When the War Was Over (50 page)

The Khmer Rouge murdered the top clergy immediately, enticing the monks to hand themselves over to their executioners with ruses similar to those used to kill off the former military officers of the Lon Nol regime.

Those who were not executed were ordered to forfeit their robes and join the people to work in the cooperatives as common field hands, an order that violated their religious tenets. Those who refused were killed. Many monks were ordered to marry, which prevented them from returning to the clergy. In some areas the Khmer Rouge cadre allowed the older monks to keep their saffron robes only to be countermanded by the Center.

Without monks the people could no longer practice their faith, but the Khmer Rouge were intent on erasing the faith from the country's memory. The pagodas, too, became targets of the regime. The nearly 3,000 pagodas in the country were desecrated or destroyed. They were used as stables or granaries, prisons, and execution sites. Statuary was defaced. The sacred literature was burned or shredded.

The Khmer Rouge were compelled to destroy the old center of Cambodian life—the pagoda—to replace it with the new—the cooperative hall or canteen, the barren wooden sheds that symbolized the death of the faith practiced by nearly 80 percent of Cambodians.

The Khmer Rouge not only destroyed the heart of Cambodian country life but all of its centuries-old traditions, the profound and the prosaic. Emblematic of the new order in the countryside was the regime's continued use of zones to mark off geographic areas rather than the old provincial names. Cambodians were stripped of their identification as people from a specific province or region that for centuries had had a distinctive reputation.
Instead, they were forced to use zone names based on compass directions, or say they were from sectors with numbers rather than names.

People could no longer take pride in saying they were from Takeo, Battambang, or Prey Veng provinces or regions. The names and boundaries were dropped and so were the distinctions. In the new revolutionary order all regions had to be the same. Takeo Province was no longer the center for weavers; Kompong Cham lost its community of silversmiths. Traditions were destroyed overnight.

Gone, too, were the gastronomic specialties of the regions. Some provinces had been known for their fish sauce, others for their sweets. Before the revolution, before the war that destroyed so much of the countryside, Cambodians took pride in the amazing variety of rice grown. Battambang rice had a flavor and texture utterly different from rice grown in Takeo and was immediately identifiable. Such distinctions were lost in the forced migrations around the country, the mindless transfer of rice from region to region, and the edict that every cooperative, every sector, and every zone be the same.

Appropriately, the Cambodians inherited the use of zones and numbered sectors from the Vietnamese communists who introduced the system during the First Indochina War. Administration of the country as if it were a battlefield erased the rural traditions—the folk and formal arts, the village crafts, the dance, the music, and storytelling.

Finally, in this mindless destruction of the people and institutions considered impure, feudalist, bourgeois, or somehow threatening to their power, the Khmer Rouge did destroy Cambodian society. What remained after the executions and pogroms was what the party considered the new ideal for Cambodian revolutionary society—the new generation.

The party had always looked to the youth, to younger people to replace the executed, purged, and enslaved. The party had counted on the young since its earliest history. Young men like Phat, who were slightly lost and impressed by the idealist rhetoric of the revolution, joined the party. Young people wanted the adventure, the ceremony, and the promises of revolution. Most major revolutions depended on youth; few used them as the foundation of a revolutionary regime as did the Khmer Rouge.

One of the first party publications was the journal
Revolutionary Youth
. It strove to “educate, construct, and nurture the principle of revolutionary political consciousness in our young men and women.” These adolescents were trusted with party secrets earlier than most adults. In their Revolutionary Youth groups they were told that Angka was the communist party.
They were lectured in a relatively sophisticated manner about the nature of communist revolution in Kampuchea—its goals, methods, and ideology.

In its inaugural issue, published in August 1973,
Revolutionary Youth
stated that the young were to be the “central force in the revolutionary movement.” The journal estimated that hundreds of thousands of young people filled the revolutionary ranks at the time—in the army, in offices, in the front and the rear lines of the war. The party and the army recruited their new members from Revolutionary Youth groups—one of the few party-backed organizations in the Khmer Rouge movement. Young men and women became the backbone of the Khmer Rouge army—they were the surprisingly young faces that stunned the people of Phnom Penh on the day of victory.

They also surprised the Lon Nol army during the war. In late 1973 a Khmer Rouge women's battalion was captured by Lon Nol troops and interrogated. What shocked the interrogators was the attitude of the women, “the audacity of these virgins who had the nerve to look a man straight in the eye and who didn't shuffle their feet demurely like good Khmer women,” according to the interrogating officers.

These were the soldiers who left their families and villages when they were as young as twelve years old and never returned. They were raised and indoctrinated by the party. And they took on the one-dimensional cruelty of adolescents outside civility that was best described in William Golding's
Lord of the Flies
. Many Cambodians compared the young cadre or soldiers to trained guard dogs. A word of command would send them off to commit violent crimes or to run straight into machine-gun fire without a second thought, or so it appeared. They were the vanguard, the young elite who devoted their energies and talent to the narrow ideology of the Khmer Rouge.

They were told by the party to develop “class consciousness; righteous revolutionary precepts; national pride, a proper patriotic spirit. Proletarian nationalism and internationalism; precepts of unremitting struggle both with the enemy and with nature and in building oneself; a spirit of serving the nation and people; revolutionary heroism; a high spirit of collectivity, ridding oneself of individual interests . . .”

They fought without rest during the war. As one soldier said: “Some days we didn't eat at all . . . we were always launching offensives, even during the American bombing.”

After the war, the party demobilized many of the young veterans and put them in charge of cooperatives running farms, factories, plantations, and
party offices. Their military experience mattered far more than the experience of their elders. They were rewarded with responsible positions, housing and food as good as was available, and symbols of prestige from motorbikes to ballpoint pens and, of course, pistols. These young veterans were declared “the most loyal tool of the dictatorship of the Revolutionary Organization.”

