Social impacts of the Khmer Rouge

Khmer Rouge & Cambodian Education

SOCIAL IMPACTS of KHMER ROUGE and TODAY'S BRUTAL REALITY for CAMBODIAN CHILDREN

Murdering of Cambodian Teachers

Cambodian Children's Propaganda Song

Child Prostitution / Sex Slavery & Child Labor

Methods, Research Design & Analyses

Results, Discussion, Implications

What many people in the U.S. remember about events in Southeast Asia in the year 1975 is the hasty departure of American military personnel from Saigon. But there was another momentous event in Southeast Asia in that year; in fact, on April 17, 1975, the murderous troops of the communist Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, and their entrance into the streets of Phnom Penh began a killing spree that took the lives of an estimated 1.7 million innocent people.

This bloodbath - known today as the "killing fields" - continued for three years, eight months, and 20 days. The extermination of an estimated 20% of the population of Cambodia was among the most terrifying programs of brutality to civilians in history. All those innocents were wiped out because the Khmer Rouge dictator, Pol Pot, and his associates - several of whom were former schoolteachers - wanted to create a Cambodian state which was void of individualism, of family ties, Buddhism, property ownership, and intellectuals. The Khmer Rouge actually believed they were cleansing their country of the last lingering vestiges of "colonial imperialism." [the French controlled Cambodia for 90 years.]

Meanwhile, there is another important issue worthy of discussion in this paper: education in Cambodia. HYPOTHESIS: Educational programs in Cambodia were becoming a very positive part this nation prior to 1975, but were basically destroyed by Pol Pot and the subsequent Vietnamese occupation. Today, 28 years later, education in Cambodia still suffers from the bloody political regimes, and while education falters, tens of thousands of children are imprisoned in the Cambodian sex slave industry and working as child laborers in industry.

REVIEW of LITERATURE: According to the journal History of Education (Ayres, 1999), there was a "prolific period of educational expansion" in Cambodia following their independence from France in 1953. And by the end of the 1960s decade, Cambodia's educational infrastructure was "the envy of many of its counterparts in the developing world," Ayres writes. There were, at that time, schools, colleges, universities, lycees "dotted the countryside," providing the children of Cambodia with the chance to learn what the French colonialists had denied their parents.

In fact, by 1969, Ayres' article continues, more than 20% of the national budget of Cambodia was allocated for the building of a decent educational system. Just since independence from France had been achieved, some 3,202 primary schools, 163 secondary schools, and nine universities had been built in Cambodia. That was an increase of 130% beyond the number of schools inherited when the French departed. But things began to go downhill for education in Cambodia when, in March 1970, there was a coup d'etat, which was followed by a civil war. That war destroyed many of the good schools in Cambodia.

Ayres writes that at the beginning of the academic year 1969-70, there were a total of 5,275 public primary schools; but with war raging and bombs falling on cities and villages, the number of primary schools controlled by the government shrank to 1,064. What happened to the schools? "Many...were leveled by the bombing," Ayres explains. "Others were turned over to the armies of the Communist and Republican protagonists, who used them as barracks, as prisons or as munitions warehouses." Four years later, well into the civil war, the destruction of schools continued. Nearly half of the nation's 148 colleges were closed, and the only universities that stayed open were located in Phnom Penh.

With the buildings that once housed their schools either demolished or turned into war-related facilities, some students were nonetheless given a "rudimentary education" outdoors under trees, in buffalo stables or in community halls. When the civil war was ended, the new regime, the Khmer Rouge, saw educational books and other materials as reminders of foreign intervention (imperialism), and they let many books rot in the tropical weather or used the books to start cooking fires or for "...rolling cigarettes." In addition to that sad situation, the Khmer Rouge reportedly murdered "...75% of teachers, 96% of higher education students and 67% of primary and secondary school-aged pupils." While he admits that those terrible figures - which were published by noted Cambodian historian Michael Vickery - may be "somewhat exaggerated," Ayres asserts that the Khmer Rouge basically "destroyed educational infrastructure" and hence they basically "destroyed education in Cambodia."

That having been said, Ayres goes on to point out that there is some evidence that members of Pol Pot's administration did actually lay out a plan for the education of children in this new regime. Some documents have been discovered that show while the old style of education (reflecting French colonial values) had been decimated, the Khmer Rouge did discuss a "Four-Year Plan" to build socialism "in all fields," including education. The plan was for Khmer Rouge-approved teachers for first "educate themselves among the people's movement," and then to teach "letters and numbers" and to "learn technology" and all the while to "cultivate good political consciousness." That consciousness, Ayres continues, really boiled down to mastery of repeating the party line ("the party is correct") and going along with the idea that "culture" was bad because it reflected colonial values.

