When the War Was Over (38 page)

The Khmer Rouge did not apply “modern science” in their massive reconstruction projects. For them, communism and politics were the sciences that guided development. They were the students of Stalin and Mao, who believed backward countries could become modern states overnight by making people work very hard on huge projects. Like Stalin and particularly Mao, the Khmer Rouge reasoned that what mattered was the correct political attitude, the correct class stand, and the correct party line. Trained economists and engineers were useless in their schemes; in the end their engineering skills were less sophisticated than those of the twelfth-century builders of Angkor, because they refused to use trained engineers from the middle class.

The Khmer Rouge reinvented many of the mistakes made in Angkor and by the Russian and Chinese communists. What marks them as unique was their willingness to take every policy to its limit and beyond, pushing the people, themselves, and their country until it broke apart. Jayavarman VII had had a similar effect on Cambodia. Louis Finot, another French historian, described what happened when imperial Angkor was invaded in the thirteenth century by the young ambitious kingdom of Siam:

In trying to reinvent Cambodia, Pol Pot and the Communist Party of Kampuchea attempted paradoxically to take the place of god-kings whom French historians had romanticized as absolute rulers of Cambodia for centuries with divine and total political power. In the span of Khmer history the brief and corrupt experiment of Lon Nol's Khmer Republic and the false democracy of Sihanouk barely mattered. The Cambodian people had not erased their cultural heritage of accepting all-powerful rulers; nor had they developed any alternatives.

At the same time, the people also supported the two basic institutions of traditional Cambodian culture—the monarchy itself and Buddhism. Both were threats to the total control desired by the Khmer Rouge. Somehow, the communists had to abolish these two pillars of society and fill the void with their own “revolutionary culture.”

The Khmer Rouge choice of a “line,” or slogan, to encapsulate their ambitions reflected their intuitive decision to step into the role of all-powerful rulers. Theirs was the “line of sovereignty, independence, and self-reliance and revolutionary violence.” They inherited the slogan from the Vietnamese and the Chinese communists but they interpreted it as Cambodians. To them sovereignty would mean total sovereignty or authority. They saw their visions of independence and radical self-sufficiency as enforcing each other. And “revolutionary violence” was the method to achieve those goals. They interpreted revolutionary violence to mean that during the various stages of “class struggle,” violence or murder was necessary to destroy “class enemies.” Violence or terror was institutionalized.

The communists' attempt to replace the society's other basic institution, Buddhism, was equally violent. Buddhism was so ingrained in the Cambodian culture that it was not properly a separate institution or faith but defined as an expression of the Cambodian way of life. It infected the language, the yearly calendar, the food, dance, and art, the people's attitude toward most facets of
life. Cambodians are not “good” Buddhists in the formal sense. They have clung to superstitions that are not part of that faith and they worship primitive animist spirits as much as Lord Buddha. Many were never even schooled in the precepts of the Buddhist faith. It is impossible to say what is Buddhist and what is not Buddhist in the Cambodian culture. Unless they are active members of another faith or belong to a separate ethnic group, most Cambodians consider themselves Buddhist whether or not they worship at home or in the pagoda. To be Cambodian is to be Buddhist.

The Khmer Rouge were no exception. The vast majority had been raised as Buddhists, most had studied under monks, and a significant number had entered the Buddhist clergy. Their first philosophical tradition, however crudely interpreted, was Buddhist, and elements of the Buddhist faith were woven into their lives: Suffering is the lot of humankind and the goal of the faith is to break that cycle; antimaterialism and an otherworldliness stem from that belief; one should adopt a gentle, nonviolent attitude because there is enough suffering in the world, not because there is a reason for optimism or any joy in life itself.

The monks who taught them and other Cambodians largely kept their ascetic vows. They were vegetarian, celibate, nonviolent, dedicated to a life of poverty. They were also tolerant—there is little dogmatism and there are few rigid rules in the Buddhist faith. Each person theoretically chooses his “dharma” or path. Political considerations are also meaningless; Buddhism thrives in countries like Cambodia where all-powerful rulers offer the faith protection and the faith, in turn, reveres the king as a “spiritual policeman.” Even when the Buddhists rose up in Cambodia against the French colonialists it was in the name of the king, the faith, and the Cambodian status quo.

Khmer Rouge ideology does not appear to have been influenced by Buddhism; if anything, it represents a strong reaction against its antimaterialism and nonviolence. But the practice of communism in Cambodia was affected by the Buddhist background of the Khmer Rouge. Buddhist monasticism may account for the extraordinary puritanism of the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot's official biography closes with the singular statement that he likes to live in the “calm,” a profoundly Buddhist notion. Moreover, the language of Buddhism seeped into the party, like the use of the word disciple for someone studying to become a member of the party. Or the regular use of devotionals addressed to the party, such as those that appeared in the “Party History” or the form used to address the party in confessions—“Most Respected and Beloved Party, Most Respected and Beloved Elder Brother leaders of the Party.”

Finally, Buddhism is a visionary faith. Buddhists not only expect suffering in the world but they believe the prophecy that after Buddha, the faith would decline until the day of the end of the world, the final dark age when the evil would rule over the good.

