1975–89
Cambodia can industrialize, because there is no vicious cycle of poverty that cannot be shattered by conscious human eff ort. But responsibility for industrialization must be taken by the government, whose policies must be translated into rigorous control of foreign trade and a planned eff ort at structural reform.
Khieu Samphan1
Sir John Clapham’s advice to economic historians about repeatedly asking
“how large? how long? how often? how representative?” is rarely as diffi cult to follow as when discussing the consequences of economic policies and practices of the Cambodian revolution.2 Despite the paper mountain of internal documents, transcripts of propaganda broadcasts and interviews with refugees, survivor memoirs, academic papers and monographs con-cerning the period, the fi rst stage of the revolution, the regime of Demo-cratic Kampuchea (DK), remains a highly contentious fi eld of study because there are no reliable, verifi able statistics.3 Most of the record of that regime remains anecdotal. Perhaps the only point of common agreement is that the experimental economic policies and plans that were imple-mented between April 1975 and December 1978 failed. Th is assessment is based on the overwhelming evidence that the regime did not adequately feed its people, and the population defi cit at the end of that period bears out survivors’ claims that vast numbers of people died of overwork, maltreatment and starvation, apart, that is, from the thousands of the regime’s own supporters who were executed for political motives.
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176 Economic History of Cambodia
Th e fi nal victory over the Khmer Republic came quickly for the forces of the Cambodian communist movement. When the Khmer Rouge troops entered Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, the territory of the Khmer Republic had already shrunk to an area that included only the capital, some towns in the northwest including Battambang, Pailin and Poipet along with around 500,000 hectares of rice fi elds there, and a further small area near the maritime port in Kompong Som. Th ese scattered population centres had been fed by U.S. airlifts of rice since February 1975 when the Mekong was closed to river convoys.
Th e evacuation of Phnom Penh began within hours of the surrender.
Th ree days later, the city that had swelled with the infl ux of nearly two million refugees from the war in the countryside had been reduced to just a few thousand inhabitants consisting of upper echelons of the party and those workers and technicians needed to maintain water and power supplies. Later, an industrial workforce for factories producing agricul-tural tools and other essential items, as well as the staff employed by a handful of foreign delegations, increased the population to perhaps 100,000.4 For all intents and purposes, however, Phnom Penh was no longer a city.5
In this fi rst large-scale migration, residents of the towns returned, where possible, to their native districts. A second major relocation oc-curred in September 1975, mainly of long-term Phnom Penh citizens who had fi rst made their way to the already populous south and south-west of the country. Th ey were transferred to the less populated north-west that had had little direct experience of communist rule because it remained under nominal control of the Khmer Republic until the end of the war, so it may have been lack of administrative experience, coupled with the urban deportees’ poor agricultural skills, that made conditions in most of the northwest cooperatives particularly harsh. Much of what is recorded about the regime of Democratic Kampuchea is drawn from accounts of refugees from the northwest region, that is, from those who were relocated to the provinces of Pursat, Battambang, and what is now Banteay Meanchey.6
Most evacuees went to the liberated zones where the revolution had been in force for some time. Kratie, for instance, had been under com-munist rule since March 1970. Until 1973, villagers in the zones retained private property and lived as normally as war conditions allowed. Ith Sarin, a former schools inspector, spent nine months in the maquis in 1972 and described his journey through the countryside fi rst south and then northwest of Phnom Penh where some villages were already silent and empty, and the big houses of Chinese merchants had been locked up
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Th e Revolutionary Economy, 1975–89 177
and abandoned. Th e landscape he described resembled a tropical Guernica,
“We saw houses broken, burnt and bombed, coconut and sugar palm trees shattered by rocket fi re, bamboo clumps and mango trees dried up and withered with shrapnel. It was a scene of war painted with great pain.”7 On crossing into a liberated zone in Takeo province, however, he noted farmers doing their work “as normal” and observed trading in food taking place along the road. Th e houses on either side of Route 3 had been destroyed and the highway itself had been “gouged out and cut up” by constant raids of T-28 aircraft piloted by the republican air force. Many wats along the way were crowded with displaced villagers who had taken refuge there.
