Scholarly Review:

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While working our way through the literature dealing with the Cambodian drama, which took place during the regime known as Democratic Kampuchea (DK) (used somehow improperly to cover the period 1975-1979 and corresponding to the rule of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), when DK technically did not exist before March 1976), it became clear that our understanding of this period of Cambodian history was not only dependent upon the efforts of the students of Cambodia, but also constrained by the broad political and normative environment. It is thus along these lines that we shall present the reviewed scholarship.

In its early stage, as we shall see first, the scholarship has been victim of the characteristics of the Communist rule in Cambodia. Then, the second wave of scholarship has been partly dependent upon considerations linked to international politics. However, these difficulties prove to be beneficial. Indeed, they generated, at the empirical level, a wealth of documentation and archives that are not usually available in the countries having known such transformations. This second wave of scholarship will continue, research being notably dependent upon access to new archival material. At the theoretical level, efforts by students of Cambodia to correct previously flawed or incomplete explanations led to controversies out of which came a greater and an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the Communist period, of its pre-conditions and of its grim achievements.

This conducted to a new phase of research, partly overlapping the previous one, characterised by a focus on processes, and greatly benefiting from previously accumulated scholarship, which furthermore endeavoured to study a potential link between genocide and nation-ness, this term referring to a collective feeling or consciousness that characterises the specific identity, “the nation”. Indeed, in the Cambodian case, references are made throughout the whole body of knowledge to the nationalist character of DK, or more exactly to its “ultra-nationalist, xenophobic, chauvinistic or racist” stance, while, more generally, the significance of nationhood and of some of its potential components such as racism, has bearing for genocide, notably in the framework of the UN genocide definition.

 I. The First Wave of Scholarship: Dealing with Secrecy and Closure

The first difficulty that scholars had to face was the near complete closure of the country after the “Khmer Rouge” took power on 17 April 1975. When most foreigners were evacuated, the frontiers closed and the few accredited diplomats assigned at residency without contacts with Cambodians (Becker, 1986: 166). Despite the Chinese and North Korean experts that were allowed to stay and work in Cambodia (Locard, 1995: 2), and the visits of a few journalists in 1978 and of some delegations of Communist Parties (Becker, 1986: 315, 398-341), our knowledge of what was happening within Cambodia vanished.

Hence, the first task at hand, even before thinking to explain or understand the events, was to trace those very events and attempt to establish the facts.

Beyond cases of willed distortions by unscrupulous individuals, as denounced most famously by Chomsky and Hermann but also by many other scholars as reported by Burgler, the information that filtered out of the country was sparse and difficult to cross-check (Chomsky and Hermann, 1979: 169-171; Burgler, 1990: 1-2, 283). It originated in refugees’ accounts, in the experience of those few who were evacuated from Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge at the beginning of the period or had had contact with the Communists before the country’s closure, in very few direct foreign accounts at the end of the period and in official National United Front of Kampuchea (FUNK) then DK radio broadcast (Becker, 1986: 315, 398-341; Carney, 1977; Ponchaud, 1977: 11).

Understandably, those who endeavoured to make sense of these patchy and often unverifiable sources were taking the risk to produce work far from the scholarly ideal of “verifiable truth.” Yet, this work had to be done and first explanations had to be attempted, as expressively described by Maguire (Maguire, 2005: 50-56). Ponchaud, in the preface of Cambodge: Année Zero, (1977) stresses these difficulties met in his attempt to reconstitute the facts. His conclusions, mainly that the Kampuchean revolution was one of the most radical revolution ever accomplished, aiming at eliminating the past, and grounded on class disparities and race oppositions, despite ulterior criticism, emanating first from Michael Vickery, do not depart much from later work or later controversies (Ponchaud, 1977: 229; Vickery, 1984: 48-51). Ponchaud (1977) underlines that the revolution stemmed from specific interactions between peasants and intellectuals, thesis that was then followed by other authors, such as Vickery (1984) or more recently Nairn (1997). He also notes the hysteria of purification, the concentration of power in a few hands and the excessive character linked to the extremist application of an ideology (Ponchaud, 1977), all factors that are often singled out or demonstrated in many later works (Heder and Tittemore, 2001; Hinton, 2001; Kiernan, 1996).

The remaining early scholarship, as reviewed by Quinn, underlined three main themes to explain the extremist side of the Kampuchean revolution, and the emptying of the cities (Quinn, 1989: 215-219). Schanberg, Porter, Lacouture and Shawcross stressed the brutalities of the war and its effects on the Khmer Rouge, referring to the US air strikes and to the 1970-1975 war waged between the Lon Nol Republic and the FUNK (Schanberg, 1975; Porter in U.S. Congressional Testimony, 1977; Lacouture, 1978, Shawcross, 1978a & 1978b). Barron and Paul underlined the mental illness of the Khmer Rouge leaders (Barron and Paul, 1977). Finally, Lacouture and Schanberg suggested the possibility of strong peasant resentment against the cities and landowners, and the possibility of a genuine peasant revolution (Lacouture, 1978; Schanberg, 1975).

These first two explanations have since then been rejected as untenable, on their own. The war cannot explain alone, for example, the planned terror of the FUNK then DK regime, nor its assumed beginning in 1972 (Quinn, 1989: 217). However, the 1970-1975 war is still deemed as a factor that may have contributed to push peasants to mobilise behind the FUNK, and was treated as such by the FUNK mobilising propaganda (Ablin and Hood, 1987: xxix; Frieson, 1992: 38; 1993; Gough, 1983: 218; Haas, 1991: 8; Kiernan, 1985: 349-357; 1996: 16-25, Margolin, 2003: 5-7). Regarding the mentally ill Khmer Rouge leaders, it was denied by the scholars and journalists who interviewed them (Jackson, 1989: 38).

On the contrary, the explanation in terms of true peasant revolution and the extent of peasant resentment against the cities outlasted this early period and became a matter of controversy. It was a focal point of one of the major works that opened the second wave of scholarship.

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