When the War Was Over by Elizabeth Becker

Author:Elizabeth Becker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2011-03-10T05:00:00+00:00

Even though Pol Pot’s belief in his own infallibility led him to think he was stronger than ever, this was the opposite of the truth. From the records kept on rice production, Pol Pot was given figures that showed the country’s harvest was improving—in 1976 some 1,900,000 tons of rice were produced, in 1977 some 2,700,000 tons, theoretically doubling the rice available for consumption. The validity of these figures is highly questionable, however. Cooperatives were required to send reports to their superiors every ten days, and cooperatives learned early that if the reports did not square with expectations they would be punished.

The people who slaved to grow that rice certainly were not reaping the benefits. Not only was the harvest undoubtedly smaller than Center figures, but ever larger amounts were confiscated by the Center to feed the army and the areas that registered deficits, and—according to the government—for export to China, Singapore, and Africa. Moreover, by the middle of 1977, the Center informed all the zones that they had to implement the earlier order enforcing communal dining, the move that further diminished the amount of food for the people.

In the middle of 1977, with the people weaker, more prone to disease, and more discouraged by the revolution, the Center ordered that the population be pushed further. Armed with their arbitrary and optimistic figures about agricultural production, the Center declared that by July 1977 the country was self-sufficient in food and ready for the second phase of development—building up modern agriculture. The people were becoming “masters of the water” due to the construction of flimsy new irrigation systems, according to the party. The base of the revolution was declared economically and politically stable, the two areas being indistinguishable in their minds.

The new four-year plan for 1977 through 1980 promised to take badly needed resources away from the cooperatives to be invested in the state farms and plantations whose produce eventually would feed new agroindustry. The plan emphasized production for sugar refineries and textile, plywood, glass, cement, rubber, and jute factories. State farms and plantations had been established beginning in 1976, using mobile youth brigades. The fruits of this industrialization were to be exported, however, again robbing the people of the benefits of their labor. Processed rubber along with jute and kapok were to become major export items to help fill the depleted government treasury.

This was criminal perversion of the self-sufficiency the Khmer Rouge claimed as the moral and economic genius of their revolution. The regime had cut the country off from the benefits of the international marketplace, but not from the travesties. Self-sufficiency was a lie. Without Chinese aid, Democratic Kampuchea could not have survived. The regime was using its own people as cheap slave labor and selling their goods to the Chinese, who hardly gave them market rates in return. Instead of wisely procuring goods needed in their country from the international market and concentrating on native industry and produce, the regime forced the people to make absolutely everything they needed by hand.

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