When the War Was Over (28 page)

In Cambodia he encountered all of the hostility generated by the fifteen years the party was divided, the hostility growing between the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese, and the fraud of claiming Sihanouk was leading the revolution.

He arrived in September and within a few months was put in command of a thirty-soldier unit of the Khmer Rouge. He trained these men and saw some fighting, largely in north-central Cambodia, in Kompong Thom province. He witnessed the Khmer Rouge and North Vietnamese armies in action, saw the Phnom Penh army do poorly, saw the general outline of the revolution, and decided he and the other returnees were in trouble.

He feared the North Vietnamese, who, he said, were trying to treat Cambodians the way they treated the Lao—as subservient revolutionaries. As early as 1970, Lim realized the relation between the Cambodian and Vietnamese communists was “not good.” Nor did he like the relation between the Cambodian communists and the Cambodian people. Lim decided the Khmer Rouge were capable of winning a war but not the people. At one point he had to personally stop the Khmer Rouge from killing civilians at Baray township in Kompong Thom, where they had been executing peasants for minor infractions.

Lim also realized early on that Prince Sihanouk was unpopular among the Khmer Rouge, who wore his badge only when they were sent to fill out the ranks of the North Vietnamese army. Among their own they spoke of the prince with bitterness.

Gradually, Lim gave up hope for a Khmer revolution. He had spent sixteen years in North Vietnam waiting to fight to “liberate” his homeland only to discover, he said, that the war in Cambodia was mainly “for the benefit of North Vietnam and not the Khmer revolution that he had heard so much about.” This was in 1071, one year after he arrived. He and his Khmer Rouge unit had fought a battle in northern Kompong Thom province and been abandoned, he said, by an NVA unit that pulled back without informing Lim and the Khmer Rouge.

Lim could not live with the deceits and disappointments. He defected to the other side, Lon Nol's side, five days after that battle. He was debriefed by intelligence officers in the U.S. embassy, whom he impressed largely with his fear: fear of Khmer Rouge violence, Vietnamese arrogance and ambitions, and the number of victims that would fall in the wake of this confused war where allies were enemies and enemies allies. He had no illusions about Lon Nol's army. He said the soldiers showed cowardice and the leadership was poor. There were no heroes in his recitation of events.

Although Lim did not realize it, his own position within the revolution was fraught with danger. Returnees like him were given combat positions like his as head of a small unit, but the political positions were all held by the local Khmer Rouge. He may have had a premonition of future danger, for
he told the Americans that the local Khmer Rouge disliked not only the North Vietnamese but returnees trained in Vietnam.

When the Cambodian communists took full control of the war and the Vietnamese retreated to the border areas and their own war, in 1973, these returnees were marked men. By 1975 most had been jailed and eventually all were killed.

These pogroms—against the native Vietnamese and the “Vietnamese in Khmer bodies”—were symptoms of the same doctrines that produced Lon Nol's pogroms. Saloth Sar and the Khmer Rouge began to make similar claims on behalf of the Khmer race and nation, but they spoke to a far more receptive audience, the peasantry. During the first three years, the Khmer Rouge had restrained their rhetoric, possibly because of the long shadow cast by the North Vietnamese army, and because they needed what remained of Sihanouk's popularity to enlist the older peasants loyal to the
deva-raj,
the divine king. The Khmer Rouge combined appeals to the Khmer national pride with communist prescriptions for greater economic and political justice. It was the first time in Cambodia's history that the rural people were being asked to play a significant role in a social movement, and the effect was profound.

This mingling of intellectuals and peasants produced an explosive chemistry. It became an axiom of the Khmer Rouge intellectuals that they were the first Cambodian leaders to take up the cause of the peasants, “the 90 percent of the people who lived miserably while the world saw Cambodia as a paradise,” in the words of Thiounn Prasith. The leaders may have begun with altruistic motivations, but as the war proceeded and demands for sacrifice increased, intellectual and peasant discovered a frightening coincidence of prejudice. They were each other's best converts to a bitter, burning hatred.

