When the War Was Over (37 page)

In a subsequent issue of
Tung Padevat
the party elaborated: “The specific traits of private property are the specific traits of the capitalist class. They are the essence or the vital part of capitalist class activities.” They included individualism, vanity, rank, boastfulness, thinking of family interests, sectionalism, organizationalism, bureaucratism, and authoritarianism. The Khmer Rouge convinced themselves that by abolishing private property these human traits were erased from society. The answer to society's moral, political, and economic or class problems as they interpreted them was to impose state ownership over all property. In one year the Khmer Rouge confiscated all property in the country—a feat no other communist government had ever attempted.

This was the logic behind the boast that never before in history had a country been so liberated as Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, that no other country had achieved socialism so quickly. But there was nothing new or ingenious about the martial-law solutions chosen by the Khmer Rouge, this shortcut to egalitarianism that made everyone a citizen of a state-run cooperative and abolished economic distinctions. The Bolsheviks too had adopted a similar strategy, the original “war communism,” after they took power. They tried to abolish class distinction by nationalizing property overnight. Isaac Deutscher's judgment on this short period of the Russian revolution is an apt statement for Democratic Kampuchea under the Khmer Rouge:

The Soviets abandoned their policy of “war communism” quickly and adopted a more measured “New Economic Policy.”

The Khmer Rouge had a rudimentary theory behind their system of cooperatives which became labor camp prisons. Like Sihanouk, from whom the party had borrowed a number of their assumptions, the leaders believed
the Khmer countryside was an untapped source of wealth. But rather than characterize the peasants as lazy, as the French, or as colorful children, as Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge believed simply that the peasants were untutored in their own self-interests. They thought that they would work harder if given a stake in their future through a “socialist system” that was without landlords or moneylenders, without private or personal property, and with the promise of building up a rich, modern Cambodia. If the peasants were freed of distractions such as religion and family obligations, they could devote their days to work in fields and factories and not be required to market, clean, cook, raise children, or worry about their upbringing and education. The country would experience an economic miracle. This stark, “modern” restructuring of society would unleash the people's hidden potential. It was entirely a matter of organization and leadership.

The Khmer Rouge considered themselves ultramodernists. They planned to accomplish in a few years the changes Western societies underwent during the centuries of their industrial revolutions: secularization, rationalization of production, transformation of a feudal, rural population into a skilled, organized workforce, and finally, industrialization that would enhance and not destroy the agricultural wealth of Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge were so confident of the wealth of the countryside that they thought it would feed the country throughout the grueling schedule that was in preparation for the second revolution.

In the scheme for the second revolution, Democratic Kampuchea was to have transformed itself into a wealthy, modern country by 1990—and would have done so in total isolation, safe from the vagaries of the world economy and the threat of foreign invasion. Secure in its revolution, Cambodia would then emerge as the miracle of the twentieth century.

When the party adopted this formal program in January 1976, the leaders put trusted Khmer Rouge cadre in charge of industry and agriculture. They planned total communization of the country—common canteens for eating, and a system of work brigades to transport people around the country to help with agricultural and hydraulic projects. Literally with their bare hands the people were expected to build enough new dams, dikes, and canals to irrigate some half a million hectares of land in one year. New factories, cement plants, and oil refineries were planned. New, hardy strains of rice were to be developed. The people were told the population had to be at least doubled, to produce more hands.

Pol Pot explained that the objective was to “turn Kampuchea, a backward agricultural country, into a country endowed with an industrial base in a period of fifteen to twenty years. This objective aims at creating the conditions
of an industrial country and to endow Kampuchea with light industry, food industry, iron and steel industry, engineering industry, power industry, oil industry and chemical industry.”

He also explained how the party expected this “backward” nation to achieve such astounding goals without foreign aid. “To achieve this objective . . . we have built various workshops in the zones, regions, districts and cooperatives. We proceed so that these workshops progressively turn into factories in the future. Thus, we are striving to develop cottage industry and industry everywhere.”

“Where can we find capital to build our industry? Our capital comes essentially from the work of our people. Our people, by their work, develop agricultural production. . . . We also have another important source of capital. That is the fact that we have no salary. The absence of salary constitutes in itself a great source of capital.”

In their radical fashion, the Khmer Rouge were repeating the experiments begun by Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong in their newly revolutionary countries. Many of their ideas also came to them through the Vietnamese communists, though from their boasts it is clear the Cambodians believed they had invented their new concepts. Only once did Pol Pot say that the thought of Mao Zedong had been an inspiration.

Stalin inaugurated his second revolution, his crash program for the countryside and industry, with the first Soviet appeal to Russian nationalism, breaking established Marxist tradition and opening the way for future wars and revolutions that would be waged in the name of national liberation. “When Stalin put his program before the people, demanding exertions and sacrifices, he could not simply explain it in terms of immediate economic needs. He tried to impart to it a more imaginative appeal. For the first time he now openly appealed to the nationalist as well as to the socialist sentiment in the people.”

