When the War Was Over (64 page)

Sary had no recourse but to fall back on his second strategy—to invite members of the international press on the same premise that they would investigate the human rights situation. On November 17, Phnom Penh issued invitations to two American journalists and a British scholar, asking them to tour the country from December 9 through December 23. The journalists were Richard Dudman of the
St. Louis Post Dispatch
and myself, for the
Washington Post
. Dudman and I accepted, and so too did Malcolm Caldwell, a teacher at London's School of Oriental and African Studies who was one of the few Western supporters of the Pol Pot regime.

Before we arrived, Sary added a few more touches to Cambodia's new image. He ordered the people in his press department to inaugurate radio broadcasts in foreign languages, including French and English, and begin them by December I. Ok Sakun, a well-known intellectual who had been reported dead in France, was rehabilitated in order to be included in the entourage that was to escort us around the country. The foreign ministry staff also began publishing a daily news bulletin in English on November 30, timed for our arrival.

The sounds of battle could be heard even then. The intellectuals were asked to begin to guard their camps in patrols of three. That November people would begin arriving in Phnom Penh from the provinces of Svay Rieng and Takeo, from the Eastern and Southwestern Zones. The intellectuals came to understand that Cambodians near the border had chosen to rally to the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge was evacuating cooperatives within reach of Vietnamese propaganda and troops.

The contradiction was awesome between this pretense at normalcy and the threat presented by the war. The foreign ministry was arranging one-day tourist trips to the Angkor temples from Bangkok, to commence in December. Behind this facade being erected by Sary, the regime continued its relentless purge of “traitors” in its own preparation for war. In the Northwestern Zone, party cadre began killing those people from the Eastern Zone who had been evacuated from their cooperatives but were still considered “suspicious” by the regime. Hundreds of them were forced to dig their own mass graves. This slaughter was accomplished with little attempt at secrecy. The sudden increase in food did not mask the heightened uneasiness of the rulers and the people now that war was closing in. The people in the northwest knew what the screams in the forest meant. The Eastern Zone people were killed in the northwest without resistance; the people were still incapable of fighting back. But the population knew that the revolution was in dire trouble.

Duch had not let up on his purges of suspected traitors, either. He did not target another region for massacres following his purge of the Eastern Zone. However, he did go after one more major figure in the regime. As always, he took his cue from Pol Pot and Pol Pot's latest obsession, which in late 1978 was industrialization. In his speech delivered at the party's anniversary on September 27, 1978, Pol Pot had outlined his “vision” of industrial, revolutionary Cambodia. It was entitled “Let Us Continue to Firmly Hold Aloft the Banner of the Victory of the Glorious Communist Party of Kampuchea in Order to Defend Democratic Kampuchea, Carry on Socialist Revolution and Build Up Socialism.”

The speech was as unwieldy and uninspired as its title. Among other issues, Pol Pot had dwelt on the need, at the moment, to turn Cambodia into an agro-industrial, self-sufficient communist state. He declared the basic economy of the country stable and sound. The new irrigation system, the agricultural output of the cooperatives, and the basic requisites of the population were described as good. It was time, he said, to build on these successes and establish light industries that would take advantage of the agricultural production of the nation.

Predictably, Duch immediately began to investigate and purge the ministry of industry. The pattern was too well established. If reality did not match Pol Pot's expectations, the figure in charge of that reality had to be accused of sabotage. It had commenced with Hou Youn, who had fought against the evacuation and labor-camp style of cooperatives. It continued with Koy Thuon, who was held responsible for the first economic blows to
the economy; with Nhim Ros, who was blamed for the Northwestern Zone's inability to create the unrealistic miracles demanded by the Center; and with So Phim for the wretched border battles with Vietnam. And now, in November, Von Vet, the man in charge of the country's industry, would be purged for failing to have whipped industry into shape in line with Pol Pot's delusions.

