When the War Was Over (49 page)

In Tao's expanded cooperative the Chinese survivors were under renewed suspicion. A number “disappeared.” And then Tao ran afoul of cooperative leaders in the fields. He had trouble controlling the buffalo used for plowing. “I couldn't plow a straight line, and they said this showed I was from the oppressive classes. I was plowing with the buffalo and couldn't keep up with the animal, so they said I was lazy. So I hit the buffalo to slow it down and they turned around and asked, ‘What is the matter with you, don't you know how to treat a buffalo?'”

At the cooperative's next mass meeting he was called before the assembly in a “criticism/self-criticism” session. The meetings were usually held at night at the central open-air building that doubled as the canteen. There, under the light of lanterns or bare electric bulbs, justice was meted out and directives explained in endless sessions. More often than not, the directives concerned the planting and harvest assignments and schedules. The criticism /self-criticism sessions were the closest thing in the country to a people's court. Cooperative leaders usually did the criticizing, the accused made the self-criticisms.

At this meeting Tao was called to the front of the meeting and listened while the elders described his error and berated him for committing the mistake. This time he got a warning that more errors could lead to severe punishment.

Tao was watched closely thereafter. He felt the presence of spies daily; perhaps he only imagined people judging his every move. He had no idea who the appointed spies were in his cooperative. Finally, he broke the steel tip of his plow on a rock. It was an accident but it was greeted as a crime. He was called before the next mass meeting. Part of him was indignant. “If an old peasant had broken the plow nothing would have been said and the plow would have been repaired,” he said later.

But Tao was Chinese, and the old people felt their new tyranny over him was justified by his community's previous tyranny over them.

Tao stood before the crowd and listened again to his elders accuse him of crimes against the revolution—beating a buffalo and breaking the steel tip of the plow. Then one of his accusers said: “If you keep this man there is no profit, if he goes there is no loss.”

That was the phrase everyone dreaded—it was used throughout Democratic Kampuchea as the ritualized threat of death. It was a saying apparently first used against the Cambodian communists who returned to the country in 1970 from exile in North Vietnam. “If you keep these people there is no profit, if they go there is no loss” paralyzed the victims with fear.

Tao visibly quaked at the threat. He apologized profusely and vowed never to commit errors again. He cowered and humiliated himself, and his performance was convincing. It saved his and his family's lives.

In this stage of the revolution, in cooperatives and even in some prisons, it was possible for a victim to win a reprieve by such acts of contrition. In even earlier stages of the revolution, during the war, a victim could be released if he successfully refuted the charges facing him, but that was very rare in postwar Cambodia. After 1975, the party always believed police charges brought against certain categories and classes of people; it was part of the ideology behind their revolution.

In this respect communist Cambodia resembled the Chinese more than the Soviet model. Joseph Stalin used “show trials” to justify his executions, and all the participants understood they were cynical charades. But Mao Zedong's executioners were true believers, particularly the Red Guard, who oversaw the purges of the Cultural Revolution.

Now the character of the Cambodian purges changed as it became vital for the Center to find enemies who could be blamed for the failure of the revolution. Charges could no longer be refuted, confession and contrition were not enough.

Though roughly half of the urban Chinese were killed by the Khmer Rouge, Tao survived by erasing all that was dangerously “Chinese” about himself. He did not speak Chinese, even to his wife, for fear spies might overhear him. This was the only way imperialist feudalist or comprador capitalist “elements” of minority races could survive—through a tremendous act of adaptation into the Khmer communist life and total submission in their cooperatives to the leaders.

The Chinese were only one of the ethnic minority communities marked for absorption or elimination. The Khmer Rouge persecuted the ethnic Thai who lived in the Southwestern and new Western Zones, in the maritime province of Koh Kong on the Gulf of Siam. The swift purge of the Thai was so unexpected it caught the ethnic Thai members of the Khmer Rouge by surprise. As many as one-third of the ethnic Thai community in Koh Kong were killed. Some escaped from the executioners and went into hiding along the
frontier with Thailand nearby. Then these ethnic Thai, who were former Khmer Rouge, asked for and received supplies from the Thai army to fight Pol Pot. Their raids against their former comrades were militarily insignificant at the time. But a few years later they would be of immense importance when the Vietnamese would look for Khmer Rouge to succeed Pol Pot.

There were irregular but intensifying purges of hill people in the northeast, even in Ratanakiri, where the central committee had gone into hiding in the late sixties and Pol Pot discovered the natives' oppression.

The Khmer Rouge policy of eliminating ethnic differences and creating a new race had the greatest effect on the Muslim Chams. These exotic people were twice doomed, for their “foreign race” and their “reactionary” faith. For generations they had avoided being absorbed into the society of Buddhist Khmers.

The Cham had always lived apart in Cambodia. They are believed to be descendants of the people of Champa, which was overrun by the Vietnamese. They ran away from the invading Vietnamese army until they reached modern-day Cambodia. They built their own villages, centered around a mosque, and observed their own dietary laws, dressed and groomed according to their faith, and established professional specialties as fishermen and merchants of cloth.

There was a richness to Cham culture. The women coiffed their long, thick tresses in elaborate styles and covered their heads with long, bright scarves. The men wore skullcaps, and many grew beards. Their priests, or muftis, wore turbans. The Khmer, predictably, had an assortment of derogatory Cham stereotypes. Cham men who went about the countryside selling cloth to Khmer villagers and driving hard bargains were considered proficient liars and commercial thieves. The exotic look of Cham women inspired stories of their promiscuity. Their language and script were alien—Arabic—so Chams were believed to have a special way with magic, from telling fortunes to administering curses. And they were Muslims, a strident orthodox faith that believes in one God and is part of the Judeo-Christian tradition—in utter contrast to Buddhism.

