Khmer Rouge Quotes

Long time I been on my own, but now really I'm alone. I survive the killing, the starving, all the hate of the Khmer Rouge, but I think maybe now I will die of this, of broken heart.

As well, they used their B-52 bombers to drop thousands of tons of bombs which included napalm and cluster bombs. In a particularly vile attack, they used poisonous chemicals on our base regions of Xuyen Moc, the Minh Dam and the Nui Thi Vai mountains. They sprayed their defoliants over jungle, and productive farmland alike. They even bull-dozed bare, both sides along the communication routes and more than a kilometre into the jungle adjacent to our base areas. This caused the Ba Ria-Long Khanh Province Unit to send out a directive to D445 and D440 Battalions that as of 01/November/1969, the rations of both battalions would be set at 27 litres of rice per man per month when on operations. And 25 litres when in base or training. So it was that as the American forces withdrew, their arms and lavish base facilities were transferred across to the RVN. The the forces of the South Vietnamese Government were with thereby more resources but this also created any severe maintenance, logistic and training problems. The Australian Army felt that a complete Australian withdrawal was desirable with the departure of the Task Force (1ATF), but the conservative government of Australia thought that there were political advantages in keeping a small force in south Vietnam. Before his election, in 1964, Johnston used a line which promised peace, but also had a policy of war. The very same tactic was used by Nixon. Nixon had as early as 1950 called for direction intervention by American Forces which were to be on the side of the French colonialists. The defoliants were sprayed upon several millions of hectares, and it can best be described as virtual biocide. According to the figure from the Americans themselves, between the years of 1965 to 1973, ten million Vietnamese people were forced to leave their villages ad move to cities because of what the Americans and their allies had done. The Americans intensified the bombing of whole regions of Laos which were controlled by Lao patriotic forces. They used up to six hundred sorties per day with many types of aircraft including B52s. On 07/January/1979, the Vietnamese Army using Russian built T-54 and T-59 tanks, assisted by some Cambodian patriots liberated Phnom Penh while the Pol Pot Government and its agencies fled into the jungle. A new government under Hun Sen was installed and the Khmer Rouge’s navy was sunk nine days later in a battle with the Vietnamese Navy which resulted in twenty-two Kampuchean ships being sunk.

The cost of war is a lifelong legacy borne by children.

I'd have to, if on Sunday I wanted to run off with some "slack-jawed Suzy," some "invertebrate," a "post-pubescent wasteoid who imagines the Khmer Rouge to be makeup and Guerrilla Warfare to be that rivalry which occurs between apes.

To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, why did God invent captions?

As a Nobel Peace laureate, I, like most people, agonize over the use of force. But when it comes to rescuing an innocent people from tyranny or genocide, I've never questioned the justification for resorting to force. That's why I supported Vietnam's 1978 invasion of Cambodia, which ended Pol Pot's regime, and Tanzania's invasion of Uganda in 1979, to oust Idi Amin. In both cases, those countries acted without U.N. or international approval—and in both cases they were right to do so.

At daybreak on the first day, thousands of Cambodians are already calmly waiting outside my polling station. They squat on the ground, silent and patient. We didn't expect this at all. We thought they would fail to understand how democracy works. We thought they would be afraid of the Khmer Rouge. We thought they would passively accept their fate. We were wrong.

Manifest Destiny anticipated nearly all the ideological and programmatic elements of Hitler's Lebensraum policy. In fact, Hitler modeled his conquest of the East on the American conquest of the West.* During the first half of this century, a majority of American states enacted sterilization laws and tens of thousands of Americans were involuntarily sterilized. The Nazis explicitly invoked this US precedent when they enacted their own sterilization laws.'' The notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of the franchise and forbade miscegenation between Jews and non-Jews. Blacks in the American South suffered the same legal disabilities and were the object of much greater spontaneous and sanctioned popular violence than the Jews in prewar Germany. To highlight unfolding crimes abroad, the US often summons memories of The Holocaust. The more revealing point, however, is when the US invokes The Holocaust. Crimes of official enemies such as the Khmer Rouge bloodbath in Cambodia, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo recall The Holocaust; crimes in which the US is complicit do not.

One in eight Cambodians – as many as 2 million people – were killed during the Khmer Rouge’s campaign to eradicate their country’s history. One out of every 250 Cambodians is missing a limb, crippled by one of the thousands and thousands of land mines still waiting to be stepped on in the country’s roads, fields, forests, and irrigation ditches. Destabilized, bombed, invaded, forced into slave labor, murdered by the thousands, the Cambodians must have been relieved when the Vietnamese, Cambodia’s historical archenemy, invaded.

