When the War Was Over (33 page)

There are Cambodians who survived the Khmer Rouge regime and who still believe there were no eyeglasses, toys, or dogs in Pol Pot's Cambodia. Perhaps this is because in their own experience there were none. More likely, these myths of general deprivations have become acceptable shorthand for specific horrors survivors may want to leave unmentioned.

The Khmer Rouge were operating on many of the same assumptions as had Sihanouk and Lon Nol, believing their primary duty was to defend the country at whatever cost. They had to prevent any foreign power from taking
one foot of Khmer soil. They would stop the erosion of Cambodian independence and sovereignty, and protect the blood and culture of the Khmer. They said this often. And it sounded preposterous at first. Sihanouk and Lon Nol had good reason to worry about Cambodia's defense while the Americans and Vietnamese were fighting. Now that the war in Indochina was over the Khmer Rouge seemed to have nothing to fear. Their Vietnamese and Lao allies had won their wars. Thailand, the once-threatening neighbor to the west, wanted to establish good relations despite the early and repeated stories of atrocities in Cambodia.

But the Khmer Rouge remembered vividly their problems with the Vietnamese communists and the repeated Vietnamese suggestions of an Indochinese federation that would take the form of a regional soviet. The leaders of Angka conceived a revolution that would provide what they thought of as an ironclad defense against foreign domination and at the same time achieve the second goal—the rebuilding and modernizing of Cambodia, raising the standard of living of the population and doing away with the people's misery. It was the stated goal of all communist revolutions.

The solution was to cut the country off entirely from outsiders. They would create a country sufficient unto itself, with no need of foreign commerce or intercourse. The Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge, isolated from unwanted foreigners and foreign influence, would become impregnable. Self-sufficiency and self-protection became the same goal. Sihanouk's protective tyrant's cocoon had evolved into Lon Nol's American-fortified bastion, and now, under the Khmer Rouge, the isolation would be completed and the country turned into a prison.

The communist tradition suited these aims. There are a number of precedents for the Khmer Rouge revolution. The Bolsheviks had decided to continue martial law after their victory in hopes of finding a shortcut to socialism; in the second revolution Joseph Stalin forced the Russians to make terrible sacrifices, including their lives, so that the Soviet Union could achieve rapid industrialization in a few years; and thirty years later the Chinese Great Leap Forward was patterned on similar lines in an effort to modernize China's industry and agriculture overnight. The Great Leap and Stalin's second revolution resulted in untold needless deaths, starvation conditions in much of the countryside, forced migrations, state confiscation of private property, and new state terror networks.

Driven in part by the Cambodians' fears of the loss of their country and destruction of their race, the Khmer Rouge adopted the most extreme aspects of communist ideology, policies that proved to be a direct threat to
Cambodia's traditional way of life. When they were marched out of Phnom Penh on the first day after the revolution, a number of Cambodians thought about the prophecy that the Khmer people would disappear from the earth.

Ieng Sary was in Hanoi when the Khmer Rouge won the war. He had the privilege of telling the Vietnamese that the Cambodian communists had taken Phnom Penh before the North Vietnamese reached Saigon. He waited one week and then flew home, landing on the crater-scarred strip at Pochentong Airport. During the fifteen-minute drive into the capital, Sary passed sights once familiar but now littered with the wreckage of war and anyhow distorted by his own altered memories. He had left abruptly twelve years earlier, and from the time he had gone into the bush, he had tried to erase the culture learned in Phnom Penh from his own life as the party had eventually excluded the city from the revolution. The war the Khmer Rouge fought was against Phnom Penh; it became less a prize than an obstacle. Now, in the late April heat, it looked to Sary like a garbage dump.

Dirt. Filth. Flies hovering over the detritus of a society. There were no shadows, no animation. The people were gone, ordered out shortly after the midday meal on the first day of victory. As the tables were being cleared the soldiers had come, and teacups and glasses of juice were left half-empty. Very little was carried away, only jewels, gold, the reliable objects of the wealthy. They had been stitched in hems and secret pockets. Scraps of papers with addresses and memories were stuffed in shoe soles. Everything else was left behind: Houses were intact, cupboards stacked carefully with sarongs and blouses, shirts and slacks, sandals and Western shoes; on their altars were images of Buddha, joss sticks, and hanging colored streamers; in the table and desk drawers were the marriage photographs, black-and-white snapshots of mother, father, grandmother, and grandfather, birth certificates and business papers. The wooden beds were softly shrouded in mosquito nets; the kitchen larders, the straw mats, all remained in place.

Sary claims he expected something else. “It was very quiet,” he said. “And it was very dirty. All I saw was destruction around the city. I saw no people at all. The soldiers had evacuated them all. I remember the National Bank had been blown up already. . . .”

Pol Pot was waiting for his brother-in-law. The new communist leader of Cambodia had arrived the day before, on April 23, without a parade or any fanfare, not even public acknowledgment that he, the former Saloth Sar, was head of the victorious communist party and its army. Like a nocturnal
predator who shuns daylight, Pol Pot decided to keep his identity and that of the party secret, even in victory.

Technically, Norodom Sihanouk was accorded the honor of leading this new Cambodia as head of FUNK and GRUNK. Pol Pot would wait one year before announcing a new government (with himself as prime minister) but even then he would refuse to acknowledge that Cambodia was run by a communist party or that the man called Pol Pot was the former Saloth Sar.