When the Khmer Rouge did away with Buddhism at the start of their revolution they did away with most of the Khmer culture. Culture was work. Nothing else. As one Chinese diplomat who served in Pol Pot's Cambodia said: “I have been a communist most of my life. I am used to going without. But I was unprepared for the life of Phnom Penh. . . . People did nothing but work, nothing.”

Still, banning the Buddhist faith did not eliminate Buddhism. For many Cambodians Buddhism provided the framework for grasping why their lives were turned upside down by fellow Khmers. Lon Nol may have prepared the way with his regular reminders of the Buddhist prophecy that the people of faith would be threatened by foreign atheists, by
thmils,
the pagans. Lon Nol warned the people of the coming “dark ages” if the communists won the war.

And in separate, scattered, but numerous instances, untutored peasants as well as educated city people turned to Buddhist lore to explain the murderous upheavals of the Khmer Rouge revolution. Pin Yathay, an engineer in Phnom Penh, remembered the prophecy of doom during the first days of the evacuation. “A certain prediction,” he remembered, “foretold an era of misfortune in Cambodia . . . the houses would be empty and people would no longer circulate in the streets . . . the untutored, the ignorants—‘the men who have fallen very low' would dare to challenge the power of the established. The educated men were condemned to fall much lower than the ignorants. It would also be an era without religion, without Buddhism. The
thmils
would wield absolute power and persecute the priests . . . only the deaf-mutes would be saved during this period of misfortune. . . . To stay deaf and mute—I found my method of survival.”

Yathay was not alone. Instinctively much of the population became “deaf-mute.” Most did not remember the prophecy as well as Yathay, but all had been steeped in the fear of the end of the world, in the triumph of evil over good. As they were herded out of the city, or in the country as they watched friends and family members marched off to certain death, many pondered the Buddhist equivalent of the Antichrist.

The prediction bore an eerie resemblance to the rule of the Khmer Rouge. The prophecy taught that the dark ages were to come at the end of the Kali-yuga, the fourth age in the concept of time the Buddhists inherited
from Hindu cosmology. The end of the Kali-yuga is said to be marked by “confusion of the classes, the overthrow of established standards, the cessation of all religious rites, and the rule of cruel and alien kings.” In certain calculations the Kali-yuga ends about the time of the end of World War II.

There are a number of reasons why the Cambodians did not rise up against the Khmer Rouge. But the ritualistic way in which they accepted their fate can be explained in part by their general, unuttered idea that the world had come to an end.

During the first phase of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, the period of “war communism,” the leadership was as concerned with eliminating potential enemies as with building up a new economy. The revolution of Democratic Kampuchea developed its own particular rhythm of pushing the revolution one step further, then searching for the enemies of that stage of revolution. In this period the Khmer Rouge were concerned first of all with their wartime enemies, the officials and officers of the Lon Nol government and army. And they were also worried about foreign enemies who would challenge Cambodian independence and sovereignty. Later they became obsessed with “class enemies” in the Cambodian population as the revolution proceeded to other stages. Revolution, then counterrevolution. As their revolution failed, their perception heightened of enemies at large. Failures required scapegoats; the party's leaders invented factions within the party and then inaugurated purges of those they claimed belonged to these imagined factions and hence were to blame for the revolution's failure.

In the first stage the Khmer Rouge set out to kill the hierarchy of the regime they had defeated. They believed these people would be active enemies of their regime, and they began murdering them on the day of victory. As soon as the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh they broadcast over national radio a request for all army officers and top government officials to report to the ministry of information—no absences or exceptions would be tolerated. On that first day, innocent of what was planned, most officers and officials heeded the call.

The military officers were sent to the city's Monoram Hotel, where they were told to write out their “biographies,” or life histories, a standard request in most communist countries when taking suspected “enemies” into custody. These officers wrote out their stories and established their bona fides as “traitors” in the eyes of the Khmer Rouge. They were taken out and
murdered. Many were executed at the city's Olympic Stadium, the large sports arena built by Sihanouk.

The very top political figures were reportedly murdered at the Cercle Sportif athletic club, the French-built haunt of the elite near the city's Wat Phnom, beheaded on the tennis courts. Lon Nol was not among them. He had left the country before the defeat, bowing to American and Cambodian pressure. The Americans and most of the remaining Cambodian government had hoped that if Lon Nol departed there was a chance to negotiate an end to the war with the Khmer Rouge and form a coalition government. Lon Nol was given $1 million to get out of the way.

But the coalition dream died even before the defeat. From Beijing, Sihanouk said there would be no negotiated settlement. And the Khmer Rouge had published the list of “super-traitors,” top government officials who they said were slated for death. Most of those “super-traitors” refused to leave with the Americans when they evacuated Phnom Penh on April 12. Prince Sirik Matak, one of the leaders of Lon Nol's coup, and a man marked for execution, sent a letter to the American ambassador, John Gunther Dean, explaining why he could not desert his country. “I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which have chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection and we can do nothing about it. . . . I have only committed this mistake of believing in you [the United States]. . . .”

That proved to be Matak's last testimony. His anger was directed against the Americans, whom he had expected to protect Cambodia, and not against his fellow Khmer, who were about to murder him. He was taken from the French embassy, where he had sought refuge with the foreign community. Lon Nol's brother, Lon Non, was also executed. He had been his brother's henchman and had stayed on in the belief that he could co-opt the Khmer Rouge.