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Excerpts from The Black Book of Communism; Cambodia: The Country of Disconcerting Crimes by Jean-Louis Margolin
[… pg. 577]  The lineage from Mao Zedong to Pol Pot is obvious. This is one of the paradoxes that make the Khmer Rouge revolution so difficult to analyze and understand. The Cambodian tyrant was incontestably mediocre and a pale copy of the imaginative and cultivated Beijing autocrat who with no outside help established a regime that continues to thrive in the world's most populous country. Yet despite Pol Pot's limitations, it is the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward that look like mere trial runs or preparatory sketches for what was perhaps the most radical social transformation of all: the attempt to implement total Communism in one fell swoop, without the long transitional period that seemed to be one of the tenets of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Money was abolished in a week; total collectivization was achieved in less than two years; social distinctions were suppressed by the elimination of entire classes of property owners, intellectuals, and businessmen; and the ancient antagonism between urban and rural areas was solved by emptying the cities in a single week. It seemed that the only thing needed was sufficient willpower, and heaven would be found on Earth. Pol Pot believed that he would be enthroned higher than his glorious ancestors--Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong--and that the revolution of the twenty-first century would be conducted in Khmer, just as the revolutions of the twentieth century had been in Russian and then Chinese.

[… pg. 580] Like the Jews who gave their last ounce of strength so that the world would know about the realities of the Holocaust, bearing witness was sometimes the last despairing goal of a number of Cambodians who braved all sorts of dangers to escape abroad. Their tenacity often bore fruit. All of mankind should take up their flame today, remembering cases like that of Pin Yathay, who wandered alone and starving through the jungle for a month "to bring news of the genocide in Cambodia, to describe what we have been through, to tell how several million men, women, and children were all coldly programmed for death. . . how the country was razed to the ground and plunged back into a prehistoric era, and how its inhabitants were tortured so relentlessly. . . I wanted to live so that I could beg the world to come to the aid of the survivors and try to prevent total extermination."

The Spiral of Horror
Despite a rather prickly nationalism, rational Cambodians recognize that their country was really a victim of a purely domestic tragedy--a small group of idealists turned toward evil--and that the traditional elites were tragically incapable of reacting to save the country or themselves. The combination is far from exceptional in Asia or elsewhere, but only rarely does it lead to revolutions. Other factors were also to blame, including the unique geographic situation of the country, especially its long border with Laos and Vietnam, and the historical moment. The full-scale war that had been raging in Vietnam since 1964 was undoubtedly a decisive factor in these events.

Civil War (1970-1975)
The Khmer kingdom, which had been a French protectorate since 1863, escaped the Indochinese war of 1946-1954 more or less unharmed. At the moment when resistance groups linked to the Viet Minh began to form in 1953, Prince Sihanouk began a peaceful "crusade for independence." Facilitated by excellent diplomatic relations between Sihanouk and Paris, this "crusade" met with considerable success and undercut his adversaries on the left. But in the face of the ensuing confrontation between the Vietnamese Communists and the United States, the subtle balancing act by which he attempted to preserve Cambodian neutrality earned him only the mistrust of all parties and growing incomprehension inside the country.

In March 1970 the prince was ousted by his own government and by the Assembly, with the blessing (but apparently not the active participation) of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The country was thrown into disarray, and terrible pogroms against the Vietnamese minority began. Of the roughly 450,000 Vietnamese in the country, two-thirds were forced to flee to South Vietnam. Communist Vietnamese embassy buildings were burned down, and an ultimatum was issued for all foreign troops to leave the country immediately. The ultimatum was of course ignored. Hanoi, which found itself with no ally except the Khmer Rouge inside the country, decided to back them to the hilt, supplying arms and military advisers and providing access to training camps inside Vietnam. Vietnam eventually occupied the greater part of the country in the name of the Khmer Rouge, or rather in the name of Sihanouk, who was so furious at his earlier humiliation that he joined with the local Communists, until then his worst enemies. On the advice of Beijing and Hanoi, the Communists rolled out the red carpet for him but gave him no actual political power. Thus the internal conflict became one of royalist Communists versus the Khmer Republic, with the latter led by General (soon Marshal) Lon Nol. The forces of the Khmer Republic were considerably weaker than those of the North Vietnamese and seemed unable to capitalize on Sihanouk's unpopularity among intellectuals and the middle classes in the cities and towns. They were soon forced to ask for American aid in the form of bombing raids, arms, and military advisers; they also accepted a futile intervention from the South Vietnamese.

