[Militant No. 478, 9th November 1979, p. 10]
By Lynn Walsh
Kampuchea [formerly Cambodia] is a devastated country. A majority of its remaining four to five million people face imminent starvation.
Eighty or ninety per cent of the country’s children are suffering from malnutrition. Diseases like malaria, dysentery, and even anthrax – which can be easily wiped out with drugs – have reached epidemic proportions.
The destruction and death which has been visited on this small country in the last decade is being seen as a new ‘holocaust’.
During 1970-73 Cambodia was subjected to barbarous American bombing. In the aftermath of the war, the US puppet regime of Lon Nol was overthrown by the Khmer Rouge which took power in April 1975, proclaiming a ‘Democratic Kampuchea’.
For four years, until it was brought down by the Vietnamese invasion last January, the Khmer Rouge regime under Pol Pot subjected the country to a ruthless dictatorship. It claimed to have returned society to ‘year zero’, wiping out the past, and to be carrying through a ‘total revolution’.
Recent reports from inside Kampuchea, particularly John Pilger’s lengthy report in the ‘Daily Mirror’ (12 & 13 September) and his harrowing television documentary, (ITV, 30 October), have highlighted the horrifying intensity and scale of the repression under Pol Pot.
What could give rise to such a barbaric regime? What was its real social and political character?
What has changed now by the Vietnamese replacing ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ with a ‘People’s Republic of Kampuchea’?
The capitalist press is now printing fearless exposures of the horrors of the Pol Pot regime. They are inhibited only by imperialism’s current attempts to establish diplomatic links and lucrative trade deals with the Chinese bureaucracy, which is still backing the deposed Pol Pot regime.
By highlighting the terrible repression in Kampuchea and the conflicts between the so-called ‘socialist’ countries in South-East Asia, the hope to distort and discredit the idea of a socialist society among the workers in Britain.
When US imperialism was devastating Cambodia with carpet-bombing, the capitalist press was silent. Until the eve of US defeat in Vietnam, they fervently supported the intervention of US imperialism.
They printed no fearless exposures of the Lon Nol regime, propped up by American arms.
The crass hypocrisy of imperialism’s ‘humanitarian’ denunciations of the so-called ‘Communist’ regimes, however, is laid bare by their cynical attempts to use desperately needed food as another weapon of war.
Only a trickle is getting through, mainly through small voluntary relief organisations. The priority for Carter and Thatcher is not to feed the starving, but as ‘The Guardian’ says, “to structure aid in such a way as to give minimum legitimacy to Hong Samrin (the Vietnamese commander now ruling Kampuchea) and maximum help to Pol Pot.”
Forced to abandon its military intervention in Vietnam, US imperialism (with Britain tagging along) is trying to undermine the attempt of Vietnam (backed by the Russian bureaucracy) to dominate South-East Asia. To this end they have sided with Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader backed by the Chinese leadership.
The Vietnamese leader, however, having brought down the Khmer Rouge regime by their military intervention, are now posing as the ‘liberators’ of Kampuchea – a claim supported by some liberals and lefts in Britain.
But it is precisely the narrow, nationalist policies of the Vietnamese, the Russian and the Chinese bureaucracies, and their rivalry in SE Asia, which has conditioned the developments in Cambodia/Kampuchea.
Liberal commentators like Pilger present the measures of the Khmer Rouge regime as irrational, destructive work of totally mad or evil men. But given the fact that this was a Bonapartist leadership attempting a social transformation within the national limits of an economically primitive country, their Draconian economic measures and ferocious repression were determined by the situation which faced them.
This does not for a moment justify or excuse the horrendous crimes of the Stalinist regime which took over Kampuchea in 1975.
But there is fundamentally nothing to choose between the different Stalinist regimes. The Vietnam-backed Heng Samrin regime may for the moment appear almost benevolent compared to that of Pol Pot. But in every case, the policies of the Stalinist regimes, whether in Russia, China, Vietnam, or Kampuchea under the Khmer Rouge, are determined by the bureaucratic, Bonapartist character of their ruling elite, and by the circumstances confronting them.
