The sentence had great international emphasis on the word "genocide", used for the first time by the Extraordinary Court of Cambodia created to judge the so-called "crimes" attributed to the Khmer Rouge, including the extermination of a figure ranging between 1.5 and 3 million people. The Trotskyist "manifesto" also joined the chorus of acclaimers of the "historical sentence", dedicating the entire last page of the November 17 edition to it, complete with photos of the now strange pile of skulls and the large-print title " Cambodian Genocide ".
Instead it is an illegitimate sentence, like all those previously issued by this puppet court, installed and run by imperialism with UN cover, to judge exclusively on the period between April 17, 1975, the day of the liberation of Cambodia from the puppet government of Lon Nol installed and armed by the American imperialists, and on January 6, 1979, the eve of the entry of the Vietnamese invasion troops, in the pay of Soviet social-imperialism, in Phnom Penh. It is no coincidence that neither the period preceding the liberation, which should have concerned the crimes committed by the Americans, with their carpet bombings which caused at least 600,000 victims, nor the one following this period, the years of people's war against the Vietnamese invaders, who remained in the country until 1991, cost an estimated one million deaths, fall within the purview of this court farce.
The narrative invented by the invaders
The brief and courageous revolutionary experience of Democratic Kampuchea led by the Communist Party of that country led by Pol Pot, who in a few years - precisely those in the sights of the UN Court - had rebuilt the country from the ruins of the war, fed to all repopulating the countryside and establishing peasant cooperatives everywhere, building schools and hospitals, defeating malaria, illiteracy, prostitution and drug addiction, rampant plagues under the corrupt dictatorship of Lon Nol, was instead truncated on January 1, 1979 by the Vietnamese aggressor, pushed and armed by Soviet social-imperialism, then in full expansion.The Vietnamese installed a puppet government in Phnom Penh and kept it up until the 1991 Paris Peace Accords, although the Resistance continued until 1998. Following the attackers was Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge traitor who will soon take the lead of the regime, which he still maintains today, and which in a short time will be characterized by corruption, arms and drug trafficking, child prostitution, the over-exploitation of local labour for the profits of foreign multinationals, which brought the country back into the darkness of the past under colonial and imperialist domination. Of course, this traitor and sold to imperialism has not been touched in the least by this sham trial.
It was precisely in order to justify their criminal invasion of Kampuchea, which instead responded to an old hegemonic design over the entire Indochinese region, that the Vietnamese invaders, aided in this by the social-imperialists and revisionist and Trotskyist parties enslaved to them, invented the narrative the bloody regime of the Khmer Rouge, the death camps, the forced deportation of the population of the cities in the countryside, etc. A narrative that only later, after the collapse of the social-imperialist empire, was it adopted in full by the American imperialists and by all the Western media. So much so that the US and the UN made around 50 million dollars available to Phnom Penh to set up the trial farce.
Once the Kampuchean Resistance was internationally isolated, it was not difficult for imperialism to bribe its leaders one by one, who in several have betrayed and in order to save their skin have agreed to surrender themselves to the international court and "confess" the crimes of the revolutionary regime of Pol Pot, all pointing the finger at him and justifying himself for having only followed his orders. Pol Pot, already seriously ill with malaria, a few months before his death on April 15, 1998, officially from a heart attack, was finally put under arrest and subjected to a sham trial by false Khmer Rouge traitors to ingratiate himself with the international court and the puppet government of Hun Sen.
The answer to the Vietnamese false accusations
Pol Pot himself, to refute the falsehoods that the Vietnamese government had put around to justify its repeated provocations on the Kampuchea borders and prepare world public opinion for the subsequent invasion, had released several statements and interviews to clarify the allegations made to him and the Communist Party of Kampuchea (PCK). In 1977 he publicly exposed the Vietnamese accusations that he wanted war with the much stronger and more armed neighbour: "Our people have no hostility towards anyone, nor do we have any intention of committing aggression or expanding our territory at the expense of another. We don't want even an inch of land that belongs to someone else. Ours is a small country with a small population." The political system of Democratic Kampuchea absolutely does not allow us to attack another country. A small and weak country, as a rule, does not go to swallow a large country. World history shows that only the reactionary ruling classes of large countries, like Hitler's, invent pretexts to provoke and accuse small countries of transgression, and then use these pretexts to justify their own aggression and expansionism."As for Vietnam" - he denounced in an interview on September 21, 1978 to representatives of the Hong Kong press - "their party is not an authentic Marxist- Leninist party. It is a completely revisionist party that has betrayed the revolution. Its regime oppresses the people".
