JOAN PILGER'S aches have revealed anation reduced to a charnel-house. A staggering two million • have died in the 1970s a after the overthrow of Lon Nol by the ter Rouge guerrillas in 1975.
The reaction of socialists tbroughout the to the uncovering Ination camps and the like has been one ror and revulsion.
CLIVE ation. We invite further contributions to | 1970 a saturation bombing campaign cretly begun by Nixon and Kissinger, The 0 once va imas. The rain of destruction the carnage of the First World war. The "lation of the capital, Phoom Penh, soared undreds of thousands of peasants fled from the countryside for their lives.
Out of this baptism of fire the Khmer Rouge emerged to lead the struggle to overthrow Lon Nol. So dependent was US aid that the Khmer Rouge forces were able to bring its tottering structures crashing down despite their own lack of mass support. Shrine Pilger describes Phnom Khmer Rouge marched in: 'It is a Luddites' shrine, cemetery of ambulances, fire engines, generators, television sets. There is a separate pile of burned telephones; communications, including "¡llegal''... Some two and a half million people were ordered out of the city at gunpoint on that April day, and most of them are said to be 'missine'.
Measures such as these defy any capitalist rationale. No Hitler, coming to power as a last resort of the capitalist class, obliterates the capitalists and their Rouge leadership didn't change places with Lon Nol and proceed to enrich themselves from the old sources of profits, plunder and graft. On the contrary, they destroyed the old regime lock, stock and barrel. government tres smashed - We army, police entire and civil service. All property was nationalised - not just the factories, banks and land, but ven the smallest items of personal property Money was abolished, foreign trade established la foreign trade actually ceased]. All resources were towards agricultural production.
Mao Most socialists were agreed that in Vietnam such capitalist rule, politically and economically. In place a workers although in which Communist Party kept monopoly of power. This consideration must reports the bulk of of Nazi-style How did it happen?
offers equivalent to five outdid this puppet regime on Penh after the machines: cars, typewriters, modern post, were property. The Khmer Nol's and a monopoly of Pot regime. formality, The the state and directed signified the overtur of established, the Vietnamese bureaucratic of (KPN), 3,000 Nazi-style extermination camps be set against the extreme brutality of the Pol Khmer Rouge leaders themselves on Mao Tse-tung and the victory of the Chinese CP. Like Mao, they concentrated on building a peasant army which would win the countryside and then take the cities.
Kampuchea's backwardness determined for them the primitive agricultural base from which reconstruction would have to begin. Al the same time they were faced with the problem of how to feed the swollen population of the citie - urban centres which nests for counter-revolutionary activity.
The methods they adopted came naturally from their training in the Stalinist school:
caused socialists to react in horror. forced regimentation modelled brigades.
middle they saw as corrupt responsibility was given.
evacuation of the cities masses into Stalin had carried through forced collectivisation of the land in the 1930s and '40s in just the same way, with liquidation of the peasants class' and transportation of whole peoples like Crimean Tartars from their homelands.
Nor is it a matter simply of the historical example of Stalinism. The bureaucrats Moscow and Peking today bear their share of for happened Kampuches after 1975. They had the resources to feed and support the population. No such aid and work Today the the population, diseases"
malnourished in trauma of the terror"!
than foreseen Today, however, the most burning issue is not whether Pol Pot was a Stalin or a Hitler — it is the fact, as John Pilger testifies, that thi people of Kampuchea face extinction process begun by Kissinger is nearing completion... 'We have six months to save three million people, the majority of the starvation and related said Jacques Beaumont {a UN official]. Eighty-five per cent of the women have stopped menstruating, because they and exhausted and, like everybody, they have not recovered from the A massive labour movement campaign for aid to the Kampuchean people is vital.
arrested,