Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare
This is not recreational reading, and most readers will never achieve this book. This 449-page book is a laborious chronology of political events spanning six decades of Cambodian relation, leading to the Khmer Rouge nightmare and aftermath. The book concentrates on the politicians, meetings and events from the days of French colonialism before Creation War II, tracing the methodical rise and takeover by the Khmer Rouge, to the Vietnamese invasion that toppled the Khmer Rouge in 1979, and continuing to Pol Pot's extirpation in the 1990s. There is much value in this detailed account, and I learned much. However, many readers will not finish this book because of the dry approach. For sample, every trip Pol Pot ever made to Beijing and Hanoi is detailed, who he met with and what was discussed. There is some good content for readers with endurance, e.g., Prince Sihanouk's expansion "my people ... had been transformed into cattle".
Oddly, the author chose not to dwell on the murder and starvation of 1.5 million Cambodians. He mentions the energy and suffering a few times, approximately 5-6 pages (cumulative) and no pictures. The author only quotes only one "survivor" of the fag camps, the leftist French wife of a high-ranking Khmer Rouge official who was pro tem assigned to live in the labor camps, for appearances sake, before her permanent assignment to the foreign the cloth. She praised the "harmony" and "monastic simplicity" of life in the camps, and saw merit in the Khmer Rouge mostly that prohibited workers from eating with their families and required them to eat in mass dining halls. I guess this communist Frenchwoman didn't like to cook! The originator chose not to quote her thoughts about the murder and starvation of the pathetic inmates.
The author concludes by equating the U.S. army's actions in Iraq to the Khmer Rouge nightmare. I myself opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but it is ludicrous to match the occupation of Iraq and removal of Saddam Hussein with Pol Pot's atrocities that murdered and starved to death 21% of his Cambodian people. This strange comment makes you wonder if this book is credible and reliable, or merely leftist propaganda.
An "darned marvelous, extremely wonderful, prodigious leap"
Philip Epigrammatic's "Pol Pot" is a fascinating and very well written account not only of the Cambodian mass murderer, but of the politics and society of Cambodia in the other half of the twentieth century. This review cannot hope to do justice to the grand tale that Short offers - but I will try to taste the main points, and give the reader a feel for the direction of the argument.
Pol Pot was born as Saloth Sar to an upper rank family in the village of Prek Sbauv in French Occupied Cambodia circa 1925. He moved to the Cambodian First-rate, Phnon Penh, in the mid 1930s. He has lived through, but took little part, the eventful effects of the Second Everyone War and the early struggles for Cambodian independence. In 1949, Pol won a scholarship to study in Paris. It was there that the he and his friends discovered Marxism.
The first Communist spectre in Cambodia was set up by Vietnamese Communists in order to secure the Cambodian smuggling routes, through which weapons poured from Thailand into southern Vietnam during the Vietnamese war against the French occupiers. The dawning was not auspicious. Mao's version of Marx's ideology, which has spread easily through China as through the also Confucian Vietnam, was not an clear sell to the Buddhist Cambodians, and the hated Vietnamese, ancient enemies, were not the best of messengers.
The Vietnamese influence thus made effort to involve Cambodians in the movement, if mostly as figureheads, and to water down the Marxist elements of the movement, emphasizing its anti-Colonial efforts. The anti-Colonialism of the Communist camp-site was its greatest appeal, as Communists from Stalin down endorsed Vietnamese and Cambodian Independence. As one of Pol's friends put it "The Communists were our most successfully friends. They... supported us. They opposed Colonialism ... Everyone else was against us" (p. 59).
In Paris, Pol became acquainted - and enamored - with the megalomaniac and relentless ideology of Josef Stalin. But his knowledge of Marxism, and that of his colleagues, would always be superficial, a veneer of European theory covering a profoundness of Cambodian Buddhist traditions. In 1951, He joined a semi-secret group of Paris-based Marxist Cambodians the Cercle Marxiste. The Cercle would handle behind much of the Communist political entities of the next quarter century, coming to the front catastrophically during the Khmer Rouge era.