In 1931 Stalin said in an address: “[Russia] was ceaselessly beaten for her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol Khans, she was beaten by Turkish Beys, she was beaten by Swedish feudal lords, she was beaten by Polish-Lithuanian Pans, she was beaten by Anglo-French capitalists, she was beaten by Japanese barons, she was beaten by all—for her backwardness. For military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for political backwardness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. . . . We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us.”

Stalin called his program a “socialist offensive on all fronts,” a “ruthless war” and a “ruthless class policy,” and he created shock brigades of workers.
His program also required forced resettlement. By one decree, some one million prosperous peasants and their families lost all their land and possessions. Tens of thousands were expelled from the large cities and sent to work in the countryside and industrial sites or in farms.

Stalin's industrial revolution reaped bitter results: famine and a state terror organization. Famine was the product of dislocation and the refusal of farmers to grow crops under the new system. And it was famine that convinced Stalin to back down from his radical experiment. The terror, a response to a leader's assassination, grew out of failures, and out of attempts to purge the masses and the leadership of those who where considered obstacles to success.

Mao Zedong launched the “Great Leap Forward” thirty years later, and the Chinese experiment was certainly a conscious model for the Cambodians. The Chinese also believed that if the people worked harder, if they were organized in large communes where their needs were attended to, then the country could develop industry and agriculture to a modern level, condensing decades of growth into a few years. The Chinese believed reorganization and leadership were the key—not scientific changes or sophisticated planning. They viewed such technological considerations as impediments.

A historian described the waste, confusion, and futility of China's Great Leap: “In 1968 more than a hundred million people were mobilized to construct dams, reservoirs, and other irrigation projects. Most of these were small projects hurriedly approved without adequate advance surveys or proper designs. During that period, even for large-scale, well-planned projects, normal construction procedures were altered under the pressure of speeding up the work. Precautionary measures were often labelled ‘superstition' and were abandoned.”

Statistics were altered to show success; the leaders in Beijing believed the false statistics and demanded greater production and agricultural quotas. The famous backyard furnaces were built across the countryside to produce steel—precursors of Pol Pot's “workshops” that were meant to produce tools and equipment. Huge tracts of countryside were deforested in the mad race to fuel those primitive furnaces. Quality disappeared from Chinese manufactured goods. The Great Leap ended abruptly, as well, when the face of famine threatened the people and the leaders had to reevaluate their “successes.”

The economic reversals demoralized the people, as did the communization. Husbands and wives were not separated, but they rarely saw each other, since they both had to work long hours. Nor did they see much of
their children, who were put into nurseries and schools all day. The breaking of family bonds was as great a hardship as any.

In China, too, purges followed failure. The numbers are not known, but countless Chinese were executed, imprisoned, or placed in labor camps; according to one historian, “the threat to personal safety was ever present, and the atmosphere of insecurity must have been tense and oppressive. . . .”

These were the two seminal precedents for the Khmer Rouge design of ultimate revolution. Other aspects were adapted from the Vietnamese, or as filtered through the Vietnamese from their Chinese source, particularly language and bureaucratic organization and concepts like reeducation. The Cultural Revolution that swept China in the mid-sixties inspired some of the Khmer Rouge abhorrence of intellectualism and condemnation of “bourgeoisie culture.” Significantly, the Khmer Rouge felt a strong sympathy for the North Korean revolution, which was characterized by a demanding authoritarianism and had a similar concept of fanatic self-sufficiency.

There were precedents in Cambodian history for some of the bleak, brutal aspects of Khmer Rouge rule. Stalin and Mao could be joined by Cambodia's thirteenth-century king, Jayavarman VII, who, in spirit at least, was a forerunner of the Cambodian communist leadership.

An ancient inscription reports that midway through the construction of Angkor Thom—“Big Angkor,” the new capital for Jayavarman VII—the king had 306,372 laborers working on the project and housed them in 13,500 specifically built villages. In other parts of the kingdom, labor crews were constructing new raised highways, smaller temples and sanctuaries, and eventually over 100 new hospitals. His building program stands out as “unparalleled alike in its immensity and in the haste and carelessness with which it was carried out.”

The historian Georges Coedès, a pioneer in Khmer historiography, wrote that Jayavarman VII was a “megalomaniac whose foolish prodigality was one of the causes of the decadence of his country. One must visualize the armies of carriers, slaving on the slopes, of porters dragging those enormous blocks of sandstone, of masons filling the stones together, of the sculptors and decorators, these human ants, not inspired by a collective faith . . . but recruited by conscription to erect mausoleums for the glory of their princes. . . .”

Seven centuries later the Khmer Rouge would re-create the same
tableau vivant,
working the people like ants under the direction of Angka to build
modern monuments to their rule of Cambodia. Under the Khmer Rouge, laborers would once again be housed in “work camps” and given meager food rations. They would be forced to build an ill-conceived irrigation system meant to propel Cambodia into a rich future legitimized by claims that they were copying the methods of the past. With no sense of irony, the Khmer Rouge consciously sought to portray their rule as directly descended from Angkor, as in this radio broadcast: