When the War Was Over (25 page)

Sihanouk had promoted Lon Nol for his political loyalty rather than his military skills, a fact that became obvious after the coup. Veteran military professionals in the army complained regularly about their leader's incompetence, but Sihanouk paid them no heed. But while the prince appreciated Lon Nol's political abilities he, too, underrated them, in part because the source of Lon Nol's ambition was obscure, or incomprehensible.

Lon Nol made no secret of his dream of purifying the Khmer race, the Khmer culture, and Khmer Buddhism of the foreign pollutants he thought had sapped the country's energy and eaten away at its identity and territory. In the sophisticated circles of elite Phnom Penh, Lon Nol's ideas were treated as a curiosity, perhaps an embarrassment, but nothing serious. He was a religious reactionary, a firm devotee of the occult and a practicing mystic who carried around the battered talismans given him in his youth by his village wiseman. He surrounded himself with astrologers and holy men, but in deference to the belief that magic should be kept private to protect its potency, he did not thrust his practices upon unwitting friends or strangers. Sihanouk could easily ignore Lon Nol's backwardness up until the very end.

Then, three months before the coup, Lon Nol had opened the Khmer-Mon Institute to propagate his ideas. Sihanouk had given Lon Nol his indifferent approval to set up this questionable center of intellectual pursuit in an aging French mansion in the city. From here Lon Nol had hoped to formalize his “eccentric” notions for resuscitating Cambodia's moral and historical heritage. His audience was broader than Sihanouk or the other modern politicians understood. Lon Nol had headed the Cambodian armed forces for decades, and he knew the appeal his ideas would have on the more common men who filled the army's ranks.

In this and other respects, Lon Nol was mining the same vein of crippled national pride that his ideological rival Saloth Sar had mined. But whereas Sar looked forward to what he considered a modern solution—communist revolution—Lon Nol saw salvation in the past, in reasserting Cambodia's Buddhist heritage. Cambodia proved fertile ground for both messages that
exalted the injured Khmer nation and race. The centuries of defeat and humiliation since Angkor, the effect of the French patronizing of “lazy” Cambodians while promoting “industrious” Vietnamese, and the vivid fear of those “industrious” Vietnamese taking over Cambodia had left their mark.

As the country began to weaken and shatter, these two men, who represented opposite and extreme ends of the political spectrum, were heading toward the same goal of turning Cambodia into a fascist state. Their goals were fascist in the strict definition of the phenomenon: a regime that exalts nation and race, stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, imposes severe economic and social regimentation, and forcibly suppresses the opposition. Both leaders also encouraged totalitarianism's by-products-racism and xenophobia.

None of this was apparent during the 1970–1975 war. Neither side openly acknowledged that its increasingly brutal behavior was propelled by racism. The American allies of Lon Nol were embarrassed by his Buddhist “mumbo-jumbo” but failed to take it seriously. An exception was a U.S. political officer in Phnom Penh named William Harben. In 1972 he wrote a confidential cable to Washington entitled “The Anthropological Lon Nol” that described the deep chord Lon Nol had struck in the Khmer people and accurately predicted the problems it would create:

What Harben could not know was that the Cambodian on the other side of the developing civil war was Lon Nol without sorcery. Saloth Sar was as preoccupied with returning Cambodia to its rightful place as the descendant of the Angkor Empire, and purging the country of foreigners and foreign influence. They were both products of Cambodia's recent history. But in the latter part of the twentieth century, communism offered a better mask for fascist doctrines than the teachings of Lord Buddha. Saloth Sar wrapped his appeal in the vocabulary of Marxist-Leninist revolution, especially the idea of national liberation. Like his comrades in China and Vietnam, he knew
how to manipulate the “modern, scientific” theories of Marxist-Leninism to give legitimate expression to ancient racist attitudes and cultural animosities. “National liberation” wars began against European colonial powers and continued against neighbors who were historic enemies. (Vietnamese communists called the Chinese communists “Han chauvinists,” when they began their feud. The Cambodian communists would call the Vietnamese communists “Yuon,” which they said was synonymous with savage, when they would both go to war in 1978.)

