Historical Overview of Cambodian Genocide
French colonizers who first came to Cambodia in the early 1860s encountered a rich culture and history.1 France finally gave up its colony in 1953, nearly 100 years after they first seized it. The colonial forces returned power to Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk and the prince’s ability to rule in their stead was challenged when a civil war erupted in neighboring Vietnam in 1955 and the violence spilled across their boarders. The Vietnam War pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its democratic ally, the United States. In response, Prince Sihanouk spoke out against western democracies and voiced support for communist ideology. In 1970, while the war in Vietnam continued, a military coup led by US-backed Lieutenant-General Lon Nol overthrew Prince Sihanouk. Prince Sihanouk and his followers, intent on reclaiming power, fled the presidential palace and joined forces with the Khmer Rouge guerilla movement.
The Khmer Rouge (French for “Red Khmer”) formed in 1960. Its leader Pol Pot was an avid admirer of Maoist (Chinese) communism and envisioned repeating Mao Zedong’s attempt to convert China’s economy into a socialist society through industrialization and collectivization (the so-called Great Leap Forward) in Cambodia.2 Ten years after it formed, the Khmer Rouge guerillas attacked the U.S.-backed Lon Nol government that had overthrown Prince Sihanouk. Pol Pot and his followers viewed Lon Nol as pro-Western and thus anti-Communist and wanted to eradicate all traces of Western influence from Cambodian society. In 1975 the Khmer Rouge succeeded in overthrowing the Lon Nol government and within days of doing so launched a program to institute Mao’s China in Cambodia. The result was devastating violence and genocide.
During the three-year, eight month, and 20 days of Khmer Rouge rule, some 2 million people perished, meaning that in less than four years the Khmer Rouge’s violent policies resulted in the death of one quarter of Cambodia’s total population. It is estimated that 40 percent of those deaths were the result of starvation and disease. All Cambodians suffered under the Khmer Rouge, but certain groups were targeted for greater violence than others. These groups included ethnic minorities (including Chinese and Vietnamese), religious groups (including Buddhist monks and Sham Muslims), and social groups (those considered wealthy and/or educated).
When Vietnamese forces finally ousted the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979, the country was in utter shambles—all professionals, engineers, technicians, and teachers had been murdered making it that much more difficult to rebuild. The Vietnamese forces, upon capturing the capital Phnom Penh, set up a transitional government composed of Khmer Rouge defectors. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Khmer Rouge had retreated into the jungle along the Thai border and there regrouped and relaunched guerrilla attacks against the Vietnamese and their Cambodian allies. The Chinese government lent its support to the Khmer Rouge rebels and renewed fighting forced tens of thousands of Cambodians to flee into neighboring countries. By the time the military conflicts concluded in 1989, an additional 14,000 Cambodian civilians perished. The country’s first democratic elections were held in 1993.
As the 1990s progressed, the Khmer Rouge political movement declined and by 1997 the Cambodian government requested support from the United Nations to prosecute the former leaders of the Khmer Rouge. At this point, Pol Pot was still alive, and pressure mounted for his arrest. Pol Pot had fled Phenom Penh before the Vietnamese forces arrived in 1979.
The creation of a hybrid Cambodian-United Nations tribunal, however, proved incredibly difficult and expensive.3 In 2001, the Cambodian government passed a law to bring the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) into being. 4 And in June 2003, the UN and Cambodia signed an agreement to create the tribunal. The court elected to only try the highest-ranking members of the Khmer Rouge. By the time the trials were finally opened in 2009, Pol Pot and many other of the most notorious leaders of the Khmer Rouge were dead or deemed unable to stand trial. Ultimately the ECCC convicted just three people, a number which has been criticized by some given the fact that it took 10 years to set up the court, the hearings ran for 13 years, and it cost more than 300 million dollars to facilitate.
1 According to archaeological data, the area we now know as Cambodia has traces of human life dating back to 2000 B.C. For more information on Cambodian history prior to colonization and the impact colonization had on social life, institutions, and culture, see Trudy Jacobson, Lost Goddesses: The Denial of Female Power in Cambodian History (NIAS Press, 2008).
2 In 1958, Mao Zedong launched a fanatical campaign to outproduce Great Britain and achieve communism before the Soviet Union. He called his five-year plan the Great Leap Forward. The results were devastating. It is estimated that from 1960-1962 some thirty million people starved in China, making it the largest famine in human history. For more information, see Clayton D. Brown, “China’s Great Leap Forward,” Education About Asia: Online Archives, Volume 17:3 (Winter 2012): https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/chinas-great-leap-forward/