When the War Was Over (62 page)

Phim went into hiding and arranged a meeting with Pol Pot. The place and time were set. Phim believed Pol Pot would come and the two men could straighten out the mistake and confusion. Instead of Pol Pot, two boatloads of Center soldiers arrived. Phim shot himself before the soldiers had the chance. His wife and children were massacred as they attempted to bury his body.

A few of So Phim's trusted aides managed to flee to the jungle, including Uk Boun Chhoeun, who had been part of the region's party forces. Heng Samrin and an Eastern Zone district chief named Chea Sim also escaped. They fought as best they could against Center troops and hid deep in the jungle. But soon they were short of food and ammunition. Through an emissary they contacted the Vietnamese nearby and asked for help. Months later, in October, Chea Sim escorted 300 Eastern Zone people across the border into Vietnam, and shortly thereafter the Vietnamese army attacked Cambodia in order to find Heng Samrin and his troops and lead them to safety in Vietnam. Heng Samrin and some 2,000 to 3,000 others reached Vietnam, grateful to the troops they had fought just a few months earlier. There they met up with Hun Sen.

Pol Pot's purge of the Eastern Zone proved to be a boon to Vietnam. The Vietnamese now had what they most needed—a group of Cambodian communists
with enough stature and experience to lead a “front” against Pol Pot. The men falsely accused of being “Vietnamese agents” were forced to become front men for Vietnam in order to save their lives. As he had done in so many other areas, Pol Pot acted so as to guarantee that his worst fears would be realized.

All that remained was the completion of the purge of the Eastern Zone. The Center hardly needed a pretext now. Since some Eastern Zone soldiers had fought to save themselves against Center troops, the Center decided the entire zone was tainted as a haven of traitors. Whole villages were emptied and slaughtered.

Han Tao, the Chinese merchant evacuated from Phnom Penh to the Southwestern Zone, was a witness to the ghastly parade. In 1978 he was assigned to a work team repairing a large bridge bordering on the Eastern and Southwestern Zones. Many of the victims of the purge of the east were marched across his bridge, in single file, walking to their deaths under the cruel sun of the hot season. “The troops came over with prisoners,” he said. “The prisoners' hands were tied behind their backs. I asked a rubber plantation worker what would happen to these people and he said they would all be shot.”

The purge seemed to leave the Southwestern as the premier zone of the country. Southwestern Zone cadre spread the propaganda that the Eastern Zone was filled with Cambodians with Vietnamese minds. They went to replace the cadre who had been killed. But six months later, they too were being arrested and killed and Pol Pot had begun secret preparations to arrest Son Sen. By now, Pol Pot could trust no one to lead his revolution or his army—both of which were failing. Only Pol Pot's killing machine functioned effectively.

The rubber plantation worker whom Tao met on the bridge told him the rumors. The plantation worker told him about the battles between Eastern Zone and Center soldiers, how Eastern Zone officers had fled to the wild jungles with some of their soldiers, and how So Phim himself was a traitor. According to the rumors, the Center had killed Phim and carried his body around the region from cooperative to cooperative to show the people what happened to those who betrayed the country and Angka.

Tao was at the edge of a volcano. The Eastern Zone erupted with waves and waves of butchery. Whole villages of people were moved to nearby fields and clubbed to death. The thick whacking sound of ax handles bludgeoning people at the neck was heard over and over again. Some cooperatives were emptied and the people moved out of the Eastern Zone across the
country into the Northwestern Zone. The Center did not want the “tainted” Eastern Zone people near the border when a war threatened with Vietnam. The entire Eastern Zone had to be “cleansed” of the “Khmer bodies with Vietnamese minds.”

By July, over 10,000 people of the Eastern Zone had been massacred and tens of thousands more would be executed before the end of 1978. Before Pol Pot could rally Cambodia as one nation behind the Vietnamese enemy he felt compelled to complete this final purge throughout the country.

