When the War Was Over (46 page)

Transporting people from one end of the country to another became a hallmark of the Khmer Rouge revolution. Like these new people headed for the northwest, deportations were used to shift labor where it was needed. Khmer Rouge leaders coldly saw the new people as the pliant serf class necessary for societies embarking upon the first stages of modernization. Deportations were also used in purges to move people considered security risks in their home areas. The evacuation of Phnom Penh was ordered for both reasons.

The May sisters and brothers felt like orphans on the train ride to Battambang. They had no idea where their mother was, their father had been murdered, and now their eldest sister and her husband—their surrogate
parents—had been left behind at Pursat. They made a vow not to give up. “We promised each other we would try to stay alive so we could help each other and return to Phnom Penh together,” said Sisopha.

The train stopped in Battambang province, and the new people were loaded on the back of bullock carts for the remainder of the journey. The May family was assigned to Sector 5, one of the worst areas of the northwest. There were no provisions for the new people. The family built crude lean-tos and laid bamboo mats on the ground. They all cut their hair in a spontaneous, silent gesture of protest. They looked for a way out.

It came soon after when a cadre came around asking if any Vietnamese were among the new arrivals. Bopha, one of the twin sisters, said yes, the family was originally from Vietnam. Their mother was from Kampuchea Krom—a Khmer from South Vietnam—and had taught the Vietnamese language to her children. The May children passed themselves off as Vietnamese and were told to assemble at a nearby pagoda. The Northwestern Zone, like the other zones, was under orders to either deport ethnic Vietnamese to their homeland or eliminate them.

Hopeful, the family once again trudged off to a new beginning, but this time they arrived too late. The truck convoy of Vietnamese had already left the pagoda. Cadre at the temple told them to go back to Sector 5. They pretended to walk back to the cooperative but once out of sight of the cadre they headed in a different direction and applied to a new cooperative. “They had killed too many people in Sector 5 and made us work too hard with no food,” Sisopha explained. “We went to Ream Khun.”

But this new cooperative was following the Center's orders to divide up families and purge “reactionary” elements. The family convinced the authorities they came from a poor background and escaped the security police.

They were sent off to separate houses and dormitories. Sisopha and her husband managed to keep the youngest boy, Sisopha's four-year-old brother, but the two others—aged six and nine—were sent to children's barracks and were never seen again. The family heard later the two boys died of malnutrition. Someth, the nineteen-year-old, was sent to a young man's dormitory, the twins were sent to young women's barracks, and the youngest sister, fifteen-year-old Orphera, was assigned to a mobile youth brigade to be trained as a nurse and sent elsewhere in the zone. In this first period the brothers and sisters could pass notes to one another through sympathetic cadre who traveled about the cooperatives.

They escaped the first new rounds of executions ordered by the Center to invigorate “class warfare.” The Khmer Rouge interpreted this Marxist-Leninist
concept literally. Zone secretaries and cooperative chiefs had their own interpretation of the classes of the country despite the April 1975 list circulated around the country. Some authorities were pragmatic and ignored a person's background as long as she or he obeyed orders. Others, particularly those in less established areas in the northwest, attacked cooperative members like zealots searching for those with improper “class composition.”

“Class composition” was a concept with open-ended possibilities. One could have improper class composition by birth—as in the Indian caste system—or by association or achievement. If one was born to an upper-class family there was reason for execution; if one's brother rose to become an officer in Lon Nol's army one was suspect; if one's sister married the officer in Lon Nol's army one could be guilty by association. In other words, if a cooperative chief or the security police wanted to get rid of a family it could be justified under the new rules of class warfare and class composition. In the northwest, where the cadre were weak and frightened and the Center was pressing for economic miracles, the rate of executions in some sectors was phenomenal. Sisopha believes nearly half of her cooperative died in 1976, from executions or disease.

No one less than Ieng Sary, foreign minister and one of the Elder Brothers of the party, confirmed Sisopha's perceptions to be correct. “The circumstance was proletarian dictatorship and class struggle . . . there was great confusion in 1976. Even people who were base people for a long time were accused of being agents,” he said. Sary blamed So Phim of the Eastern Zone and Nhim Ros of the Northwestern Zone for initiating the early divisions in categories. But the man in charge of security, with day-to-day responsibility for the insidious police and Tuol Sleng, was Son Sen, the minister of defense. And overall command of the security, like the army and the party, rested in the hands of Pol Pot himself.

And Pol Pot and the party, including the zone secretaries, wrote the directives on class warfare. Rich peasants who had fought for the revolution from the beginning were being purged and killed. Party members and Khmer Rouge soldiers were being killed for improper class background. And cooperative chiefs or security police could point to party decrees and easily justify these murders.

In the northwest, the May family managed to hide their background. They lied about their father's occupation, their own education, and their former wealth, much of it amassed during the war. They convinced the cadre they were poor people from a humble background. But they could not escape from the horrible conditions they faced every day in 1976. There was
little food. The Northwestern Zone had followed party orders to expand and consolidate cooperatives until they numbered 1,000 members and expanded the basic work unit from small, family-size groups to large labor gangs. Controlling these cooperatives were some thirty people, base people and Khmer Rouge veterans who had fought in the war. At the cooperative level there was little distinction between the party, the army, and the security police. The cooperative chief had authority over all. And in this period of purges, scant food, and heavy work schedules, the cooperative leaders were gods; in everyday decisions about food rations, work assignments, security reports, and medical attention they determined who would live and who would die.

