Lets have another pointless discussion thread about these guys, who they were and what they were doing at the time.
I'll start:
>They were CIA pretending to be collaborators who dissapeared soon after…
now we talk about the photo as I copy paste truthful info from reddit
The Often Overlooked Disturbing History of "Monatio."
There is a famous photo of a supposed "Khmer Rouge soldier" branding a handgun in Phnom penh in a black uniform trying to force an evacuation.
Unfortunately, the photo is amount one of the most miscaptioned in history.
The man in the photo is simply too clean, not exhausted enough, and if you study, is missing a key scarf and hat in the Khmer Rouge uniform. Khmer Rouge soldiers by the time entering Phnom Penh were exhausted and often sick from Malaria.
So what is the history behind this famous ill captioned photo?
Actually, ironically, it traces its origins not to the Khmer Rouge, but the political elite of the Khmer Republic under lon nol. The man in this now infamous photo is Hem Keth Dara, the leader of "MONATIO" , who in turn was manipulated by Lon Non (Lon Nol's calculating brother.)
According to François Ponchand, the handful of soldiers in the group looked like a poor imitation or parody of the Khmer Rouge, wearing black uniforms with some olive uniforms camo and civilian clothing thrown in, without the characteristic checkered scarf and mao hat.
The group was executed by the Khmer Rouge soon after, personally fitting into the definition of "useful idiots." Without them, disarming of FANK soldiers could not have occurred so rapidly and they did act practically as Traffic cops for the Khmer Rogue.
A key question is who was responsible. As I said before, many believe it was a ploy by Lon Non to somehow salvage the regime, as doomed as it was. In my opinion, a more plausible view is that Sihanouk used his connections to create this group to both ease Khmer Rouge entry in - additionally fool army officers he thought betrayed him into thinking remaining was safe. If this later case is true, and in my view due to Sihanouk's perverse influence, it likely is, it would show true callous regard of Sihanouk, as he would make a now lost film about the group glorifying the KR's slaughter of them.
By all accounts, the capitulation in the city, regardless of the terrible and unsustainable humanitarian situation was one of the worse decisions in Cambodian history, given the KR lacked the real strength for a frontal assault and according to CHhang Song, a plan for a last stand in Sihanoukville never materialized. Yet Monatio made the Khmer Rouge job as easy as slicing butter - and despite the fact they aided their countries destruction, a part of me feels slight pity for the naive youth manipulated.
Sources
https://www.khmer440.com/chat_forum/viewtopic.php?t=67311https://cambodiaexpatsonline.com/newsworthy/january-1979-t12310-10.htmlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONATIOhttps://www.khmertimeskh.com/55805/the-final-hours-of-the-khmer-republic/Yes, the forums are largely based on rumor, but Sihanouk's collusions very likely given his suspicious movie that whitewashes his role.
>>2547924and I dont know if thats the photo but sure sounds like it
its probably the third photo from here not the photo included on
>>2547924whateevers
and I think we're done with the thread
>>2547927You're not gonna adress my elite theory?
>>2547920 On the evacuation of cities:
>Moreover, the evacuation had indeed been preplanned, and not, as he asserted on another occasion, equally untruthfully, in February 1975, but the previous October. He was more honest at a meeting with Chinese journalists, when he admitted: ‘Until we had smashed all kinds of enemy spy organisations, we did not have enough strength to defend the revolutionary regime.’
>That much at least had a basis in fact. CIA officials, including the Chief Strategy Analyst in Saigon, Frank Snepp, later confirmed that the evacuation of the towns, where the agency had established secret radio terminals and clandestine spy cells, ‘left American espionage networks throughout the country broken and useless’.
<Pol Pot : anatomy of a nightmare / Philip Short—1st ed.
>>2547933yes OP mixed it up
a similar situation happened with picrel, from the 6 October 1976 massacre
<in Thailand, was a violent crackdown by Thai police and lynching by right-wing paramilitaries and bystanders against leftist protesters who had occupied Bangkok's Thammasat University and the adjacent Sanam Luang, on 6 October 1976.however, in the west this exact photograph was used as an example of SEA
communist state atrocity, specifically as cover art for dead kennedys' holiday in cambodia single release
Cambodian truther blog spitting hard facts about monatio.
Must readhttps://khmersdach.blogspot.com/2021/02/monatio-mouvement-nationale.html
>On April 17, Hem Keth Dara, a confessed former ‘playboy’, whose father had been Minister of Information under Lon Nol, ate breakfast with his French wife and two children. At 7 am, he left and met with around 200 followers, dressed ‘in a parody’ of Khmer Rouge fighters. Within 2 hours, with the ‘real’ Khmer Rouge still outside the city, many soldiers, believing peace was at hand tore off their uniforms and the center of town took on what was described as a ‘carnival atmosphere’.
>Hem Keth Dara is the son of the interior minister under Lon Nol, Hem Keth Sana. The group confiscated weapons from [FANK] soldiers who holed up in the government district and then surrendered. Within the surprising bloodless conquest, Hem Kath Dara and his followers managed to get the government radio station under control. There he performed a four-minute broadcast declaring he was the leader of a nationalist movement called MONATIO, which was responsible for the conquest. He called on the government soldiers to lay down their arms and in his address also informed the Khmer Rouge units standing in front of the city: "I have taken measures to enable our older brothers waiting outside of Phnom Penh to easily enter the city without the innocent being killed or harmed."
>Hem Keth Dara was then disarmed by the Khmer Rouge because the MONATIO movement did not belong to them and he had acted without authorization.one can also observe that the average MONATIO soldier is always male, mature, squeaky clean and cinematically polished, while (according to eyewitness claims) the real Kampuchea Revolutionary Army consisted of both male and female fighters (KR themselves constantly stressed the fact that they had around equal rates of female soldier participation in the revolutionary army, dedicating newspaper articles and revolutionary songs to female battalions) who were often quite young (around 12-15 years old) and stank horribly because of actually having spent time in the swamps and jungles of kampuchea during the people's war
>>2547935>the center of town took on what was described as a ‘carnival atmosphere’.same as in the liberated areas throughout the country prior to april 17
<picture 5>Cheng Heng was Head of State of Cambodia from 1970 to 1972, and was a relatively prominent political figure during the Khmer Republic period (1970–1975). >Immediately subsequent to the Cambodian coup of 1970, in which the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, General Lon Nol and Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak, engineered Sihanouk's removal, Heng was made Head of State until elections could be arranged. This was a largely ceremonial role, as Lon Nol had assumed most of the Head of State's political powers on an emergency basis: Sihanouk, from exile, was to dismiss Heng as an "insignificant puppet".>In 1975, with the Khmer Rouge forces surrounding the capital, Heng's name was published on a list of "Seven Traitors" (also including Lon Nol, Sisowath Sirik Matak, In Tam, Long Boret, Sosthene Fernandez and Son Ngoc Thanh) who were threatened with immediate execution under Angkar's grip at the event of a Communist victory. Heng fled the country on April 1 for Paris, where he became associated with the group of exiles centred on Son Sann. <https://web.archive.org/web/20110413202547/http://aefek.free.fr/iso_album/cheng_heng.pdf >>2547947same source
>See WAGNER, supra note 25, at 14, 96 (“After the Khmer Rouge regime there were only forty doctors left in the country. Nearly all the older doctors had died, so we had no specialists or experts. There wasn’t a single psychiatrist in Cambodia. Only eighteen out of the fifty medical students in my class survived, and I was the only woman.”); Coping with the Psychological Trauma of the Khmer Rouge (Documentation Ctr. of Cambodia), May 29, 2007, at 4 (“In the early 1970s, Cambodia had an estimated 450 qualified doctors; only 43 of them survived the Khmer Rouge regime. Most of the educated people in the country had either died during the regime or fled the country in itsaftermath.”).
Hem Ket Sana was a high official of the government and also the President of the Natioanl Administration school. He created the "Movement National" by getting the direct direction from HM Norodom Sihanouk.
The goal of the "Movement National" is to convince all intellectuals and officials of the goverment not to flee the country. The "Monatio" convinced everyboby that everything will be Okay when the khmer rouge take over because Monatio has connection with Sihanouk. People believed Monatio and did not flee the country. That was the work of HM Sihanouk with the cooperation of the Khmer Rouge. Objective was to keep all intellectuals in the country and kill them.
That is the true story. Monatio was not a work of some reckless youngs. It was a well calculated maneuver prepared by the Khmer Rouge with the cooperation of HM Sihanouk.
Hem Ket Sana was just a tool used by them.
Everybody did not fight back and let the Khmer Rouge took over P. Penh because of "Monatio". It was not a short live movement as stated. It lasted over year period before the collapse of PPenh. It was psychological warfare created by Sihanouk/Khmer Rouge.
>>2547950source please, i would like to know more
>>2547951Hem Keth Sana is waving his pistol in an attempt to stop the looters ransacking those Chinese shops. Those idiotic Western writers, like Ben Keirnan, etc, after switching sides from the KR defender to the defender of another faction of the KR/hun sen clan, stated the pistol-waving guy was a KR soldier threatening people to leave the th4e city. Sana was a lone non's scam sent out to assist his sender, hoping he would get something out of the deal, as Pot and Samphorn were ex-classmates. What non had from the Kr was his head off his shoulder. His head was seen on a fence of the Phare Thmey market soon after his surrender.
>>2547952>Those idiotic Western writers, like Ben Keirnan, etc, after switching sides from the KR defender to the defender of another faction of the KR/hun sen clan, stated the pistol-waving guy was a KR soldier threatening people to leave the th4e city. still quite hilarious to me how ben kiernan went from KR defender to possibly the most vitriolic anti-KR academic, most of his papers seemed too ideologically poisoned to me. white guilt grindset classic
please could you give me the sources for more of this information? eyewitness accounts, books, papers, websites?
