Page 248 - The Winter of Islam and the Spring to Come

THE WINTER OF ISLAM AND THE SPRING TO COME
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what was harvested without permission, or practicing any form of reli-
gion at all were all considered "activities against the state," and thus the
killing began. Between 1975 and 1979, the rice paddies turned into the
infamous "killing fields." Some 3 million people out of the total popula-
tion of 9 million were killed by being shot, or axed in the head, or suffo-
cated, or else left to starve.
As in all communist countries, a savage policy of repression was
implemented against the Muslim population. War was declared on the
people's religious values, and the regime resorted to violence in an ef-
fort to turn people away from their religion. Hundreds of thousands of
Muslims were killed. The figures speak for themselves: Some 200,000
Muslims live in Cambodia today. The figure was more than 800,000 be-
fore the communist revolution, when Muslims represented 7 percent of
the population.
The Black Book of Communism describes the savagery the Khmer
Rouge employed against the Muslim Cham people:

In 1973, mosques were destroyed and prayers banned in the liber-
ated zones. Such measures became more widespread after May 1975.
Korans were collected and burned, and mosques were either trans-
formed into other buildings or razed. Thirteen Muslim dignitaries
were executed in June, some for having gone to pray rather than at-
tending a political rally, others for having campaigned for the right to
religious wedding ceremonies… The more fervent were all but wiped
out: of the 1,000 who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, only 30 sur-
vived these years. Unlike other Cambodians, the Cham frequently re-
belled, and large numbers of them died in the massacres and reprisals
that followed these uprisings. After mid-1978 the Khmer Rouge began
systematically exterminating a number of Cham communities, includ-
ing women and children… Ben Kiernan calculates that the overall
mortality rate among the Cham was 50 percent. 65
Some 70 percent of the Muslims living in the capital, Phnom Penh,
abandoned the country because of the terrible savagery of the Khmer
Rouge and were forced to seek shelter in neighboring countries such as
Thailand, Malaysia and Laos. When the Vietnamese occupied