Cambodia: An Experiment in Genocide

By DAVID AIKMAN

The enormity of the tragedy has been carefully reconstructed from the reports of many eyewitnesses. Some political theorists have defended it, as George Bernard Shaw and other Western intellectuals defended the brutal social engineering in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Yet it remains perhaps the most dreadful infliction of suffering on a nation by its government in the past three decades. The nation is Cambodia.

On the morning of April 17, 1975, advance units of Cambodia's Communist insurgents, who had been actively fighting the defeated Western-backed government of Marshal Lon Nol for nearly five years, began entering the capital of Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge looted things, such as watches and cameras, but they did not go on a rampage. They seemed disciplined. And at first, there was general jubilation among the city's terrified, exhausted and bewildered inhabitants. After all, the civil war seemed finally over, the Americans had gone, and order, everyone seemed to assume, would soon be graciously restored.

Then came the shock. After a few hours, the black-uniformed troops began firing into the air. It was a signal for Phnom Penh's entire population, swollen by refugees to some 3 million, to abandon the city. Young and old, the well and the sick, businessmen and beggars, were all ordered at gunpoint onto the streets and highways leading into the countryside.

Among the first pitiful sights on the road, witnessed by several Westerners, were patients from Phnom Penh's grossly overcrowded hospitals, perhaps 20,000 people all told. Even the dying, the maimed and the pregnant were herded out stumbling onto the streets. Several pathetic cases were pushed along the road in their beds by relatives, the intravenous bottles still attached to the bedframes. In some hospitals, foreign doctors were ordered to abandon their patients in mid-operation. It took two days before the Bruegel-like multitude was fully under way, shuffling, limping and crawling to a designated appointment with revolution.

With almost no preparations for so enormous an exodus --how could there have been with a war on?--thousands died along the route, the wounded from loss of blood, the weak from exhaustion, and others by execution, usually because they had not been quick enough to obey a Khmer Rouge order. Phnom Penh was not alone: the entire urban population of Cambodia, some 4 million people, set out on a similar grotesque pilgrimage. It was one of the greatest transfers of human beings in modern history.

The survivors were settled in villages and agricultural communes all around Cambodia and were put to work for frantic 16-or 17-hour days, planting rice and building an enormous new irrigation system. Many died from dysentery or malaria, others from malnutrition, having been forced to survive on a condensed-milk can of rice every two days. Still others were taken away at night by Khmer Rouge guards to be shot or bludgeoned to death. The lowest estimate of the bloodbath to date --by execution, starvation and disease--is in the hundreds of thousands. The highest exceeds 1 million, and that in a country that once numbered no more than 7 million. Moreover, the killing continues, according to the latest refugees.

The Roman Catholic cathedral in Phnom Penh has been razed, and even the native Buddhism is reviled as a "reactionary" religion. There are no private telephones, no forms of public transportation, no postal service, no universities. A Scandinavian diplomat who last year visited Phnom Penh--today a ghost city of shuttered shops, abandoned offices and painted-over street signs--said on his return: "It was like an absurd film; it was a nightmare. It is difficult to believe it is true."

Yet, why is it so difficult to believe? Have not the worst atrocities of the 20th century all been committed in the name of some perverse pseudo science, usually during efforts to create a new heaven on earth, or even a "new man"? The Nazi notion of racial purity led inexorably to Auschwitz and the Final Solution. Stalin and Mao Tse-tung sent millions to their deaths in the name of a supposedly moral cause--in their case, the desired triumph of socialism. Now the Cambodians have taken bloodbath sociology to its logical conclusion. Karl Marx declared that money was at the heart of man's original sin, the acquisition of capital. The men behind Cambodia's Angka Loeu (Organization on High), who absorbed such verities while students in the West, have decided to abolish money.

