When the War Was Over (32 page)

After the bombing halt, the Nixon administration was cornered by its history of double-talk to both Lon Nol and to Congress. Congress had never approved anything resembling an adequate U.S. commitment to support Phnom Penh. Lon Nol's record of defeat and corruption suggested to the legislators that he was unworthy of such support. Revelations that the U.S. embassy secretly had taken charge of the bombing of Cambodia helped undercut whatever support the administration had had in Congress. It was the summer of Watergate, and anger over the bombing in the Cambodian War merged into the national drive for the ouster of Nixon.

The administration's appeals that the United States not desert an ally fell on deaf congressional ears. The United States had signed the Paris Peace Accords and was supposed to be withdrawing from Indochina. The enemy, the Khmer Rouge, was disguised behind Prince Sihanouk, who was held in esteem by many senators and representatives. The administration tried to win over Congress by dispatching a new American ambassador to Phnom Penh in the spring of 1974. John Gunther Dean proved able and dynamic, but he had arrived too late. The momentum was with the Khmer Rouge on the battlefield, and in the United States a campaign to diminish or suspend American aid to Lon Nol was winning impressive public and congressional support.

In Phnom Penh the mood of the army and government soured. The Cambodians saw the Paris Peace Accords and the bombing halt correctly as the beginning of the end of American interest in Indochina. The army was frightened and demoralized. There was no disguising the bankrupt political system the officers were charged with defending. The food shortages, unjust distribution of rice, and growing poverty, not to mention battlefield defeats, were creating a “hypnotic spell” among many of the military leaders, according to one of the commanders.

And then there was the enemy, the emboldened Khmer Rouge, Cambodians who did not fit the standard stereotype. As the U.S. embassy intervened to force Phnom Penh to extend working hours into the afternoon, the Khmer Rouge worked night and day. Teachers and students demonstrated in Phnom Penh, workers struck for better pay, soldiers looted markets, and all the while the Khmer Rouge seemed to command unity and loyalty. In the first campaigns of 1973 the Khmer Republic army had been amazed at the losses the Khmer Rouge were willing to take in battle. Hundreds of communist soldiers had died in actions that took the lives of only dozens of Republic soldiers.

Now the Khmer Rouge began to take on a mythic invincibility in the minds of their Khmer Republic opponents. If the communist Cambodians could push on through sheets of American bombs, what would stop them? Some of the officers of the Republic believed that the Khmer Rouge smoked massive amounts of marijuana, drugging themselves to boost their courage. Others were convinced that the Khmer Rouge had tapped an evil spirit that gave them powers that were beyond mortal men. Not by coincidence, the Republic soldiers took to smoking more marijuana before entering battle or relying on prayers to Buddha. If they could have glimpsed the scene behind enemy lines they would have been disabused of their otherworldly notions and seen the entirely human if brutal nature of the people they confronted.

The Khmer Rouge approached battle as they approached all other matters, devoted to achieving an objective at whatever cost, devising drastic strategies, willing to use people as expendable commodities. To the outsider, the Khmer Rouge on the battlefield seemed innovative; some of their spectacular successes were achieved in daring night operations. From the inside, at the junior commander level, their methods were perceived as “savage,” the word used by Hem Samin, a dissident returnee from Vietnam who later fled back to Vietnam.

“They would say we should attack right away no matter how many got killed, as long as we won, not to worry about how many got killed because it didn't matter,” Samin stated. In practice this meant ordering attack en masse. If the attack failed, the military officer in charge would be “liquidated” and a junior officer considered loyal to the party selected to regroup and reengage. If that were to fail, another attack was mounted. “Once there was some path of attack, that would be it. There would be that single path of attack,” he said.

Even soldiers loyal to Saloth Sar agreed they fought in appalling fashion. Von, a Khmer Rouge soldier who had been recruited from the peasantry, testified: “During the war we were supposed to eat twice a day, a rice gruel, but many days we ate nothing and we never had a day of rest. During the bombing we had to move as close as possible to the Lon Nol soldiers for protection. The Americans couldn't bomb us if we were next to Lon Nol soldiers but the Lon Nol soldiers might attack us. Many were killed because the only way my officers felt victory could be had was by launching constant offensives, to go forward despite casualties or the lack of food.”

The cooperatives proved an invaluable logistics network. In spite of the American bombing, and later bombing and strafing raids by Lon Nol's air force of T-28 airplanes, rice production increased from 1973 through 1975. The Khmer Rouge's lack of communication between the central command and troops was compensated for by the cooperative network.

At the end of 1973 the Khmer Rouge, overconfident as ever, ordered a general offensive to soften the Republic soldiers for a final offensive in early 1974, during the dry season. They attacked first the eastern Mekong city of Kompong Cham in the fall of 1973 but were beaten back by the Republic army after weeks of gruesome combat.

At the beginning of 1974 the Khmer Rouge went after Phnom Penh. In January they were close enough to pour 320 rounds of 105-millimeter artillery fire into the southern fringes of the capital, killing ninety-five citizens and wounding 192 others, as the embassy reported to Washington, adding
that these attacks “were made possible by [the Republic army's] initially tardy and disorganized reaction to a major enemy initiative in the south.”

Within days the Khmer Rouge shelled the city, destroying 10,000 homes and killing hundreds. The international press was filled with descriptions of the terrible human cost of the shelling, and the Khmer Rouge responded, from Beijing, that the U.S. bombing had created “terror and genocide,” and that their artillery and rocket attacks were directed solely at military targets and residences of “traitors” inside Phnom Penh. Besides, the Khmer Rouge noted that they had warned the populace to evacuate Phnom Penh.