As a Cercle operative, Pol returned to Cambodia in 1953. The motherland was in a state of war between The French backed Monarch, Norodom Sihanhouk, and the various opposition forces, Marxist and semi-Representative, Vietnamese backed and home-grown. Pol took a minor part in the action. By 1955 the war ended, and the unrestricted Cambodia became an authoritarian state, led by Sihanhouk, now styling himself Prime Minister. Sihanhouk reached an bargain with the Vietnamese Communists, which left him free to persecute the Cambodian ones.
Their interests now divergent, the Cambodian Communists started to chase after their own agenda, with the Cercle members, who were independent of the Vietnamese and better educated than most Khmer Marxists, bewitching the lead. Government persecution dwindled the ranks of the Communists, and after their leader was murdered in 1962, the direction passed to Pol Pot. Ignoring the Vietnamese opposition, Pol and his comrades were dedicated to violent struggle against the Sihanhouk r. Buoyed by public opposition to the government's tyrannical tactics, they launched their Campaign in 1968.
The fortunes of the defiance increased dramatically after a coup d'état disposed of Sihanhouk, and a new right wing government was formed. The coup amalgamated its enemies, and the former Monarch, Pol's communists and the Vietnamese became strange bedfellows in the war against the government, which was backed by America's forward and arguably counter-productive bombing campaigns. Slowly, the Khmer Rouge won ground.
With Mastery, came the revolution.
The beginning, a radical redistribution of land, was actually popular among the Cambodian unlucky. But the Revolution's radicalism grew. Collectivized agriculture, confiscation of private property, stomping of individualism, and worry of intellectuals and minorities became the norm. When the Capital, Phnon Penh, fell into rebel hands, the Khmer Rouge took an "to the nth degree marvelous, extremely wonderful, prodigious leap" (p. 8). Cambodia would be turned into a Utopia. Its people re-knowledgeable and instilled with a Proletarian mentality.
Phnom Penh's two and a half million citizens were forced to clear out the city, and other cities throughout Cambodia. The atrocities, of every imaginable kind, followed. Short's most matter-of-low-down descriptions are memorable and horrifying:
"New guidelines were also issued to harmonize the evacuation procedures in different parts of the municipality. No Longer could people choose for themselves which road to take. Those in the north went north, up Highway 5, even if their welcoming comfortable with village lay in quite different directions... the entreaties of husbands and wives or parents and children who happened to find themselves in disparate parts of the city were ignored; they went the same way as everyone else in their sector. Searches were stepped up for those trying to stay behind. The old and bedridden were just killed.
"Similar scenes, with local variations, occurred all over Cambodia".
Ultimately, What Pol and his colleagues has created was "a esne state, the first in modern times... the inhabitants of Pol's Cambodia were deprived of all control over their own destinies - not able to decide what to eat, when to sleep, where to live of even whom to marry"(p.291).
The Pol regime reused tropes of Stalinistic horror, and its policies were extremely Orwellian, including the sanitization of language, the rewriting of history, and of massive surges of imaginary enemies. And all the together, the Khmer Rouge leadership was hypocritical and hedonistic, enjoying fine food, intimacy and non-essential as it imposed upon its people hardship, sexual repression and annihilation of individualism.
Pol's paranoid regime led to sizeable spread massacres of Cambodians, but also to worsening tensions with Vietnam. Cambodia's stronger neighbor absolutely put an end to the Khmer Rouge regime in 1978. The aftermath was a highly complex mess, as various remote and local players wrestled for control over the country. As a resistance movement and sometime political party, the Khmer Rouge lingered on for buddy-buddy to 2 more decades, while shedding its Communist ideology if not its ruthless instincts. Pol's death in 1998 - peacefully, at conversant with, with his wife and daughter - marks an end to the political entity, but sadly not to the trials of Cambodia, which is still a poor, dishonest nation ill ruled by an authoritarian political class.