The 20th century merits the name "The Century of Murder." 1915 Turks slaughtered 2 million Armenians. 1933 to 1954 the Soviet government encompassed the death of 20 to 65 million citizens. 1933 to 1945 Nazi Germany murdered more than 25 million people. 1948 Hindus and Muslims engaged in racial and religious strife that claimed more lives than could be reported. 1970 3 million Bangladesh were killed. 1971 Uganda managed the death of 300,000 people. 1975 Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and murdered up to 3 million people. In recent times more than half a million of Rwanda's 6 million people have been murdered. At present times genocidal strife is underway in Bosnia, Somalia, Burundi and elsewhere. The people of the world have demonstrated themselves to be so capable of forgetting the murderous frenzies in which their fellows have participated that it is essential that one, at least, be remembered and the world be regularly reminded of it. _Consequences of the Holocaust

There is a story about the life of Buddha in which a mother carries her dead son to him draped in her arms. The woman has heard that he is a holy man who can restore life. Weeping, she appeals for mercy. Gently, Buddha tells her that he can help save her son’s life, but that first she has to bring him a mustard seed secured from a family that has never experienced death. Desperately she searches home after home. Many want to help, but everyone has already experienced a loss--a sister, a husband, a child. Finally the woman returns to Buddha. “What have you found?” he asks. “Where is your mustard seed and where is your son? You are not carrying him.” “I buried him,” she replies

A woman isn’t just married to her husband, but to his whole family

how the Khmer Rouge had multiplied and risen to power. It was due to four years of bombing, ordered by Washington, D.C. to destroy the cargo route linking Cambodia to North Vietnam.

The most difficult stories about the Khmer Rouge are the ones over which hover almost and maybe. She almost made it, but dysentery took her at the end. He is maybe buried in the mass grave at Choeung Ek, so we will pay our respects there. He almost walked all the way to Thailand, but the cadres found him in the forest. She maybe saw her infant son one last time before she was taken. Anne Spencer almost made it off those wards. After I read the email, an ancient and exuberant terror blazed through me. It was partly the terror that had grown in me alongside my very bones, knowing as I did that I only existed because my mother had outrun almost; I don’t know at what point you stop feeling the need to run, generation by generation, when you’re born after that. But it was also a wonderful, simple, human terror. The one where death brushes too close to you and you abruptly remember what an insane gift it is to be alive, and how much you’d like to stay alive even when death is laughing at your window, laughing in your mirror.

When I ask Kim what a capitalist is, he tells me it is someone who is from the city. He says the Khmer Rouge government views science, technology, and anything mechanical as evil and therefore must be destroyed. The Angkar says the ownership of cars and electronics such as watches, clocks, and televisions created a deep class division between the rich and the poor. This allowed the urban rich to flaunt their wealth while the rural poor struggled to feed and clothe their families. These devices have been imported from foreign countries and thus are contaminated. Imports are defined as evil because they allowed foreign countries a way to invade Cambodia, not just physically but also culturally. So now these goods are abolished. Only trucks are allowed to operate, to relocate people and carry weapons to silence any voices of dissent against the Angkar.

certain kinds of polities, communist party-states such as the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, are capable, in times of peace, of killing large numbers of their own citizens as a matter of deliberate policy.

During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. Before fleeing their homeland, they had witnessed the atrocities for which the Khmer Rouge, which had been in power from 1975 to 1979, was well known. Many of the women had been raped or tortured or otherwise brutalized. Most had seen family members murdered in front of them. One woman, who never again saw her husband and three children after soldiers came and took them away, said that she had lost her sight after having cried every day for four years. She was not the only one who appeared to have cried herself blind. Others suffered from blurred or partial vision, their eyes troubled by shadows and pains. The doctors examined the women - about a hundred and fifty in all - found that their eyes were normal. Further tests showed that their brains were normal as well. If the women were telling the truth - and there were some who doubted this, who thought the women might be malingering because they wanted attention or were hoping to collect disability - the only explanation was psychosomatic blindness. In other words, the women's minds, forced to take in so much horror and unable to take more, had managed to turn out the lights.

As the Khmer Rouge were about to take over, Noam Chomsky wrote that their advent heralded a Cambodian liberation, “a new era of economic development and social justice.” The new era turned out to be the killing-fields that took the lives of two million Cambodians.

Richard Nixon was elected president mendaciously promising not victory, but a “secret plan” to bring the war to an “honorable end.” The secret plan prolonged the conflict seven more years, spreading misery and death throughout Indochina. Nixon began gradually drawing down the number of Americans fighting there in 1969, and— catastrophically, as it turned out— began shifting the military burden to Saigon. General Abrams threw greater and greater responsibility for prosecuting the war to the ARVN [South Vietnamese military], shifting his efforts to disrupting and destroying Hanoi’s delivery of troops and matériel. This is what prompted the raids into the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia, where North Vietnam had long sheltered troops and supply routes. The bombing of Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia destabilized that neutral country, leading to the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk in 1970 and the rise of the murderous Khmer Rouge, which would be responsible for the deaths of millions of Cambodians in ensuing years.

