Anatomy of a Crisis: Education, Development, and the State in Cambodia, 1953-1998

4 Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge: Building and Defending Cambodia

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge Building and Defending Cambodia 94 By April 1975, most of Phnom Penh’s students had not attended classes for more than a month. When they saw the soldiers of the Khmer Rouge finally enter the city, many of these students, and their parents, were relieved . The fighting had stopped and they could finally return to school. A former student of the Lycée Yukanthor remembered his father, who was a teacher, expressing the hope that the new Khmer Rouge government would eliminate the corruption that had flourished in schools during the five years of Lon Nol’s Khmer Republic. When the Khmer Rouge soldiers finally reached the front of Kong Sao’s modest Phnom Penh villa, they told Sao’s father that his family would have to leave immediately and go to the countryside for a few days. “My father trusted them,” Kong recalled, “because some of his friends had joined the Communists .” The family left hours later with a small suitcase full of clothes, a sack of rice, and two chickens. “We weren’t worried because we could come back in three days.” Sao came back five years later. His parents never came back.1 The Communist troops, as they marched victoriously into Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, did not return the smiles of the capital’s war weary population, relieved that the specter of fighting, grenade attacks, and curfews would be finally lifted from their heads. Instead, they addressed the people assembled to welcome them without the deferential terms of reference that had characterized social relations in Cambodia since precolonial times, and they ordered the immediate evacuation of the city. Angkar (the organization, not to be confused with Angkor), everyone was assured, was in control of everything. Rather than a return to the normalcy of the lives they had enjoyed prior to the war, it quickly became clear that the seizure of state power by the new regime would be accompanied by a whirlwind of momentous social change.2 The regime that seized control of state power in Cambodia in April 1975 was known as Democratic Kampuchea (DK). The leaders of DK were members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), referring to themselves collectively as Angkar Leou (the High Organization) or Angkar Padeawat (the Revolutionary Organization). Their agenda was simple: replace perceived impediments to national autonomy, coined in terms of self-reliance, with revolutionary energy and incentives. Impediments to national autonomy included Cambodian individualism, family ties, Buddhism, urban life, money, ownership of property, and the monarchy, which, ironically, as members of FUNK (National United Front of Kampuchea), the Communists had allegedly been fighting to restore.3 The four years of DK were an era of almost incomprehensible social change, where aspects of Khmer cultural and economic life, which had developed over centuries, were totally ruptured. Traditional patterns of social relations were broken down, the nation’s market-based economy was ruthlessly dismantled, while state-sanctioned violence and terror reached heights inconceivable in previous times.4 Yet in spite of the massive changes, it is often forgotten that the era was resplendent with continuities that could be easily traced to Lon Nol and, before him, Prince Norodom Sihanouk. DK’s leaders, like Sihanouk and Lon Nol, stressed the superiority of the Khmer race and sought to return Cambodia to the glories of its illustrious past. Like their predecessors, they aimed to draw on and exploit the age-old rivalry between Cambodians and their neighbors to the east, the Yuon (Vietnamese). Finally, like Lon Nol and Sihanouk, they could conceive only of their righteousness as rulers. Their legitimacy was beyond question, and challenges to their authority were testament to high treason. DK’s leaders, with a ferocity and brutality inconceivable during the Sihanouk and Lon Nol periods, assumed and superseded beyond all measures the fundamental characteristic of the leaders of the regimes they had succeeded: a blissful and willing ignorance of the people’s needs. It is these factors that account for the stunning ferocity of the DK revolution and the equally stunning suddenness of its demise. What intellectual forces were driving the CPK in its bid to transform Cambodia? What was the ideology of Angkar? Was it a derivative of Communist models adopted elsewhere? How did it permeate DK? These key Building and Defending Cambodia 95 questions are central to an understanding of the relationship between the formation of...