>What non had from the Kr was his head off his shoulder. His head was seen on a fence of the Phare Thmey market soon after his surrender.interesting detail about the decapitation, also do you think that lon non's girlfriend abuse accusations are true and that same woman used to date pol pot before, when he was known as saloth sar?
Interesting history thread bump
Post it on /leftypol/ please.
>>2547955last time i checked, anything related to the khmer rouge got moved to /siberia/, idk how it's now though
if it's possible can mods move this thread to /leftypol/ please
>>2547958thank you anon very cool but what do introduced species becoming invasive and harming the local ecosystem has to do with monatio or the communist party of kampuchea
<inb4 lon nol's pro-american government is an introduced species (directly US-backed coup which the soviet union officially recognized as "legitimate will of the people" and prioritized lon nol diplomacy over sihanouk, let alone the communist movement) The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A history of their relations as told in the Soviet archives
>To this day, the real history of relations between the Khmer communists and their Vietnamese colleagues is enclosed in a veil of secrecy. Despite extensive research on this theme in Russia and abroad, there are still no reliable answers to many key questions. The history of relations between Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge is construed in Vietnam in a way which sometimes has nothing to do with the story told in the West.
>The research is based on a study of the former USSR’s archival materials (diaries of Soviet ambassadors in Vietnam, records of conversations with ranking members of the Vietnamese government, analytical notes, political letters of the Soviet embassy in the SRV, and other documents) deposited in the Russian State Archive of Modern History (RSAMH).
>Relations between Khmer and Vietnamese communists have passed through some major periods of development. In the first period, which can be determined to span from 1930 to 1954, a small Khmer section of the Indochina Communist Party (ICP), was under full ideological and organizational control of the Vietnamese communists. During the years of struggle for liberation from the governance of France (1946-1954), the strength of this section grew continuously due to ICP recruitment of the most radical participants in the anti-colonial struggle. The Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP) was founded in June 1951 on this basis.
>The 1954 Geneva Agreements on Indochina drastically changed relations between Khmer and Vietnamese communists. The Vietnamese withdrew their forces from Cambodia in accordance with the Agreements, but as distinct from Laos (where the so-called free zone in the region of Sam Neua was controlled by the communists), Hanoi could not ensure the same conditions for their Khmer allies.
<The Vietnamese, under pressure from the Sihanouk regime and its Western allies, did not even let the Khmer communists participate in the Geneva negotiations, and by the end of 1954 had withdrawn their combat forces from the regions of Cambodia which were under their control. Hereupon Khmer Royal Forces entered all zones that had been under KPRP authority, which forced the party underground. The consolation offered by Hanoi - granting two thousand of their allies the possibility of taking cover in the territory of North Vietnam (Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy, N.Y., 1986, p. 59) - was obviously disproportionate to their contribution to a joint struggle.
>Therefore among the Khmer communists remaining in Cambodia the story gained currency that Hanoi had simply betrayed them, used them as hostages for the sake of reaching the agreement with the then leader of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk. The evaluation of the Vietnamese operations of those days as an “unrighteous betrayal of the Cambodian revolution” (W. Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia, N.Y., 1987, p. 238) was later more than once reproduced in official documents of the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot himself claimed it many times.
>Interestingly, Hanoi’s decision was remembered in Phnom Penh even in the eighties, when such a high-ranking official in the Phnom Penh hierarchy as the executive secretary of the pro-Vietnam United Front for National Salvation of Kampuchea, Chan Ven, was of the opinion that in 1953, “the Vietnamese had acted incorrectly by leaving us alone to face with the ruling regime” (conversation with Chan Ven, Phnom Penh, July 15, 1984).
>The events in Indochina in 1954 marked the beginning of a new period in relations between the Khmer and Vietnamese communists. The close partnership of 1949-1953 promptly came to naught, and the KPRP, which had lost a considerable number of its members, went underground and fell out of the field of vision of Hanoi for many years. The North Vietnamese leaders who were preparing for a renewal of armed struggle in the South, found in Sihanouk, with his anti-imperialist and anti-American rhetoric, a far more important ally than the KPRP. Moreover, Sihanouk had real power. Hanoi placed its bets on the alliance with Sihanouk, who was not only critical of the United States but also granted North Vietnam the possibility to use his territory for creating rear bases on the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail and even to deliver ammunition and arms for the fighting in the South through the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville. (However, the Khmers retained approximately 10 % of all deliveries - see Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy, N.Y., 1986, pp. 61, 420).
<The Vietnamese did their best to strengthen this regime, and went out of their way to scrap any plans of the local communists to fight Sihanouk. Hanoi believed that “the armed struggle with the government of Sihanouk slackened it and opened a path to the intrigues of American imperialism against Kampuchea" (On the History of the Vietnamese-Kampuchean Conflict, Hanoi, 1979, p. 9).
