When the War Was Over (7 page)

“I realized we were expendable. All the analyses we had done during the war, all of our ideas about what Cambodia would be like, were so wrong I had no room in my imagination for what was happening. I finally understood what it meant to be called to ‘study'—those people were murdered. Those of us who were spared were to become work animals. We were barely surviving.”

Now everyone was asked to write or dictate his “biography” Through May and June, Komphot was totally occupied learning to farm the rice paddies and scrounge the forests for edibles. Bananas were mixed with everything. He and Nhel's family collected snails, banana leaves for “acid soup,” wild vegetables. The family had no cooking pots at first, only farm tools. They had the one set of clothing they had worn the day they left Phnom Penh. The hardship, the Khmer Rouge told them, was necessary “to make a revolution—to become self-sufficient.”

By July, however, people began disappearing—at night. One by one they were being picked off: former soldiers or the families of former soldiers, former bureaucrats, former members of the Lon Nol regime, former intellectuals. Komphot was spared. “I wrote my full biography for them, because the cooperative was crawling with other intellectuals who knew me from Phnom Penh. But the cadre didn't know much about banking. They thought teachers were intellectuals but not bankers. They thought a bank nothing more than a place where money was kept, and I presume they thought of me as a clerk—smart but not intelligent.”

Nights were quiet in the cooperative. Only the Khmer Rouge cadre dared move. In July there were sounds again of strange footsteps and the muffled cries of someone being dragged away. A “body was fading away,” the people would say. “Be careful or your body may disappear.” Komphot remembers one night when the sounds were so close to his hut “I thought they were coming to get us. I thought to myself: It is one thing to suffer to live, another thing to suffer only to die. I decided to give it two years. If nothing had changed I would commit suicide.”

At the same time Komphot made his suicide plan, July 1975, Pol Pot, the man most responsible for Komphot's misery, delivered a major address in the nearly deserted city of Phnom Penh. He spoke as chairman of the communist party's military committee, delivering what amounted to a campaign speech to 3,000 soldiers gathered in the capital to represent the major units of the revolutionary army of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. The speech encapsulated the party's version of recent history, how the party, the army, and its leaders fit within the history of Cambodia and the communist world.

It described the betrayal a generation of promising young Cambodians felt they had endured. Now they were the absolute leaders of their country. The speech was shameless propaganda, not history, but it is an accurate reflection of the myths and legends these Cambodian communists had created for themselves to survive years of obscurity and near-extinction.

“In the whole world, since the advent of the revolutionary war and since the birth of U.S. imperialism, no people and no army has been able to drive the imperialists out to the last man and to score total victory over them,” Pol Pot said. “Nobody [else] could. . . . Our army fulfilled this mission with great success unknown before in the whole world. . . . to speak in a common language, this is believed to be the work of God, for it is too imposing for mere humans.”

His listeners were dressed in all manner of tattered uniforms, some with the bodies of invalids from miserable wartime diet and the wounds and diseases they had suffered. They did not look the part of the warriors of the century, the first to stand atop the debris of American imperial ambitions. But Pol Pot told them their humble appearance added to their nobility, to the “purity” of their victory.

“In our 2,000—year history, we have never before liberated our country and achieved full independence like this,” he said. The victory was “unprecedented in the military history of our country” and of the entire world. “Only the
Cambodian nation, Cambodian people, Cambodian revolutionary army, and the Kampuchean Communist Party have managed to liberate their own country and people completely, definitively, and cleanly.”

This “clean” and “pure” victory against U.S. imperialism, Pol Pot implied, placed Cambodia as the superior communist nation in the world, above China and Vietnam, which had been his allies. The Cambodian communists could not have won without Chinese and Vietnamese help, but Pol Pot had to say otherwise.

The Cambodians' supposed defeat of the Americans had to be the most glorious in history, as well, even though the Vietnamese had certainly fought the United States decades longer. In his address Pol Pot used the nightmare of the eight-month-long American bombing campaign in 1973 as the basis for his party's claim to be the first victor over the Americans. After the January 1973 Paris Peace Accords were signed, he said, “U.S. imperialism, which previously had to fight on three different fronts [Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia], could then concentrate its firepower only on the Cambodian battlefield. The world's people believed that we would certainly be ‘flattened.' . . . Kissinger threatened that ‘if after the Paris agreement the Cambodians continue to spurn compromise and negotiations, B-52S will be sent to destroy them in seventy-two hours. . . .”'

Of all the lies they told themselves, the most crucial and dangerous was this double boast that the Khmer Rouge, on their own, had defeated “U.S. imperialism.” In two years of fighting, the Cambodian communists defeated an American client state, the Khmer Republic, but hardly the U.S. Army, which had fought in Cambodia less than three months. After the U.S. Congress forced an end to the bombing campaign on August 15, 1973, both sides of the Khmer war fought on their own; both felt betrayed by their erstwhile allies.

