REGIONAL GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCE ON TWO KHMER POLITIES

[a]t the present time nothing captivates our attention as much as the acts of invasion [or] violation of one's sovereignty . . . Both enemies, the West and the East, try to find opportunities to attack us.28

Making the Khmer nation capable of repelling threats from without required a restructuring of Cambodian society from within. Cambodians thus had to accept without question the state's absolute authority to ensure that the revolution proceeded. Influences that were deemed alien by the DK leadership were purged from the body politic, and forced labor became a tool to produce "the rectification of the self and subordination of the individual into a collective unit."29 The revolution would by necessity also "defend, strengthen, and enlarge" the DK regime itself.30

In the minds of the DK leadership, the DK's "capacity to defend the country" against aggression could only be assured by "economic independ ence."31 As detailed in the DK's Four Year Plan for 1977-1980 that was drafted in the summer of 1976, the DK chose a strategy of rapidly transforming peasant agriculture in order to overcome the country's weak industrial and technological base. To create "plentiful agricultural capital" over the period covered by the Plan, the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) expected the Cambodia's average rice yield to increase to 3 metric tons per hectare by the beginning of 1977 and the country's rice production to double between 1977 and 1980. This represented an immediate doubling of the country's average rice yield.32 DK leaders believed that "gaining mastery" over the "water problem" was critical to increasing agricultural production, and huncuds of thousands of Cambodians spent the DK period digging ditches and building dikes in water control construction projects.33 Foreign economic assistance was not needed to improve agricultural yields, DK leaders believ, d, because of the special characteristics of the Cambodian revolution, nor wa.j it wanted because of its political dangers.

As noted by Chandler et al.,34 the Northwest Zone, composed of portions of Battambang and Pursat provinces north and west of the Tonle Sap, was singled out in the Four Year Plan as the area slated for the greatest expansion of agricultural production. The DK leadership expected 140,000 hectares of previously uncultivated land in the Northwest Zone to produce 3 tons of rice per hectare by 1980, a target that would enable the Northwest to provide 60 percent of Cambodia's rice exports. While other areas of Cambodia were expected to supply 20 percent of the export value of their harvests to the central authorities, the Northwest was ordered to turn over 50 percent of its harvests by value.

The province of Battambang in the Northwest Zone had in fact been the most agriculturally productive region of Cambodia since colonization by the French in the nineteenth century. In terms of population, when the DK came to power in 1975, the Northwest also enjoyed higher land per capita and rice production per capita ratios than the more densely populated East Zone (composed of parts of the provinces of Prey Veng, Svay Rieng, Kompong Cham, and Kratie) and Southwest Zone (portions of Kampot, Kompong Speu, Takeo, and Kandal provinces).35 The East and the Southwest Zones contained the provinces located on the alluvial plain of the Mekong watershed.