The peasant's ancient distrust of the city and the towns, the tax collector and the intellectual, complemented Khmer Rouge theories about the international economic system and its destruction of native commerce, imperialist greed, and the role that the city, the bureaucrats, the middle class, and the intellectuals play to help imperialists and corporations oppress the peasant. The Khmer Rouge and the peasants easily agreed in preferring action over book learning, hardworking laborers over clever merchants and soft clerks. Prodded by Saloth Sar's calls for a return to the glory of the Khmer nation, they formed the visceral basis of the revolution and the totalitarianism it produced.

The peasants were barely literate of politics. They were “protected” by Sihanouk; he had chosen their political representatives and made sure they
had no connection to the peasants, had taken money from the national treasury and passed it out in his own personal welfare system, making publicized forays into the countryside to distribute tools and equipment and found clinics. The peasants paid taxes, grew rice, or joined the army. If they attained a position in the bureaucracy it was only after they had thrown off their peasant attitudes, got an education, and managed to climb the ladder to the middle class. The communists, asking their support, holding elections for village positions in zones they controlled, promising adoption of Hou Youn's rural program, appealed to them.

This was the transition phase, when the Cambodian communists still allowed the North Vietnamese army to fight the Lon Nol troops and concentrated on winning over the peasantry. They held a congress in July 1971 at which they decided how to proceed toward the next phase when they took over fighting from the Vietnamese. By now their fortunes were exactly the reverse of when they began fighting in 1967. Then their strength was in the city; the countryside was a disconnected series of potential and actual cells of communist sympathizers. In 1971 the countryside was the base, the city increasingly alien territory.

Vorn Veth, in charge of organizing Phnom Penh just before the coup, had lost the majority of his workers in a series of purges organized by Sihanouk. There were gunfights on the streets of the city in the late sixties as communists tried to escape Sihanouk's police. Saloth Sar's wife, Khieu Ponnary, was nearly arrested.

Now, in the countryside, the Khmer Rouge were preparing to enforce their version of the Russian Bolsheviks' “war communism,” imposing strict rule over the peasants and using force to push the Vietnamese communists out of Cambodia. Before they launched their war, they tried to shore up support among the peasantry by expanding their role in the countryside. The party's central committee sent new orders following the 1971 congress to all zones, but circumstances and predilections of local party chiefs varied widely and the results were uneven. In some areas the Khmer Rouge created mutual-aid teams to pool the peasants' labor and resources; in other areas peasants were left to work largely as they had for centuries. But the important aspect during this first “front” phase was to convince the peasants that the rebels, the front, represented the true spirit of Cambodian nationalism.

The front deceived nearly every party to the war. Saloth Sar had formed his wartime alliances with sophisticated pragmatism, creating a hall of mirrors that distorted and magnified the forces of opposition to Lon Nol. Sar
did not covet the spotlight but was content to wait out his rivals and use his enemies of yesterday as expedient allies of the moment.

The first layer of deception was the most dazzling—Prince Sihanouk's role as head of the front. His announcement on March 23, 1970, of the establishment of the National United Front of Cambodia (known as FUNK in its French acronym) set the tone: “Our soldiers have been ordered to give up defending the frontiers and the country's territory, to set themselves against their own compatriots and ruthlessly repress all those who dare to show even the slightest verbal opposition to the new fascist power which serves U.S. imperialism. . . . I call on all those of my children, compatriots, military and civilian, who can no longer endure the unjust oppression by the traitors and who have the courage and patriotic spirit needed for liberating the motherland, to engage in guerrilla warfare in the jungle against our enemies.”

This was to be a war to regain Cambodia's national honor and Sihanouk made no mention of the Vietnamese army doing the lion's share of the fighting. Nor did he acknowledge that this front was controlled by Cambodian communists. Instead, Sihanouk preferred to act as head of the front and the Royal Government of National Union of Cambodia (known as GRUNK), criticizing his partners in the front often enough to be credible but not to cast doubt on the essential nature of this war for “national liberation.” One never knew what Sihanouk actually believed, ensconced in his Beijing mansion far from the battles and reality. But when the prince made his pronouncements from China they were read by foreign analysts as if they represented the front's true policy. To the end, various Western powers believed Sihanouk powerful enough to hold the key to a negotiated settlement to the war.

