Pol Pot Revisited
By Israel Shamir
Now,
in the monsoon season, Cambodia is verdant, cool and
relaxed. The rice paddies on the low hill slopes are
flooded, forests that hide old temples are almost
impassable, rough seas deter swimmers. It’s a pleasant
time to re-visit this modest country: Cambodia is not
crowded, and Cambodians are not greedy, but rather
peaceful and relaxed. They fish for shrimp, calamari and
sea brim. They grow rice, unspoiled by herbicides,
manually planted, cultivated and gathered. They produce
enough for themselves and for export, too -- definitely
no paradise, but the country soldiers on.
Socialism is being dismantled fast:
Chinese-owned factories keep churning tee-shirts for
the European and American market employing tens of
thousands of young Cambodian girls earning $80 per
month. They are being sacked at the first sign of
unionising. Nouveau-riches live in palaces; there are
plenty of Lexus cars, and an occasional Rolls-Royce.
Huge black and red, hard and precious tree trunks are
constantly ferried to the harbour for timber export,
destroying forests but enriching traders. There are many
new French restaurateurs in the capital; NGO reps earn
in one minute the equivalent of a worker’s monthly
salary.
Not much remains from the turbulent
period when the Cambodians tried to radically change the
order of things in the course of their unique
traditionalist conservative peasant revolution under
communist banner. That was the glorious time of Jean Luc
Godard and his La Chinoise, of the Cultural
Revolution in China sending party bonzes for
re-education to remote farms, of Khmer Rouge marching on
the corrupt capital. Socialist movement reached a
bifurcation point: whether to advance to more socialism
Mao-style, or retreat to less socialism the Moscow way.
The Khmer Rouge experiment lasted only three years, from
1975 to 1978.
Surprisingly, Cambodians have no bad
memories of that period. This is quite an amazing
discovery for an infrequent visitor. I did not come to
reconstruct “the truth”, whatever it is, but rather to
find out what is the collective memory of the
Cambodians, how do they perceive the events of the late
20th century, what narrative has been
filtered down by time gone by. The omnipotent
narrative-making machinery of the West has embedded in
our conscience the image of bloody Khmer Rouge commies
cannibalising their own people over the Killing Fields
and ruled over by a nightmarish Pol Pot, anybody’s
notion of ruthless despot.
A much quoted American professor, RJ
Rummel,
wrote that “out of a 1970 population of probably
near 7,100,000 …almost 3,300,000 men, women, and
children were murdered …most of these… were murdered by
the communist Khmer Rouge”. Every second person was
killed, according to his estimate.
However, Cambodia’s population was
not halved but more than doubled since 1970, despite
alleged multiple genocides. Apparently, the genocidaires
were inept, or their achievements have been greatly
exaggerated.
The Pol Pot the Cambodians remember
was not a tyrant, but a great patriot and nationalist, a
lover of native culture and native way of life. He was
brought up in royal palace circles; his aunt was a
concubine of the previous king. He studied in Paris, but
instead of making money and a career, he returned home,
and spent a few years dwelling with forest tribes to
learn from the peasants. He felt compassion for the
ordinary village people who were ripped off on a daily
basis by the city folk, the comprador parasites. He
built an army to defend the countryside from these
power-wielding robbers. Pol Pot, a monkish man of
simple needs, did not seek wealth, fame or power for
himself. He had one great ambition: to terminate the
failing colonial capitalism in Cambodia, return to
village tradition, and from there, to build a new
country from scratch.
His vision was very different from
the Soviet one. The Soviets built their industry by
bleeding the peasantry; Pol Pot wanted to rebuild the
village first, and only afterwards build
industry to meet the villagers’ needs. He held city
dwellers in contempt; they did nothing useful, in his
view. Many of them were connected with loan sharks, a
distinct feature of post-colonial Cambodia; others
assisted the foreign companies in robbing people off
their wealth. Being a strong nationalist, Pol Pot was
suspicious of the Vietnamese and Chinese minorities. But
what he hated most was acquisitiveness, greed, the
desire to own things. St Francis and Leo Tolstoy would
have understood him.
The Cambodians I spoke to pooh-poohed
the dreadful stories of Communist Holocaust as a western
invention. They reminded me of what went on: their
brief history of troubles began in 1970, when the
Americans chased away their legitimate ruler, Prince
Sihanouk, and replaced him with their proxy military
dictator Lon Nol. Lon Nol’s middle name was Corruption,
and his followers stole everything they could,
transferred their ill-gotten gains abroad then moved to
the US. On top of this came US bombing raids. The
peasants ran to the forest guerrillas of Khmer Rouge,
which was led by a few Sorbonne graduates, and
eventually succeeded in kicking out Lon Nol and his
American supporters.
In 1975, Pol Pot took over the
country, devastated by a US bombing campaign of Dresden
ferocity, and saved it, they say. Indeed, the US planes
(do you remember
Ride of the Valkyries in the Apocalypse is Now?)
dropped more bombs on this poor country than they had on
the Nazi Germany, and spread their mines all over the
rest of it. If the Cambodians are pressed to name their
great destroyer (and they are not keen about burrowing
back into the past), it is Professor Henry Kissinger
they name, not Comrade Pol Pot.