The Republic forces rallied in February and pushed the communist troops back from the city's defense perimeter, but the Khmer Rouge fought on. They managed to restrict traffic up the Mekong River from that spring until the end of 1974. In one major engagement west of the capital the Khmer Rouge lost 380 soldiers to thirty-five killed on the Republic side, but still they pushed on. By November 1974 they were again attacking the capital, this time from the northeast. That battle cost the Khmer Rouge 558 dead to sixteen killed in the Republic army. At year's end the Lon Nol regime imagined its army had solidified its key defense positions, and it was confidently prepared for the upcoming dry-season offensive. Phnom Penh's eyes were fixed on a few recent victories. They did not step back to examine their precarious position. Phnom Penh had become encircled, and the Mekong River was almost in Khmer Rouge hands. On December 3, the Khmer Rouge warned over their clandestine radio, “If the lower Mekong is ever blocked, the clique [in Phnom Penh] would be choked to death. . . .”

At the same time the American embassy was exploring possible peace initiatives at the request of Indonesia and Thailand. Too late. The embassy cable to Washington on January 7, 1975, says it all:

The Khmer Rouge proceeded with precision and never looked back. The Mekong was mined and made impassable. Pochentong Airport was rocketed and shelled daily with thirty to forty rounds. Their troops marched up from the south, and on April i they captured Neak Luong, the same day Lon Nol was forced to leave the country by his own military and government leaders, who hoped such a gesture would invite peace negotiations.

On April 12 the U.S. embassy was evacuated, and on April 15 the city's last defense, at Takhmau to the west, was overrun. The mood in Phnom Penh was relatively calm, anxious but patient. There was no panic, as in Saigon. No crowds tried to crash the embassy gates for a ride out of the country. Lon Nol's advertised fears of a Vietnamese takeover had proved false. The invaders were Cambodians like themselves.

On April 16 the Khmer Republic cabled an offer for an immediate ceasefire to Sihanouk in Beijing, offering to transfer power over to the prince.

The next morning Sihanouk cabled back his flat rejection. (He was powerless to accept the offer, had he wanted to.)

By 8:30 that same morning the leaders of the Republic assembled at the Olympic Stadium awaiting helicopters to ferry them to a retreat in northern Cambodia, where they fancied they could establish a government in exile. The escape too ended tragically. Most of the helicopters had engine problems, and few were able to get out. The Northern and Eastern Zone troops of the Khmer Rouge entered the capital late that morning. Prime Minister Long Boret was one of the stranded officials. Sixteen years earlier he had been Sihanouk's minister of information and had faithfully criticized Khieu Samphan and Samphan's newspaper. Now Boret was captured by Samphan's cadre and reportedly one of the first acts of the communists was to behead him on the lawns of the private Cercle Sportif country club.

Saloth Sar had defeated Lon Nol. After Sar became leader of revolutionary Cambodia he officially changed his name to Pol Pot, his
nom de guerre.

This is what we should call the extremely great significance of our great victory in the international arena because never before had there been such an event in the annals of the world's revolutionary wars. . . . To win such a big victory in just five years is extremely fast. The party has thus ordered that the national construction efforts to be carried out from now should be fulfilled rapidly so that ours will rapidly become a prosperous country with an advanced agriculture and industry and so that our people's standard of living will be rapidly improved.

The whole experiment seemed to be a piece of prodigious insanity, in which all rules of logic and principles of economics were upside down. It was as if a whole nation had suddenly abandoned and destroyed its houses and huts . . . and moved, lock, stock and barrel, into some illusory buildings . . . [the nation] was lured, prodded, whipped, and shepherded into that surrealistic enterprise by an ordinary, prosaic, fairly sober man, whose mind had suddenly become possessed by a half-real and half-somnambulistic vision, a man who established himself in the role of super-judge and super-architect, in the role of a modern super-Pharaoh.

The Chinese leaders were now in a hurry; they wanted quick results. They hoped to telescope the time of several decades that were normally required for industrialization and economic development into three or four—at the maximum five years. This they hoped to achieve by making the people work harder and by undertaking simultaneous development of industry and agriculture—in short through the Great Leap. . . .

 

 

Cambodia was now in the hands of the Khmer Rouge, who undertook nothing less than ultimate revolution. They pieced together a communist program for change and ordered that it be followed “totally and completely” and “rapidly.” All at once private property was abolished. Everyone was evacuated from the city and towns to the countryside. Everything produced in the country, whether from the fields or factories, was subject to seizure by the state. Everyone's movements were controlled by the state. The country was cut off from the outside world. There were now only revolutionary classes of people—workers, peasants, soldiers, and political cadre. And there was only one source of power—the Communist Party of Kampuchea, still known as Angka.

The Khmer Rouge allowed the world to know as little as possible about their methods and ambitions. Their silence was mysterious, even sinister. The first stories about life under their rule, told by Cambodians who managed to escape to Thailand, were fantastic and made the regime sound like a monstrous abomination. Refugees said Cambodians wearing eyeglasses were killed because the Khmer Rouge thought only intellectuals wore eyeglasses. They said beautiful young women were forced to marry deformed Khmer Rouge veterans. They said all toys were banned, that there were no more kites flying in the sky. They said there were no dogs left in the country because starving people had killed them all for food.

These were exaggerations, but they were exaggerations such as are fables, based on a truth too awful to explain. The eyeglasses fable reflected how the Khmer Rouge had targeted intellectuals as dangerous and killed thousands simply for having an education. The story of beautiful women and deformed soldiers was the mythological version of how the state had taken control over marriages and outlawed sex and romance outside of marriage, often murdering offenders. The toys and the kites appropriately represented the loss of childhood for Cambodia's youngsters, who had to work like adults and were given no time for play or sport, and little time for a rudimentary education. And the disappearance of the dogs symbolized the disappearance of food for many people.