Communist Party Of Kampuchea Research Articles

The Emergence of Global Maoism: China's Red Evangelism and the Cambodian Communist Movement, 1949–1979 by Matthew Galway

<i>The Emergence of Global Maoism: China's Red Evangelism and the Cambodian Communist Movement, 1949–1979</i> by Matthew Galway

Agrarian Marxism, Animal Geographies, and non-human labor in Democratic Kampuchea

Between 1975 and 1979, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) embarked on a genocidal program of sweeping economic, social, and political change. In an effort to modernize Democratic Kampuchea, as Cambodia was renamed, CPK officials forced the entire populace to clear forests; build dams, canals, and reservoirs; and grow rice in an effort to accumulate rapidly the necessary capital for industrialization. In doing so, upwards of two million people died from disease, hunger and malnutrition, torture, and execution. The broad coordinates of the genocide are well-established. To date, however, no scholarship has examined critically the role of non-human animals in the agricultural transformations initiated during the Cambodian genocide. Drawing on two bodies of scholarship, Agrarian Marxism and Animal Geographies, in this paper we examine the role of draught animals in the regime’s plans to build an economy around agricultural expansion and rice production for export. Specifically, we trace the new productive relationships into which Cambodia’s water buffalo and oxen became enmeshed, and the structures of violence within which these animals played an essential part. We find not only that the work of draught animals materially contributed to the CPK’s plans for state-building, but in the process, the new state–animal relationship became an exemplar of the idealized relationship between the CPK and its human laborers. We conclude that the human–animal relationship provides key insights into the mass violence that transpired in Democratic Kampuchea under the Khmer Rouge and to this end encourage future engagement with interspecies relationships in the Cambodian context and in genocide studies more broadly.

The Pol Pot regime’s simultaneous war against Vietnam and genocide of Cambodia’s ethnic Vietnamese minority

ABSTRACT This article examines the international context of and empirical evidence for the genocide of Cambodia’s domestic ethnic Vietnamese minority in the years 1977 and 1978. It sets out the basis for the scholarly consensus that the state of Democratic Kampuchea (DK), ruled by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK, or “Khmer Rouge”), launched a war against neighboring Vietnam beginning in early 1977 with a series of cross-border attacks. The article then examines the evidence for the simultaneous CPK campaign of near-total mass murder of the approximately 20,000 members of the domestic ethnic Vietnamese community remaining in the country after the killings and forcible expulsions under both the previous regime and the CPK from 1970 to 1976. The article then surveys the CPK’s ethnic policies towards the country’s Vietnamese, Cham, and Chinese minorities, and demonstrates how racist policies often merely masqueraded as class analysis. It concludes with a description of the international legal concepts of both genocide and the crime against humanity of extermination, showing how each applies to crimes the DK regime perpetrated against Cambodia’s ethnic Vietnamese minority.

Ethnic Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge: the genocide and race debate

ABSTRACT This paper provides insights on the Communist Party of Kampuchea’s (CPK) ethnic policy through the dynamics of its relationship with ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia during the 1970s. During Cambodia’s civil war between the CPK and the Lon Nol government, the CPK regarded Vietnamese in Cambodia as supporters of its political movement. The paper demonstrates that although class categorization undermined CPK treatment of Vietnamese and other minority groups (notably Chinese and Cham) throughout the four years (1975–1979) of Democratic Kampuchea (DK), internal plots, suspicions of non-Khmer people, and a war with Vietnam led to the expulsion of the vast majority of Vietnamese in 1975. Expulsion gave way to the mass murder from mid-1977 onward of many of the remaining Vietnamese and mixed-parentage children. By demonstrating how CPK notions of class outweighed those of race, the paper argues that CPK purges against Vietnamese should be understood within the framework of CPK efforts to eliminate suspected enemies from Vietnam rather than stemming from genocidal intent.

Ideologies of Khmer Rouge Family Policy: Contextualizing Sexual and Gender-Based Violence during the Cambodian Genocide

Between 1975 and 1979 approximately two million men, women, and children perished during the Cambodian Genocide. These deaths are attributed to specific administrative policies and practices initiated by the senior leadership of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), all of which were geared toward the basic objective of increasing agricultural production. Many of these deaths resulted from starvation, disease, and exhaustion; for others, death resulted from torture, murder, and execution. Within this context, women and men both were subject to sexual and gender-based violence. Scholars understand that much sexual and gender-based violence is directly associated with broader CPK policies toward the family. Less attention, however, has addressed the historical context and ideological basis of CPK family policy. This paper provides a primary-sourced assessment of CPK ideologies of the family and evaluates these within the context of CPK economic planning. In so doing, the CPK’s ideology of revolutionary families is situated within the larger history of family policies of communist governments.