After the catastrophic failure of operation Chenla-II in early 1972, when the best republican troops were decimated, the war became a long agony as the Khmer Rouge tightened the screws around the main urban areas, which eventually could be supplied only by air. But this rearguard action was murderously destructive, and it destabilized the population, who, unlike the Vietnamese, had never experienced anything like it. American bombing raids were massive: more than 540,000 tons of explosives were dropped on the combat zones, mostly in the six months before the U.S. Congress cut off funding for such raids in August 1973. The bombing slowed the progress of the Khmer Rouge, but it also ensured that there would never be a shortage of recruits in a countryside now filled with hatred for the Americans. It also further destabilized the republic by causing a tremendous influx of refugees into the cities, probably one-third of a total population of 8 million. This buildup of refugees facilitated the evacuation of urban areas after the Khmer Rouge's victory and enabled the Khmers to claim repeatedly in their propaganda: "We have defeated the world's greatest superpower and will therefore triumph over all opposition--nature, the Vietnamese, and all others."

The fall of Phnom Penh and the last republican cities on 17 April 1975 had been expected for so long that it came as something of a relief, even to the losers. Nothing, it was assumed, could be worse than such a cruel and futile civil war. Yet the signs had always been there: the Khmer Rouge had not waited for victory to demonstrate their disconcerting aptitude for violence and extreme measures. Tens of thousands of people were massacred after the capture of the ancient royal capital, Oudong, in 1974."

As "liberation" swept the country, "reeducation centers" were established and became harder and harder to distinguish from the "detention centers" that, in theory, were reserved for hardened criminals. Initially the reeducation centers were modeled on the Viet Minh prison camps of the 1950s and reserved chiefly for prisoners from Lon Nol's army. There was never any question of applying the Geneva Convention here, since all republicans were considered traitors rather than prisoners of war. In Vietnam there had been no deliberate massacres of prisoners, whether French or native. In Cambodia, by contrast, the strictest possible regime became the norm, and it seems to have been decided early on that the normal fate of a prisoner was to be death. One large camp, which contained more than 1,000 detainees, was studied by Henri Locard. Established in 1971 or 1972, it confined enemy soldiers and their real or supposed families, including children, together with Buddhist monks, suspect travelers, and others. As a result of harsh treatment, a starvation diet, and widespread disease, most of the prisoners and all the children died very quickly. Executions were also very common, with as many as thirty killed in a single evening.

Massive deportations of civilians began in 1973. Some 40,000 were transferred from Takeo Province to the border zones near Vietnam, and many fled toward Phnom Penh. After an abortive attempt to take the town of Kompong Cham, thousands of citizens were forced to accompany the Khmer Rouge in their retreat. Kratie, the first city of any size to be taken, was entirely emptied of its population. The year 1973 also marked a decisive break with North Vietnam. Offended by the Kampuchean Communist Party's refusal to join the negotiations in Paris in January 1973 concerning the US. withdrawal, the North Vietnamese drastically reduced assistance, and thus their ability to influence the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot's team took advantage of this turn of events to begin eliminating approximately 1,000 "Viet Minh Khmers" who had returned to Cambodia. These former anti-French resistance fighters had left for Hanoi after the Geneva peace accord of 1954. Because of their experience and their links with the Vietnamese Communist Party, they represented a real alternative to the Khmer Rouge leaders, most of whom had come to Communism only after the Indochinese war or while studying in France. A number of the latter had begun their political training as militants in the French Communist Party.

[… pg. 584]  The influx of city dwellers to the villages caused a tremendous upheaval in rural life, particularly in the balance between resources and consumption. In the fertile rice plains of Region 5, in the northwest, the 170,000 inhabitants were joined by 210,000 new arrivals. The CPK did all it could to drive a wedge between the prasheashon shah, the country people, also known as the "70s," most of whom had been under the control of the Khmer Rouge since the war had broken out; and the prasheashon thmei, the "New People," also known as the "75s" or the "17 Aprils." It tried to incite class hatred among the "patriotic proletariat" for these "lackeys of the capitalist imperialists." A two-tier legal system was introduced; in effect only the rural people, who were in a small majority, had any rights. In the early days they were allowed to cultivate a small amount of private property to eat in the obligatory canteen before the others. Their food was marginally better, and occasionally they were also allowed to vote in elections in which only a single candidate appeared on the ballot. An apartheid system was quickly achieved. The two groups lived in separate areas of the village and, in principle, were not allowed even to talk to each other, let alone intermarry.

