Life Under THE Most Evil Communist Regime - Khmer Rouge

Life Under the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot, Famine, and S-21 1975-1979 When the Vietnamese army captured Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge in 1979, they found the city in a terrible state, and among the horrors they came across was a former high school that had been turned into a prison that was known as Security Prison 21, or just S-21. The dark buildings were enclosed in electrified barbed wire, and iron bars covered all the windows. The prisoners included academics, doctors, monks, students, and their teachers, as well as factory workers and engineers. All were accused of being enemies of the regime, and tortured and forced to name their friends and family members as co-conspirators. Whole families were often brought in together to be interrogated and executed. Ultimately, paranoia meant that the regime began to turn on itself, and the cells were soon filled with party activists and their families, and even high-ranking politicians. At least 18,145 people had been imprisoned there, and all but a handful had been executed. S-21 was only one of more than 150 torture and execution centers established by the Khmer Rouge. Today, it stands as a memorial to the The Khmer Rouge was the name given to the members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, the CPK, who ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. They were led by the infamous Pol Pot, who attempted to purify Cambodian society along racial, social, and political lines. This led to one of the worst cases of genocide in history. Influenced by Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward in China, Pol Pot imagined his own Super Great Leap Forward in Cambodia. After seizing power in a civil war in 1975, the CPK wanted to rapidly build the country under their own vision. Pol Pot compared the Cambodian revolution with those in China, Korea, and Vietnam, and proclaimed that no revolution would be as fast as his. Indeed, the CPK was obsessed with speed, and many in the party were paranoid that they would be replaced, and believed the faster their plans could be achieved, the safer they would be. The Super Great Leap was to be achieved independent of any foreign aid, through independent self-mastery. Khmer Rouge theorists believe that an initial period of self-imposed economic isolation would stimulate the rebirth of the crafts and the country's industrial capability. In order to follow this policy of extreme self-reliance, the CPK announced a four year plan to triple the country's rice production. However, Cambodia had suffered severely during the civil war. Almost three quarters of the draft animals needed to plow the fields had been killed, and by 1975, rice production had dropped by 84%. Such a rapid increase in production was impossible, but Pol Pot believed this was merely a matter of revolutionary willpower, and instituted his policy of agricultural offenses, including a nationwide system of forced labor. He believed that achieving his economic goals would be as simple as winning the civil war. The army and the CPK's agricultural warfare were the people, and manual labor was the key to victory. The purpose of every Cambodian was to work and advance the revolution. Villages were reorganized into cooperatives, and thousands of city dwellers were forced out of their homes to work on the farms. As a result of this policy, workers of all ages were forced to do 10 to 14 hours of hard labor per day in unsustainable conditions. Often, survivors reported working late into the night, particularly during harvest time, surrounded by encouraging slogans urging them to pledge to sacrifice your life to accomplish Angar's work, or to stay on the worksite until death. A lot of food was needed to feed all these productive farmers. However, rice was also needed for Pol Pot's economic goals, so large amounts of rice were extracted from the population for party use and export. The CPK provided nothing in return. Fareth, one survivor of the period, recalled that she was assigned to a children's work unit when she was 11 years old. Fareth was ordered to carry soil, dig trenches, and help build a local dam. She and her unit lived at the worksite, sleeping under a rough shelter made out of palm leaves. The dam was considered a highly important project for the revolution, and her unit were given a comparatively extravagant food ration of two daily portions of rice and salt, and sometimes fish soup. Still, Fareth was constantly hungry and exhausted, as even such plentiful rations were not sufficient to sustain such hard labor. When her unit had finished at the worksite three months later, the local officials held a celebration to commemorate the occasion. The celebration included a play, revolutionary songs, and a mass marriage ceremony. The young Fareth says she was personally praised for her hard work and felt so proud of herself. It was only later that Fareth learned about what happened to her two younger sisters during this time. Her grandmother had been placed in charge of them because she was too old to work, she was starving, and grew too weak to look after the girls. Without someone to care for them, the little girls were so hungry that they became ill and died of starvation. Meanwhile, absolute socialism meant that all natural resources were the property of the state, and any signs of individualism or privatism were banned, including private gardens, private