The roots of evil: The origins of genocide and other group violence

by Ervin Staub

  There were several reasons for the evacuation of the cities. One was fear and suspicion of enemies, who were believed to be everywhere, threatening the rather small Khmer Army (party membership was only fourteen thousand people).14 In addition, the Khmer Rouge considered the cities evil. Some classes of city people, especially military officers, were regarded as traitors and were killed. Professionals and intellectuals were also regarded as enemies. Although there was no plan to kill all such people, many were killed; only those survived who faithfully and completely followed the rules, dictates, and ideals of the new society.

  People sent to the country had to work with their own hands in the fields. These “new” people were not granted even the few privileges of the “old” people, the original peasants who were at first allowed to retain their land and animals. The new people were allowed no private property and had to work extremely hard, ten hours a day and often added hours at night, with limited food rations. Many of them starved. There was enough food in the forest for sustenance but the new people were forbidden to supplement their meager diets by foraging. Disease was rampant; medical care poor. In 1976, an estimated 80 percent of the population suffered from malaria.

  With little or no experience of farming and entirely without help, the new people were to establish communities, under the most stringent rules. Even if villages emptied by the war were near the places where they were sent to settle, they were forced to start from scratch. At times the area proved unproductive and they had to move and start all over again.15

  After they evacuated Phnom Penh and other cities, the communists began exterminating the officers of Lon Nol’s army. Many were instructed to put on their dress uniforms, ostensibly to greet Prince Sihanouk returning to Cambodia. Driven by trucks to the countryside, they were ordered to disembark and killed by machine-gun fire or marched into mine fields. At first sporadically but later more systematically, the Khmer Rouge also killed teachers, doctors, technicians, and intellectuals, individually or in groups. “Traitors” were executed by a blow from an axe handle to the back of the neck. Family members were forced to watch as their husbands, sons, and daughters were killed. They killed Buddhist monks and, guided by nationalism, members of ethnic minorities. People who deviated from communist rules or showed evidence of city ways might be executed.

  Discipline, however, was extremely strict, and minor infractions could be punished with extreme severity. The most important criterion of survivability was to adopt entirely the demeanor of a poor peasant; and a former city intellectual who would not be bothered if he acted like a peasant and worked hard, might well be executed if he showed the least hint of his former class superiority.16

  Killings also occurred in reeducation and interrogation centers. In the infamous Tuol Sleng, many communist government, party, and military personnel were tortured and killed – victims of purification and power struggles. They were forced to write and rewrite elaborate confessions before they were killed. Records suggest that about twenty thousand people were killed at Tuol Sleng.

  Expressions of love, courting, sex before marriage, and adultery were strictly forbidden. Childen “educated” by the government spied on their parents and neighbors. The system broke up the extended family; it is uncertain whether it intended to break up and destroy nuclear families.17

  The most common estimate is that nearly two million people were killed or died from starvation and disease under communist rule. The aim was to kill all actual or potential enemies, everyone who could not adopt the world view and way of life required in the new state. Some of the killing was seemingly casual, perhaps intended to terrorize the population and stifle resistance. Later, executions for transgressing rules became the normal operating procedure in certain places.

  Ideological bias and reports and views of atrocities

  Some of the reactions to events in Cambodia were guided by ideology. In an early report, Hildebrand and Porter describe the evacuation of Phnom Penh as necessary because of hunger and overcrowding. They present a positive image of the new regime and discount unfavorable news.18 They also blame the United States for starvation in Phnom Penh before the Khmer Rouge conquest and for conditions in Cambodia in general. (They are partly right; apart from military intervention and bombing, the United States had supplied military aid but not food while Phnom Penh was starving.) Hildebrand and Porter uncritically celebrate “Democratic Kampuchea.”

  Michael Vickery provides valuable information and insights despite his bias in favor of communist revolution.19 He discusses what he regards as the prejudiced nature of most early reports about the system and its atrocities. He notes specific inaccuracies of many kinds; for example, the evacuation of Phnom Penh may have been less hurried and more humane than at first reported, and not all doctors, intellectuals, and skilled workers were killed. Vickery blames inaccurate reporting on ideological bias and sensation-seeking and on the fact that refugees in Thailand, who were the only available source of information, were largely people with a stake in the overthrown system. Vickery argues that these people could not be trusted and, in the process, shifts the blame to the victims. He writes:

  These were the people – spoiled, pretentious, contentious, status-conscious at worst, or at best simply soft, intriguing, addicted to city comforts and despising peasant life – who faced the communist exodus order on 17 April 1975. For them the mere fact of leaving an urban existence with its foreign orientation and unrealistic expectations to return to the land would have been a horror, and a horror compounded by their position on the receiving end of orders issued by illiterate peasants. On the whole they cared little or nothing for the problems of the “other half of their countrymen, and would have been quite content to have all the rural rebels bombed away by American planes. Even having seen the damage done to the country during the war they seem to exclude it from their thoughts, almost never mention it unless asked, and then seem astonished that anyone would take interest in what happened in the rural areas before they arrived there in 1975.20

  Only in passing does Vickery report, in a footnote, that most of these “city people” were in fact recent refugees from the countryside, former peasants. Moreover, being “soft,” “spoiled,” or “intriguing” hardly justifies murder. Despite his bias, Vickery’s account of the nature and extent of atrocities is very similar to other accounts.

