When the War Was Over (53 page)

Outwardly, relations with Vietnam were good: Airline routes were approved at this time connecting Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. The border clashes had subsided. Vietnam had yet to press its demand that Cambodia sign a special friendship treaty. Both countries saw the United States as the primary enemy. Ieng Sary said as much at the United Nations, charging the United States with continuing “criminal activities aimed against us.” The Vietnamese had just won admission to the International Monetary Fund, over the objection of the United States.

There was no rational reason for the secret witch hunt within the party. Vietnam had not presented a strong challenge to Cambodia nor was there open dissent within the party. In all likelihood, this was another example of the Center's extreme quest for power, and for secrecy. The party had killed off most of the 1951 communists when they returned from exile in North Vietnam during the Cambodian War. Hence, Pol Pot and the inner circle saw no reason to keep up the pretense of the anniversary compromise. And by changing the date the party served notice that the Center was asserting its absolute authority over the revolution.

Duch spent another year torturing to collect evidence of this subterranean secret party in Cambodia controlled by the Vietnamese. He amassed a sufficient amount of “evidence” of this plot in time for the party anniversary of 1977, when Pol Pot and the party did publicly announce that the party was in control in Cambodia.

Duch's other major project—to uncover and purge the bourgeois or intellectual elements in the party ranks—was just as successful.

Most of the thinking and action of the party leadership was mad, and inexplicable if one used normal, humane criteria. There is an internal order to the madness, however, the order found in the files at Tuol Sleng and secret party documents.

In 1975 and 1976 Khmer Rouge diplomats like Thiounn Prasith were bombarded by insistent demands from sympathetic Cambodians living abroad to return and contribute to the revolution at home. Intellectuals and professionals who had supported Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge during the war wanted to be part of the revolution about which they believed only the rosy official accounts. Some had heard the first stories of random executions and hunger, stories told by refugees who fled to Thailand, but they discounted the stories as black propaganda. Most of these Cambodians were not party members, only sympathizers who wanted to believe a socialist revolution was changing their country for the better. In September 1975 the party decided these Cambodians could come back if they underwent “reeducation.”

The overseas Cambodians gave up their lives and families in the United States, France, Canada, and Eastern Europe. They left their diplomatic posts in the Middle East and Asia, in communist and non-communist countries where they had represented the cause of the united front during the war. And they returned to Phnom Penh to be welcomed as suspicious characters or traitors. Most went straight into reeducation camps upon their return. Some stragglers, however, went more or less directly into Tuol Sleng. They were condemned because they had “come back from outside the country and thus are separated from the movement.” They had become “separated” and contaminated in foreign countries. The xenophobia of the Khmer Rouge was growing.

Intellectuals and professionals made up the largest group of Cambodians who returned from overseas and, initially, they received a better reception. One was Try Meng Huot, an intellectual who had lobbied for the “socialist” cause in Paris during the war, sacrificing his studies and health for a revolution he believed would bring justice and freedom to his country. He returned to Phnom Penh at the end of 1975, excited at the prospect of building socialism in Cambodia. He realized his error on arrival at Pochentong Airport.

“We came back together—returned intellectuals from France, Romania, the United Kingdom, and the United States. . . . They [the Khmer Rouge] allowed only one foreign wife to return with her husband and that was through the intervention of Sihanouk [who was still titular head of the front government].”

The Phnom Penh Huot returned to after nine years overseas was not the home he remembered. “It had changed so much I was disturbed. Perhaps, I thought, it had changed because the new regime wants no distinction between the rich and the poor.”

Huot was thirty years old, a self-described “militant” of the socialist movement with years of experience as a poor student in Paris trying to make ends meet and still help the cause. None of this prepared him for the life he began leading as soon as he arrived in the capital.

Khieu Samphan was selected to teach a political education course to the newly arrived intellectuals. They were housed in the former Khmer-Soviet School, 300 intellectuals in all. Samphan told them: “Everyone is equal. Everyone must work. There is not a lot of rice. The revolution is in solidarity with the Chinese.”

There was no mention of Vietnam. That was the extent of the education. Work commenced at once. The intellectuals were housed “in barracks as crowded as refugee camps,” Huot said, and made to work twelve-hour shifts. Around the clock that first year they cultivated rice and vegetables. “We were all discouraged. We all had problems with our health and our morale,” Huot said. “I didn't think this could happen to me. I thought I would do many things for my country but not plant rice or cauliflower all year long.”

Huot estimated that by the end of 1976, 500 to 600 intellectuals were working and living together around Phnom Penh. They were segregated from the rest of the people. The intellectuals returned from the United States were further separated out that year, Huot remembered. About that time Huot and a number of other intellectuals were assigned to work for the ministry of industry—replacements, it would seem, for the workers recently executed by the dozens in a minor bloodbath at Tuol Sleng. Huot was assigned to work in Iron Factory Number Seven on the banks of the Bassac River. Now he and the other intellectuals saw how the better class lived.

