Kampuchea
From the first century to the fifth century of our era, Cambodia (Kampuchea in the Khmer language) was part of the great Fu-nan state. From the VI century, the kingdom of Chen-la (known as the land of the Cambuja) succeeded the former state. The kingdom of Angkor appears around the year 800 and will exist until 1450. During the development of this period Angkor existed several wars territorial disputes. To the north by the present-day Thailand and to the south with Vietnam. These wars became bloodier with the arrival of the nineteenth century and the entry of the Portuguese and Dutch into the conflicts. They were colonial disputes.
The French colonial period began in 1863, thanks to agreements between the Cambodian monarch Norodom and the French government. In 1887, Cambodia went from being a French protectorate to a member of the Indochina Union (a large French colony that included Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand in addition to Cambodia). Cambodia's independence would not come until 1953, after decades of nationalist demands. Norodom Sihanouk abdicated the throne in favor of his father (Norodom Suramarit) and founded the Sangkum Party (nationalist). The Sangkum elects the entire bench in the first post-independence elections, and - after the death of his father (in 1960) - Sihanouk becomes head of state and government (without claiming the title of king). Sihanouk was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup in 1970.
In the struggles for independence, the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party (communist), which emerged in the early 1950s after the division of the Communist Party of Indochina into regional parties (Cambodia, Vietnam and Vietnam Laos), is the most prominent. In the 1955 elections, as it was the PRPK, the Cambodian communists formed a legal party (Krom Pracheachon) to participate in the process. The party won 4% of the vote, but no seats in parliament, which was dominated by the Sangkum. Persecuted by Sihanouk (whom he pejoratively referred to as the Khmer people who had fought bravely against the "Khmer Rouge"), the KPRP split immediately after the elections. Two groups, the "urban" (led by Tou Samouth) and the "rural" (led by Sieu Heng), began to promote internal conflicts. The "urban" tendency (supported by the Communist Party of Vietnam) defended the position of support for what they called the "progressive prince" (Sihanouk); the "rural", on the contrary, adopted the position of the people's war to defeat what they called the "feudal lord" himself, the prince. The leader Sieu Heng went over to the enemy side and collaborated with the repression, destroying about 90% of the organization in the countryside. Only a few hundred communists associated with the "rural" faction remained active in the capital, Phnom Penh.
A group of Cambodian communist students living in France had already organized. These communists did not yet have many links with the confused KPRP, and in September 1960 (after years in the underground) they organized a congress and founded the Workers Party of Kampuchea. Of the 21 leaders who attended this training congress, 14 were from the former "rural" faction and were deeply anti-Vietnamese. A Central Committee was formed and Tou Samouth became Secretary General. Pol Pot (one of the student leaders who formed the Marxist Circle in France) became the third name in the party and was made part of the "rural" line. In 1962, after the assassination of Samouth by the Cambodian government, Pol Pot takes power and is elected Secretary General during the Second Congress of the WPK.
The new leader left the capital and led about 100 fighters to the field in Ratanakiri prefecture (northwest of the country), forming a base of insurgency. Most of the WPK leaders had previously defected and been imprisoned by the Sihanouk regime. In 1965, Pol Pot travels and spends the year in China, meeting Chairman Mao Tsetung and Kang Sheng for political training. Between 1967, the war begins led by the WPK, with few successes. The national ascent of the civil war would take place only from 1968. The guerrilla forces were called the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea (RAK). In 1971, the WPK changed its name to the Communist Party of Kampuchea. The new name was kept secret among the leaders of the Kampuchean Communists and People's China.
On March 18, 1970, a U.S.-backed coup overthrew the government of Prince Sihanouk and a military junta (led by Lon Nol) took power. The Soviet Union immediately recognized the new government. Before this coup, the United States - which was massacring the Vietnamese in a murderous war - was already in a state of Cambodian territory to fight North Vietnamese troops.
