1973 Part Two: Pull Them Up By Their Roots! Ta Mok and the 'Model' Southwest Zone

In June 1973, a young American official and his fiancée climbed a mountain on the Vietnamese border, expecting a view of farmers planting rice. What they saw instead were columns of black smoke rising from Cambodian villages as far as the horizon. They were all burning at the same time.

Time Period Covered: April to December 1973

Why did the Khmer Rouge begin collectivising the countryside two years before they won the war? Who was Ta Mok, and how did his Southwest Zone become the model for the rest of the country? What did a Khmer Rouge cooperative actually look like in 1973?

In this episode, Lachlan continues his three-part exploration of 1973, leaving the prince behind and going down into the liberated zones he had just been paraded through. On 20 May 1973, the Party decided to organise peasant cooperatives, and within months the black clothes, the travel passes, the illiterate village chiefs, the night-time political meetings and the disappearances were already in place across the countryside, a year and a half before the fall of Phnom Penh.

Three primary sources tell the story from the top down and the bottom up. The Black Paper, Democratic Kampuchea's 1978 account of its grievances against Vietnam, gives Pol Pot's own version of the Paris negotiations and the betrayal he believed was coming. A 1976 Party document celebrating the third anniversary of the cooperatives explains, in the Party's own words, why they did it, and then, almost by accident, gives the real reason. And Kenneth Quinn's 1974 airgram, pieced together from refugee interviews on the South Vietnamese border, documents the system on the ground in extraordinary detail: the rice ration, the penalties for travelling without a pass, children returning from training camps, and monks marched into the army. Almost no one in Washington believed it.

Meanwhile, in Ta Mok's home district of Tram Kak, a Party meeting place called Kraing Ta Chan becomes a prison, the villages along the Vietnamese border are emptied and burned, and as the American bombing reaches its peak and then stops on 15 August, the people living under the new regime are already walking out.

Check out the video Lachlan made on his trip to Takeo to visit Kraing Tachan Prison: https://youtu.be/Qbc3ltScWNY

Sources:
Communist Party of Kampuchea - Third Year Anniversary of the Organization of Peasant Cooperatives (1976)
Democratic Kampuchea, Ministry of Foreign Affairs - Black Paper: Facts and Evidences of the Acts of Aggression and Annexation of Vietnam Against Kampuchea (1978)
Kenneth M. Quinn - The Khmer Krahom Program to Create a Communist Society in Southern Cambodia, US Consulate Can Tho Airgram (1974)
Andrew Mertha - Bad Lieutenants: The Khmer Rouge, United Front, and Class Struggle, 1970–1997
Philip Short - Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare
Henri Locard - The Khmer Rouge Gulag
Donald Kirk - Revolution and Political Violence in Cambodia, 1970–1974, in Communism in Indochina (1975)
Ben Kiernan - How Pol Pot Came to Power
David Chandler - Mok
Ea Meng-Try - The Chain of Terror: The Khmer Rouge Southwest Zone Security System
Ian Harris - Cambodian Buddhism: History and Practice
François Bizot - The Gate
ECCC Case 002/02 - Trial transcripts and witness testimony (Pech Chim, Phann Chhen)