When the War Was Over (81 page)

But the radio that morning added to our apprehension. There was more news from Phnom Penh, further reports that Pol Pot and the party were preparing for an imminent invasion. Prasith told us to be calm and announced that we were off to a rubber plantation cooperative and then our first agricultural cooperative, Phum Preah Meas.

There were more tourist stops. The plantation was orderly; the workers, male and female, were healthy. We were given a journeyman's lecture and a tour of the makeshift factory, then brought back for a briefing and refreshments. The trio running the plantation were all veterans of the war. One man was missing an ear. He said little when the top man briefed us on the factory's and plantation's success.

The 25,000 workers of the complex had no experience in the field until assigned their jobs by the authorities. “The overwhelming majority came from peasant stock. They didn't even know what a rubber tree was,” the official said with pride. “They learned how to tap the latex, operate the factories, and care for the trees themselves. . . . Most of the rubber workers in the former society were Vietnamese. They went back to their home country in 1973.”

The man with the missing ear added: “In the former society the French did not teach the Khmers how to work the rubber, they only taught the Vietnamese.”

We were given a short question period. At my turn I asked the men their origins, whether they were party members and where they had fought during the war. There was a silence at the question of party affiliation. The man without the ear spoke up. Yes, he said, he was a party member and a veteran from the Eastern Zone. The other two then spoke up, and shortly the question period was over. Prasith laughed and said my questions were humorous.

Back into the car, we were off to the cooperatives, a true Potemkin village. Perhaps I had had the nightmare earlier because what was being presented to us as reality was so obviously fake. I was waiting for something of Cambodia to break through the shield around us, even if it was violent. The cooperative could have been a movie set. It bore no resemblance to the descriptions of cooperatives refugees had fled. There was a cluster of handsome one-room Khmer wooden huts on stilts. Everyone, the cooperative
leader told us, ate three meals a day, including dessert with the main meal. They had three holidays a month—on the 10th, 20th, and 30th. The cooperative leaders showed us women weaving cloth, men repairing implements, and a large canteen where all shared their meals. The leader said he and the others running the cooperative were common people selected by the masses as leaders because they showed superior management skills. Later I discovered the leader and all those presented to us as common people were in fact top party officials.

Here, however, Prasith produced one of the witnesses I had asked to see since the first day—someone who had lived in Phnom Penh before the evacuation. The man he produced was a Sino-Khmer. Under repeated questioning, he seemed genuine if terribly nervous. I asked him innocent questions and let him tell me whatever story he wished. He said he had held a number of low-paying jobs during the war—from clerk at a furniture shop to a salesman of rice wine on the street. He said, “Angka gave me permission to live here [at the cooperative] after the evacuation.” He was not a member of the communist party but an “ordinary citizen” who believed there were other evacuees from Phnom Penh living in the cooperative but wasn't sure. He said he guessed certain people were from Phnom Penh by the way they looked working the rice fields, but he had never talked to them. He was dismissed.

Obviously any serious attempt to examine human rights questions had to begin with that section of the population said to be the target of the most arbitrary and violent treatment by the regime—the people of the cities and those who had worked for the defeated government and army. Prasith disagreed with my approach and said I was wrongheaded: I should examine the lives of the peasants—90 percent of the population, he said—and stop worrying about the criminals from the old regime. Since nearly two million of the country's six to seven million population had been living in the city at the time of victory, I said it would seem relatively easy to find representatives of one-third to one-fourth of the population. Prasith shook his head.

Each day Prasith described a separate aspect of the Cambodian revolution which he felt appropriate to the site on our touring schedule. At the cooperative he described the administration of the country, how it was divided first at the cooperative level, up to subdistrict, then district, then region, and then zone. Farm cooperatives reported to their district or subdistrict superiors. A plantation bypassed that structure altogether and reported directly to the ministry of trade, which also handled rubber production.