The millions of Cambodian dead
The justification for the invasion of Kampuchea in 1979 by the Vietnamese invaders was the "genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge". This historical falsification is one of many that punctuate the history written by the bourgeoisie to try to tarnish the popular revolutions and socialists over time. Since 1871 (with the Paris Commune), the bourgeoisie has slandered socialists and communists, portraying them as murderers and genocidaires, when in fact the murderers and genocidaires of humanity over time have been the ruling classes. In these absurd accounts, often made in the offices of bourgeois newspapers, Lenin and Stalin "killed" 70 million and Mao more than 100 million. Figures absurdities that make the most attentive suspicious. In the case of the Union, the farce of the "millions of dead Soviets" is still propagated towards Stalin. All of this is nothing more than a reduced vision of history and a way to manipulate the masses through counter-propaganda and to turn them against socialism.In Cambodia, this slaughter did take place, and it was - probably - more than 1 million Cambodians who were murdered. However, the murderers were not poor peasants who wielded rifles and lived on economic rice rations to survive and a life of total dedication to the revolutionary cause. The murderers of the Cambodian people (mostly peasants and poor workers) were the Yankee aggressors. Cambodia has been the most bombed country in history. These criminal bombings, falsely justified to stop the advance of the North Vietnamese troops crossing the Cambodian border, began on March 18, 1969. This first phase of the aggression killed about 1 million Cambodians (mostly women and children) and left more than 3 million Cambodian refugees (many of whom died of starvation and the consequences of the bombs dropped by the murderous Yankees).
Still in 1969, before the overthrow of the Sihanouk government and even with serious divergences due to the bourgeois character of the prince, the WPK begins talks with anti-imperialist forces and founds the National Front of Liberation (led by Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot, of the WPK and the prince Sinahouk, who after the coup begins to live in China and helps the war as foreign affairs, obtaining resources and weapons for the movement).
During the years of guerrilla warfare, Kieu Shampan organized a conference with the communist parties of Laos, North Vietnam, the NLF of South Vietnam (Vietcong) and the Cambodian resistance. At this conference, the genocide committed by the Yankees against the Cambodian people was denounced. Thus, the enemies of socialism seized the information about the mass murderer and changed the perpetrators of the crimes, starting to blame members of the WPK. The historical falsification was done. From this point on, the conference: the West begins to attribute to the "murderer Pol Pot" most of the "three million dead" of Cambodia. This fantasy version gained popularity after the book report by the Yankee journalist (of the New York Times) Sidney Schanberg. The book "The Death and Life of Dith Pran," based on the testimony of his friend and Cambodian doctor Dith Pran. A somewhat suspicious testimony, since the doctor managed to "escape" from Kampuchea and arrive in the United States, where he would become a famous reporter for the TNYT. Today, he is one of the most anti-communist activists in existence and gives lectures to commemorate the "genocide committed by Marxist Cambodians". Pran is nothing more than a very well-paid agent (by the way) of U.S. imperialism.
The Khmer revolutionaries arrived in Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, and the Lon Nol puppet government's army surrendered. Before leaving the capital, the anti-communist and revisionist forces destroyed documents proving other crimes committed by Lon Nol and the United States against the Cambodian people, crimes that had been silenced by the ambassadors of the Soviet Union and East Germany.
Democratic Kampuchea is established.
A profound and original revolution
Many Marxist-Leninists, even today, do not have the good will to understand the socialist experience of Democratic Kampuchea. They ignore the cultural, social and economic aspects and especially the historical context of the anti-imperialist and socialist struggle led by the Communist Party of Kampuchea. The decision of the CPK was one of total independence and took a stand against any form of copying models of other revolutionary experiences and also not to depend only on foreign aid was one of the rules of the communist leadership. They had, in fact, based the form of struggle of the people's war, but with the particular characteristics of Cambodia.
