When the War Was Over (48 page)

Here is the story of one man, a Chinese, who managed to survive the pogroms of the unwanted ethnic groups.

The Old Market section lies in the heart of Phnom Penh. A commercial district with tree-lined streets and thick-walled colonial buildings, it was once home for most of the capital's Chinese community. Within the blocks of stores and shops were the best gold stores in the town, the finest restaurants, and the richest merchants and moneylenders. There were also modest vendors of dry goods and small, dark apothecary stores selling Chinese cures. But the overall impression was of wealth.

These Chinese were held in awe by the Cambodians, despised and envied for their industry and their seeming lack of scruples. These Chinese were
the people who had held the country's peasantry in ransom, who had hoarded rice until the price shot up to intolerable levels, and who had charged interest rates that bankrupted families in the city as well as in the countryside. The Old Market was something of a forbidden city, sealed off by language, custom, and design until April 17, 1975.

Then the world of the Khmer Rouge burst upon the Chinese, including a young businessman named Han Tao. He was thirty-one years old, married, and the father of an infant son. He had grown up in the protected environment of Old Market, amid the stores with herbal medicines displayed in glass jars, the acupuncture charts, and the signs in Chinese ideograms. He could barely understand the Khmer Rouge soldier who came to his door, ordering him out of his home immediately.

To go where? Tao asked in badly broken Khmer. To your home village, the soldier answered.

Tao's home village, the birthplace of his ancestors, was in southern China. The Khmer countryside was utterly foreign to him. So he was directed to the southwest, the zone of the soldier. His family packed few belongings—at the soldier's insistence—but carefully hid gold in their clothes. Then they walked out of their home and joined the slow procession into the unknown.

Luck was with them. The Southwestern Zone was one of the best organized and most receptive, at the beginning of the revolution, to the new people. Not far from Phnom Penh, in Kompong Speu province west and south of the capital, Tao and his family were accepted by a cooperative. The cooperative made him a “ward” and sent him and his family to the very edge of the village, where the scrub brush jungle begins. The villagers had erected crude lean-tos, and Tao's family stayed in one for two months in political and economic quarantine until they proved themselves.

Tao felt lost. Nothing was familiar—not the flat, silent vista broken by sugar palm trees, nor the rhythm of rural life, rising before the sun and working even after the day disappeared quickly into deep tropical nights. Tao had never lived without what he considered the requisites of mosquito nets, soap and water, cots, and regular meals. And he had never done manual labor. His thin body had developed without the strong musculature of a worker. But Tao realized he had to adapt quickly and without complaint. He was reminded often that he was a member of the comprador class.

In the case of the Chinese, race and class were indistinguishable in the Cambodian revolution. Tao grew accustomed to the politically sanctioned racist taunts of the new order. He was called “chalk-face” and “white-face”
and “Chinese capitalist,” but mostly he was called the Khmer equivalent of “Chink.” He was told regularly that the tables were now turned—the victims of his community's usurious moneylending practices were now at the top and he and the other Chinese were the last in line. “We got the wateriest gruel,” he said. “We were the last to receive clothes. The cadre would say: ‘You are Chinese capitalists, you do not need clothes.' Then we were cursed and called white-face.”

These white-faces had to prove they wanted to become proper Khmers, and the greatest test was to speak nothing but the Khmer language. Speaking Chinese or exhibiting Chinese culture in any other fashion was punishable by death in some areas. There are numerous stories of ethnic Chinese who risked their lives by speaking Chinese to visiting Chinese delegations from Beijing. Hundreds of Chinese experts and advisors visited Cambodia, but those who were confronted by the Chinese of Cambodia behaved as if there was no cultural or racial loyalty. When the Sino-Khmers attempted to tell their Chinese “brothers” from the mainland that the Cambodian revolution was persecuting them, they were stopped short by Khmer Rouge cadre and killed or turned in by those visiting advisors.