Their supervisors and fellow workers were Khmer Rouge cadre. “They lived next door to us in Phnom Penh,” Huot said. “They worked with us but they ate very well while we often had nothing but rice gruel. Food that wasn't fit for pigs. This wasn't equality—that the cadre should live so much better than us and eat so well. It didn't matter then whether I was alive or dead. How could I say I was serving my country?”

Try Meng Huot and the other intellectuals had spent most of their adult lives studying the issues now facing Cambodia—how best to use scarce resources and modernize agriculture and industry without becoming subservient to multinational corporations or powerful foreign governments, how to convince the people that hard work and sacrifice at the initial stage of a revolution pay off in improved living standards and greater independence. But the intellectuals were forbidden to use their knowledge. Their
studies had become suspect. Under the new class analysis the process of becoming an intellectual had put them in the enemy class status of the bourgeoisie. They had to atone for their years of work for the Khmer Rouge as intellectuals. Huot, who had believed he could become a member of the ruling party, now felt like its slave. Only people with proper class composition were considered proper candidates for the communist party. Son Sen and Duch, under orders from the standing committee, were in the process of eliminating bourgeois party members, not adding to their number.

By 1977 the party had begun arresting and executing some of these intellectuals and dignitaries who returned from overseas—the 148 who are listed in Tuol Sleng records and others who were summarily killed and who “disappeared.”

These new victims had to describe their “network” of associations—the new system of discovering “nests of spies” in the country, the system Sary said had been approved earlier in 1976. “Networks” were a variation of the Stalinist purge system whereby friends, family, and like-minded colleagues were considered guilty by association with the accused. Networks were the equivalent of a political or sociological family tree—a chart with one's work colleagues, party cell members, boss, and family members listed together as if they,
prima facie,
represented one narrow political tendency or the cell of some subterranean political organization.

The network system of guilt by association was at the center of the security center set up by Duch and the party to institute wholesale purges. The Center powers were looking for the sophisticated system hiding enemies used to undermine the people and, eventually, the revolution. According to Ieng Sary, if three people accused someone of plotting against the regime, of being a member of a “network,” then that person was presumed guilty and could be arrested. “If three people said someone was an agent of the CIA or KGB, then that person was arrested,” said Sary.

Duch and the security police constructed elaborate conspiracies and networks. They mapped them on charts at Tuol Sleng. They dared not see themselves as simply executioners coldly killing rivals or enemies. They were executing people only after their prisoners “confessed” to causing the problems confronting the revolution. Torture and execution were seen as exacting sciences needed to unearth these networks. The majority of people listed in many of these intellectuals' networks were members of the ministry of foreign affairs, including Thiounn Prasith. That ministry was one of the main targets in the first wave of purges against the bourgeoisie, since no other department or ministry contained so many former intellectuals. Most
of the students and teachers returning from overseas after 1975 knew and worked with ministry of foreign affairs people, particularly Prasith and Ieng Sary. One of the first party figures taken to Tuol Sleng, in February 1976, was a top official at the ministry of foreign affairs.

That ministry continued to be purged during the Khmer Rouge regime, despite the fact that Ieng Sary headed it. It was the home of the educated intellectuals, men and women with more foreign experience than time in the jungle. Sary was able to protect some of his people but not others and he probably denounced some in ways that led to their arrest. On the other hand, he could not send his diplomats overseas. Nuon Chea refused to give security clearance for travel to a number of cadre Sary nominated for diplomatic posts abroad, Sary said. And in the end-of-the-year report of 1976, a party official complained there were not enough trained cadre to send overseas: “Our only failing overseas has been a shortage of cadre in the revolutionary movement who are able to work in the field of foreign affairs. Some personnel have come back from outside the country and thus are separated from the movement. Others have acceptable life stories, but lack the skills to serve the movement. At the moment we need four to ten new ambassadors, and we beg those attending this meeting to put their minds to solving this problem.”

The regime needed the new ambassadors because the security police had arrested and killed the old ones.

These left-leaning intellectuals, the sympathizers who had returned from overseas, were either killed in Tuol Sleng or sequestered in special “intellectuals” cooperatives outside Phnom Penh. Sary fought a losing battle to win approval to send trained diplomats to overseas postings. He said he could not send illiterate peasant revolutionaries in their place; they would be useless. Most overseas posts were left vacant.

But just as zone secretaries had when they faced a purge, Sary ultimately went along with the purges of his ministry and the overseas Cambodians he had helped to return. Like the others, he believed in the security police system and all that Tuol Sleng represented. He believed there were “enemies” hidden inside the country and the party, actively sabotaging the revolution and preventing its success. He had gone along with the other purges; he had no choice but to accept the purges in his ministry.