Both Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot got their Marxism in Paris.
How a Paris Playboy Came to Kill a Million and a Half People
jenmartinez.com
Pol Pot, the fanatical mass murderer of almost two million of his own people, epitomizes the bloodthirsty ideological movements of our time and time recently past. Former BBC correspondent and author Philip Short cast some light on this mysterious and reclusive dictator in a talk at UCLA March 9 summarizing Short's just published book, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare. Short conducted interviews with top leaders and rank-and-file members of the murderous Khmer Rouge during several trips to their redoubts near Cambodia's Thai border. His informants included no less than Ieng Sary, Pol Pot's foreign minister and brother-in-law.
Mr. Short said, "This is the story of a holocaust. In three years and eight months beginning on 17 April 1975, between one and two million Cambodians died, as much as a quarter of the entire population." Hundreds of thousands were executed by the Communist Khmer Rouge and the rest died of malnutrition, disease and overwork in a nationwide Cambodian gulag that Short described as "the first modern slave state." The man responsible was virtually unknown even to Cambodians.
Pol Pot, whose real name was Saloth Sar, was born in 1925 into a family of wealthy rice farmers. One of his sisters was a royal concubine of King Sisovath Monivong. As a teenager he became a novice in a Buddhist temple. After World War II he was among a group of Cambodian students who went to Paris to attend university. There, some of his friends of that period told Philip Short, he was not much of a student but instead "had a reputation as a bon vivant. His friends describe him as likeable but retiring. He liked to dance and to drink red wine. He was said to be engaging."
The Cambodian Communist Party, properly the Kampuchean (or Khmer) People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP), began as a tiny organization in 1951 under Vietnamese tutelage. In 1962 Pol Pot became the party head. The Cambodian CP, which began to be known as the Khmer Rouge, grew rapidly from a few thousand in 1970 to some 30,000 by 1973 with control over about a third of the country. On April 17, 1975, the pro-U.S. government of Lon Nol collapsed and the Khmer Rouge marched into the capital, Phnom Penh, a city of 3 million. "Four to five hours after entry they told the entire population to leave, on foot, with what they could carry," Short said. "It took five days to get the first 8 miles; 20,000 died that first week."
The 1.5 millions deaths, Philip Short proposed, were principally due to "two emblematic decisions." The first was the ruthless evacuation of the capital. The second was the abolition of money. "Their idea was, no money, no capitalism. This decision was the root of many of the regime's evils. It abolished the miniscule area of free choice in the economy. People then worked without wages. If they offended their superiors their rations were withdrawn and they starved to death, or you were killed. There was no freedom to marry. This was the first true slave state of modern times."
Philip Short said that during his several visits to the areas still held by the Khmer Rouge near the Thai border he interviewed a Khmer Rouge soldier who had taken part in the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh in 1975. He asked the soldier, weren't there people who didn't or couldn't leave? Yes, the soldier replied. They were mostly old people. "What did you do?" "We killed them," the soldier answered. The soldier showed no remorse.
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