A Century of Genocide by Weitz Eric D.; Weitz Eric D.;

Author:Weitz, Eric D.; Weitz, Eric D.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-03-24T04:00:00+00:00

RITUALS OF POPULATION PURGES

The vast extent of the population purges in Democratic Kampuchea was possible only because of the incorporation of tens of thousands of people into the regime. Like the other cases discussed in this book, Democratic Kampuchea was a twentieth-century dictatorship, one that mobilized substantial segments of the population. The perpetrators carried out orders and also invented rituals that bound together the partisans of the regime and, at the same time, completely dehumanized the victims.152

Seng Horl was a teacher who was forced out of Phnom Penh. He returned to his native village in the Southwest, one of the key areas where DK policies were applied most radically. “My mother watched us arrive from a distance…. Mother did not dare come and ask me anything.” The village chief confiscated his books, in Khmer and French, and his diploma, calling them imperialist objects. “My mother had never seen my children, but she did not dare approach us until the village chief and militia had left. She said to survive, you had to do three things: … know nothing, hear nothing, see nothing.”153 In the large commune Horl found teachers in one group, factory workers and doctors in another, ex-soldiers in still another. All of them were kept distinct from the base people. This kind of strict segregation was a means of recategorizing society after the initial flush of egalitarian enthusiasm, a way of identifying the people in need of reeducation or those who had to be eliminated altogether. All the people from Phnom Penh were called, simply, “enemies.”154

The class resentments that Seng Horl described had provided the Khmer Rouge with much of their initial popular support and continued to feed the revolution after the conquest of power. The Khmer Rouge politicized the dislike and sometimes hatred of the peasantry for their social betters and provided an outlet for such sentiments in population purges. Seth Pich Chnay, an art student, was sent to a village of two hundred people that had become the site of residence for another five hundred deportees. The peasants had supported the Khmer Rouge and disliked the city dwellers as “oppressors.” “You used to be happy and prosperous. Now it’s our turn,” they said. In a symbolic destruction of the upper classes, villagers cut in two a Mercedes 220 that had arrived with the urban residents, the metal used to fashion plows, the wheels put on an oxcart, and the engine adapted as a makeshift water pump.155

Yet at the same time, numerous survivors report good relations between new and base people, especially in the early months and years. There are accounts of local people being “hospitable” or “nice to us,” and even sharing food with the new people. In the more moderate eastern zone, the Khmer Rouge commanders were also relatively tolerant, even helpful, and survivors reported no killings or excessively harsh conditions in the first two years of the revolution. Even people arrested were released after relatively brief internments.156

But others reported more gruesome experiences. One survivor

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