Lisa Hajjar In: 309 (Winter 2023)
What is happening to Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip bears some gruesome similarities to the Cambodian killing fields of the 1970s.
To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss,” was the Khmer Rouge slogan when they seized power in war-torn Cambodia in April 1975. Declaring the start of their reign “Year Zero,” they set in motion a policy to transform the country into an agrarian communist utopia. The first step was to empty the cities, a “cleansing” process bathed in blood. Anyone associated with the overthrown government, ethnic minorities, religious adherents, college educated professionals, property owners and merchants were executed. Their extended families were not spared. The zero-fication also involved the destruction of schools, universities, hospitals, factories and, indeed, any institutional or infrastructural entity that did not comport with the Khmer Rouge vision for Kampuchea, as the country was renamed. Urbanites were forced to march to rural areas where they were put to backbreaking work on collective rice farms and subjected to intensive reeducation. The regime was guided by the presumption that hard labor and ideological conformity would create a classless society of “New People.” Over the next four years, one-quarter of the country’s population died. One million people were executed or tortured to death and a further million perished from starvation, disease or exhaustion.