As John Pilger’s reports themselves made clear, between the Spring of 1970 and 1973 the equivalent in tons of five Hiroshima bombs was dropped on Cambodia. This devastation of a formally neutral country was the result of an unconstitutional, secret decision by Nixon and Kissinger, who regarded it as a ‘logical’ extension of US intervention in SE Asia.
By 1975 Cambodia had suffered dislocation and devastation that equalled and probably surpassed that of Laos and Vietnam. At least 600,000 people died as a result of the bombing, and consequent malnutrition and disease.
It is imperialism that bears the primary responsibility for events in Kampuchea. The Khmer Rouge instigated the forced transfer of the urban population to the countryside. By its fall, the Pol Pot government had, in fact, restored a self-sufficiency in rice – but at enormous human cost.
The Khmer Rouge also favoured the evacuation of the towns for political reasons. The towns were, by their very nature, centres for the capitalists, merchants, financiers, and professional middle classes, linked to US imperialism and its puppet regime, and thus the obvious basis of counter-revolutionary opposition to the Khmer Rouge regime.
As a leadership evidently lacking overwhelming mass support, the Khmer Rouge was forced to take drastic repressive measures to secure its power. In the countryside they could rely on the support or passive acceptance of the peasantry, who make up over 80% of the country’s population.
The Khmer Rouge not only destroyed the rotten Lon Nol government but eliminated landlordism and capitalism, and Kampuchea, like Vietnam, and Russia and China, must now be characterised as a proletarian Bonapartist state. As in every other case where progressive property relations have been introduced by Stalinist methods, this has been at an enormous human cost.
In Russia, Stalin’s forced collectivisation of the peasantry, his forced labour and prison camps, and his political executions, claimed five or six million victims, or more. In Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge’s purges (perhaps 200,000 executions) and the fatal effects of their forced migrations and harsh forced-labour regime in the countryside, has taken the proportionately heavier toll in relation to the country’s seven million – probably a million victims or more.
Only a genuine Marxist leadership, with mass support among the workers and peasants, and making an internationalist appeal to the stringer sections of the working class in the more economically developed country in a democratic manner and without a terrible expenditure of human resources.
Such a perspective has nothing in common with Stalinism.
It would be entirely wrong to suppose that Vietnam intervened in Kampuchea for democratic or humanitarian reasons. Under Ho Chi Minh and after, the Hanoi regime has never hesitated to use repression if necessary to safeguard its privilege and power.
Since the start of its conflict with the Chinese bureaucracy, for instance, the Vietnamese government has instigated a thoroughly undemocratic, nationalist campaign against the ethnic Chinese in northern border regions, provoking a mass exodus of refugees.
Although only 1% of the population of the north, the ethnic Chinese made up about 10% of the skilled working class, and their expulsion has disrupted industry and added food and other shortages in Vietnam.
The conflict with China, which led to war last year, itself arises from the national rivalry between the bureaucracies for domination of SE Asia.
Back by the Russian leadership, Vietnam, the strongest military power of the region, is undoubtedly attempting to establish its hegemony over SE Asia. Vietnam’s attempts to set up an Indo-China Federation, as a means of cementing their domination, was at least partially responsible (together with the Chinese leadership’s manoeuvres in Cambodia) for the Khmer Rouge’s commitment to an extreme form of ‘socialism in one country’.
Laos is already a satellite of Vietnam.
Whatever the welcome for the Vietnamese forces for the moment, the Hanoi-controlled Heng Samrin regime has taken over colossal problems in Kampuchea. In all probability it will also face armed resistance from the remnants of the Khmer Rouge, as well as from nationalist and right-wing forces.
How can the appalling problems of backwardness in South-East Asia be overcome and the national conflicts be resolved?
Only a Socialist Federation of South-East Asia, based on the fraternal co-operation of the states involved and undertaking internationalist collaboration with the working class of the advanced capitalist countries, can provide a way forward.
This would presuppose the removal of the parasitic bureaucracies which misappropriate and squander the gains of the planned economy – and necessitate the establishment of democratic rule by the workers and peasants.
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