Philip Short: Pol Pot. Fields of Death

It was the most extremist revolution in human history. In just a fewer years it annihilated a 4th of Cambodia's population – then called Democratic Kampucha – and implemented ideas that were besides utmost for all erstwhile regimes. The Red Khmers' goal was to destruct all manifestations of individuality, deny everything human.

Wydawnictwo Prószyński and S-ka thank you for sharing a part for publication. We encourage you to read the full book.

Cleaning Fires

In the first half of the 1970 ’ s the Khmer Reds fought not 1 but 4 wars.

The first led the United States utilizing dense bombers that came from Guam. Their goal was to concentrate the Vietcong and Red Khmer troops, but

The bombs fell everywhere and above all on the civilian population.

Bill Harben, a disappointed political officer at the American embassy in Phnom Penh, did a simple experiment.

He took a part of cardboard to designate a "field", 800 metres wide and 3 kilometres long, harm caused by a B-52 bomber load, and placed it on a large scale map. He discovered that in most areas of central and east Cambodia he could not be placed anywhere so that the field would not include villages or villages.

The second war, not always well coordinated with the first, led the forces of Lon Nola on land. There was besides a 3rd war, sometimes hidden, sometimes public, between Cambodian and Vietnamese communists. And finally, there was a conflict for influence that never turned into an open war, just balancing on its edge, between Sihanouk in Beijing and opposition leaders in Cambodia.

The air war was much more dramatic.

The B-52 raids were resumed on July 27, 1970, after the Pentagon realized that the "limited trespass" in the spring had solved nothing. The targets were located throughout the east region and later besides in a large part of the remaining Cambodian territory – which was essential due to the fact that the intrusion led to the dispersal of the Vietcong in a much larger area. Truong Nhu Tang, Minister of Justice of Vienna, later wrote:

None of what the guerrilla had to last was like the terrible panic of B-52 bombings.

[...] It looked as if a immense scythe had driven through the jungle, knocking down immense teak trees on its way and ed like grass, tearing them into billions of scattered splinters [...] It is not that everything was destroyed – in any amazing way everything ceased to be [...] There was nothing in the unrecognized scenery of the immense craters [...]

The first fewer times I survived the B-52 attacks, it seemed to me that out of tension I was trying to compression into the bunker level that I was surrounded by the apocalypse [...] Shocking boom-boom was getting closer and closer [...] Later, the cataclysm swept over us, all cuddled to the ground, any quietly screamed, others attempted to halt the attack of violent involuntary tremor. The earth around us began to sway spazmatically and surrounded us with a monstrous roar [...] The horror was complete. You lost control of your body erstwhile your head shouted incomprehensible orders to get out of there.

On 1 occasion, the russian delegation visited our ministry erstwhile an highly late informing about the raid came. erstwhile it was over, no 1 was injured, but the dignity of the full delegation was severely hurt – uncontrolled trembling and wet pants until besides well pointed to interior convulsions. Visitors could have spared themselves a sense of embarrassment – all hosts have known these symptoms very well for a long time [...]

But sooner or later, the shock caused by the bombings weakened, giving way to a sense of pathetic fatalism. Veterans no longer crawled across the bunker floor, twisting in fear. Instead, people just sat down resigned [...] B-52 in any way implemented order [...] It was a lesson that I remembered, as many others did.

The United States dropped 3 times as many bombs on Indochina during the Vietnam War as all participants in planet War II throughout its duration; a full of 3 times the tonnage was dropped on Cambodia than on Japan, taking into account both atomic bombs.

Party activists dedicated to the case could rationalize the fear caused by B-52. The peasants were terrified. "Their minds were stoned out of fear and lurking in silence, without giving a voice for 3 or 4 days," 1 of the villagers recalled. Their brains were completely confused. [...] They could not even swallow food.”

The effect was twofold.

Hundreds of thousands of peasants fled to cities where they lived a miserable life on the brink of starvation.

