When the War Was Over (39 page)

Many other officials were captured at the roadblocks the Khmer Rouge set up on the highways leading out of Phnom Penh. Still blind to the purpose of their requests for “biographies,” officials and bureaucrats of the Lon Nol regime told the Khmer Rouge who they were and what they had done for the Lon Nol administration. Men like the relatives of Mey Komphot, the banker, believed they faced no penalty worse than a form of “reeducation,” and that they would be allowed to return to their families and work for the reconstruction of the country. Those who were suspicious and who held back their true identity were often betrayed by others who knew them. Thousands were butchered in the first weeks after “liberation.”

The only other enclave of the defeated Khmer Republic was in Battambang, in the northwest. Here the Lon Nol army made a last stand and was rewarded with the summary execution of all officers. On April 19 the Khmer Rouge ordered all these officers to surrender at an appointed hour and place. Again the officers were asked to explain in detail who they were, and once that was completed they were asked to assemble again. This time they were to wear their finest dress uniforms, with medals and decorations. They were told they were going to Phnom Penh to greet Prince Sihanouk, who was returning from Beijing.

The officers did as they were told and were bundled into six trucks. The trucks drove off in the direction of Phnom Penh led by a jeep and a Land Rover filled with Khmer Rouge soldiers and followed by a truck carrying more Khmer Rouge soldiers. At a crossroad not far from Battambang, the caravan pulled off the main highway and stopped. The officers were told to climb out and stretch for a rest period. As soon as they were all out, the trucks sped away. Khmer Rouge soldiers stepped out from the forest. For fifteen minutes the unarmed officers stared at their executioners. Then the Khmer Rouge opened fire and all but four of the men were killed.

Later that same day the noncommissioned officers who had surrendered at Battambang were piled into ten trucks and told they were being transferred to a nearby camp where they would be retrained as revolutionaries. Instead, they were pulled off the road just north of the city and gunned down. That afternoon, with all the major executions in Phnom Penh and Battambang completed, Pol Pot made his entrance into Phnom Penh.

These executions were carried out with all of the hallmarks of the Khmer Rouge. There were no pretenses of justice, no show trials, no people's juries. Instead, they were lured to their death by trickery and deception. They were killed in the shadows. The Khmer Rouge did not want the executions made public. They hid the deaths from the people and denied them if asked. The cycle of revolution/purging of counterrevolution was filled with just such secret, brutal deaths.

The Khmer Rouge planned these confrontations with their wartime enemies. They were surprised, however, by the sudden appearance of foreign enemies. The Vietnamese, their feared allies, wasted no time in presenting the Cambodians with the first of what would prove a difficult series of foreign confrontations during their first month in power.

With their victory in Vietnam, the Vietnamese were expected to clear the Cambodian border sanctuaries that had been used to fight the Americans and the South Vietnamese army. But the Vietnamese communists were slow to retreat from the Cambodian territory, particularly in the remote areas of Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri. The Khmer Rouge sent an official request to the Vietnamese in Hanoi asking that their troops be ordered home. They received, in an indirect reply, a statement from the Vietnamese saying that some of this territory was Vietnamese and the Vietnamese troops were staying in their home country. Local fights broke out quickly along the border. Eastern Zone leader So Phim's first run-in with the party Center was over these battles. Pol Pot and the party reprimanded So Phim for not preventing his troops from fighting the Vietnamese; they cautioned the Eastern Zone secretary to rein in his men.

The fighting ranged from the farthest northern corner down to the southern border and the islands in the Gulf of Siam. Soon the clashes were concentrated in the islands the Vietnamese now disputed. The Cambodians asked the Vietnamese why they were not abiding by their 1967 agreement with Sihanouk that recognized all existing borders between Vietnam and Cambodia as drawn by the French. Even though the French boundaries had been drawn in favor of the Vietnamese, Sihanouk had used them in negotiations simply to establish that the Vietnamese had no right to claim further territory.

The Vietnamese had barely won their war when they told the new leaders in Phnom Penh that there should be fresh negotiations over the boundaries. The most controversial of the lines was the “Brevie Line,” which the French had drawn as the maritime boundary between the Vietnamese and Cambodians but which they had described as a colonial administrative boundary, not necessarily a true international boundary. The Cambodians reacted to the Vietnamese contention that these islands were in dispute by sending patrol boats to police the islands. One island, Puolo Wai, became the focus of the dispute.

By early May the Khmer Rouge were so concerned with Vietnamese designs on sacred Khmer soil that they began stopping all foreign ships cruising in the area. In early May they stopped and searched a Panamanian ship. Three days later they fired upon a passing Swedish vessel in the Gulf of Siam that had sailed near Puolo Wai. Then early on May 12, the Khmer Rouge sent a small marine force to land on Puolo Wai itself and assert Cambodian claims to the island.

Later that morning an American merchant ship named the
Mayaguez
sailed so close to Puolo Wai that the Khmer Rouge navy, under orders to protect the island from foreign invasion, stopped and seized the ship. The operation was carried out by patrol boats from the Southwestern Zone with no direct contact to Phnom Penh.

Officials in Washington learned about the seizure before the party did in Phnom Penh. And Washington declared the
Mayaguez
an international crisis. It was barely weeks since the shock and humiliation of America's historic defeats in Saigon and Phnom Penh. Henry A. Kissinger had been retained as secretary of state by the new U.S. president, Gerald R. Ford, and Kissinger transformed the seizure into a cold-war confrontation. “There are limits beyond which the U.S. cannot be pushed,” he said. The crisis was officially described as the “toughest” problem President Ford had faced.

