When the War Was Over (78 page)

All states were acting as predicted. ASEAN was neutral. The communist states lined up on either side of the battle for Cambodia. The West was as preoccupied with the refugee question as with the upcoming war. The stage was nearly set. Even the question of witnesses had been settled by Ieng Sary during his October visit to the United Nations, when he invited us to visit his country.

In September, newspaper reporters from Hong Kong visited Cambodia, and at the beginning of November, a high-level delegation from Beijing arrived in Phnom Penh, including the chief of the Chinese Communist Party's inner security branch—a man who knew something about party purges in his own country. Thereafter the country was put on full alert. The regime cabled Richard Dudman and me telling us our proposed visits to Democratic Kampuchea would begin on Saturday, December 9, 1978. The week before we arrived the Vietnamese unveiled their Cambodian front—the Kampuchea United Front for National Salvation. This front's program was nothing less than the “overthrow of the reactionary Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique.” Its president was Heng Samrin, the member of the executive committee of the Eastern Zone party and commander of the zone's Fourth Division who had fled to Vietnam in September in the wake of the Center's purge of the Eastern Zone.

Now everyone was in place. The war for Cambodia could begin.

From the moment our Chinese aircraft landed at Phnom Penh's Pochentong Airport, I felt like an inhabitant of someone else's dream. I had known Cambodia before. For nearly two years during the war I lived in Phnom Penh and was the special correspondent for the
Washington Post
. I kept up my interest in the country afterward, when I moved to Washington to work at the newspaper, and at the age of thirty-one, I was considered something of an old hand or specialist on the country But this was not the Cambodia I had known during the war. It was a country beyond my reach. There were no people in the streets. Nothing stirred. No one talked to us unless specifically ordered to do so by the authorities, by Angka. Nothing happened unless Angka ordered it.

We arrived on the biweekly flight from Beijing, by then the only commercial flight between Cambodia and the outside world. We were ordered to remain in our seats until we were called out in groups. First to disembark were the dozens of Chinese experts who made up nearly three-fourths of the passengers. They were followed by a small group of heavyset European men, then by a delegation from the Japanese Workers Party, and finally we were called. We walked down the stairs into two Mercedes sedans parked at the foot of the ramp. It was the start of our incubated tour of the revolution. We were in a bubble that glided by people and places, that could be burst only by a violent attempt to circumvent the power of the party.

At arm's length, the country was mysterious. The Phnom Penh I first glimpsed had the precise beauty of a mausoleum. The rusting barbed wire that had crawled around its parks, boulevards, and government buildings during the war was gone. The wire and barricades had been replaced with pots of flowering bougainvillea and frangipani. Government buildings were freshly painted; the railway station was a muted coral color, the old ministry of information a soft yellow. The parks were immaculate, the lawns reseeded and mowed, the flower beds weeded and in bloom. There was no litter on the streets, no trash, no dirt. But then there were no people either, no bicycles or buses and very few automobiles.

As we drove into the city I saw a few soldiers manning guard posts, but they did not appear to be serious defense positions. Guard stations were painted in bright Tyrolean greens and golds. The posts they used as roadblocks across the highway were striped in red and white, like barber poles. We saw no bunkers, tanks, antiaircraft guns. Even though the country was on full military alert the capital gave no sign of battle preparations.

We were taken directly to our official guest house from the airport. It was on the city's main street, Monivong Avenue, in a part of the city I knew well. The house was a few doors from the back entrance to the Chamcar Mon Presidential Palace, a modern sprawling complex built originally for Sihanouk and situated in large, parklike grounds. The guest house itself was a former private residence.

The crisp December weather was perfect, but the air conditioners nevertheless were turned on for our benefit. I was put in a bedroom on the first floor. The vanity was stocked with two bottles of French nail polish, five tubes of lipstick, and a box of face powder, but no soap. The men were given separate bedrooms on the second floor, near the liquor cabinet, which contained ample quantities of whiskey, gin, and cognac. Boxes of Cambodianmade cigarettes were stashed throughout the residence. We were the first Western journalists allowed into the country and our welcome displayed the Khmer Rouge interpretation of our daily habits.

