One of the destabilizing factors was a series of corrupt and power-hungry individuals in various government leadership roles. Another factor was radical socialism, instantiated both in a number of domestic extremist groups and in covert political interventions from several other countries.
As a report by Mercury Radio Arts states:
In 1975, the Communist Party of Kampuchea, often called the Khmer Rouge, emerged as the victor of the seven-year-long Cambodian Civil War. The Khmer Rouge was composed of avid Marxists who attempted to impose their radical ideas using brutal force.
To ensure the people’s compliance with the socialist system which Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) wanted to impose, it was necessary to indoctrinate the people with an absolute obedience to the state.
The CPK needed the people to be shaped by a value system in which the state was seen as the ultimate value. Any potential competing value had to be eliminated, or at the very least subordinated to the state. That meant getting rid of, or devaluing, alternative values like family, friends, faith in God, art, music, etc.
Under the Khmer Rouge’s ruthless leader Pol Pot, all previous loyalties were abolished and strictly forbidden. Cambodians were banned from keeping their religious and family ties. All civil liberties were taken away. Every Cambodian was instead required to make the good of the collective his or her primary focus. To indoctrinate all children with a Marxist ideology, every child aged eight or older was separated from their parents in 1977 and required to join labor camps, where they were trained to treat the state as their parent.
In a radical effort to eliminate income inequality, CPK dismantled large segments of Cambodia’s economy and civilization. In an effort to eliminate anything which might even seem like a class distinction, personal choice in most aspects of life was eliminated.
Implementing an allegedly scientific version of socialist economics, the CPK destroyed libraries and forbade the practice of modern medicine. The CPK undertook a wildly naive project of returning the entire nation to a romanticized version of an 11th-century agricultural civilization.
As the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust notes, the “Khmer Rouge ideology stated that the only acceptable lifestyle was that of poor agricultural workers,” so they forced millions of people from their homes in the city to work as farmers. “Factories, hospitals, schools and universities were shut down. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers and qualified professionals in all fields were thought to be a threat to the new regime. … Money was abolished and all aspects of life were subject to regulation. People were not allowed to choose their own marriage partners. They could not leave their given place of work or even select the clothes that they would wear.”
Estimates vary, but it is generally accepted that more than two million people were killed by CPK between 1975 and 1978. In addition, other people starved to death, or died from lack of standard medical care.
The shocking number of deaths is even more astounding, given the small population of Cambodia. At least 25% of the nation’s population was murdered, as the Mercury Radio Arts report notes:
Million of people across Cambodia were effectively forced into slavery - all in the name of building Marx’s utopian society. Anyone daring to speak out against the regime was imprisoned or murdered. Hundreds of thousands of others died from starvation or disease. During the Khmer Rouge’s four-year reign, an estimated 2 million people perished as a direct result of the Communist Party’s policies.
In 1978, the CPK’s rule came to an end. The combined forces of the USSR and Vietnam invaded the country and removed the CPK from power. It is a measure of how bad the situation in Cambodia was, that the people were relieved to be invaded by two harsh socialist nations.
During the next few years, researchers and historians were able to compile accounts of exactly how brutally the CPK had terrorized the people.
In 2008, two surviving senior leaders of the regime, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, were found guilty of genocide for their participation in the actions in Cambodia by a United Nations-backed tribunal.
Even decades after the atrocities which they committed, the CPK leaders spouted socialist rhetoric in their defense. Accused of genocide, they claimed that all their actions were done to promote socialism.
Did these men truly believe what they said? Or were they cynically deploying propaganda to defend themselves? An investigation of their private communications and personal lifestyles might shed light on these questions, but it may be impossible to get a definitive answer.
Nuon Chea, a Khmer Rouge leader and brother-in-law of Pol Pot, gave insight into the justification of the actions during their trial. “The CPK’s policy and plan were solely designed to one purpose only,” said Chea, “to liberate the country from the colonization, imperialism, exploitation, extreme poverty and invasion from neighboring countries.”
The CPK claimed that it wanted to liberate Cambodia from colonialism, as it has existed under the FRench, and from imperialism, as in Vietnam’s ambitions. But the Khmer Rouge inflicted far worse conditions on their own people than Cambodians ever suffered at the hands of the French or the Vietnamese.
“The CPK’s policy was clear and specific: it wanted to create an equal society where people were the master of the country … The CPK’s movement was not designed to kill people or destroy the country,” said Chea.
The Soviet Socialists and Vietnam jointly controlled the country from 1978 until 1992. Even though they imposed a brutal socialist occupational government, they were an improvement over the Khmer Rouge.
In 1993, the Cambodia’s king regained his throne, and a constitutional monarchy was organized.