Pol Pot and his friends inherited a
devastated country. The villages had been depopulated;
millions of refugees gathered in the capital to escape
American bombs and American mines. Destitute and hungry,
they had to be fed. But because of the bombing campaign,
nobody planted rice in 1974. Pol Pot commanded everybody
away from the city and to the rice paddies, to plant
rice. This was a harsh, but a necessary step, and in a
year Cambodia had plenty of rice, enough to feed all and
even to sell some surplus to buy necessary commodities.
New Cambodia (or Kampuchea, as it was
called) under Pol Pot and his comrades was a nightmare
for the privileged, for the wealthy and for their
retainers; but poor people had enough food and were
taught to read and write. As for the mass killings,
these are just horror stories, averred my Cambodian
interlocutors. Surely the victorious peasants shot
marauders and spies, but many more died of
American-planted mines and during the subsequent
Vietnamese takeover, they said.
In order to listen to the other side,
I travelled to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, the
memorial where the alleged victims were killed and
buried. This is a place some 30 km away from Phnom Penh,
a neat green park with a small museum, much visited by
tourists, the Cambodian Yad va-Shem. A plaque
says that the Khmer Rouge guards would bring some 20 to
thirty detainees twice or thrice a month, and kill many
of them. For three years, it would amount less than two
thousand dead, but another plaque said indeed that they
dug up about eight thousand bodies. However, another
plaque said there was over a million killed. Noam
Chomsky assessed that the death toll in Cambodia
may have been inflated "by a factor of a thousand."

There are no photos of the killings; instead, the humble
museum holds a couple of naïve paintings showing a big,
strong man killing a small, weak one, in a rather
traditional style. Other plaques read: “Here the
murderous tools were kept, but nothing remains now” and
similar inscriptions. To me, this recalled other
CIA-sponsored stories of Red atrocities, be it Stalin’s
Terror or the Ukrainian Holodomor. The people now in
charge of the US, Europe and Russia want to present
every alternative to their rule as inept or bloody or
both. They especially hate incorruptible leaders, be it
Robespierre or Lenin, Stalin or Mao – and Pol Pot. They
prefer leaders keen on graft, and eventually install
them. The Americans have an additional good reason: Pol
Pot killings serve to hide their own atrocities, the
millions of Indochinese they napalmed and strafed.
Cambodians do say that many more people were killed by
the invading Vietnamese in 1978; while the Vietnamese
prefer to shift the guilt to the Khmer Rouge. But the
present government does not encourage this or any other
digging into the past, and for good reason: practically
all important officials above a certain age were members
of the Khmer Rouge, and often leading members. Beside,
almost all of them collaborated with the Vietnamese. The
present PM, Hun Sen, was a Khmer Rouge commander, and
later supported the Vietnamese occupation. When the
Vietnamese went home, he remained in power.
Prince Sihanouk, who was exiled by the Americans, also
supported the Khmer Rouge. He returned home to his neat
royal palace and to its adjacent silver temple with
Emerald Buddha after departure of the Vietnamese.
Unbelievably, he is still alive, though he transferred
the crown to his son, a monk who had to leave monastery
and assume the throne. So the royal family is not keen
on digging up the past, either. Nobody wants to discuss
it openly; the official story of Khmer Rouge alleged
atrocities is entrenched in Western conscience, though
attempts to try the perpetrators bore scant results.
Looking back, it appears that the Khmer Rouge of Pol Pot
failed in their foreign policy rather than in their
internal one. It is fine that they canceled money,
dynamited banks and sent bankers to plant rice. It is
fine that they dried up the great blood-sucking leech,
the big-city compradors and money-lenders. Their failure
was that they did not calculate their position vis-à-vis
Vietnam, and tried to push beyond their own weight.
Vietnam was very powerful – it had just defeated the US
– and would brook no nonsense from their junior brothers
in Phnom Penh. The Vietnamese planned to create an
Indochinese Federation including Laos and Cambodia under
their own leadership. They invaded and overthrew the
stubborn Khmer Rouge who were too keen on their
independence. They also supported the black legend of
genocide to justify their own bloody intervention.
We talk too much about evils committed under futurist
regimes, and too little about the evils of the greedy
rulers. It is not often we remember Bengal famine,
Hiroshima holocaust, Vietnam tragedy, or even Sabra and
Shatila. Introduction of capitalism in Russia killed
more people than introduction of socialism, but who
knows that?
Now we may cautiously reassess the brave attempts to
reach for socialism in various countries. They were done
under harsh, adverse conditions, under threat of
intervention, facing hostile propaganda. But let us
remember: if socialism failed, so did capitalism. If
communism was accompanied by loss of life, so was and is
capitalism. But with capitalism, we have no future worth
living, while socialism still offers hope to us and our
children.