REGIONAL GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCE ON TWO KHMER POLITIES

The problem facing DK leaders was to increase rice production and yields in the Northwest Zone without a ready supply chemical fertilizers, agricultural machinery, or other capital-intensive inputs. DK leaders implemented an ingenious if brutal solution to the problem: sending additional labor to the Northwest Zone by relocating not only many of Cambodia's million-plus urban residents but also people from rural southeastern Cambodia.

The forced relocation of large numbers of people from southeastern Cambodia not only increased the amount of labor available in the Northwest Zone, but it also served the DK's wider ideological agenda. Pre-1975 Cambodian society had to be overturned, class enemies had to be destroyed, and the DK's hold on power had to be solidified. Ordinary Cambodians had to "build and defend Cambodia'1 while "standing guard against widespread but poorly defined enemies who threatened the Organization [the CPK] and its revolution."36 Southeastern Cambodia, especially the provinces located in the East Zone, was the area of Cambodia believed by DK leaders to be most in danger of foreign aggression. DK leaders believed that the area contained the greatest numbers of civilians and CPK members whose commitment to the DK - and thus to the Khmer nation - were suspect. These individuals had to be removed from southeastern Cambodia - in one way or another - for security reasons. Notably the first DK district administration in the East Zone brought under greater control by the central DK leadership was Chantrea in 1975-76. Chantrea is the only area of Svay Rieng province and the East Zone surrounded on three sides by the territory of Vietnam.37

According to Kiernan, 800,000 people were relocated under the orders of the DK leadership to the Northwest Zone between April 1975 and the middle of mid-1976.38 The majority of those moved to the Northwest seem to be civilians from the Southwest and East Zones - Cambodia's southeasternmost provinces. Included in these evacuees was a large group of Chams from the East Zone. Chams, being non-Khmer, were, by the DK's definition, enemies and as Kiernan39 has argued convincingly, the victims of genocide under the DK.

Vickery,40 in contrast, argues against the view that "the Chams were as a group a special object of extermination policy" and that evidence indicates that "there was never a central policy to destroy them . . . they were not the object of any special attention by the authorities and that they survived in the same proportion as other people." The death rate of Chams under the DK does not alter the fact that Chams were deliberately relocated away from the East early in the regime on the orders of the central DK leadership - against the wishes of DK cadres in the North and Northwest Zone. An official telegram to Pol Pot on 30 November 1975 states:

According to the final decision of the meeting [between regional and district authorities in the Eastern Zone], we must not send the Islamic People [the Chams] to Kracheh [Kratie] Province [in Cambodia's southeast]. The Northwest and the North [Zones] have to accept them, so that we can keep them away from the Mekong River to help ease the atmosphere ... In principle, the Zone withdrew fifty thousand people to the North. More than one hundred thousand additional Islamic people remain in the Eastern Zone . . . But we will not have enough people to reach the one hundred fifty thousa id [slated for relocation out of the Eastern Zone], if the Northern Zone will not accept the Islamic people.41