Old people and cadre of other regions were arrested and killed in this last frenzy. Tao, in the Southwestern Zone, said that cadre and old people of his cooperative “disappeared” at the time. In this stage of the revolution, the party not only killed the suspected “traitor” but his family as well.

“They executed whole families. I heard in the Southwestern Zone they even executed whole villages,” Tao said.

It was at this stage—when the entire country had been warned of Vietnamese spies, had heard of the unimaginably bloody purge of the Eastern Zone, and were frightened about the implications of the purge—that the party declared the revolution a success. It was now time to bring the country together, step up industrialization, education, and the defense of the nation.

Attempts were made by China and Vietnam to diffuse the border situation. In January 1978 a Vietnamese deputy foreign minister traveled to Beijing to discuss compromises. A Chinese delegation subsequently flew to Phnom Penh. Nothing came of those talks other than renewed Chinese support for Cambodia's claim that Vietnam was attempting to impose an Indochinese Federation on its neighbors.

In February the Vietnamese offered a three-point proposal that included a cease-fire, a five-kilometer withdrawal from the border by both sides, recognition of existing boundaries, a formal treaty, and agreement on international guarantees that the treaty would be obeyed. Cambodia rejected the proposal and said it was a smokescreen for international consumption to hide Vietnam's war preparations. This time the Cambodians were correct; it is believed that at a February party meeting the Vietnamese decided to invade Cambodia at the end of the year.

The requirements of war forced the Cambodian communists to reshape the image of their revolution and country. First the party concentrated on
the foreign audience; then the cadre, army, and special residents of Phnom Penh; and finally on the population as a whole. The party formally loosened the rein on the people while in fact accelerating the killing. Barely two months before the war, Pol Pot announced his ambitious industrialization scheme as well as the country's first “educational” program. By the time the two armies faced off at the end of 1978 the delusions in the country had become monstrous.

At Chinese prodding, the regime began inviting friendly communist delegations to visit Cambodia. The most influential was a group of journalists from Yugoslavia who arrived in Phnom Penh in March 1978. They were the first European journalists to record the revolution. Only Chinese and Vietnamese had visited before. They were newspaper correspondents and television cameramen. They gave the world the first true pictures of the revolution, the first nearly objective glimpse of life within Democratic Kampuchea.

The newspaper accounts dripped with the irony imposed on communists writing about another communist country they found horrifying. One journalist wrote this account of a meeting with peasants on a cooperative: “The atmosphere was, to put it mildly, very solemn, perhaps because we were the first foreigners to come there; we had considerable difficulty persuading the women to smile when we took pictures.”

They described Phnom Penh as a near ghost town. They wrote about the lack of modernity, the peasant mentality of the revolutionary spokesmen they interviewed. They did not raise the issue of massacres of hundreds of thousands of people—the chief question about the revolution. Perhaps they were prevented from doing so because they, too, were communists. But one correspondent deftly made this comment: “We were inclined to believe the statement of our guides that the class enemy has been relatively quickly eliminated in Cambodia.”

Their newspaper accounts were widely translated and commented upon. But it was the television pictures that aroused the greatest reaction. Audiences in the United States and Europe saw an unbelievable moving record of young children so small they had to stand on boxes to work machinery in a simple factory. They saw faces of Cambodian people too frightened or hardened to express emotion. They saw a drab uniformity in complete contrast to memories of a Cambodia that had been a bright, bustling country.

Four American communist journalists from the small Communist Party USA-Marxist-Leninist followed the Yugoslavs to Phnom Penh. They spent eight days in Cambodia in April and came back with a contrary view. Their spokesman, Dan Burstein, was enthusiastic about the “successes” of the revolution
and expressed scorn for those who believed refugee accounts of labor camps and mass murder. The Americans, unlike the Yugoslavs, said they “found the people very candid in their views, even in the presence of party officials.” Burstein did ask Ieng Sary whether there had been mass murders, and he replied, “Absolutely not.” The American went on to contend that the “genocide myth is being fabricated.”