Specters of Dependency: Hou Yuon and the Origins of Cambodia's Marxist Vision (1955–1975)

This article traces the intellectual contributions of Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) intellectual and founder Hou Yuon, whose influence on party policy has been the subject of scholarly debate. Although proposals in his political writings were implemented in CPK liberated zones and, later, Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979), his outspoken nature led to his ejection from the CPK picture and from appraisals of Cambodian Communism. From his studies in France to his death in 1975, Hou Yuon's importance as a Cambodian Marxist and Communist deserves our attention. Marxist theory provided him a critical interpretive paradigm and language with which to contextualize Cambodia's stark rural-urban divide and larger issues of global capitalist exploitation in his writings, most notably in his 1955 doctoral dissertation. The goal of this article is to uncover the link between Hou Yuon's application of Marxist theory to understand inequality and underdevelopment in his homeland and more broadly, to fill the gap between the Paris Group Cercle Marxiste and many of its members' leap to "pure socialism" and "total equality" in founding Democratic Kampuchea.

Khmer Rouge Irrigation Schemes During the Cambodian Genocide

Between 1975 and 1979 Cambodia was witness to a period of mass violence in which approximately two million people died from famine, disease, and murder. This violence was the result of policies initiated by the Communist Party of Kampuchea, better known as the Khmer Rouge. To date, little research has systematically or empirically studied the geography of specific practices, notably the construction of irrigation schemes, initiated by the CPK that produced those material conditions that resulted in death and deprivation. Using satellite images, aerial photographs, archival records, and field observation, we systematically document and map Khmer Rouge irrigation schemes. Findings indicate that approximately 7,000 kilometers of canals and dikes and over 350 reservoirs were constructed during the genocide. A six-class typology is forwarded, as we argue that local hydrologic and geomorphic conditions did figure in the construction of dams, dikes, canals, and reservoirs.

Gender and sexual violence, forced marriages, and primitive accumulation during the Cambodian genocide, 1975–1979

Between 1975 and 1979 approximately two million men, women, and children died during the Cambodian genocide. These deaths are attributed to specific administrative policies and practices initiated by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), all of which were geared toward the basic objective of increasing agricultural production as a means of building socialism. A crucial question regarding these practices was whether the CPK implemented policies designed specifically to destroy the traditional family structure of Cambodia. Drawing on the work of Silvia Federici, this article argues that policies and practices forwarded by the CPK constitute a variation of primitive accumulation; and that transformations of the traditional family structure were conditioned by the overall social organization of production initiated by the CPK. However, a more pressing form of gendered violence is apparent – a mode that pivots on the social ordering of the CPK’s political economy.

Surveillance, Bureaucracy, and the Politics of Anonymity in Democratic Kampuchea

Between 1975 and 1979 upwards of two million men, women, and children died from exposure, exhaustion, disease, starvation, and murder under the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). Pervasive to the widespread forms of structural and physical violence was a complex security apparatus. In this paper, my direct concern lies not in the legalities of surveillance and control but instead with the violence that emanates from the material practices of bureaucratic surveillance and the politics of anonymity. Drawing on the organizational structure and activities of the CPK I critically interrogate the dialectics of anonymity that preconfigured the Cambodian genocide. More precisely, I call attention to the dialectics of self- and state-anonymity, of the violent contradictions of men, women, and children who wanted to remain unknown yet became known and a governmental structure that drew power from its being simultaneously known but unknown. In so doing, I draw on several fields of study, including insights from the literature on surveillance and space; the scholarly study of bureaucracies; and studies on the geopolitics of anonymity. In so doing I demonstrate the salience of a political economic perspective for the study of bureaucratic state surveillance.

Music, Nature, Power, and Place: An Ecomusicology of Khmer Rouge Songs

Between 1975 and 1979, approximately 2 million men, women, and children died in Cambodia during the brutal regime of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK; the Khmer Rouge). To date, much scholarship has focused on the widespread practices of torture, starvation, and execution; decidedly less attention has been directed toward the cultural or aesthetic practices of the Khmer Rouge. We maintain that this omission is exceptionally important, in that it risks minimizing the importance of the performing arts, and especially music, held by the Khmer Rouge. In this article we employ narrative analysis within an ecomusicology framework in an attempt to better understand how music was used as a political instrument by the Khmer Rouge. Specifically, we document how the Khmer Rouge used songs as a means of conveying policy into practice; as a form of public pedagogy, songs provided instruction to the men, women, and children of Cambodia as to both proper political consciousness as well as the right attitudes toward labor. More precisely, Khmer Rouge–era songs presented nature as the pivot on which a new revolutionary society was to be built.

