Over half of Cambodia’s city dwellers, about 4 million people, were ordered to leave their homes, abandon their possessions, and march for days without food, water, or medical help until they reached rural “reeducation” (and detention) camps. And faithful to Rousseau’s dictum that “cosmopolitanism” was the rooot of all evil, Pol Pot ordered the depopulation of the nation’s urban centers. On the way towards establishing the Marxist paradise, therefore, Pol Pot – whose brother-in-law said: “Pol Pot thought that he was above everyone else on the whole planet … a god on earth” – eliminated Cambodia’s property and business owners and its intellectual class. The darkest period in Cambodia’s history was 1975-1979, when the communist Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, terrorized the nation. Pol Pot and his cohorts, many of whom were educated in France and received militant training from the French Communist Party, boasted that they were influenced by Jean Paul Sartre’s doctrine of “necessary violence” and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s charge that the perfect state must “possess men and all their powers.” This sorry episode has been so neglected – and by now almost forgotten – that a little history is in order. Amid the slow-moving process of finally seeking justice over Cambodia’s “killing fields,” it has emerged as well that Catholics bore a disproportionate amount of the violence in Cambodia.

After five years of legal bickering and $100 million of expenditures, a United Nations-supported tribunal is finally bringing to trial four surviving henchmen of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The defendants – all of whom have pleaded not guilty – include Nuon Chea (84), former Chief Communist ideologue and 79-year-old ex-head of the state of Khieu Samphan.

Cambodia by François Ponchaud