The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

278 genocide’s wake
on one another has increased, what are the possible reasons for that perception? For
one thing, the social circles within which assistance is provided may be smaller than
in the past. Vijghen has discussed this shrinking circle of relatives and asserts that
needy kin are often given only enough food so they will not starve, but they are not
provided with equipment, land to farm, or investment capital (Vijghen, cited in
Frings 1994; Vijghen and Ly 1996). We would interpret such a situation as indicating
not lack of concern for one’s fellows but rather the poverty of most villagers,
who have little or no spare money or land to give to others. 15 It is true that the extreme
deprivation and violence of the Pol Pot period made people watch out for
themselves more than ever before. But there are numerous instances in Svay of people
helping each other in a variety of ways, including sharing food, providing cash
donations or loans, giving emergency financial and other assistance, and offering
psychological support (see Ebihara 1994; Ledgerwood 1998b). Such aid is most often
proffered to relatives and close friends, but we have also seen Svay villagers give
whatever help was possible to mere acquaintances whose dire straits evoked compassionate
responses.
GENDER IMBALANCE
In the years immediately following the ouster of Pol Pot, a major issue for the People’s
Republic of Kampuchea during the early 1980s was the large number of widows
left by high male mortality during DK. Banister and Johnson estimated that
about “ten percent of men and almost three percent of women in young adult
and middle age years were killed above and beyond those who died due to the general
mortality situation” (1993:90). In some parts of the country during the 1980s,
widows were said to constitute anywhere from 65 to 80 percent of the adult population
(Ledgerwood 1992; Boua 1982). Of the specific West Hamlet population
who died during DK, some 56 percent were male, which is lower than the Banister
and Johnson estimates. However, looking at the newly created administrative
unit of West Svay village, local census figures for 1990 noted that the total village
population (including all ages) was 80.5 percent female (although those figures are
open to question; see below).
Such shortage of male labor, as well as of draft animals and agricultural implements,
led the early PRK government to institute a semisocialist system with
communal production and distribution of rice and certain other foodstuffs by socalled
solidarity groups (krom samaki), although other subsistence activities were left
to private household production and consumption as in prerevolutionary times (see
also Boua 1982; Vickery 1986; Curtis 1990). Although this system was intended to
benefit widows and other needy folk, Svay villagers were averse to such communal
effort—perhaps because it reminded them all too vividly of the hated Pol Pot years,
when they had been forced into labor teams—and de facto household production
and consumption for all subsistence activities re-emerged by around 1986. Although