The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 [Hardcover]

Ben Kiernan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 24, 1996

The Khmer Rouge revolution turned Cambodia into killing fields, as the Pol Pot regime murdered or starved to death a million and a half of Cambodia's eight million inhabitants. This book - a comprehensive study of the Pol Pot regime - describes the violent origins, social context and course of the revolution, providing an answer to the question of why a group of Cambodian intellectuals imposed genocide on their own country. Ben Kiernan draws on more than 500 interviews with Cambodian refugees, survivors and defectors, as well as on a collection of previously unexplored archival material from the Pol Pot regime (including Pol Pot's secret speeches). He recounts how in the first few days after Cambodia became Democratic Kampuchea in 1975, authorities evacuated all cities, closed hospitals, schools, monasteries, and factories, and abolished the use of money. For nearly four years, the country was a prison-camp state, the countryside was "cleansed" of minorities and a war was fought against Vietnam. Exploring the nature of the regime that enforced such a revolution, Kiernan shows that its atrocities - the widespread massacres, forced assimilation of minorities, and foreign alliances and wars - can be explained by its ideological preoccupation with racist and totalitarian policies. Kiernan concludes with a description of the resistance movements that sprang up and the destruction of the regime by Vietnamese forces in 1979.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"I first visited Cambodia in 1975," Ben Kiernan writes. "None of the Cambodians I knew then survived the next four years." In The Pol Pot Regime, Kiernan presents the first definitive account of the four-year reign of terror known as "Democratic Kampuchea." Working very closely with Cambodian sources, including interviews with hundreds of survivors and the archived "confessions" extracted by the Khmer Rouge from political prisoners just before their execution, Kiernan depicts the horrific nature of Pol Pot and his thugs with chilling specificity, and his historical analysis makes a valuable contribution to understanding how they were able to come to power in the wake of the Vietnam War. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Pol Pot, the paramount leader of Democratic Kampuchea, trumps Hitler, Stalin, and Mao as the most bloodthirsty ruler of modern history. In fewer than four years, Pol Pot's regime caused the death of 1.7 million people in Cambodia, one-fifth of the population. Using hundreds of interviews with survivors, Kiernan, the leading authority on modern Cambodia, meticulously examines Pol Pot's killing machine and clears up many misconceptions found in earlier studies. In chilling detail, he shows that Pol Pot, obsessed with fantasies of ethnic purity and national grandeur, tried to exterminate the Cham, Vietnamese, Thai, and Lao minorities in his country. Finally, internal revolt supported by Vietnam caused the regime's collapse. An important book for students of genocide as well as scholars of Southeast Asia.?Steven I. Levine, Boulder Run Research, Hillsborough, N.C.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 492 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (January 24, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300061137
• ISBN-13: 978-0300061130
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,080,014 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

63 of 70 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Poorly written, untenable explanation of Khmer Rouge., July 16, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 (Paperback)

This much heralded history by the Australian historian Kiernan has turned out to be a big disappointment. Despite his access to enormous amounts of information, he shows no talent for organizing the material, nor being able to discern what is important from what is trivial. His prose style is extremely dull. And as many reviewers have pointed out (e.g. New York Review of Books, Washington Post) his explanation of the Khmer Rouge (misnamed the Pol Pot regime) as being primarily motivated by racism, doesn't hold water. The overwhelming majority of the Khmer Rouge victims -- some of whom included many of my relatives -- were from the ethnic Khmer majority, not from Cambodia's ethnic minorities. Kiernan, as a former supporter of Pol Pot (until 1978) who is now a supporter of the current Hun Sen regime in Cambodia, seems determined to protect what he considers the "good" idea of communism from the bad reputation of Pol Pot. As an Australian educated Cambodian, who has studied the history of communism, I find Kiernan's perspective quite bizarre, not to say morally repugnant. A far better written and more reliable account of the topic is Elizabeth Becker's When The War Was Over. The most reliable academic history is David Chandler's Tragedy of Cambodian History and the relevant sections of his briefer History of Cambodia.

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Study of the Khmer Rouge Years, September 1, 2004

By 

Matthew P. Arsenault (SW Michigan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 (Paperback)

Without argument, Ben Kiernan is one of the the top Cambodia scholars working on the subject today. He has been in and out of Cambodia since the 1970's, including a trip shorty after the fall of the DPK in 1980. In 1995, Khmer Rouge forces even accused Kiernan of being a "war criminal," beaming the macbre message from guerrilla radio stations along the Thai border.

