Cambodia's Killing Fields

Photograph

By: Denis D. Gray

Date: April 17, 1981

Source: Gray, Denis D. "Cambodia's Killing Fields." Associated Press, 1981.

About the Photographer: Denis D. Gray is a reporter best known for covering events in Southeast Asia for the Associated Press (AP), a worldwide news agency based in New York.

INTRODUCTION

From 1975 to 1979, a Communist political party known as the Khmer Rouge ruled the nation of Cambodia, a country directly to the west of southern Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge (Khmer is the ethnicity of ninety-five percent of Cambodians and "rouge" is French for "red," the color usually associated with Communism) preached a radical philosophy of class warfare and social purification. City dwellers, college-educated people, scholars, Buddhist monks, persons connected in any with the previous government or foreigners, and many others were considered enemies of the new society, which, the Khmer Rouge announced, would count its calendar starting with "Year Zero" in the year of their victory. In pursuit of this utopian vision, the Khmer Rouge declared money, private property, religion, and books illegal and committed massive atrocities. The capital city of Cambodia, Phnom Penh (pronounced pih-nom pen), fell to Khmer Rouge forces on April 17, 1975. They ordered the city's two million inhabitants to evacuate to the countryside; many thousands died of exposure and starvation as a result of this forced exodus. Persons were also urged to confess their crimes against the state and were promised forgiveness from the new government, but in reality, those who identified themselves as members of a suspect group were taken away to remote rural locations, "killing fields," and executed, often after being tortured.

The rule of the Khmer Rouge ended in 1979 when the forces of Communist Vietnam—united as a single country since the defeat of the Americans at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975—invaded. The Vietnamese established a conventional Communist government in Cambodia and the genocide ceased. The Khmer Rouge became a guerrilla force once again and continued to pay a major role in Cambodian politics until the late 1990s. In 1996, about half the remaining Khmer Rouge forces surrendered in exchange for amnesty. Their founder and leader, Pol Pot, died in 1998.

In their few years in power, the Khmer Rouge killed over a million people, some by hand in the "killing fields" and many more through famine: estimates vary widely, from 1.2 million (U.S. State Department), 1.4 million (Amnesty International), or 1.7 million (Yale Cambodian Genocide Project) to 2.3 million (the scholar Francois Ponchaud). The bones shown in this photograph were uncovered and arranged a few years after the ousting of the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese in order to document their atrocities.

PRIMARY SOURCE

CAMBODIA'S KILLING FIELDS

See primary source image.

SIGNIFICANCE

The crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge show how geopolitical power struggles can prepare the conditions for genocide, and reconcile even nations that value human rights to genocidal regimes.

Most historians agree that U.S. actions during the Vietnam War helped the Khmer Rouge rise to power, though other factors contributed as well. The Khmer Rouge began fighting in the countryside as a small guerrilla force in 1963, but made little progress. In 1969, the U.S. Air Force began bombing raids on Cambodia that were allegedly targeted at Viet Cong military camps. The United States had been bombing the neighboring country of Laos since 1964. By 1973, over two million tons of bombs had been dropped on Laos and over half a million tons on Cambodia, more tonnage than had been dropped in all of World War II by all sides combined. In Cambodia, between 150,000 and 500,000 Cambodian civilians were killed by the bombing. The Khmer Rouge, which was receiving aid from China and North Vietnam, exploited the resulting chaos, social breakdown, and anger to its advantage, becoming a more formidable fighting force. The exiled Cambodian King, Sihanouk, declared his support for the Khmer Rouge, further boosting their popularity. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge took power and began to take people to the killing fields.

At that time, the United States saw Cambodia as a regional counterbalance to North Vietnam, which was supported by Soviet Russia; in 1975, U.S. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger explained to the dictator of Indonesia, Suharto, that the United States was unwilling to oppose the Khmer Rouge government for this reason. President Ford told Suharto that "there is … resistance in Cambodia to the influence of Hanoi 'North Vietnam.' We are willing to move slowly in our relations with Cambodia, hoping perhaps to slow down the North Vietnamese." When these words were spoken on December 6, 1975, the Khmer Rouge genocide had been underway for about eight months.

After the Vietnamese conquered Cambodia in 1979, China and the United States gave aid to an anti-Vietnamese resistance coalition formed by King Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge, which U.S. President Jimmy Carter had called "the worst violater of human rights in the world" in 1978, thus became the indirect recipient of tens of millions of dollars of U.S. aid starting in 1979. The United States under Presidents Carter and Reagan also supported the retention of Cambodia's seat at the United Nations by Khmer Rouge representatives.

Vietnam left Cambodia in 1989. In 1992, United Nations peacekeeper forces oversaw a transition to a constitutional monarchy, and the following year Sihanouk was re-installed as king. In 2003, the United Nations, with U.S. support, signed an agreement with Cambodia to hold a tribunal to try former officials of the Khmer Rouge for genocide and crimes against humanity. As of early 2006, no trials had yet been held.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Chomsky, Noam, and Edward Herman. After the Cataclysm. South End Press, 1979.

Periodicals

Scheffer, David J. "Justice for Cambodia." The New York Times. (December 21, 2002).

Web sites

CBS. "Remembering the Killing Fields." 〈http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/04/15/world/main184477.shtml〉 (accessed April 24, 2006).

The Jurist. "High Time for Justice: The US and the Khmer Rouge Tribunal." 〈http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2006/01/high-time-for-justice-us-and-khmer.php〉 (accessed April 24, 2006).