The Pol Pot regime: race, power, and genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79
By Ben Kiernan
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. 477 pp., $63 (hb)
Reviewed by Helen Jarvis
As rumours circulate once again about the death of Pol Pot, the publication of this masterful account of the three years, eight months and 20 days of his rule over Cambodia, allows us finally to know in some considerable detail the nature of that regime. Ben Kiernan, who made his name with his earlier book and doctoral thesis How Pol Pot came to power, here moves on to the considerably more problematic and traumatic sequel of what Pol Pot did once in power.
Kiernan wields his familiar combination of a detailed incisive scalpel and a broad analytical interpretation, giving us the first really considered understanding of what really was going on in Democratic Kampuchea, whose length of time Cambodians inevitably recall with exact detail. Zone by zone he chronicles, mainly in the words of those who lived and died in its vortex, Cambodia's descent into ever greater destruction. From the very first days in power (and indeed even beforehand, as Pol Pot gained control of large sections of the country during the civil war) Pol Pot's murderous policies were put into effect.
Kiernan grounds this mammoth work on data collected and analysed over 15 years after Pol Pot was overthrown in 1979, making principal use of interviews with more than 500 refugees, and his own examination of what seemed then to be the scant primary documentary evidence remaining from the regime (particularly the prison records and a newly uncovered cache of Commerce Ministry archives), as well as the more extensive secondary literature.
Documenting carnage
According to Kiernan's calculations, at least 1,671,000 people (some 21% of the entire 1975 population) died under Pol Pot. The carnage moved through various categories of "enemies" and "spies", mostly condemned for serving foreign interests.
Kiernan demonstrates the insistence on racial purity with which the regime targeted its various minorities — the Muslim Cham people, who had lived in Cambodia for centuries, even being depicted on the bas-reliefs of Angkor, but over a third of whom perished under Pol Pot; more recent immigrants from China or from all of Cambodia's neighbours (Thailand, Laos and Vietnam) of whom nearly all fled or were killed; and the montagnards or highlanders who were often selected as bodyguards or executioners but who themselves faced repression and death, losing some 15% of their people.
But numerically, most of the regime's victims were ethnic Khmers, many of whom were discounted by being branded as "Khmer bodies with Vietnamese minds". The killing drew ever closer to "the Centre" itself, the small coterie of Pol Pot loyalists who were supposed to make up the government and the party.
Kiernan's research gives us more details of the fate suffered by the various ethnic and social groups. Another study published last year by a Polish demographer, Marek Sliwinski, comes remarkably close to Kiernan's figure, estimating 1.71 million deaths, on the basis of completely different data sets.
Figures given previously have oscillated wildly from the 20,000 that the Khmer Rouge themselves admit to killing, through Michael Vickery's 1985 estimate of 700,000, to the 3.3 million that the Cambodian government research committee estimated in 1982. This latter figure is itself now being studied carefully by the Cambodian Genocide Program, which has recently gained access to the raw data from which it was compiled, and this may well lead Kiernan to some upward revision of his already shockingly high estimate.
But Kiernan's main contribution is his mid-range focus between mind-numbing statistics, and personal depiction of the suffering, which we have read in harrowing detail many times before. He seeks to link the personal testimony with other data in order to document the motivation and campaigns that surrounded the various waves of executions. Of particular importance is the new perspective shown by the extent to which resistance was mounted — albeit unsuccessfully until the formation in late 1978 of the front that swept Pol Pot aside with Vietnamese assistance.
Racism and power
Kiernan revisits the various interpretations of Democratic Kampuchea. The regime itself claimed to be "the Number 1 Communist state" in 1976, having leapfrogged China and Albania, while David Chandler (from a critical viewpoint) holds the companion view to this, seeing it as "the purest and most thoroughgoing Marxist-Leninist movement". The Vietnamese and the Cambodians who overthrew Pol Pot saw his regime as a Maoist deviation from orthodox Marxism. Michael Vickery advanced the view (formerly shared by Kiernan) of a peasant revolution pulling it along in an anti-Marxist direction.
Kiernan has now come to the view that it was neither a communist proletarian revolution that favoured the working class nor a peasant revolution favouring the farmers. Rather racism and the struggle for power were the two explosive elements that came together, detonated by the social destruction of the war, to create Pol Pot's genocide.
Since the book was written, Kiernan has continued his work on researching and documenting the genocide as director of the Cambodian Genocide Program (CGP) at Yale University, where he is a professor of history. The CGP received its initial funding from the US State Department following the 1994 passage through US Congress of the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act. During the past 18 months it has amassed an enormous wealth of documentation from the Pol Pot regime itself — thousands and thousands of documents and photographs including prison records of personnel and inmates— as well as petitions and testimonies from survivors of the regime and interviews and photographs taken today.
We can be grateful that Ben Kiernan completed the manuscript for this book before coming across all this new material — otherwise he would have been sorely tempted to delay publication until it was incorporated. But that will take years, and we have already gone too long without the level of analysis and interpretation that Kiernan gives us in this fluidly written, compelling and significant tome. [Dr Helen Jarvis is consultant on documentation for the Cambodia Genocide Program and the recipient of a supplementary grant from the Australian government to enable computerised mapping of 100 genocide sites around Cambodia.]