When the War Was Over (23 page)

Sihanouk's police discovered where the communists had moved, and the prince decided to travel to Ratanakiri to personally press a counterattack against the communists, with weapons newly arrived from Beijing. He ordered government soldiers to be “pitiless” in smashing the revolt. Moreover, the prince took public and personal responsibility for an order that all rebels be summarily executed. “I will assume responsibility and be judged by [a] people's tribunal,” he declared.

The army of Lon Nol and Sihanouk did arrive at the doorstep of the central committee headquarters and nearly captured Sar. But the leadership escaped. Phat remembered the fight. He was studying at the “very first military branch training” school set up and taught by Sar. “Brother Number One [Saloth Sar in code] had just presented the program of study when the soldiers of. . . Lon Nol came out on one of their rampages . . . capturing the guns of the couriers assigned to protect [another leader]. So the military school was temporarily closed and the guerrilla militia was sent to the battlefield.”

Brother Number One now gave Phat a new assignment, “to go over . . . to the villages higher up and evacuate the people in that area and take them into the forest to attack the enemy at [a nearby] military post. Subsequently Brother Number One sent me to go along with [Son Sen] to go to Veune Sai [a district town in western Ratanakiri province] to fight the enemy.” Phat remained there until Sihanouk's overthrow. Saloth Sar's counterattack against Lon Nol had succeeded. He and other members of the central committee were evacuated to safer ground.

Sihanouk was upset and declared that his army had to kill off all the rebels: “They [the communists] gave rifles to the Khmer Leou and ordered them to fire on the national forces. . . . I could not allow this and took stringent measures which resulted in the annihilation of 180 [tribespeople] and the capture of thirty ringleaders who were shot subsequently,” he said. “I do not care if I am sent to hell—I will submit the pertinent documents to the devil himself.”

In the end, Sihanouk created his own hell, in part because of this “rampage” against the communists, which killed far more innocent villagers than true communists, who were still few in number. The communists were largely “barehanded,” without guns or weapons. They spent as much time foraging for food as recruiting new members. When they attacked small government outposts their chief objective was to steal weapons, not to capture government territory.

Yet Sihanouk declared in 1968 that Cambodia was engulfed in “total war. . . . Civil war these days has extended to other provinces [besides Battambang] such as Kompong Speu, Kirrirom, Chambak, and Kampot . . .”—areas throughout the country. He orchestrated demonstrations against the Khmer Rouge and the Khmer Serei, the rightist supporters of Son Ngoc Thanh. And his military reports made the communists appear stronger than the communists themselves reported at a later date.

Sihanouk's publications reported rebels stealing fifty rifles in a single day of fighting around the country. Phnom Penh reported that some 10,000 villagers had taken to the forest at the instigation of the Khmer Rouge. The
truth of their strength probably lay somewhere in between Sihanouk's and the Khmer Rouge's claims. But the Khmer Rouge had managed to control some of the propaganda and sow confusion and myth into Sihanouk's camp. The prince believed Khieu Samphan, the honest intellectual, was in charge of the revolt. Samphan was the communist with the strongest support in Phnom Penh. And however unlikely it was to imagine this proven follower rather than leader was at the head of command of a rebel army, Sihanouk and hence the country believed it. And what a contrast Samphan's record was to Sihanouk's. Samphan had been a brilliant student of economics in Paris; he had made a career of refusing bribes and leading a modest life, and he had championed the poor both in his newspaper and in Sihanouk's cabinet.

As Sihanouk targeted the left, the rightists in his government moved in for the kill. They prodded Sihanouk to charge the Vietnamese with supporting the Khmer Rouge. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Sihanouk began asking in public if his erstwhile Vietnamese and Chinese communist friends were supporting the Cambodian communists. Hanoi's worst fears were threatening to become a reality. Sihanouk was testing to see if the Vietnamese communists could become scapegoats for his problems at home. The prince asked the commission set up under the Geneva Accords to investigate allegations that the Vietnamese communists were infringing on Cambodia's territorial integrity (which he knew was true).

But Sihanouk's fears were also becoming a reality. In less than three years the Khmer Rouge mounted an army of more than 5,000 soldiers, albeit poorly trained and equipped, operating at company strength. Small as the army may seem compared to that of neighboring Vietnam, it was still a significant threat to Cambodia's army, which counted no more than 35,000 soldiers at battalion level and which depended on foreign communist aid for its arms. It was a predicament that bothered Lon Nol as well.

Lon Nol was now prime minister and defense minister. Secretly his government sent out feelers to the United States asking for an improvement in relations. Sihanouk agreed to apply for membership to three U.S.-dominated lending institutions—the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—to appease his rightist critics and lift the country out of its doldrums. But he was no longer in control of the country he was supposed to be ruling. The next year, 1969, his foreign policy fell apart in a jumble of now genuine inconsistency. In March the United States launched an unauthorized, secret bombing campaign inside Cambodia against Vietnamese communist troops. Sihanouk complained publicly about the bombing and vowed to shoot down as many American planes as possible. But a few
months later he reestablished the long-broken ties with the United States after Washington agreed to recognize Cambodia's borders.