It is pivotal to understand, Ayres writes, that education was provided to the population during the Pol Pot dictatorship "only to the extent that it did not interfere with the regime's other priorities." And the reality of the "schools" available for learning during this horrific period of human suffering actually consisted of teachers who were not credentialed and were located in buffalo stables, "in a thatched sala or under trees." Students were "required to make their own primitive learning instruments" - for example, making chalk from clay - and among the most important things taught were "rudimentary literacy, numeracy, revolutionary songs, and through slogans, revolutionary morality."

One of the songs children were required to learn was called "Children of the New Kampuchea" (the name Pol Pot gave to his bloody revolution). The lyrics went like this:

We, the children have the good fortune to live the rest of our time in precious harmony under the affectionate care of the Kampuchean revolution, immense, most clear and shining. We the children of the revolution make the supreme revolution to strive to increase our ability to battle, and make the stand of the revolution perfect."

In September 1978, Pol Pot announced that he had a plan for a "revolutionary educational system"; Ayres writes that this rhetoric was designed to show the world a "human face" to try to deflect criticism from the world community of the Khmer Rouge atrocities. But three months after his announcement, the Vietnamese launched a "full-scale invasion of Cambodia," and Pol Pot's regime collapsed on January 7, 1979. Key leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime fled to remote parts of the country, neat the border with Thailand, where they "regrouped with their few supporters" and in fact maintained control "over large sections" of several provinces.

Meanwhile, what happened to education during the ten years that the Vietnamese controlled most of Cambodia? Thomas Clayton, who was a teacher and researcher in Cambodia on three different occasions since the early 1990s, has written a book (Education and the Politics of Language: hegemony and pragmatism in Cambodia, 1979-1989) that was reviewed in the journal Comparative Education (McNamara 2001). The author claimed that the Vietnamese occupiers intended to "change the brains" of the Cambodians through "good political training and good technical training." The situation during the 1980s Vietnamese occupation in Cambodian was tense, Clayton explains on page 166 of his book. "Periphery educators" tried to balance their "need for resources" to teach children "against the certainty of ideological imposition" by the occupying Vietnamese socialists.

The French language was apparently used often in schools during that time for pragmatic reasons. Vietnam and Cambodia had both been colonized by France; and hence, many of the Vietnamese "advisors" who ruled over the ramshackle Cambodian educational system spoke fluent French, as did those Cambodian teachers who available during that period.

The Vietnamese idea of education was, McNamara paraphrases Clayton as saying, to "bring their own internationalist Marxist hegemonic order" into the classrooms (such as they were); and the courses themselves and tests given at the end of the courses were seen by the Cambodian students "as very difficult," McNamara writes. What was presented to those Cambodians in higher education during those years was a "complex Marxist theoretical model," which was primarily based on philosophical abstractions.

The bottom line is that education was not a priority for the occupying Vietnamese, other than the Marxist propaganda and some technical skills the Vietnamese believed important in terms of stimulating the devastated economy of Cambodia. But then, in 1991, the Paris Peace Agreements basically ended Vietnamese rule of Cambodia, and opened the door for elections. In 1993, elections were held, and a new coalition government was launched. This new government pledged (in 1994) that education would received 15% of the nation's budget, but McNamara asserts that at least up to a few years ago, only 8% of the budget is targeted for education in Cambodia. That is clearly not enough, and while educational resources are scarce, the sex and child labor industry flourishes.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor report, "Incidence and Nature of Child Labor," published August 23, 2006, 44.8% of Cambodian children ages 5 to 14 years old were working in 2001 (notwithstanding the labor law sets the minimum age for employment at 15). The jobs held by children included agriculture (the "majority" of children work in the fields), "hazardous conditions on commercial rubber plantations, in salt production," in the fishing industry and in garbage collection. Not only are Cambodian children put into slavery for sexual services, the Labor report asserts that Cambodian children "are trafficked to Thailand and Malaysia" for sexual commercial exploitation or "bonded labor."

Meanwhile, the Asia Foundation (with funding provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development), published a "Review of a Decade of Research on Trafficking in Persons, Cambodia." In the report's Summary, the authors (Derks, et al., 2006) point out that figures on trafficking vary wildly, depending on the source; for example, one estimate in the late 1990s puts the number of trafficked women at 80,000 to 100,000 and the number of trafficked girls at 5,000 to 15,000.