Posted on 01/13/2004 6:15:20 AM PST by SJackson
Bright red blood which covers towns and plains
Of Kampuchea, our Motherland,
Sublime Blood of workers and peasants,
Sublime Blood of revolutionary men and women fighters!
The Blood changing into unrelenting hatred...
- the Khmer Rouge national anthem
Twenty-five years after the worst holocaust since the Second World War, former Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan finally admitted last December that genocide did occur in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, the years of Khmer Rouge rule. Samphan was president of ‘Democratic Kampuchea’, which the ultra-murderous Khmer Rouge renamed the Southeast Asian nation, while the infamous Pol Pot was prime minister.
Samphan’s long-delayed realization occurred after watching a documentary about Tuol Sleng, the notorious torture-murder center in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, where 20,000 people were killed under unspeakable circumstances. About two million other Cambodians were executed, perished from starvation or exhausting slave labor in one of the bloodiest socialist experiments ever carried out in the long, sorry history of communism. The movie, ‘The Killing Fields’, revealed to a shocked world the horror of the Cambodian holocaust, its title becoming, like Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, a part of Western vocabulary.
The Khmer Rouge’s cruelty was almost indescribable - even for communists. While Marxist theory calls for the building of socialism before the leap to communism is made, the Khmer Rouge established a communist social order their first day in power on April 17, 1975. The cities were forcibly emptied of their populations, money was abolished, and Year Zero, the start of the new, and final, era in human history, was declared.
The first instances of class extermination, carried out in all Marxist socialist societies, took place almost immediately among the hundreds of thousands of city dwellers trudging to their new places of residence in the countryside where they became slave laborers in agricultural collectives. People were executed on the sides of roads while others simply disappeared for ‘re-education’. The Cambodian communists’ eventual aim was to eliminate everyone over the age of twelve at the time of the ‘revolution’, so as to wipe out all historical memory of the pre-revolutionary world.
Several excellent memoirs by survivors have helped convey the extent of Cambodia’s martyrdom under the Khmer Rouge. Among them, The Stones Cry Out: A Cambodian Childhood 1975-1980 stands out for its poignancy. Its author, Molyda Szymusiak, was a 12-year-old child living in Phnom Penh in 1975 when the KR took over. This remarkable girl and the other 19 members of her extended family survived the city’s evacuation but, when the nightmare was over four years later, only she and three younger cousins were among the living.
Viewed through the eyes of a child, Szymusiak (who later took the name of her adoptive parents) depicts with an insight beyond her years the Marxist socialist hell she inhabited with seven million other Cambodians. People’s suffering reached the point where they didn’t care whether they lived any longer. Whole families would commit suicide to escape their cruel fate, while others willingly went to their executions for the same reason. Like the Ukrainian holocaust of the early 1930s, food was deliberately withheld to create mass starvation. Only Khmer Rouge members were well fed. Szymusiak’s own mother would pray that an atom bomb be dropped on Cambodia to end the torment.
In Szymusiak’s case, her mother, brother and two sisters died while lying beside her. Of the 1,000 people in her collective, only 100 remained at one point. In her group of ten families she was the sole survivor, while her four-year-old cousin was the only child left alive in the village. Her depictions of the Khmer Rouge’s incredible sadism are unforgettable and many. She once came across six naked bodies of young people holding hands with their throats cut. They had married without permission. Another time she and girls from her work team found corpses of naked women adorned with jewelry and with grass stuffed in every orifice. The girls left them untouched, fearing a Khmer Rouge trap. And what she witnessed at the dreaded ‘re-education school’ simply beggars description. Szymusiak’s account is truly the Ann Frank Diary for communist holocausts and should be required reading in every school.
It is a safe bet however that Samphan has never read Szymusiak’s book, since he denies all knowledge of such deeds. In a two-page letter he released after viewing the Tuol Sleng documentary, he acknowledges the genocide and admits the Khmer Rouge were a disaster for Cambodia, but shirks any real responsibility, saying he was “cloistered” during those years and didn’t have time to get around the country.
But Samphan’s repugnant self-exculpation may also be due to the fact that trials for Cambodia’s Marxist murderers were finally agreed upon in late December between the Cambodian government and the United Nations after years of delay. But if the 73-year-old Samphan ever does see the inside of a courtroom, one can probably expect only more Nuremburg-type excuses from him and others of his ilk. After all, Marxist mass murderers have never been known for experiencing any great pangs of conscience.
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Stephen Brown is a journalist based in Toronto. He has an M.A. in Russian and Eastern European Studies.
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Conservative Debate Handbook
Oh, that's right, they're too busy trying to figure out how to indict Bush for War Crimes for freeing the Iraqi people from a megalomanical, genocidal madman, or Sharion for attempting to protect his people from the same, in the person of Error-fat.
This was Richard Nixon's fault. That's what he'll tell you.
Please explain what you mean. The Khmer Rouge expelled all foreigners and cut off all communication to outside of the country. The extent of the killings was not even known until the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979, long after anything could be done about it.
There are regimes today - Cuba, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, and even Cambodia still - where political killings are taking place. Should the U.S. go in and overthrow the leaders of those countries?
If we do, we're imperialists. If we don't, we're complacently indifferent.
Armchair diplomacy is easy. Actually making those decisions isn't. But if you're going to pontificate about it, it would certainly be a good start to get your facts straight.
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