The consequences of these animosities would be most devastating in Cambodia, as always at the bottom end of a string of antagonisms. During their war Saloth Sar and Lon Nol would accuse each other of being a puppet of a foreign power, and both launched racist pogroms to prove their “purity.” Sar knew his audience better, knew the peasants were more likely than the bourgeoisie to respond to pledges to protect and purify their blood and soil. Moreover, Sar's communist allies, Vietnam and China, were wise enough to hide their feuds and distrust until the war ended and Sar had won. Then he proved the latter part of Harben's prediction that the Cambodians were too weak to launch foreign wars. The Vietnamese invasion, however, defied Harben's corollary judgment that the Khmers were too numerous to be absorbed in a Vietnamese empire.

Lon Nol had filled the officer corps with men largely like himself, men who lacked the education or background to compete in the civilian world and who were loyal to him.

Within days after the coup, Lon Nol took command of the fighting, and quickly displayed his lack of military acumen, his obsession to turn the war into a crusade against the Vietnamese infidels, and his determination to reassert the glory of Cambodia and Buddhism. The first months of battle were disastrous. Phnom Penh's forces effectively lost or gave up control of more than half of the country to the North Vietnamese army. The east and northeast went quickly: Snoul, Chup (site of the rubber plantations where the Vietnamese Indochinese Communist Party had won its first recruits in Cambodia), Krek, Stung Treng, and the provinces of Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri—headquarters for Saloth Sar's Communist Party of Kampuchea. By August the North Vietnamese had forced the Khmer Republic army to abandon most of western Cambodia south of Battambang province down to the Gulf of Siam as well as the area between Kompong Speu province and the southern riverport city of Kompot.

North Vietnam's army was now the best in Southeast Asia; Phnom Penh's was among the worst. But Lon Nol carried a large measure of the responsibility.
At the time of the coup his forces numbered 35,000 poorly armed soldiers. In two months it tripled to 110,000 soldiers with no new equipment and no serious battlefield training. On Lon Nol's orders they were sent out to inevitable slaughter. One of his commanding officers, Sak Sutsakhan, later described this irresponsible expansion as “Lon Nol's fairyland ambitions to see the [army] transformed overnight into a grand armed forces made in the image . . . of the U.S. forces, bypassing all of the fundamental principles of development and operation.”

Lon Nol's “fairyland” ambition to build an army overnight was intended to prove Cambodia capable of evicting the Vietnamese just as rapidly. And Lon Nol demanded that the United States equip his new military overnight. The Americans refused for the time being. So Lon Nol created “twenty-four-hour” soldiers, accepted all new recruits without regard to professional standards, and made rash rapid promotions that became established procedure throughout the war. There were more appalling practices: His army drafted children to inflate its numbers, padded payrolls with “phantom soldiers” to pay off rapidly promoted and corrupt officers, and Lon Nol permitted other forms of wholesale corruption that led to a disintegration of morale.

Lon Nol ignored these problems and concentrated instead on providing his soldiers with religious protection he genuinely believed would lead them to victory. In 1970 he issued a decree calling for an “organization for cultural warfare employing traditional Mon-Khmer
Vethamon”
(occult practices) within the army's mobilization bureau. The organization was called the Committee for Coordination of Activities of Friends of the Khmer-Mon and Khmer-Mon-Malayo-Polynesian Culture. Chief among its activities was to publish a list of practices recommended for soldiers: “Cutting of the skin in order to allow the Buddha to enter the body and bring strength . . . fabrication of clothing with inscriptions giving strength to the person wearing it . . . creating the illusion of many soldiers to frighten the enemy when in fact only a few exist. . . .”

