The Books: “When the War Was Over: Cambodia And The Khmer Rouge Revolution” (Elizabeth Becker)

My history bookshelf. Onward.

WarWasOver.jpgNext book on this shelf is called When The War Was Over: Cambodia And The Khmer Rouge Revolution, Revised Edition by Elizabeth Becker. This is a massive book. It took me forever to finish it. But it’s very good and gives you a HUGE history of that entire region and what happened in Cambodia, and how it came about. The countries in that region are so intertwined – you really get a good overview of the entire history of southeast Asia.

There is so much information in this book it was hard to find one excerpt – but I chose the part where Norodom Sihanouk, the Prince of Cambodia – returned from a world tour, getting support, and found that he was to be pushed aside. This was in 1976.


From When The War Was Over: Cambodia And The Khmer Rouge Revolution, Revised Edition by Elizabeth Becker.

The revolution did not wait for Sihanouk. Before he finally returned, the united front government he allegedly headed met in Phnom Penh for the last time and on December 14, 1975, adopted a new constitution that acknowledged what had in fact become the law of the land since April 17. It was the front’s third (and last) national congress. Its new constitution for the land abolished the monarchy and “reactionary” religion. Sihanouk was now a commoner, and his faith, the faith of his ancestors and his nation, was forbidden. The prince was to play no role in the new government.

All property became “collectively owned”; farms, factories, homes, offices, small fishing craft, tools, and cars were the property of the state. Citizens were divided into three categories: workers, peasants, and soldiers. No others existed. According to the constitution, all they were to do was to work and to defend the country. The system of justice was given cursory treatment; there were to be “peoples courts,” which were not defined, and there was a blunt warning that anyone “threatening the popular state” could look forward to the “severest form of punishment”.

The government was described as a collective. A state presidium, headed by a chairman and including a first and second vice-chairman, matched the three-member leadership system used by cooperatives. The composition of the Cambodian revolutionary army merited an article of its own. Equality of the sexes was upheld in the constituion, polygamy and polyandry was banned. But above all else, this constitution spoke about work and production. The new national coat of arms was composed of irrigation terraces and factories. Culture was defined as “serving the tasks of defending and building Cambodia into a great and prosperous country.” Every worker “has his subsistence fully secure”, the constitution said, and unemployment was outlawed in the country renamed Democratic Kampuchea. (Kampuchea is the Khmer name for Cambodia).

There was also no mention of freedom. “The worker, laborer and peasant are the master of the factories, the hands and means of production,” but their only right was the right to work.

The country’s foreign policy was described as independent, peaceful, nonaligned and neutral. The constitution warned that Democratic Kampuchea was opposed “to all forms of subversion and aggression from outside, whether military, political, cultural, social, diplomatic, or so-called humanitarian” but stated that it was ‘full of goodwill” and “firmly determined to maintain close and friendly relations with all countries having common borders with her and with all countries throughout the world, near and far, on the strict basis of mutual respect of sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

The constitution did not describe the government as socialist, much less communist. It was extremely simple and, in that sense and most others, it was true to the system the Khmer Rouge adopted. The national anthem, entitled “Glorious April 17” came closer to describing the spirit of the new regime:

Bright red Blood which covers towns and plains
Of Kampuchea, our Motherland,
Sublime Blood of workers and peasants,
Sublime Blood of revolutionary men and women fighters!
The Blood changing into unrelenting hatred
And resolute struggle,
On April 17th, under the Flag of the Revolution,
Flees from Slavery!

Long live, long live Glorious April 17th!
Glorious Victory with greater signification
Than the times of Angkor!

We are uniting to edify
Splendid and democratic new Kampuchea and new society
With equality and justice,
Firmly applying the line of independence,
sovereignty and self-reliance.
Let us resolutely defend
Our Motherland, our sacred Soil
And our Glorious Revolution!