The decisions that caused certain prejudices (even among Marxist-Leninists) were profound and radical, such as the abolition of money (a fetish according to Marx) and the transfer of the majority of the urban population to the countryside. In the case of the latter measure, the new government of socialist construction did not have the materials to rebuild - immediately - the cities that had been heavily bombed by the Americans, and decided to move most of the people to the countryside, where they would be more secure in the event of new Yankee attacks. In 1975, even with the end of the Vietnam War, who guaranteed that the United States would not return to attack the region with nuclear weapons? That was the fear of the Communist leadership. In 1978, the Swedish newspaper Dagem Nyveter stated in a long report that "in just three years after the end of the war, the nation was feeding itself and exporting the surplus rice." Thus, the plan to rebuild the country devastated by the American bombs was working and the country was already recovering from the hunger to which the Cambodian people had been subjected since the beginning of the imperialist aggression. On the issue of the abolition of cash, bonuses were created that corresponded to the time spent working for the exchange of food, services and clothing in state cooperatives. Thousands of new comfortable houses were built for the people, different from the old thatched ones.
Another interesting testimony comes from the American journalist Malcolm Caldwell, who was in the country in December 1978 and, after personally investigating the Kampuchean socialist experience, he praised several about what was actually going on there. Mysteriously, this journalist was murdered by agents linked to Vietnam (consequently linked to the Soviet agents). The journalist was a witness to the experience being put into practice at that time.
The Vietnamese invasion
Vietnam, after the independence of Indochina, thought it had the right to be the legitimate heir of the French colony and began to cause friction between the borders with Cambodia. When the CPK succeeded in forming the revolutionary government, independence and the decision of the leaders of Democratic Kampuchea not to accept interventions and models imposed by other socialist nations caused a malaise in socialist Vietnam. It's good to highlight that in this period, 1975, the tensions between the USSR and People's China were still high. Socialism in the USSR was going through a deep crisis (economic and ideological), installed after the rise to power of the revisionist and fifth column Nikita Khrushchev, aggravated by the arrival of the also revisionist Leonid Brezhnev. China, with Mao still in power, supported the Khmer struggle and offered military aid to the Kampucheans to resist. Despite all the difficulties of an economically backward country devastated by the millions of imperialist bombs dropped on its territory, the vast majority of the Kampuchean people supported the new regime.In late 1978, Vietnam sponsored the creation of a "resistance" movement, the National Liberation Front. In reality, this "resistance" was formed by agents of Hanoi with the help of the USSR and the German Democratic Republic. The invasion of Kampuchea's territory took place on January 1, 1979, after months of provocations on the Kampuchea-Vietnam border. The Vietnamese war machine - with tanks, advanced Soviet fighter planes and Mig-21 fighters (also manufactured by Vietnam) - did not allow the small and still poorly equipped Revolutionary Kampuchea Army (RAK) to put up any effective resistance. Seven days after the start of the Vietnamese invasion, the capital Phnom Penh fell and the RAK (together with the CPK) decided to resume a people's war and form guerrilla columns in the mountainous regions bordering Thailand. Vietnam creates a People's Republic of Kampuchea and forms a fictitious "Communist Party of Cambodia". The country was now led by a cadre of the CPK, Heng Samrin (a former low-ranking official of the CPK).
A revealing account of this invasion and the results of the government was given by Swedish journalist Jan Myrdal. Myrdal, in his book "Kampuchea, 1979", describes the end of hunger in the country, the reconstruction of the railways, the repair of communications (especially telephony), and the construction of thousands of houses for the population that had previously lived in huts. The journalist also talks about the schools he visited and the different books he saw published in the country. According to Myrdal, everyone could see this progress.
In 1980, the anti-Vietnamese forces united and formed a tripartite government with Sihanouk as president and Khieu Samphan as vice president. This government operated from China (where Sihanouk lived in exile). The struggle continued until the Vietnamese puppet government was overthrown in 1989. The country changed its name again in 1993 and restored the monarchy with the return of Sihanouk to power (who abdicated and passed the leadership to his son). The CPK still struggled in the mid-1990s, but weakened and persecuted, Pol Pot was found dead in his modest field home after being arrested by his own comrades.
Disinformation about the socialist experience in Democratic Kampuchea is still rampant. The bourgeois intelligentsia wields enormous power and influences sectors of the left (including many Marxist-Leninists) to slander Pol Pot and turn him into a monster. Mistakes were undoubtedly made, but not to the extent that the hypocrites and real criminals who slander the communist movement on a daily basis would have us believe. The day will come when the truth will be revealed to the masses and all these slanderers in the service of the bourgeoisie will be judged by the people.