When the War Was Over (54 page)

The fate of Cambodian communist intellectuals was sealed on April 10, 1977, when Hu Nim, one of the Three Ghosts, was secretly arrested in Phnom Penh. Hu Nim was minister of information in the regime. His name
had seemed linked permanently to Khieu Samphan, head of the state presidium. With Samphan and the also murdered Hou Youn, Hu Nim had embodied the Khmer Rouge cause during the war. Before that the three had been symbols of honest, thoughtful dissent against Sihanouk and corruption. But that mattered little in 1977 when the party was plowing ahead with the elimination of bourgeois subversives. Their fear and paranoia had turned from the countryside to the new Phnom Penh. And unlike Khieu Samphan, Hu Nim had refused to become subservient.

Hu Nim was selected as the sacrificial intellectual of the regime. He and his wife were tortured and forced to confess to an elaborate CIA-directed plot to undermine the regime. In Tuol Sleng, Hu Nim confessed that he was a traitor and a spy. After three months of abject torture and isolation he was killed in July.

There was no public announcement that the minister of information had died. Months later, Son Sen's wife—Madame Yun Yat—replaced Hu Nim on government rosters as minister of information. The reach of the security police was now formidable. By the middle of July 1977, other top party members realized the seriousness of the party's purges. So, too, did alert foreigners, in particular a Chinese diplomat in Phnom Penh who had been a friend of Hu Nim's. This diplomat had never been comfortable in revolutionary Democratic Kampuchea. Hu Nim's disappearance was the final straw.

No life in Cambodia was more comfortable than that of a Chinese diplomat in Phnom Penh. The embassy was cool in the hot season. There was a swimming pool large enough for exercise and ample space for the staff. The mission had its own Chinese chef, and food was flown in weekly from Beijing. As the preeminent ally of Democratic Kampuchea, the Chinese even had some access to the people and countryside. Thousands of advisors visited and were rotated more often than American soldiers in Vietnam. Yet, whether pragmatists or ideologues, the Chinese apparently believed from the start something was wrong in Cambodia.

“Of course I was surprised when I went to Phnom Penh,” said this senior Chinese diplomat, who cannot be identified. “I came from a European capital but I suppose I would have been as shocked if I had come from Beijing. There was no one there. No one on the street. My strongest impression was how absolutely perfect they kept the city. It was absolutely clean all the time. Early in the morning every day soldiers were out in the streets sweeping. In one and a half years I never saw a Cambodian taking a promenade. If I met Cambodians on the street they were either going to work, working, or they were soldiers guarding the street.”

The diplomat had been briefed on the Cambodian revolution and had been raised in a life of restrictions, but he was unprepared for the virtual house arrest he and the other diplomats experienced in Phnom Penh. Days passed when he had no official reason to leave the Chinese compound and was thus told to stay confined to his quarters. He could not bear this and began going for walks with one of the dozen or so other Chinese diplomats. “We were all nervous and bored. . . . The Cambodian government asked us not to go on walks but we went anyway. One or two soldiers followed us always, usually walking fifty yards behind us. We were never afraid on the streets because there was so many armed patrols.”

Two or three times a week a Cambodian bureaucrat visited the Chinese embassy to keep up official contact. The embassy received official Democratic Kampuchea publications: a daily news bulletin, a few issues of magazines, newspapers, and journals—very few. Soon Chinese diplomats were taking morning and evening constitutionals despite government pleas to stop. One memorable day they greeted an Egyptian diplomat jogging down the boulevard and braving complete censure. The walks, of course, were also a way to discover how the country operated. “On the evening walks we saw quite a few small factories where young girls were sewing. But we couldn't visit them. We could only see the factories funded directly by our assistance projects.”