<Dmitry Mosyakov, Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences
>>2547962The posts and words are too big and scary there though
Surrealpolitik: The Experience of Chinese Experts in Democratic Kampuchea, 1975–1979Andrew Mertha, 2012<https://muse.jhu.edu/article/494077>[The] author argues that the Chinese experience in Democratic Kampuchea was structured and constrained by the contradiction of technical imperatives in a milieu of deadly political infighting, as well as by the many institutional shortcomings on both the Cambodian and the Chinese sides. The author uses the petroleum refinery project at Kampong Som (Sihanoukville) to illustrate his argument.
>In looking at the Chinese experience in Democratic Kampuchea, the question I am most frequently asked is: what did the Chinese experts on the ground know about the killings that were taking place at the time? Several analyses imply that Chinese advisers in Democratic Kampuchea, by doing nothing or by somehow benefiting from DK policy, were somehow complicit in the horrors of what was occurring in DK.<There were thousands of Chinese technical experts living in the country, mainly working in industry, transport and energy. But there must have been also a number of military advisors, all weapons being provided by China which had built a vast secret air base, with two runways near Kampong Chhnang at Phum Krang [Leav]. Since the army was so much involved in the repression it is difficult to imagine the Chinese were completely unaware of what was going on in the country. This cannot be demonstrated—nor disproved—until all archives are opened.>Although my interviewees—retired Chinese technicians who managed infrastructure projects in Democratic Kampuchea—tended to become a bit guarded when discussing this, it became clear that they did not, nor could not, know the extent of the killings that were taking place, even as they were aware that something sinister was afoot.<The Chinese were told that a person had “disappeared” (这个人不见了) or that they had been “cozying up to Vietnam” (亲越). Years later these Chinese technicians bandied about other euphemisms that suggested they had an inkling of what was afoot: “recalled to Phnom Penh” (说要去金边/要 调你到金边), “the big forest” (森林大), “particularly large coverage” (覆盖 面特别大), “digging a pit” (挖个坑), “burial by your entire family” (全家都 给你埋了), and so on. They would hear such expressions when Cambodian colleagues—such as the original director of the oil refinery—stopped showing up for work.
>The experience of Chinese technical experts in Democratic Kampuchea was complex and often contradictory. Some Chinese technicians fondly recall a Cambodia very different from that portrayed by other foreign observers (and by many Chinese, whose epic criticisms of DK seem to have receded over time). Some waxed nostalgic as they recalled walking into any store in Phnom Penh and simply taking as many bottles of beer and Coca-Cola as they wanted. They did not fully realize that because the CPK had emptied the cities immediately after the fall of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, urban areas throughout Cambodia were in a state of suspended animation—that these beverages had been sitting there undisturbed for years.
<Picrel I: Chinese Dignitaries and Foreign Experts, Chinese Embassy, Phnom Penh, September 1978. Note in the middle of the first row (from left) Hu Yaobang, Yu Qiuli, and Wang Dongxing.
>In the late 1960s, the French company Elf Aquitaine concluded a joint venture agreement with the Royal Government of Cambodia on an oil refinery at what was then called Sihanoukville, in southwest Cambodia. The refinery opened on November 14, 1968, and began processing by the end of the year. After the 1970 coup that deposed Sihanouk, the oil refinery became a target for antigovernment rebels opposed to the Khmer Republic. The facilities lay unused until the CPK victory in 1975. <Just a month after the fall of Phnom Penh, Kampong Som briefly gained notoriety again when U.S. bombers strafed the petroleum refinery in the last act of the Mayaguez incident, which was the final battle of the U.S. war in Indochina. On August 18 of that year, China and Cambodia had signed an economic agreement that entailed aid projects like the oil refinery. In December, the two sides signed a more specific agreement. >On June 9, 1976, a Chinese investigation group of technicians was sent to Kampong Som to start drawing up plans for the oil refinery. China was to renovate and expand the oil refinery in Sihanouk Bay and provide all equipment and facilities for its construction, which was slated to be finished by 1980. In terms of manpower, the original plan was to send 446 people over to Cambodia, and these were meant to be mostly management level or technical experts. In reality, they had to send skilled workers as well.
<Picrel II: The Petroleum Facility at Kampong Som. >>2552503>A Chinese technician noted that the expansion of the facilities required extra equipment for catalytic cracking. This is because they were also switching the processing technology, which had been premised on processing crude oil from Qatar, to refining equipment that could process oil from China’s Daqing oil fields. Although China claims that this was Chinese technology, it actually came from Cuba. The Cubans had somehow obtained blueprints of the facility from the Americans, and since they had sets, they decided to share one with the Chinese.>But the project was beset by problems. An on-site worker summed up the situation at the oil refinery in brusque and dire, but nonetheless accurate, terms that matched the general mood of workers who had been working on the project on a long-term basis: <It has been three years since we have been working on this refinery. We have to recover the operating room, but there have been so many problems, especially with electricity. Also, the supply chain from China to here has simply been disconnected. The Cambodian side seems to refuse to learn about what we are doing. We also need to train translators. The Cambodians who should be in charge of production are poorly educated, and too young. The techniques and methods of operation for oil refinery are unique, and workers need a basic industrial knowledge base.