Short's fantastic book is an ideal introduction to the sad relation of Cambodia in the second half of the twentieth century. It is especially welcome as its focus is squarely on the townswoman events and personalities - the Cambodian affair is seen in an Asian context, and not primarily from the viewpoint of Westerners. I immensely recommend it.
Your're there
Apart from biography (one of the best I read).
Perfect and magic description of the old Kampuchea, cultural and geographically speaking. Intricate insight of Saloth Sar, his childhood, youth years and his final way to total power.
It's great to cognizant of of the other guys of Angkar too - Kieu Samphan, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Hou Yuon - that were with him in France, still young idealist men, even-handed dreaming of revolution and changing the world.
Very revealing not only about the deep relations with China and North Korea, but the surprising nexus with Romania, Albania, Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Humanity. Very documenting about the strange but strong Buddhist nature of the peculiar Khmer communism and - above all - the early (and catastrophic) influence of french revolutionaries like Robespierre and Saint-Just in the radical thought of the pubescent leading cadres of the future Democratic Kampuchea.
And very accurate about the dark and final influence of Stalin, when the paranoia and the purges began to rot his r from within.
I wanted to know about him, not the atrocities that we all know. I wanted to find the human being, and I found him... And even felt sorry for his chastening demise; purged by his own men, old, ill and finally cremated in a pile of garbage.
Pol Pot was a man so complicated that no book, no friend, no connected could describe him enough clearly. And this book demonstrates that.
Oh, by the way... The author doesn't put Norodom Sihanouk in good inane, portraying him as he actually is: an oportunist, two-faced crook that was the first and foremost killer of democracy in his country and absolutely guilty of paving the way first for the far-right regime of Lon Nol and then, the far-left regime of Pol Pot.
Recommended?
What you're waiting? Buy it.
Wholly Good All Round
"Pol Pot" is a superb book that comprehensively documents Pol Pots political life from his studies in Paris, to his down fall in the past due 90's at the hands of his disgruntled, primary military leader, Mok.
Philip Short evaluates Pol Pot's take flight to power, and his short reign over Cambodia, from an unbiased and authoritative position, he shows the real reasons, from a historically Cambodian outlook, why the atrocities orchestrated under Pol Pot were committed. Short's focus in the book is the political evolution of what culminated into the CPK (Communist Social gathering of Kampuchea), from Pol Pot's early influences during his overseas studies, to the political climate in Cambodia during Pol Pot's youth.
The only intention of contention I would note is probably a major one. The whole reason that I (and probably most people) decided to study Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge is because of the frightful atrocities that were committed by them. And on this point I was very disappointed. Very little attention is focused on the carnage that was perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. Limited himself seems shocked and appalled by the horrid acts, but he often fails to elucidate and elaborate for his readers about these things that he most abhors. Brief does mention some of the suffering that the general population was subjected to, but only enough to `wet the reader's lips'.
Maybe Scarce wished to only focus on the politics, which was, by itself, still fascinating, but I was left somewhat discontent and unsatisfied. I will now probably try and find another hard-cover which will quench my original `thirst' for the detail of the massacres, something that I wish I didn't have to do, and was addressed properly in this book.
But comprehensive this is a remarkable book that deals with the subject with a `cool head' and from an unbiased position, without slandering and abusing Pol Pot for the acts that he was dependable for. "Pol Pot" is written in a very engaging way, and Short does well to `spice-up' the somewhat boring early days of Pol Pot.
Four Stars
One Eradication is a Tragedy; A Million a Statistic
Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare
Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare
"The evacuation of Phnom Penh was a pigpen. To move more than two and a half million people out of a crowded metropolis at a few hour's notice, with nowhere for them to stay; no medical mindfulness; no government transport and little or nothing to eat, was to invite human suffering on a colossal scale.