These two population groups were soon subdivided. As part of total collectivization, the peasants were divided into "poor peasants," "landed peasants," "rich peasants," and former traders. Among the New People, nonofficials and those who lacked an education were soon separated from former civil servants and intellectuals. The fate of these last two groups was generally dire: they were purged little by little, with each successive purge reaching a little further down the hierarchy, until both groups completely disappeared. After 1978 the purges also included women and children.

But ruralizing the entire population was not enough for the leaders of the CPK. After only a few months, many of the New People were ordered to new deportation centers, and this time they had no voice in their fate. For example, in September 1975 alone, several hundred thousand people left the eastern and southeastern regions for the northwest. It was not uncommon for an individual to be deported three or four times. In addition there were "work brigades," which would take all young people and parents with no young children far from their assigned village for several months. The intention of the regime was fourfold. First, to preclude any potential political threat, the regime sought to forestall the formation of any lasting links between the peasants and the New People. Second, the regime sought to "proletarianize" the New People ever more thoroughly by preventing them from taking their possessions with them and from having the time to reap what they had sown. Third, the Khmer Rouge sought to maintain total control of population movements through the initiation of large-scale agricultural projects, such as cultivating the relatively poor land in the mountains and the sparsely populated jungle regions in the outlying areas of the country. Finally, the regime undoubtedly sought to rid itself of a maximum of "useless mouths." Each successive evacuation-- whether on foot, in carts, or in slow, badly overcrowded trains that sometimes took as long as a week to reach their destination--was an extremely demanding experience for severely undernourished people. In light of the severe shortage of medical facilities, losses were high.

"Voluntary" transfers were a slightly different matter. New People were often given the chance to "return to their native village" or to work in a Cooperative where conditions were easier, with better health care and better food. Invariably the volunteers, who were often quite numerous, would then find themselves in places where conditions were even worse.

[… pg. 587]  The interrogators zealously extorted successive confessions by any means possible in order to please their bosses. Imaginary conspiracies abounded, and more networks were constantly being uncovered. The blind hatred of Vietnam caused people to lose all sense of reality. One doctor was accused of being a member of the "Vietnamese CIA"; he had allegedly been recruited in Hanoi in 1956 by an American agent disguised as a tourist. Liquidations were also carried out at the grass-roots level; according to one estimate, 40,000 of the 70,000 inhabitants in one district were killed as "traitors collaborating with the CIA."

But the really massive genocide took place in the eastern zone. Hostile Vietnam was nearby, and Sao Phim, the military and political chief of the region, had built up a solid local power base. It was here that the only full-fledged rebellion against the central regime ever occurred, in a short-lived civil war in May and June 1978. In April, after 409 cadres from the east had been locked up in the central prison in Tuol Sleng and it was clear that all was lost, Sao Phim killed himself, and his wife and children were murdered while attending his funeral. A few fragments of the armed forces in the region tried to foment a rebellion, then crossed into Vietnam, where they established the embryonic Front for National Salvation, which later accompanied the Vietnamese army from Hanoi to Phnom Penh. When the central authorities regained control in the east, they condemned to death all the people living in the region, labeling them "Vietnamese in Khmer bodies." From May to December 1978 between 100,000 and 250,000 people out of a population of 1.7 million were massacred, starting with militants and young people. In Sao Phim's village all 120 families (700 people) were killed. In another village, there were 7 survivors out of 15 families, 12 of which were totally wiped out. After July any survivors were taken away in trucks, trains, and boats to other zones, where they were progressively exterminated. Thousands more died in transit. They were forced to wear blue clothes specially imported from China; everyone else under Pol Pot's rule wore black. Gradually, with little fanfare, and generally out of sight of the other villagers, the people dressed in blue disappeared. In one cooperative in the northwest, when the Vietnamese army finally arrived, only about 100 easterners of the original 3,000 remained. These atrocities took a horrific new turn just before the fall of the regime. Women, children, and old people were massacred together with the young men, and the original peasants were killed together with the New People. Because the task was so overwhelmingly large, the Khmer Rouge forced the ordinary population, including even the "75s," to help them carry out the massacres. The revolution was out of control and was threatening to engulf every last Cambodian.