Those who held the power were not even listed on the rolls of officials of GRUNK or FUNK. Saloth Sar and Nuon Chea, the two top chiefs of the communist party, were listed only as members of the high military command: Sar as first vice president and chief of the
military
conduct of the war; Chea as the second vice president and chief of the army's
political
conduct. Son Sen, whom Sar had known since their days in Paris, was named chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The still very secret party had what it wanted—command of the army; the rest was decoration.

But what a convincing bit of decoration, this
pièce de résistance
of subterfuge. Ieng Sary was without an official position in either the front or the government but was appointed special envoy between the battlefront in Cambodia and the “leader,” Prince Sihanouk, in Beijing. In fact, he was
charged with policing Sihanouk and making sure the hall of mirrors did not collapse, responsibilities that required him to travel to Hanoi as well.

The three Thiounn brothers, with their noble bearing, family connections, and European manners, were highly visible mouthpieces for the front and the government. Prasith was third to Sihanouk in the front and a government minister. His elder brother Mumm, the intellectual, was a ranking member of the front as well as minister of economy and finance of the government. All the brothers soothed anxieties about the front, traveling around Europe and telling Westerners and third world leaders they were representative of Sihanouk's movement which was the modern, humane alternative to the corrupt, backward, and reactionary regime of Lon Nol.

More compelling for Cambodians at home and abroad was the commanding position of the Three Ghosts. Khieu Samphan, Hou Youn, and Hu Nim—the attractive leftists who had served under Sihanouk and had then been pronounced dead by the prince—were resurrected to great effect to lead the front and the government behind Sihanouk. Returning from years in hiding, the three romantic heroes personified honest, modern, and democratic government. Officials of the Lon Nol government as well as the United States embassy in Phnom Penh said the three men were dead and declared these new ghosts imposters.

The false backdrop of the front was too clever and the Khmer Rouge found they had to mollify their followers who were angered that Sihanouk was accorded even titular leadership of their war. Sihanouk, the leaders told the cadre, was being used like a “water buffalo to get across the mud.” Cambodia's most famous personality was harnessed to the party, the god-king under the whip of the communists.

A Phnom Penh school inspector sought out the Khmer Rouge during this period of the front and he managed to get behind the mirrors, see the actual nature of the communists, and provide the one detailed account of this stage of the Khmer Rouge revolution. His name was Ith Sarin and he abandoned the Lon Nol regime in disgust in 1972, intent on joining the “maquis” and finding Cambodia's true patriots. After nine months with the front, Sarin returned to Phnom Penh a dedicated anticommunist. With an uncommon respect for the awful possibilities of his country's war, Sarin published his observations about the Khmer Rouge in 1973 in a book entitled
Regrets for the Khmer Soul
, which he dedicated to “Bring light to some of the secrecy of the Khmer problems and to expose the great danger from the communists inside the country.”

It was an immediate success, seen all over Phnom Penh and easily distinguished by its cover featuring a map of Cambodia drawn in the shape of a
heart that is broken apart by the coursing Mekong River. Riverboat captains, pedicab drivers, and politicians read his revelations: that there were Cambodian communists preparing a revolution, that the North Vietnamese had been fighting to pave the way for these communists but that the Cambodians nevertheless were plotting against the Vietnamese. He wrote of the strengths of the Khmer Rouge and warned Lon Nol that he faced a formidable Cambodian enemy and that Phnom Penh would have to change its ways if the enemy was to be defeated.

Lon Nol banned the book and jailed Ith Sarin. The regime wanted to continue fighting the foreign devils. The members of the Central Intelligence Agency posted at the U.S. embassy in Phnom Penh doubted Ith Sarin's loyalties and considered his book “black propaganda” because, they thought, it was too flattering to the Khmer Rouge.
Regrets for the Khmer Soul
did not fit the propaganda aims of the CIA either.