`The... defining features of the evacuation - the systematized stripping away of the possessions of the rich and not-so-rich; the writing and rewriting of autobiographies to identify passive opponents; the summary executions; the near total absence of resistance by millions of people, uprooted from their homes and thriving like sheep to the slaughter - were equally a foretaste of the regime to come." Philip Gruff; Anatomy of a Nightmare, P. 283
Thirty years after the end of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, many of the leading players like Pol Pot are unresponsive. Others, like Ieng Sary and his wife face war crimes charges in international courts. Sary was granted amnesty by former Majesty Sihanouk but still faces charges in The Hague.
The country remains one of the poorest in Asia: per capita receipts is about $300 US, and most of the country's inhabitants exist on subsistence farming. One of its growth industries, tourism, ironically is straining the rickety Angkor Wat Temples.
Like many of history's worst villains, Pol Pot was a self-made man who was constantly reinventing himself. After losing his engineering learning in Paris in the early 1950's, he began his political ascent as a guerilla fighter. As Cambodia was targeted for US bombing strikes during g the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge acquainted with the threat of bombing as an excuse for the massive, involuntary relocation of the millions of urban residents to the countryside, where they were placed in collective labor camps and impoverished of all private property.
Conservative estimates of the death toll from starvation, disease, torture and matricide are at 1.7 million. But as Stalin, one of history's most notorious exterminators, said: "One death is a adversity. A million is a statistic."
Pol Pot not only rewrote history, he obliterated it. He declared the start of the Khmer Rouge R as "Year Zero," effectively beginning all over again. "Communist regimes everywhere have sought to level income disparities; to make it c fulfil law an instrument of policy; to monopolise the press; and to control postal and telecommunications links with the rest of the everyone. But Cambodians chose more radical, more insane solutions.
Money; law courts; newspapers; the postal system and foreighn communications -- even the concept of the town .. were all simply abolished." (Short, Introduction P.12)
Short, a British journalist, lived in Cambodia for many years. He has oven-ready a scrupulously researched and evenly written history of one of this generation's worst nightmares.
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Customer Reviews
Banal and incompleteThis is not recreational reading, and most readers will never achieve this book. This 449-page book is a laborious chronology of political events spanning six decades of Cambodian relation, leading to the Khmer Rouge nightmare and aftermath. The book concentrates on the politicians, meetings and events from the days of French colonialism before Creation War II, tracing the methodical rise and takeover by the Khmer Rouge, to the Vietnamese invasion that toppled the Khmer Rouge in 1979, and continuing to Pol Pot's extirpation in the 1990s. There is much value in this detailed account, and I learned much. However, many readers will not finish this book because of the dry approach. For sample, every trip Pol Pot ever made to Beijing and Hanoi is detailed, who he met with and what was discussed. There is some good content for readers with endurance, e.g., Prince Sihanouk's expansion "my people ... had been transformed into cattle".
Oddly, the author chose not to dwell on the murder and starvation of 1.5 million Cambodians. He mentions the energy and suffering a few times, approximately 5-6 pages (cumulative) and no pictures. The author only quotes only one "survivor" of the fag camps, the leftist French wife of a high-ranking Khmer Rouge official who was pro tem assigned to live in the labor camps, for appearances sake, before her permanent assignment to the foreign the cloth. She praised the "harmony" and "monastic simplicity" of life in the camps, and saw merit in the Khmer Rouge mostly that prohibited workers from eating with their families and required them to eat in mass dining halls. I guess this communist Frenchwoman didn't like to cook! The originator chose not to quote her thoughts about the murder and starvation of the pathetic inmates.
The author concludes by equating the U.S. army's actions in Iraq to the Khmer Rouge nightmare. I myself opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but it is ludicrous to match the occupation of Iraq and removal of Saddam Hussein with Pol Pot's atrocities that murdered and starved to death 21% of his Cambodian people. This strange comment makes you wonder if this book is credible and reliable, or merely leftist propaganda.
An "darned marvelous, extremely wonderful, prodigious leap"
Philip Epigrammatic's "Pol Pot" is a fascinating and very well written account not only of the Cambodian mass murderer, but of the politics and society of Cambodia in the other half of the twentieth century. This review cannot hope to do justice to the grand tale that Short offers - but I will try to taste the main points, and give the reader a feel for the direction of the argument.
