After five years of civil war, from April 17, 1975 to January 7, 1979, the totalitarian regime of “Khmer Rouge” precipitated Cambodia in the horror of a revolution on the Maoist model. Around 2 million Cambodians will find the country of a quarter of its population depriving the country.
Long ignored, even denied, the genocide perpetrated by the Khmers Rouge has been presented as a parenthesis denying specific to the history of Cambodia. Without obscuring its historical part, the Khmer experience is not the fruit of an anomaly but a chemically pure example of the confrontation of the Marxist-Leninist ideocracy with reality.
The origin of the “forest revolution”
The West has always remained deaf to the requirement of justice that such a crime called, by blindness as much as for fear of exhuming its bad conscience. The “forest revolution” founded, in the Maoist spirit, on the peasants is first thought of by intellectuals trained in France by the Communist Party. In the 1950s, the Saloh Sar, future Pol Pot scholarship holder, rubbed the school of executives in Guyot.
Inspired by Rousseau and the Robespierrist praxis, he wrote, with Kieu Samphan Ieng Sary and his Sen a deadly regeneration project. Pol Pot then experienced his murderous utopia in the Cambodian jungle until 1970 when King Sihanouk’s deposition offers Khmer Rouge the opportunity to take power. The fall of Phnom Penh, on April 17, 1975, sounded their victory.
The acting obsession of the Khmers Rouge pushes them to deport all city dwellers “Corrupted by urban luxury” towards the countryside. Phnom Penh is emptied in 48 hours. The rehabilitation of the masses, started in the conquered regions, reproduces the Maoist cultural revolution. Everything conspires against natural social ties, essentially unequal. The filial relationships are thus reversed for the benefit of children whose soul is not corrupt in the past. Kids direct the executions and denounce their own parent. Power requires forced marriages.
In the questionable but moving Killing Fields From Joffé, camp executives explain that love is a feeling “Bourgeois” to be replaced by the mistrust of the other. Anything that contributes to social interaction, money, trade or school, is abolished. You shouldn’t think about either. Those who study, know how to read or simply wear glasses are exterminated. THE “Comrades” Uniformize the hairstyle and the dress reduced to black cotton pajamas. From production to consumption, everything is collectivized until the meals must be taken in canteens.
In the country, renamed Democratic Kampuchea, everything is done in secret. It was not until 1976 to discover the face of Pol Pot, secretary general of the party, called “brother n ° 1”. The Angkar organization which actually directs the country uses fear to maintain the fighting spirit of activists. The militarization of society born in the maquis thus entrusts warriors with the exclusivity of the country’s reorganization and repression.
The country has become an open pile
Educated from the glorious past of his country, Pol Pot is less looking to erect a new man than to restore the original Khmer, rid of “The Vietnamese Spirit”. The genocidal practice is deployed against the backdrop of breeding of breeds, not classes. By disaffiliating the “New people” enemy, from its Cambodian strain, power intends to separate it from “Ancient people”rural and loyal.
Sorting takes place through travel and massacres. In the S21 killing center, led by Douch the torturers “Question” lconsciousness and “Punish” The flesh to purify themselves. Civil servants, “Traitors” to the cause, clerics, in all 20,000 “Enemies of the interior”are executed there after admitting imaginary crimes but essential to the paranoid narrative of the Communists. A quarter of the population disappears under the combined effect of forced steps, from reduction to slavery, purges and mass killings. The country has become an open -air massagess.
Ideological blindness of the West
The revelation of crimes, reported in the West by survivors, embarrassments. Didn’t the Quai d’Orsay ask the French Embassy to keep the abuses of the Khmers Rouge secret but also to refuse political asylum to refugees to deliver them to their executioners? The world, Liberation Or humanity Had they not jubilee before the communist victory?
Ideological blindness borders on ridicule when Maoist students encourage Khmer troops. When Vietnam attacks this monstrous engineering, the intellectuals who, from Marek Halter to Jean Lacouture, had supported the Vietminh against the Americans, now protest against Hanoi.
When the Khmer regime falls, foreign diplomacies promote the retirement of Pol Pot which, without ever being worried by any criminal court, will not be arrested until 1997 … by his own before dying opportunely shortly after! The first trial brought against the Khmer regime only opened up in 2003 and under the control of the country’s authorities.
The memorial laws of 2013, repeated last February, do not prevent the negationism from prospering. Dozens of murderers still alive have never been understood, some even teach in France. Since 1917, communism in power, whatever its incarnation, has killed all over the world and still kills. His trial has still not been made.