In August, “friendship” delegations from Sweden and Belgium visited the country, but they received far less publicity even though they spoke with Pol Pot. The leader of Democratic Kampuchea appeared on Swedish television in an interview with Jan Myrdal, son of Gunnar and Alva. Myrdal raised most of the same questions the American communists posed to Ieng Sary, but Pol Pot's answers were markedly different. The public relations campaign was moving forward. Sary had said that the United States had committed genocide in Cambodia, not the Khmer Rouge, and that the United States was responsible for the deaths of 800,000 Cambodians during the five-year war. Pol Pot raised the figure to 1.4 million Cambodians killed by “U.S. imperialists and their lackeys.”

Moreover, Pol Pot's claims for the revolution were far more grand than those reported by the American communists after the Ieng Sary interview. The Americans reported simply that the peasants had enough to eat whereas before the revolution they “could not put food on their tables.” Pol Pot told the Swedes and Belgians that all Cambodians now ate their fill, were well clothed and properly housed, and enjoyed medical care and schooling. He claimed the revolution had eliminated illiteracy throughout the country. He even pretended to the delegation from Belgium that Cambodians enjoyed organized sports activities, films, dance, and music. For Pol Pot, propaganda was propaganda. He would counter the previous three years of refugee testimony with myths of smiling, happy, contented people and accuse those who believed otherwise of acting on behalf of American imperialists or Vietnamese expansionists.

All of these groups were escorted by guides who showed only the parts of the country and the people that would support these fantasies. And by inviting only communists or “friends” predisposed to support the Khmer Rouge, the regime hoped to dilute the refugee accounts as well as blunt the Vietnamese, who, after the 1977—1978 border conflict, began to flood the world with accounts of atrocity in Cambodia.

In February, shortly after the border war died down, the Vietnamese invited five respected foreign journalists to the Vietnamese border area to record for themselves the aftermath of the border war. The journalists photographed
bloated, mutilated bodies. They interviewed villagers who told of crazed Cambodian communist soldiers killing their loved ones with a vengeance. But the journalists were all Veterans who had covered the Vietnam and Cambodian Wars, and they reported more than the Vietnamese may have intended. Nayan Chanda, of the
Far Eastern Economic Review,
wrote the first eyewitness account of how the Vietnamese were recruiting and training Cambodian refugees to become a first-line unit for what had to be a planned Vietnamese attack on Cambodia. Roland Parringaux of
Le Monde
and Tiziano Terzani of
Der Spiegel
added supporting details in their reports. These stories convinced many foreign governments, including that of the United States, that Vietnam and Cambodia would be fighting a full-scale war before the year was out.

That truth was clear in the Cambodian countryside. The wind was shifting. The mass mobilization program to bring complete socialism to Cambodia had gone badly. Communal eating had reduced the amount of food for everyone. The increased demands for labor, longer work hours, and scarcity of medicine had further weakened the population. And the fear, the fear had crippled party people and new people alike. The majority of new “disappearances” and purges had been against the party faithful, cadre, and old people. The effect was to compound the confusion and chaos. No one knew who was to be trusted.

Moreover, as the executions increased they were inevitably better known; secrecy was becoming impossible and the cadre were less mindful of the consequences once the population discovered the corpses and evidence of the ever-increasing sadism. Han Tao, the Sino-Khmer, returned from his stint repairing the bridge and found evidence of more torture in his home zone, the Southwestern. “People were clubbed to death with all kinds of weapons. Then the corpses would be opened at the abdomen so the body would not swell up. Sometimes, though, they would cut up corpses just to be vicious, especially with women.”

The orgy had to be curtailed; the army needed soldiers and the party needed a unified country. All over Democratic Kampuchea mass meetings were called to describe the Vietnamese threat and whip up enthusiasm for the Cambodian cause. The party realized there had to be rewards, and in the summer of 1978 they announced several changes. There was an edict to remove all distinctions between the new people and the old people. All cooperative members would be equal and receive the same rations and work the same hours. There was a promise of increased food, although in many areas of the country that remained only a promise.