Long live, long live, long live,
Democratic and prosperous new Kampuchea!
Let us resolutely raise high
The Red Flag of the Revolution!
Let us edify our Motherland!
Let us make her advance with great leaps,
So that She will be more glorious and more marvelous than ever!

Sihanouk finally returned at the end of December and on January 3, 1976, promulgated the constitution. It called for an elected “people’s assembly,” and on March 20, an ‘election’ was duly held across the country for members of the assembly, who then met for several hours in April. The assembly members were photographed raising their hands to accept unanimously the resignation of the old front government and the request of Prince Sihanouk to retire. A new government was immediately formed. At its head was Pol Pot. Unknown to the outside world, this nomme de guerre was used to conceal the identity of Saloth Sar.

Sihanouk, no longer of use to the regime, was put away, under house arrest at the royal palace.

The days of the united front were over. There was no longer any pretense at including people from all strata of the old society in the new revolutionary regime. Angka no longer courted the monks, intellectuals, or members of the royal family whose names had added prestige and respect to their cause and whose labor had been so instrumental at crucial stages of their revolution. Diplomats from other communist countries, particularly in the Soviet bloc, were more shocked by Sihanouk’s “retirement” and the end of the united front strategy than were non-communist nations. They knew how unorthodox and dangerous it was to spurn so early and with such extreme finality those people who had held the respect and admiration of the population. But the diplomats made no public criticisms.

The Khmer Rouge planned to make their mark by surpassing communist orthodoxy as well as more established political behavior. No other communist country had dared attempt such a complete confiscation of property, much less within a year after victory. In theory, socialist revolutions were planned in discrete phases, to prepare the population for gradually giving up their old way of life for a new communist order. The Khmer Rouge began their revolution at a stage most communist countries would consider extreme as a goal, much less a starting point.

The Khmer Rouge adapted the most radical economic examples from communist history — the overnight industrial revolutions of Stalin and Mao — as the normal pace for their revolution. And they directed these upheavals through the mysterious Angka. They were still hiding their communist party behind a wall of secrecy. Too impatient to try to win popular support and too cynical, they became tyrants and ruled through terror. Each new directive they issued was accompanied by a new wave of executions and purges to ensure obedience.

Ieng Thirith said the Center never felt it truly controlled the country and that the party felt threatened by scores of enemies trying to rob it of power. First the party blamed the elite of the old society and killed many of them. Then the party launched its version of the socialist revolution, and when the revolution went out of control, the Center began to suspect the men it had appointed as ministers in the government of March 1976. They were arrested and killed. In 1978 the Center went after the powerful zone secretaries and killed many of them. Feeling beseiged, the party initiated “class warfare” in a desperate search for “enemies” and purged peasants and party members alike for not coming from an extremely poor, hence proper, class background, or for associating with an ill-defined enemy class bent on sabotaging the revolution. The Center suspected that the United States, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam had agents within the Cambodian communist party. Purge followed purge, but the “enemy” grew ever more elusive, and ever more pervasive in the party’s mind.

The Khmer Rouge were living proof that power does not grow out of a gun. The rifles of the Khmer Rouge destroyed the old power, but those same guns could not in the end create a new power base. That requires a degree of popular support and understanding of the new order that the Khmer Rouge never cultivated or won. They ruled, instead, through violence and terror.

Hannah Arendt, student of revolutions, made this observation years before the Khmer Rouge attempted their ultimate revolution: “To substitute violence for pwoer can bring victory, but the price is very high … the end will be the destruction of all power.”

She described how a complete rule by terror would operate and why it would bring about its own cataclysmic failure. The terrorist regime must first destroy all organized opposition. The people must become “atomized, an outrageously pale, academic word for the horror it implies.” They must be separated from each other and forbidden normal ties and relationships, something the Khmer Rouge achieved with the evacuations and cooperative system. Then, she wrote, the people would have to be policed by spies, ubiquitous informers. The Khmer Rouge established a spy system through their national security police service and within the cooperatives. Children were made to inform on parents, comrades on comrades, neighbor on neighbor, to save themselves.

