When the War Was Over (45 page)

The second category was probationary or candidate membership. Fewer new people were accepted immediately into this category, which allowed them some participation in the management of the cooperative, the use of better tools, and a better share of the rations. They were also more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt if they failed at various tasks. New people such as former rickshaw drivers, poor peasants who had fled to Phnom Penh during the war, and the urban poor were most likely to be accepted as candidate members.

The top category was full-rights membership. The old people kept this category for themselves, entitling them to divide the shares of the cooperative food, equipment, housing, clothing, and other material goods. Only full members were allowed to determine cooperative policy, hand out work assignments, and recommend members for admission to the party, the army, and plum jobs elsewhere. The full members also decided which children and single men and women were sent on work brigades. They meted out what passed for justice. The cooperative leaders listened to the full members when they complained of reactionary behavior, bad work performance, and other perceived sins among the cooperative membership. The full members were the overseers, the judges, and the jury. They were in charge of security, and their reports of traitorous behavior could lead to imprisonment and death. They were also in charge of the spies that were a constant, cancerous feature of cooperative life.

Bophana had infuriated her cooperative leadership, in part, because her sudden status as wife of Deth, a cadre, and daughter-in-law of his family, old
people, allowed her to jump categories and reap the benefits of full membership without, in their view, earning it.

Before they arrived at a cooperative, before the new people could petition a cooperative for membership facing the real prospect of rejection, they had been sorted out by Khmer Rouge soldiers and police lining the roads. These authorities had another list of criteria, prepared in April. They were searching for the true enemy classes of the revolution. These were imperialists, feudalists, the bourgeoisie, and comprador capitalists. The categories and the use of “mountain” imagery were inherited from the Chinese communists, but the Cambodians defined them loosely and with abandon.

“Imperialism” was anything or anyone considered foreign. That included the ethnic Vietnamese, sometimes the ethnic Chinese, the Muslim Chams, and any other rare foreigner caught in the revolution—people of Indian blood, most often. Foreign languages, from French and English to Vietnamese and Chinese, were outlawed. Foreign faiths, foreign dress, and anything construed as foreign culture, including books in French or English, were forbidden because they were “imperialistic.”

“Feudalists” were the elite of traditional society including the aristocracy, mandarins, and big landlords. The “bourgeoisie” were the new elite from the colonial and post-colonial society, including the “intellectuals,” civil servants, teachers, and small traders. Monks, functionaries, and particularly royalty were considered feudalists. It was under this rubric of destroying the old feudalist society that the Khmer Rouge justified their purge of Cambodia's two pillars of society—the royalty and the Buddhist clergy.

Another group targeted for destruction was the comprador capitalist class. This category was interpreted to be composed largely of the ethnic Chinese, who ran big businesses. This attack was widened as Cambodian antipathy toward Chinese moneylenders flared after. Many Chinese were killed outright. Others who passed the first test on the road out of Phnom Penh faced the constant threat of execution as a racial minority or a member of the comprador capitalist class. Only the strong alliance with Beijing saved the Chinese from as complete a purge as the Buddhist monks, or the Muslim Chams.

The party had ordered the army, the police, and the base people to “root out” these class enemies. This intensified the deadly three years of stratification of the population into the full-rights, candidate, and ward people in cooperatives.

These divisions and classes led to the same goal in the leaders' minds. They erased the possibility of the people defining themselves as anything
but worker-peasants. Cambodia, in their view, needed to overcome its status as a backward nation by producing record-breaking harvests and increased industrial output, and needed only peasants and workers. Their favorite work slogan was “Nothing is more honorable than growing rice.”

The Khmer Rouge believed that the people need not have a job in a factory to have a “proletarian outlook,” whatever that might be, they need only have the character of a true worker. They need only work like beasts of burden.

For all of this attention to rules and categories, the first year was chaotic. The new people began the revolution like nomads in a wilderness. Their wanderings and fortunes varied with the landscape and mood of the zones they entered. Some found space immediately, others were shunted off to sparse jungle clearings in the wilderness. At the start some lost friends and family to the bullets of executioners or the difficulties brought on by the evacuation. Others carried enough gold and rice with them to pass the first months comfortably. Some were treated with hostility and punished for their first tired attempts at farming; others were welcomed for their professional skills at curing the sick or managing cooperative accounts.

They all ended up, however, leading the same narrow existence. At first their only comfort was family. The party never outlawed families as such and in the first year the revolution allowed the basic family unit to survive. But by the second year new orders were issued to break up that most powerful of all institutions: orders to eat communally rather than as a family; orders to send boys off to dormitories separate from dormitories for girls; orders to limit families to parents and their children under six years of age. Family ties were exploited, not nurtured. Children were encouraged to spy on their parents. If one family member was selected for execution others were often arrested and killed at the same time.

Here is the story of one Cambodian family, how it was broken up during one of the worst episodes of the revolution—the second deportation and purge of the Northwestern Zone—and how it managed to survive, smaller but stronger in spirit.

From September through November, 1975, the Center ordered tens of thousands of people who had been moved from Phnom Penh in the April evacuation to be moved again, this time from the Southwestern Zone to other zones, primarily to the Northwestern Zone. Ta Mok, the secretary of the Southwestern Zone, had complained of overcrowding. At the same time, the party leaders had devised ambitious plans for the Northwestern Zone.

