When the War Was Over (82 page)

And Prasith translated throughout. “Tonight I have the opportunity to host an informal dinner among us. . . . I have met Mr. Dudman and Miss Elizabeth Becker before. This is the first time I have met Professor Caldwell. . . . What are the problems you would like me to explain, what are your questions?”

Dudman handled the questions skillfully; he was the diplomat of our group. But Sary nonetheless chose to ignore our questions and said we should wait for our interview with Pol Pot, which had yet to be approved. Instead he gave a speech he had prepared for us on the inevitability of a full-scale war with Vietnam.

“Vietnam wants to force Kampuchea to be part of its Indochina Federation. . . . We have inflicted defeat against the Vietnamese aggressions. They have been defeated,” he said. “The Vietnamese will have to carry out a protracted
war . . . and in the past year the Vietnamese have been very isolated in the international area . . . with the boat people. The Vietnamese can no more mislead the world public opinion. The world knows now, clearly, that Vietnam is the pawn of the Soviet Union.”

War was imminent, and our questions about human rights and the welfare of the population were irrelevant. Prasith and Sary both said there were no prisons in the country, justice was administered through the cooperatives by people's courts, and that was the end of such issues. War mattered. Sary said, however, that while war was inevitable we had nothing to worry about. We had seen the Cambodians at Krek. We had seen their defenses. (We had seen a few jeep loads of soldiers and little else.) He said news agencies in Bangkok had refused to believe we had visited Krek and wrote, instead, that we had traveled only as far as Tonle Bet, across the river from Kompong Cham. Finally, Sary asked for our impressions of the country. Dudman answered for us, admirably: “We're still observing and we're still asking questions.”

That worked for us journalists, but Ieng Sary wanted to hear something from Caldwell, the friend of Cambodia. He pressed him at dinner for his opinion of the revolution. “We have nothing to hide, nothing to cover up,” he said to Caldwell. But Caldwell was too sophisticated, and surprised him. Rather than discuss the workings of the revolution, the professor asked Sary what the upcoming war with Vietnam meant for other communist insurgents in the area, particularly the Thai Communist Party. Caldwell saw himself as a friend of all poor revolutionaries—Vietnamese, Thai, and Cambodian—and he was extremely upset at the prospect of war between Cambodia and Vietnam. Sary said, as he had earlier, that Cambodia's communists won their war on their own, and so could the Thai communists. He also said Cambodia needed friendly relations with the Thai government at the moment; it was a question of the survival of Cambodia itself.

Caldwell said nothing more and looked passively at his food and drink the rest of the evening. The meal was excellent, as we had come to expect, and the wines were good, although only we foreigners drank from our glasses. The Cambodians sipped at theirs out of courtesy. We left early. Sary had work to catch up on. Caldwell remained silent. He had been so voluble during the trip, the liveliest of us three, that his gloom set over all of us. He was watching his long-held dream of revolutionary cooperation disappear before his own eyes and was badly shaken.

The next day we drove down south, reaching Kompong Som seaport in a day, after making a sidetrip to interview Kampuchea Krom refugees from South Vietnam. They said they had fled Vietnam because the authorities there
were opposed to capitalism and had come to Cambodia to earn money. We did not discourage them. Without Prasith the three of us actually worked better together. We were an odd-looking group. Dudman was going bald and had the jolly face of a favorite uncle. Caldwell was a tall, tempestuous-looking Scotsman, always disheveled, with flowing auburn hair that masked his age. I added to the strangeness of the group simply because I was a woman.

We were housed at the seaport in a lovely home on the hill overlooking the sea; we were told this had been the villa of the queen mother. The next morning was beautiful, and we hoped to spend the day at Kompong Som. We went first to the docks, where we saw a ship from Singapore and one from China, a gaily decorated tugboat, and a large warehouse piled with kapok and rubber for export. A leader of the dock committee gave us a half-hour interview and then we were told it was time to go—to go back to Phnom Penh. We knew nothing we could say would alter the “program,” and we had learned to appreciate whatever we saw out our car windows.

