There was a short segment on NPR (National Public Radio, pretty much the only radio I listen to) the other morning about Cambodia, talking about how the genocide of the Khmer Rouge regime is hardly taught in schools anymore. In ninth grade, Cambodian students have all of 5 sentences about the genocide in their textbooks. It's unbelievable that an event as huge as the genocide of the uh...Khmer Rouge? should be glossed over like that.
Who are (or were?) the Khmer Rouge? And why is their genocide being glossed over? Why do I not really know much about them?
The Khmer Rouge weren't killed off, they did the killing. They were a Communist party that ruled Cambodia from 1975-1979, and, as a function of percentage of population, were the best regime in the 20th century at killing off their own citizens. Of an estimated population of 7.5 million, they are estimated to have killed between 850,000 to 3 million people through starvation, execution, or forced labor. Wow. That's anywhere from around 10 to more than 33 percent.
There's a few disturbing links between the U.S. and the Khmer Rouge in the article, although it's lacking attribution for them. According to Wikipedia, the Khmer Rouge would not have gained power if it weren't for the carpet bombings of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. More disturbingly, the article claims that the US assisted Cambodia during their preemptive invasion of Vietnam in 1979, which ultimately led to the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime at the hands of the Vietnamese. (Talk about irony!) I know that the US was blindly anti-Vietnam at the time, but to support a regime that was killing off a minimum of 10% of their population?
Why were they killing off so much of their population in the first place? They wanted to turn Cambodia into a classless agrarian utopia. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn't want to be farmers. Solution? Kill some of them, and force the others to become farmers. Of course, since they don't know anything about farming, a lot of them might die of starvation. Oh well. It's all in the name of progress!
I started wondering...if the Cambodians were the most lethal as a percentage of population, where do they stand on the list of genocides judged sheerly on scale? They couldn't be too far behind the Nazis, could they? Turns out they are pretty hum-drum as far as genocide goes on a sheer numbers scale. The Turks killed an estimated 2 million Armenians, about 1 million died in Rwanda, and Americans killed at least 1 million Filipinos in the Phillipine American War. Still, it's nothing to sneeze at, as people got all upset about Bosnia, and there were only 8,000 killed at Srebinicia. Even high estimates of casualties from the Bosnian genocide are only 200,000. Pshaw.
No, for a real idea of what's possible in mass fatalities, we have to look to China under Mao, for the estimated 20-30 million who died during the Great Leap Forward, and the Soviet Union under Stalin, where through a combination of executions, famine, and forced labor, up to 30 million are thought to have died. An interesting note is that both Mao's and Stalin's high death scores are due to attempting to rapidly industrialize their nations, where Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge's impressive score came from an attempt to de-industrialize and return to some fanciful agrarian ideal.
To be fair, neither Mao nor Stalin were "genocide" so much as "politicide". No, to find longest running and highest death toll in actual "genocide", in history, we need to look at the Native Americans in the post-Columbus period, notably including the United States. Oh yes. Once again, we're number 1.
Oh, and since we're thinking about such an uplifting subject, don't forget that up to 2 million people have been killed, and more than twice that displaced, in Darfur in the Sudan right now.
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