The Pol Pot Regime, a follow up to Kiernan's How Pol Pot Came to Power, begins with the DPK takeover following the fall of the Lon Nol government. He then provides a nearly 500 page systematic study of the Pol Pot regime.

Kiernan breaks the study down into three parts. The first segment discusses the very early days of the DPK and their paranoid attempt to cling to their hard-won power by emptying the cities, creating agrarian communes and exterminating the human remenants of the Lon Nol era, 1970-75.

Kiernan labels this section, "Wiping the Slate Clean." Indeed, that is exactly what the Khmer Rouge intended to do, wipe the 'slate,' Cambodia, clean- in order to usher in a new era, even going so far as to declare 1975 Year Zero.

Following "Wiping the Slate Clean," Kiernan begins to discuss the evolution and implementation of Khmer Rouge policies. It seems as though the ultimate goal of these radical Marxists was to create an agrarian utopia regardles of cost, even at the risk of turning the nation into one giant charnel house. Following the forced exodus of all major towns and cities, Cambodians were forced into the countryside to grow rice which the DPK felt would lead to the re-emegence of the great Khmer power of the past. The result was starvation and disease on a scale never before seen.

Although production was quite high, the Khmer people were placed on starvation rations. Nearly all surplus rice was exported in exchange for goods and military hardware to support the emerging bloody conflict with neighboring Vietnam. This leads us to Kiernan's third section illustrating the subsequent demise of the DPK.

As the war with Vietnam began to escalate, so did paranoia within the Party Cental. "Enemies" were ferreted out and executed, including numerous high ranking cadre and military commanders. In 1977, the purges were spiraling out of control. It wasn't long until a small contingent of DPK leaders grew fearful and disillusioned with the Central Party. A number of now famous commanders, most notably the current Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, fled to Vietnam and garnered support for the liberation of Kampuchea. Kiernan does an excellent and indepth job of studying the stucture of the DPK purges and why they lead to the ultimate collapse of the Pol Pot regime.

The Eastern Zone of Cambodia, from where the liberation leadership emerged, was was the most heavily purged, not only due to it's close proximity to Vietnam, but also because the Eastern Zone cadre, from the earliest days of the revolution, tended to be less brutal in their treatment of Cambodians, essentially making them weak in the eyes of the Party leadership.

Aside from exterminating native Khmer's, the Pol Pot regime launched pogroms against any ethnic minorities, claiming those who were not pure Khmer were in possession of Vietnames minds.
It would seem that the DPK was seeking not only an agrarian utopia, but one that also preserved racial purtiy.

In conclusion, Kiernan's work is an invaluable source for one working to understand the intricacies of Cambodia during the 1970's. The Pol Pot Regime was the main source I used prior to visiting Cambodia and although it only covers a brief segment of Cambodian history, it still was extremely helpful in understanding the people and their terribly sad past.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Poorly written, untenable explanation of Khmer Rouge., July 16, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 (Paperback)

This much heralded history by the Australian historian Kiernan has turned out to be a big disappointment. Despite his access to enormous amounts of information, he shows no talent for organizing the material, nor being able to discern what is important from what is trivial. His prose style is extremely dull. And as many reviewers have pointed out (e.g. New York Review of Books, Washington Post) his explanation of the Khmer Rouge (misnamed the Pol Pot regime) as being primarily motivated by racism, doesn't hold water. The overwhelming majority of the Khmer Rouge victims -- some of whom included many of my relatives -- were from the ethnic Khmer majority, not from Cambodia's ethnic minorities. Kiernan, as a former supporter of Pol Pot (until 1978) who is now a supporter of the current Hun Sen regime in Cambodia, seems determined to protect what he considers the "good" idea of communism from the bad reputation of Pol Pot. As an Australian educated Cambodian, who has studied the history of communism, I find Kiernan's perspective quite bizarre, not to say morally repugnant. A far better written and more reliable account of the topic is Elizabeth Becker's When The War Was Over. The most reliable academic history is David Chandler's Tragedy of Cambodian History and the relevant sections of his briefer History of Cambodia.