When the War Was Over (2 page)

The invasion also freed large numbers of Cambodians to leave their country and allowed me and other writers to interview them at length. I spoke to refugees during trips I made to refugee camps in Thailand and Malaysia and in interviews in North America. I interviewed Cambodian, Vietnamese, and other foreign officials during two trips to Vietnam, one to Laos, and two to Cambodia in addition to my research in the United States.

The story is presented as a narrative and often in the voices of witnesses, people whom I interviewed or whose stories were left behind in the prison files of the Khmer Rouge. The witnesses come from all walks of life and all vantage points. They include a modern Cambodian banker who was representative of thousands of Cambodians who knew nothing about the Khmer Rouge but blindly welcomed their victory in hopes it would lift the country out of its misery; a young peasant orphan who joined the revolution in his teens, rose within its ranks, and was executed for crimes he never committed; two provincial women, one of whom became a model citizen of the revolution and the other a classic victim; and finally the leaders themselves, including Pol Pot and Ieng Sary. They are the voices of the torturers and the victims.

It is as a witness that I came to write this book. For nearly two years I covered the war for the
Washington
Post
. Later I was one of two Western journalists allowed to visit Cambodia while the Khmer Rouge were in power. I
returned to Cambodia under Vietnamese occupation, to complete the initial research for this book. This revised edition is based on another ten years of research, including five more trips to Cambodia.

The story of the Khmer Rouge proved to be as simple and complex as the story of the Nazis' rise to power in modern Germany or Stalin's triumph in the Russian revolution. It is rooted in Cambodian history and not in the popular notions of Cambodia as a “paradise lost.” Before the 1970 war Cambodia had an enviable reputation as a culturally rich society, seemingly immune to the upheavals ravaging its neighbors—war and revolution to the east in Vietnam, disfiguring development and militarism to the west in Thailand. In contrast, Cambodia's largely unspoiled landscape and graceful people were so attractive, the country was routinely described as a welcome oasis if not a paradise.

These notions of a golden epoch were belied by Cambodia's war and subsequent revolution which nearly decimated the society But theorists looked for a foreign villain to explain the inexplicable—how a paradise could become a nightmare without warning. The three most commonly cited culprits were the importation of Maoist communist ideology, the war policy of the United States, particularly the 1973 U.S. bombing campaign, and later, a historic Vietnamese drive to conquer Cambodia.

While the United States and Vietnam do share responsibility for much of Cambodia's sorrows, ultimately Cambodians were the victims of their own leaders and their own traditions and history. The shimmering patina of a tropical paradise masked a country that had been told its people were threatened by extinction and whose rulers routinely encouraged a corollary belief in Cambodia's cultural and ethnic superiority. It is a country long accustomed to quarrelsome, despotic rulers who treated their subjects, or citizens, like children and saw Cambodia as one of history's great victims. And it is a country with a tradition of violence.

The Cambodian communist movement was an expression of these conflicting, desperate impulses, just as the Russian revolution was a reflection of that nation's heritage. This is how I present the Khmer Rouge movement in this book, as it grew out of Cambodia's history and shifting fortunes during the violent spasms of twentieth-century Asia. It is a heartbreaking tale for there was nothing inevitable about the rise of the Khmer Rouge. They came to power through a series of self-serving maneuvers and miscalculations by Cambodia's leaders and foreign nations; again, largely Vietnam and the United States.

It is also a cautionary tale. One of the most frightening aspects of the Khmer Rouge is the intent behind their madness. Much of the destruction of their revolution was done in the name of the future, or at least how the Khmer Rouge saw the future in countries calling themselves modern. In the name of efficiency and increased productivity, the Khmer Rouge abolished family life, individual life, the rhythms of agricultural life, and instituted a system of labor camp life throughout the entire country. The most frightening of futuristic fables was realized in this rural, third world country and not in the industrial world.

