Khmer Rouge

The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia from 1975-1979. Theirs is among the most brutal regimes in history. In pursuit of a utopia, the Khmer Rouge killed 2 million people in four years through starvation, execution and forced labour – one-quarter of Cambodia’s population.  

The leaders of the Khmer Rouge, or the ‘Communist Party of Kampuchea’, were middle-class, French-educated socialists inspired by Stalin and Chairman Mao. Pol Pot (below), or Brother Number One, operated from the shadows – until 1979 few even knew who he was. The Khmer Rouge saw Cambodia’s impoverished peasants as the only force free from the corruption of modern capitalist society, and the force they could harness to take control of the country. To eliminate inequality for good, Cambodian society needed to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up, by whatever means necessary.

Cambodia gained independence from France in 1953 under Norodom Sihanouk, who tried to play both sides of the Cold War. He called the guerrillas in the countryside ‘red Khmers’, and the name stuck.

In 1973, the Nixon Administration began bombing the jungles where the Viet Cong operated from across the border. That year, pro-American general Lon Nol took power in a coup. As, American bombs devastated the countryside, the peasants who lived there came to detest the government and its city-dwelling backers. 

Although both communists, the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese did not see eye to eye. The North Vietnamese were aligned with Moscow and the Khmer Rouge with Beijing.

Year Zero began in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took over Pnom Penh. On the pretence of an American bombing raid, they evacuated the entire city and forced everyone to abandon their property. Soldiers and members of the old regime were rounded into the Olympic Stadium and shot.

The Khmer Rouge divided Cambodia into two groups: Old People and New People. Old People were peasants who lived in the old, liberated zones in the countryside, whereas New People were relocated city dwellers.They were distributed into agricultural collectives and forced to work ten-hour days without pay. All public institutions, including hospitals and schools were closed. By 1979, up to 80% of Cambodians had malaria.

The Khmer Rouge were determined to move as quickly as possible to a rural communist society. They envisioned a land free of private property and commerce, where everyone worked as rice farmers – the purest occupation. Everyone wore the same dyed black clothing with red and white headbands and car-tyre sandals. Individualism of any form was prohibited. The only acceptable possession was a spoon.

Filmmaker John Pilger, 1979:

The new rulers of Cambodia call 1975 “Year Zero”, the dawn of an age in which there will be no families, no sentiment, no expressions of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music, no song, no post, no money – only work and death. 

Khmer Rouge cadres targeted anyone suspected of impeding their vision; intellectuals too steeped in the old way of life. Those who complained or spoke out were chosen for ‘re-education’ which in practice meant torture and death. Victims included:

• ethnic minorities.
• Christians, Muslims, and Buddhist monks.
• speakers of foreign languages.
• wearers of eyeglasses.
• anyone suspected of treason, hoarding, or unliscenced foraging.

To save bullets, the Khmer Rouge used rifle butts and sharpened bamboo sticks. They threw their victims into mass graves, dubbed ‘killing fields’. Children of political victims were killed as well, lest they grow up to take revenge. A Chankiri tree outside Pnom Penh still bears the marks of the infant heads bashed against its trunk. A Khmer Rouge adage was ‘to keep you is no benefit, you destroy you is no loss.’

Most Khmer Rouge cadres were illiterate peasants, both men and women. The most fanatical were teenagers who had grown up in the civil wars.

In 1979, tensions between Cambodia and neighbouring Vietnam reached a boiling point. The communist Vietnamese invaded. They overthrew the Khmer Rouge and set up a new government. Led by China, the international community condemned the invasion and continued to recognise Pol Pot’s ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ as the country’s legitimate government until 1991. The Khmer Rouge survived in the remote countryside until Pol Pot died in 1998.

Although they ultimately failed, the Khmer Rouge changed Cambodia for good. Today the old political elite and much of Cambodian high culture are no more. Many of the country’s leaders are former associates of Democratic Kampuchea.

Sources: Asia Pacific Curriculum, Pnom Penh Post, Real Dictators

Tonya the Machine Gun Girl

Antonina Makarova, known as ‘Tonya the Machine Gun Girl’, was a Soviet war criminal and Nazi collaborator. In her early twenties, she executed over 2,000 people with a Maxim machine gun; she then escaped capture for the next thirty years over a case of mistaken identity. Makarova was one of three women hung in the USSR.

Antonina Parfenova was born in Soviet Russia in 1920 in a village near Smolensk. She was the first in her family to attend school. When asked by her teacher on the first day, she could not remember her surname. Knowing her father was called Makar, the teacher noted her name as ‘Antonina Makarova’. 

When Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, Makarova joined the Red Army as a nurse. By January, the 21-year-old Makarova stranded behind enemy lines. Starving and distraught, she travelled from house to house looking for shelter. A month or two later, Nazi collaborators offered her a job. They needed an executioner, and Makarova accepted.

Bronislav Kaminski was a Russian engineer and anti-communist who offered his services to the Nazis when they took over his region. With Nazi support, Kaminski formed a brigade of anti-Soviet Russians under the SS around the town of Lokot. They assisted the Nazi occupiers by fighting the Soviet partisans operating in the woods.

