Kampuchea Communist Party

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Kampuchea Communist Party
Banner of the Communist Party of Kampuchea.svg
Party leader Pole pot
Deputy Chairman Nuon Chea
founding 1951
resolution 1981
Alignment Agrarianism,
Khmer nationalism,
communism

The Communist Party of Kampuchea , also Communist Party of the Khmer ( khm. កុម្មុយនីស្ត កម្ពុជា or បក្ស កុ ម្មុ យ នី ស កម្ពុជា; English Communist Party of Kampuchea , CPK; French Parti communiste du Kampuchéa , PCK) was a communist party in Cambodia . Their leader was Pol Pot and their followers were commonly known as the Khmer Rouge . The party operated underground for most of its existence. She took power in the country in 1975 and founded the Democratic Kampuchea state . After a period of mass murder, the party lost power in 1979 following the invasion of the Vietnamese armed forces and the establishment of the People's Republic of Kampuchea by former Khmer Rouge who had renounced the Pol Pot regime. The party was officially dissolved in 1981, after which the Democratic Party of Kampuchea became its successor. The party called itself first the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP), from 1960 Workers Party of Kampuchea (WPK) and only from 1971, initially secretly, Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK).

history

Founding of the party, first splits

The party was founded in 1951 after the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) was split into a Cambodian, a Laotian and a Vietnamese communist party. The decision to form Cambodia's own communist party was made at the ICP Congress in February of that year. Different sources give different dates for the exact founding and first congress of the party. Sơn Ngọc Minh was appointed acting chairman of the party. The party congress did not elect a complete central committee, but instead determined a party committee for propagation and founding. At the beginning, the name of the party was People's Revolutionary Party of the Khmer (English Khmer People's Revolutionary Party , KPRP). The ICP had been heavily dominated by the Vietnamese, and the KPRP was actively supported by the Vietnamese party in its early stages. In order to hide the dependence on Vietnam in the common struggle against French colonial rule, the history of the party was later rewritten and 1960 was given as the year of foundation.

In the version of the party history of the Democratic Kampuchea , the failure of the Viet Minh to negotiate a political role for the KPRP at the Geneva Conference in 1954 represented a betrayal of the Cambodian movement, which still controlled large parts of the country and commanded at least 5,000 soldiers . Following the conference, around 1,000 members of the KPRP, including Sơn Ngọc Minh, undertook a Long March to North Vietnam, where they remained in exile. At the end of 1954, those who remained in Cambodia founded a legal political party, the Krom Pracheachon , which took part in the National Assembly elections in 1955 and 1958. In the elections in September 1955 she won about 4% of the vote, but did not get a seat in parliament. The members of the Krom Pracheachon were exposed to constant harassment and arrests because the party outside Sihanouk movement Sangkum remained. Government attacks prevented participation in the 1962 elections and forced the party underground. It is believed that Krom Pracheachon's decision to present candidates for the election was not approved by the party , which has since been renamed the Workers Party of Kampuchea (WPK). Sihanouk regularly insulted the Cambodian communists as the "Khmer Rouge", a term that later referred to the Communist Party and its supporters, as well as the Democratic Kampuchea state led by Pol Pot, Nuon Chea , Ieng Sary , Khieu Samphan and their supporters .

Mid-fifties were two KPRP- factions in appearance, the "urban committee" (headed by Tou Samouth ) and the "rural committee" (headed by Sieu Heng). These groups represented fundamentally diverging revolutionary lines. The prevailing "urban" line, supported by North Vietnam , recognized that Sihanouk was a respected national leader because of his success in the struggle for independence from the French, whose neutrality and deep distrust of the United States made him a valuable asset in Hanoi's struggle made to "liberate" South Vietnam. The leaders of this line hoped that the prince could be persuaded to distance himself from the right wing and embrace left-wing politics. The other line, largely backed by rural cadres familiar with the country's harsh realities, advocated an immediate fight to overthrow the "feudalist" Sihanouk. In 1959 Sieu Hang defected to the government and provided the security forces with information that enabled them to destroy up to 90% of the party's rural apparatus. Although the communist networks in Phnom Penh and other cities resisted better under Tou Samouth's leadership, only a few hundred communists remained active in the country by 1960.