Pol Pot was born as Saloth Sar to an upper rank family in the village of Prek Sbauv in French Occupied Cambodia circa 1925. He moved to the Cambodian First-rate, Phnon Penh, in the mid 1930s. He has lived through, but took little part, the eventful effects of the Second Everyone War and the early struggles for Cambodian independence. In 1949, Pol won a scholarship to study in Paris. It was there that the he and his friends discovered Marxism.
The first Communist spectre in Cambodia was set up by Vietnamese Communists in order to secure the Cambodian smuggling routes, through which weapons poured from Thailand into southern Vietnam during the Vietnamese war against the French occupiers. The dawning was not auspicious. Mao's version of Marx's ideology, which has spread easily through China as through the also Confucian Vietnam, was not an clear sell to the Buddhist Cambodians, and the hated Vietnamese, ancient enemies, were not the best of messengers.
The Vietnamese influence thus made effort to involve Cambodians in the movement, if mostly as figureheads, and to water down the Marxist elements of the movement, emphasizing its anti-Colonial efforts. The anti-Colonialism of the Communist camp-site was its greatest appeal, as Communists from Stalin down endorsed Vietnamese and Cambodian Independence. As one of Pol's friends put it "The Communists were our most successfully friends. They... supported us. They opposed Colonialism ... Everyone else was against us" (p. 59).
In Paris, Pol became acquainted - and enamored - with the megalomaniac and relentless ideology of Josef Stalin. But his knowledge of Marxism, and that of his colleagues, would always be superficial, a veneer of European theory covering a profoundness of Cambodian Buddhist traditions. In 1951, He joined a semi-secret group of Paris-based Marxist Cambodians the Cercle Marxiste. The Cercle would handle behind much of the Communist political entities of the next quarter century, coming to the front catastrophically during the Khmer Rouge era.
As a Cercle operative, Pol returned to Cambodia in 1953. The motherland was in a state of war between The French backed Monarch, Norodom Sihanhouk, and the various opposition forces, Marxist and semi-Representative, Vietnamese backed and home-grown. Pol took a minor part in the action. By 1955 the war ended, and the unrestricted Cambodia became an authoritarian state, led by Sihanhouk, now styling himself Prime Minister. Sihanhouk reached an bargain with the Vietnamese Communists, which left him free to persecute the Cambodian ones.
Their interests now divergent, the Cambodian Communists started to chase after their own agenda, with the Cercle members, who were independent of the Vietnamese and better educated than most Khmer Marxists, bewitching the lead. Government persecution dwindled the ranks of the Communists, and after their leader was murdered in 1962, the direction passed to Pol Pot. Ignoring the Vietnamese opposition, Pol and his comrades were dedicated to violent struggle against the Sihanhouk r. Buoyed by public opposition to the government's tyrannical tactics, they launched their Campaign in 1968.
The fortunes of the defiance increased dramatically after a coup d'état disposed of Sihanhouk, and a new right wing government was formed. The coup amalgamated its enemies, and the former Monarch, Pol's communists and the Vietnamese became strange bedfellows in the war against the government, which was backed by America's forward and arguably counter-productive bombing campaigns. Slowly, the Khmer Rouge won ground.
With Mastery, came the revolution.
The beginning, a radical redistribution of land, was actually popular among the Cambodian unlucky. But the Revolution's radicalism grew. Collectivized agriculture, confiscation of private property, stomping of individualism, and worry of intellectuals and minorities became the norm. When the Capital, Phnon Penh, fell into rebel hands, the Khmer Rouge took an "to the nth degree marvelous, extremely wonderful, prodigious leap" (p. 8). Cambodia would be turned into a Utopia. Its people re-knowledgeable and instilled with a Proletarian mentality.