Cambodian xenophobia extended to its most respected ally. The Chinese role in Cambodia was crucial. Chinese medical teams came to help in serious epidemics that broke out in 1976. Other teams taught Khmer Rouge medical cadre basic Western medicine, including simple surgery and X-ray techniques. Chinese technical corps rebuilt factories in Phnom Penh and the provinces—textile, bottle, glass, cement, and rubber factories. When the Cambodians realized in 1977 they needed an agricultural advisor, the Chinese sent them one of their top experts. Cambodia's limited trade was routed mainly through China. The few Cambodian students sent abroad for study went to Beijing.

But the senior Chinese diplomat said this valuable assistance did not translate into more freedom for him. His trips to the provinces to inspect Chinese-funded projects were little more than tourist trips. He was rarely allowed to stay more than one night outside the capital. He traveled with at least one and usually two jeeps filled with guards, who watched him as if he were a prisoner. “Everybody thought we were the exception. They were bored and nervous but not the Chinese. . . . But it was as difficult for us to discuss anything with most of the Cambodians. We were kept apart just as other foreigners.”

At the same time, the diplomat said the Chinese decided not to protest or to show disapproval of the Cambodian policies. He said the Chinese believed as early as 1976 that there were large-scale purges in the countryside. “We heard about violence. Not exact stories but rumors. We did guess many were dying in the countryside at the hands of local functionaries.”

But the Chinese believed the Khmer Rouge stories of economic success, the propaganda that the Cambodians had turned the corner in 1977 and were becoming self-sufficient. The diplomat once talked at length with Pol Pot about agriculture and came away impressed. “He seemed to have traveled a lot around the country. He could explain the state of agriculture in the provinces very well . . . but then I never spoke with him alone. He was generally with Ieng Sary and Thiounn Prasith. But the stories of improvement seemed true. The first year [1976] seemed very hard for Cambodians and they were very thin. By 1977 the situation so improved they were exporting rice to Hong Kong. They donated rice to Laos.”

But 1977 was also the year that the diplomat had to face the nature of violence in the country. His one friend in the regime, Hu Nim, disappeared without explanation. “Hu Nim had been a friend from the fifties. He was very warm and
sympathique.
He had been prudent speaking to us about the internal Cambodian situation. Instead, he liked to talk about films, texts. When our cameraman came [to shoot a documentary on the revolution], Hu Nim held a reception for him at the Royale Hotel.”

When Hu Nim disappeared the Chinese diplomat was too discreet to inquire after his friend. “We knew we couldn't ask about him.”

Soon thereafter, the Chinese diplomat cut short his tour of duty and went home. He asked Beijing to transfer him out for health reasons. “Normally a diplomat stays three to five years. I left because I was sick and I had no work. . . .”

But the Chinese diplomat, an accomplished intellectual, knew more than his words might suggest. He said his government criticized Pol Pot for making “extreme left mistakes” and did not consider the Cambodians to be modern Maoists. He saw, like other communists, that the Khmer Rouge were the embodiment of much of what passed as revolutionary theory in the sixties. The Khmer Rouge came out of the same general movement as Frantz Fanon, who believed in the cleansing nature of violent revolution for a people who had been subjugated by white colonialists. They were influenced by an era of supernationalism, superindependence, when guerrilla groups around the world fell deeply under the spell and romance of violent revolution.

The heart-stopping difference between the Khmer Rouge and most of their revolutionary romantic contemporaries is that the Cambodians actually won and enforced their ideas. By 1977 it was clear to the dignified elderly Chinese diplomat that he had to leave this revolution whose one constant ingredient was terror, terror that had targeted his friend Hu Nim, an intellectual, and all he stood for.

No two people better exemplify the changed state of affairs, the consequences of the Center's fears that the “enemy” was inside the party and not among the new people, than the banker Mey Komphot, whose story began this book, and the communist recruit Phat, the orphan who joined the communist movement in Phnom Penh after working at Khieu Samphan's newspaper. Phat rose in the party ranks and was attached to Pol Pot when the party leaders fled Phnom Penh and began their revolution in the countryside.