The population of Phnom Penh, which at the time of the assassination numbered 650 thousand, exceeded 1 million at the end of the year and was to scope 2.5 million in 1975. The provincial cities inactive in the hands of the government, specified as Battambang, Kompong Thom and Siem Reap, grew to the limits of the explosion.

Hundreds of thousands of others fled in the other direction, to the forests, the eternal refuge of the Khmer peasants during the war and desolation. In late 1970, American intelligence estimated that more than 1 million people were in the areas controlled by Wietkong, Vietnamese from the north and Red Khmer, whose coverage now expanded to half the country's territory.

It would be a mistake to claim that the strength of the bombing was brutalized by Cambodian and thus contributed to shaping the nature of the government that led Pol Pot and his co-workers. Much more explosives fell on Vietnam, yet the Vietnamese did not make a strategy akin to the Khmer Red System. Bombardment could have helped make a climate that exacerbated extremism. But the ground war would have done it anyway. The Khmer Reds were not “bombed back to the stone age”. Even if there were no B-52 raids at all, it is improbable that Democratic Kampucha would look importantly different ^[1].

The raids, on the another hand, became a stone around the government's neck due to the fact that they flooded the cities with demoralized waste of human misery, which the authorities could not help, which was a pleasant surprise to the Red Khmer propaganda, and they full exploited it—taking the peasants for political training conducted among the craters on bombs and shrapnels, explaining to them that Lon Nol had sold to the American people to stay in power, and that the United States, like Vietnam and Thailand, was inclined to sweep the country off the face of the earth, so that erstwhile the war ended, Cambodia would cease to exist.

"What they said sounded credible due to the fact that so many immense bombs were falling," said 1 man. “This is what made Khmer's Reds so easy to raise.”

During warfare, demolition produces hatred, and hatred alleviates even greater destruction. The villagers who lost their loved ones or saw their homes destroyed by bomb raids were filled with hatred. The Red Khmer ranks grew – to estimated 12 1000 regular soldiers in late 1970 and 4 times more 2 years later – while on the government side, erstwhile corruption escalated to an degree unknown even in Sihanouk's time, advanced moral level was irretrievably lost.

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On 9 February [1973 – ed.], 2 days after Sihanouk and the Vietnamese leaders announced that the Cambodian opposition would proceed to lead the fight, the United States resumed bombings.

Over the next six months, until legislature banned them from continuing, B-52 and another aircraft dropped 257 1000 tons of explosives on the Khmer villages, almost half of the full tonnage consumed during the 5 years of the war.

This was partially due to the fact that Cambodia – as CIA manager William Colby put it – was now “only one”. As a consequence of the Paris Agreement, the United States was paralyzed in Laos and Vietnam. With all of Indochin, only in Cambodia could America lift the muscles and show that even in reverse it is inactive capable of something. Bombing became a symbol of vitality.

"The president wanted to send a 100 extra B-52s," recalled Air Force Secretary Robert Seamans. It was scary. You couldn't even imagine where they were all going to fit.” In any event, the number of B-52 missions reached eighty a day, 3 times as much as in Vietnam, and the density of air traffic became so crucial that bomb charges frequently fell tens of kilometers from the target.

The flood of fire from the air saved the Lon Nola government, which, according to observers' predictions, including the Americans, was to fall this year. He besides caused tens of thousands of people to join the opposition as recruits or to take refuge in Phnom Penh and another government-controlled cities due to the fact that the peasants fled the village much more than always before. More importantly, it created the conditions for changing the Khmer Reds policy, which would have happened with the passage of time, but now it has happened much faster^[2]. The consequence was a stricter, more repressive government in which the suffering of individuals became void due to the fact that there were so many.

