More than thirty years after the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror ended, the trial of three living leaders begins in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. The regime fell after an army invasion of neighboring communist Vietnam. America continued to support the Khmer Rouge for years after their fall.
It was one of the darkest pages in the history of the twentieth century:the reign of terror of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The leader of the Khmer Rouge, Saloth Sar - better known by his revolutionary nickname Pol Pot - has been resting since 1998 in a simple grave in Anlong Veng, a small village in northern Cambodia not far from the Thai border. Three remaining leaders are now on trial.
The Khmer Rouge followed an ideology that was a strange mix of Stalinism, nationalism and Maoism, but also had elements of liberalism and the ideals of the French Revolution in it. Pol Pot came into contact with these different political ideas when he went to study in Paris in 1949. The unstable Fourth French Republic in the 1950s was a melting pot of communist, liberal and Gaullist ideals.
Back in Cambodia, Pol Pot and his guerrilla movement ousted the United States-backed government of army chief Lon Nol and established a communist regime. According to the Khmer Rouge, the ideal state was an agricultural state. Food production was all a country really needed.
Cities were evacuated for this purpose, intellectuals were tortured and executed and enormous collective farms arose in the countryside, which resembled concentration camps most. In and outside these camps, some two million Cambodians died from malnutrition, forced labour, torture or execution.
Ideologically, the Khmer Rouge was close to Maoist China. Even before the takeover in 1975, the movement received intensive support from the People's Republic. The Khmer Rouge and the leaders in Beijing had a common enemy in the region:the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese minority in Cambodia therefore had a hard time once the Khmer Rouge was in power.
Unacceptable
The end of the Vietnam War in 1975, when the last Americans had to flee headlong from the roof of their embassy in Saigon from the advancing communists, was not only a trauma for the US. The Viet Cong was seen as a puppet of the Soviet Union and relations between Moscow and Beijing had cooled severely in previous years. Therefore, China was not happy with how the situation in South-East Asia had developed.
Due to the repression of ethnic Vietnamese by the Khmer Rouge and repeated incursions into Vietnam itself, the Vietnamese army launched a military intervention in Cambodia in December 1978. The Vietnamese wanted to end the Pol Pot regime and install a government that was more favorable to their country.
The invasion went well. The Vietnamese army drove the Khmer Rouge west towards the border with Thailand, where it pitched its tents. However, China and the US, the two superpowers that gritted their teeth on tiny Vietnam, were not about to watch passively. Not only was Soviet-backed Vietnam expanding its military and ideological influence in the region. It was also hard for the US to accept that communist Vietnam would take credit for expelling a regime that could easily rival the Nazis in terms of atrocities.
Together with Thailand, the US started an intensive program to provide the Khmer Rouge with food. “Thailand and the US, which paid for most of the food program, insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed,” two US aid workers reported.
Reagan Doctrine
In early 1982, at the initiative of the US and China, an anti-Vietnamese coalition was formed, consisting of the Khmer Rouge and two non-Communist opposition groups, including a right-wing organization led by former head of state Prince Sihanouk. In the summer of 1982, a budget of $5 million was set aside by the CIA intelligence service to support this coalition, a significant portion of which was claimed directly by the Khmer Rouge.
Supporting anti-communist resistance groups in Asia, Africa and South America was one of the core elements of the Reagan administration's foreign policy. Under the Reagan Doctrine, the US tried to "roll up" the Soviet empire by destabilizing communist states from within. In Cambodia, too, the US eventually hoped for a non-Communist takeover and the expulsion of the Vietnamese.
However, the chances of that were slim. "After all, the basis for a non-Communist regime must lie in the urban middle class, and there isn't much of that left in Cambodia," writes former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in From the Shadows, a book about his years with the CIA. .
At the urging of the US and China, the Vietnam-installed Cambodian government was not recognized by the United Nations. Pol Pot's spokesman at the UN, Thaoun Prasith, continued to represent Cambodia. Officially speaking on behalf of the coalition, Prasith was one of the main defenders of the Khmer Rouge's crimes.
In the course of the 1980s, the US, China and some Western European countries such as Sweden and West Germany continued to support the coalition and thus the Khmer Rouge. There are indications that these countries secretly supplied weapons, via Singapore. For example, German, American and Swedish weapons have been found in coalition camps.
Terrorize
The anti-communist resistance in Cambodia was worthless without the 25,000 well-trained, armed and motivated Khmer Rouge fighters. The son of Prince Sihanouk, the official leader of the coalition, said in 1989:"The Khmer Rouge is our main force. We celebrate every victory of theirs as a victory for all of us.”
Between 1980 and 1989, coalition guerrilla forces regularly attacked villages in western Cambodia, terrorized the population, built minefields and stole food and livestock from local farmers. But they never posed a real threat to the communist government in Phnom Penh.
In late 1989, with the global demise of communism, Vietnam withdrew all its military forces from Cambodia and the government was dismantled. It was not until 1990 that Prasith had to give up his seat in the UN. The Security Council drafted a plan to bring the country's administrative structure under international control. This plan was accepted by Vietnam and 'all Cambodian parties'.
Also in 1990, reports leaked that American support for the coalition came directly into the hands of the Khmer Rouge. The new George Bush Sr. administration announced that the program would be stopped immediately. In February 1991, the government had to confess to Congress that there had been "tactical military co-operation" between the US-backed anti-communist resistance and the Khmer Rouge.
Elections were called in 1991 under UN supervision. The political branch of the Khmer Rouge was also allowed to participate, but they received too few votes for government participation.