and visiting the hallowed sites of Choeung Ek ‘Killing Fields’ and Tuol Sleng (S.21) prison was something that we felt obliged to do. You don’t really look forward to it, but you feel you must, to pay respect and homage to victims, and indeed to pay respect and homage to those who live everyday with their memories of this horrific period in Cambodia’s history.
Before he was Pol Pot, he was Saloth Sar. Born in 1925, in Kampong Thom Province, son to a considerably wealthy, land-owning, rice farmer and eighth of nine children. At the age of 20 he moved to Paris on a scholarship to study radio electronics, however he neglected his studies when he joined the Cercle Marxiste (Marxist Circle) that had taken over the Khmer Students Association, and indeed captivated the impressionable young man and his peers.
He returned to Cambodia in 1953, after losing his scholarship, and joined an underground communist movement whilst teaching French literature and history at a private school, an incredible irony considering teachers were amongst those targeted under his leadership.
In 1962, Sar became the acting leader of the Cambodian Communist Party but soon after was driven into hiding in the jungle near the Vietnamese border by Prince Norodom Sihanouk. It was during this time that Sar formed his armed resistance movement, the Khmer Rouge (Red Khmers/Cambodians). The colour red was invoked as a symbol of communism.
His road to power began in 1970, when Sihanouk was removed as head of state after he ordered anti-Vietnamese protests that spun out of control, and his followers were found to be involved in clandestine operations. After his removal from government, the North Vietnamese convinced Sihanouk to support the Khmer Rouge, which he did actively, and they also offered Saloth Sar (Pol Pot) whatever resources he required for his insurgency against the Cambodian government.
In the period that followed, the North Vietnamese (Viet Minh) and the rebel group in South Vietnam (Viet Cong) undertook most of the fighting against the Cambodian government. Sar took this opportunity, not only to instill his principles of Cambodian self-sufficiency, but also to gather and indoctrinate new recruits into his army. These new recruits were peasant class youths (the poorer, and by extension, less educated and more easily inculcated, the better). By 1973, Sar already controlled two thirds of the country and half the population. He had began reorganising peasant villages into cooperatives, evacuating cities to the countryside and importing 5 million dollars a year worth of weapons from China, funded by slave-labour run rubber plantations in the north of the country.
On April 17, 1975 the Khmer Rouge army, primarily made up of teenage peasant guerrillas, marched into Phnom Penh to begin a mass evacuation of all its citizens to the countryside. Saloth Sar renamed himself ‘brother number one’ with the pseudonym of Pol Pot.
Thus began the 4 year rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and indeed also began the unfathomable horror that was inflicted upon Cambodia.
The country was renamed the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea, and became somewhat of an experiment, informed by Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, in extremist agrarian socialism. Year 0 was announced, and society began to be ‘purified’.
Money was quickly removed from circulation, businesses were closed, media was shut down, as were means of communication including mail services, telephone and even the ownership of bicycles. Foreigners were expelled, and foreign languages ousted, foreign economic and medical assistance was also denied. Education was halted, religions were banned, health care eliminated and parental authority curtailed.
Two million inhabitants of Phnom Penh were sent, on foot, to the countryside, with some 20,000 dying along with way. Everyone was forced into slave labour on collective farms and projects. Pol Pot demanded that the national rice yield be tripled immediately, which of course, was an impossible demand to meet. And though the crop output and exports were enormous, Cambodians starved. A work day was 18 hours long, with only two rest periods, and workers were expected to survive on two meals of rice soup (but the grains of rice were so few one could count the number of them in one’s bowl).
All remnants of ‘old society’ were destroyed, and many of those imprisoned, tortured and executed were the educated, wealthy, police, lawyers, teachers, former officials and soldiers, and even buddhist monks or other religious figures.
Through the combined efforts of executions, forced labour, malnutrition and virtually no healthcare, 25% of the Cambodian population perished. The exact numbers are not known, but the best estimate, is some 2.2 million people.
Photos by Ben Journee
