On Friday, Cambodia’s government announced that its Cabinet had approved a draft bill that will toughen penalties for anyone denying atrocities carried out by the communist Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s.
The bill stipulates “the prosecution of any individual” who denies or condones the atrocities committed by Democratic Kampuchea, as the Khmer Rouge regime referred to itself, according to a government statement quoted by the AFP news agency. The bill’s definition of atrocities includes genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, for which a U.N.-backed court prosecuted five top Khmer Rouge leaders between 2006 and 2022, eventually convicting three of them.
Led by “Brother Number One” Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia from April 1975 until their overthrow by a Vietnamese invasion in January 1979, during which time they attempted a radical reengineering of Cambodian society along agrarian lines. The attempt cost the lives of an estimated 1.7 million people from starvation, illness, overwork, and outright execution.
Under the seven-article draft bill announced on Friday, people who “deny the truth of the bitter past” will be jailed for between one and five years and could face fines of between $2,500 and $125,000.
The draft bill will be sent to the National Assembly soon for approval, which it is almost certain to gain, given that the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) holds 120 of the 125 seats in the assembly.
Once passed, the law will replace a similar bill passed in 2013 on then-Prime Minister Hun Sen’s request, after opposition politician Kem Sokha suggested that some of the evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities was fabricated by the Vietnamese government. This law prescribed terms of imprisonment of six months to two years and fines of between $250 and $1,000.
The announcement of this more punitive draft law comes three months ahead of the 50th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge takeover on April 17, and three weeks after the CPP held its annual commemoration of the overthrow of Democratic Kampuchea on January 7.
Cambodia is far from the only nation that has banned genocide denial. Seventeen European countries, as well as Canada, and Israel, have introduced legislation criminalizing Holocaust denial and Rwanda has passed a number of laws banning denial of the country’s 1994 genocide. Western advocates of such laws often argue that such laws serve the progressive goal of preventing the dissemination of hate and misinformation that can traumatize survivors. As one author noted in a recent study of genocide denial laws, “genocide denial can have a drastic negative effect upon survivors and others touched by the crime of genocide.”
In Cambodia’s current political context, however, the impacts of such a law are likely to be more pernicious. To understand why, it is important to recognize how central the Khmer Rouge has been to the CPP government’s claim to legitimacy.
Ever since the CPP helped the Vietnamese military sweep the Khmer Rouge from power on January 7, 1979, local understandings of the regime and its atrocities have been nearly inseparable from the country’s hotly contested politics. Throughout the 1980s, the CPP-led People’s Republic of Kampuchea, installed and sustained in power by the Vietnamese military, battled a Western- and Chinese-backed resistance coalition that included the remnants of the Khmer Rouge.
Against the backdrop of this civil war, the CPP, then known as the Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party, built its legitimacy squarely on the fact that it had overthrown Pol Pot and presided over the country’s “second birth.” In the early 1980s it built dozens of local memorials to Khmer Rouge horrors, including the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, housed in the former S-21 security prison in Phnom Penh, and the “killing fields” memorial outside Phnom Penh, both of which are now popular tourist sites. This remains the CPP’s official position today, conjoined to its claims to have ended the Cambodian civil war in the late 1990s and fostered an unprecedented period of peace and political stability in the years since.
However, the “liberation” of Cambodia by the Vietnamese army was and remains a politically controversial event. For many of the CPP’s opponents, the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge was accompanied by a Vietnamese “invasion” that brought the country under the sway of Vietnam, which many Cambodian nationalists view as a historical enemy.
Even today, nearly a half-century on, the toppling of the Khmer Rouge regime on January 7 represents a deep fault line in Cambodian politics, which leaves little room for neutral historical inquiry. In a speech marking the 40th anniversary of the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge on January 7, 2015, Hun Sen stated that anyone who opposed his government was essentially pro-Khmer Rouge. “You hate Pol Pot,” he said, “but you oppose the ones who toppled him. What does this mean? It means you are an ally of the Pol Pot regime.”
Cambodian nationalist paranoia, coupled with the CPP’s dominance of the official narrative, has nurtured a history of denial, or at least distortion, around the subject of the Khmer Rouge. Opposition politicians, many of whom belonged to factions that were allied with the ousted Khmer Rouge during the 1980s, have blamed Vietnam for the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, by encouraging them, carrying them out, or exaggerating their extent. Anecdotally, such views are also surprisingly common among the public at large. These views tend to coexist with the perception that Hun Sen and the CPP are “puppets” of the Communist Party of Vietnam, or are otherwise doing its bidding.
The text of the draft law has not yet been made public, but in this highly polarized and politicized context, any law seeking to criminalize “denial” of the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, while it may succeed in blanketing out the most paranoid nationalist conspiracy theories, will provide the CPP with the legal means to muffle legitimate dissenting interpretations of Cambodia’s – and its own – history.
While the CPP’s official historiography emphasizes the “bitter truth” of what took place in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, all to highlight better its own achievements, it is also marked by areas of silence. Most obviously, it discourages people from asking questions about the histories of the various CPP leaders, including but certainly not limited to Hun Sen, who served the Khmer Rouge regime prior to its fall. (Hun Sen defected to Vietnam from Democratic Kampuchea in mid-1977, but others served the regime until its final months.) This question also bedeviled the U.N.-backed tribunal’s efforts to try surviving former leaders of the Khmer Rouge in 2006, which the government worked hard to restrict to a preselected clique of former leaders, fearing where an “open” legal process might stray.
More subtly, given how closely the CPP has associated itself with the legacy of opposition to the Khmer Rouge, such legal restrictions may also inhibit discussion on a host of other related historical questions, from the role played by the country’s monarchy since 1979 to the impacts and legacies of the United Nations peacekeeping mission of 1992-93, which helped create, at least for a time, a competitive multiparty political system.
While the goal of the law may seem benign – who, after all, is in favor of allowing the denial of amply-documented historical atrocities? – its intended or actual purpose will be to ring-fence the official historical positions of the CPP-led government and to place them beyond effective intellectual challenge, in the same way that the party’s recent political crackdowns have placed it beyond effective electoral challenge. Its ultimate effect will not be to serve truth, but to prop up a political dispensation characterized by a stifling social and political consensus.