Genocide

Some historians have argued that mass deaths and mass killings in the 20th Century were linked to utopian projects that aimed at the radical transformation of society. This essay will look at why this argument is both true and correct and will focus on the mass deaths and mass killings better known as genocide that occurred in Cambodia (1975-1979) and Rwanda (1994) both of which were linked to utopian projects.

In order to understand why these mass deaths and mass killings did take place we need to define what is meant by utopian projects, what is genocide and secondly examine the historical events in Cambodia and Rwanda before the mass deaths and mass killings took place. “A utopia is an imaginative account of a perfect society or ideal commonwealth. The term, which I often used derogatively to mean unrealistic is derived from Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)” . “What is Genocide? Lemkin the inventor of this term explains that genocide is… “a term deriving from the Greek word genos (tribe, race) and the Latin cide (by way of analogy, see homicide, fratricide)…” The legal definition of “genocide” is stipulated in Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crime and Genocide which reads as follows:

…genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group, as such:

a) Killing members of the group;

b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

In the context of genocidal state, the genocidal acts, namely the activities depicted in points a, b, c, d, e are committed or sponsored by the state.” We will now look in more detail how the idea of utopian projects can be applied to Cambodia (1975-1979) and Rwanda (1994) and the resulting genocide.

“Its is a sad irony of history that it took Pol Pot’s savage utopia to put Cambodia on the current world map.” Prior to the establishment of Democratic Kampuchea (DK) Cambodia was for most westerners (if they knew of it at all) an exotic backwater that was home to the fabulous ruins of Angkor. Yet Pol Pot’s three and half years of rule over Cambodia shattered this stereotype with as many as two million people killed through mass executions, starvation and slave labour in one the most chilling and bloody chapters of the twentieth century as he strived for a utopian society.

Pol Pots political activity began in post World War II France, which ruled Cambodia as part of its Indochina colony. The son of a prosperous farming family, Pol Pot was well educated and three years after joining Ho Chi Minh’s Indochinese Communist Party in 1946 he was awarded a scholarship to study radio engineering in Paris. During his time in Paris Pol Pot would create a Paris student group with other Cambodian students, this group was the forerunner to the Khmer Rouge. It was also during this time Pot’s plan’s for Cambodia would first emerge. In a pamphlet authored by Pot he challenged the legitimacy of Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s (king from 1941-45 and prime minister from 1955-60) Cambodian government, claiming he would someday institute a democracy “pure as a diamond”.

In 1952 Pol Pot took another significant step when he joined the French Communist Party which was known for its Stalinistic views and its expressed goal of brining real socialism to Cambodia. Returning to Phnom Penh in 1953 Pol Pot established the embryonic Communist Party in Cambodia which began to form a resistance to Sihanouk but aced with police repression as a result of the resistance he fled 10 years later in 1963, seeking sanctuary in the remote rural areas of the country. During 1965-67 Pol Pot travelled extensively in North Vietnam and China. It was during this trip to China that Pol Pot would become heavily influenced by the Chinese Stalinists.

China was in the throes of a Cultural Revolution and it was this Revolution which inspired Pol Pots agrarian communist utopia where the very lifeblood of his nation could be poured entirely into agricultural projects of the grandest scale. This vision would also lead to the creation of the Khmer Rouge – an extreme form of Mao Zedong’s eclectic mixture of Stalinism, nationalism and peasant radicalism and the atrocities that occurred once they were in power.

Unfortunately for Pol Pot the Khmer Rouge lacked