Word: kampuchea
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...National anthem of Kampuchea...
Since the 1975 Communist takeover transformed Cambodia into Democratic Kampuchea, the prophecy of the new national anthem has been amply borne out. A series of political purges and a disastrous mass resettlement policy, combined with a nine-month-old border war with Viet Nam, have splattered, indeed drenched the country with blood...
...last week, the earlier purges cost 100,000 lives "as the absolute minimum." In 1975-76, the victims were intellectuals, officials of the previous regime and members of the armed forces, once commanded by Marshal Lon Nol, who escaped to Hawaii in 1975. (Last week the deposed leader challenged Kampuchea's right to U.N. credentials.) In 1977 the government concentrated on killing regional Khmer Rouge commanders who had collaborated with the Vietnamese in the war against the U.S. The current purge aims to liquidate professionals, minor officials, and peasants and soldiers suspected of disloyalty. "The killing is proceeding methodically," observed...
...abolish cities, because cities cannot survive without money. The new Cambodian rulers did just that. What matter that hundreds of thousands died as the cities were depopulated? It apparently meant little, if anything, to Premier Pol Pot and his shadowy colleagues on the politburo of Democratic Kampuchea, as they now call Cambodia. When asked about the figure of 1 million deaths, President Khieu Samphan replied: "It's incredible how concerned you Westerners are about war criminals." Radio Phnom Penh even dared to boast of this atrocity in the name of collectivism: "More than 2,000 years of Cambodian history...
...dilution of their doctrine by what Solzhenitsyn has called "the great reserves of mercy and sacrifice" from a Christian tradition. Yet if there is any doubt about what the focus of the purest of revolutionary values is, consider the first three lines of the national anthem of Democratic Kampuchea...