[… pg. 599]  As though it was not already difficult enough to adjust to a new way of life, the system gave people no time to rest and recover. The leaders seemed convinced that the radiant future was just around the corner, at the end of the Four-Year Plan presented by Pol Pot in August 1976. His objective was to increase production massively by increasing capital through the export of agricultural products, which were the country's only obvious resource. The Khmer Rouge believed that the way forward would come through the industrialization of agriculture and the development of diversified light industry, followed later by the construction of heavy industry. Strangely, this modernist mystique was based on the old mythology about the state of Angkor: "Because we are the race that built Angkor, we can do anything," said Pol Pot in a long speech on 27 September 1977, in which he also announced that the Angkar was really the Communist Party of Kampuchea. His other justification for his belief in the Khmer Rouge was the "glorious 17 April," which had demonstrated the superiority of the poor peasants of Cambodia over the world's greatest imperial power.

[… pg. 603]  The Destruction of All Values
Hunger dehumanizes, causing one person to turn on another and to forget everything except his own survival. How else can one explain cannibalism? It was perhaps less widespread than in China during the Great Leap Forward, and it seems to have been limited to the eating of people who were already dead. Pin Yathay reports two examples: a former teacher who ate her sister, and the inmates of a hospital ward who ate a young man. In both cases, punishment for the "ogres" (a particularly bloodthirsty spirit in the Khmer tradition) was death; the teacher was beaten to death in front of the assembled village and her own daughter. As in China, cannibalism also existed as an act of revenge: Ly Heng tells of a Khmer Rouge deserter who was forced to eat his own ears before being killed. There are also many stories about the eating of human livers. This act was not confined to the Khmer Rouge: republican soldiers ate the livers of their enemies during the 1970-1975 civil war. Similar traditions can be found all across Southeast Asia. Haing Ngor describes how in one prison the fetus, liver, and breasts of a pregnant woman who had been executed were treated; the child was simply thrown away (others had already been hung from the ceiling to dry), and the rest was carried away with cries of "That's enough meat for tonight!" Ken Khun tells of a cook in a cooperative who prepared an eye remedy from human gall bladders (which he shared out quite liberally to his bosses) and who praised the tastiness of human liver. These instances of cannibalism reflect the loss of all moral and cultural values, and particularly the disappearance of the central Buddhist value of compassion. Such was one of the paradoxes of the Khmer Rouge regime: it claimed that its intention was to create an egalitarian society in which justice, fraternity, and altruism would be the key values, yet like other Communist regimes it produced a tidal wave of selfishness, inequality, and irrationality. To survive, people were forced to cheat, lie, steal, and turn their hearts to stone.

The loss of all human compassion and decency had long been the norm at the highest level of power. After Pol Pot disappeared into the jungle in 1963 he did nothing to get back in touch with his family, even after 17 April 1975. His two brothers and his sister-in-law were deported along with everyone else.

[… pg. 617]  Contemporary events often cause us to reconsider the past--not to alter the facts, in the manner of the North Koreans, but to change priorities and to reinterpret events. For a long time Cambodia was seen as the peaceful country of Sihanouk, an island of neutrality during the wars in Indochina, typified by the "Khmer smile" of Apsara goddesses on the Angkor reliefs and by the happy faces of an urbane monarch and his peaceful peasant people who contentedly tended their rice crops and palm canes. But the events of the last three decades have brought out the darker side of the Khmer past. Angkor is one of the marvels of the world, but most of its miles of low-relief sculptures represent warlike scenes. And such huge constructions, with even bigger water reservoirs (baray), would have required massive deportations and enslavements.

There are very few written records about the Angkor period, which lasted from the eighth to the fourteenth century; but all the other Hindu and Buddhist monarchies of the Southeast Asian peninsula (in Thailand, Laos, and Burma) were constituted along the same lines. Their rather violent history resembles that of Cambodia: throughout the region repudiated concubines were trampled to death by elephants, new dynasties began with the massacre of the previous monarch's family, and conquered populations were deported to desert zones. Absolute power was the norm in all these societies, and disobedience was tantamount to sacrilege. The more enlightened despots did not abuse their power, but administrative structures were invariably extremely weak and fragile, and the situation was often volatile as a result. Everywhere the populations seemed to have a tremendous capacity simply to accept things; unlike in China, revolts against monarchic power were rare. Instead, people tended to flee to other states, which were never far away, or simply to more remote regions.

