When the War Was Over (47 page)

But the Center needed far more rice to move ahead with the Great Leap. Their social revolution was playing havoc with their economic plans, although the leadership never recognized this basic truth. Not enough rice had been produced by the underfed, ill-trained workers. The transportation system was in ruins. Rice earmarked for a rice-poor region never arrived. Some zones were short of rice seedlings for the next planting season. (It was this crisis that spurred the Tuol Sleng authorities to force Bophana and other victims to confess they had purposely disrupted the country's transportation of rice. Thereby enemies could be blamed, not policies.)

Yet, in a September interview, Ieng Sary told reporters in Tokyo that Cambodia was earning enough hard currency from the export of surplus rice to begin plans for mechanizing agriculture and building new agroindustries. In fact, by October the regime had established its own trading company in Hong Kong, called the Ren Fung Co., Ltd. It was set up with the help and money of China, necessary to cover foreign exchange credits. Through this company, Cambodia bought $2.4 million worth of spare parts for transportation and communications systems as well as pharmaceutical goods, but sold only $357,000 worth of fish and rubber. All the rice Ieng Sary claimed his country was exporting was not listed in company records.

At the end of the year, the party leaders met and assessed the performance of the country. The Eastern Zone got the highest marks for its labor force and harvest. So Phim remained the best zone leader. The Southwestern Zone did well. The Northwestern Zone, however, was singled out for its failures.

In their end-of-the-year report, the party leadership wrote: “In some places, particularly in the northwest, the proportion of new people is far too high. For this reason, former soldiers and former government employees have insinuated themselves into positions of responsibility in many collectives. For this reason, the party has been unable to develop sufficient influence, so far, and a number of combatants and a number of revolutionary youths must be chosen to take charge of these collectives to prevent [unnamed] enemies from taking over.”

The party's disenchantment with the northwest was largely over practical matters like low rice yields but it was expressed in terms of power politics. The report exemplified the studied blindness and contradictions in the
party's thinking. The Center had made heavy demands on the zone for goods and labor while giving little in return. When the people's standard of living fell as a result, it was blamed on bad politics. “Some comrades seem to believe that all ‘new people' are enemies and so they do not pay attention to expanding their awareness of politics, and do not pay attention to solving problems of their livelihood. This is a very great error, for it would mean not gathering up everyone on the side of the revolution . . .”

But starving and executing them was part of the underlying logic of this “revolution.”

The comrades of the northwest were simultaneously criticized for putting too many new people in their zone (which was a decision of the Center) and for not taking good enough care of those new people. The Center did not send emergency food and medicine to relieve the horrible conditions. Instead, the party leaders ordered a purge, or “sweep,” of the Northwestern Zone, the second purge of a zone since the Khmer Rouge took over one year earlier. In the first purge, the Center had allowed the Eastern Zone to help purge the old Northern Zone. This time the Center turned to the West and Southwestern Zones and ordered their cadre to move in.

The sweep began at the outset of the rainy season after the northwest had completed the 1976 harvest and begun a number of irrigation projects. At first, the Northwestern Zone secretary, Nhim Ros, cooperated with the Center and southwestern cadre in hunting down and eliminating “suspect” cadre at the sector level. By the time the sweep was over, one year later, Southwestern Zone troops had removed or killed forty of the top cadre of the zone and countless other low-level cooperative leaders.

The Southwestern Zone cadre were surprised at what they found. Some of the nine sectors of the northwest had so little food even the cadre had to go without. It was clear the Center had demanded too much rice from the northwest's first harvest. But rather than risk angering the Center, the sector leaders had sent in reports of a good harvest and gave the Center as much rice as the Eastern Zone, which had the best-established cooperatives.

The Northwestern Zone was agonizing proof that the revolution's central concept of evacuating the city people and turning them into worker-peasants overnight had failed. There are accounts that the deputy secretary of the Northwestern Zone had traveled about the region admonishing the old people for mistreating the new people because they were novices. But that did not save him. Results were what mattered. If the Center and other zone leaders had examined the crisis in the northwest objectively they would
have had to redesign the entire revolution. Instead, the deputy was one of the first arrested in the northwest sweep.