Eventually, a member of the May family made a mistake. Milia, one of the twins, had written her private, angry thoughts about the revolution in a notebook that the other twin—Bopha—used in her duties as a teacher for small children. Bopha taught primary-age children the rudiments of reading and writing in the mornings before the day's work. The notebook with the denunciations was found in a routine security check. Spies were everywhere, as the people suspected. The cooperative chief immediately brought Bopha in for interrogation—it was her notebook. Bopha did not recognize her sister's handwriting; she said she had not written those passages and was released. Later, through a process of elimination, Milia was brought in, and she confessed. The cooperative chief let them off and told them to stop acting so stupidly, they might get in trouble.

But the story spread, and the twins were brought before a large political meeting. Bopha was first to be criticized and punished—she lost her job caring for the children and was put on a work brigade. Milia was next. The criticism session was far shorter. She was taken away with her wrists tied behind her back and never seen again. Bopha could do nothing to save her twin sister without indicting herself. The family heard later that Milia had been killed with injections.

Then Sisopha's husband fell ill. He had been suffering from malnutrition, like the other members of the family, when his body began swelling up, and he died during the night. The youngest boy, four years old, died about the same time. He had become so badly swollen that his sister Sisopha had carried him around day and night to try to save his energy. The cooperative said there was no food or medicine for him. Now Sisopha was a widow without small children to care for. She was moved to a women's barracks. The May family had arrived in the northwest just six months earlier. During the first year of the revolution eleven family members had died or disappeared.
There were now only four left, all existing separately, unable to lend the support they had promised each other on the train ride to Battambang.

In the middle of 1976, after Sisopha was widowed and sent off to a women's barracks, the Northwestern Zone received an important visitor—Ieng Thirith, the new minister for social affairs in the government announced that April. Madame Ieng Thirith, the cabinet official most responsible for the well-being of the population, had been sent to the northwest at the request of Pol Pot to investigate charges of shortcomings in the health, diet, and housing of the worker-peasants.

Thirith found plenty of evidence of “problems,” as she put it. “Conditions there were very queer,” she said. “In Battambang I saw they [the cadre] made all the people go to the rice fields. The fields were very far away from the villages. The people had no homes and they were all very ill . . . I know the directives of the Prime Minister [Pol Pot] were that no old people, pregnant women, women nursing babies, or small children were to work in the fields. But I saw everybody in the open rice fields, in the open air and very hot sun, and many were ill with diarrhea and malaria.”

Thirith could have found similarly awful conditions in other parts of Democratic Kampuchea but her assignment was to uncover problems in the northwest. She returned to Phnom Penh and filed her report in which she concluded that the Northwestern Zone cadre were intentionally disobeying the party's orders. Rather than concentrate on solving the problems she said she cited in her report—the inhuman working conditions, the plight of the family, pregnant women, and small children—Thirith reacted like her fellow Khmer Rouge leaders and immediately suspected that enemy agents were afoot.

“Agents had got into our ranks,” she said, “and they had got into the highest ranks. They had to behave with double faces in order to make as if they were following our line [policies].”

Thirith's investigation became part of the self-protecting rationalizations of the leaders in Phnom Penh to blame the Northwestern Zone cadre for an assortment of failures in the revolution.

The Center amassed “evidence” that the northwest had become infiltrated by enemy agents intent on sabotaging the revolution. And then the leaders plotted a purge of the zone in order to replace these newly distrusted cadre with a new set of communists it hoped would prove to be thoroughly loyal to Phnom Penh. Thirith herself reduced the problem to one of control, or power, over the revolution. “We were not yet in full control in 1976,” she said. “The power was in the hands of the governors [zone secretaries].
We had not yet full control; even the army was not entirely in our hands yet. . . .

“It was a very new government . . . All the power was in the hands of the governors, they were very powerful. They controlled millions of people and we, the government, we controlled nothing but factories [in Phnom Penh, at the Center]. That's all.”

But the tragedy in the northwest was not caused by enemy agents trying to usurp power from the Center, the paramount fear that fed the insane designs of the revolution. The northwest had become the focus of the “Great Leap” and the unwitting laboratory for the regime's extreme ideas for a “new society.” The May family saga showed how the end result was a zone run by terror, a zone where the old social fabric was ruined.

As became so evident in the northwest, the revolution's unrealistic economic goals were inseparable from their inhuman social policies. Thousands of new people were shipped like cattle in the second deportation to fill the northwest with workers, regardless of their own lack of training and the zone's inability to house and feed them. Families were broken up not only to erase that strong, threatening loyalty but also to ensure that every able body, whether a seven-year-old boy or a seventy-year-old woman, was entirely engaged in the work dictated by the revolution.

And in 1976 the Center conceived some of its most fantastic economic schemes, with extraordinary demands on the northwest. At the start of the year, at a party congress, the leaders determined that the first stage of the revolution was over and that Cambodia could enter the next stage—socialism. The fields throughout the country would have to produce record rice crops to support this stepped-up phase of the revolution. By the summer, the regime decided that the rice crop was good enough to speed ahead. Pol Pot said in an interview with the Vietnam News Agency that the December 1975 rice harvest had been “good,” there had been progress if not any “big success.” He emphasized that the country's focus was on a new irrigation system to cover 1.5 million hectares of land. This would solve the “problem of water” and “food” and become the springboard for the next stage—industrialization.

In August the party leaders acted on this ill-founded optimism and ordered the introduction of a four-year economic plan for January 1977, one that literally imposed starvation. Both party intellectuals and ministers who were skeptical of the plan and the deported new people who were blamed for not working hard enough to fulfill it would die in purges throughout 1977. The Center had assessed certain amounts of rice, deemed “surplus,” from the Northwestern, Eastern, Southwestern, and new Western
Zones. Ultimately, the Center received some 150,000 tons of rice from these zones. Some of it was exported to China, some used to feed the bureaucrats and workers in Phnom Penh, and a large amount was allocated to the army.