And as the revolution took the place of the family, these young warriors were called upon to train the very young children assigned to dormitories. Until—and even after—they were married these young cadre were in charge of raising the next generation.

The result was tragic. There was no play, no grooming, no growing up for children from six years of age who boarded in the dormitories. Their lives were Dickensian, political orphans with no proper care or teachers. Some saw and partook in unspeakable cruelty. All were denied affection. On the roads one could glimpse slender young girls dressed like waifs who were called members of a “construction gang.” There were groups of even younger boys and girls carrying firewood as part of a “mobile youth brigade,” shoeless, foraging in the dusty underbrush.

Adolescents fared better; they at least had been raised by their families before the revolution and had the wherewithal to survive some of the revolution's practices. They escaped the forced marriages imposed on the adults. In Democratic Kampuchea a couple could marry only with the approval of cooperative elders; in practice that meant marriages were generally arranged by the party. The puritanism of the regime restricted many newlyweds from living together and provided for conjugal visits a few times a month when the wife believed herself fertile.

As the executions increased and the party found fault with more classes and categories of people, the adolescents were called upon to fill jobs in the countryside, factories, and offices. One of these youths was Chhoi Vanna, a favored daughter of the revolution. In comparison with most other Cambodians, her life was charmed.

Vanna was fourteen years old when the Khmer Rouge won the war. Her parents then owned two hectares of land in southern Kompong Cham province. They grew tobacco, tubers, and beans, earning enough money to send Vanna to a primary school until she was ten years old and considered literate. The farm was under the control of Lon Nol troops through most of the war. Vanna first glimpsed a Khmer Rouge soldier after the fighting ended, when soldiers from the Eastern Zone came to take charge of their humble farm.

Vanna's family was not treated like the city evacuees. They were farmers without a political past and were accorded the rights of the base people. Under So Phim, the zone secretary, Vanna's family was merged immediately into the “base.” She did not even see any “new people” that first year after the war. The family was sent south to help a solidarity group plant the major rice crop in May 1975. They were supervised by a peasant revolutionary who impressed Vanna with his sense of fairness and equality. “Our work schedule was heavy and food insufficient,” she said. “But we ate alike.”

Life among the base people was not the nightmare suffered by many of the new people. When Vanna's family returned home they were made members of a cooperative and lost their private plot, but they adapted without complaint. Their village friends remained, the family stayed together. No new people were admitted to their cooperative. In July 1976, that life changed forever. Canteen eating, enlarged cooperatives, and vastly enlarged work units were introduced despite a good deal of foot-dragging. The family unit was broken up. Vanna, as a healthy fifteen-year-old, was assigned to a mobile work brigade with other young women her age. They were sent to another side of the province, and she said goodbye to her family. She never saw them again.

The girls were assigned to work on an irrigation project. They built their own straw lean-to huts for shelter and were ordered to help complete work in the nearby paddy fields. After a few months of fieldwork and digging at the irrigation project, they were ordered to move again—to the Chhup rubber plantation that was becoming a state farm. Their rations were adequate, though they had no time to rest. This was the life of the privileged children.

The girls had just begun learning how to care for the rubber trees when orders came that some were to be transferred again to the rubber refinement factories in Phnom Penh. Vanna was among them.

She was happy to give up the strains of the mobile brigade and its nomadic life of lonely work. She was a daughter of peasants, not slaves, and she resented the mobile brigade work. She was assigned to Rubber Factory Number Eight on the northern edge of the capital. The rubber processing plant had been built during the war by a French consortium. It was a long wooden shed facing the Mekong with docks for easy off-loading of the rubber sap shipped down from the plantation. The machines were kept up by a Phnom Penh family that had worked in the factory under the French. Everyone else was a young revolutionary from the Eastern Zone. They heard that the former workers of the factory had been executed.

The factory operated around the clock. Shifts were eight hours long and the girls usually worked only one shift a day. Every tenth day was a holiday
from the factory but not the revolution. The girls either worked in vegetable gardens or rice paddies near the city or attended political education meetings. These were as dull as the meetings in cooperatives. “They urged us to work harder,” Vanna said. “They told us not to think all the time about our families and not to loaf when we were slightly ill. We could only take time off if we were seriously ill.”

No entertainment was provided, no books, no true education, and no respite from work. Yet Vanna lived what was considered a privileged life. She was one of thirty young women who boarded together in a large, comfortable wooden house across the street from the factory—their “cooperative.” They worked, slept, and ate together. And their food was good and plentiful. Their chairman, a man, ate first, and after he had his fill, they sat down. But there was always enough rice and vegetables, and they ate meat and fish regularly. They sent and received mail. The chairman of the boats that brought down the rubber to their factory was part of an informal system that included truck drivers who passed mail around for the base people and communists. The girls received medical treatment at Khmer Rouge hospitals in Phnom Penh. Some were married off, in group ceremonies, but if a girl strongly protested she could avoid an unwanted marriage. Vanna does not remember a single act of violence against her or her roommates.

Her impression of that period would have pleased Pol Pot: “Life was ordered and quiet.”

The girls were cloistered from the revolution, from the evil of the Tuol Sleng Incarceration Center more than one mile away, from the misery and slaughter in the city and the countryside. They had left the Eastern Zone long before purges were launched there, and they were sheltered from the daily violence in Phnom Penh by the restrictions imposed on their travels. They were not allowed to leave their house or factory, not even for a walk. They would have been punished if they had tried. When they were taken to the fields or gardens around the city they worked as a unit separate from the others. This was the ideal “atomization” Hannah Arendt described, in a society built upon terrorism.