ABSTRACT
On 17 April 1975, Cambodia began Year Zero. Pol Pot, the commander of the Communist Khmer Rouge revolutionary movement, took control of the capital, Phnom Penh, on that date and so began 3.5 years of one of the most brutal regimes of the 20th century. An extreme Marxist who believed that many communist revolutions had been unsuccessful because of their failure to totally destroy all vestiges of capitalism, Pol Pot embarked on a reign of terror and destruction that the world has rarely seen (Becker, 1986). In less than 4 years, some 1.7 million Cambodians out of a total population of 11 million had perished under his paranoia. Cambodia's cities and towns were depopulated, most of the infrastructure of the towns and cities was destroyed, and its entire society was reduced to just two categories: soldiers and peasant slaves. The objective was to create a pre-industrial rural utopia. Every person older than the age of six years was drafted into a work gang and relocated to the countryside where he or she toiled from dawn until dusk without wages on a semi-starvation diet (which itself was a control mechanism applied universally to all but the soldiers on grounds that underfed people would lack the strength and will to offer any resistance). All schools were closed; education ceased. Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians identified as ‘educated’ (above primary school level 7) were exterminated on the simplistic basis that if they could read and write, they must have participated in the corruption of the military regime of General Lon Nol that Pol Pot overthrew. Their extended families were also killed on the rationale that they were parasitical beneficiaries of the corruption and could not be allowed to survive to exact revenge. Together with monks who were also singled out for death, they were ‘the enemies of the state’. In Pol Pot's terminology, uneducated people were ‘blank slates’ who could be manipulated into performing even mass killings without remorse (Chandler, 1999). For ‘intellectuals’, as defined by the Khmer Rouge, ‘to keep you is no gain; to kill you is no loss’ (Dutton, 2007, p32). The scale of the killing has been described as ‘systematic political slaughter’ (Dutton, 2007) or ‘democide’ (Rummel, 1997), rather than genocide, because it was carried out by the Khmer government against its own ethnic Khmer citizens (with the exception of some minorities such as Chinese Cambodians and Cham–Muslim–Cambodians, who were also targeted as enemies of the state). The distinction is that while both genocide and democide are mass killings that are government driven, a democide can include annihilation of a group because of its symbolic political meaning (Rummel, 1997). Because the violence in Cambodia was directed at Cambodians who were racially identical to the perpetrators, it was not a true genocide, which would logically imply auto-extermination (Dutton, 2007, p31). Ideology was the basis for differentiating between ‘them’ and ‘us’. The introduction of Year Zero was symbolic of the dawn of a new era: history and the past were eliminated and reference to them was punishable by instant death.