One wonders why no one in church history has ever been considered a heretic for being unloving. People were anathematized and often tortured and killed for disagreeing on matters of doctrine or on the authority of the church. But no one on record has ever been so much as rebuked for not loving as Christ loved. Yet if love is to be placed above all other considerations (Col. 3:14; 1 Peter 4:8), if nothing has any value apart from love (1 Cor. 13:1–3), and if the only thing that matters is faith working in love (Gal. 5:6), how is it that possessing Christlike love has never been considered the central test of orthodoxy? How is it that those who tortured and burned heretics were not themselves considered heretics for doing so? Was this not heresy of the worst sort? How is it that those who perpetrated such things were not only not deemed heretics but often were (and yet are) held up as “heroes of the faith”? If there is an answer to this question, I believe it lies in the deceptive power of the sword. While God uses the sword of governments to preserve law, order, and justice, as we have seen, there is a corrupting principality and power always at work. Much like the magical ring in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the sword has a demonic power to deceive us. When we pick it up, we come under its power. It convinces us that our use of violence is a justified means to a noble end. It intoxicates us with the unquenchable dream of redemptive violence and blinds us to our own iniquities, thereby making us feel righteous in overpowering the unrighteousness of others. Most of the slaughtering done throughout history has been done by people who sincerely believed they were promoting “the good.” Everyone thinks their wars are just, if not holy. Marxists, Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, Islamic terrorists, and Christian crusaders have this in common.

As Pa speaks, I know he thinks someone in our family has stolen the rice. The story of the rat is not true and everyone knows it. Convinced that he realises it was me, I hide my eyes from him. Shame burns my hand like a hot iron branding me for all to see; Pa's favourite child stole from the family. As if to rescue me,Geak wakes up and her screams of hunger interrupt the incident.

I recently walked through the Cambodian killing fields and saw the remnants of that horror myself. I remember looking down at my sandals to see what had been caught between my toes as I was walking through the grass—it was a human tooth. There are teeth, tattered clothing, bones, and other remains of the tortured still scattered throughout the fields today. One of the taunting slogans of the regime was: “To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss.” While attending a church service in Cambodia, I was served Communion by a former member of the Khmer Rouge whose life was completely transformed by the love of Christ. Many other former regime members have also dedicated their lives to Christ and are active in the church today. If Pol Pot’s soldiers can change, then there is hope for even a rebellious teenager.

It was 1977. Bob Marley was in a foreign studio, recovering from an assassin’s ambush and singing: “Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. Don’t ask me why.” Bantu Stephen Biko was shackled, naked and comatose in the back of a South African police Land Rover. The Baader-Meinhof gang lay in suicide pools in a German prison. The Khmer Rouge filled their killing fields. The Weather Underground and the Young Lords Party crawled toward the final stages of violent implosion. In London, as in New York City, capitalism’s crisis left entire blocks and buildings abandoned, and the sudden appearance of pierced, mohawked, leather-jacketed punks on Kings Road set off paroxysms of hysteria. History behaved as if reset to year zero. In the Bronx, Herc’s time was passing. But the new culture that had arisen around him had captured the imagination of a new breed of youths in the Bronx. Herc had stripped down and let go of everything, save the most powerful basic elements—the rhythm, the motion, the voice, the name. In doing so, he summoned up a spirit that had been there at Congo Square and in Harlem and on Wareika Hill. The new culture seemed to whirl backward and forward—a loop of history, history as loop—calling and responding, leaping, spinning, renewing.

Orwell’s words aptly describe the Khmer Rouge: “Big Brother is watching you.” Even on the streets of Portland I look over my shoulder. And here I am on these survivors’ doorstep, asking them to reveal difficult memories. The Khmer Rouge are a continent away, and yet they are not. Psychologically, they are parasites, like tapeworms that slumber within you, living passively until something stirs them to life. I was asking these subjects to wake those parasites.

By early 1979, the border area is a dead-eyed, stinking hell. He signs on as an aid worker with the Red Cross and they give him a stipend and a room. In January, the Vietnamese Communists crossed the Cambodian border, swept the Khmer Rouge aside, and took Phnom Penh in less than two weeks. The refugees wash up in their black clothes, so debilitated and disturbed that Hiroji thinks he is walking through an exhumed cemetery, they are more soil and sickness than human beings.