The West and Southwestern Zone cadre in effect partially colonized the region. In many cooperatives the advent of new troops was considered a blessing. Sisopha said the Southwestern Zone troops removed the most despised leaders in her cooperative.

She tells the story: “The southwest meant to do good. They gave the people enough to eat and they only killed the cadre, not the April 17 people [new people]. They killed maybe 20 to 30 percent of the cadre, very secretly. They just disappeared. The southwest cadre seemed to have a little bit better education than the northwest. Some could write in Khmer. They made us work even harder, much, much harder. We worked twenty hours a day and slept four hours. We worked to find water, digging deep in the land for wells and to make canals. But we had a second rice harvest we didn't have before. And we ate good rice.”

The new cadre had been charged with making good on Pol Pot's demand that the Northwestern Zone realize its vaunted reputation for waterworks and lush rice fields. During the sweep they were given urgent deadlines for new water projects that required twenty-four-hour work crews, quick decisions, and masses of people. The plans were drawn up by cadre with no engineering experience and without advice from peasants familiar with the area. The construction of the First January Dam is a good example of the awful results.

That dam was built in the northwest in 1977. The Center ordered it to be completely dug and constructed between the January harvest and the May planting season. It was to irrigate 20,000 hectares of land. There was practically no mechanical equipment available—no bulldozers for digging and few trucks for hauling. The cooperatives in the general vicinity had to “donate” labor teams of thousands of people with no training. They worked like ants, digging the earth with crude picks and shovels, carrying backbreaking loads of dirt and rocks in bamboo baskets balanced on poles across their shoulders. They worked around the clock with the moon and lanterns lighting the area at night. But they finished on time. And in the 1978 rainy season the dam burst. It had been constructed without a spillway, a shortcut that halved construction time but made it certain that the dam would not hold up under heavy rains and swelling rivers during the monsoon season.

Nearly every dam in Democratic Kampuchea was built that way. One engineer who later surveyed the irrigation projects of the Khmer Rouge described the criminal neglect of these construction schemes. “Without a spillway there is no effective way to control the water and it broke through
the dam. When the dam broke there was little protection for the people who lived downstream and they were flooded. The rest of the irrigation system was usable but many canals were either out of alignment or in need of basic repairs that would have been unnecessary if the canals had been built correctly in the first place.”

But such care and consideration were impossible in the regime's schemes for a great leap forward and in its basic political philosophy that the political character of the workers was more important than engineering skills. It was especially ironic that the Khmer Rouge harkened back to the days of Angkor for inspiration in these projects. “If we are masters of water, we are masters of the country. If we master the water we clean the air. We irrigate the fields. We prevent flooding. . . . Our people become masters of the country, ancestors of the builders of Angkor.”

While the Khmers of the Angkor era advanced the state of the art, constructing irrigation systems with hydraulic engineering techniques that were sophisticated for their time—techniques which nonetheless were unable to prevent the salination of the soil—the Khmer Rouge considered engineering skills incidental. They managed to reproduce the slavery of that previous era and little else. “It was the equivalent in labor to building the pyramids of Egypt,” the engineer said. “It was a tragedy.”

Phnom Penh radio reported the projects as successes, noting the details of size, height, depth, and length, the number of acres to be irrigated, and the increase in rice yield expected. Sisopha and the other Northwestern Zone people were moved about from project to project and then sent back to tend to the rice fields.

The West and Southwestern Zone cadre had purged so many of the old cooperative leaders they had to recruit new leaders from among the new people. Sisopha was asked to replace one of those purged. When the Southwestern Zone cadre arrived, Sisopha, like other new people, had invented even more humble origins. She said she was illiterate and changed her name to Mala because it had a common ring. She was tested and found sufficiently reliable to become the equivalent of a boss for a labor gang. At first she was put in charge of a group of ten people. “I worked hard and made them work hard. So I was put in charge of thirty people, then ninety people. When I had ninety people they sent two boys—maybe fifteen years old—with me to the fields. They both had rifles.”