Supposedly to avoid bombings, full villages were displaced and moved to fresh places. The movement of the population on a smaller scale was already in 1972 – and in Ratanakiri even in 1968 – but at the time it was about excluding people from government control by moving them deeper into the "liberated zones" where they lived under conditions that did not disagree much from those that they knew before. Now they were sent to distant mountain regions and the jungle. Their homes, if not destroyed, were burned to halt them from returning. alternatively of working individually or in tiny teams of common assistance, they were forced to form cooperatives consisting of 30 or forty families who collectively cultivated the land.

Bacciles of Stalin

The meat device is getting more and more. In the first half of 1976, 400 people went to S-21. In the second half – over a thousand. In the spring of 1977, thousands of people were “broken down” per month. Stalinism has its own logic. In democratic Kampucha he was given a free hand.”

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The S-21 was not designed to kill, it was not designed to supply testimony. Death was the last resort, but it happened almost accidentally.

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What happened in S-21, which was subject to central control, was terrible enough. erstwhile the elder interrogating Pon disciplined his subordinates for excessive violence, he had to explain that he meant "beating prisoners to death, inflicting open wounds on their hands, fingers and penises." Inmates were given blood for usage in urban hospitals. "They utilized pumps," said 1 of the guards. They didn't halt until there was no blood, and they could barely breathe. 1 could only hear this wheezing sound and see the proteins of their eyes rotation over, as if they were very surprised. erstwhile they were finished, the bodies were thrown down.”

The medieval wildness of agrarian detention, where interrogating activities did not limit anything, made even specified horrors seem tame. Haing Ngor was taken to 1 of those prisons in the Northwest region erstwhile he was caught collecting food:

We stopped at a group of buildings that I had never seen before, on a clearing in the woods [...] any wrinkled black objects hung from roof hoods, but I was besides far distant to see what it was [...] In the afternoon, the guards brought a fresh prisoner, a pregnant woman. As they passed, I heard her say her husband was not a soldier [Lon Nola] [...]

Later the interrogator went along the tree spar, holding a sharp knife [...] He was talking to a pregnant woman, and she was answering. [Then] cut and ripped her clothes off, ripped her belly open and pulled out the baby.

I turned around, but in no way could I hear her agony, a scream that slow went into a whimper and only after besides long had changed into a merciful silence of death. The killer walked quietly past me, holding the fetus by the neck [...] He tied [him] with string and hung in the hood alongside others who were dry, black and shrunk.

The peasant Khmer activists, like Issarak before them, utilized Kun krap, “smoked children”, as magical talismans. They were cutting out the prisoners' gallbladder bags for medication. They ate the livers of those they killed. Denise Affonço, a Vietnamese female of French descent who lived in a cooperative close Battambang, saw a young man die that way. With her perceptiveness, the housewife noted that “the human liver, cooked on the stove, moves lightly like fried pancakes.”

photo by Prószyński and S-ka

Philip Short, Pol Pot. Fields of Death, Prószyński and S-ka, 2016

^[1]William Shawcross in Sideshow. Kissinger, Nixon and the demolition of Cambodia he proved the other by writing convincingly about “boys and girls from the countryside, dressed in black, breaking slow through the mud, half-crazed as bombers destroyed them by day, and all night a hail of 3 100 and ten-pound bombs was torn around them.” He noted that the number of casualties on the side of the Red Khmer frequently far exceeded the level at which, according to the orthodox military doctrine of the unit, they would experience "imreparable intellectual damage", and quoted Zhou Enlai, who stated that the longer the war takes, "the more utmost and cruel the final triumph will be." All of this is surely true. However, politics was not cultivated by peasants, only Pol and another members of the Standing Committee of the NCP, people who had not personally experienced the bombing. The ruthless absoluteism of Khmer Red regulation after 1975 had another causes.

^[2]The precedent for this was the events in China, where the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 created a climate for patriotic exaltation, which allowed for a crucial acceleration of the expropriation of landowners, the creation of agricultural cooperatives, the elimination of "controvolutionists" and the nationalization of manufacture and trade. As a result, social and economical changes, which were expected to last 20 years, took place within 5 years.