The Khmer Rouge openly acted on the country's deep racial fears to turn fear easily into hatred. Like the government of Lon Nol, the Cambodian revolutionaries oversaw pogroms of ethnic Vietnamese during the war, but the Khmer Rouge pogroms were done in secret. After the war the same policies, supported by the Cambodian interpretation of “national liberation” policies, led to massacres that threatened the Muslim Chams with extinction and caused the deaths of nearly half of the urban Chinese community. It was a policy that was practiced throughout the country: The Eastern and Southwestern Zones were responsible for most of the massacres of the Chams; the Southwestern and Western Zones persecuted the Thais; all zones suppressed the Chinese. The question of racial purity seemed of a piece with the superiority the Khmer Rouge felt toward other communists and other countries. As Pol Pot wrote, the revolution was being waged “in conformity with the genuine nature of the working class” in order to “ensure the perenniality of the Kampuchean race.”

The Khmer Rouge directives to all zones that only the Khmer language would be spoken in Democratic Kampuchea and that, in effect, minority nationalities no longer “existed” meant people of minority races either became Khmer in a sometimes brutal fashion or faced execution. Some Khmer Rouge cadre took the decree as license to slaughter minorities.
(Stalin's attempts to force rapid industrialization on the Soviet Union had also been accompanied by suppression of minorities.)

Under the Khmer Rouge, the desire for racial purity led to the nullification of marriages to foreigners. With some exceptions, even Khmer Rouge officials were obliged to leave their French wives in France. One Japanese wife of a Khmer managed to survive; all others discovered at the beginning of the revolution were ordered out of the country with the foreigners who had taken refuge in the French embassy. The ethnic Vietnamese were ordered out, and most returned to South Vietnam by the end of 1975.

Tao survived by falling between the cracks and through fierce fortitude. He never complained, he never fought back. He was rewarded after two months of quarantine by being allowed to move into the cooperative village. Then he was inducted into the life of a revolutionary peasant.

They rose long before daybreak. By four in the morning Tao had left for the fields, where he toiled with his solidarity group. Three hours later, when the sun had begun to burn off the dew, the men were given a thin gruel for breakfast. More work, then a longer rest period at midday. Back to the fields by four in the afternoon, then work until seven or eight in the evening. Tao seemed to shrink; his pale skin darkened to the color of tanned leather. His wife was undergoing the same metamorphosis. She, too, followed a demanding schedule, but with a woman's work crew. Sometimes she tilled fields, other times she dug small feeder ditches or tended the cooperative vegetable garden. Tao and his wife saw each other only in the late evenings. Then they cooked their supper together—the first year food was rationed but families ate by themselves and supplemented the rations with whatever else they could find.

“The food was miserable; we scrounged for tubers, bananas, weeds. Many of us caught malaria because we had no mosquito nets. They hadn't let us take anything from Phnom Penh, but I managed to hide some gold and valuables in my clothes—and we survived.”

Tao's family lived off that buried treasure for the first nine months. Black markets flourished throughout the country, though all markets were forbidden. The new people traded their gold and sturdy clothing, their watches and other valuables, for chickens, aspirin, rice, and vegetables. Tao's village had gone over to the Khmer Rouge in 1970 and set up solidarity work groups in 1973, and in 1975 it considered itself one of the most established in the region. Because they were more confident, the cooperative leaders were less erratic than many others. They were severe but predictable. “I did
what they said. They harassed me and called me stupid and lazy but I did what they said. I survived,” said Tao.

With poor rations and unaccustomed to the work, the new people fell prey to malnutrition and disease far more easily than the old people. Since they were practically ineligible for medicine that could help them, they died from diarrhea, dysentery, malaria, and typhoid. The epidemics were so widespread that first year that the Khmer Rouge broke their golden rule of self-sufficiency and asked for DDT from an American charity to help control mosquitoes carrying malaria. Tao's young son became ill that year, too, and Tao abandoned his work one morning to exchange gold for medicine. The cooperative leader had told him that as a “capitalist feudalist” he did not qualify for medicine.

