October 29, 1996-  a commencement:  CAGP will promote public awareness of, and support for, this project for documenting--and preventing further--holocaust in Cambodia (and elsewhere).  Donations, funds or in-kind contributions, will be appreciated and acknowledged as CAGP documents the Khmer (Cambodian) Holocaust.  After researching this topic within the community, and through interaction with those familiar with the Jewish Holocaust, the Cambodian Association now formally commences this project for documenting the Khmer Holocaust.  As a first priority, documentation will be gathered from witnesses and organized into a display which will be offered for circulation among cultural organizations, museums, and where appropriate, public schools.  In addition to these eyewitness accounts, a second priority will be to organize a library collection of existing materials which we propose to gather including published works from the following basic sources.  Our "Khmer Holocaust Documenting Project" will gather oral history testimony like from Dith Pran that lived through the holocaust and was later sent to Khmer Rouge re-education camps after the fall of Phnom Penh in April 1975.  People like Hang Ngor were later sent from these camps to UN refugee camps, usually in Thailand; other refugees escaped the Khmer Rouge directly and fled to Thailand.  A second source would be newspaper accounts from publications like the NY Times, Readers Digest (which was one of the first magazines to reveal the holocaust), Time, Newsweek, and various books which have covered the Cambodian Holocaust using eye witness accounts.  The other, third main source of existing material would be visual material such as any existing photographs of the killing fields, memorials of human skulls which are still in Cambodia, etc., and as a centerpiece, the movie The Killing Fields, plus any photo archives such as from the AP, UPI, Gamma, Sygma, and other photo journalist services which covered Cambodia.
 Please submit contributions--funds, magazines, books, photos, videos, etc., to the attention of Mr. Saphan Ros, Executive Director, Cambodian Association of Greater Philadelphia, Inc.

HOLOCAUST IN CAMBODIA

 During the years that the Vietnam War was being fought in South Vietnam, American commanders began to believe that one of the main headquarters for the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese lay, not in South Vietnam, but across the border in Cambodia.  Although technically neutral, Cambodia, ruled by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, contained a large Communist guerrilla force, the Khmer Rouge, which existed in camps along the Cambodian border with Vietnam.  Americans believed, quite rightly, that the Khmer Rouge supported the Communists in South Vietnam and guarded stretches of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the main supply route from North Vietnam into South Vietnam.  It was in the area of the Cambodian border effectively controlled by the Khmer  Rouge that the Americans believed that the major Viet Cong and North Vietnamese headquarters complex was located, COSVN, or the Central Committee Directorate for the South, of the Vietnamese Communist Party.
 With the identification of the site of COSVN in 1969, heavy American air bombardment began to exacerbate the political situation in Cambodia where Prince Sihanouk moved closer to the Khmer Rouge, while the Royal Cambodian Army remained strongly anti-Communist.  Finally, on March 18, 1970, while the prince was out of the country, the army overthrew him in a coup and General Lon Nol became head of state.  Immediately, the Cambodian forces joined with the South Vietnamese army in artillery attacks on the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, who refused to leave the Cambodian frontier.  Meanwhile, as if to prove the charges against him, Prince Sihanouk formed a political alliance with the Khmer Rouge while in exile in Communist China.
 The situation along the Cambodian-South Vietnamese border began now to escalate rapidly.  The South Vietnamese Army began raids into the "Parrot's Beak," one of the main sanctuaries of the Communist forces in Cambodia by late March 1970.  Finally, giving in to South Vietnamese pressure, and also wanting to encourage a strong South Vietnamese army in the days when the United States hoped to be leaving the fighting increasingly to the South Vietnamese, President Richard M. Nixon authorized a large incursion of American and South Vietnamese troops, some 20,000 in all, into another Communist sanctuary, the "Fishhook."  This took place on April 28 and April 29.  American intelligence reports proved to be true.  According to William S. Turley in his The Second Indochina War:  A Short Political and Military History, "thousands of weapons, millions of rounds of ammunition, tons of rice, and hundreds of vehicles were seized" by the American and South Vietnamese troops.  From a military point of view, the invasion of the Communist sanctuaries was a complete success, the loss of literally mountains of supplies severely crippled Viet Cong and North Vietnamese operations in South Vietnam for nearly two years.