That first day our hosts left the gates open, and as soon as our escorts departed we took a long stroll around the neighborhood. Even though I knew the city fairly well I stumbled in search of old landmarks. During the war, seamstress shops, corner vendors, a favorite haunt for children, and lines of cars waiting for rationed gasoline had been my signposts far more than street addresses. Now that was all gone. Monivong Avenue was a canyon. We could walk down the center of the street without seeing a car.

We left Monivong and walked down toward the river to Norodom Boulevard and the Independence Monument, and from there to the old American embassy Dudman and Caldwell had made brief trips to Phnom Penh before, but neither had ever lived in the country. I should have been an able guide but I felt as much of a tourist as they. Moreover we were just beginning to know each other and did not entirely trust each other. Normally it would have been of little consequence, but on this trip we were all conscious of our role as singular witnesses of the revolution and, perhaps, of the war that everyone was predicting.

We were three writers with what appeared to be complementary skills and experiences. Caldwell was a lecturer on Southeast Asia. He had made
one trip to Cambodia in the late sixties to investigate charges that the United States was violating Cambodian neutrality. He had coauthored a book about the Cambodian War and, after the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975, had been a champion of their revolution. Caldwell had visited communist China and communist North Korea and had expected to be closely watched and guarded on this trip to communist Cambodia. He had been invited to Phnom Penh as a “friend.” Dudman and I had been invited as journalists, a distinction the Khmer Rouge considered important.

Dudman was an experienced foreign correspondent. He had traveled often to Vietnam during the war and had earned a considerable reputation for his critical reporting of the American war effort there. He had been captured at the start of the Cambodian War in 1970 and held for forty days by Vietnamese communists inside Cambodia. He had written sympathetically of the developing communist movement he had seen during his captivity. After the war Dudman was the first American journalist invited back to Vietnam, and he was given a nationwide tour. He was close to retirement, and this invitation to be one of the first foreign journalists to see Cambodia's revolution capped his career. He was the senior foreign affairs writer at his newspaper and certainly the most experienced in our group. He was also the only one of us who had not written about the Khmer Rouge after 1975 and had yet to form his views about the Cambodian revolution. Caldwell had immediately dubbed him the Edgar Snow of Cambodia.

My foreign reporting had been limited entirely to Cambodia; I had a strong emotional as well as intellectual commitment to the story of that country. I was one of a handful of young Western reporters who had got their start covering the war. We came of age in Cambodia. We lost friends in the war, and we witnessed, unknowingly, the start of one of this century's major catastrophes. At war's end most of us did not want to believe the first terrifying stories from the refugees for fear it meant the Cambodians we had befriended were now at risk. Most of us felt that we had seen the worst during the war—the devastation and bombing, the fast decline of the country that was unlike the war in Vietnam. Even though I had written one of the very few investigations of the Khmer Rouge during the war—a 1973
Washington Post
in-depth article describing the cold-blooded “iron will” propelling them to victory and revealing some of their history and the personalities leading them, including Saloth Sar as head—I was as surprised as everyone at the evacuation and subsequent destruction of the Khmer society. I decided I had to get back to Cambodia and see the revolution for myself. Even though my new assignments kept me in Washington I monitored
the scant information available and lobbied regularly for a visa. Whenever Ieng Sary visited the UN I tried to speak to him, and eventually I convinced him I was the journalist he had to invite back.

At the same time I wrote occasional background pieces about the revolution, including a long review of two books printed on the subject—a review in which I declared that the evidence given by the refugees was overwhelming and the revolution awful. Nonetheless, I was given a visa—apparently because I was best remembered for my wartime coverage that was critical of the American role in the war. Moreover I represented the
Washington Post
, an important newspaper if the Khmer Rouge really wanted to get their view across to the American government.

