What Pol Pot Did to Cambodia’s Smartest People Will Haunt You

“How do you remake a country? Well, you might start by killing everyone who mattered in the old country. Doctors, lawyers, people who worked in government, even artists. A true revolution could only happen if all the old faces were wiped away. Between 1975 and 1979, that’s exactly what the Khmer Rouge did to Cambodia.”

“Under the leadership of Pol Pot, they unleashed a reign of terror that murdered around a quarter of the country’s population in just four years. Specially targeted among those victims were the intellectual class. But why did the regime hate them and how did it destroy them? Today, on A Day in History, we’ll see how Pol Pot brutally massacred the intellectuals of his country.”

“The Khmer Rouge seized power by capturing the capital city of Phnom Penh in 1975. They destroyed the old US-backed regime of Lon Nol and promised a communist political and economic system in its place. The Khmer Rouge believed the old regime represented the interests only of the rich upper classes, of foreigners, landowners, and capitalists who were opposed to the interests of the working people.”

“Instead, the new regime idealized the peasant farmer and the humble workers who’d been oppressed under the old system. Everything the regime did, according to its propaganda, was for the good of the workers. Pol Pot’s regime promised to wipe the old order away. Everyone connected to it and everyone who profited from it would be removed. This required a total purge.”

“Its officials were rounded up and killed. Its symbols were torn down and outlawed. And even its capital of Phnom Penh was purged of all its people when the regime came to power. All relics of the old ways of life, including religion and art, were to be replaced by a new communist culture. Historians call this the year zero policy, although the regime never actually called it that.”

“Basically, Cambodia was reset and the regime would remake it from the ground up.”

“So, how did the intellectual class play into this? An intellectual could mean a lot of things. Basically, it was anyone whose occupation mostly involved their mind instead of their body. For the Khmer Rouge, it could mean academics, lawyers, doctors, civil servants, writers, painters, musicians, and just about anyone else who wasn’t a farmer, a soldier, or a party activist.”

“These intellectuals were dangerous to the regime for a few reasons. First of all, they made up the middle and upper classes. Under communist ideology, they were all thieves and exploiters of the working people. As long as they lived, they would try to fight the revolution and restore the capitalist system, or so the regime said. They had to be dealt with.”

“Secondly, intellectuals posed an ideological threat. They could argue against the regime’s lies and argue for alternative political beliefs. They were more likely to hold competing ideologies of their own and more likely to have the ability to turn those beliefs into resistance. The third reason was that the intellectual class were sources of leadership and social stability.”

“Often, the local doctor or government official would be trusted and respected by the local community and become a sort of unofficial leader. Decapitating existing community leadership left society weak and easier to manipulate for the revolutionaries. Finally, intellectuals were believed to be linked to foreign influence.”

“A lot of their education was Western in style and older intellectuals had largely been trained under the old colonial French regime and still carried some of its beliefs. Richer people were also more likely to consume Western media, listen to Western news, or wear Western clothes. Intellectuals were therefore a source of potential foreign influence or interference in the regime’s plans.”

“It didn’t help that most of the designated intellectual class had mainly supported Lon Nol’s pro-Western regime in the civil war. The Khmer Rouge’s beliefs were similar to those of their biggest ally, China. Mao had also seen the educated elites as enemies. When he took power in 1949, most of China’s intellectual class were loyal to the old Republican government.”

“Many were traditionalists who followed old Chinese beliefs and social systems like Confucianism, which were an obstacle to revolution. Mao had many of these people rounded up to be forcibly re-educated or they simply vanished never to be seen again. When Pol Pot took power in 1975, China was still undergoing Mao’s Cultural Revolution where a new wave of persecution saw all non-Communist elements, from religious texts to teachers who criticized the regime, attacked by mobs of Mao’s Red Guards.”

“So, to the Khmer Rouge regime, removing the intellectual class was a basic demand of their ideology, a protection against future and foreign threats, and a way to make the revolution that much easier to carry out. It also put communist Cambodia on the same path as its major ally, China. The big irony was that the leaders of the Khmer Rouge were themselves intellectuals.”

“Pol Pot had studied radio electronics in Paris and spent several years as a student in France. It was there that he joined his first Marxist group and learned most of the ideas that he would apply so terribly in his home country. Pol Pot was hardly the only one. Nearly all of the major players in the Khmer Rouge were intellectuals.”

“The regime’s chief ideologist and Pol Pot’s second in command, Nuon Chea, was a law graduate turned civil servant. While the regime’s third in command, foreign minister Ieng Sary, had been a student in Paris with Pol Pot. The regime didn’t persecute intellectuals because they were ignorant or because they irrationally hated them.”

