S3 Ep6: 1972 - Life (and Death) in the Liberated Zones. Regrets for the Khmer Soul and M-13

In 1972 a Phnom Penh schools inspector named Ith Sarin spent nine months inside Khmer Rouge territory and came back to write about it. Around the same time a French scholar named Francois Bizot spent three months chained in a jungle camp called M-13, interrogated daily by Duch. Between them they left the two most detailed accounts of the Khmer Rouge before it took power, and they do not describe the same regime.

Time Period Covered: 1971 to 1972

Why would someone join the Khmer Rouge? How would people view the parts of the country now being run by the communists? What was M-13, and why is it so important?

In this episode, Lachlan returns to one of the most invaluable insights into the prototype regime of Democratic Kampuchea and the countryside control of the Khmer Rouge: Ith Sarin's Regrets for the Khmer Soul, a detailed account of life under the communists for nine months, which is not as damning as some might expect.

This is in sharp contrast to another memoir from this same period, Francois Bizot's The Gate, in which he recounts his imprisonment at M-13, the jungle prototype of Tuol Sleng.

Woven through these two sides of the story is the evolution of the Khmer Rouge into a group taking over the functions of a state, and applying the blueprint of revolution they had settled on to the Cambodian population they controlled, which numbered in the millions.

Check out my visit to M13 at YouTube or https://www.patreon.com/

Sources:

David Chandler The Tragedy of Cambodian History
Philip Short Pol Pot
Ith Sarin Regrets for the Khmer Soul (available at https://www.mekongriverpress.com/)
Francois Bizot The Gate
ECCC Testimony Kang Gek Iev (Duch)
Henri Locard Jungle Heart of the Khmer Rouge
Norodom Sihanouk My War with the CIA
Ben Kiernan How Pol Pot Came to Power
Sophal Ear The Khmer Rouge Cannon (Phd Thesis)
Ian Harris Buddhism Under Pol Pot
Alex Hinton Why Did They Kill?