Komphot, the banker, had supported the Khmer Republic during its first days but quickly grew to hate its corruption and Lon Nol's incompetence, greed, and mysticism. He wanted nothing more than the war to end and the Khmer Rouge to install an enlightened, moderate socialist regime. He was as surprised as the other Cambodians when the Khmer Rouge ordered the evacuation of the capital on the first day. He was stripped of all privilege and rank and sent to a cooperative like all other urbanites. He had made a suicide plan shortly after realizing what the revolution meant for him and his country. But he changed his mind, out of responsibility to those around him.

His recipe for survival was similar to that of many other educated professionals. The Khmer Rouge knew he had worked in a bank but had decided his job had been of no consequence. Komphot encouraged that impression by acting like a slightly daft uncle. He shortened his name to Phot, Mit or Comrade Phot, threw away his one set of city clothes, and made a pair of shorts for himself out of rough burlap. He wanted to look like a clown, a fool. In his own way, Komphot, too, became a “deaf mute” to survive this apocalypse.

His skin was dark in the city; in the fields it became nearly black. His short curly hair grew longer and became matted. He learned not to protest—to be deaf and mute to the disappearance of people from his cooperative, to the lack of food and medicine, to the misery around him. And he worked hard, very hard.

His cooperative was small at the beginning. In communist parlance it was the “self-garden” stage. He and his cousin's widow and children could live together as an extended family. He had to write his biography out again, once he settled in the cooperative, but he and the family survived. Others did not. “People were being killed one by one—not mass killings. At first it was about one dozen new people, the ones suspected of being soldiers, like that. In the first two years maybe one-tenth of the new people were killed, picked out one by one, including their children. I can't tell you how many people altogether.”

Komphot had settled in the old Northern Zone, the zone of Phat; he and his relatives witnessed the purge by the Khmer Rouge against the old Northern Zone. “Koy Thuon, the head of our zone, was taken away. He was purged. He was killed, for sure, but they never said it. He was accused of being a CIA agent, they said, he had a cultural fault—he was bourgeois. . . . Some new cadre came. But Koy Thuon's deputies stayed in power for a while. Later, they started to arrest Koy Thuon's deputies, accusing them of being Vietnamese agents.”

The village radio, always tuned to the state radio station, was Komphot's main source for understanding the revolution. The political meetings, he said, were “not serious.”

“We had to go to meetings all the time—not serious political discussions, but talks about how to improve our behavior, or work, how one acts in a socialist country. They never talked about Marxist-Leninism. In the beginning they didn't even mention communism. It was all step by step. We had to work together, to destroy all the bourgeoisie—the two kinds were former government administrators and capitalists. They were not really sophisticated.”

In 1976 Komphot had to write his biography once again. “Each time you wrote your biography you were afraid you would disappear,” he said. Again, Komphot and his relatives survived to take part in the socialist revolution declared by the Center. Komphot remembers it as the “command garden” stage, when the self-garden enlarged and communal kitchens and canteens were instituted. The food became nearly impossible to eat. They had dysentery. They became constipated. They had cramps. “We had no vegetables to feed them—in Cambodia where there are so many wild vegetables. But eating in common we had to eat what they gave us; only assigned groups could go out to find wild vegetables or snails and then there was never enough for the whole group. It was impossible—it was like saying, one day everyone eats steak, the next everyone eats pork. How could everyone eat the same thing?”

There was no medicine, but Komphot did not complain. “You don't say anything. We were frightened from the beginning of becoming
bat kluon,
a disappearing body. We didn't say people died or were killed. We said their bodies disappeared, or faded away.”

By mid-1976 even the old people had to accept reduced rations in Komphot's cooperative, a sign of trouble ahead for them. The 1975 harvest had been distributed to each family; the 1976 was common stock, Komphot said. The 1977 harvest wasn't even common—a good share was sent away to granaries. Komphot's cooperative, now about 1,500 people in all, began to receive some medicine and cloth, but most of it went to the old people. In July 1977 there was the first real massacre in Komphot's cooperative.

“Before, they only took the one person they suspected of something, not the family. This massacre—of new people and old people—they took the whole, whole family, all of the children, even the babies. This was seven or eight families taken away at once. We did not know why.”