KHMER ROUGE

The Communist élites which seized power by force all over Indo-China in April 1975 immediately embarked on nationwide programmes of social engineering which recalled Stalin’s collectivization of the peasants, though in some respects they were even more inhuman. The best-documented is the ‘ruralization’ conducted in Cambodia by the Communist Khmer Rouge, which entered the capital Phnom Penh in mid-April, the American embassy having been evacuated on the 12th. The atrocities began on 17 April. They were carried out mainly by illiterate peasant soldiers, but they had been planned two years before by a group of middle-class ideologues who called themselves Angka Loeu (‘the Higher Organization’). Details of their plan had been obtained by a State Department expert, Kenneth Quinn, who circulated it in a report dated 20 February 1974.

The scheme was an attempt to telescope, in one terrifying coup, the social changes brought about over twenty-five years in Mao’s China. There was to be ‘total social revolution’. Everything about the past was ‘anathema and must be destroyed’. It was necessary to ‘psychologically reconstruct individual members of society’. It entailed ‘stripping away, through terror and other means, the traditional bases, structures and forces which have shaped and guided an individual’s life’ and then ‘rebuilding him according to party doctrines by substituting a series of new values’. Angka Loeu consisted of about twenty professional political intellectuals, mainly teachers and bureaucrats. Of the eight leaders, all in their forties (one a woman), five were teachers, one a university professor, one an economist, one a bureaucrat. All had studied in France in the 1950s, where they had absorbed the doctrines of ‘necessary violence’ preached on the radical Left. They were Sartre’s children.

It is notable that, while this group of ideologues preached the virtues of rural life, none had in fact ever engaged in manual labour or had any experience at all of creating wealth. Like Lenin, they were pure intellectuals. They epitomized the great destructive force of the twentieth century: the religious fanatic reincarnated as professional politician. What they did illustrated the ultimate heartlessness of ideas. In any other age or place, the plans of these savage pedants would have remained in their fevered imaginations. In Cambodia in 1975 it was possible to put them into practice.

On 17 April over 3 million people were living in Phnom Penh. They were literally pushed into the surrounding countryside. The violence started at 7 am with attacks on Chinese shops; then general looting. The first killings came at 8.45 am. Fifteen minutes later troops began to clear the Military Hospital, driving doctors, nurses, sick and dying into the streets. An hour later they opened fire on anyone seen in the streets, to start a panic out of the city. At noon the Preah Ket Melea hospital was cleared: hundreds of men, women and children, driven at gunpoint, limped out into midday temperatures of over 100 Fahrenheit. Of 20,000 wounded in the city, all were in the jungle by nightfall. One man humped his son, who had just had both legs amputated; others pushed the beds of the very ill, carrying bottles of plasma and serum.

Every hospital in the city was emptied. All papers and records in the city were destroyed. All books were thrown into the Mekong River or burned on the banks. The paper money in the Banque Khmer de Commerce was incinerated. Cars, motorbikes and bicycles were impounded. Rockets and bazookas were fired at houses where any movement was detected. There were many summary executions. The rest were told, ‘Leave immediately or we will shoot all of you.’ By evening the water-supply was cut off. What gave the episode its peculiar Kafkaesque horror was the absence of any visible authority. The peasant-soldiers simply killed and terrified, obeying orders, invoking the commands of Angka Loeu. Nothing was explained. The intellectuals who had planned it all never appeared.

Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.