The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (87 page)

POSTWAR VIETNAM

Death toll:
365,000
¹

Rank:
91

Type:
ideological purge

Broad dividing line:
Communists vs. former anti-Communists

Time frame:
1975–92

Location and major state participant:
Vietnam

Who usually gets the most blame:
Communist government of unified Vietnam, Malay pirates

Another damn:
insane people’s republic

The unanswerable question everyone asks:
Does this mean the Americans were right to go into Vietnam and wrong to leave?

I
N THE CHAOTIC DAYS PRECEDING THE FALL OF SAIGON, THE AMERICANS
managed to evacuate 175,000 Vietnamese allies who would have been the most obvious targets for retribution—government officials, army officers, and biracial children. Even with that many rescued, the new Communist government found plenty of suspiciously Americanized South Vietnamese who needed to be dealt with. Civil servants, teachers, former officers, girlfriends, and students were told to report for a one-month seminar at special reeducation camps.

The ordeal did not pass as quickly as promised. They were to be quarantined from the new society and converted to loyal Marxists. The camps were run with a sort of religious fervor dedicated to transforming these hard cases into model citizens, but first their will had to be broken, often by torture, overwork, fatigue, and hunger. Many were kept in the camps for ten to fifteen years, working hard labor on low rations. Discipline was strict. Prisoners’ ankles and wrists grew scarred from chains and handcuffs.

“A lieutenant colonel tried to escape from the Lang Son reeducation camp by bribing one of the guards,” one witness described. “His plan was revealed; he was shot in one leg and caught. On the next day he was buried alive. He died after four days.”
²

Almost a million people passed through these camps, where probably 65,000 people were executed, and another 100,000 died of neglect, disease, or overwork. The reeducation camps were closed during a general amnesty in 1992, and thousands of prisoners who had been held for the full seventeen years were finally freed.

Boat People

Faced with unforgiving new rulers, many Vietnamese tried to flee the country. They used all their handy cash to bribe officials and buy whatever boats were available, many of them barely seaworthy, good for maybe a single one-way trip and not always that. Political refugees were only one part of the exodus. When a border war broke out between China and Vietnam in 1979, Hanoi heavily persecuted all Vietnamese of Chinese ancestry as suspected traitors.

Probably a million boat people fled Vietnam in just a few years, and as many as one-fourth of them died at sea.
³
They drifted in the harsh sun in leaky boats, slowly sinking, often running out of food or water. The dead were thrown overboard.

Aside from the ordinary hazards of the seas, the boat people suffered from human perils. The neighboring nations didn’t want them. Local coast guards chased them back into the open sea, and vigilantes attacked them when they washed ashore on foreign beaches. Many boats were seized by Malay pirates. Their possessions were stolen, the women raped, the men beaten.

Most of the boat people went to Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and the Philippines as their first stop, where they waited in refugee camps for richer countries to take them in. The largest numbers were resettled in the United States, with France and Australia taking many thousands as well.
⁴

In the late 1980s, another surge of boat people risked their lives to get out of Vietnam. Unfortunately, by this time, the world classified the boat people as economic refugees rather than political ones. They were considered a nuisance and received less sympathy.

In one 1989 incident, “seven pirates armed with shotguns and hammers stormed the refugees’ boat, which had left Vietnam on April 14 with more than 130 people aboard, including 20 children. . . . The pirates shot and killed the boat’s two pilots and raped most of the 15 to 20 women and girls aboard. Then they set the boat afire. In the ensuing panic, many refugees grabbed buoys, jerrycans and floats and plunged into the sea. . . . The pirates used sticks to prevent refugees from clinging to floating objects.” There was only one survivor, who drifted away on floating planks.
⁵

DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA

Death toll:
1,670,000

Rank:
39

Type:
Communist regime

Broad dividing line:
Khmer Rouge vs. everyone

Time frame:
1975–79

Location:
Cambodia (official name: Democratic Kampuchea)

Who usually gets the most blame:
Pol Pot, Khmer Rouge

Another damn:
insane people’s republic

The Killing Fields

The Communist insurgency in Cambodia had been little more than bandit gangs in the countryside until the American bombings and invasion spread the Vietnam War over the border. As Cambodia became engulfed in the larger conflict, the credibility and stability of the government in Phnom Penh faltered. The capital finally fell to the Khmer Rouge on April 17, 1975.