Phnom Penh's two and a half million citizens were forced to clear out the city, and other cities throughout Cambodia. The atrocities, of every imaginable kind, followed. Short's most matter-of-low-down descriptions are memorable and horrifying:
"New guidelines were also issued to harmonize the evacuation procedures in different parts of the municipality. No Longer could people choose for themselves which road to take. Those in the north went north, up Highway 5, even if their welcoming comfortable with village lay in quite different directions... the entreaties of husbands and wives or parents and children who happened to find themselves in disparate parts of the city were ignored; they went the same way as everyone else in their sector. Searches were stepped up for those trying to stay behind. The old and bedridden were just killed.
"Similar scenes, with local variations, occurred all over Cambodia".
Ultimately, What Pol and his colleagues has created was "a esne state, the first in modern times... the inhabitants of Pol's Cambodia were deprived of all control over their own destinies - not able to decide what to eat, when to sleep, where to live of even whom to marry"(p.291).
The Pol regime reused tropes of Stalinistic horror, and its policies were extremely Orwellian, including the sanitization of language, the rewriting of history, and of massive surges of imaginary enemies. And all the together, the Khmer Rouge leadership was hypocritical and hedonistic, enjoying fine food, intimacy and non-essential as it imposed upon its people hardship, sexual repression and annihilation of individualism.
Pol's paranoid regime led to sizeable spread massacres of Cambodians, but also to worsening tensions with Vietnam. Cambodia's stronger neighbor absolutely put an end to the Khmer Rouge regime in 1978. The aftermath was a highly complex mess, as various remote and local players wrestled for control over the country. As a resistance movement and sometime political party, the Khmer Rouge lingered on for buddy-buddy to 2 more decades, while shedding its Communist ideology if not its ruthless instincts. Pol's death in 1998 - peacefully, at conversant with, with his wife and daughter - marks an end to the political entity, but sadly not to the trials of Cambodia, which is still a poor, dishonest nation ill ruled by an authoritarian political class.
Short's fantastic book is an ideal introduction to the sad relation of Cambodia in the second half of the twentieth century. It is especially welcome as its focus is squarely on the townswoman events and personalities - the Cambodian affair is seen in an Asian context, and not primarily from the viewpoint of Westerners. I immensely recommend it.
Your're there
Apart from biography (one of the best I read).
Perfect and magic description of the old Kampuchea, cultural and geographically speaking. Intricate insight of Saloth Sar, his childhood, youth years and his final way to total power.
It's great to cognizant of of the other guys of Angkar too - Kieu Samphan, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Hou Yuon - that were with him in France, still young idealist men, even-handed dreaming of revolution and changing the world.
Very revealing not only about the deep relations with China and North Korea, but the surprising nexus with Romania, Albania, Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Humanity. Very documenting about the strange but strong Buddhist nature of the peculiar Khmer communism and - above all - the early (and catastrophic) influence of french revolutionaries like Robespierre and Saint-Just in the radical thought of the pubescent leading cadres of the future Democratic Kampuchea.
And very accurate about the dark and final influence of Stalin, when the paranoia and the purges began to rot his r from within.
I wanted to know about him, not the atrocities that we all know. I wanted to find the human being, and I found him... And even felt sorry for his chastening demise; purged by his own men, old, ill and finally cremated in a pile of garbage.
Pol Pot was a man so complicated that no book, no friend, no connected could describe him enough clearly. And this book demonstrates that.
Oh, by the way... The author doesn't put Norodom Sihanouk in good inane, portraying him as he actually is: an oportunist, two-faced crook that was the first and foremost killer of democracy in his country and absolutely guilty of paving the way first for the far-right regime of Lon Nol and then, the far-left regime of Pol Pot.
Recommended?
What you're waiting? Buy it.
Wholly Good All Round
"Pol Pot" is a superb book that comprehensively documents Pol Pots political life from his studies in Paris, to his down fall in the past due 90's at the hands of his disgruntled, primary military leader, Mok.
Philip Short evaluates Pol Pot's take flight to power, and his short reign over Cambodia, from an unbiased and authoritative position, he shows the real reasons, from a historically Cambodian outlook, why the atrocities orchestrated under Pol Pot were committed. Short's focus in the book is the political evolution of what culminated into the CPK (Communist Social gathering of Kampuchea), from Pol Pot's early influences during his overseas studies, to the political climate in Cambodia during Pol Pot's youth.