The Paris student group

In the 1950s, Khmer students in Paris organized their own communist movement that had little or no connection with the highly competitive party in their home country. From their ranks came the men and women who returned home in the 1960s and took over the party apparatus, led a successful uprising against Sihanouk and Lon Nol from 1968 to 1975 and established the Democratic Kampuchea regime .

Pol Pot, who rose to become the leader of the communist movement in the 1960s, was born in 1928 (some sources cite 1925) in Kampong Thom Province , northeast of Phnom Penh. He attended a technical high school in the capital and went to Paris in 1949 to study radio electronics (other sources claim he attended a school for printers and typesetters, and also studied civil engineering).

Other members of the Paris student group were Ieng Sary , Khieu Samphan , Hou Yuon , Son Sen and Hu Nim . Ieng was a Khmer of Chinese descent who was born in 1930 in South Vietnam. He attended the elite Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh before taking courses in trade and politics at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (better known as Sciences Po ) in France. Khieu, considered "one of the most brilliant intellectuals of his generation", was born in 1931 and specialized in economics and politics during his time in Paris. Hou, born in 1930, who studied economics and law, was little inferior to him. Son, born in 1930, studied education and literature, Hu, born in 1932, law.

Most of the members of the Paris student group came from families of landowners or officials. Three of the Paris group formed an association that survived years of revolutionary struggle and intra-party conflict. Pol Pot and Ieng Sary married Khieu Ponnary and Khieu Thirith (also known as Ieng Thirith), allegedly relatives of Khieu Samphan. These two well-educated women also played a central role in the Democratic Kampuchea regime .

Sometime between 1949 and 1951, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary joined the French Communist Party . In 1951 the two went to East Berlin to take part in a youth festival. This experience is considered a turning point in their ideological development. After meeting with Cambodians who had fought with the Viet Minh (and whom they later viewed as too submissive to the Vietnamese), they were convinced that only a strictly disciplined party organization and willingness to engage in armed struggle could spark a revolution. They transformed the Khmer Students' Association (KSA), to which most of the 200 or so Khmer students in Paris belonged, into an organization for nationalist and leftist ideas. Within the KSA and its successor organizations there was a secret organization, the Cercle Marxiste . It consisted of cells of three to six members, most of whom knew nothing about the overall structure of the organization. In 1952, Pol Pot, Hou Yuon, Ieng Sary and other leftists gained some notoriety for sending an open letter to Sihanouk calling him the killer of the young democracy . A year later, the French authorities banned the KSA. In 1956, however, Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan helped set up a new group, the Khmer Students' Union . Internally, this group was still led by the Cercle Marxiste .

The dissertations written by Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan represent theses that would later become cornerstones of the politics of the Democratic Kampuchea . In his 1955 dissertation, “The Cambodian Peasants and Their Prospects for Modernization”, Hou Yuon pointed to the central role of peasants in national development and challenged the traditional view that urbanization and industrialization were necessary precursors to development. The main argument in Khieu Samphan's dissertation from 1955, "Cambodia's economy and industrial development", was that the country must become independent and end its economic dependence on the developed world. In general, Khieu's work reflected the influence of a branch of the school of "dependency theory" which blamed the economic predominance of industrialized countries for the lack of development in the Third World.

Secret underground movement in Phnom Penh

After his return to Cambodia in 1953, Pol Pot took care of the party work intensively. First he joined forces allied with the Viet Minh in the rural areas of Kampong Cham Province . After the end of the Indochina War , he moved to Phnom Penh under Tou Samout's "municipal committee", where he became an important contact point between legal left parties and the secret communist underground movement. His comrades Ieng Sary and Hou Yuon became teachers at a new private school, the Lycée Kambuboth , which had been founded by Hou Yuon. Khieu Samphan returned from Paris in 1959, taught at the law school of the University of Phnom Penh and founded the French-language, left-wing publication L'Observateur . The newspaper soon gained prominence in Phnom Penh's small academic community. The following year the government shut down the newspaper and Sihanouk's police publicly humiliated Khieu by beating, stripping, and photographing him in public - as William Shawcross notes, "not the kind of humiliation men forgive or forget". Nonetheless, Khieu has advocated working with Sihanouk to promote a united front against US activities in South Vietnam . Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim were forced to cooperate with the system by joining Sihanouk's Sangkum and taking posts in the prince's government.