Almost immediately, the Khmer Rouge started herding the population of Phnom Penh out to the countryside. The people were told that Americans were on their way to bomb the city, so they should hurry. Leave everything behind and get out to the countryside as quickly as possible. Anyone who disobeyed was shot, as was anyone discovered on the list of class enemies. All across Cambodia, cities were abandoned by hundreds of thousands of people who would never see their homes again.

The populace was being moved back to the farms. To a certain extent, this was a purely practical response to the food shortages crippling the cities after years of guerrilla war, but ideology guided the move as well. The Khmer Rouge would not even consider two simpler, time-tested ways of getting food to the cities—foreign aid and free markets.
¹

The Khmer Rouge believed that the simple life of the humblest Cambodian peasant was the only acceptable lifestyle. Self-sufficient, contented, and hard-working, the peasant had survived the centuries without exploiting the labor of others. It represented the Communist ideal. Freed from capitalist exploitation, the peasants of Cambodia were now expected to triple their output. The average pre-war yield of 1 metric ton of rice per hectare was expected to reach the new quota of 3 metric tons per hectare. In practice, their output didn’t even come close.

Shopkeepers, waiters, clerks, secretaries, and anyone else who had been too much a part of modern, urban society were classified as “New People”—the source of everything that was wrong in the world. They were taken out to the country and put to work on farms, but they were clearly expendable. If the New People adapted to the peasant life, that was fine, but if they died of exhaustion, that was fine too. Ethnic minorities were also classified as New People and systematically wiped out. A third of the Cham—a Muslim ethnic minority—died over the next few years. Half of the Chinese in Cambodia died, as did around 40 percent of the Lao and Thai who lived along the border. Probably every Cambodian of Vietnamese heritage who didn’t flee or hide in time ended up dead at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. None have been found who survived the era out in the open.
²

Every institution across the country—temples, schools, mosques, stores—was closed as the Khmer Rouge began to wipe out Cambodia’s intellectuals. Obviously, teachers, students, journalists, and priests were killed right away, but anyone tainted by education was suspect. Wearing glasses or knowing a foreign language was enough to prove that a person had been poisoned by a dangerous degree of learning. These people would be killed as well, as would their parents, spouses, and children. As with the Soviet purges and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the taint of being a class enemy fell on all of the members of a family.

Tuol Sleng high school in the suburbs of Phnom Penh was adapted as a prison, S-21. The records show that only 7 of the 14,000 prisoners who entered this building survived the visit. That’s seven
period
, not seven thousand.
³
The rest are now just pictures in file folders and jumbled bones in the ground. After the suspects confessed to whatever crimes they were charged with (they always confessed), they were taken to the nearby village of Choeung Ek in batches to be shot and dumped into mass graves. A quarter century later, forensic archaeologists had exhumed almost 9,000 skeletons from eighty-nine burial pits at Choeung Ek. Many more remain to be explored.

The year 1975 was reset as the year zero, with April 17 as its first day. Money was abolished; it was not needed in the new society. Farming provided everything a person needed according to a simple formula. Those who worked were fed, housed, and clothed. Those who didn’t were shot.

Party cadres enforced discipline all across the countryside. On the farms, Khmer Rouge overseers summarily killed people for laziness or backtalk. They killed them for slowing down after the endless cycle of hard work, poor food, and little sleep. They killed them for stealing food to supplement their meager rations. They killed them if they showed anger or sadness when someone else was killed. Famine swept through the rest.