>One of the most difficult challenges faced by the Chinese workers on site had to do with the quantity and quality of Cambodian workers. The number of workers on site was insufficient; the Chinese had assigned 380 people to work on construction and recovering the facility and 54 people to be in charge of production required, and these numbers were not being met because of the high rate of absenteeism on the Cambodian side. Moreover, the Cambodian workers that did show up for work did not inspire confidence. The frustration of one Chinese expert is almost tangible:<After being in Cambodia for a year, we have no clue what we have to do. We just mend roads, dig dirt, and we have no idea if we should be doing any of this because no one tells us anything. We have been digging a warehouse of dimensions 1.7 by 3.724 meters, and as we dig in the pits, the Cambodians are up there laughing at us. <Another worker complained that the Cambodians “don’t seem to be worried [about completing the project on time] because they seem to have their own thoughts and ideas that make little sense to us” (柬方不着急 因为它有它 的想法咱也不清楚).>Such criticism was not unique to the Chinese side. At the commercial port in Kampong Som, the increase in goods to be off-loaded demonstrated that the port facilities were inadequate. There were problems with lifting the goods from the docked ships. The cranes at the dock were sometimes stretched to their limit by individual loads of more than three tons. The derricks on the ships posed additional problems. The aging Chinese fleet had derricks that were broken or otherwise inoperable. In other cases, tensions arose because the DK workers did not stop during periods of rain (or during the regularly scheduled breaks taken by the Chinese).>This was certainly not the case at all locales. For example, in the Krang Leav airfield in Kampong Chhnang, which was being constructed under Chinese management, there was no shortage of workers: ongoing political purges ensured a steady supply of slave labor for the project. Some of this may have to do with the fact that, because of its strategic position with regard to shipping and the oil refinery, Kampong Som was under direct control of Phnom Penh. Yet the center never achieved a coherent strategy for managing Kampong Som, and as a result, there seemed to have been a not insignificant degree of autonomy, whereby workers could—and did—exercise their ability to simply refrain from showing up for work, much to the chagrin of the Chinese.>Another problem that was not limited to Kampong Som but was endemic throughout the country had to do with the fact that these workers were extremely young, many of them in (or just barely out of) their teens. This was a deliberate result of the sociopolitical engineering at the heart of CPK doctrine and governance.<Moreover, at Kampong Som (and elsewhere) the Cambodian site leadership was deemed “not very capable” by the Chinese. They could not keep up with the Chinese on technical matters. Even worse, according to their Chinese colleagues, they did not seem to care about or take the project particularly seriously. One exasperated Chinese worker complained: “There is a problem with gloves. How come some people aren’t wearing their gloves? There’s an issue with safety here. What if someone fell on the work site, got hurt or died? What would happen? Do labor safety laws count for anything? Not even basic ones?”
>In a December 12 meeting at Kampong Som, a number of these issues were largely—almost flippantly—dismissed out of hand by a Chinese embassy official:<We need to prepare for production. Although there is no exact deadline, we need to be clear about the goal. The point is to recover production after construction. Secondly, we don’t need that many personnel, but they all need to be good. Thirdly, the issue of expenses for stationery [and] tools for drawing and documentation was brought up to our Mainland work units, but they told us to resolve it on our own. Fourthly, when it comes to the Cambodian workers, we need to think about how many Cambodians are needed to start production work at the refinery. <There was also, however, a remarkable—even startling—admission: “since we are not sure who is in charge of operating the refinery, we should try and find out.” That is, three years after the project broke ground, the Chinese embassy was unclear about which committee—the DK industrial committee (Ministry of Industry) or the DK power committee (Ministry of Power)—had jurisdiction over the oil refinery.>On the one hand, this is somewhat understandable, given both the generally opaque nature of the DK power structure and its functional governing structure, as well as the power shifts occurring as a result of the latest set of purges and centralization of certain bureaucratic responsibilities. And, as mentioned above, it is true that Kampong Som had a direct, centralized authority relationship with Phnom Penh. Yet it is extraordinary that the Chinese side remained largely ignorant of which DK institution was its partner in developing the Kampong Som oil refinery.
>Specifically, the problem was how to link these individuals to the leadership structure in Phnom Penh. And the Chinese were at sea; in the words of a Chinese technician, “working here seems like fighting a war on the bottom of the ocean.” According to another Chinese expert, “Originally, the DK power committee would come once a month. Now, they don’t have translators, and we don’t know what attitudes they have towards the refinery. There is also a big problem with labor. There are ten people who are supposed to grind the dirt, but they just sit there. Can we bring this up with the power committee so this is brought to their attention?”>Things were not much better at the site level. According to one of the Chinese:<We need to talk about the following issues with the Cambodians. First, the Cambodian workforce may have four hundred people. However, they do not have strength, they are mainly girls, and [they] do not have equipment or labor insurance. The labor force is not stable and often fluctuates. Our people often have to do all the work. The Cambodians must also have a leadership, organizational hierarchy for the installation work. They need a person to be the leader, and we can be the advisers. There has to be planning and management. Without a strict organization, we cannot complete this project. In order to learn techniques and management skills, we also need translators. We are also worried about whether or not the Cambodians can guarantee the provision of local materials for construction. Next year is the peak of construction, so they need to make sure they supply enough materials.