  However, he points out variations in the level of atrocities in different provinces, under the rule of different leaders, and at different times. For example, after the initial killings, murders and executions became rare in 1975 and 1976, and then commonplace in 1977 and 1978. These variations were associated with struggles among the leadership. Pol Pot and his group were highly influential in the central government from the start, but the leadership in some of the provinces opposed them. Pol Pot lost his position as prime minister from June to October 1975, and the regime was milder during that time. After that, his faction consolidated its power and the severity of the system increased.

  Ideology, world view, and the aims of the Khmer Rouge

  The major tenets of the Khmer Rouge ideology were to create a society organized around the soil, a peasant society in which life was to be communal. Neither private property, knowledge, nor pleasures were to differentiate people or separate the individual from the community. Social leveling was one aim of the evacuation of cities. Life was to be simple and ascetic. Everyone was to have the status of a simple peasant.

  Policies and actions expressing the ideology and world view of the Pol Pot group, other than those already described, included the establishment of communal dining and the elimination of education, except for early primary grade schooling in some areas. The young received ideological indoctrination. The communists also tried to establish a purely barter economy. People were supposed to despise wealth and money. Upon their victory in Phnom Penh, the communist troops destroyed money.

  Technology was mistrusted and destroyed, except for some factories producing goods deemed
absolutely essential, mainly for agriculture. Strong nationalism and an emphasis on national self-reliance were part of the ideology. One reason for this emphasis was mistrust. The Pol Pot group mistrusted everyone: the people, especially the “new” people; communists with a background or beliefs different from their own; and other countries, especially Vietnam. Their suspicion and fear were one reason for the killings. Those killed after October 1976 included many old-time communists, especially those who spent periods of time in Hanoi and were suspected of Vietnamese sympathies.

  The scope of intended change was enormous. “Its designs penetrated beyond the reorganization of political and economic institutions, social relations and kinship systems, and into the very seat of human consciousness itself. This was genuine totalitarianism... .The aim was to transform the grammar of thought within the culture.”21 The sources of this fanatical ideology were (1) certain characteristics of Cambodian culture, (2) personal experiences of Pol Pot and his associates, (3) ideas within the communist movement and the example of communist states, and (4) changes that resulted from learning by doing and from the political and social consequences of the Pol Pot group’s actions.

  The genocidal ideology was created by a small group of people. Given the assumption stated early in the book that there will often be some individuals who evolve deviant and destructive ideologies, important questions are how did they gain followers and how did their followers become the perpetrators of their genocidal ideals?

  Cultural preconditions: the roots of ideology and genocide

  The Cambodian genocide had many cultural and historical roots or building blocks. This is especially so if we look far enough back in time. David Chandler described substantial continuity from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century in many Cambodian practices and customs, such as clothing, ceremonies, and the worship of the king.22 In spite of nineteenth- and twentieth-century societal upheavals, many of these cultural elements persisted.

  Class divisions, urban—rural rift, and slavery. Cambodia was a country with deep class divisions. The king was an object of devotion for the people. However, the country was actually ruled by a rich oligarchy that controlled the land and taxed the peasants. The aristocracy expressed its devaluation of the common people by using such names for specific individuals as “stinking brute,” “detestable,” and “dog.”23 A related division was the rift between cities and countryside. In many regions the peasantry was isolated, hostile to everything urban, and in certain areas restless and dissatisfied long before 1970.24

  The cities were small; Phnom Penh, the largest, had substantially fewer than one hundred thousand inhabitants at the end of World War II. To the peasants, city dwellers were officials who enforced rules, landlords who controlled the land, and owners of financial and commercial enterprises (often foreigners) to whom the peasants were indebted. The results of long-term resentment can be seen in the practice under Pol Pot of having people turn up “the palm of the hand – roughened, it saved – if not it was death.”25 Vickery reports that he heard a similar story in 1962 from an urban schoolteacher who was stopped by Issarak while traveling on a bus in 1952. The Issarak ("free") were anti-French groups and antiroyalist freedom fighters active between 1946 and 1954. He survived only because he sat in the back and security forces arrived before the Issarak reached him. The others with smooth palms were taken away. The violence preceding 1975 – the U.S. bombing, the invasion, and the revolutionary war-affected the countryside most, and this intensified peasant hostility toward city dwellers.