Cambodia’s Political Economy of Violence: Space, Time, and Genocide Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79

Between 1975 and 1979, approximately two million Cambodians died from exposure, disease, starvation, and execution under the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), also known as the Khmer Rouge. The standard narrative interprets these murders as the brutal acts of a cadre of radical communist ideologues, bent on establishing a pure, despotic, and autarkic state. Using a Marxist approach to political economy, this paper challenges the standard narrative, finding that these killings were a consequence of the CPK’s attempt to establish a system of state capitalism that exploited workers through the production of increasing surpluses. This analysis reveals the particular and deliberate structural arrangements that made the deaths of millions a justifiable consequence. In so doing, we seek to highlight the broader benefits of a Marxist analysis of political economy in the study of genocide; notably its emphasis on the materiality of violence and its ability to expose the forms of social organization that produce mass violence.

Crimes of Democratic Kampuchea: Megacrimes and the Criminological Imagination

The story of the Cambodian hemoclysm or bloodbath, its causes and evolution, have been documented and accounted for by a sustained and critical scholarship. We draw on this literature to account for the extreme lethality of the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) regime led by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). First, we briefly outline the scale of the violence during DK and then describe the phases, patterns and surges of violence against different ‘classes’ of victims that occurred with the implementation of the DK’s nation building plans, and in doing so offer a sketch of the DK’s short-lived attempt to create a communist utopia. Then we situate our criminological analysis in terms of the struggle to define mega-crime and mass violence, and the limitations of current criminological theories. Next, we outline the explanatory contribution of both macro-level and micro-level criminological theories about the causes of extreme violence, and how these aid us in understanding how individuals and the DK regime were able to implement terror and repeatedly perform acts of murder. We conclude by re-examining the likely causes of this catastrophic surge in mass violence, and argue that although ample precursors of such violence are evident in Cambodia’s history, the convergence of a multitude of adverse external and internal factors combined with the particular form of radical Maoist policies imbued with indigenous over-confidence produced a perfect storm of violence.

Landscape Photography, Geographic Education, and Nation‐Building In Democratic Kampuchea, 1975–1979

On April 17, 1975, Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, fell to the armed forces of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (). Cambodia, however, was not primed for revolution. This is significant in that it contributed to specific postconflict policies and programs initiated by the , including the promotion of geographic education and the use of propaganda photographs. In this article we examine six photographs produced during the Khmer Rouge era. Our main thesis is that when viewing these photographs, we are witnessing the photographic production of a nationalist landscape. As geographers have argued, photographs are inauthentic from the standpoint of “truthful” representations. However, the photographs produced by the are authentic simulacra in their “truthful” representation of how the envisioned both the revolution and subsequent administration of Democratic Kampuchea. In so doing, our research is positioned within a longer tradition of cultural‐political geography that has examined the use of landscape photographs as political instruments used in nation‐building.

Nature, Poetry, and Public Pedagogy: The Poetic Geographies of the Khmer Rouge

Between 1975 and 1979, more than 2 million men, women, and children died in what has become known as the Cambodian genocide. In just under four years, approximately one quarter of the country's prewar population succumbed to arbitrary murder, torture, detention, starvation, and disease. Amidst these acts of destruction, however, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK; the Khmer Rouge) advanced various pedagogical practices, including the promotion of poetry. Superficially, poems produced by the Khmer Rouge are literary forms of propaganda. Such a conclusion is incomplete. Through a reading of Khmer Rouge–era poetry, this article contributes to two themes in geography: fictive and public pedagogy. We argue that the Khmer Rouge used poetry as a form of public pedagogy. More specifically, Khmer Rouge–era poetry presented nature as the fulcrum on which society was to be transformed. The cultivation of a proper political consciousness required the nurturing of a community identity of what Democratic Kampuchea was to become. This argument is developed in five sections. First, we provide a brief overview of literary geographies. We then consider the transformative power of public education. Third, we provide an overview of educational policies under the Khmer Rouge. This is followed by a discussion of nature as conceived by the CPK. Our main empirical analysis of Khmer Rouge poetry is presented in the fifth section. Finally, we conclude with a consideration of the politics of creative interventions as a form of public pedagogy.