>This was echoed by another Chinese colleague: “The biggest problem is the leadership problem from the Cambodian side. They have no command system. . . . There are also transportation [problems] where the equipment or materials would arrive at the port but wouldn’t get to the refinery until a month later due to ground transportation issues.”>On December 14, 1978, there was a meeting at the refinery, attended by members of the on-site technical team, representatives from the embassy’s ECD, and visiting Chinese technical experts charged with evaluating the situation on the ground. The discussions revolved around how they were going to solve the problems with the Cambodians, their trouble in finding out who was in charge, and who could solve their problems for them. They were unable to come up with much more than the fact that the power committee was not really powerful, because its main function was to distribute the oil, but little else. This problem would persist until the very end of the Chinese foreign aid experiment in Democratic Kampuchea.
<Picrel: Chinese Schematic for the Kampong Som Refinery, Feb. 1977. 民主柬 埔寨炼站厂 (Democratic Kampuchea Oil Refinery Station), 工厂总说明 (Plant Description), 扩初设计 (Development Design), 第一册 (Volume 1), 中华人民 共和国石油化学工业部 (Ministry of Petroleum and Chemical Industry of the People’s Republic of China), 第一石油化工建设公司炼油设计研究院 (The Number One Petrochemical Construction Company Refinery Design Institute), - 九七七年二月. Source: Cambodian National Archives, Box Number 7. >>2552520>The problems discussed above were considerable, but they were also particular to the Cambodian case, as evidenced by the fact that the Chinese had to bring not only technical experts but also their own workers, and by the bizarre notion that the Chinese, after two years in DK, were still unsure who they needed to communicate with on the Cambodian side. Moreover, these problems do not explain the larger issue of coordination that lay at the root of the systematic variation in the effectiveness of Chinese overseas assistance.
>On December 22, 1978, three days before the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia, a group of Chinese technical leaders presented a report based on more than a month of survey work at the refinery site. The report noted that:<When it comes to the supply of materials, [coordination] has been lax. The work that needs to be done now needs to be done mostly by the Chinese. Therefore, when the supplies do not arrive on time, or if they are incompatible, we cannot do our job properly. . . . Please tell the superiors back home. . . . The commerce unit has already stamped this request, and the MoFE wrote back and said that the embassy needed to send a full request. Now we only have a small jeep and it is not going to do the trip. In addition, there is the problem of lacking water bottles. Please try and solve these problems for us.
>Arguments over the scarcity of resources as well as the seemingly unequal distribution of resources dominated the conversation, as did complaints about subpar coordination:<The companies that send people have no idea how to organize and manage these people. The Cangzhou Thirteen Huajian Company certainly has no clue. So much has been invested that this is clearly not a joke. It seems more like a war, but a war that we’re losing. The mission is simply not clear. . . . we have no clue what is going on and what we have to do.
>This worker also underscored the problem with the quality of the technicians and skilled workers sent from China, suggesting that it was not necessarily the best or the brightest who were being sent to Democratic Kampuchea:<Those sent from the mainland were not sent according to national standards, and therefore the quality of people is quite low. We’re not going to give specific examples, but the company and everyone knows this is the case too . . . now, even those who are in charge of the project have no idea how to fight this war.
>The result was a kind of surreal state of suspended animation in which there was no clear line of responsibility and nothing seemed to function properly, if at all:<People come but don’t have critical equipment like a water pump. The cars come and break down after a month. When we work, we just surround the bulldozer, clueless as to what to do. We can’t construct this way or that because the responsibilities are not clearly delineated, whether from within or from the outside. There are so many difficulties in building this refinery. There are two hundred some people from Thirteen Huajian, but the work is not coordinated at all. . . . We need to be clear about who needs to do what, and when the equipment comes, we need to get our act together.
>Adding to the growing bonfire of discontent, another comrade chimed in:<Machines, equipment and small tools should have arrived, like rulers and pencils. When we have no pencils, we just have to use nails instead. Even during the high tide when the equipment was coming in, we didn’t even have an oil pump. We should really work on finishing this properly. Otherwise, we are not going to get a return on our investment. As far as bread-and-butter issues of daily living, the design people (Luoyang) requested that the mainland send some pickled vegetables. No more fish, please! They want vegetables.
>The complaints about bureaucratic politics had extended to food and eventually also included gripes about entertainment: the Lanzhou technicians were dissatisfied with the movies they were being shown for entertainment and wanted to choose new ones (there was particular grumbling from other quarters later on that team leaders should not have veto power over what movies were brought over from the mainland).
