On 14 November 1976 a young woman named Kim Ham-Bin was arrested and detained at a secretive prison designated ‘S-21'.

Located in Phnom Penh, the security-centre was established as one of approximately 200 detainment sites located throughout Democratic Kampuchea - as Cambodia was renamed. During its brief existence, roughly between October 1975 and January 1979, upwards of 12,000 men, women and children were warehoused under inhumane conditions.

Little is known of Kim Ham-Bin. Archives from S-21 indicate that she was 25 years old. Her ‘position' is recorded simply as ‘wife of Chhim Sak'. No documents have survived that might indicate why she was arrested - other than the fact that she was the wife of Chhim Sak. As to Chhim Sak, he was arrested on 16 January 1976 and executed on 22 July 1976 - three months prior to his wife's arrest.

On the day of Kim Ham-Ban's detainment, forty-five other people were arrested. Of these, at least forty were women, all of whom were classified as ‘wife', ‘mother' or ‘sister' of other detainees. And with few exceptions, all of these women, including Kim Ham-Bin, were executed within twenty-four hours.

Since the collapse of Democratic Kampuchea, the security-centre known as S-21 has assumed a prominent role in the ongoing historiography of the Cambodian genocide. As an institution, S-21 calls attention to the adminis­tered violence that was manifest in Cambodia. Undue focus on S-21, how­ever, deflects attention from other, more systemic forms of violence that enabled the security-centre to function.

From its inception as a disorganised socio-political movement, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK; aka the ‘Khmer Rouge') emerged as one of the most violent and brutal apparatus of state terror and murder since the Nazi party held power in Germany.

The dominant interpretation of Cambodian history during this period, described by Michael Vickery as the ‘Standard Total View' (STV), presents the CPK as a totalitarian, communist and autarkic regime seeking to reorga­nise Cambodian society around a primitive, agrarian political economy.¹ Under the STV, the victims of the regime perished as a consequence of the structural violence of misguided and irrational economic policies, a draconian security apparatus implemented to instil terror, and the central leadership's fanatical belief in the creation of a utopian communist society. Notable here is the blame laid upon Pol Pot, the highly secretive and paranoid leader of the CPK. Under the Khmer Rouge, following the STV, cities were emptied; hospitals and schools destroyed; and religion, currency and private property were abolished. To this end, Stewart Clegg and co­authors write, ‘the Khmer Rouge embarked on creating an agrarian, egalitar­ian, anti-professional, anti-technology and self-sufficient society - a primate communist utopia'.^{[875] [876]}

For Vickery, the STV limits our understanding of CPK ideology, policies and practice to such an extent that its presumptions of CPK autarky and despotism have become conventional wisdom. These latter presumptions have permeated not only scholarly accounts, but also popular understandings and journalistic commentaries.

centric, independent, self-sustainable nation, with an emphasis on self­mastery. Money was abolished, foreign trade collapsed.'^[877]

It is not so much that the STV is inaccurate as that it is incomplete and theoretically vapid. In fact, documentary evidence indicates that the CPK sold rice surpluses on the global market to satisfy the state's need for fertiliser, tractors, industrial inputs and provisions.^[878] Ben Kiernan finds also that agri­cultural exports were traded for artillery, coastal patrol boats and other weaponry.^[879] Rhetoric aside, the regime's consolidation of control was not based on an irrational foundation of self-reliance and self-mastery. Instead, as I document in this chapter, CPK policy was predicated upon surplus agricul­tural production and a selective engagement with the global economy as informed by its allegiance to the Non-Aligned Movement. Accordingly, I challenge standard historiography of the Cambodian genocide by providing an analytical overview of the structures of violence set in place by the Khmer Rouge. First, however, it is necessary to provide a broader geopolitical framework from which to understand the emergence of the CPK as a political organisation that would come to orchestrate genocidal violence upon its own people.