Sihanouk had tried to integrate the Chams into Khmer society, but both the Khmers and the Chams disapproved. The Chams did not want to lose their identity or disobey their faith as integration might require. The Khmers were sufficiently racist to prefer the Chams to keep a lowly distance.

At the beginning of the war in 1970 the Chams were sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge. They hoped the communists would win and reverse the long-standing policies of benign discrimination practiced by the central authorities in Phnom Penh. Both sides were eager to enlist the Chams—as
minorities whose faith accepted war, they were considered the best and most ferocious fighters in Cambodia. The majority of Chams joined the Khmer Rouge and were among their ranks until 1973, when, with the inauguration of cooperatives, the communists declared the Cham's distinct lifestyle counterrevolutionary.

All women had to dress in the Khmer Rouge style: bob their hair and don black pajamas or sarongs. Khmer Buddhists may have had personal objections, but the Cham women were forbidden by their faith to cut their hair and give up their way of dress. In some cooperatives Chams were forced to eat pork, forbidden in Islam, and were not allowed to speak their language or practice their faith. As the war was coming to an end, the Phnom Penh authorities learned through intelligence reports of the Khmer Rouge suppression of Chams, and tried to entice Chams to their side. They promoted Cham military officers and strengthened ties with Islamic countries in the Middle East as well as those in Southeast Asia. But it was too late. The war ended and the rumors of discrimination against the Chams blossomed into a violent pogrom.

After the Khmer Rouge victory, the attack against the Chams became open and systematic. The religious and community leaders of the Chams were hunted down and murdered. Mosques were destroyed or desecrated, used, like pagodas, as granaries, pigsties, or prisons. Copies of the Islamic religious book, the Koran, were destroyed. Cham schools were shut down, as were all schools.

The rules that all Cambodians had to follow after the revolution had even more devastating consequences on the Chams, forcing them to choose their faith and identity or the revolution and their lives. They had to drop their family and given names and choose “Khmer” names. To “look” Khmer they had to cut their hair, shave their beards, and wear clothes that further robbed them of their identity. They were forced to eat pork at gunpoint, as a test. And their families, too, were broken up, preventing the adults from passing on their culture to the children who were sent to dormitories with Khmer children or on mobile youth brigades.

But the Chams rebelled. Whole Cham villages took up arms against the Khmer Rouge, and whole villages were, in turn, slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge. Even villages that did not openly protest were massacred by zealous cadre. And none of the Cham villages was allowed to remain intact. Chams were dispersed to predominantly “Khmer” cooperatives and forced to integrate.

Most of these villages were along the Mekong River, in the Southwestern, the old Northern, and the Eastern Zones. Some were in the Phnom Penh Special Zone, or the Center. One of the greatest concentrations of Chams was in the Eastern Zone. So Phim, leader of that zone, had a reputation for disciplining his cadre and preventing unnecessary bloodshed but he showed no mercy toward the Chams. Just as the Eastern Zone had complied with the party's orders to suppress the Khmer communists returning from Vietnam during the war, so the Eastern Zone complied with the pogrom against the Chams.

The Chams had few avenues of escape from the Khmer Rouge and were too militant to accept the destruction of their culture and religion. In less than four years of Khmer Rouge rule as many as one-half of the Chams died. But they did fight back. It is remarkable that most reports of rebellion were among the ethnic minorities—the ethnic Thais in Koh Kong province, the Chams, even the Chinese who individually stood up and courted death by pleading for help in their own language to advisors from Beijing.

The majority of Cambodians, those who spoke the right language and were ethnically and culturally “proper” Khmers, also lost their culture, their families, their way of life during the revolution. But there were few reports of uprisings by them. Some escaped to Thailand or Vietnam, others committed suicide. Perhaps their centuries-long tradition of following absolute rulers prevented them from striking back at the Khmer Rouge.

They were not the only people in the twentieth century who became too dehumanized by tyranny to revolt. It happened in other countries of Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America, in countries with concentration camps, torture, and famine. People in these conditions do not react with “rage and violence, but their conspicuous absence is the clearest sign of dehumanization” that paralyzes a nation. The people of Cambodia increasingly acted like a nation of “deaf-mutes” as waves of terror swept across the country, just as was predicted in their prophecy of the end of the world.

Nothing exemplified the revolution's disdain for the traditional rural life of the vast majority of Cambodians more than the regime's destruction of the Buddhist faith and the Buddhist way of life.

Much of the Buddhist clergy had expected to be part of the revolution, not its victims. Encouraged by Prince Sihanouk and his appeals from Beijing, many of the Buddhists of the countryside joined the Khmer Rouge. In a repeat of what had happened during the First Indochina War, the Khmer Rouge actively recruited monks during the first years of the war and treated them with respect. Monks were named to ceremonial positions in the united front government and allowed to continue administering to the faithful in many areas under Khmer Rouge rule. Even when religion was suspended in the late war period, the Khmer Rouge promised it was a temporary emergency measure to allow full mobilization of the people.

With victory, the Khmer Rouge immediately attacked the Buddhist clergy, Buddhist pagodas, statuary, relics, libraries, and schools. The destruction was nearly complete, with more devastating consequences for Cambodia than the Chinese attack on Buddhism had had for Tibet.