PROBLEMÁTICA DE LA INTERPRETACIÓN POR IMAGEN

Khmer Rouge

Building and Defending

Cambodia

94

By April 1975, most of Phnom Penh’s students had not attended classes for more than a month. When they saw the soldiers of the Khmer Rouge finally enter the city, many of these students, and their parents, were re-lieved. The fighting had stopped and they could finally return to school.

A former student of the Lycée Yukanthor remembered his father, who was a teacher, expressing the hope that the new Khmer Rouge govern-ment would eliminate the corruption that had flourished in schools during the five years of Lon Nol’s Khmer Republic. When the Khmer Rouge soldiers finally reached the front of Kong Sao’s modest Phnom Penh villa, they told Sao’s father that his family would have to leave im-mediately and go to the countryside for a few days. “My father trusted them,” Kong recalled, “because some of his friends had joined the Com-munists.” The family left hours later with a small suitcase full of clothes, a sack of rice, and two chickens. “We weren’t worried because we could come back in three days.” Sao came back five years later. His parents never came back.¹

The Communist troops, as they marched victoriously into Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, did not return the smiles of the capital’s war weary population, relieved that the specter of fighting, grenade attacks, and curfews would be finally lifted from their heads. Instead, they addressed the people assembled to welcome them without the defer-ential terms of reference that had characterized social relations in Cam-bodia since precolonial times, and they ordered the immediate evacu-ation of the city. Angkar (the organizevacu-ation, not to be confused with Angkor), everyone was assured, was in control of everything. Rather

than a return to the normalcy of the lives they had enjoyed prior to the war, it quickly became clear that the seizure of state power by the new regime would be accompanied by a whirlwind of momentous social change.²

The regime that seized control of state power in Cambodia in April 1975 was known as Democratic Kampuchea (DK). The leaders of DK were members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), referring to themselves collectively as Angkar Leou (the High Organization) or Angkar Padeawat (the Revolutionary Organization). Their agenda was simple: replace perceived impediments to national autonomy, coined in terms of self-reliance, with revolutionary energy and incentives. Imped-iments to national autonomy included Cambodian individualism, fam-ily ties, Buddhism, urban life, money, ownership of property, and the monarchy, which, ironically, as members of FUNK (National United Front of Kampuchea), the Communists had allegedly been fighting to restore.³

The four years of DK were an era of almost incomprehensible social change, where aspects of Khmer cultural and economic life, which had developed over centuries, were totally ruptured. Traditional patterns of social relations were broken down, the nation’s market-based economy was ruthlessly dismantled, while state-sanctioned violence and terror reached heights inconceivable in previous times.⁴ Yet in spite of the massive changes, it is often forgotten that the era was resplendent with continuities that could be easily traced to Lon Nol and, before him, Prince Norodom Sihanouk. DK’s leaders, like Sihanouk and Lon Nol, stressed the superiority of the Khmer race and sought to return Cam-bodia to the glories of its illustrious past. Like their predecessors, they aimed to draw on and exploit the age-old rivalry between Cambodians and their neighbors to the east, the Yuon (Vietnamese). Finally, like Lon Nol and Sihanouk, they could conceive only of their righteousness as rulers. Their legitimacy was beyond question, and challenges to their authority were testament to high treason. DK’s leaders, with a ferocity and brutality inconceivable during the Sihanouk and Lon Nol periods, assumed and superseded beyond all measures the fundamental charac-teristic of the leaders of the regimes they had succeeded: a blissful and willing ignorance of the people’s needs. It is these factors that account for the stunning ferocity of the DK revolution and the equally stunning suddenness of its demise.

What intellectual forces were driving the CPK in its bid to transform Cambodia? What was the ideology of Angkar? Was it a derivative of Com-munist models adopted elsewhere? How did it permeate DK? These key

questions are central to an understanding of the relationship between the formation of the state and policies and practices in education in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The CPK’s assumption of state power signaled the rise in Cambodia of a political culture committed to equal-ity. Spawned among nationalists at Cambodia’s colonial twilight, this egalitarian culture was actively promoted among many of the Khmer students who had studied in France and drifted into the Communist movement on their return to Cambodia.

A commitment to equality starkly opposed that which had sustained Lon Nol and Norodom Sihanouk, who both enjoyed absolute power.

Both presided over social and political systems in which people knew their places. In turn, both saw their development and educational aspi-rations descend into chaos. How did egalitarianism affect aspiaspi-rations for education? What was the educational agenda of Angkar Padeawat? Was education pursued in order to assert the legitimacy of the new regime, as Sihanouk and Lon Nol had done and as the new Communist gov-ernment would do in neighboring Vietnam? Or was education merely another impediment to “national autonomy”?

Responding to these questions is fraught with difficulties. Interpreta-tions of DK, and the policies pursued within the country, have contin-ued to shift significantly over the past twenty years. Throughout the DK period, views were polarized. On one side, initial reports and analysis by anti-Communist Western scholars, such as John Barron and Anthony Paul in theirPeace with Horror, attempted to paint the events transpiring in Cambodia as a nationwide cataclysm.⁵Michael Vickery called this the Standard Total View (STV) of the Cambodian revolution.⁶Alternatively, writers whose attitudes toward the revolution were sympathetic sought to discredit these reports.⁷ With the regime’s self-imposed exile from the international community, it was difficult for either side to firmly es-tablish its case.

In the aftermath of DK’s defeat, extreme anti-Communist analysts fo-cused their criticisms on the Vietnamese-backed successor to the Khmer Rouge, further clouding understanding of what actually transpired between April 1975 and December 1978. Vickery’s 1984 study of the DK years attempted to analyze the alleged excesses of the Khmer Rouge. He argued:

I am convinced that all the worst atrocities which have been reported occurred at some place at some time, but not as the STV would have it, everywhere all the time.⁸

Vickery then estimated that approximately 741,000 people died “in excess of normal and due to the special conditions of DK.”⁹While his study successfully undermined elements of the so-called STV, highlight-ing the regional and temporal variations characteristic of the period, more recent research has shown that Vickery significantly underesti-mated the extremities of DK.¹⁰While the death of Saloth Sar (Pol Pot) in April 1998 virtually ensures that we will never fully comprehend the motivations and actions that guided this most tragic period of Cambo-dian history, there is still much we can add to the historical record in attempting to understand the extremities alluded to here.¹¹

DK’s educational agenda, we shall see, correlated with its radical at-tempt to reconstruct the Cambodian nation-state. Conceiving of a Cam-bodian state that was completely self-sufficient, without dependence on the West, and that firmly rejected capitalism, DK’s leaders attempted to destroy the old society. Education became a victim of the motivation to-ward destruction. The crisis was a function of the regime’s sweeping on-slaught against vestiges of the past, the fervent ideological dogma inher-ent among its leaders, an unrealistic quest for immediate self-sufficiency, and unparalleled contempt for its perceived beneficiaries.