UNITE! Info #47en: H.I.: Process against Pol Pot [Posted: 06.08.97] Note / Anmerkung / Note / Nota / Anmärkning: On the UNITE! / VEREINIGT EUCH! / UNISSEZ-VOUS! / ¡UNIOS! / FÖRENA ER! Info en/de/fr/es/se series: See information on the last page / Siehe Information auf der letzten Seite / Verrez information à la dernière page / Ver información en la última página / Se information på sista sidan. INTRO NOTE: Here is reproduced, in translation by me from the Swedish, an article by Hans Isaksson published in issue No. 2/1997 of the magazine Clarté, which reached me today. I find its informations and argumentation very good and deserving of a wide audience. Hans Isaksson i.a. was chairman of Vänskapsförbundet Sverige - Demokratiska Kampuchea (Friendship Association Sweden - Democra- tic Kampuchea), whose exact history I don't know but a member of which I was from 1978 on. As far as I remember and can ascertain today, it expired in the next few years. The magazine Clarté was founded in 1974 and is the organ of Svenska Clartéförbundet. Postal address: Clarté, Bondegatan 69, S - 116 34 Stockholm, Sweden; e-mail: ; home- page: . End of Intro Note T H E P R O C E S S A G A I N S T P O L P O T - IN DEFENCE OF SALOTH SAR - By Hans Isaksson We Swedish half-old leftist people as everybody knows are always getting fooled. Thus it has been and thus it will remain, as long as we lack the power to define that objective historical truth against which our opinions on history and society are to be measured. Kampuchea is a parade example, as if there were need for any more of them. The imprisoned Pot Pot / Saloth Sar is, if we are to believe a concerted media chorus, the biggest murderer of our time. And we have aided and abetted him. What we have been conducive to is not "genocide" but "democide", in accordance with that more developed terminology that profes- sor Rummel has invented, the expert in this field and the latest mentor of Per Ahlmark [Swedish liberal writer & ex-minister - Tr]. Democide is almost even worse. Democide includes genocide, political murders and mass murders but excludes those fallen in war. It is an expedient definition, in particular if you are representing that nation which in the 20th century has waged more wars than all others combined. For if you happen to get a bomb dropped on your head instead of a bludgeon, you are not a murdered person but a war casualty. And that makes a big diffe- rence. How do matters stand then with the biggest genocide of our time? After Kampuchea became independent in 1955, it once more found itself squeezed between the two US allies Thailand in the north and South Vietnam [i.e. the territory in southern Vietnam cont- rolled by the US-puppet clique; NB that the 1954 Geneva peace accord stipulated that Vietnam was to remain one state - Tr] in the east - both of them states whose territorial claims on Kam- puchea had been laid on ice during the long French colonial pe- riod. Vietnam however was still engaged in its long war between 1946 and 1975. Sihanouk's government, which outwardly stood for a neutralist line, in the interior conducted a harsh regime, supporting it- self on a minimal landowner caste. A movement of social insurrection led by the Communist Party of Kampuchea and Saloth Sar began in 1962. It was countered by the king with white terror including political murders and an in- creased oppression. The support given to the Vietnamese commu- nists by first Sihanouk and later the Kampuchean resistance movement was punished by the USA by means of massive bombings of Kampuchea in 1973-75, after an invasion of the country in 1970 and the placing of a puppet general into governemental power had not produced the desired results. The war in Kampuchea went on, with few interruptions, for 13 years. After Sihanouk had been deposed by the US coup in 1970, the resistance was led by Saloth Sar - in a new alliance with his former enemy, Sihanouk. When peace broke out in 1975 and the "Red Khmers" of Saloth Sar entered the pillaged Phnom Penh, Kampuchea's infrastructure in- cluding its irrigation systems had been bombed to bits. The country looked like a Swiss cheese, where the malaria mosquitoes thrived in the bomb craters. And relations to the victorious re- sistance movement in Vietnam had deteriorated radically since the Paris accord in 1973. There was no big power on which to support oneself except China, which had now gotten a neighbour in the south, allied to the hostile Soviet Union, which needed to be watched closely. In this situation, the new leaders of Kampuchea, rightly or wrongly, saw as the only solution in the short run as well as in the long run, to put in all efforts into restoring the agricul- tural infrastructure, manage against a threatening mass starva- tion by securing the year's rice harvest and make the country less vulnerable by evacuating as far as possible the population of the cities to the countryside. For most people, the evacuation meant a return. Of actual cities there were hardly any in Kampuchea before 1920. The population was almost exclusively dependent on rice cultivation for its survival. Plus, earlier, under the French and the Japanese, on rubber production. Phnom Penh, which in 1970 had had 500,000 inhabitants, because of the refugee influx during the war had swollen to 2 million inhabitants, who had subsisted on US aid. Such aid could now no longer be counted on. It thus in most cases was not a firmly rooted urban population that in a short time and by rough means was returned to agriculture. An extensive collectivisation of agriculture was carried out (often of units where the owners had fled or been killed during the war) and large irrigation system constructions were started. A large portion of the cadre within science, medicine and educa- tion had fled together with the US tributary regime and had taken with them everything that could be moved. There was a lack of medicine and of hospital beds and the health situation de- teriorated, i.a. on account of malaria epidemics in the wake of the war. Political resistance in the form of allies of Vietnam and rests of the old regime were a source of unrest. The cadre of the communist party in many cases were young and inexperien- ced, as were the armed