[The following article is reprinted from the April 22 issue of the French Trotskyist daily Rouge. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
Two years ago, the Cambodian liberation struggle triumphed. The U.S. ambassador made a sorry exit from Pompenh, carrying the American flag under his arm.
Since then, information about developments in "democratic Cambodia" has been scarce. A polemic has developed within the far left as to the nature of the orientation guiding the new Cambodian leadership.
A good example of this is the two articles by Serge Thion and Patrick Ruel in a recent issue of Libération [a Paris daily that reflects various leftist currents of opinion.—IP]. Thion claims the right to "judge this regime" guilty of "cold-blooded massacres," while Ruel takes the opposite view, writing paradoxically that "the Khmer experience seems to offer the best solutions to the problems of underdevelopment and growing impoverishment of the Third World's inhabitants. However, the reality that emerges from accounts by refugees is unacceptable." (Libération, March 7, 1977.)
It is this question, above all, that must be taken up. Was the "Cambodian road" inevitable? Better yet, can it serve as a "model" to other neocolonial countries of how to throw off dependency and underdevelopment through a revolution-costly, to be sure, in terms of human life, but farreaching in its impact? Is there an unresolvable contradiction between the compelling needs of a Third World revolution and the methods that are morally acceptable to Western revolutionists?
One problem we are confronted with in the case of Cambodia is, of course, a lack of information. But we can try to give a rough picture of the actual steps taken and the actual orientation proclaimed by the Angkor leadership—the "Organization"- in power today.
The mass executions do not seem to have been carried out on the scale that the media would have led us to believe. According to the investigations made by Ponchaud* himself, they seem to have involved chiefly the officers, troops, and administrators of the old Lon Nol regime. The executions were more numerous in some provinces than in others, and reportedly ended after a few months. On the other hand, many "stubborn elements" were reportedly killed for no reason other than the cruelty of the local leaders. However, most of the loss of life that cast a pall over the first year of the new regime was due to exhaustion, malnutrition, and disease.
Other Choices Were Possible
Many deaths were unavoidable. Famine and disease had taken their toll of Pnompenh even before the victory. The halting
*Francois Ponchaud, author of Cambodge: Annee Zero (Cambodia: Year Zero) (Paris: Juilliard, 1977).
of U.S. food shipments was the final blow to the inhabitants of the zones formerly controlled by the puppet government. The hospitals were unsanitary. The means for transporting provisions were inadequate. There was a desparate shortage of medicine. The responsibility for these deaths rests directly on U.S. imperialism.
However, many other deaths are ascribable to the brutality with which the evacuation of the inhabitants of the cities and zones formerly controlled by the puppet government was carried out. This must be our starting point. Was the forced evacuation of Pnompenh really necessary?
The answer is no. To be sure, Pnompenh was uninhabitable, and the Cambodians could not avail themselves of the same resources as the Vietnamese immediately after the liberation of Saigon. But an urgent appeal for international aid in the form of food and medical supplies could have been made so as to gain precious time, save the lives of as many sick persons as possible, and find ways of organizing the population.
In the tragic circumstances of the time, it is hardly likely that such an appeal would have gone unanswered. And if it had turned out that way, international responsiblity for the hard decisions that had to be made would have been undeniable.
However, such an appeal was not made. On the contrary, the very idea of doing so was condemned as something that would jeopardize national independence. Here we begin to get to the heart of the problem: the orientation and ideology of the leadership team, and the political power structures it created to transform the country.
Security considerations seem to have weighed heavily in the decision to rapidly empty the capital of its population. The city was considered to be uncontrollable. More important, this particular measure soon became part of a general policy. The extreme authoritarianism of this decision, made without any popular vote or any prior educational campaign, continued well beyond the first few weeks after the victory.
The bureaucratism of Cambodia's political structure is unparalleled in other Asian revolutions. It is reflected in the lack of political organization among the newly liberated citizens, the Angkor leadership's shadowy composition and ill-defined political and organizational policy, and the masses' total lack of control over the administrative apparatus.
The refusal to ask for international aid from the beginning has now proven to be part of an economic development program for the medium term. The Cambodian people must rely only on their own strength. Trade with other countries must be determined by Cambodia's actual export capacities (rice today, rubber or fish tomorrow). The plan for economic growth must be kept within the narrow confines of the country.
A Nationalist Retreat
What this represents is the basic elements of a general orientation. Some of its historic roots can be traced. They include Cambodia's economic backwardness, which meant that the social base of the revolution was very weak, much more so than in Vietnam, for example. There was a much greater division between the city and the countryside, because of the city's ethnic composition as well as its economic in many other Third World role, than countries.
The revolution was still relatively young; only five years of nationwide struggles had led up to the victory. The historic roots of the Cambodian workers and Communist movements were particularly shaky prior to 1970. Having been sacrificed to the 1954 Geneva accords, the Cambodian revolutionists must have been all the more tempted to fall back on nationalism.
Political divisions, perhaps deep ones, must have separated the old Communists of the period of the Indochinese Communist party and the Vietminh from the present-day central leadership, who seem for the most part to have been won to Marxism in France in the early 1950s, under the stultifying influence of the Stalinist French Communist party.
Thus it is both possible and necessary to try to explain the present course of the Khmer revolution. But in that case, it is necessary to stop using it as an example of "radicalism," despite the severity of the
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Christian Science Monitor
"revolutionary" measures adopted, such as the outlawing of money. On the contrary, what characterizes it is the weakness of its social base of support, the authoritarianism of its governmental structures, the political weakness of its leadership and administrative apparatus, and its technological backwardness. These are all factors that spur the development of a bureaucracy, rather than putting a brake on it.
The Cambodian leaders can, of course, point to some major economic achievements. These include the installation of new hydroelectric machinery, the achievement of a rice "surplus" for export, and putting the country's few industries back in operation.
But these accomplishments should not be overestimated. If the peasants derive no profit from their labor, they will withhold production. If the administrative personnel are free from any control by the masses, they will hoard goods. If the population continues to be treated like an army on a campaign footing, it will become more and more disillusioned with the revolution. The political cost of the mass deportations
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City must already have been substantial. This is the standpoint from which the orientation adopted by the Cambodian leadership must be evaluated.
The Evacuation of Pompenh
From this standpoint also, other choices could have been made. Cambodia's development could have been considered in the context of Indochina as a whole. This would have made it possible to take a more balanced approach, and lessen the sacrifices demanded of the Cambodian people. For that matter, how could the country be industrialized and the Mekong valley developed without close collaboration throughout the region? Would such an orientation have entailed the heavy risk that Cambodia, with its seven million inhabitants, might be dominated by Vietnam, with its fifty million people? Perhaps. But the danger of nationalism has already become a real one for the Angkor leadership. In particular, the orientation adopted in the name of the now sacred terms "independence and sovereignty" poses a threat to the future of the social revolution.
The "Cambodian road" cannot serve as a model for the development of the Third World countries. Yet it does not exhibit a "totalitarian frenzy" on the part of the Angkor leadership. It shows what consequences the nationalist retreat of a Communist current can have in a country where the objective difficulties are as great as they are in Cambodia. It highlights the historic responsibility of imperialism. But it also brings out the price that the colonial revolution continues to pay for the delay of the revolution in the imperialist countries and for the long dark night of Stalinism, with its betrayal of genuine internationalism in the name of "socialism in one country."
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