For the Sake of All Living Things

One in ten Cambodians were killed in the multiforce fighting between 1967 and 1975—600,000 to 700,000 of 7.1 million—approximately half to the civil war and half to various invasions, pogroms and purges. From April 1975 to January 1979 more than two million people were killed, starved to death or died of epidemics caused by government policies. In the twelve months after the Viet Namese conquest of January 1979, an additional 600,000 to 700,000 Khmers were sacrificed to the policies of this new regime. And now, amid talk of new superpower détente and Viet Namese withdrawal from Cambodia, the cruelty, enslavement and murders continue.

How did it happen? What were the conditions and events that drove an unwitting people to the threshold of extinction? Was Cambodia a gentle land or the heart of darkness? A sideshow or an inextricable theater of the Southeast Asian war? A fertile lacustrine basin or an inevitable killing field?

By midsummer 1968 Cambodia was a nation set on a course of destruction, yet only a decade earlier Cambodia had been experiencing a period of unprecedented prosperity and optimism.

BROKEN PROMISES—BROKEN LEADERSHIP

In 1946, as Viet Namese nationalists were battling the reestablishment of French colonialism, France granted Cambodia internal autonomy. Three years later, as France foundered in Viet Nam and America sent its first anti-Communist aid to Southeast Asia, Cambodia gained de jure independence. Full independence was granted to the Royal Government of the Kingdom of Cambodia in November 1953—six months before the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, eight months before the Geneva Agreements divided Viet Nam into Communist and non-Communist halves.

The excitement of independence drove Cambodia but the new state never expunged the weaknesses of colonialism or the underlying feudal structure. King Norodom Sihanouk abdicated his throne to become prince and head of state. Using his early popular mandate, partially based on a belief in the divinity of the monarch, he reduced his critics to states of impotence. Sihanouk became a neomandarin, a leader unable or unwilling to understand or direct his people. Under his growing cult of personality, contrary views had no outlet. Elements of the political right and left faded into urban back alleys or into the forests and jungles that cover three quarters of the country. Hidden, the disenchanted joined or formed revolutionary parties.

In the decade and a half following independence, there was no development of democratic institutions or of an independent bureaucracy to run the daily business of the government. Sihanouk delegated almost no authority. No ministers of the cabinet, no representatives in the legislature, no officers in the army, and no intellectuals at the university were allowed to mature into leaders. From 1955 Sihanouk ruled as if he were the government, overriding all institutions at his personal whim, suffocating all those subordinate to him. By 1960, he had established near-total dominance over all means of mass communication.

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