President Carter To Pol Pot
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Dear Pol Pot:
News of your policies in your country has reached my administration and I. Unable to merely avoid the urge to speak out in denunciation of your government, I am nothing less than disappointed and outraged. In your experiments concerning the Cambodian people, the atrocious transgressions have disregarded the humane reasoning and directly violated the principle of human rights and dignities, which I firmly believe in and advocate, in the utmost despicable manner.
As the leader of inhumane regime of radical Marxists, the Khmer Rouge, your sadistic dealings with the people of your nation along with the actions of your followers have flouted the rights of the Cambodian people. “Of all human rights, the most basic is to be free of arbitrary violence, whether that violence comes from government, from terrorists, from criminals, or from self-appointed messiahs operating under the cover of politics or religion.” (Woolley) Instead, this is exactly what you and your regime went against. During the time the people were rejoicing and celebrating because of the end of the civil war, their happiness was short-lived that very same day and was replaced with a wave of terror of confusion. They were violently and forcefully evacuated from the city with no other explanation to answer their questions other than gunshots. No one was exempt from this abrupt violence, not even the pregnant, old, sick and dying. From the outset, you denied them one of the most basic rights by your capricious brutality. Rather than giving them the right to be free of arbitrary violence, you and the Khmer Rouge bound them to the cold chains dreadful act that they were supposed to be entitled freedom from. Again, they were repressed into the deathly shadows as more information about what was happening was not released. All they were told was that the country was now run by Angka. (Carvin) To enforce your new movement, the barbaric Security Office 21, more commonly known as S-21, was established in order to interrogate and exterminate those opposed to Angka. I could hardly grasp the idea of what I heard went on at this place! “Political killings, tortures, arbitrary and prolonged detention without trial or without a charge, are the cruelest and the ugliest of human rights violations.” (Woolley) Ugly hardly depicts the revolting crimes committed at S-21! The numbers alone make me cringe in a nauseating sickness, knowing that nearly 20,000 have entered S-21 for interrogation, but only 6 are known to have survived. The Cambodian people have committed no wrongdoing, yet they were subject to torture! What held them accountable to being tortured with knives, battery powered electric shocks, searing hot metal prods, lynches, and other cruel methods?
Even in your experiment for an agrarian utopia, in what sense is it a utopia at all if no rights for the people exist? In your attempt to achieve the most extreme form of communism by moving all inhabitants to rural areas of the country, “the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state” was breached. (Universal) The people have already established their lives where they lived, especially those who originally came from the urban areas you forced them out of. However, in short instance and several gunshots later, their