The last entries of government officials incarcerated and killed at Tuol Sleng were almost all members of the ministry of industry: They were directors of a distillery factory, construction factory, soft drink factory, cement factory, and cigarette factory. In late November, Von Vet was arrested and taken to Tuol Sleng.

It did not matter that Von Vet had been loyal to Pol Pot since the early days when Pol Pot had inducted Vet into the party. Vet had taken charge of Phnom Penh after Pol Pot and most of the party hierarchy had fled the city in the early sixties. Vet had been rewarded with the position of secretary of the Special Zone around Phnom Penh during the war. Afterward, when Phnom Penh came under direct control of Pol Pot and the party, Vet had been named minister of industry.

In his forced confessions, Vet had to admit to being an agent of the Vietnamese and the CIA, recruited decades earlier solely to sabotage the revolution. This also followed the established pattern: The CIA was blamed for economic shortcomings in Tuol Sleng documents while Vietnam had come to be cited as the spoiler in the political and military fields. Moreover, Von Vet was also made to confess to being too slavish an admirer of the Chinese model of revolution.

There was more than a touch of irony in this last purge. Von Vet had been Duch's immediate superior in the war when Duch was establishing the secret police force in the Special Zone. Vet had to have been one of the original supporters of the liquidation system that was now overseeing his own death.

Like the Eastern Zone cadre who escaped to Vietnam once they understood they were scheduled for extermination, the cadre under the minister of industry bolted and went into hiding. But they were not close to a border; they were not within the protective reach of the Vietnamese army. They could only band together and operate as a rogue vigilante group in Phnom Penh itself, a group of angry, armed factory workers bent on taking revenge against Pol Pot, Duch, and the revolution. They apparently ambushed and killed other cadre. When Ieng Sary said he feared a coup d'état inside Cambodia at the time, he was undoubtedly referring in part to these men.

The real threat came from the cadre who escaped to Vietnam. They were regrouped by Vietnam in preparation for war. On December 3, 1978, these Eastern Zone figures announced the formation of the Kampuchea United Front for National Salvation. The leaders included Heng Samrin, who had commanded the Fourth Division in the Eastern Zone army, and Chea Sim and Hun Sen, both refugees from the Eastern Zone party structure. When they announced their new “front,” by broadcast through Vietnamese radio, these men condemned the regime's entire three-year record in terms even harsher than those used by the refugees along the Thai border. Even though the majority had escaped from the country and their roles of responsibility in the regime only months earlier, they claimed the “Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique” was responsible for “massacres that are even more atrocious, more barbarous than those committed in the Dark Ages or those perpetrated by the Hitlerite fascists.” They called cooperatives “disguised concentration camps.”

Not surprisingly, they highlighted the regime's purge of the Eastern Zone as the major crime of Democratic Kampuchea. The Eastern Zone was the only one mentioned by name. It was the beginning of the major propaganda effort to paint the Eastern Zone as the one that differed from the rest of the country and the one that suffered the most. The corollary to this argument was that these Eastern Zone cadre, therefore, were not responsible for any of these “Hitlerite fascist” crimes.

With the publication of this “front” and this program, war was officially declared. The Vietnamese had set the ground for claiming their invasion was an “uprising” by genuine Cambodian communists against the traitorous communists led by Pol Pot. I arrived in Cambodia six days later, as Pol Pot continued his secret plans to arrest Son Sen and on the eve of the public war between the tigers and the crocodiles.

Nearly every country has a rival, usually a neighboring state that is a convenient focus of national fears and prejudices. One week in a foreign country and the most desultory tourist knows who that rival, or enemy, is by the jokes told and the epithets screamed in anger. These fears are not dangerous until stimulated by the state or fed thundering rhetoric by demagogues.

That is the character of the problem between Cambodians and Vietnamese. They do not hate each other, nor have they always been at each other's throats. But they had been defined as national rivals for some two centuries and there is national resentment and competition between the two states in the best of times. Their peoples have well-developed respect and fear of each other and well-honed stereotypes. In the worst of times, they have succumbed to violence and hatred against each other, generally when urged on by their governments.

