Translation and introduction by Vasco de Silva . The translated article was originally published in the May/June 1986 edition of Workers´ Policy.
Introduction
Cambodia, under the rule of the Khmer Rouge and the imperialist attacks by the USA, was probably one of the countries that suffered the most during the 20th century. It was also certainly the most gruesome state that ever claimed to be implementing a socialist project. In light of this, it is necessary for communists to understand and explain the causes that lead to the barbarism that unfolded in Cambodia in the 1970s. It is not enough to simply dismiss the claims and questions with a simple claim to the ultra-leftism and pseudo-radicalism of Pol Pot´s clique. This article by Francisco Martins Rodrigues, a Portuguese Communist who dedicated his work to studying the paths, successes, and failures of 20th-century Communism, proposes a summarized analysis of the Khmer Rouge, its social base, the crimes it inflicted in the name of revolution and a simple conclusion: that under the assault of imperialism, there is no alternative to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
“Red” Terror in Cambodia by Francisco Martins Rodrigues
The slaughter that took place in Cambodia under the “Khmer Rouge” regime was shown around the world as a terrifying example of what communists are capable of when left to their own devices.
Books, articles, and films spread the “information” that the Khmer Rouge exterminated two to three million people in an orgy of madness. In a several times awarded, high impact film by the American Film Academy, Roland Joffe’s “Killing Fields”, the spectators were haunted by macabre piles of skulls and gratuitous summary executions. The horrors of martyred Cambodia moved all quarters of political opinion. With few variations, liberals, Social-Democrats and humanists began to cite the “Khmer Rouge” as the example of the bloodthirsty fanaticism of the communists. Revisionists joined the chorus, attributing the atrocities, not obviously to communism, but to “ultra-leftism,” blamed for all the excesses.
Today, as Cambodia is out of the political limelight and humanitarian associations have grown weary of collecting funds and food for the Khmer “victims of communism,” the war in Cambodia continues. This time without publicity. This is because the United States, which years ago denounced Pol Pot as a new Hitler, now supports him in the fight against the pro-Vietnamese regime installed in Phnom Penh. The Cambodian issue will be ominous until the end. Meanwhile, the accumulation of testimonies that are filtering in allows us to begin to lift the tip of the veil. And to say that international public opinion has been manipulated by a vast propaganda campaign designed to exonerate imperialism, discredit the cause of the revolution, and paralyze support for national liberation struggles.
Not because the Cambodian massacres were invented. They are one of the darkest realities of the contemporary era. But because the images of horror broadcast around the world have served to mystify the underlying questions: who committed the genocide in Cambodia? What was the “Khmer Rouge”? How did the unmanageable chaotic situation of 1977-78 come about?
With this article, based largely on a paper published some time ago in the US communist newspaper The Workers’ Advocate1 we try to advance some elements of an answer to these questions.
The Cambodian nightmare was triggered by US aggression. This is the first fact that must be established when looking for responsibility for the genocide of the Khmer people.
Carpets of Bombs
The guerrilla war of the “Khmer Rouge,” which began in 1967 near the Thai border, originated in peasant revolts against the oppression and crushing misery they suffered under Prince Sihanouk. Thousands of peasants took over the land, executed the lords and executioners, instituted egalitarian reforms, and created their local governments. It was to crush this popular revolution, which threatened their rear in Vietnam, that the United States installed in 1970, through a CIA coup, the puppet dictatorship of Lon Nol. Here began the first act of the Cambodian tragedy. As the liberated areas were spreading and already threatened to besiege the capital itself, the Pentagon generals concluded that the massacres and mass torture inflicted on the peasants (which, by the way, Joffe’s film “forgets” to show) were no longer enough. In 1973 they decided to try out on an expanded scale the “carpet bomb” system they had already used in Vietnam. It can be said that this second step in the American escalation against Cambodia was one of the greatest mass extermination undertakings of modern times. Half a million tons of bombs were dropped methodically over six months on Cambodian villages, with the aim of annihilating the guerrillas by outright suppression of the population, agricultural resources, and all forms of life. Between half a million and a million people perished under the bombs and the famine and epidemics that followed. But of this act of American genocide in Cambodia there is generally not much to say, outside of technical discussions about the best or worst use of bombing.