From September 28-30, 1960, twenty-one leaders of the KPRP held a secret convention in a vacant space at Phnom Penh train station. An estimated 14 delegates represented the “rural” faction, 7 the “urban”. This central event still puzzles historical scholars as its outcome became a matter of dispute (and a considerable historical recast) between Khmer Pro-Vietnamese and anti-Vietnamese communist groups. At this meeting, the party was renamed Workers Party of Kampuchea (WPK) and a new party structure was adopted. The question of cooperation with or resistance to Sihanouk was discussed intensively. For the first time a permanent Central Committee (ZK) was formed with Tou Samouth as general secretary of the party, who advocated a policy of cooperation with Sihanouk. His ally Nuon Chea (also known as Long Reth) became deputy general secretary, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were appointed to the central committee to the third and fifth highest positions in the party hierarchy. Another member of the Central Committee was the communist veteran Keo Meas . In Democratic Kampuchea , this meeting was later dubbed the party's founding date in an attempt to deliberately downplay the party's policies prior to Pol Pot's rise to leadership.

On July 20, 1962, Tou Samouth was murdered by the Cambodian government. In February 1963, at the second WPK Congress, Pol Pot was appointed general secretary of the party to succeed Tou Samouth. Tou's allies, Nuon Chea and Keo Meas, were removed from the Central Committee and replaced with Son Sen and Vorn Vet. From then on, Pol Pot and his loyal student comrades in Paris controlled the party center, displacing older veterans who they considered too pro-Vietnamese.

Uprising in rural Cambodia

In July 1963, Pol Pot and most of the Central Committee members left Phnom Penh to prepare a base for an uprising in Ratanakiri Province in the north-east of the country. Pol Pot had recently been placed on a list of 34 communists whom Sihanouk wanted to force into the government and sign declarations that he was the country's sole possible legitimate leader. Pol Pot and Chou Chet were the only ones on the list who escaped the action. Everyone else agreed to cooperate with the government and were then watched by police around the clock.

In the mid-1960s, the US State Department estimated the number of party members to be around 100.

The region into which Pol Pot and his supporters moved was inhabited by a minority, the Khmer Loeu , whose abrupt treatment (including relocation and forced assimilation) by the central government made them willing recruits for guerrilla warfare. In 1965, Pol Pot went on a visit to North Vietnam and China for several months. It is believed that he was trained in China, which may have raised his reputation when he returned to the WPK Liberated Areas. Despite the friendly relations between Sihanouk and the Chinese, they kept Pol Pot's visit a secret from Sihanouk. In 1971 the party was renamed the Kampuchea Communist Party (CPK). The name change was kept strictly secret. Subordinate members of the party and even the Vietnamese were not informed of this for the time being, and members only many years later. The party leadership approved the armed struggle against the Sihanouk government. In 1967 the CPK made several minor attempts at insurrection, but with little success.

In 1968 the Khmer Rouge started a nationwide uprising across Cambodia. Although North Vietnam was not informed of the decision, its troops offered protection and weapons to the Khmer Rouge after the uprising began. The guerrilla forces of the party were in Kampucheanische Revolutionary Army (Engl. Kampuchean Revolutionary Army named). Vietnamese support for the uprising made it impossible for the inefficient and ill-motivated Cambodian Royal Army to counter it successfully.