On the evacuation of Phnom Penh
Regarding the accusation of having massively deported the population of Phnom Penh to the countryside to die of hunger and hardship, he declared on March 18, 1978 to a delegation of Yugoslav journalists visiting Kampuchea:"There are so many reasons that we led to evacuate the population from Phnom Penh and other cities. The first reason was the economic one, that is, to ensure food for the many millions of inhabitants in the cities. After having considered the problem at length, we came to the conclusion that we could not solve this problem as long as such a large population remained in the cities. But if we had evacuated this population in the countryside, in the cooperatives, the latter could have nourished it, since they have rice fields, production tools, and everything they need. The population would have had no faith in the revolution if it had been left to starve in the cities. This was the economic reason.
Connected to this economic problem was that of the defense and security of the country. Before the liberation, we already knew the emergency plan of the US imperialists and their lackeys. According to this plan, after our victory and our entry into Phnom Penh, they would have created difficulties for us in the political, military, economic and so on to destroy our revolution. So, after reflecting on the situation, we evacuated the population of the cities in the countryside, in the cooperatives, to solve both the food problem and, at the same time, to crush the plot of the American imperialists in advance, so that they could not attack us when we were entered Phnom Penh".
Pol Pot's interview on his alleged crimes
On October 30, 1997, a few months before his death, in an interview with the American journalist and war correspondent, Nate Thayer, who insistently questioned about the alleged massacres during the 4 years of his government, Pol Pot replied: "I was come [to power] to carry out the struggle, not to kill people. Even now, he can see it. Am I a savage person? My conscience is clear. " And then he explained: "Our [Khmer Rouge] movement made mistakes, [but] we had no other choice. Of course we had to defend ourselves. The Vietnamese wanted to assassinate me because they knew that without me they could easily swallow Cambodia."As for the millions of deaths attributed to him, which according to sources would reach as many as 3 million out of a population of 7 million (practically one person every two!), Pol Pot had flatly denied: "To say that millions of people died [due to mine] is too much. Most of the Cambodians whose death is attributed to me were actually killed by the Vietnamese ", he replied, putting the interviewer in front of the evidence of the contradiction that it was the attacked and not the attacker who was being accused.
He had equally flatly denied having given orders to kill the family members and grandchildren of his relative and former defense minister, Son Sen, accused of treason, even though he had honestly admitted that the execution was his mistake: "I had not given the order to kill those people, the children, the young people.
For Son Sen and his family, yes, I am saddened. It was a mistake to carry out that plan. " It is of that mistake that the renegade and traitor, Ta Mok, also accused but managed to escape, will then take advantage, in agreement with the puppet government, to have Pol Pot arrested by the Khmer Rouge and tried by a "people's court" in Anlong Veng for the murder of Son Sen.
False accusations to cover up real crimes
It is evident that even Pol Pot, even the CPK, made mistakes, and he himself recognized it, but it is equally evident that this has nothing to do with the slanderous accusations that the imperialists and their lackeys invented to discredit and criminalize the revolutionary experience of Democratic Kampuchea and erase it from history as a parenthesis of horrors. A convenient way to make people forget and absolve the real crimes of imperialism, before and after that experience.After all, hasn't we done this too, with the Resistance and the sinkholes? What better way to absolve fascism of its immense crimes, to rehabilitate the Republican assassins and to rewrite history from the right than to take a few episodes - which have always been as there have always been in civil wars - of personal vendettas, summary executions of spies and fascist torturers and other excesses, to then magnify them, multiply them by a thousand, write books on them, institute "days of memory" etc., and in the end reduce the glorious Resistance to a carnage and the heroic partisans to bloodthirsty bandits?
This is the operation that was also carried out against Pol Pot and Democratic Kampuchea. As has been done in history against all revolutionary leaders, starting with the bourgeois revolutionaries themselves when they went too far, such as Robespierre. And as has been done against the Grand Masters of the international proletariat and Communism, accused by the bourgeois ruling class of being the source of all evil and all crimes, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.
It is no coincidence that the imperialists and their lackeys put Pol Pot together with other "bloodthirsty dictators" like Stalin and Mao. But with this, for us Marxist- Leninists, they do honour him in spite of themselves.
2018