The army, composed largely of peasants more susceptible to folk beliefs than the people of the city, was inclined to follow such practices with or without orders. The soldiers wore magic scarves. They sucked holy amulets before going into battle. They hung images of Buddha, horoscopes wrapped in metal, and other talismans around their necks. They tattooed holy designs on their skin. The most devout followers of these edicts were the Khmer Krom, the ethnic Cambodians from South Vietnam, who volunteered en masse to Lon Nol's side in 1970, leaving their positions in the
South Vietnamese or American armies with permission to return to defend their ancient motherland.

It was becoming apparent to the elite of Phnom Penh that Lon Nol's ideas of the war differed from theirs and, crucially, from the Americans', whom he wanted to pay for the war. Lon Nol now believed himself possessed of the power of divination and, consequently, saw his military orders as holy writ or
kbuon,
the unchallengeable wisdom gleaned from magical formulae and sacred scriptures. He believed he was the leader prophesied by Lord Buddha himself to lead a war for the survival of Buddhism in Cambodia against the
thmils,
or foreign infidels.

Students, laborers, underpaid clerks, and migrant peasants who flocked to the recruiting stations in Phnom Penh this first year had no appreciation of the extent of Lon Nol's folly. They clambered aboard buses with cardboard suitcases, shouting defiantly against Vietnamese invaders, and were rushed to the front. Given cursory instruction in warfare at training camps such as Phnom Penh's golf course, and blessed with Lon Nol's magic, they were “routed, overrun or completely destroyed by the enemy” in the first months of warfare, according to Sak Sutsakhan, a top commander.

Lon Nol's military officers lost major battles because of their leader's constant interference. He intervened with orders to wage a holy war, reordered battle plans according to the predictions of his personal astrologer, restructured military campaigns in order to capture holy monuments rather than an enemy position. He held up engagements to make sure soldiers wore sacred vests to ward off enemy bullets.

And he did not restrict his holy war against the Vietnamese to the battlefield. Only days after the coup, Lon Nol's rhetoric against the North Vietnamese had turned into a campaign against all ethnic Vietnamese. There were half a million Vietnamese living in Cambodia in 1970. Most had settled in the country under the patronage of French colonialists, and the majority were clerks, commercialists, and skilled laborers in Phnom Penh. Generally these ethnic Vietnamese were as anticommunist as the new Phnom Penh regime, but they were inconveniently of the same race as the Vietcong. They fell into Lon Nol's category of “traditional enemy.”

Not long after the coup, crude signs appeared on store windows questioning the loyalty of Vietnamese proprietors within. Word-of-mouth campaigns started boycotts of Vietnamese establishments, from restaurants to automobile repair shops.

By early April 1970, Lon Nol had ordered his military to set up detention camps or holding centers for all Vietnamese citizens. Soldiers rounded up
the Vietnamese and placed them in large abandoned buildings, where they were held as prisoners. One Cambodian woman remembered a bleak detention center near her home. “The soldiers took over a deserted house near our temple and the Vietnamese had to live there. They had nothing. They slept on hammocks and had to sit in the compound all day with nothing to do. The women sat on the ground nursing their babies; the men just walked around. Lon Nol hated the Vietnamese.”

The campaign grew into a pogrom. The government admitted to arresting some 30,000 Vietnamese and jailing 7,000 of them under suspicion of treason. They did not acknowledge the stories of racial murders that were reaching Phnom Penh. On April 10, 1970, in the town of Prasaut, eighty-nine Vietnamese citizens were summarily killed by Lon Nol's soldiers. There were unconfirmed reports of murders in other parts of the countryside. Two weeks later the army went after one of the biggest Vietnamese communities, the largely Catholic Vietnamese settlement on the isthmus of Chrui Changwar directly across the river from the capital.

The soldiers came at night and took the men away, some 800 Vietnamese laborers. They tied their victims' hands behind their backs and shoved them onto waiting boats. Then the soldiers executed every man and threw the bodies overboard into the Bassac River. For days these bloody, bloated corpses floated on the waters, an open, hideous warning to all Vietnamese living in Cambodia.