 However, within Cambodia, the situation took an ugly turn.  The Communist now took the offensive, and  the North Vietnamese pushed out the militarily weaker Cambodian army out of the border regions entirely.  Furthermore, the South Vietnamese, retaliating for earlier attacks on Vietnamese by Lon Nol, unleashed a reign of terror against the Cambodians in the border areas.  Under this condition, it was not too hard for Prince Sihanouk and his Khmer Rouge allies to project themselves as the defenders of Cambodia against South Vietnamese aggression!  Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge formed an organization known as FUNK, the National Cambodian United Front, in English.  Backed by the North Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge became a military force to be reckoned with in Cambodia, violently opposed to the Lon Nol regime.  By June 1970, Hanoi could declare that North Vietnam had become the "common rear area of the Laotian and Kampuchean [Cambodian] revolution."  Symbolically, in September, the North Vietnamese army was actually able to close several highways leading into Phnom Penh itself.
 Throughout the next several years (1970-75), Lon Nol and the Cambodian army fought a losing battle against the Khmer Rouge and the North Vietnamese.  This was made all the more drastic as the American Congress began to shut off all aid to Cambodia and South Vietnamese troops, and as, in the process known as Vietnamization, more and more American troops were sent home, as President Nixon gave into the demands of the anti-war movement in the United States.  By the end of 1971, American troops levels were down to some 156,800 in South Vietnam.  No American troops had returned to Cambodia after the invasion in 1970; the last American troops left in June 1970.  The very next day, Congress passed the Cooper-Church Amendment barring any more American participation in the war in Cambodia.  From then on, it was only a matter of time until the Khmer Rouge won.  On March 29, 1975, the last American soldiers departed from South Vietnam.  Virtually all American aid was cut off  when the Military Procurement Act was passed refusing any funds to be used for American troop action in Southeast Asia on November 15, 1973.  Throughout 1974, the Khmer Rouge and the North Vietnamese steadily gained around against the embattled Lon Nol forces.  Finally, on January 1, 1975, they launched all-out attacks against Phnom Penh from positions around the capital.  Any help which might had gotten through was made impossible by the bombardment of the Phnom Penh air port and the closing of the Mekong River to any supplies from outside the country.

 While the world was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 1995, Southeast Asians both in the United States and in the Far East were quietly marking another, much sadder, anniversary, the conquest of Cambodia by the Communist Khmer Rouge.  For, on April 17, 1975, resistance by Lon Nol's army collapsed and the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh.  When Cambodia and its capital, Phnom Penh, fell to the Khmer Rouge guerrillas led by Pol Pot, shortly before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in April 1975, few people knew that the fall of Phnom Penh would mark a tragic chapter in Asian history which would link Cambodia forever with World War II in the annals of human suffering.  For, as the Second World War was marked by the Nazi Holocaust against European Jewry, the Khmer Rouge seizure of Cambodia would mark the beginning of another terrible episode--the Cambodian Holocaust.
 The Khmer Rouge, the "Red" Khmer (Khmer is the ancient name for the people of Cambodia), were, unlike the North Vietnamese who captured Saigon, a strange amalgam of guerrilla and agrarian reformer.  Their philosophy embraced a mixture of rural communism such as motivated Mao Tse-tung in his struggle for power in China with a viral hatred of any modernism, so unlike Mao and the Chinese Communists'  attempts at marrying modern improvements with native Chinese ingenuity to build a "new China."
  The first thing which Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge did was to physically evacuate all the citizens of Phnom Penh from the capital city, which they saw as fatally infected with the virus of Western contact stemming from the years of American involvement during  the years of the Vietnam War.  All of these were sent to re-education camps which soon became no different than the German concentration camps at Treblinka or Auschwitz in the Second World War.  Eventually, tens of thousands of Cambodians, especially those who were educated or had had any contact with the West, were liquidated by their Khmer Rouge guards.  Estimates of the number of Cambodians murdered by the zealous soldiers of Pol Pot  number from between one to two million, a massacre that was barely smaller in degree than the Jewish Holocaust in the Second World War.  Certainly, it was no smaller in suffering.
 Even today, towers of human skulls stand mute testimony in Cambodia to the brutality visited on an entire people by the remorseless soldiers of the Red Khmer.