Sihanouk's reign (from 1941, although the French protectorate lasted until 1953) appears almost idyllic in comparison to the events that followed his dethroning in March 1970. But he himself never hesitated to resort to violence, particularly against his leftist opponents. There is a good deal of evidence that in 1959 and 1960, when he was concerned with the growth in popularity of the Communist left--which was highly critical of corruption within the regime-- he had the editor of the newspaper Prasheashun (The people) assassinated, and had Khieu Samphan, the editor of the best-selling paper in the country, the biweekly French language paper L 'observateur, beaten up in the-street. In August 1960 eighteen people were thrown into prison, and all the main left-wing papers were banned. In 1962, in conditions that are still unclear today, Tou Samouth, the secretary general of the underground Communist Party of Kampuchea, was assassinated, most likely by the secret police, an event that facilitated Saloth Sar's ascension to the top of the hierarchy. In 1967 the Samlauth revolt and the influence of the Cultural Revolution in some Chinese schools brought the worst episodes of repression of Sihanouk's reign, leading to numerous deaths, including those of the last Communists who were still out in the open. One side effect of this was that about 100 intellectuals who were sympathetic to the leftist cause then enlisted in the Khmer Rouge resistance movement. In Henri Locard's view "Polpotist violence grew out of the brutality of the repression of the Sihanoukists." From a strictly chronological point of view, he is undoubtedly correct. Both the regal autocrat and the marshal silenced anyone who was remotely critical of their inept regimes. In so doing, they left the CPK as the only opposition with any credibility. But it is harder to agree with Locard from the point of view of genealogy: the ideological foundations and the political ends of the Khmer Rouge were never a reaction to Sihanouk, but were instead part of the great tradition of Leninism found in the successive figures of Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh. Cambodia's calamitous evolution after independence and its participation in the war facilitated the seizure of power by CPK extremists and lent some legitimacy to their unparalleled recourse to violence, but the radicalism itself cannot be explained away by external circumstances.

[… pg. 619] 1975: A Radical Break
It was much easier for the revolution in Cambodia to define what it opposed than actually to announce a positive program. For the most part, the Khmer Rouge sought revenge, and it was through this intention that they found most of their popular support, which then gained new impetus through radical collectivization. The revolution was also the revenge of the countryside against the towns. In no time at all the peasants had taken everything from the New People, either through the black market or by quite simply going through their baggage. In the villages, the poorest peasants took revenge on the local "capitalists," who were identified as anyone who had anything to sell or who employed someone. But revenge was often personal, too, as old professional and familial hierarchies were overturned. Eyewitness statements often emphasize the surprising promotion of previously marginal characters, such as alcoholics, to new positions of authority in the villages: "Often these people were rehabilitated by the Angkar and given positions of authority because they could kill their compatriots without showing any scruples or remorse." Haing Ngor saw in this action the political sanctification of what he considered to be the lowest part of the Khmer soul, known as kum, a murderous thirst for revenge that time is powerless to assuage. Many suffered as a result: Ngor's aunt, for instance, stayed behind in her native village, lost without the help of her parents in the city. Ngor also met a nurse who had been promoted to the position of doctor and who tried to have him killed even though he was a newcomer. The nurse was then promoted to the position of ward leader, radically overturning the hierarchy he had helped support. What exploded in Cambodian society was thus a complex of tensions, only some of which could be termed social in the strictest sense of the word.

Values were turned on their heads. Jobs that had been extremely low status, such as chef or canteen cleaner, became the most sought after, as they offered ready opportunities to steal food on the job. Degrees and qualifications became useless bits of paper and a real liability if one ever attempted to use them. Humility became the cardinal virtue: among cadres who came back to the countryside, "strangely enough, the job they wanted most was toilet cleaner. . . . getting over one's repugnance for such things was proof of ideological transformation." The Angkar wanted a monopoly on familial relations, and sought to be addressed by people in public as "mother-father." This typical feature of Asiatic Communism caused considerable confusion between the Party-state and the adult population.