Like all modern Cambodian regimes, Democratic Kampuchea hoped to make the country as glorious as it supposedly had been in the days of the
Angkor Empire. The spires of Angkor dominated the country's new flag and images of Angkor's old water empire were used to justify an attempt to surpass the Vietnamese and Chinese communist obsessions with creating a system of irrigated rice production. The Center ordered gigantic new waterworks projects to irrigate and double the size of the northwest rice harvest, particularly in the rice-growing plains of Battambang province. But few new people had moved to the northwest, which had been one of the weakest zones for the party during the war. There were too few people or cadre to till the fields or tame the jungle, much less embark on the new waterworks project. The second evacuation was designed to please both the Southwest and the Northwest leaders.

This second deportation was as poorly arranged as the first out of Phnom Penh. Hundreds more died on this second trek. And, again, the Khmer Rouge tricked most of these people about the intention of the journey. The cadre told the new people they were either on their way home to the capital, or that they were being sent to Battambang or other northern provinces to help with one full planting and harvest season. Afterward they could return to Phnom Penh. The new people voluntarily abandoned the fruits of their labor in the southwest, giving up their share of the harvest, and went to the north where there was little food or shelter.

In Takeo province, in the eastern section of the Southwestern Zone, a twenty-two-year-old nurse's aide named May Sisopha volunteered with her husband and family to go to Battambang in the second deportation. She was part of a family of nine brothers and sisters—six young adults and three small children. Their mother had never returned from a trip she made outside Cambodia just before the war's end. Their father had been killed by the Khmer Rouge in June. He had been a physician in Phnom Penh and had organized the family's departure from the capital during the evacuation. They traveled for two months before settling in a cooperative in Takeo. Ten days after they had been accepted in the village, four men appeared at the doorstep asking for their father.

“We had said we were poor people but I think our maid told on us and then they came for our father,” Sisopha said. “They told us [the grown children] they were taking our father to a reeducation center, to work in the forest for two or three days.”

Their father told them not to protest and went away under armed guard. About one month later, a family friend told them their father had been tortured to death.

They had carried stocks of rice and sugar and caches of gold and silk with them from Phnom Penh and were able to survive by trading on the informal
black market of the village. The cooperative seemed of two minds about these new people. Sometimes members of the May family were ordered to do back-breaking labor in the fields; on other occasions days would go by with no orders. They were housed separately from the old, base people and never integrated into the village or cooperative structure. The Khmer Rouge cadre and soldiers also lived apart but in well-constructed homes with plenty of food and medicine.

When the cooperative held a mass meeting asking for volunteers to leave the Southwestern Zone it was obvious the new people were expected to raise their hands. The adult members of the May family included the youngest sister, a fifteen-year-old high school student; seventeen-year-old twin sisters, who had completed lycée; a nineteen-year-old brother, who was a medical student; Sisopha, the nurse's aide, and her husband; and a twenty-six-year-old married sister and her husband. There were six younger children. The times were so confusing that they left the meeting with different impressions of the journey ahead of them. Sisopha thought the Khmer Rouge would take them back to Phnom Penh immediately; Bopha, one of the twins, said they would go to Battambang first, in the northwest, and after the first harvest they would return to their home in Phnom Penh. They packed their belongings that night and awoke early the next morning eager to leave the Southwestern Zone. Some twenty trucks pulled up. Soldiers stood guard and confiscated the small bundles the people were holding. Then they shoved the new people into the trucks as tightly as pigs to market—250 to 300 in a flatbed with barely room to breathe. But their spirits were not dashed. The weather was bright. It was the dry season, when Cambodia's climate resembles the early Mediterranean summer. And this was a journey of escape.

The trucks reached Phnom Penh in the early afternoon. They saw their hometown for the first time since the traumatic revolution began. But the capital was now inhabited by black-clad Khmer Rouge soldiers and cadre. They drove within sight of the Olympic Stadium. There was an air of quiet desperation among the people in the truck.

The trucks sped on, beyond the city and its northern suburbs and farther north, then west. Those who thought they would be returning to Phnom Penh grew nervous. “People started talking. ‘Where are we going?' ‘Are they going to kill us?' I didn't know. I decided it didn't matter. My brother Someth didn't say anything. Soon everyone was quiet. There was nothing to say,” said Sisopha.

They were not killed. After one and a half days of travel without stops, even to relieve themselves, they were dropped off unceremoniously at a crossroads in northern Pursat province. The next day they were marched to
the Pursat train depot, where they became part of a crowd of thousands camped out on the trainbeds. They were all “new people” and were treated accordingly. The area was littered with human feces and swarming with flies. There was not enough food, again, and nowhere to rest but the open ground. There was little water for drinking, none for bathing.

At their cooperative's meeting they had not been told why they were asked to move to the northwest. They had no idea that the Center had a grand design to move thousands of new people to the less populated plains of the northwest. They still knew the party only as “Angka,” and they had no appreciation of its gigantic ambitions. In many ways this journey was harder than the evacuation from Phnom Penh. The new people had weakened during the intervening months, and their spirits could not bear many more deceptions.

More people crowded into the Pursat depot. The Khmer Rouge set up a canteen and every three days passed out rations of powdered rice. Corpses littered the area, and the stench from human and animal feces became overwhelming. After eight days the train pulled up. It stopped first at the farther end of the yards and unloaded cattle from the cars. Then the train pulled up to the new people and they were herded on. Each family was given a number, and groups of numbers were called off by guards standing beside each cattle car. Finally their number was called and the May family joined the throngs heading for a cattle car. Most of the family had climbed aboard when the guards declared the car filled. The eldest sister and her family were held back and told to wait for another car. No amount of pleading could persuade the guard to allow the sister and her husband and children to join the crush inside the car. The train pulled out of the station, and the eldest sister waved goodbye to her departing family. She vanished from their lives for many years to come.