The White House issued an immediate public demand for the ship's release. The administration also gave the Chinese messages for the Khmer Rouge demanding the release of the ship within twenty-four hours and threatening reprisals if this was not done. The Chinese returned the messages, implying there was no way for them to reach the Cambodian officials. Beijing may have had a radio or telex connection to Phnom Penh, but that is not certain. There was barely a government in Phnom Penh in May and no diplomatic missions. More crucially, there was no quick, direct line of communication from Phnom Penh to the outer zones.

When the twenty-four-hour request was not answered, the White House ordered a military reprisal. U.S. aircraft were sent to bomb the immediate area. Reconnaissance ships steamed toward the Gulf of Siam. After American intelligence discovered the crew of the
Mayaguez
had been transferred to the mainland from the islands, American warplanes were directed to bomb the island of Koh Tang. Simultaneously, the United States asked the secretary-general of the UN, Kurt Waldheim, for help. Waldheim demurred. He said that the UN had no way to contact the Cambodians either.

The leadership in Phnom Penh, meanwhile, claimed they did not hear of the seizure until it was broadcast over the Voice of America radio program, which they monitored. The party immediately ordered the authorities in Kompong Som seaport to get in touch with the armed forces on Puolo Wai and send the commanding officer to Phnom Penh at once.

“He arrived at 2:00 P.M. [that day],” Ieng Sary said. “He informed us of this affair and around 5:00 P.M. we ordered him back with the order to release the
Mayaguez
ship immediately.”

This would have been May 13, one day after the seizure. Early the next morning, on May 14, Information Minister Hu Nim read a statement over the government radio saying the
Mayaguez
would be released. (At this stage only Khieu Samphan and Hu Nim held public positions in the government that was still under the titular leadership of Sihanouk.) This was expedient behavior for the Khmer Rouge, considering the state of the country in the first weeks after the war, and particularly in light of their alleged fears that the Americans would return to bomb the capital. The Khmer Rouge clearly did not want a confrontation with the United States any more than they wanted a border war with Vietnam.

The Hu Nim response was not speedy enough for the United States. Thirty minutes after the official Khmer Rouge broadcast, a U.S. Marine assault force landed on Koh Tang. The White House explained that the Khmer Rouge had not explicitly said they would release the crew along with the ship. Those marines encountered heavy opposition from Khmer Rouge dug deep into the island in preparation for a Vietnamese attack.

While the marines were fighting on Koh Tang, the Khmer Rouge officials released the
Mayaguez
and its crew without incident. Nevertheless the United States mounted one last bombing attack against the mainland, hitting Kompong Som seaport—its railyard, oil refinery, and airfield and the runways, hangars, and aircraft at the nearby Ream naval base. In theory these bombing raids were ordered to provide cover for the marines trying to escape from the far-off island of Koh Tang. But as one administration official told a national American newsmagazine at the time: “It wouldn't be a bad thing if the other side goes a step too far in trying to kick us while we're down. It would give us a chance to kick them back—hard.”

When the fighting was over, thirty-eight American servicemen lost their lives to save thirty-nine crew members of the
Mayaguez,
and most of them died after the crew members had been released. Those dead veterans were counted as the last American casualties in the U.S. war in Indochina.

Washington declared a victory. The U.S. embassy in Bangkok, however, saw the crisis in a considerably different light. “Local [Cambodian] commanders apparently have considerable autonomy and have freely exercised their authority, sometimes to the national embarrassment,” the embassy wrote in a classified cable referring, in part, to the
Mayaguez
incident.

One Cambodian intellectual later complained that
Mayaguez
was the only story about Cambodia covered with any thoroughness by the Voice of America during the first months of Khmer Rouge rule.

Despite their boasts, it was not the Americans who were the victors in the
Mayaguez
face-off, but the Vietnamese. The United States knocked out much of the Khmer air force and did considerable damage to its navy. In June, the Khmer Rouge accepted the Vietnamese proposal for an exchange of visits between Cambodian and Vietnamese officials. Cambodians apologized for the island “incidents,” saying the local commanders had a poor sense of geography Vietnam then recaptured Puolo Wai.

Perhaps as important was the image of American intentions then burned into the Khmer Rouge mentality. Once again, the Americans seemed to have bombed their country wantonly—after they had declared they would return the seized ship. The
Mayaguez
affair confirmed their earlier convictions that U.S. imperialism was their chief worry. Antagonisms with Vietnam cooled for the time being. The Khmer and Vietnamese signed an economic cooperation accord that August during a visit to Phnom Penh by top Vietnamese communist leader Le Duan.

Thereafter, from May 1975 until the spring of 1977, the Khmer Rouge believed the United States, through CIA spies, was actively attempting to sabotage their revolution. Phnom Penh continued to see the United States as the most prominent and dangerous enemy. Vietnam, by comparison, seemed a benign threat.

The Khmer Rouge took the position that it would have no part in any formal alliance by treaty—either in the Western-backed Association of Southeast Asian Nations or in a political friendship treaty with Vietnam. Its isolation was even more studied. Phnom Penh could trade with Hanoi, but Vietnam officially remained a friendly country with which Cambodia had difficulties. The United States was the imperialist enemy.