We could see blue trucks, fifty-five empty Chinese-made blue trucks, roar out of the garage at the seaport. The convoy passed us on the highway and barely avoided hitting women thrashing rice on the right side of Highway Four. The December crop seemed plentiful from the evidence we saw on the roadway. Half of the infrequently used pavement was appropriated for the more useful work of threshing. For miles we passed women working the rice to complete every aspect of harvesting by January 10, 1979. That goal was broadcast repeatedly over government radio. We wondered if the Cambodian leaders thought they had until January 10 before the war with Vietnam actually began. During our trip we had glimpsed silhouettes of workers marching toward fields in the distance, hurrying to complete quotas set for them by the authorities. Once when we ran across a dusty band of small children carrying sticks on a side road, we were told these little ones were part of a “youth brigade” helping a cooperative reach its quotas. The ragged urchins looked like babies gathering kindling.

We had seen in our travels how the people rose at dawn and trooped to the demanding fields each day. We could not talk to them but we could notice how rarely we saw them resting. Once in a while we would see an old man leaning on a hoe or very young children fishing in the dike of a canal, but never a group of workers relaxing at lunch, talking, and resting. Perhaps it was done, but not in our sight.

The voice of Radio Democratic Kampuchea supplied us with regular reports about the success of the crops in its “home news” series. “At present, the movement of harvesting of the rainy season paddy is proceeding in all
zones, districts, and cooperatives in a permanent atmosphere of great militant solidarity and revolutionary optimism.” In other words, the regime wanted the people to get the crop in before the Vietnamese invasion.

On our way back north to the capital we saw workers putting together a new stretch of railway to connect Phnom Penh and the seaport. It seemed an odd priority, since the highway already accomplished that purpose and seemed scarcely used. One might have expected the early-twentieth-century French colonialists to order such a rail line but not Cambodian revolutionaries. And it was an awesome task, requiring cutting tunnels out of forbidding passes.

Our last stop before returning to the capital was the country's most impeccable model cooperative, named Leay Bau, in Takeo province. Friendly delegations from foreign countries had visited it before, and our visit went smoothly from start to finish. Everything was immaculate. The separate huts on stilts were furnished with fresh straw mats, cotton pillows, and solid pieces of furniture. Each family had such a home, we were told, and families did live together despite refugee stories to the contrary: Mother, father, and children lived together, the authorities agreed.

We were taken to one such family dwelling and introduced to a mother and her son. She sat on the mat throughout the visit, dressed in a black sarong and blouse and staring at us with a worried countenance that never eased. It was one of those faces the Yugoslavs had noticed, a face that could not smile. We left the hut quickly for fear of upsetting the woman, or putting her in jeopardy.

It was on to the large communal dining hall and large cement patio. Beyond that was a foundry for smelting agricultural implements. We were presented there with souvenirs, axes made at the foundry with brass melted down from spent American ammunition casings. And we were lectured once more on the self-sufficiency of the revolution, Cambodia's major accomplishment. The cooperative leader recalled the results of self-sufficiency—the people had become masters of the land, masters of the water, masters of their country's defense. Together they had provided each other, through the state, with food, clothing, farm equipment, and most other things required in their everyday lives. There was no need for money, the state provided all. It was all rational, logical, and tidy. Cambodia had fallen back on its own resources and come up the better. This is what we were to report back to the Americans—and the rest of the people of the world.

Nearby there were pagodas used as granaries. It was evident that Buddhism had been entirely wiped out. Prasith had said that it was a “reactionary faith” that the people no longer respected. The cooperative leader
repeated this formula. He, like the other leaders we had met, was a veteran of the Khmer Rouge army. He, too, wore a wristwatch and showed the confidence of someone considered part of the elite. When I asked to meet someone who had once lived in Phnom Penh, the leader produced a gentleman who, again, said he had been treated well by the revolution.