  The treatment of the new people under Pol Pot had specific cultural origins as well. They were treated as slaves, without any rights. Slavery had a long history in Cambodia. According to the report of a Chinese envoy in 1296-97, the majority of the people in Angkor, the capital city of the Angkor empire, were slaves. There were three classes of slaves, one of them hereditary. Six hundred years later, in the 1850s, the French discovered the Angkor complex and found a prosperous Buddhist monastery tended by over a thousand hereditary slaves. The French attempted to eliminate slavery in the second half of the nineteenth century, but at first found the institution so deeply rooted that they allowed it to continue. It was outlawed only at the beginning of this century.26 In addition to its other uses, slavery was regarded as a means of civilizing people such as “wild” mountain tribes.

  The new people were forced to work the land and to build elaborate irrigation systems. The Cambodian kings too had used forced labor in extensive building programs, which often included irrigation systems and reservoirs. David Chandler notes that the only feature of Cambodian life singled out for praise by the Pol Pot system was the mobilization of the people by King Jayavarman VII, late in the twelfth century, to build ternpies, hospitals (maintanence and food supplied by slaves), reservoirs, and rest houses for travelers. Like the Khmer Rouge, this king stated as a central motive for his policies compassion for the people and the desire to deliver them from pain. Forcing hundreds of thousands of people to build his structures could serve compassion in his mind because building a city and temples to honor the Buddha “assured workers of less suffering and greater happiness – but in another life.”27

  Thus class divisions and the urban-rural rift were sources of devaluation of the wealthy and educated that helped the Khmer Rouge gain followers, and the Cambodian history of slavery and forced labor provided a cultural blueprint for their policies.

  Orientation to authority. The authoritarian-hierarchical character of Cambodian society was probably one source of the totalitarian system created by the Pol Pot regime. A Portuguese missionary who was in Cambodia in 1556 wrote that the people

  dare do nothing of themselves, nor accept anything new without leave of the king, which is why Christians cannot be made without the king’s approval. And if some of my readers should say that they could be converted without the king knowing it, to this I answer that the people of the country is of such a nature, that nothing is done that the king knoweth not; and anybody, be he ever so simple may speak with the king, wherefore everyone seeketh news to carry unto him, to have an occasion for to speak with him; whereby without the king’s good will nothing can be done.28

  Ever since the great empire of Angkor (ninth to fourteenth century), the king had been elevated to the rank of a god. The tremendous temples of Angkor Wat served the cult of the divine king.29 Although the actual power of the king diminished greatly under the French protectorate, his symbolic power probably increased. As the French eliminated princely offices, the king became the sole center of the nation. The people repeatedly demonstrated their tremendous devotion to him during French rule. Disrespect shown to the king by the French was one cause of an uprising that occurred in 1884. In January 1916 dissatisfied peasants came to Phnom Penh to petition the king or merely to see and talk to him, until thirty thousand of them were in the capital.30

  The king’s authority over the aristocracy resided in his capacity to assign titles, roles in the government, and authority over land cultivated by the peasants that entitled them to a share of the crop. Wealth was not inherited; it was returned to the king when the owner died. Possessions, land, and rank were all held at the king’s pleasure. Offenses against the king were strictly punished, for example, by stripping the offender of his possessions. The authority of the king over the peasants was also maintained by superstitions, such as the belief that he controlled rainfall. The role of the king in Cambodian society provided a cultural blueprint for absolute authority and made it easier for people to accept the absolute authority of the Khmer Rouge.

  Sihanouk became king in 1941. After the country gained independence, he abdicated, was elected prime minister, and continued to rule. For the common people he continued to fulfill the role of king, providing a source of authority and guidance, representing a way of life, and helping them maintain a world view and an understanding of the world and their own place in it. The peasantry’s devotion to him was great. Under the difficult conditions of life the
need for such a figure would have intensified.

  Socialization in the home and schools stressed authority. Until recently Cambodian schoolchildren memorized a collection of informal laws, the chbab, which clearly delineated conduct. Social status determined conduct; for example, the status of a speaker in relation to the person addressed determined the mode of address.

  The ideology of antagonism toward Vietnam. Among the Khmer Rouge’s many irrational policies, the most self-destructive was its provocation of Vietnam, such as border attacks in which soldiers raided inside Vietnam, a country with ten times Cambodia’s population and a powerful army.

  Hatred of the Vietnamese had a long history and was shared by people across the political spectrum, except for communists who worked with the Vietnamese after World War II. Although the Pol Pot group also worked with Vietnamese communists until about 1973, for them it was only a marriage of convenience. Once they gained power most members of the party who had been associated with Vietnam were killed.

  There was a long history of conflict between Cambodia and Vietnam. In the 1620s the Vietnamese moved south to the Mekong Delta (now part of southern Vietnam), pushing back the Khmer people living there. Subsequently, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and supported dissenting elements within Cambodia. In the 1830s and 1840s the Vietnamese occupied Cambodia, substituting Vietnamese for Cambodian provincial administration. They ruled brutally, desecrated pagodas, persecuted monks, and rendered the royal family powerless. Osborne wrote in 1969: “It is difficult to exaggerate the searing effect of the Vietnamese occupation.... the Vietnamese struck at the vital roots of the Khmer state.”31