>What does the foregoing say about Chinese technicians and workers in Democratic Kampuchea, and by extension, in other foreign theaters of operation at the time? First of all, it underscores that while such opportunities afforded Chinese experts the ability to ply their trades, in reality they were frustrated not so much by political developments (at least not directly) but rather by organizational and institutional (read: bureaucratic) problems. Second, there appears to have been little sense of socialist brotherhood; rather, Chinese workers seem to have expected a professional experience in which they might act as mentors to a rising class of technical workers in DK. In reality, DK incompetence was greeted with thinly veiled disgust on the part of the Chinese (although on a human level, they demonstrated a genuine amount of empathy for their Cambodian colleagues and helped them when they could). Finally, although these Chinese experts were almost certainly aware that some horrific political violence was taking place—given their own less lethal but nonetheless violent experiences in China—there was nothing they could do about it, except by discreetly mitigating the circumstances of the Cambodians they worked alongside, when their CPK minders were not looking. Imagine NADK (Khmer Rogue soldiers) encountering these MONATIO weirdos for the first time, just posing in front of foreign cameramen waving these weird flags like crusaders and loaded with a ton of weapons acting like they did the revolution.
monatio
Mo-nato
>>2554488some (like upthread illegalism flag poster) claim that MONATIO showing up in PP was coordinated with the KR but even if it was somehow coordinated with the upper echelons of the Communist Party of Kampuchea i genuinely don't think the average KR knew about any of this
>NADKwasn't it RAK (Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea) at the time of April 17th? i think they only re-named to NADK after the Vietnamese invasion if i recall correctly
>>2555888Is that skull one what Cambodian men used to goon to?
>>2557439no it's a horror movie, presumably not sexual but sex sells everywhere including in cambodia post DK regime
What actually happened in Cambodia? I have no clue. There was the Khmer Rouge, they emptied out the cities, they killed millions. What am I missing? This sounds just like weird atrocity propaganda because of imperialists losing Vietnam.
>>2557706i mean they really did kill a lot of people and really did mass evacuate the cities, the vietnamese themselves outright proved it when they went there, are some of the stories outlandish? certainly but many of them are probably real
>>2557436Those two images kind of express (almost) all of what USAID is about, they set up legitimate programs to help proles while pushing a certain worldview favorable to Amerikkka at the same time. And it's also a vector for intelligence gathering and covert ops although this aspect has been exagerated a bit.
>>2557708>the vietnamese themselves outright proved it when they went thereBut did they really murder millions?
>>2557713>Although a new Cambodian currency had been printed in China during the civil war, the Khmer Rouge decided not to introduce it. At the Central Committee Plenum held in Phnom Penh in September, they agreed that currency would lead to corruption and undermine their efforts to establish a socialist society.[238] Thus, there were no wages in Democratic Kampuchea.[239] The population were expected to do whatever the Khmer Rouge commanded of them, without pay. If they refused, they faced punishment, sometimes execution.I find this very hard to believe.
>>2557713I remember Chomsky claimed that he believed that 2 million died during the whole period going back to the Cambodian civil war. Around 800,000 could be blamed on American shenanigans and 1.2 million on the Khmer rouge. That's just how I remember what he said I think there's a video on YouTube where he states his belief on these matters.
>>2557713millions? it's sort of hard to prove that, the best explanation is that they did at least murder a significant number, probably in the hundreds of thousands (say, 300-500k) whereas the rest were what we'd call deaths by reckless negligence, that is to say, while they didn't directly kill them, they may as well have as they were caused directly by the khmer rouge's policy, likewise there's the aforementioned US bombing beforehand which also contributed to these deaths
>>2557715it's not that hard to believe, there's enough witness testimony and enough overall evidence to at least make it a reasonable enough thing to say
Victims of leftism
>>2557716this reads like pretentious dystopian fiction wholly inspired by readings of postmodernist philosophy, of the french post-structuralist kind
>>2557773very reasonable take tbh. you also have to keep in mind the scale of the US carpet bombing during the civil war. they bombed the whole mainland southeast asia during that time with laos and kampuchea getting the absolute worst of it because of the ho chi minh + sihanouk trails (first covers laos and cambodia, second is through cambodia only, both lead to "south" vietnam
aka kampuchea krom)
<https://data.opendevelopmentcambodia.net/en/dataset/us-bombing-in-cambodia-1965-1975- I don't know how to interpret pol pot.