Perhaps the truth was that Hell wasn’t a physical location; it was an idea that could be summoned into being. Hell had been created countless times before, from the Crusaders’ massacre of Jerusalem to Stalin’s “hunger-extermination” of seven million Ukrainians; from reeking, disease-ridden slave ships bound for New Orleans to the systemized horror of Auschwitz; from Lieutenant Calley to the Khmer Rouge. There was almost an equation to it. Hell was born when some decided others weren’t people.

The 20th century merits the name "The Century of Murder." 1915 Turks slaughtered 2 million Armenians. 1933 to 1954 the Soviet government encompassed the death of 20 to 65 million citizens. 1933 to 1945 Nazi Germany murdered more than 25 million people. 1948 Hindus and Muslims engaged in racial and religious strife that claimed more lives than could be reported. 1970 3 million Bangladesh were killed. 1971 Uganda managed the death of 300,000 people. 1975 Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and murdered up to 3 million people. In recent times more than half a million of Rwanda's 6 million people have been murdered. At present times genocidal strife is underway in Bosnia, Somalia, Burundi and elsewhere. The people of the world have demonstrated themselves to be so capable of forgetting the murderous frenzies in which their fellows have participated that it is essential that one, at least, be remembered and the world be regularly reminded of it. _Consequences of the Holocaust by Raul Hilberg

I was out on the Mekong again today when an entire village of refugees floated past. They had been attacked upriver by the Khmer Rouge. It was a pathetic sight, a flotilla of hundreds of ragged houseboats lashed together into giant rafts, drifting slowly. They were carrying their dead with them. I could see the bodies, wrapped in cloth. They stared at me blankly as I glided silently past, my multicolored sail bright in the sunlight. A small child waved but didn’t smile. Then a gentle gust caught my sail and I was gone.

When Nixon resigned over Watergate, it provided all the leverage Hayden and his activists needed. The Democrats won the midterm elections, bringing to Washington a new group of legislators who were determined to undermine the settlement that Nixon and Kissinger had achieved. The aid was cut, the Saigon regime fell, and the Khmer Rouge marched into the Cambodian capital. In the two years that followed, the victorious Communists killed more Indochinese than had been killed on both sides in all 13 years of the anti-Communist war.

[One bad idea] inspired the lynching trees of America, the smokestacks of Auschwitz, the gulags of Siberia, killing fields of Khmer Rouge, and the butchery of those in Rwanda, Darfur, Congo, and more. Given its bloody track record you would think that this idea would be universally rejected but it is staging a massive comeback in the 21st century, rebranding itself as “justice.” What is this bad idea? Tribalism is the idea that we should divide people into group identities then assign undesirable or evil trait to that group and such a way that we don't see the unique image-bearers of God before us.

In this chapter, I want to focus on the really big crimes that have been committed by atheist groups and governments. In the past hundred years or so, the most powerful atheist regimes—Communist Russia, Communist China, and Nazi Germany—have wiped out people in astronomical numbers. Stalin was responsible for around twenty million deaths, produced through mass slayings, forced labor camps, show trials followed by firing squads, population relocation and starvation, and so on. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s authoritative recent study Mao: The Unknown Story attributes to Mao Zedong’s regime a staggering seventy million deaths.4 Some China scholars think Chang and Halliday’s numbers are a bit high, but the authors present convincing evidence that Mao’s atheist regime was the most murderous in world history. Stalin’s and Mao’s killings—unlike those of, say, the Crusades or the Thirty Years’ War—were done in peacetime and were performed on their fellow countrymen. Hitler comes in a distant third with around ten million murders, six million of them Jews. So far, I haven’t even counted the assassinations and slayings ordered by other Soviet dictators like Lenin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and so on. Nor have I included a host of “lesser” atheist tyrants: Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, Nicolae Ceaus̹escu, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-il. Even these “minor league” despots killed a lot of people. Consider Pol Pot, who was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party faction that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Within this four-year period Pol Pot and his revolutionary ideologues engaged in systematic mass relocations and killings that eliminated approximately one-fifth of the Cambodian population, an estimated 1.5 million to 2 million people. In fact, Pol Pot killed a larger percentage of his countrymen than Stalin and Mao killed of theirs.5 Even so, focusing only on the big three—Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—we have to recognize that atheist regimes have in a single century murdered more than one hundred million people.

When I was still a teenager, building my personality from the films and the books and the songs I later tried to give to Graham, the chief monk of one of Cambodia’s largest wats announced that he could not rule out that the victims of the Khmer Rouge were not the final link in a chain of karmic cause and effect. If they had behaved with integrity in past lives, perhaps they would not have had to lie in mass graves at the end of this. My mother never went back to our temple after that. She kept flowers and fruit on the shrine at home, but it became a place she put her thoughts to dry out. All her honoring she gave to her new country, which told her she was welcome as long as she worked. In terms of karmic cause and effect, that was far more palatable.