Refugee camps sprang up across the border in Thailand, holding as many as 600,000 frightened Cambodians by the regime’s end. When stories of the atrocities began to leak out, the world was shocked—if not shocked then skeptical. No one had ever seen anything like it. No other revolution had been so thorough about wiping out every trace of the old ways so quickly. Never had such a merciless mass murder been directed against a people by their own kind.

Pol Pot

Unlike most other Communist regimes, there was no cult of personality surrounding the ruler of Cambodia. At first, Prince Sihanouk (see “Vietnam War”) was the public face of the regime, but after about a year, he was arrested and kept out of sight. As far as anyone knew, the secretive Angka (the “Organization”), a shadowy cabal of faceless ideologues, ran Cambodia.
⁴
The leader was known publicly only as “Brother Number One.”

Born under the name Saloth Sar to prosperous peasants in an undetermined year of the 1920s, Brother Number One had been educated by Buddhist monks, Catholic nuns, and Parisian professors. They had tried to teach him useful skills like carpentry and radio electronics, but he was more interested in politics and he failed at several schools. After joining the Viet Minh rebels in their fight against the French, he went to school in Paris. When he flunked out, he returned to Phnom Penh to teach (his day job) and to help organize the small Cambodian contingent of the Viet Minh into a separate movement directed at overthrowing the monarchy (his hobby). In 1963, a police crackdown in the capital forced him to flee to the countryside. There he acquired the war name Pol Pot.
⁵

After rising to general secretary of the Communist party, Pol Pot proceeded to weed out the less pure among his colleagues. He cleaned out foreigners, moderates, and intellectuals. By the time the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, only the purest remained in the organization. This massive turnover had removed the movement’s elders and experienced veterans, and filled the ranks with fanatic teenagers—often children—which might explain a lot of the impetuous cruelty of the regime.
⁶

Third Indochina War

As Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge had inherited an ethnic hatred of the Vietnamese that transcended Communist solidarity. When the Cambodians tried to intimidate the Vietnamese by raiding over the border, they stirred up a hornets’ nest. The Vietnamese army crossed in full force in December 1978, and it quickly became a proxy fight in the larger rivalry between China (patron of the Khmer Rouge) and Russia (patron of Vietnam). Within two weeks, the Vietnamese were in Phnom Penh, and the Angka had fled to the countryside. The Khmer Rouge were soon driven even farther back and quarantined in the boondocks where they could do less harm.

In one of those Orwellian “Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia” ironies, the United States joined China in supporting the fugitive Khmer Rouge in their fight against the Vietnamese-Soviet puppets installed in Phnom Penh. Even though everyone knew about their atrocities by now, the Khmer Rouge remained seated at the United Nations as the official government of Cambodia until 1992, when most of the factions in the ongoing civil war agreed to stop fighting and hold free elections under UN sponsorship.

After Pol Pot disappeared into the jungle in 1979, he was not seen again until a video surfaced in July 1997 showing a frail old man on trial for treason in a Khmer Rouge enclave. His former comrades sentenced him to house arrest in a hut near the Thai border.
⁷
After a few more months of silence, in April 1998 reporters and officials were brought to the hut and shown his corpse, dead of a heart attack.
⁸

Death Toll

The Cambodian autogenocide is probably second to the Holocaust as the most studied megamurder of the twentieth century, so body counts are easy to find. At one extreme, the Cambodian government installed by the Vietnamese conquerors claimed that 3.3 million Cambodians had died under the previous Khmer Rouge regime.
⁹
This comes to about half of the original population, and it is the upper limit of plausibility. At the other end, Michael Vickery’s estimate of 400,000 deaths is the lowest death toll ever seriously suggested by a knowledgeable historian.
¹⁰
Most authorities estimate the death toll to be in the range of 1 to 2 million, and Ben Kiernan’s estimate of 1,670,000
¹¹
(approximately one-fifth of the population) is probably the most widely accepted specific number.