Then the harvest period came and Tao had no time to worry about his crimes and errors. By then, many of the “new people” had been moved from the Southwestern to the Northwestern Zone, and Tao's cooperative was short of hands. He and his wife worked even longer hours and nearly lost their sickly child. Normally their son was left in the care of elderly members of the cooperative during the days. “But at the first harvest even the old women had to rise early and go to the fields,” Tao said. “The babies were abandoned. There weren't even enough people to care for the children.”

That harvest was good in Tao's area: He expected life to improve. The worst—the evacuation, the complete shock of moving to the countryside, learning the life of a peasant and a communist—was over. The tasks were becoming easier. Tao and his wife were adapting.

But when the members of the party's central committee held their congress in January 1976 they decided the initial phase, the war communism, had been successful enough to allow them to move on to the next stage of revolution—further collectivization of the cooperatives, greater “transformation” of the society by eliminating the remaining “feudal and bourgeois” elements and increasing the demands on the people. Democratic Kampuchea was ready to embark on the “socialist revolution” stage.

The party organized the new government, wrote the new constitution, and sent out new directives to the cooperatives. The Southwestern Zone followed them more completely and earlier than any other zone.

The leaders in Phnom Penh demanded a high percentage of the first harvest, and the Southwestern Zone complied. Tao's food rations diminished rather than increased. “The Khmer Rouge told us our rice was taken to places where it was needed and that we would be given credits for the rice to
trade for clothes and medicine. It was not true,” Tao said. “Our rags got more tattered and there was no medicine, at least not for us.”

Collectivization intensified. “Individualism” was outlawed and everyone was required to eat in the cooperative canteen—no more family meals or family rations of food. Private vegetable plots and private ownership of livestock—particularly pigs—were banned. The size of cooperatives doubled and even tripled in area. The size of rice fields expanded as a consequence. The stands of trees and small feeder ditches that had divided rice fields for generations were cut down and filled. The work teams that tilled the fields enlarged, and people were sent to fields far away from their home cooperative.

This was also the stage when children as young as five and six years of age were separated from their families and put in dormitories—boys in one, girls in the other. Tao's family stayed intact, but there was little family life left.

The base people, not entirely happy with this new stage of the revolution, used their positions as full-rights members to retain their few remaining privileges. They, too, had to eat communally, but they saved the best food for themselves and gave the leftovers to the candidate members and depositees. “Our rice gruel got thinner and thinner, a handful of rice in a pot of water for twenty or thirty people. No meat or vegetables for us. Just gruel with water chestnut, banana stalks, or corn. The base people ate well. They ate at separate tables [in the canteen]—pork, vegetables, plates of rice and sometimes fish,” said Tao.

In a country facing a food crisis, the shift toward communal eating was not only unpopular but wrongheaded. When a family ate together the father or mother could make something out of wild vegetables or small wild animals found around the area. But when hundreds of people ate together, how could such treasures be shared? And in many cooperatives searching for wild food was outlawed at the same time. It was decided that foraging for food took up valuable time better spent in the fields. Cambodia's time-honored supply of jungle food, the peasant's mainstay in bad times and source of supplementary food in good times, was discarded by a regime that showed a willful ignorance of rural life.

The directives to further “cleanse” the society of unwanted elements from the old society had an immediate impact as well. The cooperative leaders and old people were coming down harder on the new people, searching backgrounds again. Hundreds of bureaucrats, students, teachers, former military men, and professionals who survived the first round of executions were caught. In 1976 this new wave of murders was reflected in the files at Tuol Sleng, where a number of the victims were taken for interrogation and execution.
From Tao's zone, the Southwestern, the security police searched out and killed former Lon Nol military men (they had been protected, at first, in that zone), students, professors, and a few officials of the old regime. In the Eastern and Northwestern Zones the arrests appeared to concentrate more heavily on the professionals of the old society—doctors, engineers, and bureaucrats.