ABSTRACT
The mostly urban-based middle and upper classes were full members of Cambodian society, both legally and conceptually, during the Sihanoukist and Lon Nol periods. Associated in the minds of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge leadership with the historic oppression of the rural peasant masses, the privileged classes of the pre-DK era were reconceptualized as non-members of the revolution. As Sihanouk recalled of his years in the Khmer Rouge maquis in the early 1970s, "Pol Pot and Ieng Sary quite rightly thought that if they trained their young recruits in cruel games played with each other, they would end up as soldiers with a love of killing and consequently war". When Eastern zone cadres were purged in large numbers in 1978, those who had trained or lived in exile in Vietnam were accused of being foreigners with "Khmer bodies but with Vietnamese minds".
