REGIONAL GEOGRAPHIC INFLUENCE ON TWO KHMER POLITIES

Although executions on a mass scale did not begin in the East until 1978, East Zone cadres apparently began to be arrested as early as 1975, and by 1976 cadres from the Southwest Zone had begun a implement a centrally-directed plan "to sweep all E istern cadres out of the system."42 The decision to "purify" the East was thus a decision reached before the beginning of execution campaign of 1978.

Heightening fears among DK leaders that southeastern Cambodia might fall victim to foreign invasion were increasingly frequent military clashes with Vietnam. Vietnamese forces had penetrated more than 20 miles into Cambodian territory in 1977, and residents of the East Zone retreated into Vietnam as its army pulled back. For this event to occur, the DK leadership believed, the area had to be rife with traitors, and these traitors had to be eliminated if the border was to be secured. If traitors were not exposed and defeated by the DK, they would eventually "rot society, rot the Party, and rot the army,"43 leading to the destruction of the Khmer.

The killing campaign instituted by the DK in the East Zone in 1978 targeted all remaining East Zone cadres, urban evacuees, and in particular anyone in the Zone believed to be ethnic Vietnamese or a supporter of Vietnam - anyone labeled as having a "Khmer body but a Vietnamese mind." During the 1978 purge between 100,000 and 250,000 men, women, and children from the East Zone were killed.44

The importance placed by DK leaders on "purifying" southeastern Cambodia near Vietnam rather than Cambodia's northwestern interior is further demonstrated by the pattern of mass graves that have been mapped by researchers participating in the Cambodian Genocide Program (CGP) at Yale University. In Cambodia's southeastern provinces (Kompong Cham, Kompong Speu, Kampot, Kandal, Prey Veng, Svay Rieng, Takeo, and the city of Phnom Penh) - the provinces that occupy the flat alluvial plain of the Mekong - approximately 12,000 mass gravesites were identified, composing almost two-thirds of all mass grave sites that had been located in Cambodia by July of 2001. Although the precise number of people killed at these locations is unknown, evidence indicates that these are in fact "mass" graves filled with the bodies of people executed by the Khmer Rouge.

At most of the sites containing mass graves, CGP researchers also identified Khmer Rouge-era prison facilities at or near the mass grave site. This fact, along with witness testimony and records of the Khmer Rouge security services obtained by the CGP, leads us to conclude that most mass graves hold the remains of victims of centrally-organized violence, rather than of other causes of death such as disease or starvation.45

For example, documents record that 94,000 people were killed at a single site in Svay Rieng province.46

Northwest Cambodia presents a different picture. In the six provinces surrounding the Tonle Sap (Siem Riep, Battambang, Pursat, Kompong Chhnang, and Kompong Thorn) - a region that includes the heartland of the former Angkorian empire and the productive rice fields of Battambang, nearly 5,200 mass grave sites were located by July of 2001 - less than half the number found during the same period in southeastern Cambodia. The geographic distribution of death under the DK regime is heavily skewed toward Cambodia's southeastern provinces, as shown in Fieure 1.