Nature and post‐conflict violence: water management under the Communist Party of Kampuchea, 1975–1979

Between 1975 and 1979 approximately two million people died in Cambodia. Whereas most literature has focused on the ‘direct’ killing associated with torture and execution, we focus on the structures of violence that contributed to the death of men, women and children through famine‐related causes. Accordingly, this paper sits at the intersection of three bodies of literature: water management policies, post‐conflict reconstruction and political violence. Through a case study of Democratic Kampuchea, we first add to contemporary research that has destabilised the dichotomy between ‘conflict’ and ‘post‐conflict’, by showing how post‐conflict societies are not necessarily free from violence: indeed post‐conflict policies of state rebuilding may establish structures that engender widespread violence. Second, we provide a variation on ‘environmental violence’. In contrast to previous literature, we consider how environmental management policies contribute to violence in a post‐conflict setting rather than focus on environmental degradation following conflict. Third, and more narrowly, we provide a transformative understanding of the Cambodian ‘genocide’. Together, we argue that Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) water management was a key component of a larger post‐conflict reconstruction effort of Democratic Kampuchea's leadership. Agricultural surplus production was essential, but the CPK understood that increases in agricultural productivity were impossible without a systematic water management strategy. The imposition of post‐conflict policies would manifest in the death of millions, but not because CPK policies were unplanned or unorganised. Rather, the remarkable death toll that ensued was just the opposite; it was the result of a highly organised attempt to reconstruct Cambodia.

THE EXTRAORDINARY CHAMBERS IN THE COURTS OF CAMBODIA AND THE PROGRESS OF THE ‘KHMER ROUGE TRIALS’

AbstractThe world has witnessed many atrocities since the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, better known as the Khmer Rouge, marched into Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975 and unleashed a regime of terror of more than three and a half years on the Cambodian people in which an estimated quarter of the population perished. However, the fate that befell this small South-East Asian nation continues to grip and challenge the imagination. Perhaps it is the notion of the State turning on its own people on such an unprecedented scale that is so difficult to fathom. Perhaps it is the tranquil, smiling populace, forging a space in the modern era against the proud backdrop of the ancient Angkorian temples that makes such a dark recent history so improbable. Or perhaps it is the scales of justice, finally weighing in, more than thirty years after the crimes in defiance of donor countries' ‘tribunal fatigue’, that have refocused the world's attention.The Khmer Rouge takeover had been preceded by a struggle for power which saw Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who had abdicated and governed Cambodia since independence in 1953, overthrown by Prime Minister Lon Nol and Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak on 17 March 1970. The new government was allied to the United States in the Vietnam War, fuelling Khmer Rouge resentment as well as that of Sihanouk who aligned himself with the communists. The Khmer Rouge gradually consolidated its power and control of territory, and when the time was seen to be ripe to institute the planned nationwide ‘agrarian dictatorship’, it easily overpowered the weak and corrupt Lon Nol government.

Rewriting Cambodian History to ‘Adapt’ it to a New Political Context: The Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party's Historiography (1979–1991)

In the midst of Pol Pot's struggle for the control of the Cambodian Communist Party in the 1970s, the subject of the Party's history came to assume a crucial importance. In 1976, the date of the foundation of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) became so important an issue that veteran Party members who remembered that the Party had been founded at a date previous to that claimed by Pol Pot, were tortured and killed for that reason. History was rewritten to suit the interests of Pol Pot's faction and the political circumstances of the time. A particularly sensitive subject was the role played by the Vietnamese in the formation of the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party, the predecessor of the CPK in the 1950s. After the relations between the Vietnamese and Cambodian Parties turned sour in the mid-1970s, the CPK deleted all allusions to the Vietnamese role from its official Party History.