While he hid behind Sihanouk, Pol Pot's party hid behind the ubiquitous name “Angka,” or “Organization.” It would be two years before the Communist Party of Kampuchea declared itself—another first in communist annals. No other communist party had so totally maintained its wartime secrecy for such a long time after victory. Few other parties, however, were as obsessed with the threat of enemies and the need to protect itself with layers of secrecy.

In the first days, this secrecy served the party's intentions well. Swiftly, Angka prevented an uprising. Soldiers of the defeated army were immediately disarmed. The ranking officers of Lon Nol's army were tricked into giving themselves up to the new authorities and were immediately executed. Secrecy also covered the party's fear that its ranks were too small to control the population.

There were relatively few communist cadre and soldiers, not enough to openly control Cambodia in April 1975. The army numbered 68,000, and the party 14,000 members. The secrecy and mystery of Angka multiplied its image of omnipotence while the leaders bought time to figure out what to do in the next stage of revolution and how to exercise power. Contact even within the party was kept to a minimum to ensure no one knew too much. Proper identities were regularly hidden behind
noms de guerre.
Cambodians outside the party or the army were left wholly in the dark, especially those who had been forced out of Phnom Penh.

The people in the city knew only of Angka, powerful and clever enough to have tricked them all into leaving their homes and then cruelly confined them to shabby shelters in the countryside. They thought the evacuation a heartless, bold plan of a powerful Angka. It was in fact an act of desperation by a party that had too few members and too many fears. And the city was at the core of those fears.

During the war the party had been unable to enlist the support of the Phnom Penh people in its revolution. Lon Nol's police were efficient at rooting out their contacts; most of the citizens were too wary to enlist actively with the rebels. Consequently the Khmer Rouge never had illusions about urban
uprisings and never made it part of their strategy as the Vietnamese did in their failed Tet Offensive of 1968. Instead the Khmer Rouge saw the city as a target, its inhabitants as cowardly refugees from the revolution. In victory they had struck back. They did not repair the city they despised. Nor were they concerned for the evacuees as they left the city. The people of Phnom Penh could not be trusted: Throw them out and turn them into peasants.

The evacuation was the first step toward the revolution of self-sufficiency and complete independence. The people were marched to the countryside, not the rural life of tradition but new cooperatives begun during the war to replace the old society. Swiftly, the party cut them off from their own people and culture. Everyone would have to work very hard to get Cambodia back on its feet and then modernized, especially since foreign aid was forbidden, with a few major exceptions.

At the same time the Khmer Rouge withdrew voluntarily from the international community—in fact from the twentieth century—as had few revolutionaries before them. They cut off international telephone, telegram, and cable connections. There was no international mail service. All regular airline service save occasional flights from Beijing and Hanoi halted. The borders were closed and mined, the maritime boundaries were patrolled. No one entered or left the country without permission under penalty of death. (By year's end cable links were restored with a few communist countries.) Foreigners were thrown out; those who had taken refuge in the French embassy were sent off in truck convoys to Thailand by the first week of May. No foreign embassy was accredited for months. And those few diplomats eventually posted to Phnom Penh were so restricted in their movements they felt as if they were under house arrest.

Inside the country the isolation was severe, a duplication of the deprivations and isolation the Khmer Rouge suffered during their years of obscurity. The revolution was under way from the first day. Perhaps unconsciously, the Khmer Rouge took Cambodia backwards into the nineteenth century in order to reconstruct a communist society and achieve industrialization within a decade. Cambodians would be required to make a supreme effort; there would be no time for anything but work. Within one year the people were scattered across the country in semiautonomous fortresses that were begun in 1973. They slept in barracks, ate in canteens, gave up their young children, and worked. All else was banned: markets, money, schools, books, religion, prayer, idle hours of conversation and laughter, music. The people worked every day with rare days off for “political education.” The workday began about six in the morning and could last
until eight or ten in the evening. The workday, like the amount of food and quality of shelter, varied dramatically, but the common condition for the city people that first year was fatigue mixed with fear.

From the beginning the Khmer Rouge ruled by terror. They killed the leading “enemies of the revolution” in the first weeks—the former police and military figures of Lon Nol's regime and the political and bureaucratic elite of the old society. Certain professionals such as teachers, engineers, and doctors were executed in the first wave because they too were classified as dangerous counterrevolutionaries. These first executions combined with the evacuation were sufficient to fill the city people with dread and foreboding. Many had been separated from family and friends and were at the mercy of strangers who barely had adequate food for themselves. Everyone had to depend on the authorities to provide for all needs—food, clothing, medicine, dry goods, and tools. No one could afford to challenge an order or protest conditions. Anyone who did might disappear.

In this way Cambodia became one great labor camp where workplace and home were fused together in a piece of land from which there was no exit. By official decree citizens were either peasants, workers, or soldiers in the new country of “Democratic Kampuchea.” They were promised one right—the right to work. The peasants and workers were building up an industrial base and expanding the agricultural production for the new superstate; the soldiers were defending the country. Immediately there were volleys with the Vietnamese, in frontier areas where the border was unclear or contested. The catastrophe of the seizure of the American commercial ship
Mayaguez
prevented aggressive Cambodian patrolling of offshore islands where the only border was the French colonial-era Brevie maritime line. Early on Cambodians had landed on a Vietnamese island, the Vietnamese hit back hard, and the Cambodians retreated. In the Mayaguez incident, they also backed off and released the ship's crew. The U.S. bombed Cambodia anyway. Afterwards, over those first two years the Cambodians had little concern with foreign affairs other than fears of more American attacks. At this stage Vietnam seemed less a threat than the United States.