Sisopha was not alone among the new people who were tapped to replace the purged old people. The honeymoon with the Southwestern Zone cadre, however, did not last long. The demands from the Center did not let up.
First it was rice; the Center asked for most of the rice from the second harvest. “Our rice started to disappear again,” said Sisopha. “We ate gruel and banana stalks. I was told they sent our rice to another country.”

It should have been obvious that the system could not work no matter who was in charge. But temporary and local improvements confirmed Pol Pot's belief in the infallibility of his leadersip.

The Center made demands for more and harder labor to build the irrigation projects. There was also a new directive, in the middle of 1977, to kill off a new category of enemy—people of Vietnamese ancestry. By this time Sisopha had learned to hide her Kampuchea Krom family history. “They started killing people with any Vietnamese blood, even Kampuchea Krom. At first we did not know why.”

The new people were in the dark about the rationale behind nearly all of the directives that had issued from the Center since the revolution had begun in April 1975. At the most basic level, that of survival, the new people felt the sweep of the northwest had benefited them more than it had the old people. Sisopha explains how the sweep helped the new people in her cooperative. “When we were put in charge, none of our people were killed. In my field we all worked hard. One boy and one girl ran away but I caught them and brought them back. They weren't killed. But if I had not caught them I would have been killed.”

The new people had managed to hold off the terror for the time being. The Center was temporarily satisfied with the false belief that by destroying the old society and purging the zone cadre, the northwest was now a success. Comrade Mala, or Sisopha, was proof of the contrary. Like the other new people and an increasing number of the old people, Sisopha despised the revolution more, not less. Her loyalty to her few surviving family members was even stronger. In fact her family was all that mattered to her. Eventually, she kept her promise to her brother and sisters and they escaped to Thailand.

The most desperate people in Democratic Kampuchea were those targeted for elimination because of their ethnicity, creed, or culture. Implicit in the Khmer Rouge drive to force everyone to lead the same narrow, isolated existence was the corollary requirement that everyone be the same. All citizens had to be proper Kampuchean worker-peasants, as defined by the revolution, which meant not Vietnamese, Chinese, or Cham and only what the party considered Khmer. Part of the Khmer Rouge mission was to revive the
glory and honor of Cambodia and to ensure the perenniality of the reinvented Kampuchean race, as Pol Pot himself said.

To that end, the Khmer Rouge adopted a philosophy of racial superiority and purity that resembled that of Nazi Germany, including the use of pogroms to eliminate minorities. And the Khmer Rouge concept of a pure nation of Kampuchean worker-peasants was as monstrous and stupid as that held by the Nazis of a mythical Aryan race. The Cambodian people are a mixture of racial stocks—largely, the earliest Negroid, Australoid, Malay, and northern Mongoloid racial families and including the later wave of migrations by Europeans, Chinese, and Vietnamese. The idea of pure Kampuchean blood or a pure Kampuchean race was a combination of European racism and Marxist science fiction.

The Khmer Rouge confused the idea of race with that of culture, creed, language, and nation, as had the Nazis. They arbitrarily decided that Cambodia's minorities—the Chinese, the Chams, the ethnic Thais, and, on occasion, even the hill tribespeople—were a threat to the health and vitality of the Kampuchean nation. Their solution was to decree the assimilation of all people into a super-race of Kampuchean worker-peasants.

That decision was interpreted with varying degrees of violence and fidelity in the zones where it was often understood to mean forced “khmerization.” In some areas there were outright massacres and pogroms. Other sectors allowed minorities to live in the cooperatives as long as they abandoned their language, habits, and religions. Khmer Rouge cadre created a conundrum—What is a proper Khmer?—which they could only answer in the negative. Anyone who did not “look” Khmer or “act” Khmer or speak the Khmer language was suspect. Like their other arbitrary divisions of society, the decree banishing minorities was a license to harass and murder thousands of innocent victims.