“They persecuted them because they understood exactly how dangerous it was to allow intellectuals with rival ideologies to exist and organize against them. The Rouge wasn’t anti-intellectual per se, but anti any intellectuals who didn’t agree with them. On April 17th, 1975, the Khmer Rouge’s forces captured the capital of Phnom Penh after a brutal civil war with the old regime.”

“With that, the communist victory was all but complete. One of the first things the new regime did was banish everyone from the capital. As far as the communists were concerned, the only people who lived in the capital were old regime loyalists, foreign imperialists, and traitorous intellectual types.”

“Tens of thousands of people were sent into the countryside with nowhere to go. They even emptied the hospitals of their patients, many of whom died without that care. This was a devastating blow to the country’s intellectual class. In an instant, they lost their homes, their jobs, and their communities. Their lives had effectively been restarted.”

“The regime labeled them the new people or the April 17th people, referencing the date the capital fell. The idea was that their old lives had with the start of the communist regime. All their wealth and status was gone. They were now basically new people with nothing to their name. Some scattered into the countryside where they tried to attach themselves to existing villages with mixed success.”

“Most were rounded up by the regime forces in the following months and taken away to labor camps or forced onto collectivized farms where they toiled in the fields like the rest of the country. All contact with the outside world was heavily controlled. Telephone and telegram lines were cut. Foreign flights were restricted to regime approved ones and border guards had orders to stop anyone trying to leave with deadly force.”

“The only way to escape Cambodia was to brave the jungles and cross into Thailand in the wilderness hoping patrols weren’t in the area. But that trek could take days or weeks exposing people to the dangers of exhaustion, exposure, starvation, and disease. For most people, it wasn’t a realistic option.”

“Their homeland was their new prison. And for many, it would be their graveyard. Not all intellectuals were treated equally. Civil servants loyal to the old regime were killed in the first few days. Teachers and doctors in the capital were also attacked early seen agents of anti-communist indoctrination and Western science, respectively.”

“It was down to local cadres to carry that work out. One district officer described how his orders were simply to smash internal enemies, Chams, Vietnamese, capitalists, former regime workers, intellectuals, and CIA agents. These people were sometimes described as microbes or diseased elements who posed a danger to the health of the new communist society.”

“If allowed to remain, they would spread and destroy everything. They had to be cut out, even if that meant taking out some innocents in the process. Little guidance was given on how to figure out who belonged in these categories, and so the regime’s local death squads were often let loose with virtual freedom to kill whoever they thought might be a problem.”

“But how could they tell someone was an intellectual? Well, it could be what they wore. It’s commonly said that the Khmer Rouge killed anyone with glasses because they believed everyone who wore glasses was smart and therefore a threat. That’s only a slight exaggeration. There was never an actual policy of killing people because they wore glasses, but in practice, almost everyone who did wear them would be a target because of what having glasses represented.”

“Glasses were not easily available in Cambodia at the time. The average farmer, for example, probably couldn’t get a pair. If you owned glasses, that was a good sign that you were one of the wealthier people in the country. Furthermore, glasses could indicate occupation.”

“If a short-sighted person worked in the fields all day, they could probably go without glasses. But a short-sighted person with a job that required him to read and write would be much more likely to get a pair, so he could do his work. Therefore, glasses became an easy way to identify people who were middle class or in an intellectual occupation, and it was for those reasons that they would be taken away or killed.”

“Local cadres with minimal guidance from the center simply used glasses as one guideline for who to target. However, refugees coming out of Cambodia would say that everyone wearing glasses was being killed, which was close enough to the truth, even if it wasn’t 100% accurate. So, the glasses story wasn’t literally true, but it captured the spirit of what happened.”

“Countless people were killed by a regime who declared huge chunks of the population to be equivalent to living diseases, and who couldn’t care less about making sure their victims were who the regime was accusing them of being in the first place. Killing was organized on a local level. Village heads would be ordered to assemble a list of everyone in the village, including their occupation and family history.”

“This process rounded up the intellectuals among the rural population, and also gave village heads the chance to identify any other potential troublemakers to be taken away by the regime. Of course, the village heads had little choice in this. If they didn’t cooperate, they’d be killed, and in many cases, the whole village would be punished for the actions of a single member.”

“To many villages, handing over their doctors, religious leaders, or intellectual refugees was the only way to ensure their survival. The regime worked to prevent new intellectuals emerging as well. The entire education system was purged of non-communist content and reworked with proper ideological indoctrination in mind.”

“Virtually all foreign books and films were banned, as were all religious texts and prayer. Even unapproved music was banned, with serious punishment coming for anyone caught listening to Western music in particular. Not that people would have time to enjoy intellectual culture even if it did still exist.”

“The entire country was forced into collectivized farms, labor camps, or military cadres, where work began at dawn and ended late at night, leaving no time for other activities that weren’t regime-approved. As far as the regime was concerned, the only life Cambodians needed was the life of a good communist worker laboring for the state.”