forces. During the years 1975-1979 therefore, in all probability there in Kampuchea died a number of persons unnecessarily. According to such a certain American source as the Encyclopedia Britanni- ca, it is considered to be ascertained that at least 20,000 per- sons were executed. Those who were executed without having com- mitted any crime you may, if you wish, designate as having been murdered. Those informations which exist are to a large extent based on such information as, during the first weeks of the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea in 1979, were cabled out over the world as part of a war propaganda - i.e., a source that under normal con- ditions would never have been accepted. As early as some months after the invasion, the invasion army and its tributary regime in the presence of the international press in Phnom Penh were building impressive pyramids out of death's heads, purportedly all of them victims of Pol Pot. This so-called need for documen- tation quite clearly was one that served the interests of war propaganda and in part was percieved as such by observers at that time too. The fact that univocally our news media, professor Rummel and Per Ahlmark under those circumstances related above have arrived at the conclusion that 2,035,000 people "were murdered" during the time '75-'79, no more and no less, points at almost clair- voyant powers of theirs. The last census before the war, you see, was in 1962 (5.9 million people). In a speech in 1979, De- mocratic Kampuchea stated its population as being 8 million. In between the two are 15 years of constant war, civil war, mas- ssive US bombings and severe hardships. An impartial demographic assessment, which might confirm the accusation of massive geno- cide, there is not. But where there is a political interest, a critical treatment of the sources plays a lesser role. Some more sober commentators at least are admitting that Pol Pot perhaps cannot be personally blamed for every single death. Usu- ally, instead the regime of Democratic Kampuchea is being ac- cused of genocide on the ground of its politics having contribu- ted to the succumbing of one to two million people to hardship, to the extent that they were not wilfully killed. This is a new and widened definition of genocide. And it presup- poses that the civil war, the US invasion and bombings, the war of liberation and the Vietnamese invasion had been of no impor- tance for the deaths, which is a bold supposition. That definition also is foolhardy, inasmuch it ought to rebound onto those who are setting it up. If every day 40,000 children die quite unnecessarily on account of an unreasonable economic and political system, the architects and profiters of that sys- tem rightly can be considered to be perpetrators of genocide. If the new ruling class in Russia [unclear how new the author means by "new" here, but obviously the class referred to is the bourgeoisie - Tr], zealously cheered on by our democratic Wes- tern states, by its economic policies within only a few years are reducing the life expectancy of the population by some 7-10 years, this means millions of unnecessary deaths annually out of, if you wish, "hardship". But the two last-mentioned examples are *invisible* examples of genocide. Invisible, since they are so normal in our world and since we today are not being stimulated to reflect on them. In- visible to all who consider World Bank capitalism to be not one but *the* natural state of things. Defined away out of all res- ponsible historical and social sciences that have any aspira- tions for sponsor money. Abnormal and well visible, however, was the desperate and failed attempt by Pol Pot and Democratic Kampuchea to change these conditions. Therefore, it is Pol Pot who is going to stand trial, not Yelt- sin or the World Bank. The main witness in this trial will be the state and party leadership of Vietnam, who thereby will ob- tain a further footing in respectable circles. They already have clearly shown their ambition to achieve this. For in Hanoi, once again reign the companies from the USA, from Great Britain, Japan with additions from the new robber-knights Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Marlboro and Dunhill are fighting out poster wars in the streets of the city. The dollar has taken over as against the dong, whereby the USA is controlling the currency flow, Japan the lending to the consumers, Singa- pore the real-estate market, Taiwan and Korea the tax-free as- sembly industries. Vietnam has joined the program of the World Bank and has under- taken to guarantee that a society is created in which a safe ex- ploitation of labour power is assured, in which the economic gaps are widening and social progress is not given priority as against capital. That is, guaranteeing that the thirty-years- long liberation struggle of the Vietnamese was really for no- thing. It thus remains to prove that the leaders of Democratic Kampu- chea in any reasonable sense did commit genocide. Even if such is the case, this in the final instance is not why the West is conducting such a vehement hate campaign against that regime whose last remains now seem to be crumbling in the jungles of Kampuchea. It is the impudence, the total revolt against world capitalism that must be punished, "as a punishment to himself and a warning to others". This hate is the same as that which once Martin Luther directed against the rebellious German peasants: "Is there anything more devilish than a rebellious person? Therefore, these thou may sting, strangle and strike down. And shouldst thou by this become dead - well for thee, for thou shalst then have eternal life." [So far the translated article by Hans Isaksson] UNITE! / VEREINIGT EUCH! / UNISSEZ-VOUS! / ¡UNIOS! / FÖRENA ER! Info en/de/fr/es/se series: Advocates the political line of Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong. Each item # will be posted in one or more language(s). Leaflets in the INFORMATIONSBLAD series published by me, mainly in Swedish, since 1975 are available on request. Befürwortet die politische Linie von Marx, Lenin und Mao Zedong. Jedes Nummer # wird in einer oder mehreren Sprache(n) gesandt werden. 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