Those who argued that the number of Cambodians killed was in the hundreds of thousands or those who tried to generate press coverage of the horrors did so assuming that establishing the facts would empower the United States and other Western governments to act. Normally, in a time of genocide, op-ed writers, policymakers, and reporters root for a distinct outcome or urge a specific U.S. military, economic, legal, humanitarian, or diplomatic response. Implicit indeed in many cables and news articles, and explicit in most editorials, is an underlying message, a sort of “if I were czar, I would do X or Y.” But in the first three years of KR rule, even the Americans most concerned about Cambodia—Twining, Quinn, and Becker among them—internalized the constraints of the day and the system. They knew that drawing attention to the slaughter in Cambodia would have reminded America of its past sins, reopened wounds that had not yet healed at home, and invited questions about what the United States planned to do to curb the terror. They were neither surprised nor agitated by U.S. apathy. They accepted U.S. noninvolvement as an established background condition. Once U.S. troops had withdrawn from Vietnam in 1973, Americans deemed all of Southeast Asia unspeakable, unwatchable, and from a policy perspective, unfixable. “There could have been two genocides in Cambodia and nobody would have cared,” remembers Morton Abramowitz, who at the time was an Asia specialist at the Pentagon and in 1978 became U.S. ambassador to Thailand. During the Khmer Rouge period, he remembers, “people just wanted to forget about the place. They wanted it off the radar.

Like the monks chanting their Pali mantras, learning by rote was the accepted method of education just as in English schools of the time. ‘In geography,’ Sokheang recalled, ‘we would have to learn the size of a country, the population, the agricultural produce, etcetera. And we would get called up to recite it to the rest of the class.’ The accuracy of this recitation was the measure of a successful student. ‘Knowledge,’ said Sokheang, ‘was the storage of facts.

In 1969 the Khmer Rouge numbered only about 4,000. By 1975 their numbers were enough to defeat the government forces. Their victory was greatly helped by the American attack on Cambodia, which was carried out as an extension of the Vietnam War. In 1970 a military coup led by Lon Nol, possibly with American support, overthrew the government of Prince Sihanouk, and American and South Vietnamese troops entered Cambodia. One estimate is that 600,000 people, nearly 10 per cent of the Cambodian population, were killed in this extension of the war. Another estimate puts the deaths from the American bombing at 1000,000 peasants. From 1972 to 1973, the quantity of bombs dropped on Cambodia was well over three times that dropped on Japan in the Second World War. The decision to bomb was taken by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and was originally justified on the grounds that North Vietnamese bases had been set up in Cambodia. The intention (according to a later defence by Kissinger’s aide, Peter W. Rodman) was to target only places with few Cambodians: ‘From the Joint Chiefs’ memorandum of April 9, 1969, the White House selected as targets only six base areas minimally populated by civilians. The target areas were given the codenames BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER, SUPPER, SNACK, and DESSERT; the overall programme was given the name MENU.’ Rodman makes the point that SUPPER, for instance, had troop concentrations, anti-aircraft, artillery, rocket and mortar positions, together with other military targets. Even if relatively few Cambodians were killed by the unpleasantly names items on the MENU, each of them was a person leading a life in a country not at war with the United States. And, as the bombing continued, these relative restraints were loosened. To these political decisions, physical and psychological distance made their familiar contribution. Roger Morris, a member of Kissinger’s staff, later described the deadened human responses: Though they spoke of terrible human suffering reality was sealed off by their trite, lifeless vernacular: 'capabilities', 'objectives', 'our chips', 'giveaway'. It was a matter, too, of culture and style. They spoke with the cool, deliberate detachment of men who believe the banishment of feeling renders them wise and, more important, credible to other men… They neither understood the foreign policy they were dealing with, nor were deeply moved by the bloodshed and suffering they administered to their stereo-types. On the ground the stereotypes were replaced by people. In the villages hit by bombs and napalm, peasants were wounded or killed, often being burnt to death. Those who left alive took refuge in the forests. One Western ob-server commented, ‘it is difficult to imagine the intensity of their hatred to-wards those who are destroying their villages and property’. A raid killed twenty people in the village of Chalong. Afterwards seventy people from Chalong joined the Khmer Rouge. Prince Sihanouk said that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger created the Khmer Rouge by expanding the war into Cambodia.

