rfmcdonald (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rfmcdonald) wrote2005-09-07 10:10 pm
rfmcdonald) wrote2005-09-07 10:10 pm
[BRIEF NOTE] Child Soldiers
I've recently read The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79, written by Ben Kiernan, director of Yale's Cambodian Genocide Project. As one would expect, this book suggests that cambodia in the late 1970s was trapped in that hellish conjunction of relentless genocide and surreal politics so characteristic of the Khmer Rouge. The most telling sign of the Khmer Rouge's near-ridiculous manic energies, it seems to me after Kiernan, was Phmon Penh's enthusiastic claiming of the territory of the Khmer Krom of southern Vietnam even as the Khmer Krom living in Cambodia were massacred for being Khmer bodies with Vietnamese spirits. While in a dystopic mood, I asked on soc.history.what-if what Cambodia would have looked like if the Khmer Rouge had stayed in power longer. After reading Kiernan's tome, I'm surprised that the Khmer Rouge lasted as long in power as it did.
Almost since Phnom Penh fell to the Vietnamese in January 1979, the question of what the Khmer Rouge's leaders could have been thinking has been frequently raised. The ethnic antagonisms of Khmers--the hatred of the Vietnamese, the distrust of the Muslim Cham and of the Chinese middleman minority--was clearly a factor, as was the concentration of these minorities in an agrarian society sharply divided between prosperous multiethnic urban areas and a depressed Khmer peasantry. The utopian ideals of the Khmer rouge leadership to forcibly break Cambodia's links with an exploitative external world and to build a modern self-sufficient Cambodia, justified by stated rationales not too dissimilar from dependency theory, also played a role. Certainly the destruction inflicted upon Cambodia by North Vietnam's partial occupation and the United States' murderous bombing raids created a space for radicals to seize power and do things.
Looking through Kiernan, one thing that particularly struck me was the use of child soldiers. With the examples of Sierra Leone and Liberia behind us, the Lord's Resistance Army and the Tamil Tigers, we in the early 21st century are more aware of the potential mayhem that a child torn from family and brutalized by ruthless ideologues can inflict. One thing that many of Kiernan's interviewees kept mentioning, again and again, were the young soldiers entering the cities in 1975, dull-eyed and holding their guns, barking orders and happily killing anyone who failed to respond adequately. Thinking about the literature on the Cambodian genocide that I've read as an interested amateur, the use of child soldiers per se didn't enter into the discussion much. Perhaps it should have.
Almost since Phnom Penh fell to the Vietnamese in January 1979, the question of what the Khmer Rouge's leaders could have been thinking has been frequently raised. The ethnic antagonisms of Khmers--the hatred of the Vietnamese, the distrust of the Muslim Cham and of the Chinese middleman minority--was clearly a factor, as was the concentration of these minorities in an agrarian society sharply divided between prosperous multiethnic urban areas and a depressed Khmer peasantry. The utopian ideals of the Khmer rouge leadership to forcibly break Cambodia's links with an exploitative external world and to build a modern self-sufficient Cambodia, justified by stated rationales not too dissimilar from dependency theory, also played a role. Certainly the destruction inflicted upon Cambodia by North Vietnam's partial occupation and the United States' murderous bombing raids created a space for radicals to seize power and do things.
Looking through Kiernan, one thing that particularly struck me was the use of child soldiers. With the examples of Sierra Leone and Liberia behind us, the Lord's Resistance Army and the Tamil Tigers, we in the early 21st century are more aware of the potential mayhem that a child torn from family and brutalized by ruthless ideologues can inflict. One thing that many of Kiernan's interviewees kept mentioning, again and again, were the young soldiers entering the cities in 1975, dull-eyed and holding their guns, barking orders and happily killing anyone who failed to respond adequately. Thinking about the literature on the Cambodian genocide that I've read as an interested amateur, the use of child soldiers per se didn't enter into the discussion much. Perhaps it should have.