There was no mention of how the head of Cambodia's rubber plantation had been duped into assisting in the bloody purge of the East Zone, only to
be arrested himself in a sadistic drama where he was treated to a sumptuous dinner by Khieu Samphan, the head of state, and then immediately taken off to Tuol Sleng. And, of course, Prasith said nothing about the massacres of rubber plantation workers that had characterized the purge.

He hoped to impart the impression that this was a rational, efficient regime. There was an answer for everything. Prasith's Cambodia had no hunger, no prisons, certainly no torture chambers and no inhuman labor camps. His Cambodia shared everything equally, worked together in a spirit of cooperation and trust, defended the country with zeal, and looked forward to a more prosperous era when the fruits of hard labor would be rewarded. I had no idea whether he was lying, whether he believed any of this story, or whether he was too frightened to admit the truth.

And this was the only Cambodia we saw for most of the trip, Democratic Kampuchea as interpreted by Prasith. We mixed with no one. We took our meals separately. We were driven in our own car. We were housed alone. The only people we saw and spoke with were those chosen by Angka to represent Cambodia, and Prasith interpreted all that these people said. We would drive for hours to have a ten-minute conversation with a cooperative leader; then drive for hours to picnic alongside the road and proceed to another stop. Lunch required an hour of preparation. (I suspect Prasith, who had cooked for Ieng Sary's wedding twenty-five years earlier in Paris, supervised the preparation of our sumptuous meals.) We were required to rest for an hour after lunch. We were usually discharged for the night long before we were either hungry or tired.

We drove to Siem Reap from the cooperative. Siem Reap is the large town adjacent to Angkor, home of Cambodia's famous temple complex. Along the way we lunched at Kompong Thom, at a new houseboat on the Great Lake, and then on the highway our car stopped “spontaneously” to see from a distance a group of peasants working a field and singing revolutionary songs under a flapping red flag. Dudman and I took photographs; Caldwell, the sympathetic “friend,” was the only experienced tourist to communist countries and by far the greater cynic. He preferred to stay in the car and laugh at the clumsy photo opportunity prepared for us.

The next day we toured the temples. What should have been an awesome occasion was marred by the presence of our Khmer Rouge hosts, in particular Prasith, who used the occasion to demonstrate how little he knew about his country's history and just how much he despised the French who had rebuilt the temples.

The temples suffered in the same fashion as the national museum in Phnom Penh, from lack of care—primarily bat dung and a jungle virus. Khmer curators who had been trained by the French were working in Siem Reap at the time of the Khmer Rouge victory. I asked Prasith about them. He said intellectuals were not employed in their fields of expertise unless they had proved themselves dedicated to the goals of the Cambodian revolution. Apparently none of the curators had passed this test. We saw only soldiers and a few peasants working in the area—not keeping up the temples but raking the lawns outside the temples. The temples had been left to deteriorate.

They were protected in a political sense, however. The temples were at the center of what the Khmer Rouge and the modern rulers before them consider Cambodian culture. In revolutionary Cambodia, paintings of Angkor Wat hung at the official buildings and guest houses we visited—not photographs of Pol Pot or other Cambodian leaders, and not pictures of Karl Marx, V I. Lenin, or Joseph Stalin as in Vietnam. Only Angkor was safe enough to become the symbol for revolutionary Cambodia. Pol Pot was still too insecure to post his picture around the country. (Although he had already commissioned at least busts of himself, they were not in public evidence during our trip.)

We spent two nights at the temples, and we were to leave the next morning. But there was an unexpected delay. First we were told there had been flooding on the roadway. Security men reported regularly to Prasith. We worried about unrest. We turned on the radio as we waited for hours. News had broken that the United States and China had reached an agreement to normalize relations. Prasith said this was a fortuitous accord for Democratic Kampuchea. But even he did not know how fortuitous.

