First They Killed My Father: Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge

Introduction: Life Before and After the Khmer Rouge

Loung Ung lived through four years of hell in Cambodia during the regime of the Communist Khmer Rouge. Her survival is somewhat of a miracle — but what is more miraculous is how she turned that experience into a lifelong commitment to helping others who suffer under vicious and evil regimes. Her book is at once chilling and inspiring, yet it opens up many questions about what happened in Cambodia, and why the world stood by and watched while two million people died horrible deaths.

The Khmer Rouge was the name given to the Communist party in Cambodia. They came into power in 1970 and reached the peak of their influence by 1975, when Ung's memoir First They Killed My Father begins. As the author notes at the outset: "From 1975 to 1979 — through execution, starvation, disease, and forced labor — the Khmer Rouge systematically killed an estimated two million Cambodians, almost a fourth of the country's population" (Ung ix). Historically, the Khmer Rouge stands as one of the most vicious and violent regimes in world history.

Ung's book opens with a portrait of ordinary life shared by many Cambodians before the regime. Her family clearly has money: they own three automobiles, eat many of their meals in restaurants, employ a maid, and live in a large apartment. They have more to lose than many people of Phnom Penh, and they are correspondingly more vulnerable to the whims of the Communists when those Communists seize power. The opening chapters reveal how normal life was in Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge took over, and how everything turned into a nightmare once the regime stormed the cities. As Ung poignantly writes, "Yesterday I was playing hopscotch with my friends. Today we are running from soldiers with guns" (Ung 27).

How the Khmer Rouge Seized and Maintained Power

The author carefully explains the regime that held power before the Khmer Rouge in order to give the reader essential background. Because her father held a high post in the prior government, he was especially vulnerable. He hid his identity as long as possible, but he is eventually found out, taken away by soldiers, and never seen again. The mother, realizing the family must separate in order to survive, is later taken away as well, along with the youngest child.

The Khmer Rouge controlled the population through fear and violence. They killed anyone who did not agree with them and anyone they believed might rise up against them. They also held skewed views of technology and science, equating both with capitalism and rejecting them in their vision of a new society. While the Khmer Rouge might seem ludicrous in retrospect, to millions of Cambodian peasants their ideas appeared relevant — designed to equalize an extremely unequal population. As Ung's narrative shows, there was a deep divide between the middle class and the poor in Cambodia, and the Khmer Rouge exploited this divide to win peasant support. The regime changed everything: the way people lived, the way they spoke, and the way they dressed. In many ways, they surpassed even the worst excesses of other historical dictatorships. They embodied consummate evil, rooted in a hatred of anyone who had achieved any success under the old order. Ung's family represented everything the Khmer Rouge despised, and so they were forced to transform themselves in order to survive.

In the ultimate paradox, a society proclaimed to be totally equal still harbored divisions — between village leaders, villagers who had embraced the regime from the start, and newcomers from the cities who were not yet trusted. Cracks were already appearing in the Khmer Rouge's thinking and organization, but the people were too oppressed to exploit them, which was precisely what the regime intended. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that the Khmer Rouge could not survive indefinitely — there was far too much wrong with their disorganized organization — but for as long as they held on, they terrorized the population with knives, guns, and brutality.

The children who survived did so because of their strength, resilience, and growing hatred of the regime. As Ung trains to become a child soldier, she dreams of killing Pol Pot and making him pay for the deaths of her mother, father, and two sisters. She becomes exactly what the regime feared most: someone fully capable of leading a revolt against its atrocities. She is consumed by hatred, and this is entirely understandable given what she has endured in just three years. All of the regime's planning to keep the people passive had backfired; it had only created a mass of people burning for revenge.

Suppression of Education and Intellectual Thought

Another critical tool of control was the deliberate suppression of education. The Khmer Rouge would not allow children to be educated, and they eliminated anyone who might be intelligent enough to lead a rebellion. They recognized, in their own brutal way, that education encourages questions — questions they were unprepared to answer with anything other than violence. By forbidding the education of young, inquisitive minds, they used ignorance as a weapon. The most evil regimes tend to be the most restrictive toward their people, precisely because they understand that their control hangs by a thread. The Khmer Rouge clearly recognized how vulnerable they were to intellectual scrutiny, which would immediately see through their violence and lies, and so they removed the problem entirely.

Only the most uneducated peasants would genuinely believe in the propaganda the Angkar (government) continually fed the people, such as: "The Angkar says our new society will produce many thousand kilograms of a rice surplus within two years. Then we'll eat as much rice as we want. And we will be self-reliant. Only by becoming self-reliant will the country be master of its own fate" (Ung 65).

Before the regime, Cambodia was reasonably technologically advanced and relied on a wide variety of trade and commerce. The Khmer Rouge appeared determined to drive the country backward, away from all outside "Western" influences and unable to compete in the modern, mechanized world. A country cannot survive when it is prevented from advancing alongside the rest of the world, and an economy based entirely on rice production is not only impractical but dangerously shortsighted. As Ung observes, "Though the Angkar says we are all equal in Democratic Kampuchea, we are not. We live and are treated like slaves. In our garden, the Angkar provides us with seeds and we may plant anything we choose, but everything we grow belongs not to us but to the community" (Ung 66). This shortsightedness would ultimately prove to be the regime's undoing, as it has been for every cruel and violent regime throughout history. "His government has created a vengeful, bloodthirsty people. Pol Pot has turned me into someone who wants to kill" (Ung 205). Eventually, the cruel victor becomes the vanquished, and the cycle begins again.

Conclusion: Lessons from Cambodia

Looking back on this time in Cambodia, it is difficult to read about, and even more difficult to think about living through. That a family who came from a sheltered and comfortable life in the city could survive such atrocities says something profound about their inner strength and character. That any human being could treat another so brutally also says something about the character of those who ran the regime. While the people starved in the countryside building a "new" Cambodia, the leaders enriched themselves — a betrayal that exposes the true nature of the Khmer Rouge's ideology.