I became a very timid individual. I became introspective. I wondered what had made me act the way I had acted. Why had I killed my fellow men in war, without any feeling, remorse, or regret? And when the war was over, why did I con­tinue to drink and swagger around and get into fistfights? Why did I like to dish out pain, and why did I take positive delight in the suffering of others? Was I insane? Was it too much testosterone? Women don’t do things like that. The rapacious Will to Power lost its hold on me. Suddenly I began to feel sympathetic to the cares and sufferings of all living creatures. You lose your health and you start thinking this way. Has man become any better since the times of Theog­enes? The world is replete with badness. I’m not talking about that old routine where you drag out the Spanish Inqui­sition, the Holocaust, Joseph Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, etc. It happens in our own backyard. Twentieth-century America is one of the most materially prosperous nations in history. But take a walk through an American prison, a nursing home, the slums where the homeless live in cardboard boxes, a cancer ward. Go to a Vietnam vets’ meeting, or an A.A. meeting, or an Overeaters Anonymous meeting. How hollow and unreal a thing is life, how deceitful are its pleasures, what horrible aspects it possesses. Is the world not rather like a hell, as Schopenhauer, that clearheaded seer—who has helped me transform my suf­fering into an object of understanding—was so quick to point out? They called him a pessimist and dismissed him with a word, but it is peace and self-renewal that I have found in his pages.

Tadpoles. Crickets. Toads. Centipedes. Mice. Rats and scorpions. We eat anything. As we till the earth, we look upon bugs as buried treasure. Our eyes scan the soil, tucking any edible treat in a waistband, a pocket, tied into a scarf. Later the prize is retrieved, skewered on a stick, and stuffed into the fire. Those who haven’t caught anything watch, their begging eyes following each move. We must ignore them, and also ignore what we eat. There is no revulsion. Food is food. Anything, everything tastes good—even the smell of roasting crickets makes stomachs rumble with desire. Yet even the smallest creatures, the rodents, the insects, are becoming scarce. Some days, our meals for the entire day consist of boiled leaves. Our lives are reduced to a tight circle. Each day revolves around what we can find to eat for the following day. And until it comes, we think about food. All day. All night. Hunger owns us.

Over the next 1,364 days, the Khmer Rouge, seeking to obliterate the social classes and create an agrarian society of peasants, was responsible for killing, starving, or working to death about two million Cambodians, out of a population of eight million. Accounting for the percentage of people destroyed, Pol Pot’s Communist regime was the most murderous in the modern age.

The way people behave depends on the basic moral tests and norms in a society. Naturally, the Khmer Rouge, Al-Qaeda terrorists, respectable middle-class Europeans, and, say, members of the Komosol in the 1930's, would behave quite differently in identical situations. But that wouldn't change the essential point. The ration of altruists and egoists, even among Benedictine monks and members of the Gestapo, is the same. It's just that their altruism and egotism are expressed differently.

The Khmer Rouge is in the casino business now!’ Casinos? Run by the most vicious, hard-core Commie mass murderers in history? Well, why not check it out?

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The war in Vietnam spread to Cambodia when the United States bombed Cambodia’s borders to try to destroy the North Vietnamese bases. The bombings destroyed many villages and killed many people, allowing the Khmer Rouge to gain support from the peasants and farmers. In 1970, Prince Sihanouk was overthrown by his top general, Lon Nol. The United States-backed Lon Nol government was corrupt and weak and was easily defeated by the Khmer Rouge.

Las personas cultas -decían los nuevos líderes- son un lastre para los trabajadores. Las ciudades encarnan el mal. La cultura y la educación son inútiles y egoístas. El dinero y el comercio están corruptos. La fuerza de un país es el hombre trabajador, no los parásitos que viven de él. ¡Plantad arroz para que el país prospere! (...) Aquello era un holocausto. No solo de la vida, sino también del sentido común y de la razón.

Kaplan “was further surprised to discover that a list of 154 influential people of color did not include Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, or Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, though it included many violent revolutionaries. There was even a flattering description of Pol Pot, the communist leader of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, who was responsible for the murder of a quarter of the Cambodian population during the 1970s.

Leading communists like Khieu Samphan had served as ministers in his government during the 1960s, and he thought he knew them well. In early 1973 the prince and his wife Monique toured the CPK’s “liberated zone,” posing with pasted-on smiles in the black pajamas worn by the communist troops. He later wrote to several Democrats in the US, reassuring them (and maybe also himself) that the Khmer Rouge would not set up a communist system after coming to power, “but a Swedish type of kingdom.”15 In private he was more pessimistic, predicting that the Khmer Rouge would spit him out “like a cherry pit” once they gained power.16

political theory, this also relates to the term “Year Zero” reflected in such historical events as the 1975 takeover of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge and to the “Year One” of the French Revolutionary calendar.

Cole jumped into the bow of the boat and walked slowly to where the short Khmer Rouge soldier was lying, grabbing the bullet wound in his left shoulder with the cup of his right hand. It was not a fatal wound. And Cole was about the fix that.