The war took a turn for the worse. After three years of shadow boxing, the opponents finally came out in the open and realized the enemy was their brother—not the North Vietnamese, as Lon Nol had said, and not the U.S. Army, as Pol Pot had said, but their fellow Cambodians. Their anger exploded in atrocities the likes of which had not been seen on the battlefields of other Indochinese countries at war.

Pol Pot had to extinguish that memory, at least in military lore. He focused in his July speech on April 12, the day the small remaining staff of the U.S. embassy was evacuated from Phnom Penh. “U.S. imperialism sent fifty helicopters to evacuate its men. . . a great event clearly demonstrating to the world that small Cambodia with a small population was extremely brave and could force U.S. imperialism to flee in a most shameful manner.”

By pretending that the Cambodians had won the war on their own, had built “a revolutionary army independently and self-reliantly into a purely Cambodian revolutionary army without hesitation or foreign support,” Pol Pot was laying the groundwork for the disastrous experiment in “self-reliance” that followed.

This idea of a “clean, pure” revolution was the driving force behind the hell that was descending on Komphot and over six million other Cambodians. Overnight, the people were required to become either peasants, workers, or soldiers. There was no need for other occupations. They had been abolished on the first day of the revolution. All commerce and private enterprise were abolished. All markets were closed, every shop and every restaurant. Money was abolished; no one was to be paid for his labor. The revolution claimed it would take care of every need of the citizenry.

The state claimed ownership of all property and control over every activity of the citizens. All individuals rights were abolished. There were nearly no laws. The people were at the arbitrary mercy of their leaders, who could decide how much food was consumed, whether medicine was available, and how punishment would be administered.

The people's lives were to be filled with work and little else. Schools were shut down. Religion was banned. Recreation was unheard of. There was no entertainment. Travel, reading, writing were outlawed for all but the privileged people.

Cambodia's communist leaders so distrusted foreigners that they cut off the country from the rest of the world to build their revolution. This need to pull away, to be the best in the world, the best in Cambodian history, the best communists, was the result of particular strains in Cambodian history and the twists and turns of communist revolution in Asia. Cambodians felt they had been pushed to the bottom by friends who turned out to be enemies. They felt so threatened they set out to prove they were one of the superior races and nations in order to save themselves from extinction.

Retracing that history can begin to explain this extreme psychology as well as the ideas, myths, fears, and events that ultimately—but not inevitably—led to the tragic revolution of the Khmer Rouge.

French descriptions of the ancient water empire of Angkor, which flourished from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries, provided the god-king inspiration for Cambodia's rulers, the country's cultural pride, and a particularly Khmer view of the world that has lasted to this day. The purported ways
of that empire provided a model not only for the modern
deva-raj,
Prince Sihanouk, but for those who challenged him for the right to govern.

Colonial accounts of Angkor's decline, feuds within the royal family that facilitated foreign conquest of Cambodia, combined with the realities of ninety years of French colonial rule, added bitterness to the legacy. By the time Cambodia won its independence in this century, its people believed its national pride had been severely wounded, neighboring Siam and Vietnam had grabbed their territory, nearly always with the aid of a Khmer prince, and the French had declared Cambodians unfit for the modern era. Whenever a leader rose to challenge the French as occurred during the Second World War, he was done in as often by his fellow Khmer as any foreign figure.

Kingship and Buddhism were said to have survived through the centuries of upheaval. After independence, however, pressures created by Sihanouk's attempt to insulate his country, his version of the monarchy and its culture from his notions of limiting modernity from versions advocated by other Cambodians merged with pressures from the Vietnam War to help create the Khmer Rouge and eventually usher in their revolution.

The touchstone of Cambodian history, of Cambodia's identity, is the temple complex at Angkor. Those massive stone wonders are to modern Cambodians what the Parthenon is to today's Greeks—architectural masterpieces and solid, visible reminders that Cambodia was once the premier state and culture of the region.

The early Khmers who built the Angkor kingdom and society were people with boundless ambition and a robust attitude toward culture. They had a natural bent toward borrowing and adapting ideas whether on a spiritual or a practical plane. And they were artists. There was a strong sense of beauty and grace, balance and proportion to their irrigation systems as well as to their delicate carvings.

Accomplishments in architecture and irrigation engineering are the foundation of Angkor's impressive reputation. In both endeavors, the Khmers borrowed ideas from other cultures and transformed them. By the sixth century they inherited the rudiments of hydraulic engineering from earlier peoples of the lower Mekong valley who had learned how to drain their delta swamplands, controlling the monsoon deluge as well as retaining water for irrigation in the dry season. The style of Angkor architecture owes a large debt to Champa, Angkor's rival state to the east. The Khmers borrowed
the forms of Champa as well as its technique for wood carving, which the Khmers used on their soft stone.