The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War and Revolution Since 1945 , and: Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 161 into so many small states, and citizenship ofthis type would have threatened their sovereignty. Thus, citizenship had to be tied to the institutions ofthe State. When Bismarck established the German Empire, he created an imperfect nation-state and therefore did not eliminate the dichotomy. The German State did not include all of the German Nation, and, in fact, included many people who were not part ofthe German Nation. Citizenship linked to such a state was a source offrustration for nationalists. Basing citizenship on descent was a step toward solving this dilemma. Citizenship of this type would include all of Germandom, reinforce the Germanness of the State, and move Germany closer to the ideal of the nationstate . The conclusions of this book regarding the national self-identities (the determining factor ofcitizenship laws) ofFrance and Germany help to illuminate their quite different reactions to the Maastricht Treaty. The decision of the Twelve to allow Community citizens to vote in local elections evoked strong reactions in France, leading the government to call a popular referendum. In Germany, there have been no strong reactions against Maastricht (at least not in this area), and the issue will be decided in Parliament rather than by popular vote. These opposite reactions are very understandable in the context of this book. Historically, France has had a very state-centered concept of citizenship. Rights, includingthe right to vote, guaranteed by the State are therefore considered sacred. Granting these rights to people who are not official French citizens devalues French citizenship because the principle ofexclusivity, expressed as ties to the institutions of the State, is violated. In Germany, on the other hand, citizenship is not tied to the State, but rather to the ethnocultural concept of the Nation. Therefore, civic rights can be extended to non-citizens without threatening the exclusivity principle of citizenship. The focus ofthis book, citizenship laws, effectively gives shape to a much more fundamental element of the nation-state: the concept of self-identity. Citizenship laws are a surface manifestation of this deeper characteristic. The explanatory powers of citizenship laws as tools of analysis is limited if a nation-state's selfidentity is not also considered. Together, they produce a much more powerful tool of analysis, which is able to go beyond explaining issues related exclusively to citizenship laws and on to a myriad of other issues, such as how states relate to one another and how states react to challenges to their sovereignty, as in the case of the Maastricht Treaty. The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War and Revolution Since 1945. By David P. Chandler. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. 396 pp. $35/Hardcover. BrotherNumber One:A PoliticalBiographyofPolPot By David P. Chandler. Boulder: Westview Press, 1992. 254 pp. $24.95/Hardcover. Reviewed by Jeffrey M. Ritter, MA. Candidate, SAIS. In April of 1975, when the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) defeated the Lon NoI government and declared the establishment of Democratic Kampuchea 162 SAISREVIEW (DK), a spokesman for the new regime claimed that the revolution had brought two thousand years of Cambodian history to an end. During the DK era, which lasted until 1979, an estimated one million Cambodians, or one out ofeight, died as aresultofmalnutrition, disease, overwork, or deliberate execution. Most Americans know Cambodia only through the depiction of the DK period in the 1986 film The Killing Fields. In two recent books, David Chandler, a professor at Australia's Monash University, has undertaken to rescue Cambodia's pre-1975 history and place Democratic Kampuchea in its proper historical context. He has largely succeeded . The Tragedy ofCambodian History is Chandler's attempt to distill Cambodian politics since World War II into a coherent narrative. Beginning with the Japanese coup de force of 1945, which toppled the French colonial administration, Chandler traces Cambodian politics through all its twists and turns: the return ofthe French; the earlyrounds ofmultipartypolitics; Prince Norodom Sihanouk's struggle against the Democratic Party and his eventual monopolization of authority; the tensions which led to Sihanouk's ouster in the coup of 1970; the collapse ofthe hapless Lon NoI government; and the rise and fall of Democratic Kampuchea. Underlying Chandler's account are three interpretive themes which ascribe...

Origins of Khmer Communism

On 3 April 1979, the new pro-Vietnamese Government in Kampuchea renamed Phnom Penh's Avenue General de Gaulle after a Buddhist monk called Achar Hem Chieu, who died in a French prison in 1943. Other main streets were named after former anti French monks who, unlike Chieu, became communist leaders in the 1950s and the 1960s: Achar Mean (Son Ngoc Minn), Tou Samouth (Achar Sok), and Keo Moni (Achar Mao), whose name now belongs to the Boulevard which had borne that of another Asian communist leader called Mao. The names of nineteenth century anti-French rebels such as Pou Kombo and Si Votha were also given to some of Phnom Penh's avenues. This symbolic change was an attempt by the remnants (and the successors) of the early communist movement, now ruling Kampuchea, to declare their links with the anticolo nial tradition out of which Khmer communism was born. The period (1963-79) of the Pol Pot group's leadership of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), when anticolonial figures were ignored or despised as Vietnamese puppets and nearly all veteran communists were among the hundreds of thousands executed, was thus seen as a break from this tradition which needed to be corrected. Although the early communists such as Son Ngoc Minn never won unchallenged leadership of the 1945-54 Kampuchean anti-French movement, they did play an important role in securing independence for the country. This role is worth studying, if only to see how their descendents, the Heng Samrin/Pen Sovan regime, now seek to cast themselves in terms of Khmer patriotism.