 Yet the slaughter in Cambodia remained largely unknown in the United States, whose support of General Lon Nol and his pro-American regime, which toppled the ruling of Prince Sihanouk, actually thrust the Khmer Rouge into the heart of Cambodian affairs.  Prior to the American invasion of Cambodia in the Spring of 1970 to destroy Viet Cong sanctuaries, the Khmer Rouge had largely confined its activities to support of the Viet Cong along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.  It was only the appearance of the movie "The Killing Fields" which really brought to America the sufferings of Cambodia after our evacuation of the country in the twilight of the Vietnam War.  "The Killing Fields" was the story of Dith Pran, who survived the brutality of the "re-education camps" to finally escape to sanctuary in the United States.  Pran had been sent to the camps because he had served as a "stringer," or part-time reporter,  for The New York Times in Phnom Penh and thus was considered a "Westerner."
 Ironically, it would come from a Communist that one of the most outraged denunciations of the Khmer Rouge merchants of death would come.  In August 1979, at the Sixth Conference of Nonaligned Nations in Havana, Cuba, Cuban leader Fidel Castro would denounce the Khmer Rouge regime, which had been led by Khieu Samphan.  In 1978, Vietnam, now united, had overthrown the Khmer Rouge, and had installed its own allied government in Phnom Penh, led by Pen Sovann, former Prime Minister.  Defending the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia as a humanitarian effort aimed at Pol Pot's forces, Castro declared that "we condemn the genocidal government of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary [Pol Pot's brother-in-law].  Two million dead accuse them."  Castro found it "inexplicable" that "efforts are being made to condemn Vietnam for its legitimate defense against [Khmer Rouge] aggression," when so few voices had been raised against the genocide carried out by "Pol Pot's bloody government, an affront to all mankind."

 Thus, with the removal of all American forces, and the military collapse of South Vietnam in April 1975, the alliance between the Khmer Rouge and the North Vietnamese disintegrated.  Clashes between the two Communist powers ended in the wholesale slaughter on the eastern border of Cambodia with Vietnam of some 100,000 Cambodians by Pol Pot who were thought to support the Vietnamese who, since 1975, had of course been ruled by Hanoi.  Even worse, with the Chinese support of Pol Pot and Sihanouk, Hanoi began to fear encirclement by China and her Khmer Rouge allies.  With the centuries of war between the Vietnamese and China, this was a logical concern.  As Indian observer Nayan  Chanda noted , "the Vietnamese saw the orgy of violence inside Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge attacks on Vietnam as part of a well-laid Chinese plan to crush Vietnam."  (On their part, the Chinese saw the increasing dependence of North Vietnam on the Soviet Union as a danger to them!)  Reacting accordingly, the North Vietnamese, with the strongest army in Southeast Asia, launched a major assault on Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge on December 25, 1978.
 Surprisingly, the military forces of Pol Pot gave way with hardly a struggle.  On January 7, 1979, the Vietnamese installed a client government in Phnom Penh, backed by a veteran 120,000 man army of occupation.  In the place of Pol Pot, Pen Sovann took over the reins of government in Phnom Penh.
 What followed as worse a period of chaos in Cambodia as ever existed during the years of the Holocaust.  It was clear from the beginning that the average Cambodians preferred the regime backed by Hanoi to the genocidal Khmer Rouge.  However, this did not mean that Pol Pot gave up the struggle.  Instead, he and his guerrillas faded into the bush to begin the same type of guerrilla war against Pen Sovann and the Vietnamese that they had employed against Lon Nol and the Americans.  Even worse, the United Nations refugee camps, located in Thailand to the west of Cambodia and along the border with Thailand, set up to take the people displaced by the Holocaust and the Vietnamese onslaught, became battlefields themselves.  As the Khmer Rouge were relentlessly pushed westward by superior Vietnamese strength, they took over the camps in Cambodia, infiltrated those in Thailand, and instituted the same sort of reign of terror they had carried on during the Holocaust!  Any Cambodians who refused to work for the Khmer Rouge in work details or fight for them were taken into the jungle and executed.  So too were any suspected of supporting Pen Sovann.
 What exacerbated the situation inside Cambodia was the external diplomatic picture.  Both the Chinese and the United States were anxious to embroil the Vietnamese in a guerrilla struggle in Cambodia, since both sides saw the Vietnamese as the proxies for the Soviet Union.  Even more so, the United States was glad to see the Vietnamese caught up in Cambodia in the same type of guerrilla conflict that the North Vietnamese had carried on against the US during the Vietnam War.  Although it was made clear that any aid being sent to Cambodia would go to the "non-communist allies of" the Khmer Rouge (although there really were none), all aid sent by the US and the Soviets was used to strengthen Pol Pot and the Vietnamese-backed regime in the capital.  This strange scenario has continued until, it appears, today.  In spite of the Cambodian genocide perpetuated by Pol Pot, the United States still seems to give full support to Pol Pot.