How to do that? Well, one simplistic way was to abolish cities, because cities cannot survive without money. The new Cambodian rulers did just that. What matter that hundreds of thousands died as the cities were depopulated? It apparently meant little, if anything, to Premier Pol Pot and his shadowy colleagues on the politburo of Democratic Kampuchea, as they now call Cambodia. When asked about the figure of 1 million deaths, President Khieu Samphan replied: "It's incredible how concerned you Westerners are about war criminals." Radio Phnom Penh even dared to boast of this atrocity in the name of collectivism: "More than 2,000 years of Cambodian history have virtually ended."

Somehow, the enormity of the Cambodian tragedy--even leaving aside the grim question of how many or how few actually died in Angka Loeu 's experiment in genocide--has failed to evoke an appropriate response of outrage in the West. To be sure, President Carter has declared Cambodia to be the worst violator of human rights in the world today. And, true, members of the U.S. Congress have ringingly denounced the Cambodian holocaust. The U.N., ever quick to adopt a resolution condemning Israel or South Africa, acted with its customary tortoise-like caution when dealing with a Third World horror: it wrote a letter to Phnom Penh asking for an explanation of charges against the regime.

Perhaps the greatest shock has been in France, a country where many of Cambodia's new rulers learned their Marx and where worship of revolution has for years been something of a national obsession among the intelligentsia. Said New Philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, a former leftist who has turned against Marxism: "We thought of revolution in its purest form as an angel. The Cambodian revolution was as pure as an angel, but it was barbarous. The question we ask ourselves now is, can revolution be anything but barbarous?"

Levy has clearly pointed out the abyss to which worship of revolution leads. Nonetheless, many Western European intellectuals are still reluctant to face the issue squarely. If the word "pure," when used by adherents of revolution, in effect means "barbarous," perhaps the best the world can hope for in its future political upheavals is a revolution that is as "corrupt" as possible. Such skewed values are, indeed, already rife in some quarters. During the 1960s, Mao's Cultural Revolution in China was admired by many leftist intellectuals in the West, because it was supposedly "pure"--particularly by contrast with the bureaucratic stodginess of the Soviet Union. Yet that revolution, as the Chinese are now beginning to admit, grimly impoverished the country's science, art, education and literature for a decade. Even the Chinese advocates of "purity" during that time, Chiang Ch'ing and her cronies in the Gang of Four, turned out to have been as corrupt as the people in power they sought to replace. With less justification, there are intellectuals in the West so committed to the twin Molochs of our day--"liberation" and "revolution"--that they can actually defend what has happened in Cambodia.

Where the insane reversal of values lies is in the belief that lotions like "purity" or "corruption" can have any meaning outside an absolute system of values: one that is resistant to the tinkering at will by governments or revolutionary groups. The Cambodian revolution, in its own degraded "purity," has demonstrated what happens when the Marxian denial of moral absolutes is taken with total seriousness by its adherents. Pol Pot and his friends decide what good is, what bad is, and how many corpses must pile up before this rapacious demon of "purity" is appeased.

In the West today, there is a pervasive consent to the notion of moral relativism, a reluctance to admit that absolute evil can and does exist. This makes it especially difficult for some to accept the fact that the Cambodian experience is something far worse than a revolutionary aberration. Rather, it is the deadly logical consequence of an atheistic, man-centered system of values, enforced by fallible human beings with total power, who believe, with Marx, that morality is whatever the powerful define it to be and, with Mao, that power grows from gun barrels. By no coincidence the most humane Marxist societies in Europe today are those that, like Poland or Hungary, permit the dilution of their doctrine by what Solzhenitsyn has called "the great reserves of mercy and sacrifice" from a Christian tradition. Yet if there is any doubt about what the focus of the purest of revolutionary values is, consider the first three lines of the national anthem of Democratic Kampuchea:

The red, red blood splatters the cities and plains of the Cambodian fatherland,

The sublime blood of the workers and peasants, The blood of revolutionary combatants of both sexes.

-- David Aikman

Currently stationed in West Berlin as TIME'S Eastern European bureau chief, Aikman was the magazine's last staff correspondent to leave Cambodia, a few days before Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge.

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