Intending to proceed to the subject of human cruelty and the homicidal tendency of the species, Cosima ordered documentaries on Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, the Soviet gulags, the Khmer Rouge, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others.

Led by Prince Sihanouk, Cambodia, then a French colony, became an independent nation in 1953. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Cambodia prospered and was self-sufficient. However, many people were not happy with Prince Sihanouk’s government. Many regarded the Sihanouk government as corrupt and self-serving, where the poor got poorer and the rich became richer. Various nationalistic factions sprang up to demand reforms. One of the groups, a secret Communist faction—the Khmer Rouge—launched an armed struggle against the Cambodian government.

When he talks about life under the Khmer Rouge, he uses phrases very unlike him—“true hell,” “more than insane,” “below zero.

The last time Holbrooke saw Blythe was in the fall of 1980, when he was in New York to finalize the divorce and to reaffirm the American vote for the Khmer Rouge seat at the United Nations. "Pol Pot, Dick?" Blythe said after they signed the papers. "How could you?

Mother’s tenderness toward my younger sisters caused more tears to pool in my eyes. I felt too old to be hugged and caressed by her, yet my body yearned for her touch; at least this once. I couldn't recall the last time she had shared the same warmth with me. The countless months of hardship had created an ocean of distance between us. It would be too awkward to hug her now. I sat across from her with tear-stained cheeks, wondering if she could feel my sadness and if she knew I loved her unconditionally.

At the farm, in our hut, they cooked plain rice porridge and added soy sauce for taste, which nearly rivaled the thrill of drinking water. That was all I ate for a week.

Our lives are reduced to a tight circle. Each day revolves around what we can find to eat for the following day. And until it comes, we think about food. All day. All night. Hunger owns us.

her supervisor and the soldiers were already accusing her of being a malingerer.

Several research studies have demonstrated that one-third to one-half of all Cambodians who lived through the Khmer Rouge era have PTSD, borne of their traumatic experiences then.

To survive during the Khmer Rouge, you had to steal, cheat, lie, point fingers at others, even kill. And now you are ashamed.

It's been years, and yet she still talks about my first New York studio like it was the "hole" in a Khmer Rouge prison.

Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth provided intellectual cover for a generation of enthusiasts for Third World socialism—including Sartre himself. Revolutionary violence in far-off countries would serve as a source of both political liberation and cultural regeneration. Cuba, Vietnam, China (particularly during Mao’s Cultural Revolution), and Khmer Rouge Cambodia promised to turn politics into the same cleansing, unifying force that National Socialism’s revolution on the Right had promised: a spontaneous, vital, and invincible movement toward liberation from a dying West.

The lake was part of one of those insane irrigation schemes leading nowhere, built by forced labor under the Khmer Rouge. Judging by the height of the dam, a lot of Cambodians must have died during the construction.

I thank you very sincerely for your letter and your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave [Cambodia] in such a cowardly fashion. As for you, and in particular your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would . . . [abandon] a people which have chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection, and we can do nothing about it. You leave, and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under the sky. [If I die here] I have committed only this mistake of believing you.8 When the Communist Khmer Rouge seized Phnom Penh, they shot Matak in the stomach. Unattended, it took him three days to die.9

For us, Cambodia was an election amid minor eruptions of political violence from a decrepit Khmer Rouge, just dangerous enough to add an edge to the otherwise bacchanalian proceedings. We thought Somalia would be similarly exultant, but instead we’re inserted directly into combat. This is a hot war. It’s hard to make peace in a society of nomadic warriors who like to fight, and twenty thousand UN and U.S. soldiers are failing.

Nixon bombed the hell out of Cambodia at the end of the Vietnam War. The Khmer Rouge seized the moment of chaos, took power, and killed anyone they thought represented corrupt Western culture: lawyers, teachers, artists, people who spoke French, anyone who wore glasses. More than a million civilians died. It was one of those Maoist purges, inspired by the Cultural Revolution in China. I never understood in college exactly what that meant, ‘Maoist,’ but I think it means kill everything that moves.

Radio messages report rampant rumors of Khmer Rouge attacks. There is a curfew imposed at dusk. Every corner along the main road is occupied by tanks and armored personnel carriers, soldiers everywhere. The road to Vietnam is crawling with military, and everyone is nervous. But rather than being afraid to go outside, I find it thrilling. I’ve stepped into a TV show and any misadventure can be undone with a flick of the remote.

At daybreak on the first day, thousands of Cambodians are already calmly waiting outside my polling station. They squat on the ground, silent and patient. We didn’t expect this at all. We thought they would fail to understand how democracy works. We thought they would be afraid of the Khmer Rouge. We thought they would passively accept their fate. We were wrong.

