Great Moments in the History of Modern Totalitarianism
[This is another installment in
Quid Nimis' ongoing series to present a more balanced view of 20th
century atrocities. Why should Hitler hog all the glory!]
Thirty years ago, Pol
Pot and the Khmer Rouge evacuated Phnom Penh and sent two million
people to be 're-educated' according to Communist principles. By
conservative estimates, this evacuation cost 2o,000 lives. In
the years that followed, more than 1.7 million people died at the hands
of the Khmer Rouge, nearly a third of Cambodia's population. This first hand account describes what children went through:
While children elsewhere in the world watched TV, I watched public executions. While they played hide-and-seek with their friends, I hid in bomb shelters with mine; when a bomb hit and killed my friend Pithy, I brushed her brains off my sleeve. I will never forget the day they came for my father. They said they needed him to help pull an oxcart out of the mud. As he walked off with the soldiers, I did not pray for the gods to spare his life. I prayed only that his death be quick and painless. I was 7 years old.Editorial pages of the major newspapers have featured similar accounts this week. Yet, in our brief search for information to include in this post, we found a "scholar's" rendition:
“Oudong had been captured, and they had marched the citizens out into the jungle where some of them had been killed, those who were regarded as misfits, most of them intellectuals,” Short said.
“One of Pol Pot’s aides told me when I did these interviews that to them there hadn’t been many problems, they felt that the evacuation of Oudong had gone well, that it had saved the Khmer Rouge forces from being contaminated by ideology, and if that had worked at Oudong, this was something that could be done in the whole country which meant in Phnom Penh,” he said.
Yes, Oudong went swimmingly, so on to Phnom Penh! However, Phnom was quite a bit larger and so posed some logistical difficulties:
The evacuation of Phnom Penh “was chaotic, it was highly disorganized, and in a way it was a paradigm… emblematic of everything that would follow, because it was extremely harsh, extremely brutal,” Philip Short, whose book “Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare” was published in February, said in an interview.
"Pol Pot decided [to] abolish the idea of the city," Short said. "And that’s what happened, everyone was sent out, [and] at least 20,000 [people] died during the evacuation as a result of a muddle of incompetence and inefficiency."
But no one died as a result of bullets? No one died because they
shouldn't be force-marched in the tropical heat with no food or
water? Cause of death: inefficiency.
Time Photo Essay: Cambodian Genocide and the Legacy of Pol Pot