In 1977 the government of Democratic Kampuchea resorted to fanning the fires of racism against the Vietnamese when, for real and imagined reasons, its leaders decided Vietnam was attempting to take over Cambodia. In propaganda Vietnam became the “historic” enemy, incapable of rising above its historic mission to conquer Cambodia, rather than a socialist neighbor.

For their part, the Vietnamese accused the Cambodians of acting like savages, or barbarians, a charge made over a century earlier by one of Vietnam's emperors and one that survived in the darker myths of the country. Both sides wanted to blame these hazy old rivalries for the very modern, precedent-breaking war between communist states.

While it is certainly true that their years of rivalry did play a role in the Third Indochina War, it was not the “manifest destiny” accorded it by the respective governments. Cambodia and Thailand have been historic rivals for hundreds of years, too, yet they did not wage war in 1977. Phnom Penh did not accuse Bangkok of attempting to take over Cambodia, even though the Cambodians believed at the time that Thais were squatting on Khmer territory at numerous points along their common border.

It was the peculiar nature of Khmer-Vietnamese relations, and especially between the two modern communist states, that led to the Third Indochina War. And in 1977 communist Vietnam was anxious to step forward and force a resolution of the question “What will be the special relationship between Vietnam and Cambodia now that they are both communist states?”

Vietnam was accustomed to being the pivotal actor in modern Indochina. Its fortunes jolted Cambodia like whiplash. In 1977 the fears of the Khmer Rouge were not entirely misplaced. The communists in Hanoi did see Cambodia as a lesser state, one that should accept Vietnam's benevolent influence if not indirect rule. It was in this regard that the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975 had been both a boon and a setback for Hanoi.

In January 1976, after the communist victories in Phnom Penh and Saigon in April 1975 and in Vientiane, Laos, in December 1975, all of former French Indochina was under communist rule. There was a real possibility that Vietnam would head a strong Indochinese communist bloc that would serve to improve reconstruction possibilities in Vietnam and assure Hanoi a leading position in Asian politics as head of an important regional group. But the Khmer Rouge were suspicious of all Vietnamese suggestions to form such a grouping. The Cambodians balked at friendship treaties or special friendships of any sort with Hanoi. Moreover, the Khmer Rouge sought out China as their strongest ally, and by 1977 China was Vietnam's leading enemy One of the best situations for Vietnam was deteriorating into one of the worst.

While it is clear Cambodia started the border war with Vietnam, it is less obvious why Vietnam interpreted that challenge as an invitation to invade and occupy Cambodia.

It was not the atrocious policies of the Khmer Rouge that turned Vietnam against Cambodia, not the slaughter or the slavery. It was a question of domination, control, and territory, of ridding Vietnam of the “problem” of Cambodia once and forever—questions that cannot be arbitrarily relegated to the communist era, the colonial period, or even the Angkor era. But they are questions that can be resolved without full-scale war and occupation. It was Vietnam's resort to total warfare that prompted the inevitable comparisons with their Red River ancestors. The communists in Hanoi had turned a near-disaster into a historic opportunity to realize what their predecessors had attempted centuries earlier: control over the Mekong River.

The memory of the conquest by the Vietnamese of the Red River Delta southward into the Mekong River Delta is part of the “historic fears” of Cambodians. So, too, is the French legacy of creating an artificial entity called
“Indochina” dominated by Vietnam. Crucially, there is no corollary example of modern Cambodians taking over Vietnamese territory. Despite calls by Lon Nol to recapture “Kampuchea Krom,” Cambodian rhetoric has not been matched by deeds. Cambodia's legendary xenophobia, its leaders' sensitivity to border issues—from Sihanouk to Pol Pot—are rooted in fears of continued Vietnamese ambitions. And in the cultural differences between the two nations.