50 years of the Cambodian genocide: the erasure of a people

On April 17, 1975, the Khmers Red Forces entered Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, and immediately undertook to empty it from its inhabitants. Two million city dwellers are thrown on the roads, forced to settle near villages, their separate families. They form a slave labor which for four years will work in rice fields until the exhaustion of its forces. The same process will happen again in all cities. While the elites of the country – intellectuals, notable – and certain ethnic minorities (Vietnamese, Muslim Chams in particular), considered as traitors, are systematically eliminated.

In 1979, when the Vietnamese army chased the Khmer Rouge in big cities, 1.7 million out of the 7 to 8 million inhabitants that the country had disappeared. Or a quarter of the population.

4 years of bloody dictatorship and forced labor

Fifty years later, several trials of Khmer Rouge officials took place, making it possible to specify the notion of genocide – which was delicate to establish because here, Cambodians massacred fellow citizens who were not always of another ethnicity or religion according to the definition of the word.

Last February, the Cambodian National Assembly even hardened the 2013 memory law fixing the sentences incurred in the event of a negation of the genocide. The sinister prison S-21, a torture center established in the heart of Phnom Penh, where 20,000 “enemies of the regime” became tortured and perished became a “museum of genocidal crime”, a true memorial place for the population.

“There is no taboo on this period,” also testifies the anthropologist Anne-Laure Porée. The young generations are even curious in their history and the dictatorship of the Khmer Rouge is today in their textbooks. »»

The thought of the Khmer Rouge: anatomy of a annihilation project

Researchers now want to better understand by what means and what logic these radical maoist activists have been able to impose their violence on a whole population and how they sought to create a new society, erasing the millennial history of Cambodia.

“Because we have not finished exploring the proper thought of” Angkar “, this movement also called” Khmers Rouge “which, except in S-21, left little archives,” explains Anne-Laure Porée. After studying the functioning of the prison, she therefore became interested in a black notebook, a manuscript found in the archives of S-21 and belonging to its director, the disaster “Duch” (nickname Kang Kek Ieu, Pol Pol Pot Police Police) who was definitively condemned in 2012 for “crimes against humanity”. “These” educational “notes, are written for interrogators: he explains how it is necessary to dose physical and psychological torture, how we compose a file of confessions …”

From this document, the anthropologist was able to reconstruct the language and the political project of the Khmer Rouge and drawn a book which has just been published: The language of Angkar. Red Khmer lessons of annihilation.

She stressed that from the early 1970s, Khmer Rouge rebel groups put into practice some of their ideas in the maquis. Of course, they are the heirs of Maoism and Stalinism. Like their inspirers, they promise equality, the end of the exploitation, and will set up the springs of a company ultra-controlled by a Party-State.

But the traditional “class struggle” is transformed into a simple positioning request “with or against the party”. Above all, they act in the name of an infallible “old people” in the face of which, all the others, of the “new people”, that is to say all those who pass under their thumb in April 1975, are suspect. So, according to an unstoppable logic, it is a question of sorting them and “purifying the society” of the “defilement” of its bad elements – in particular city dwellers – or foreign agents (KGB, Vietnamese, CIA) which could “contaminate” it.

The new people must understand that “man comes from the grain of rice”. So, when those who work in rice fields die, there are no funeral: they will simply serve fertilizer! Same thing for murdered prisoners of S-21 and the two hundred other prisons in the territory.

“This desire for total annihilation of the other, once defined as enemy, is a common point in all genocides: in S-21, we make her body disappear, we rewrite her story …”, specifies Anne-Laure Porée.

The end of a regime, the slow reconstruction of a people

If the genocide of the population is forced, hungry, brutalized and controlled, stopped in 1979, the Red Khmers did not disappear suddenly, far from it: they fell back into the countryside near the border with Thailand and continued to control a good part of the territory until 1998, also dates from the death of their leader Pol Pot.

“It is only from that moment that the Cambodians felt a feeling of security found,” confirms the anthropologist.