young children (born between 1970 and 1979) had a 10 percent probability not to survive until the end of 1979.

Figure 3 further emphasizes that point by plotting the death probability during the 1975-1979 period by birth cohort and gender. Mortality is much higher among males, but this is only true for adults. The fact that prime adult males are, by far, the most likely to die during the Khmer Rouge period indicates that violent deaths made a major contribution to excess mortality.<sup>6</sup> The result of this differential mortality by birth cohort and gender is that there are serious imbalances in the current population structure of Cambodia, including an excess number of females especially for certain age groups.

# **_II.3 Selective mortality: mortality by socio-economic status_**

It is generally believed that the Khmer Rouge targeted especially the educated and urban groups in the society, as they were seen as obstacles for the creation of a “new” society. However, this claim, based on numerous anecdotal evidence and survivors accounts has not yet been quantified very reliably. Only Sliwinski (1995) who uses, because of constraints at the time of his survey, a non representative sample of survivors (63 Cambodian households refugees in France, 589 households refugees in Thailand and 644 households in the Phnom Penh area) provides estimates of selective mortality: he indicates that more educated individuals were more likely to die between 1975 and 1979 and especially that some professions like army officers, policemen, managers and the clergy were at very high risk. He also provides estimates of mortality rates by province. Such estimates, however, based on samples of convenience, are not as reliable as estimates from a nationally representative sample.

In the siblings’ data collected in the nationally representative Demographic and Health Survey, there is no direct information on the socio-economic status of the siblings. However, by using information about the respondents, it is possible to have an idea of the socio-economic status of the family. One variable indicates whether the respondent lived in a rural or an urban environment during her childhood. For women born before 1975, this allows to determine whether her family was of urban or rural origin. Given the large internal migrations that occurred under the Khmer Rouge, the strategy is less reliable for younger women. Similarly, for women who could have attended secondary school before

> 6 This point was already made by Heuveline (1998). Sliwinski (1995), based on survivors’ accounts, provides a breakdown of mortality by type of deaths (executions, famine, missing, natural and war). An interesting comparison with “normal” mortality rates by age and gender before the mortality crisis can be made by looking at the estimates by Migozzi (1973) for 1958-59 in Cambodia: at that time, the age pattern of mortality displayed the usual J-shape with very high mortality for young children, declining rapidly until adolescence and increasing thereafter, first slowly until age 50 and then more steeply. Similarly, Migozzi (1973) estimates that, because of maternal mortality, between ages 15 to 40, women were more at risk than men in 1958-59.

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