Triumph and Agony
Interestingly, those who rush to compare the “Khmer Rouge” to the Nazis fail to note that this classification applies with far greater propriety to the US. Enduring terrible losses and superhuman sacrifices, the “Khmer Rouge” eventually took over the capital, forcing the American ambassador and “advisors” and their closest minions to flee in panic. The helicopter flight sequence from Pnom Penh airport in “Bloody Land” is an unintentional tribute to the invincibility of people´s war2, in the face of which all imperialist military technology has become impotent.
But the Americans won in one respect: they left the “Khmer Rouge” a starving, devastated, depopulated country. And this was the third act of the tragedy. The gigantic task of total reorganization of the economy and social life that the Khmer Rouge faced was far beyond their capabilities. They launched into convulsive actions, which aggravated the situation even more, but which had nothing insane about them, as the imperialist propaganda would have us believe. The forced evacuation of the urban population to the camps was one such desperate attempt to deal with the food catastrophe the country had been left in. Moreover, after consecutive years of fierce warfare, the cities had become hotbeds of counter-revolution. Phnom Penh, like Saigon, was, at the time it was abandoned by the Americans, a hornet’s nest of fascists, drug dealers, bandits, and prostitutes.
With agricultural labor camps, the rebels tried to counter the threats of famine and counter-revolution. But all they succeeded in doing was to decimate new thousands of lives through famine and epidemics and begin to lose the base of popular support they initially enjoyed.
The utopian measures of abolishing the currency and administration in the name of “pure communism” worsened the chaos. Thus, in 1977-78, as the economic meltdown deepened and peasant revolts against the new regime began to take place, the “Khmer Rouge” sank into repression and fighting between rival factions. It is the epilogue of the tragedy. Indiscriminate terror and summary executions take on vast proportions in some regions (Note that Vickery, unsuspected of sympathy for the Khmer Rouge, considers, based on a large mass of testimonies from refugees, that the figure of hundreds of thousands of executions reported in the West is absurd).
The “Khmer Rouge” regime agonizes in desperate violence. As the “good” American in Joffe’s film bitterly notes, “we underestimated the madness that would be unleashed by seven billion dollars’ worth of bombs.” The most liberals can do is lament the excesses of imperialism.
Failure of a Peasant Revolution
“Be that as it may,” argue the clear conscience moralists, “it has been proven that the dictatorship of the Communists is prone to unleash extremes of horror.” That is, communists around the world should feel at fault that the “Khmer Rouge” were unable to pull the country out of the hell it had been plunged into.
Apart from its obvious cynicism, this argument rests on another lie that needs to be dispelled. The “Khmer Rouge,” a peasant revolutionary movement, copied several measures and slogans from the Communists, especially from the CP of China, but never followed a Marxist orientation.
The so-called CP of Kampuchea was formed in 1960 by the merger of a group of nationalist students returned from France (Pol Pot, leng Sary, etc.) with the Cambodian nucleus of the former CP of Indochina, which had in the meantime broken up into national branches. From then on, a struggle, at first deaf and then increasingly explosive, ensued within the party between the radical nationalist tendency of Pol Pot and the revisionist tendency of the pro-Vietnamese.
Harassed by the repression of Prince Sihanouk (the famous “neutralist” prince, then as today cherished by the Chinese) and forced to act only in the most backward areas, the party did not publicly declare its existence and its objectives, so as not to arouse the hostility of the peasants. It operated in the villages as a secret society, known under the name “Angka” (“The Organization”) and gradually shaped itself, not as a communist party but as a peasant party.
Without a communist policy, without a workers’ base, the “Khmer Rouge” ended up with a strong nationalist, voluntarist, and puritanical, i.e. petty-bourgeois, stamp, typical of revolutionary peasant organizations. They were not guided by a Marxist program for revolution but by the mystique of the rebirth of the fatherland through agricultural labor. They glorified the peasants as the vanguard of the revolution and deified the spontaneity of the masses. They thus formed a powerful social current, inspired by the most negative traits of Maoism, doomed to lose its initial revolutionary potentialities as the class struggle gave it heavier tasks.