The result, Arendt said, would be a regime where no one could be trusted, a regime of sabotage and subterfuge. In such an environment, economic progress is doomed because terror produces paralysis in society. Waste, of human lives and human production, is the natural product of terror. Eventually the regime is consumed by the increasingly inward quest for the mysterious enemies robbing it of progress and power. It must finally turn on itself.

Arendt concluded: ” … terror turns not only against its enemies but against its friends and supporters as well, being afraid of all power, even the power of its friends. The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday’s executioner becomes today’s victims.”

Arendt was writing in philosophical terms, summing up the experience of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union years before the Khmer Rouge captured Cambodia. She foresaw the consequences of a regime that took revolution by terror to its ultimate extreme — economic upheaval, purges, failure, and death. And Arendt pinpointed how such a regime would have to enforce its terror — through atomization.

The effect of the revolution on the people of Cambodia can best be seen through the prism of atomization. That process of breaking down and then isolating society both describes and defines the disease that had infected the Cambodian revolution long before the communist army won in 1975. In their years of obscurity, the Khmer Rouge developed a preoccupation with betrayal that came to be as intense as their appreciation of Cambodia’s lost honor. Avenging both became nearly a divine mission. This shaped their choice of an extreme communist ideology and an obsessively secret form for their revolution.

Since they built their party and revolution without the active support or legitimacy of the communist world, much less the Cambodian population, they learned to trust no one. Everything was a secret. Isolation became an asset. It contained a sense of mystery and supported an overblown idea of their own power. Secrecy, distrust, and isolation became the modi operandi of the Khmer Rouge, and spawned their theories of battle and of the ideal society to follow. They believed the “enemy” was everywhere, and extreme measures were their only answers to thwarting and defeating that enemy. Hence their wartime cooperatives were prison fortresses and their soldiers were ordered to fight like kamikazes.

And with victory their vigilance was heightened, not relaxed. They followed Stalin’s maxim that class struggle would intensify after victory. Despite their rhetoric, they never trusted “the people” so often extolled in their speeches. When faced with individuals the Khmer Rouge saw only enemies. They saw Cambodia’s former society, the ancien regime, as a nest of enemies, and sought to destroy it. All human relationships were suspect. The notion of a personal life, of the rights and feelings of the individual, was denied. Individuals were not loyal to the revolution, only classes were: the peasantry, the soldiers, and the workers.

Family life had to be eliminated. The state had to usurp the authority of the family if it was to survive. The family was the most potent, hence the most feared, of all relationships of the former society. In the countryside the peasant families had had power over the basic decisions the revolution now wanted to make: what kind and how much food would be planted; when and how crops would be marketed; who would work in the fields; who would work at home.

The larger identities of the people were also suspect. The cultural and religious minorities had to abandon their distinctive ways and assimilate. They had to become new Cambodian worker-peasants, or face death. Everyone had to be the same; everyone had to be loyal to the state and to the state alone. Even the Khmer peasantry had to give up its traditions, to become like the proletariat. That meant giving up the peculiarities of village or province, and living the cooperative way of life which had to be uniform throughout the land. All relationships outside that of the individual to the state were discouraged if not outlawed — from the personal, to the family, to the minotiry, to the traditional provincial life of the minority.

This attack on society was done in the name of purification of a worker-peasant revolution, to protect the communist cadre from the impure elements of the old society and its enemy classes. But the definition of enemy shifted constantly as the party failed to win power and failed to achieve the desired economic miracles. A swing in party politics or a change in revolutionary theory created new categories of enemies. Fear of enemy classes was replaced by fear of enemy elements who had infiltrated the party. Ultimately, no one could be protected, for the party found no one to trust. Angka was on a path of complete self-destruction, complete atomization of society.

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