The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

cambodian villagers 273
intensive covert bombing of the countryside by the United States in a spillover from
the conflict in Vietnam. During the early 1970s the communist rebels expanded rapidly
throughout the county until they captured Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, ushering
in Pol Pot’s infamous Democratic Kampuchea. The regime was short-lived,
lasting only through the end of 1978, when the Vietnamese, goaded by DK incursions
into Vietnam, invaded Cambodia and routed the Khmer Rouge, who retreated
to bases on the border with Thailand and certain other regions. At that time, many
people were forced by or escaped from the Khmer Rouge to the Thai border area,
where enormous refugee camps with hundreds of thousands of people were created
under the auspices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (on
camp life, see French 1994a). Over a period of years following 1979, some 250,000
refugees were eventually relocated to such countries as the United States, France,
Canada, and Australia, creating an extensive Cambodian diaspora (Ebihara 1985). 3
In Cambodia after 1979, the government (initially called the People’s Republic
of Kampuchea, or PRK, renamed the State of Cambodia, or SOC, in 1989) moved
gradually from an initially semisocialist system to restoration of various features of
prerevolutionary Cambodian society, including private property, a market economy,
and the revival of Buddhism. Peace, however, was elusive, as the country experienced
renewed civil conflict between the incumbent PRK/SOC government
and several resistance forces: the militant Khmer Rouge, a royalist group loyal to
Sihanouk, and a pro-Western faction. Following negotiations and a peace agreement
among the contesting political groups, the United Nations sponsored a nationwide
general election in 1993. The country was yet again renamed, this time
as the Kingdom of Cambodia, with Sihanouk as figurehead leader over an ostensibly
coalition government of officials from several political parties or factions. In
fact, however, the Cambodian People’s Party (under Prime Minister Hun Sen) holds
primary political power.
MORTALITY
Even prior to the genocide of the DK regime, the civil war period caused some
275,000 “excess deaths” (Banister and Johnson 1993:87). The village of Svay was
located in a region of intense fighting between Lon Nol government soldiers and
rebel Khmer Rouge; several villagers were killed by random gunfire in the early
1970s, and people began to flee the countryside as it became too dangerous to tend
the rice fields. Villagers escaped to what they hoped would be safe havens in and
around Phnom Penh, and their abandoned houses and fields fell into ruin. Immediately
after the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975, when people were forcibly ejected
from Phnom Penh, many villagers tried to return to Svay but found only what they
characterized as an overgrown “wilderness” (prey) where their homes had once
stood. 4 DK cadres sent the wanderers to a barren area nearby, where the evacuees
were forced to live for several months in makeshift shelters with little food or water.
Eleven West Hamlet villagers died there from starvation and illness before the