The only intention of contention I would note is probably a major one. The whole reason that I (and probably most people) decided to study Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge is because of the frightful atrocities that were committed by them. And on this point I was very disappointed. Very little attention is focused on the carnage that was perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. Limited himself seems shocked and appalled by the horrid acts, but he often fails to elucidate and elaborate for his readers about these things that he most abhors. Brief does mention some of the suffering that the general population was subjected to, but only enough to `wet the reader's lips'.
Maybe Scarce wished to only focus on the politics, which was, by itself, still fascinating, but I was left somewhat discontent and unsatisfied. I will now probably try and find another hard-cover which will quench my original `thirst' for the detail of the massacres, something that I wish I didn't have to do, and was addressed properly in this book.
But comprehensive this is a remarkable book that deals with the subject with a `cool head' and from an unbiased position, without slandering and abusing Pol Pot for the acts that he was dependable for. "Pol Pot" is written in a very engaging way, and Short does well to `spice-up' the somewhat boring early days of Pol Pot.
Four Stars
One Eradication is a Tragedy; A Million a Statistic
Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare
Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare
"The evacuation of Phnom Penh was a pigpen. To move more than two and a half million people out of a crowded metropolis at a few hour's notice, with nowhere for them to stay; no medical mindfulness; no government transport and little or nothing to eat, was to invite human suffering on a colossal scale.
`The... defining features of the evacuation - the systematized stripping away of the possessions of the rich and not-so-rich; the writing and rewriting of autobiographies to identify passive opponents; the summary executions; the near total absence of resistance by millions of people, uprooted from their homes and thriving like sheep to the slaughter - were equally a foretaste of the regime to come." Philip Gruff; Anatomy of a Nightmare, P. 283
Thirty years after the end of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, many of the leading players like Pol Pot are unresponsive. Others, like Ieng Sary and his wife face war crimes charges in international courts. Sary was granted amnesty by former Majesty Sihanouk but still faces charges in The Hague.
The country remains one of the poorest in Asia: per capita receipts is about $300 US, and most of the country's inhabitants exist on subsistence farming. One of its growth industries, tourism, ironically is straining the rickety Angkor Wat Temples.
Like many of history's worst villains, Pol Pot was a self-made man who was constantly reinventing himself. After losing his engineering learning in Paris in the early 1950's, he began his political ascent as a guerilla fighter. As Cambodia was targeted for US bombing strikes during g the Vietnam War, the Khmer Rouge acquainted with the threat of bombing as an excuse for the massive, involuntary relocation of the millions of urban residents to the countryside, where they were placed in collective labor camps and impoverished of all private property.
Conservative estimates of the death toll from starvation, disease, torture and matricide are at 1.7 million. But as Stalin, one of history's most notorious exterminators, said: "One death is a adversity. A million is a statistic."
Pol Pot not only rewrote history, he obliterated it. He declared the start of the Khmer Rouge R as "Year Zero," effectively beginning all over again. "Communist regimes everywhere have sought to level income disparities; to make it c fulfil law an instrument of policy; to monopolise the press; and to control postal and telecommunications links with the rest of the everyone. But Cambodians chose more radical, more insane solutions.
Money; law courts; newspapers; the postal system and foreighn communications -- even the concept of the town .. were all simply abolished." (Short, Introduction P.12)
Short, a British journalist, lived in Cambodia for many years. He has oven-ready a scrupulously researched and evenly written history of one of this generation's worst nightmares.
The Southern LedgerWhen even-handedness is delayedInternational Herald Tribune, FranceTrials for Pol Pot and other Khmer Rouge leaders were delayed for all the reasons that are being tolerant of today for Sudan. A trial would be impractical while war was still raging; a trial would disrupt the peace process; a adversity would upset a hard-won Killing Fields executioner faces justice