>>2565363why do you feel you must interpret him, or anyone as an individual at all? i mean it would theoretically be kind of interesting to approach pol pot from a schizoanalytic angle but that seems
>>>/dead/ on arrival
>>2547940The same happened to Che in the Congo, why do people think that their "magikkk" has some effect on real, material and dialectical physics
>>2565692some of the magikk, like traditional medicines derived from herbs (myth and medicine being inseparable in many societies), was (and still is, in places) a reasonably well-enough to work explanation for the processes of real, material and dialectical physics
not unheard of are drugs used today being extracted, isolated and used on their own in scientific medicine, like the antimalarial drug
artemisinin which was discovered during the secret chinese cultural revolution-era program
project 523, along with a number of other compounds extracted by Tu Youyou from a variety of traditional chinese folk remedies that she collected the recipes of on a journey throughout the country. this earned her a nobel prize in physiology
<https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228382-000-the-modest-woman-who-beat-malaria-for-china/however just like the medicinal plants which often contain not only the healing component(s) but also a number of other compounds including the ones with quite unpleasant side effects if ingested/applied on a human, if not outright poison that kills them; the magikk has a comparable byproduct of such in the idealist ways of thinking it is self-reinforcing
>picrelmedicinal plant of strychnos nux-vomica for thread [people's] tax. strychnine trees grow on ទួលស្លែង, Tuŏl Slêng [tuəl slaeŋ]; lit. "Hill of the Poisonous Trees" or "Strychnine Hill"
another famous species is the chankiri tree Cambodian man kept live land mines as yard decorations>PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — Authorities in northwestern Cambodia have scolded a man for his lawn decorations – old land mines and other abandoned ordnance still containing live explosives, an official said Friday.
>About 30 unexploded munitions were hung from a tamarind tree and scattered around the man’s yard, said Khen Srieng, an official from the Cambodian Mines Action Center, the government agency that oversees mine clearance.>Khen Srieng, who went to the man’s home on Wednesday to collect the munitions for destruction, said they were left over from three decades of civil war that ended in the 1990s and that most of the mines were still active and dangerous.>He said the man used to be a junk collector and had gathered the devices from rice fields and forests near his home to sell as scrap. The man, whose name was not released, told Khen Srieng that after the government banned the sale and purchase of land mines and other unexploded ordnance, he didn’t know what to do with them.>Violators of the ban are rarely if ever prosecuted, because they are generally poor villagers seeking a bit of extra income. CMAC lectured the man for breaking the law.>CMAC chief Heng Ratana, who on his Facebook page described the situation as “unbelievable,” said the man sometimes acted as an unlicensed deminer by clearing mines from the fields of other villagers for money, and then kept them.
>The man’s house is in Banteay Meanchey province near the Cambodian-Thai border, where there was combat in the 1980s and 1990s between Cambodian government forces and communist Khmer Rouge fighters.>An estimated 4 million to 6 million uncleared land mines and other pieces of unexploded ordnance remain in Cambodia.>A January report by the Cambodian Mine Action and Victim Assistance Authority said there were 77 casualties from land mines and other unexploded ordnance last year, including 12 fatalities. It said that from 1979 to 2019, such items killed 19,780 people and injured 45,075 others.https://apnews.com/article/oddities-cambodia-land-mines-686df8b93bee30be43ec394c8749dcb0 >>2547940t.
>>2557706>>2557708I read some of Michael Vickery's book on the subject. It's pretty interesting. He describes the worst violence being an internal purge that occurred a bit later waged by Pol Pot's faction against KR cadre in the eastern zones. He describes Pol Pot as a petit-bourgeois peasant populist with extreme nationalist tendencies and made analogies to the the green Tambov rebellion during the Russian civil war.
>>2557713Don't think so but it was a lot.
>>2574030>videoshe's so real for this
>He describes the worst violence being an internal purge that occurred a bit later waged by Pol Pot's faction against KR cadre in the eastern zones. kind of trve… internal purge of '78 having to do with eastern zone cadres "being influenced by vietnam". turned out to be actually trve in heng samrin's case lol
>He describes Pol Pot as a petit-bourgeois peasant populist with extreme nationalist tendenciessounds too "great man"-ish. while there were certainly petit-bourgeois peasant populist tendencies in his faction and the resulting actions, he
personally was the least petit-bourgeois, certainly less so than ta mok and nuon chea for example
>made analogies to the the green Tambov rebellion during the Russian civil war.do you remember the exact title of book this was stated in? this sounds interesting, weren't russian civil war green/peasant uprisings primarily motivated by resentment towards both the whites' random acts of chauvinist terror and the reds/bolsheviks' prodrazviorstka policies?
>>2574155thank you anon♡
>you know a lot more about this subject than I do soi don't really think so tbh, actually i could be very wrong on a lot of stuff and not know it ;( but i guess it's nice that i give off the appearance at least
>you might find some of the debates in it interestingyes, from the screenshots you've provided it seems like vickery & radkey either had a rather poor understanding of what was going on in civil war era russia or tried to purposely mislead the reader in order to feed into "le evil gomunists" narrative, for starters looks like they did not distinguish between left and right SRs and instead grouped them as a single unit with a clear political program and organization, which is missing a lot of nuance as left SRs later fought among the bolsheviks
true that their [left SR] leaders were later executed thoughthe last sentences of 2nd picture also seem to be deliberately misleading as highlighting the greens' high use of violence as "exceptional" during the civil war, in reality "actions that explored the ultimate recesses of all that is fiendish in human nature" were common from all sides involved (mostly whites though, owing to their movement's inherently reactionary and chauvinistic nature, and foreign interventionists' support)
>along with Chomsky i just really hope this (easily disprovable) narrative about him being "cambodia denier" dies out soon, if there's a reason to hate him it's the epstein connections
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