As peasant revolutionaries with a limited ideological horizon, the Khmer Rouge viewed the urban workers as strangers to the countryside, as deserving of mistrust as the bourgeois, and set out to “re-educate” them through agricultural labor. With even greater rigor they acted against service workers3 and intellectuals, whom they considered en bloc as parasites generated by the corrupt cities, and many of whom were exterminated in the labor camps.
Unable to understand the role of the working class, unable to differentiate between the various sectors of the urban population, which would allow them to distinguish between elements to isolate, neutralize, or attract, and unable to maneuver politically, the “Khmer Rouge” ended up having before them only the path of massive repression. This constitutes an element of accusation, not, as they would have us believe, against the communists, but against the deviations of communism.
In the Swamp of Nationalism
The other major factor in the political degeneration of the Khmer Rouge was their nationalist mystique, which gradually evolved into an exacerbated chauvinism as they demanded the recovery of the regions that in centuries past had been forcibly integrated into Vietnam. China, for its part, tried to create the right climate to poison the fractional disputes between Pol Pot supporters and the pro-Vietnamese. Starting in 1977, mass executions began to target all those suspected of having sympathies for Vietnam. With the attempted uprising of the pro-Vietnamese “Khmer Rouge” the following year, chauvinistic repression took on new proportions and all Vietnamese ethnic groups began to be massacred. This created a chaotic situation that was exploited by Vietnam for the 1979 invasion and to institute a regime aligned with Hanoi and the Soviet Union.
When it was disintegrated by the Vietnamese invasion, Pol Pot’s regime, in insoluble crisis, was beginning to turn to the old ruling classes in the cities for support to reorganize production and trade. Peasant “communism”, ultra-radical and utopian, was about to spill over into capitalism. Had they not been overthrown, the “Khmer Rouge” would have ended up as a bourgeois nationalist regime. Moreover, the passage of Pol Pot’s forces in recent years into the service of the CIA attests to their irreversible political decomposition.
The Communists Accuse
In the face of the Cambodian tragedy, the communists do not apologize but accuse. They accuse US imperialism as the successor to Nazism, the greatest criminal in the history of humanity, and the one largely responsible for the holocaust of the Khmer people. Demanding that US murderous rulers and generals be punished is the mark of a principled attitude toward the Cambodian issue.
This is what liberal and reformist critics of imperialism delude with their apparent impartiality between the two camps. They condemn the horrors of imperialism only as excesses, regrettable and unjust, but part of the realities of this world. As for the violence produced by the revolution, they do not care about the causes that triggered it and paint it as an outrage to the human race. They thus become, in the name of “human values,” apologists for the maintenance of the capitalist order.
The pro-Soviet revisionists are more refined. They present the Cambodian massacres as the product of “leftist revolutionary excesses” and draw an idyllic picture of the present “people’s democratic” regime in which the exploitation of the petty bourgeoisie over the masses of the people is restored daily. Supported by the Vietnamese occupation army, the bourgeois government of Heng Samrin tries to reach a compromise with the forces of Sihanouk and Son Sanu, linked to China and the US.
Thus, the gulf that seems, at first sight, to exist between the primary anti-communism of the Readers’ Digest and the Diário‘s4 preaching about Cambodia brings together, in two extreme versions, the same essential message: beware of the revolt of the oppressed masses, because it brings about an uncontrollable unleashing of horrors.
For us, the Cambodian tragedy did not call into question the need for revolution but confirmed it. The Cambodian revolution foundered under the fierce assault of imperialism because it was deprived of a communist workers’ leadership. The experience of the “Khmer Rouge” demonstrated that today, more than at any other time in history, the peasant revolution, left to itself, can only end in disaster.
Cambodia has proved once again, if such were still necessary, that in the struggle to overthrow capitalism and imperialism, there is no alternative to the dictatorship of the proletariat.
- The Workers’ Advocate, organ of the Marxist-Leninist Party, USA, April 1 and July 1, 1985.
- In the original “guerra de massas“. The literal translation, mass warfare, doesn´t express the same in English as in Portuguese. I’ve used people’s war as a more suitable replacement and not as a reference to the Maoist PPW.
- In the original “empregados“. I can’t find another word that translates the same meaning.
- Portuguese newspaper which at the time was close to the Portuguese Communist Party.