It’s so savage. So primitive.” “Modern man isn’t far behind. Think of the Nazis in WWII. The Serbs in Bosnia. Khmer Rouge. Taliban. Chechnya. The list goes on. It’s all the same. Mass murder followed by cover-up. Nothing changes.

The deserters and dissenters expelled from the party formed RENAMO, a rebel group committed to snatching power from FRELIMO. Supported by South Africa and Rhodesia, who did not want a socialist government on their doorsteps, RENAMO conducted a campaign of terror, destabalisation and plunder, murdered hundreds of thousands of Mozambicans. It was a tragedy and travesty of the worst kind. It was a conflict that surpassed the brutality of the war in Vietnam: RENAMO, it was said, outdid the Cambodian Khmer Rouge in cruelty, perpetrating some of the most inhumane acts against their own people, with the full knowledge, support and encouragement of Mozambique’s white-ruled neighbours. [280]

But I’ve never seen a free exchange. A gift is something else. I lived for four years in a society without currency, and I never felt that the absence of money made injustice easier to bear. And I can’t forget that the very idea of value had disappeared. Nothing could be estimated, or esteemed, anymore—not human life or anything else. But to assess something, to evaluate it, doesn’t necessarily mean to have contempt for it or to destroy it. Nothing

in this society there is no one else you can count on,” said Chandler, the historian. “They don’t think a society really exists.” That tendency proved useful for most of Cambodia’s history, as the nation lived through successive wars with its neighbors. Most Cambodians focused only on family and village life. These were their only havens as foreign troops ranged over the nation and government leaders schemed and connived for their own accounts. Egoism was of undeniable value during the Khmer Rouge era. To survive Cambodians had to behave as Kok Chuum, the Dang Run village chief, did. “I ate wild potatoes I found in the woods,” he said. “I did it secretly. I told no one.” Presumably, back then, others near him were starving to death, as workers did all over the nation. But in the twenty-first century individualism, this shared personality trait, ensured that Cambodians would remain hungry and illiterate. By and large they could not, would not, stand up and advocate for themselves.   Imagine

I have covered several trials for genocide or crimes against humanity in international courts; no other perpetrator has been given such ample opportunity to be heard—not in Arusha, Freetown, or The Hague.

It was at this time that his interest in communism began to take root,

Sólo los políticos se arrogan el derecho a condonar o perdonar en nombre de todos, cosa inconcebible para un crimen de masas o un genocidio.

Recuerdo haber visto, en imágenes de archivo, a cerdos paseándose por la Biblioteca Nacional de Phnom Penh, vaciada por los jemeres rojos. Derribaban sillas y pisoteaban mondaduras. Los cerdos sustituían a los libros. Y nosotros sustituíamos a los cerdos.

Había que sobrevivir. Ése era nuestro primer deber. Nuestro primer combate. Rebelarse significaba, en primer lugar, vivir. O más bien: seguir vivo.

Habíamos perdido nuestras capacidades físicas y morales de imaginar la libertad.

Los cadáveres se quedaban allí, con su ropa negra, devorados por las ratas y los gusanos, derretidos por el sol, anegados por las lluvias. Eran el abono del miedo.

DUCH’S IS THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL TRIAL CONCERNED WITH crimes committed in the name of Communism. International lawyers and human rights activists are scathing about so-called nationalist revolutions—those that openly pursue racist or xenophobic aims. No one has any trouble rejecting the movement for a Greater Serbia or denouncing Hutu Power. Yet many balk at the notion that, in a trial of the Khmer Rouge, Communism itself takes the stand as well.

What is the norm for measuring enthusiasm? The Communist Party was a paranoid organization. They suspected everything, and they believed that anyone could turn out to be a traitor. There was no criterion for measuring what was within the parameters of an acceptable result and what wasn’t. This is my most frank answer, Your Honor.

He has a better recollection of what he was ordered to do with lepers: destroy them all. Communism must liberate man. Communism abhors the handicapped, the sick, the mentally ill, the religious, homosexuals, and intellectuals.

On April 17, 1975, Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge. Overnight, Cambodia became a blank spot on the map, sealed off from the rest of the world.

The point is that it was something done by others against us. In Ukraine, as indeed in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge genocide of 1975–79, it was not something quite so clearly done by others.

La hambruna es el primer crimen de masas, y es muy difícil probarlo con certeza.

¿Cuál es el régimen político más inhumano? El que decreta el bien del hombre.

Es una defensa clásica en los sistemas totalitarios: todos los verdugos afirman estar aterrorizados. Tal vez en parte sea cierto. El torturador puede tener miedo, pero tiene elección. El prisionero sólo tiene miedo

el combate es infinito contra el otro oculto en uno mismo.