G. Cambodia
Also enjoying a comfortable post-genocide life is Pol Pot, the perpetrator of the best known mass-murders of the post-World War II era.
Cambodian gun control was a legacy of French colonialism. [97] A series of Royal Ordinances, decreed by a monarchy subservient to the French, appears to have been enacted out of fear of the Communist and anti-colonial insurgencies that were taking place in the 1920s and 1930s throughout Southeast Asia, although not in Cambodia. [98] The first law, in 1920, dealt with the carrying of guns, while the last law in the series, in 1938, imposed a strict licensing system. [99] Only hunters could have guns, and they were allowed to own only a single firearm. [100] These colonial laws appear to have stayed in place after Cambodia was granted independence. The Khmer Rouge enacted no new gun control laws, for they enacted no laws at all other than a Constitution. [101]
Cambodia was a poor country, and few people could afford guns. [102] On the other hand, the chaos that accompanies any war might have given some Cambodians the opportunity to acquire firearms from corrupt or dead soldiers. There is no solid evidence about how many Cambodians, with no cultural history of firearms ownership, attempted to do so. [103]
As soon as the Khmer Rouge took power, they immediately set out to disarm the populace. One Cambodian recalls that
Eang [a woman] watched soldiers stride onto the porches of the houses and knock on the doors and ask the people who answered if they had any weapons. "We are here now to protect you," the soldiers said, "and no one has a need for a weapon any more." People who said that they kept no weapons were forced to stand aside and allow the soldiers to look for themselves. . . . The round-up of weapons took nine or ten days, and once the soldiers had concluded the villagers were no longer armed, they dropped their pretense of friendliness. . . . The soldiers said everyone would have to leave the village for a while, so that the troops could search for weapons; when the search was finished, they could return. [104]
People being forced out of villages and cities were searched thoroughly, and weapons and foreign currency were confiscated. [105] To the limited extent that Cambodians owned guns through the government licensing system, the names of registered gun owners were of course available to the new government. [106]
The Cambodian genocide was unique in the twentieth century, in that its target was not a single ethnic, religious, or political group, but rather the entire educated populace. Lacking infrastructure for sophisticated Nazi-style extermination camps, the Khmer Rouge used the genocide methods which had been used by the Turkish government (internal deportations with forced marches designed to kill), the Soviet government (hard labor under conditions likely to kill), and the Guatemalan government (murders of targeted victims). [107]
Like other victims of genocide, the Cambodians forced into slave labor were kept so desperately hungry that revolt became difficult to contemplate, as every thought focused on food. One slave laborer explained that
There was no possibility of an uprising. . . . Contact between many people was made impossible by the chlops [informers] . . . . Besides, we had no arms and no food. Even if we'd been able to produce arms and kill the fifty Khmer Rouge in the village, what would happen to us? We didn't have enough food to build up any reserves to sustain a guerilla army. In our state of weakness, after a few days wandering in the jungle, death would have been inevitable. [108]
The authors estimate that Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge murdered about a million people, at least 14% of the Cambodian population. [109] The percentage was about the same as the percentage of the Soviet population murdered by Stalin, except that Pol Pot accomplished in three-and-a-half years what took Stalin twenty. [110]
The mass murders of the Khmer Rouge became well-known in the international community, but no nation made an effort to try to rescue the Cambodian people. Finally, Pol Pot was driven from power by a Vietnamese invasion that was motivated by imperialist, rather than humanitarian reasons. [111]
Pol Pot's fate was thus similar to Idi Amin's: the world would tolerate genocide, but threatening the borders of a neighboring country would lead to the regime's demise. According to the New York Times, "Pol Pot is today a free, prosperous and apparently unrepentant man who, 15 years after his ouster from Phnom Penh, continues to plot a return to power. The calls for some sort of international genocide tribunal for Pol Pot and his aides have not been heard for years." [112]
The authors have demonstrated that every nation in the twentieth century which has perpetrated genocide has chosen a victim population which was disarmed. If the intended victims were not already "gun-free," then the murderous governments first got rid of the guns before they attempted to begin the killing.