Rise to power

The Khmer Rouge gained political appeal with the population due to the removal of Sihanouk as head of state in 1970 by Prime Minister Lon Nol with the support of the National Assembly. Sihanouk, who was in exile in Beijing, allied with the Communist Party of Kampuchea and became the nominal leader of the dominated by the Khmer Rouge government in exile GRUNK (fr. For Gouvernement royal d'union nationale du Kampuchea ), by the People's Republic of China supports has been. Sihanouk's popularity in rural Cambodia allowed the Khmer Rouge to expand their power and influence to the point that in 1973 they exercised de facto control over the majority of Cambodian territory, which, however, comprised only a minority of its population.

The link between the massive bombing of Cambodia by the United States and the growth of the Khmer Rouge through population recruitment and support is a controversial topic of historical research. For some historians, the US intervention and bombing campaign from 1965 to 1973 is an important factor that led to increased support for the Khmer Rouge by Cambodian farmers. However, Pol Pots biographer David P. Chandler argues that the bombing only "had the effect the Americans wanted - it broke the communist encirclement of Phnom Penh." Peter W. Rodman and Michael Lind argue that the US intervention saved Cambodia from collapse in 1970 and 1973. Craig Etcheson agrees that it is “untenable” to claim that US intervention caused the Khmer Rouge to win. He admits that she may have played a minor role in reinforcing recruitment for the insurgents. William Shawcross, on the other hand, believes that the US bombing and ground invasion plunged Cambodia into the chaos that Sihanouk had tried for years to avoid.

The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, launched at the request of the Khmer Rouge, is also cited, including by Shawcross, as a major factor in their eventual victory. Vietnam later admitted that it played "a crucial role" in the seizure of power. China armed and trained the Khmer Rouge during the civil war and helped them for years afterwards.

When the US Congress suspended the military support of the Lon Nol government in 1973 , the overwhelming power of the Khmer Rouge massively increased and hopelessly overwhelmed the government forces, the Khmer National Armed Forces . On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh and overthrew the Khmer Republic with the execution of all its officers.

The Khmer Rouge in power

The leadership of the Khmer Rouge remained largely unchanged from the 1960s to the mid-1990s. Most of the leaders came from middle-class families and had been trained in French universities.

The Standing Committee of the Khmer Rouge Central Committee ("Party Center") during their time in power consisted of:

  • Brother No. 1: Pol Pot (Saloth Sar), General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) 1962–1981, Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) 1976–1979
  • Brother No. 2: Nuon Chea (Long Bunruot), Deputy General Secretary (CPK), President of the People's Assembly (DK)
  • Brother No. 3: Ieng Sary (Kim Trang), Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for Foreign Affairs 1975–1979 (DK)
  • So Phim (So ​​Vanna): Secretary of the Eastern Zone 1954–1978 (CPK), First Vice President of the State Presidency (DK)
  • Front Vet (Penh Thuok): Deputy Prime Minister, Economy Minister 1976–1979 (DK)
  • Ros Nhim (Moul Sambath): Secretary Northwest Zone (CPK), Second Vice President, State Presidency (DK)
  • Ta Mok (Chhit Chhoeun, Ek Choeun): Secretary Southwest Zone (CPK), Leader of the National Army (DK); last leader of the Khmer Rouge
  • Son Sen (Khieu): Security (CPK), Deputy Prime Minister, Defense Minister (DK)
  • Khieu Samphan (Hem): President of the Central Committee (CPK), President of the State Presidium (Head of State, DK)

Once in power, the Khmer Rouge carried out a radical program that included isolating the country from foreign influence, closing schools, hospitals and factories, abolishing banking, finance and currency, banning all religions, and confiscating it included all private property and the transfer of people from urban areas to collective farms, which were usually used for forced labor. The purpose of this policy was to transform professional and urban Cambodians, that is, the "old man", into the "new man" through agricultural work. The aim was to develop an economy based on the export of rice in order to develop the industry later. The party carried the slogan: “If we have rice, we can have everything.” This program culminated in the genocide in Cambodia , in which, depending on the estimate, between 750,000 and more than 2 million Cambodians were executed by execution for a total population of around 8 million the killing fields , forced labor , starvation and inadequate medical care perished.