 Meanwhile, within Cambodia, both sides fought themselves into a virtual state of exhaustion by the end of the 1980s.  The result was that the Hun Sen (became Prime Minister in 1985) government and the Sihanouk-Pol Pot alliance agreed to United Nations supervision of elections aimed at bringing peace to Cambodia after nearly thirty years of war and unrest.  Part of the plan was to elect a coalition government to rule the war-ravaged land.  During the elections which followed, supervised in the field by unarmed Japanese forces (the first time Japan had sent forces overseas since her defeat in 1945), elements of the Khmer Rouge tried to disrupt the election process, often by force or the threat of force.  Nevertheless, in spite of this intimidation, Cambodians elected a coalition regime which was headed by Prince Sihanouk, who now took the hereditary title of King.  (Cambodia, however, is now usually still referred to by the Khmer Rouge name of Kampuchea).

 

 With Cambodia now politically united under a government led by its long-time leader Sihanouk, prospects for peace seem on the surface good for the Cambodian people.  Yet in spite of the elections, which gave a strong mandate to now King Sihanouk to try to reconstruct the devastated country, many Khmer Rouge remain in the jungle, unwilling to accept the verdict of the elections, even though Sihanouk has been their ally since 1970.  Tentative attempts have been made to bring these diehard Khmer Rouge to participate in Cambodian life and to lay down their weapons, but these attempts have not been uniformly successful.  Over the summer, the New York Times reported on efforts to integrate some Khmer Rouge forces into the new national army, but remarked on those who refused to give up the gun, those who still hold allegiance to the old Khmer Rouge belief that only they have the true vision for "Kampuchea."  After fighting now for over twenty-five years, there are many, perhaps Pol Pot himself among them, who will never give in.  These likely see Sihanouk as one who betrayed his alliance with them for his royal crown.
 It is these unreconstructed Khmer Rouge who can prove a clear and present danger for Cambodia, especially if the charismatic and mysterious Pol Pot, who is so secretive that his own brother did not know that his sibling was the dread Khmer Rouge leader, stays in the jungle.  Still well-armed and highly-motivated, the Khmer Rouge in the jungle can prove every bit as dangerous to the popular front regime of Sihanouk as they were to the junta of Lon Nol.  This is especially true if they are really being secretly armed and given provisions by the United States!  With the Khmer Rouge diehards, still apparently commanded by Pol Pot, still resisting the new government, there is a very real danger that, given the proper motivation, especially added to any trouble within the Sihanouk government, or any serious problems like crop shortages in the countryside, the Khmer Rouge might decide to make a bid for power again, as they did in the last years of the Lon Nol rule.  The armed forces of King Sihanouk, especially since they contain a good number of former Khmer Rouge fighters, would not be able to offer any serious resistance to an all-out Khmer Rouge attack.  In such a case, the Khmer Rouge, with any foreign intervention unlikely (especially if the US is backing them), could easily seize power in Phnom Penh as they did in 1975.
 If such a conquest took place, the result could very likely be catastrophic for Cambodia--nothing less than a return to the Khmer Rouge "killing fields" of 1975.  The philosophy of the Khmer Rouge (they have rejected orthodox Communism) would with terrible logic probably lead them to reinstitute the  purges that characterized their takeover of Cambodia after the fall of Lon Nol.  Once again, innocent Cambodians could be slaughtered in their tens of thousands by the ideological warriors of Pol Pot.  This, then, is the ultimate justification for the exhibit on the Cambodian Holocaust of 1975.  It is really more than just a memorial for what happened in the past: it can be a potent reminder of the fate which can lay in store if the world forgets the past and ever permits Pol Pot and his followers to ever again take power in Cambodia.  Once again, the parallel with  the Holocaust of European Jewry in the Second World War is crystal clear.  Since the end of World War II, Jews the world over have kept alive that memory of that terrible time, not just to commemorate those who perished, but to keep the world alive to the idea that history could repeat itself if the past is ever forgotten.  They have echoed the words of British statesman Edmund Burke in the 18th Century that all that it takes for  evil to triumph is for good men to keep silent.  The Jews' cry of "never again" is their best defense that such an atrocity will indeed never again take place.  By establishing a memorial to the Cambodian Holocaust, by keeping alive the memory of the awful past into the present and the future, they can also help to insure that the holocaust perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in 1975 is allowed to happen "never again!"