Orphans of Genocide: The Cham Muslims of Kampuchea Under Pol Pot
Author(s)
Kiernan, Ben
Abstract
Few regimes in history, even those led by atheists, have successfully managed to abolish religion. In Pol Pot’s Democratic, Kampuchea (DK)from 1975 to 1979, all religious practice was prohibited and very effectively suppressed, sometimes with great violence. Buddhisin, Islain, and Christianity were all eliminated with the same vigor applied to the destruction of both traditional cultures and treasonable heresies such as “capitalism” and “revisionist” communism. In all, over a million people died. This study explores the impact of four years of massacre and repression on a Muslim minority group that arguably suffered even more repression than the Khmer Buddhist majority in the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) period. The evidence for this, based on over 100 interviews with Cham survivors of DK, is set out in detail. The documentary case is weak, but the mass of eyewitness testimony is undeniable, and it is possible to infer the guiding intent from what happened all over the country. My conclusion is that the Pol Pot regime’s attempts not only to destroy Islamic religion, but also to exterminate the Cham community as such constitute genocide as defined under international law: various acts such as “killing members of the group” pursued with “an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.”