In Phnom Penh and other cities, the Khmer Rouge told residents that they would only be relocated to locations “two or three kilometers” outside the city and could return in “two or three days”. Eyewitnesses said they were told they would be evacuated because of "threats of American bombing" and that they would not have to lock their houses as the Khmer Rouge would "take care of everything" until they returned. These were not the first evacuations of civilians by the Khmer Rouge. Similar evacuations of the dispossessed have been going on since the early 1970s, albeit on a much smaller scale.

The Khmer Rouge sought to transform Cambodia into a classless society by depopulating cities and forcing urban populations into agricultural communes through brutal totalitarian methods. The entire population was forced to become farmers in labor camps. During their four years in power, the Khmer Rouge drained and starved the population. At the same time, they executed certain groups (including intellectuals) whom they believed could undermine the new state, and even killed many others for minor rule violations.

In the 1970s, and especially after mid-1975, the party was shaken by faction fighting. There were even armed attempts to overthrow Pol Pot. The resulting purges peaked in 1977 and 1978 when thousands, including some key CPK leaders, were executed. The older generation of communists, who were suspected of having connections or even sympathy for Vietnam, were particularly in the focus of the leadership around Pol Pot.

The Angka

For about two years after the CPK came to power, she referred to herself as Angka (khm. អង្គការ; pronounced angkah ; dt. "The organization"). On September 29, 1977, however, Pol Pot publicly stated in a five-hour speech that the name was behind the CPK. He thereby revealed the true character of the highest authority in Cambodia, an obscure ruling body that had previously been kept secret.

During its entire existence, the CPK worked in the greatest secrecy. Prior to 1975, this was necessary for the party's survival, but Pol Pot and his closest allies continued to maintain secrecy thereafter in order to strengthen their position against their suspected internal enemies during their first two years in power. The revelation of the CPK's existence just before Pol Pot was due to travel to Beijing came amid pressure from China on the Khmer Rouge leaders to recognize their true political identity at a time when they are increasingly turning to China's help against the Vietnamese threat were instructed. Accordingly, in his speech, Pol Pot claimed that the CPK was founded in 1960 and emphasized its own identity towards Vietnamese communism. The secrecy particularly concerned Pol Pot himself. Unlike most communist leaders, he was not the subject of an open personality cult. It was almost a year after he came to power to confirm that he was Saloth Sar, who had long been named as the general secretary of the CPK.

The fall of the Khmer Rouge

In December 1978, relations between Cambodia and Vietnam deteriorated due to the multi-year border conflict and the flood of refugees from Cambodia. Pol Pot feared a Vietnamese attack and ordered a precautionary attack on Vietnam. His Cambodian forces crossed the border and pillaged nearby villages. Despite Chinese help, these Cambodian forces were repulsed by the Vietnamese.

In early 1979, a Pro-Vietnamese group of CPK dissidents, led by Pen Sovan, held a congress near the Vietnamese border they called the “Third Party Congress” (thus failing to recognize the 1963, 1975 and 1978 party congresses as legitimate). Together with Heng Samrin , Pen Sovan was one of the leading founding members of the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation (KUFNS; French Front uni national pour le salut du Kampuchéa , FUNSK), a heterogeneous collection of regime critics, including defectors of the Khmer Rouge Advocated invasion of Vietnam to overthrow the Khmer Rouge. Congress split off the group from the CPK under the name of the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party (since 1991 the now ruling Cambodian People's Party , CPP).

The Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia together with the KUFNS and captured Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979. The party led by Pen Sovan was installed as the ruling party of the new People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK). The Pol Pot-led CPK withdrew its troops west to an area near the Thai border. Under the unofficial protection of the Thai army, they started a guerrilla war against the PRK government. The party founded the Patriotic and Democratic Front of the Great National Union of Kampuchea as a united front in September 1979 to fight the PRK and the Vietnamese. The front was led by Khieu Samphan . In December 1979, the armed forces remaining under the command of the former National Liberation Forces were renamed the National Army of Democratic Kampuchea . In 1981 the party was dissolved and replaced by the Democratic Kampuchea Party .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cambodia's brutal Khmer Rouge regime. In: BBC News . 4th August 2014.
  2. ^ Keo Duong: Nationalism and mass killing: The khmer rouge extreme nationalism against Vietnam. Human Sciences Encounters in Phnom Penh (HSEPP), 2015.
  3. ↑ Khmer Rouge. In: History .
  4. ^ A b Russell R. Ross: Library of Congress Major Political and Military Organizations. In: Cambodia. A Country Study. Appendix B. Library of Congress Country Studies , Washington 1987.
  5. ^ A b c K. Viviane Frings: Rewriting Cambodian History to 'Adapt' It to a New Political Context: The Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party's Historiography (1979–1991). In: Modern Asian Studies. Vol. 31, No. 4, October 1997, pp. 807-846.
  6. ^ A b c d David P. Chandler : Revising the Past in Democratic Kampuchea: When Was the Birthday of the Party? Notes and Comments. In: Pacific Affairs. Vol. 56, No. 2, Summer 1983, pp. 288-300.
  7. ^ Chronologie du Cambodge de 1960 à 1990 ( Memento of April 22, 2007 in the Internet Archive ).
  8. ^ Roger W. Benjamin, John H. Kautsky: Communism and Economic Development. In: American Political Science Review . Vol. 62, No. 1, March 1968, p. 122.
  9. ↑ The party statutes published in mid-1970 claim that the name change was approved by the 1971 party congress; see Ieng Sary's Regime: A Diary of the Khmer Rouge Foreign Ministry, 1976-79. Genocide Studies Program, Yale University .
  10. ^ David P. Chandler : Brother Number One. A Political Biography of Pol Pot. Revised Edition. Silkworm, Chiang Mai 2000, ISBN 978-974-7551-18-1 , p. 96 f.
  11. ^ Peter W. Rodman: Returning to Cambodia. Brookings Institution , Aug 23, 2007.
  12. ↑ Michael Lind: Vietnam: The Necessary War. A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict. Free Press, 1999.
  13. ↑ Craig Etcheson: The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea (= Westview Special Studies on South and Southeast Asia ). Westview Press, Boulder 1984, ISBN 978-0-86531-650-8 , p. 97 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  14. ^ William Shawcross: Sideshow. Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia. Cooper Square Press, New York 2002, ISBN 978-0-8154-1224-3 , pp. 92-100, 106-112.
  15. ↑ Dmitry Mosyakov: The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A history of their relations as told in the Soviet archives ( Memento of May 11, 2008 in the Internet Archive ). In: Susan E. Cook (Ed.): Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick / London 2009, ISBN 978-1-4128-0515-5 , pp. 54 ff. ( Yale University's Genocide Studies Program , Monograph Series No. 1, 2004). Quotation (transl.): “In April / May 1970, important North Vietnamese troops marched into Cambodia, when asked for help not through Pol Pot, but through his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: 'Nuon Chea asked for help and we liberated five Cambodian provinces in ten days.' "
  16. ^ William Shawcross, Peter W. Rodman: Defeat's Killing Fields. Brookings Institution, June 7, 2007.
  17. ↑ In: The Economist . February 26, 1983; Washington Post . April 23, 1985.
  18. ↑ Antoaneta Bezlova: China haunted by Khmer Rouge links. In: Asia Times . February 21, 2009.
  19. ↑ Ben Kiernan : The Pol Pot Regime. Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 (3rd Edition). Yale University Press, New Haven (CT) 2008, ISBN 978-0-300-14434-5 , pp. Xx f.
  20. ↑ a b Milton E. Osborne: Sihanouk. Prince of Light, Prince of Darkness. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 1994, ISBN 978-0-8248-1639-1 .
  21. ↑ Justus M. van der Kroef: Cambodia: From “Democratic Kampuchea” to “People's Republic”. In: Asian Survey. Vol. 19, No. 8, August 1979, pp. 731-750.