“With information flowing out of the country tightly controlled, some Cambodian intellectuals who had been training around the world returned to their homeland to find themselves unexpectedly seized. Hundreds of individuals who had been training as doctors, engineers, or other professional jobs from China to France found themselves taken away to special revolutionary training as soon as they stepped off the plane.”

“One specific group of intellectuals who were heavily targeted were religious leaders. Cambodia’s dominant religion was Buddhism, but there were also members of other faiths, such as the Muslim majority Cham people and a small Christian minority. Communism treated religion as an enemy.”

“Marx called it an opium of the masses that distracted the workers from the true issue of class struggle. Religion promoted non-communist beliefs and said that spiritual well-being was more important than economic and political revolution.”

“People in religious communities would be more difficult to break off and place into the new communist society the regime was creating. However, Buddhism also represented Cambodia’s intellectual and cultural pillars. In Cambodia, like in so many other countries, the monasteries and temples had been the chief producers of the country’s cultural, artistic, and intellectual output in ages past. It was the monks who knew how to read and write the poems and stories, and the monasteries or temples who commissioned or hosted the great art and sculptures of the country.”

“By the 20th century, rising public education and the effects of French colonialism had ended religion’s dominance over those affairs, but it was still an important part of Cambodia’s intellectual life. Monks could also be important figures in rural communities. Temples could provide food, education, care, and guidance for villages who had little access to it otherwise.”

“When the Khmer Rouge’s soldiers came in to shut down the temples and monasteries, and haul away or kill the folks running them, it devastated local communities who had depended on them for centuries. In many ways, this was even more true for other religions like Islam. Excluded from political power and isolated as a minority, Imams were usually the most important figures in Cham Muslim communities, enacted as political, as well as intellectual and spiritual leaders.”

“While the regime targeted all Chams, it especially targeted the Imams as a way to shatter the core of these communities, and weaken them for further persecution. The communists also targeted artists. They accused existing art of carrying counter-revolutionary themes, and worked hard to destroy both the art and the people who made it.”

“Thousands of artists were massacred or worked to death in labor camps to ensure that only regime-approved art existed. Vannath was one such Cambodian painter who suffered under the Rouge. Born to a poor family, he had worked his way through art school to pursue his life’s passion as a painter. Vannath managed to make a bit of money with his painting career, but was not rich and still had to work his own rice fields to feed his family.”

“That didn’t matter to the agents of the Khmer Rouge, who arrested him in January 1978 for alleged crimes against the regime. Nath was tortured with electric shocks, beaten in order to reveal his secret connections with counterrevolutionary agents. He had no connections and was just a painter.”

“Without any evidence, Nath was thrown into the infamous S-21 prison with countless other inmates with no hope of freedom. S-21 was the worst prison in Cambodia, and it was where the regime’s most hated enemies were sent to be tortured for confessions and then executed. 15,000 people would die there. He spent weeks inside a cell with 50 other prisoners waiting for his inevitable execution.”

“His name was on the execution list, but at the last minute, the prison’s chief, Kang Kek Ieu, better known as Deuch, decided he could be more useful alive and ordered him to be spared. They needed a painter for Pol Pot’s propaganda, and Vannath was one of the only artists who wasn’t dead or gone. Vannath spent the next year painting propaganda for the regime.”

“He was one of only a handful of prisoners who survived S-21. Van Nath and his country’s freedom came in January 1979 when Vietnamese forces invaded and captured Phnom Penh. Despite both being communist, the two countries border disputes were too much to solve with diplomacy and Vietnam’s experienced army demolished the Khmer Rouges in a matter of weeks.”

“Although the communists clung onto pockets of power across Cambodia for years to come, most of its power collapsed and its persecution of Cambodia’s intellectuals ended with it. Between 1.7 and 2.2 million people lost their lives under the Khmer Rouge. It is impossible to say how many of them were part of what the regime called the intellectual class.”

“It was certainly in the thousands. 15,000 people died in the infamous S-21 prison alone and a large chunk of them were intellectuals. With thousands massacred at the capture of Phnom Penh, countless massacres in the countryside, and an untold number lost in the famines that resulted from failed regime policies, it’s a number historians will never be clear on.”

“Survivors could only ensure that their experiences were preserved and remembered. Many of those intellectuals who suffered under the regime took up the responsibility of rebuilding the country after its fall. While Cambodia will bear the scars of the Khmer Rouge for generations, it has worked hard to repair the damage.”

“Van Nath, for example, wrote a vivid account of the S-21 prison and worked with historians and journalists to preserve its history and gather evidence to get the prison’s chief, Kang Kek Iew, on trial for his crimes. Vannath died in 2011, a few months after seeing Kang Kek Iew sentenced for his crimes at S-21.”