We were given a full two hours to visit the cooperative and to discuss political education sessions, which the leaders described as taken up largely by daily routine—questions about crops and harvest schedules. The cooperative was a showcase of the regime, and it did conform to the intellectual underpinnings detailed for us by Prasith. By now it was obvious to me that most of what we had seen on our trip was window dressing but impressions that nonetheless had to be examined for clues to the revolution. There was no dispute, for example, about the use of child labor. The sacrifice of at least one generation of children was seen as necessary to reach the hallowed goal of self-sufficiency. It seemed no sacrifice was too great for self-sufficiency, anything to protect Cambodia from the whims and plots of rich nations and corporations. The Khmer Rouge were protecting the people as had Prince Sihanouk before them, insulating them from the harsh reality beyond Cambodia's borders, or so successive regimes had told themselves. Cambodia was, is, nothing if not the victim of big-power politics. Conversely, it is a victim of its leaders' radical attempts to protect the country from the big powers.

The next day was our last full day in the country, Friday, December 22. We toured the textile factory on the road to Pochentong Airport, a factory built in Sihanouk's era with large doses of Chinese aid. All the machines were in operation when we walked through the building taking photographs of the largely female workforce. We chatted with the three-member female committee running the factory—all three were also army veterans—and went across the highway to their dormitory, where we were asked to peek in on the kitchen. Lunch of rice, soup, and vegetables was being prepared. We smiled, accustomed now to the routine.

There was still no word about our interview with Pol Pot. We were back in our guest house in Phnom Penh and ready to return home. After lunch the men retired to their rooms to review notes or nap. I waited until the guards left for their siesta and found the gate unlocked. I snuck out and took what I assumed would be my last stroll around Phnom Penh. I passed the old Chinese hospital on Monivong and peered in. There were Cambodian soldiers lying on beds and cots waiting for attention, apparently wounded in fighting. I continued on and was heading for the river when a Mercedes screeched to a stop.

Out came Suon, our friendly steward, furious. He nearly shoved me into the car and sped back to the house. Pol Pot had agreed to see us within the hour, and Suon had feared that I was lost.

It took no time to shower and dress and retrieve the questions Dudman and I had submitted for Pol Pot. We were granted an interview together, Caldwell a separate one in accordance with his special status as a “friend” of the regime.

The drama was worthy of such a secretive ruler. We were the first American journalists to interview him, and we were treated to a ritual that reminded us of our privilege. A large Mercedes came to our house, one we hadn't seen before, and we were driven to the former governor's palace built for the French colonial ruler. It is a sober gray building near the waterfront.

We drove up the inclining semicircular driveway and were let off at the doorway. Two officials were waiting, and they escorted us into the grand receiving room. Sheer white curtains covered the floor-to-ceiling windows, and they billowed from the wind made by floor fans stationed all around the salon. First I saw Prasith, standing to the right side with another translator and another aide.

At the far end stood Ieng Sary. Beside him, seated like a king, was Pol Pot himself. We walked toward Pol Pot, prime minister, secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, and the man accused of committing some of the worst crimes in modern history. He was not what I expected. It took me several minutes to recover from an involuntary seizure of nerves and focus on the man. He was actually elegant, with a pleasing face, not handsome but attractive. His features were delicate and alert and his smile nearly endearing. Dudman and I were told we could take a few pictures, and mine proved quite flattering.

Although I had heard stories of Pol Pot's charisma I had doubted them on the basis of the few mugshots of the man I had seen published. But in person there was no question of his appeal. Physically, he had a strong, comfortable appearance. His gestures and manner were polished, not crude. There was no question of his aloofness, however. He smiled and nodded through a few pleasantries, briefly, while we drank the fresh orange juice placed before us. Then the mood, and Pol Pot, changed.

We were seated to his right—at a considerable distance. His translators were directly across from us to his left. Standing and walking behind him was Ieng Sary. Quickly it became apparent we were part of an audience, not an interview, and the man delivering the address was saying things that sounded mad.