We were finally headed toward the northwest, to Battambang city, capital of the province of the same name. Here was the home of so many of the evacuees sent out from Phnom Penh. Although no one knew, then, very much about the working of revolutionary Cambodia, we knew something about the northwest, since it bordered on Thailand and refugees had been leaving it since 1975. It was not only home to many of the “new people” from Phnom Penh but in some districts it had an alarmingly high rate of murder and deprivation. Here I hoped to run across someone I might know. Here I could assess the living conditions of the people considered the most vulnerable in the harsh Khmer Rouge rule.

It took a day to reach Battambang city. We stopped for lunch near Sisophan and toured a rice research center. Again, in Prasith's inimitable style,
we were made to believe that the rice-rich northwest was being properly cultivated for the first time in history. Under Khmer Rouge rule, new seeds were being tested for various soil types, seeds that did not need expensive foreign fertilizer. These seeds were properly distributed throughout the northwest and, with the irrigation system, were responsible for a miraculously bountiful harvest.

That night we were told to prepare our questions for Pol Pot should he agree to see us before our trip ended.

In the morning Prasith had a surprise. We could not visit a single cooperative in the northwest. It was completely forbidden. All of the responsible authorities, he said, were busy in the fields. Instead, we could see the irrigation works these evacuees had built.

Without thinking, I started arguing with Prasith. We had to visit cooperatives in the northwest; otherwise our trip would be worthless. His excuses didn't hold up. Prasith, in turn, told me I didn't know what I was talking about and added: “You'll never understand this country.”

It went on like that. I brought up Ieng Sary's pledge that we could visit northwestern cooperatives, specifically to refute the charges of massive human rights violations against the former residents of Phnom Penh. But there was nothing to be gained, finally. Prasith was the bureaucrat charged with lying to us, and he had no choice but to enlarge those lies the more he was pressed.

My anger stemmed in large part from the implications of his announcement. Could it mean that life in the northwest was worse than the refugees claimed? Immediately I saw the faces of friends who I now feared were in graver danger than I had suspected. I shivered. My confidence in my guides also began to sink. Prasith and I barely spoke to each other the rest of the day, and for the rest of the trip I became rather combative, arguing not only with my Khmer Rouge hosts but with Dudman and Caldwell.

That afternoon, while touring one of the dams, the tone was set for the rest of the trip. Caldwell and Dudman asked questions about the dam, which was under repair following damage from the record-breaking monsoon floods. The gate had broken because the dam had been built without proper controls. When it was my turn I asked the young man in charge questions not about the touted irrigation system but about the war. (We had already been given the ritualistic unprovable statistics about the dam and those built throughout the northwest—they had already been given over the radio earlier in the year.) The young man was named Von, a twenty-five-year-old veteran
of the war who had been demobilized and appointed head of the committee in charge of constructing the dam.

He made a game of my interview. While answering my questions he scaled the concrete frame of the project, forcing me to follow behind him, and Prasith, the translator, behind me. I asked him about the American bombing during the war, the living conditions for him and the other infantrymen. At the end of this exercise I rejoined Dudman and Caldwell, and Caldwell was aghast at my behavior: “You're an American,” he said. “How can you ask questions like that of a Cambodian? It's as bad as if a German reporter came to London after the war and asked a British soldier what it was like to fight the Nazis.”

There was a disagreement. After I explained that I had come to report from Cambodia, not act like a tourist, we had little to say to each other, although we both wrote nasty notes about the argument in our diaries.

Prasith took us back to Phnom Penh the next day and quit as our guide. The next night, December 19, we dined with Ieng Sary at Chamcar Mon Palace. Prasith was Sary's translator, and all ill will appeared to be forgotten. Prasith announced another cadre would be taking us south the next day, to the seaport of Kompong Som, while he stayed and took care of pressing business in the capital. Sary held forth during the cocktail hour. After asking after our health he said he was pleased we had traveled over 1,000 kilometers in Cambodia and that we could report how well the people lived. He looked well himself. He was impeccably groomed, wearing a dark, welltailored Mao suit. Sary has a porcine look, and his face can be set in an awful glower with ease. However, he can be extremely charming, and within these revolutionary circles he was not considered particularly ruthless.