At the same time, with much the same logic concerning Cambodia's borders, Sihanouk officially recognized the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the South Vietnamese communists. The PRG had promised in writing that all Vietnamese troops would leave Cambodia once peace was restored in Vietnam, a resounding public acknowledgment that the Vietnamese communists were inside Cambodia. Sihanouk had recognized one government whose troops occupied a large part of Cambodia's border territory and another government which was bombing that same territory. This was no longer a “balanced” foreign policy, it was desperation, and no one understood this better than Lon Nol, who, in August 1969, formed a new cabinet entirely under his control. He struck down the remaining decrees based on Khieu Samphan's program for nationalization and heated up the war on the local communists, moving against the Vietnamese sanctuaries at the same time.

Beijing and Hanoi were worried. In 1969 both Saloth Sar and Sihanouk visited Hanoi on separate trips, Sihanouk to attend the funeral of Ho Chi Minh. The North Vietnamese tried to assess Sihanouk's intentions and those of the Khmer Rouge and prepare for a change in Cambodian politics.

Lon Nol was making his separate alliances, and in September 1969 he initiated talks with Son Ngoc Thanh, the original independence fighter. During the twenty-five years since he had first come to national attention, Thanh had moved from a centrist to rightist position but had not altered his opinion of Sihanouk—whom he detested. Thanh had fought against Sihanouk during the First Indochina War on the side of the noncommunists. After independence he kept in touch with followers in Phnom Penh but moved to his birthplace, South Vietnam, where he recruited Khmer Krom to fight against the Vietnamese communists and Sihanouk. He was supported by the American Central Intelligence Agency in these endeavors and became the most reliable rightist critic of the prince. Thanh agreed to work with Lon Nol, as expected. With those negotiations completed, the right waited until Sihanouk had left the country the following spring to stage a coup.

The coup had the earmarks of American approval if not direct American support. Son Ngoc Thanh's CIA connections, Sirik Matak's open friendship with American officials, and the targets of the first day of demonstrations—the embassies of the North and South Vietnamese communists—led Cambodians and foreigners alike to believe that the United States was behind it.

The coup ended the twenty-six-year-old game of the Vietnamese and Chinese communists. The two Asian powers now determined to unite
Sihanouk with the Khmer Rouge. Saloth Sar and Sihanouk were in Beijing shortly after the coup, and although they never met they agreed to work together. Sihanouk would be the titular leader of the Khmer Rouge, Saloth Sar its true and secret chief. The Khmer Rouge needed no longer to fight against a prince who espoused socialism and starved their chances for aid by his befriending of communist nations. Before, Vietnamese support for the Cambodian communists had been confined largely to use of Vietnamese sanctuaries inside Cambodia as safe, rearguard positions when Lon Nol's army chased them. Now they had to contend with more Vietnamese support than they wanted. The Vietnamese army was prepared to fight their battles against Lon Nol and, contrary to Cambodian communist wishes, to set up local administration in their name.

There was no change in the party's concept of revolution. It was still “pure” and “self-sufficient,” still distrustful of outsiders, especially the Vietnamese and Chinese communists. Its leaders were convinced they were the anointed ones who could rescue their country, “whose honor and dignity have been jeered and which has been exploited, oppressed and despised during many centuries.”

Privately, they held Sihanouk, the United States, and the Vietnamese primarily responsible for their miserable condition and the state of Cambodia. Yet here they were, in alliances with two of their three enemies. Only the Chinese could have brokered such a sacrilegious union, one that required subterfuge, secrecy, and delicate maneuvering to endure to the end. The Khmer Rouge chose to accept the more distant, more radical Chinese communists as patrons for complicated ideological and historical reasons. The unholy alliance lasted until the war's end and then exploded in the vicious and extreme adherence by the Cambodian communists to their own rules of self-reliance, revolutionary violence, clandestine government, and the empty concept of purity.

After Lon Nol's coup, Phat was elevated to the rank of political commissar to a Khmer Rouge company fighting in Rataniki province. He performed well and by the end of the war was named secretary, or leader, of an entire sector. But Phat, the faithful recruit, discovered after the war that even he, who had followed all the party's commands, had to prove again his purity.

In the first days of March 1970, a rumor circulated around Phnom Penh that a white crocodile had been sighted near the capital. The story spread quickly. The White Crocodile is one of the most powerful and auspicious symbols in the Khmer otherworld. He was present at Cambodia's birth and ever after was put in charge of controlling the current of the Mekong River. In legend the White Crocodile is credited with the annual miracle that changes the Mekong River's current. His appearances aboveground occur only when the Cambodian people are at a crossroads.

As the days passed the number of crocodile sightings multiplied. Whoever was coordinating these rumors was planning a major turn of events. And on the warm afternoon of March 18, 1970, the president of Cambodia's national assembly read a short announcement over the government radio that the two houses of government had unanimously “withdrawn their confidence from Prince Norodom Sihanouk in his position as chief of state.”

In form, this was merely a
coup de chef d'état
. Only Sihanouk was displaced; the government remained. In fact, this act was the beginning of the end of much of what Cambodia had been not only in the modern, independent era, but for centuries. One of the world's oldest continuous monarchies was abolished. In its place the new rulers said they would build a republican government. Instead they walked straight into war.