Cambodian Genocide

       In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered the capital and seized power from Lon Nol. Pol Pot heads the newly founded regime starting the following year, he lead the communist society into “Year Zero,” a “blank-slate” for the new agrarian, collectivized society.   During this time, the Khmer Rouge adopts the name “Communist Party of Kampuchea” (CPK) and promptly changed Cambodia’s name to “Democratic Kampuchea.”

 

 

      The communist agenda of the DK was originally rooted in the persecution of Vietnamese, Cham Muslims, and other religious and ethnic minorities such as the Thais and Buddhists. However, as time progresses it spreads to include all "class enemies" that could compromise Communism.

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      The Khmer Rouges is estimated to have killed roughly 95% of Cambodia’s 70,000 Buddhist monks, leaving behind only about 2,000 potential survivors.

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      The Khmer Rouge forms a social hierarchy within his new state, where two million city-residents are labeled as potentially threatening “new people” and are evacuated from urban regions to work in rural slave-labor camps.  The next category of people within the new government are branded “candidates,” and finally, country-side peasants are deemed the most ‘trust-worthy’ and are called “base people.”

 

       Despite harsher punishments for the “new people,” such as less food, and heavier assignments of manual labor, all Cambodians were all starved, overworked, and neglected. Any challengers to the new restrictive regime were relentlessly executed, including former advocates or affiliates of the Lon Nol’s government. By the beginning of 1979, one quarter of the Cambodian population was killed from the starvation, disease, or grueling slave-labor. 675,000 peasants (representing fifteen percent of the “base people”) had been killed off either through the regime’s draconian policies or through direct execution.

 

       On May 10, 1978: The Khmer Rouge radio broadcast from the capital of Phnom Penh, incited Cambodians to “exterminate 50 million Vietnamese” and “purify” Cambodia.

 

        The largest scale killing campaign was organized and executed against the Eastern zone lining the Cambodian-Vietnamese border. The CPK degradingly accused the easterners of possessing “Khmer bodies, but Vietnamese heads.”   They were evacuated and sent to the capital, Phnom Penh, where each civilian was issued a “kroma” or a blue and white checkered scarf which later became known as a mark of death. One witness testified, “I have seen the Khmer Rouge come to a place and take away the people with the blue scarves. Every day was a killing day. They put on a killing sign.”

 

        The definition of the “class enemy” applied to any intellectuals; anyone who wore western clothes, glasses, or revealed any indication of being educated or multilingual was branded as a threat to the new agrarian age of rebirth. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, soldiers were instantly arrested and promptly taken to the killing fields.

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        Victims of the Khmer Rouge were ordered to dig their own mass graves and kneel before them, with their hands and feet restrained behind their backs by a rope, they were beaten with hoes and iron bars.

 

        Roughly anywhere from 1.7 million to 2.2 million Cambodians were viciously exterminated; Within three years, the Khmer Rouge wiped out potentially 25% of the country’s original population and forced 100,000 of the survivors to seek asylum in the United States.