We three arrived in Cambodia with varying appreciations of the revolution. Caldwell had a political stake in its success; I had a long-standing personal and professional commitment to uncover its meaning; Dudman had an enviable detachment to the story. Quickly we discovered what Cambodia meant to each of us. What we did not know was that before we arrived it was decided that one of us would be killed.

Our afternoon idyll that first day ended before we could return to the guest house. One of our guides pulled up in a Mercedes and motioned us into the car. We were driven back to the house and ordered to stay until further notice. We were told never to walk out by ourselves again—it was too dangerous. One never knew what the unnamed “enemy” might do. We were under the equivalent of house arrest.

Dudman and I had been briefed on the tenuous situation confronting Cambodia before we arrived. I had talked to experts at the American government's State Department, Defense Department, and Central Intelligence Agency in Washington. In Bangkok and Beijing I had met with political and military experts of the United States, France, Canada, Australia, Sweden, and China. Not one had predicted a full-scale war between Vietnam and Cambodia. At most, these experts said, the Vietnamese would push to the Mekong River and stop there, satisfied to control the east bank before pressing on to the capital in a later offensive. One of America's leading Cambodian experts, an old friend, told me in Bangkok that fears I expressed about the rumors of war and my own safety were unwarranted. “It will be a piece of cake,” he said.

Certainly our guard's warning that the regime could not guarantee our safety if we walked off on our own was meant to prevent us from seeing what was off-limits. But the eerie silence and empty streets, the sensation of walking into a tropical twilight zone, made us wonder whether there were “enemies”
out there—Vietnamese or otherwise—who would rather see us dead. The briefings we had had before arriving now seemed innocent. Within days the three of us decided the situation was far worse than the outside world realized.

I made one more try at finding the Cambodia that I had known; I set my alarm and woke early the next day and was out of the house before the guards arrived. The gates were closed but not locked. The sun was already climbing and shone like a spotlight on the streets. This time I met workers standing in small groups by the curb, waiting for trucks to haul them out to their jobs in the rice paddies or factories. Otherwise the city was empty. The sunlight bounced off the cement and buildings, turning Monivong Avenue into a white canyon.

I stayed close to the sidewalks, hiding under overhanging trees and ducking into corners when I heard trucks. This time I could tarry on my own and see what had not been apparent on our ride in from the airport or short promenade the day before. Behind Monivong, beyond the stage-set perfection of the boulevard, the city had been left to rot. Down the side streets, the houses with their sweet gardens, the small bungalows and shops, were overgrown with weeds. Some yards were now garbage dumps. Not all of the shops on Monivong itself were empty, in fact. They were warehouses of sorts. Furniture was thrown inside some of them, stacked in a haphazard fashion. Others were crammed with appliances.

Farther up the street was the intersection with the old Central Market. It had been planted in banana trees. Their fanlike leaves sprouted like feathers out of the stalls and vending areas. No people were in sight.

I continued up Monivong, past the old Banque Khmer pour le Commerce, and I thought of my friend and former banker Mey Komphot. I knew he had stayed behind in Cambodia, and I wondered where he was, where other friends might be. It was my first full day in the country, and I still entertained fantasies of running across Komphot or other friends I had known. Then I spotted two men leaving what had been the Lycée Descartes carrying large pots across the street. They were dressed in the black pajama uniforms of the Khmer Rouge, and they stopped to stare. I greeted them in Khmer.

Now I could see the Hotel Royale or Hotel le Phnom, where room 27 had been my office and home. Before I crossed the street I looked to my left. Two cows were grazing on an empty field where the city's French cathedral had stood, a towering church directly down the avenue from the Buddhist Wat Phnom. I had been told the cathedral had been damaged, like the Central Bank, but this was not what I had expected. It had been dismantled; not a stone survived. I hurried on.