In May 1973, at the height of the American B-52 saturation bombing, when conditions in the countryside must have been intolerable, the Khmer Rouge initiated eff orts to create a nationwide system of cooperatives. Th is would take time to eff ect, but gradually ownership of the means of production, including draught animals, was collectivised.
At fi rst, membership in the collectives was voluntary but by 1974 harsh coercive measures were being reported by peasants fl eeing from them to the towns. Market activity ceased and money was no longer used for transactions. Each collective was urged to attain self-suffi ciency.
Th e structure of the collective that had developed during the period of people’s war served as the model for reconstruction as, in one giant leap after 17 April 1975, the Cambodian revolution passed from the phase of national revolution directly into that of democratic or social revolution.
Th e radical economic policies of Pol Pot, the revolutionary leader of Democratic Kampuchea, might have eventually achieved their aims of mastery and self-reliance, perhaps along the lines of North Korea. Deep factional rifts within the Communist Party of Kampuchea, however, and hysterical xenophobia directed against Vietnam together wrought such violence that, as the revolution turned on itself, the party ranks were depleted by bloody purges and counter-productive raids on Vietnamese territory. Future key players, among them Heng Samrin, Hun Sen and Chea Sim, defected to Vietnam and plotted the downfall of Democratic Kampuchea.
By late 1978, a counter-revolutionary front had formed in the refu-gee camps in southern Vietnam. In the last week of December, with the massive support of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) in a military eff ort funded largely by the USSR, the National Salvation Front forces, led by Heng Samrin, moved against Democratic Kampuchea and drove the Khmer Rouge towards the northwest border with Th ailand. Th ere, and later safely ensconced inside Th ailand in refugee camps supported
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178 Economic History of Cambodia
by western governments and multilateral aid agencies, as well as with ongoing diplomatic and matériel support from the People’s Republic of China, the Khmer Rouge regrouped and fought alongside Khmer royalist and republican contra-style troops in a bitter decade-long war against the Vietnamese-backed regime installed in Phnom Penh.
Th e People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) was founded a few days after the liberation of Phnom Penh on 7 January 1979. While heavily dependent on Vietnam’s ongoing military presence and Soviet technical and fi nancial assistance, the new revolutionary regime committed itself to national defence and nation-building, as Democratic Kampuchea had, in the name of social revolution. Factional infi ghting was kept relatively in check and despite the ongoing war against the regrouped Khmer Rouge and the severe restrictions imposed by the U.S. embargo on inter-national trade, aid and credit which it shared with Vietnam, Cambodia was slowly rebuilt.
Th e ten-year struggle for hegemony in Cambodia was the last battle of the Cold War and it ended without a clear victory, moral or military, for either side. Major political and economic changes taking place in the Soviet Union, along with demands arising in Southeast Asia for freer regional market and trade conditions put pressure on the Cambodian warring factions to resolve their diff erences. Following a protracted diplo-matic process, peace was negotiated and settled according to the Paris Peace Agreements signed on 23 October 1991.
By then, the Cambodian revolution was long over. Market liberalisa-tion had already commenced in 1985 and relaxaliberalisa-tion of rural policies con-cerning the organisation of labour, and access and control over land had continued throughout the PRK regime. In 1989, the revolution formally ended with the transformation of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea into the ideologically neutral State of Cambodia, which opened suffi cient diplomatic space for resolving the country’s longstanding confl ict prior to United Nations-sponsored general elections in May 1993.
Policies
When the revolutionary movement triumphed in April 1975, Cambodia watchers believed, with good reason, that the new regime’s economic policies would more or less follow the general principles argued in the theses of the three leftwing economists who had all held government posts during the Sangkum: Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim.
Th ey had all fl ed to the maquis in 1968 and had played active roles during the people’s war period. Hou Yuon, for instance, was the GRUNK,
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