The government of Cambodia and international organizations led by the United Nations are trying to agree on a framework for trials against Khmer Rouge leaders for genocide. Two weeks ago, those pushing for a Khmer Rouge trial received a gift from Khieu Samphan, the head of state during the group’s 1975-79 control of the Southeast Asian nation. He said he has “no more doubt left” that his Khmer Rouge government committed genocide, though he says he didn’t know about any killing at the time. The high-profile quasi-confession is being hyped as an important step to reconciling Cambodia with its gruesome past. The problem is that the Khmer Rouge were not genocidal.
The Cambodian Communists, led by Pol Pot, were indeed mass murderers. In less than five years, they killed nearly 2 million of their countrymen, 25 percent of the population. The incredible numbers, however, do not constitute genocide. As journalist Philip Short explained in a controversial op-ed in the Phnom Penh Post, “’Genocide’ means a conscious effort to exterminate a race. There was genocide in Rwanda. There was genocide in Nazi Germany. But no one can seriously pretend that Pol Pot and his colleagues deliberately set out to exterminate the Khmer race.” What the Communists were after was control.
The Khmer Rouge enforced an extreme form of Communist agrarian reform. An intrinsic component to this reform was to eliminate the bourgeois classes, blamed in Communist dogma for infecting society with class prejudice. During the bloody rule of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (the official name of the Khmer Rouge), the world got a frightening glimpse of where we might have been taken had the United States not buried the Soviet Union. The goal was to level society at all costs. If anyone wore glasses (which meant they could read) or had soft hands without calluses (which revealed they were not laborers), they were murdered by hand in the most brutal fashion, usually by being beaten to death with a hoe. This was one logical conclusion of Marxist class warfare.
The problem with mislabeling the Khmer Rouge mass murder as genocide is that it covers up the real source of the massacre, which was Communist ideology. Many on the left — especially in the media and in international organizations such as the United Nations — are still soft on the ideology of radical egalitarianism and the redistribution or abolition of private property. Genocide is a race crime, not a political one. For Cambodians to heal their land, they will have to renounce not only mass murder, but the political ideas behind it as well.
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