Every day, the Kaminski Brigade captured partisans and their families and crowded them into a jailhouse which could fit 27 people. The following day, the collaborators led them to a ditch where Antonina Makarova mowed them down with a machine gun. She was allowed to chose clothes from the dead and spent her evenings with SS officers and local prostitutes. As Makarova killed up to 27 people a day, by 1942, her victims numbered over 15,000. Partisans called her ‘Tonya the Machine Gun Girl’.

Makarova later said:

I did not know who I killed. They did not know me. So I was not ashamed before them. Sometimes, you shoot, you come closer, and some people still move. Then I shot again in the head…. All those sentenced to death were the same for me. Only their number changed. Usually I was ordered to kill a group of 27 people–so many partisans fit into the room for execution…. At the command of the authorities, I knelt and shot at people until they fell to the ground.

By 1942, Makarova and the local prostitutes had contracted a sexually transmitted disease and were relocated to a hospital further behind the lines. When the Red Army reclaimed Lokot two years later, they could not find the notorious executioner. 

When the war ended, Makarova slipped back into civilian life. The KGB, who were responsible for tracking down war criminals, were looking for an Antonina Makarova, unaware her real name was Parfenova. 

Makarova married Victor Ginsburg, whose family had perished in the Holocaust. She lived the respectable life of a veteran for the next thirty years, built a good reputation in her village and had two daughters. The KGB assumed Makarova had died.

In 1977, a Soviet diplomat named Parfenov applied for a passport. As part of the process, he listed all his immediate family members. One name stood out to the officials processing his application – Antonina Ginsberg’s maiden name was not Parfenova like her siblings, but Makarova. Unwilling to try an innocent, the KGB spied on Makarova for the next year until eyewitnesses confirmed she was Tonya the Machine Gun Girl.

The KGB arrested Makarova in 1978 and tried her for murdering over 150 prisoners of war. She had killed more, but only 150 of the victims could be identified. Now 56, Makarova freely admitted to everything she had done but was surprised when the KGB sentenced her to death. She was executed by firing squad.

Sources: Pravda, War History Online

The Laotian Civil War

The Laotian Civil War (1959-1975) was a Vietnam proxy conflict that left 40,000 dead. Officially uninvolved, the CIA recruited an army of hill tribesmen to fight the North Vietnamese and Lao communists while making Laos the most bombed country in history. It was not enough. By 1975 Laos was the last of the Asian dominoes to fall.

In 1953 the French colony of Laos, a  thinly populated and landlocked backwater situated between Thailand and Vietnam, gained its independence. The French transferred power to the old royal family, who established the Kingdom of Laos.

Like Cambodia and South Vietnam, a Marxist insurgency threatened Laos. The North Vietnamese Army invaded in the 1950s to support the Pathet Lao, a local communist group. The Ho Chi Minh Trail, which supported the insurgency in South Vietnam, flowed through Lao territory. Heavily backed by North Vietnamese troops and Soviet and Chinese arms, the Pathet Lao sought to overthrow the Lao monarchy and establish a socialist state.

The Royal Lao Government was weak in comparison. Despite American support, they could not match the Communists’ numbers or determination. Internal division and low morale beset them.

From 1964, the CIA conducted a ‘Secret War’ on Washington’s behalf. While the 1962 Geneva Convention obliged foreign powers to respect Lao neutrality, North Vietnam ignored it and the USA only pretended. They never officially stationed troops in Laos and never declared war. Using $3.3 billion a year, the CIA outsourced operations to Hmong militias and Air America. Their base at Long Tieng housed 40,000 people, was Laos’s second-biggest city and one of the world’s busiest airports, but appeared in no Atlas and officially did not exist. In fighting this Secret War, the CIA hoped to divert North Vietnamese manpower and halt the spread of communism.

The main strategy was aerial bombardment. From bases in allied Thailand, American planes bombed communist territory daily.  The CIA dropped two million tons of explosives on Laos from 1964-73, an average of one planeload every eight minutes. More explosives were dropped on Laos than Germany and Japan in WW2 combined. Today unexploded ordinance still kills an average of 300 Laotians a year. The American public was kept in the dark.

As the Royal Lao Army proved ineffective, CIA operatives trained and equipped a ‘Secret Army’ of 20,000 Hmong militiamen under major-general Vang Pao. An ethnic minority from the mountains, the Hmong proved capable fighters; rescuing downed American pilots and matching communist guerrillas at their own game. A further 20,000 Thai mercenaries assisted. With 60% of Hmong men serving in the Secret Army, the CIA turned a blind eye to opium trafficking and child soldiery in their ranks.

In 1973 President Nixon made peace with North Vietnam and abruptly ended US involvement in Laos. Abandoned by their allies, the royalists resisted for another two years alone before they surrendered on the 2^nd December 1975, eight months after the fall of Saigon. The Indochina Wars had come to an end.

The Pathet Lao established a one-party dictatorship and exacted brutal reprisals against the royalists and the Hmong, whom they promised to wipe out. 300,000 of Laos’s 4 million people, including a third of the Hmong and 90% of the intelligentsia, fled Laos by the 1980s. Thousands of others suspected of working with the Americans and the old regime were sentenced to ‘re-education camps’. The royal family were worked to death.

See Also:

• Thailand
• Khun Sa and the Burmese Opium Trade