[… pg. 623]  The system thus never progressed beyond its warlike origins, and hatred always formed a crucial part of its ideology. This was often translated into a morbid obsession with blood. The beginning of the national anthem, "The Glorious Victory of 17 April," is revealing:
Bright red blood that covers towns and plains
Of Kampuchea, our motherland,
Sublime blood of workers and peasants,
Sublime blood of revolutionary men and women fighters!
The blood, changing into unrelenting hatred
And resolute struggle
On 17 April, under the flag of revolution,
Frees us from slavery!
Long live, long live, Glorious 17 April,
Glorious victory, with greater significance
than the age of Angkor Wat!

Pol Pot once commented: "As you know, our national anthem was not written by a poet. Its essence is the blood of our whole people, of everyone who fell in the course of the past few centuries. It is the appeal of this blood that has been incorporated into our national anthem." There was even a lullaby that ended with the words: "You should never forget the class struggle."

The Marxist-Leninist Culmination
The exceptionally bloody nature of the Khmer Rouge experience inevitably arouses a temptation to insist on its uniqueness as a phenomenon, similar to the argument for the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Other Communist regimes and the people who defend them have led the way here, claiming that the Pol Pot regime was an ultra-left-wing phenomenon or some sort of red fascism that was thinly disguised as Communism. But two decades later it is clear that the CPK was indeed a member of the family: it had its own peculiarities, but so did Poland and Albania. And in the final analysis, Cambodian Communism was closer to Chinese Communism than Chinese Communism was to the Russian version.

Several possible influences on the Khmer Rouge have been singled out. There has long been a theory that there was a considerable French influence, since almost all the Khmer Rouge leaders were at some point students in France, and most of them--including Pol Pot himself--were members of the French Communist Party. A number of the historical references they used can be explained on that basis. As Suong Sikoeun, leng Sary's second-in-command, explained: "I was very influenced by the French Revolution, and in particular by Robespierre. It was only a step from there to becoming a Communist. Robespierre is my hero. Robespierre and Pol Pot: both of them share the qualities of determination and integrity." It is difficult to go beyond this ideal of intransigence and find anything more substantial in the discourse or practice of the CPK that might be described as clearly coming from France or from French Communism. Khmer Rouge leaders were far more practical than they were theoretical: what was genuinely of interest to them was carrying out an experiment in "real socialism."

[… pg. 634]  It is unquestionable that Pol Pot and his cohorts are guilty of war crimes. Prisoners from the republican army were systematically maltreated; many were executed. Those who surrendered in 1975 were later persecuted without mercy. It is equally clear that the Khmer Rouge also committed crimes against humanity. Entire social groups were found unworthy of living and were largely exterminated. Any political opposition, real or supposed, was punished by death. The chief difficulty involves determining the crime of genocide. If one uses the literal definition, the discussion risks falling into absurdity: genocide refers only to the systematic extermination of national, ethnic, racial, and religious groups. Because the Khmers as a whole were not targeted for extermination, attention would then have to turn to ethnic minorities and eventually to the Buddhist monks. But even taken as a whole they would represent only a small proportion of the victims; and it is not easy to say that the Khmer Rouge did specifically repress minorities--with the exception of the Vietnamese after 1977, when relatively few remained in the country. The Cham on the other hand were targeted because of their Muslim faith, which was a serious cause for resistance. Some authors have tried to resolve the problem by bringing in the notion of politicide, which, broadly speaking, means genocide on a political basis (one might also speak of sociocide, meaning genocide on a social basis). But this fails to get to the heart of the matter. The real question is, should such crimes be treated as seriously as genocide or not? And if the answer is yes, as these authors seem to believe, why should the issue be clouded by the use of a new term? It is perhaps worth recalling that during the discussions leading to the adoption of the United Nations Convention on Genocide, it was the Soviet Union that--for all too obvious reasons--opposed the inclusion of the word "political" in the definition of the term. But it is above all the word "racial" (which covers neither ethnicity nor nationality) that should provide an answer here. "Race," a phantasm that recedes ever further as human knowledge increases, exists only in the eyes of the beholder; in reality there is no more a Jewish race than there is a bourgeois race. But for the Khmer Rouge, as for the Chinese Communists, some social groups were criminal by nature, and this criminality was seen as transmittable from husband to wife, as well as an inherited trait. Here the ghost of Trofim Lysenko looms large. We can speak of the racialization of social groups, and the crime of genocide therefore can be applied to their physical elimination. This elimination, as we have seen, was pushed to its limits in Cambodia and was undoubtedly carried out deliberately.