Khmer Rouge Monsters: Untold Half of Story

There are two popular adages that could serve as our compass as we grope our way through the dense ruins overgrown with tropical vegetation of unwelcome historical memories.”It is the victors who write the history of important conflicts”,and ” The hero always needs scapegoats for his disgraces”.

An American journalist who was perhaps one among a few of those sturdy hard-bitten breed who stake their lives on reporting the truth was found murdered in an hotel in Bangkok,the favoured take-off point for reporters plunging into the war-infested swamps and jungles of Southeast Asia.It was around late seventies of the last century.So long ago that my memory has grown dim.I attended a lecture by him at Cambridge and was struck by his stoic demeanour fending off years of witchhunt by American establishment.His name was perhaps Charles Taylor,though I am not so sure.But for some time I had followed his itinerary in newspapers and transient left news-sheets.His murder had left me grief-stricken.Death is so common.Practically no one took any notice.

It was he who had revealed the lies in the American(CIA) propaganda about the Khmer Rouge.He had been there.Cambodia was ruled by a prince called Narodom Sihanuk in a country where historical Hindu footprints were familiar.His name had been derived from the Sanskrit ‘Narottama'(best of men).As the deadly war raged in neighbouring Vietnam American generals were worried that the revolutionary Viet Cong troops safely transported their supply of guns and munitions from North Vietnam down a road on Cambodia’s border with Vietnam.They pressured Prince Sihanuk to agree to monitoring of that transport by Americans.Prince Sihanuk had flatly rejected the request.His stiff resistance kept his country out of the war zone.He had then gone on to author a book MY WAR WITH CIA published by Penguin.Alas,it was premature.In 1972 he was dethroned by a coup led by Lon Nol,a Cambodian army general backed by CIA.

But this also encouraged the Viet Cong to be less discreet and more unbridled in their use of Cambodian territory.To counter them the Americans took to carpet-bombing of Cambodian territory.Soon widespread use of the petrol jelly fire known as Napalm and weedicide Agent Orange ruined and permanently damaged lush Cambodian paddy fields.So no rice to feed the teeming population.

Lon Nol’s phony Republic of Cambodia was on the point of mass starvation.Americans propped it up by supplying millions of tons of free rice and providing a safe place from bombing to displaced Cambodians in the capital Pnom Penh,which burgeoned into a city of refugees, native women driven into prostitution,vice rings,dens of spies and pleasure-seeking American soldiers on furlough.Lon Nol’s regime supported American war efforts.Such artificial respiration could not sustain it.Besides patriotic Cambodians resented it. Out of that mess arose the Khmer Rouge outraged by this descent of a gentle civilized nation into such degradation.Tough and idealistic they had from the beginning taken a strong dislike to the vice-laden,indolent and corrupt comfort symbolized by Pnom Penh then Some Paris-returned and some natives from the grass-roots they became fanatical followers of Maoism and its puritan hostility to Western ‘decadence’.

In 1972 following the American debacle in Vietnam and its earnest desire to disentangle itself from a useless and wasteful war Lon Nol’s republic collapsed like a house of cards and Pol Pot and Khiu Samphan led their troops into Pnom Penh sending the dictator into a flight to the country of his patrons.

But the Victorious rebels had hardly a moment’s respite to celebrate.The sudden stop to the regular American supply of wheat and rice left the country teetering on the edge of famine.The Khmer Rouge were desperate to resume rice farming in the country.So thousands of unfortunate victims of American adventurism who hung around the bars and vice shops of Phnom Penh and others who were used to a parasitical life were dragged out of their haunts and summarily despatched to the countryside to plough the land and grow rice crops.Most had forgotten the skills.Many had never learnt. Besides the land had been turned highly acidic and barren by blizzards of American bombs and poison sprays.And the Khmer Rouge for its part shot dozens in disdain for parasitical vices.By the time the Vietnam-supported dissident group of communists seized control from Khmer Rouge thousands upon thousands had perished.As their bodies decayed and their bodies lay mouldering in their makeshift graves,they left relics of the tragedy in skulls and bones.These have now been gathered and put on display in a museum of horrors as the brutal relics of a monstrous regime.People like the murdered journalist had recorded the inconvenient truth and were therefore silenced,so the American fiction triumphed in its place.

Satya Sagar’s allusion leaves out half the story.As for Khmer Rouge,they had forgotten that when Marx said that men make history he had immediately added the qualification,not on a blank slate but under given circumstances. These are not the exact words,but something in the same vein.Maoist simplification then had been a terrible snare.

Hiren Gohain is a political commentator