Migration

Within three days of their arrival in the capital of Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, the Communist Khmer Rouge forced all the city’s inhabitants to evacuate. For weeks, roads leading to rural areas were clogged by over two million evacuees, and any who resisted were summarily shot. Simultaneous evacuations occurred from every other city and town throughout the country. Schools, hospitals, banks, post offices, libraries, and temples were systematically plundered and destroyed. To accommodate the millions of displaced people, the Khmer Rouge hastily established rural work communes throughout the country. At the same time, tens of thousands escaped to neighbouring Vietnam (150,000) and Thailand (35,000–40,000).

For those left behind, the next four years of Khmer Rouge rule consisted of continual massive transfers from one rural labour camp to another. It is generally recognized that in Pol Pot’s Kampuchea up to two million Cambodians died, which represented approximately one-quarter of the total population. The causes of these deaths varied from torture and executions (100,000) to starvation, forced labour, lack of medical care, and war victims. All this brutality was carried out in the name ofAngka , a nameless, faceless organization whose leaders were not known to their victims.

During the Khmer Rouge regime, the Cambodian population was divided into three social groups. The Khmer Rouge cadres and soldiers were leaders and authority figures; the “new people” (moulatan thmai) were considered as slave labour; and the “old people” (moulatan chass) were overseers of new people, acting as administrators of labour, housing, and food distribution. The “old people” were rural-based, generally illiterate, ethnic Khmer, who had consented to Khmer Rouge rule. The “new people” were those living in the cities (including displaced rural dwellers), and they received especially harsh treatment because, as city dwellers and in many cases non-Khmer, they were identified as enemies of the state.

Individuals targeted for immediate execution included former government officials, soldiers, merchants, educated and professional people, classical dancers, members of the royal family, artists, Buddhist monks, and those perceived as being Western-influenced (for example, those speaking French or wearing glasses). Before its own demise, the Khmer Rouge purged many of its cadres and leaders, and even the “old people” administrators became increasingly caught up in the forced relocations and slave labour.

In its efforts to create a radical Communist state, the Khmer Rouge sought to alter completely traditional Cambodian society by engaging everyone in state-controlled rural production. Classical Khmer dance and music were denounced as corrupt and replaced by Chinese Communist propaganda plays and songs glorifying Communist China’s Cultural Revolution. Buddhist practice and traditional ceremonies were strictly forbidden. Children over the age of five were taken from their parents, placed in “children’s work camps,” and interrogated to determine if their family members could be identified as “class” enemies. Wives were separated from husbands and forced marriages were common. Communal food was provided only for workers, while the elderly, sick, weak, and disabled were expected to die. In a drastic departure from the traditional social and gender hierarchy, young females (mit neary), were given the authority to command people and to identify “enemies” of the Communist state. The constant threat against and subsequent disappearance of those identified as enemies created extensive mistrust within families and among friends, relatives, and co-workers.

The government-organized violence that traumatized Cambodian society came to an end in early 1979 when Vietnamese troops invaded the country. Cambodia was renamed the People’s Republic of Kampuchea and headed by a government dependent on Vietnam. Although the collective farms and forced labour systems collapsed, and people began returning to their areas of origin to search for their families, an estimated 40,000 who feared the Vietnamese Communist invaders and the possible return of the Khmer Rouge fled to Thailand where they were often mistreated and forced back across the border by the Thai military. About the same time, Cambodia was struck by the most catastrophic famine in its history, forcing hundreds of thousands more Cambodians from every class and ethnic group out of the country to search for food in neighbouring Thailand.

In September 1979, as the numbers of Cambodian refugees reached nearly half a million, international pressure forced Thailand to open its border and to allow the creation of large holding centres under the management of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). In UNHCR camps, Cambodian refugees received food and medical treatment. Several international aid groups provided education, retraining programmes and, most important, hope for resettlement. The UNHCR camps did not, however, distinguish between Cambodian refugees who were former supporters of the Pol Pot Communist regime (leaders, soldiers, and “old people”) and those who were its victims (“new people”).

By 1980 Thailand had closed its borders again, and any refugees escaping Cambodia were directed into the more than twenty border camps. Over the next eight years, these border camps acted as military buffer zones in which refugees were frequently used as human shields between Khmer Rouge fighters and the Vietnamese-backed government of Cambodia. During this same period, thousands of Cambodian refugees moved from one border camp to another before making it to UNHCR camps and resettlement opportunities. Finally, in 1989 the Vietnamese withdrew and the country was renamed Cambodia. Since that time, political conditions have remained unstable, with the present government, the former pro-Vietnamese leaders, supporters of Prince Sihanouk, and the remnants of the Khmer Rouge all jockeying for control of an otherwise economically devastated country.