The Arrest of Nuon Chea- Terror is an Old Hat

The name, Khmer Rouge, may no longer mean much to most people. Yet to read of the arrest of Cambodia’s senior-most surviving Khmer Rouge ideologist Nuon Chea or "Brother No 2" brought back memories. Nuon Chea was arrested and charged with crimes against humanity yesterday - three decades after the murderous communist regime left 1.7 million people dead by subjecting them to starvation, overwork and execution. The Taliban whom we love to hate, and Saddam Hussein may figure on the list of despised regimes along with North Korea but it is too early for history to rank them.

I have heard from those of my parents’ generation about the cruelty and atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese in those parts of Asia that were under their control. Films and books like the Bridge on the River Kwai capture this very well. But in the post-World War II era, if there was an instance of systematic and brutal genocide in Asia, it was in Cambodia in the 70s. We hear so often of right wing extremism and religious fundamentalism that we may have forgotten that there is also a left wing fundamentalism. What happened in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge years was nothing but an instance of ideology that ran amok in a totally ghastly way. What the Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians), a term ironically coined by the then king Nordom Sihanouk did in Cambodia makes India’s extreme left wingers and the Maoists of Nepal look benign.

The Khmers began well, displacing the US-backed puppet regime of Gen Lon Nol. The US-backed regime itself was so hated that the Khmer Rouge troops were initially welcomed. In fact, it was only after the American intervention in Cambodia that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge began to win wider support. From a badly-organized and poorly-equipped force of fewer than 5,000 men in 1970, it grew to become an army of around 70,000 when, in April 1975, the Lon Nol dictatorship finally collapsed.

Soon, however, their ideological puritanism came to the forefront. Through its vision of an agrarian society, Khmer Rouge tried to take Cambodia back to the middle ages, forcing millions of people from the cities to work in communal farms in the countryside. But this dramatic attempt at social engineering inflicted a terrible cost and whole families died from execution, starvation, disease and overwork.

This vision of an agrarian society had no place for any one who could not work at the farms and so academics, professionals, bureaucrats and teachers were all bundled into trucks and driven mostly out of the capital city of Phnom Penh into the countryside. Basically, all people who could read and write were suspects but since that could not be easily discerned, any one wearing spectacles was picked up on the premise that any one who wore glosses presumably needed to read something and held a desk job. By the time the Khmer Rouge was deposed by a Vietnamese-backed faction of Communists – (Hun Sen, the Prime Minister today, was the foreign minister in the Vietnamese-backed regime), a whole generation of intellectuals had been wiped out, leaving Cambodia bereft of practically every kind of professional.

The Khmer Rouge attempted to turn Cambodia into a classless society by depopulating cities. Family members were often relocated to different parts of the country with all postal and telephone services withdrawn. The total lack of agricultural knowledge on the part of the former city-dwellers made famine inevitable. The regime tampered with the religion, culture, customs, language and even the calendar by starting a new era called year zero.

Over the years, although political stability of sorts has returned to Cambodia, the scars have not yet healed. Hardly any one has been brought to trial. Most of the top leadership has died and in respect of those who have been arrested, trials are far from being complete - part of the reason being that there are few Cambodian judges left and the UN-sponsored tribunal has to have judges conversant with the French system of jurisprudence which is followed in the country and the government has to approve of the judges chosen.

The arrest of Nuon Chea, a now obscure but once powerful symbol of terror re-minds us that the war against terror is not a new one. The tools and methods of the past were different but the end result was the same - suffering, misery and decimation. And what is scarier, if you dig deep enough, you will find hovering in the background, the long shadow of a superpower. usually, the same familiar superpower.