ownership of foodstuffs, and even the act of cooking privately, which was punishable by imprisonment and execution. The people were not even allowed to forage for food in the countryside. After Fareth's little sisters had died, her grandmother survived on a small amount of hidden medicine. However, the Khmer Rouge searched the village every three days, looking for so-called contraband, including cooking equipment and rice. The small stash of medicine was found and confiscated, along with the family's only cooking pot by local Khmer Rouge cadres. Fareth's grandmother refused to suffer this final indignity, and within a week she succumbed to a combination of illness and starvation and passed away. Although the situation rapidly deteriorated into a full-blown famine, Pol Pot continued to talk about agriculture as a military operation, and he saw enemies everywhere. In his mind, any shortfalls in production were the fault of saboteurs and ideological enemies. Anybody who criticized the CPK's policies was branded an enemy of the state and was arrested, tortured, and executed. While the farmers starved, the CPK continued to make thousands of arrests with those who it believed to be enemies or a threat to the state. Many experienced doctors were executed or hid their profession, because any sign of a privileged or urban background, including education or professional training, were viewed with extreme suspicion by the Khmer Rouge and created a high risk of execution if discovered. Indeed, this led to a lack of medicine and healthcare at a time when many of the nation's workers were sickly and starving. Instead of seeking a solution, the Khmer Rouge mocked its victims. The suspicious CPK accused overworked and underfed workers of feigning illness to avoid work, saying those that were starving had caught an imaginary disease. CPK's slogan said that, we must wipe out all those who imagine they are ill and expel them from our society. There was no respite for the exhausted, starving, and sickly population, and many victims simply just gave up and collapsed and died. Utilizing its secret police, the Khmer Rouge rounded up, tortured, and executed anybody who was seen as an enemy. This also included all foreigners and ethnic minorities, those with connections to the previous Cambodian government, professionals, and intellectuals, including anybody who had an education or understood a foreign language, and party members who had fallen foul of the regime. Innocent men, women, and children, even newborn babies were brought to prisons like S-21, and coerced into confessing for imaginary crimes and providing the names of other alleged enemies of the state. For 12 days and nights, an engineer called Choumé was tortured at S-21. His tormentors whipped him with bamboo sticks and broke his fingers when he tried to shield himself. They shackled his legs and removed his toenails with pliers. Choumé was also subjected to electric shocks, which he feared the most. Electrodes were placed inside of his ears, and the shocks deafened him. He said that he felt as though his eyes were on fire, and he was ready to tell them everything they wanted to hear. The interrogators forced him to sign a false confession that he was working for the CIA and had recruited other men and women. The dozens of innocent acquaintances that he had named were also arrested, tortured, and murdered. Choumé had never heard of the CIA and never found out why he had been arrested. He was one of the few who actually survived their stay at S-21. Most foreigners had left the country before the end of the Civil War, but several were imprisoned at S-21, including the 26-year-old British teacher, John Dawson DeWurst. John was traveling the Hippie Trail to visit his friend in Malaysia when he met the owners of a small yacht, a Canadian, Stuart Glass, and a New Zealander, Kerry Hamill. They decided to sail north along the Thai coast toward Bangkok when somehow the three men found themselves in Cambodian waters and their boat was seized by a revolutionary patrol boat. Stuart was shot dead immediately while John and Kerry were taken to the infamous Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh. The men were undoubtedly tortured, and records show that John had written a confession that mixed the true events of his life with false accounts about his life as a CIA agent. After confessing, most inmates were brought to one of several sites known as the Killing Fields. In the four years of the CPK's rule, more than one million people were executed and buried in mass graves at these places. Khmer Rouge soldiers, young men or women usually taken from peasant families, would then execute their victims using brutal and horrific methods, such as poison or literally beating them to death. In some cases, they even made their victims dig their own graves first as a final insult. To this day, their remains are still being uncovered at the Killing Fields. Starvation and executions under the Khmer Rouge were responsible for around 1.5 to 2 million deaths, nearly a quarter of Cambodia's population at that time. After the Vietnamese seized Phnom Penh in 1979, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge fled into Thailand to wage a guerrilla war. Support for the CPK gradually waned and the Khmer Rouge became less powerful and disbanded. Pol Pot died of a heart attack in 1998. In the final interview before his death, he said that his conscience was clear and everything he had done, he had done for his country.