But fanaticism was in the air before the Khmer Rouge came to power, as was the hatred that led racial pogroms under Khmer Rouge rule. It was no accident that the Khmer Rouge chose the most radical of communist models and tried to revolutionize Cambodia overnight to prove the country's superiority. They were the heirs of the worst in Cambodia's past.

Among the witnesses who bring this tale to life are people who exhibited true dignity and courage. For despite their rulers and despite the travesties they have suffered from foreign nations, the Cambodians remain an unforgettable people, endowed with a culture that at its best is symbolized by the awesome yet sensitive beauty of the famous Angkor temples.

Elsewhere I acknowledge the experts and friends who helped and cheered me on while I undertook this study They are not responsible for the conclusions in this book, which are solely mine.

ELIZABETH BECKER
WASHINGTON, D.C.

The villages are burnt, the cities void;
The morning light has left the river view;
The distant followers have been dismayed;
And I'm afraid, reading this passage now
That everything I knew has been destroyed
By those whom I admired but never knew;
The laughing soldiers fought to their defeat
And I'm afraid most of my friends are dead.

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.

 

 

 

The Second Indochina War (1960–1975) was the Vietnam War. That was how it was known, that was the country being fought over. Laos and later Cambodia were countries brought into the fighting by both sides. There was never any question that the Vietnamese communists were the giants among their Indochinese allies, that the Vietnamese were the most equal among equals.

After 1975 the focus of attention shifted swiftly and dramatically from Vietnam to Cambodia. The Vietnam War gave way in peace to the Cambodian Debacle. Cambodia became synonymous with misery, death, destruction, and despair. And with mystery. It seemed unfathomable and unknowable why the Cambodian communists under the leadership of Pol Pot could undertake a bloody experiment in social restructuring that would lead to the deaths of as many as two million of their people immediately after a war that had devastated the country. The victims of this revolution understood least of all.

Mey Komphot was thirty-seven years old when the war in his country ended. The fighting began in 1970 and ended in the spring of 1975––it lasted only five years. It had not been a quagmire or a war of attrition such as the French and Americans considered their long, disastrous battle to deny the Vietnamese communists the independence they believed they had won in 1945. Cambodia's descent into misery had been precipitate and brutal, catching all Cambodians by surprise, especially men like Komphot.

He had watched his country's collapse from an extremely privileged position, as an executive in one of Phnom Penh's largest private banks. Sophisticated and intelligent, a bachelor with entree into the capital's elite circles, Komphot epitomized all that the Khmer Republic and its American sponsors claimed to be fighting to protect. But Komphot had grown so weary of war and so disgusted with the leadership in Phnom Penh that he wanted nothing more than that the war should end and the Khmer Rouge win as he knew they would.

Komphot knew very little about the Khmer Rouge, or Red Khmer. The Cambodian communists had not mounted sophisticated, successful political propaganda campaigns such as those of the Vietnamese communists. By design they had obscured their history and their ultimate aims while they fought the war.

Yet Komphot felt compelled to judge these communists and decide if he wanted the Khmer Rouge to win the war. His answer, finally, was a qualified yes. The Khmer Rouge could not be as awful as the leaders in Phnom Penh. In such a fashion, Komphot became a distant follower.

He reached this conclusion because he had faith in the few acknowledged Khmer Rouge leaders and because, he believed, most Cambodians shared a particular set of values. The leaders promoted by the Khmer Rouge during the war were men and women Komphot and his generation had long admired. In the early sixties they had made their mark in Phnom Penh as skilled intellectuals, writers, journalists, and politicians who resisted corruption—the disease that had kept Cambodian politics at medieval-court standards.

Komphot had known only one Khmer Rouge figure personally, and that was Khieu Ponnary. She was one of the country's first independent-minded women and a widely respected professor. She had taught Komphot during his first year at lycée, or high school, and he remembered her intelligence and vivid sense of Khmer nationalism. She had never betrayed her communist
sympathies in the classroom, nor those of her husband, who became infamous under the
nom de guerre
Pol Pot.

Khieu Ponnary and the other Khmer Rouge leaders were presumed communists, but in Phnom Penh most of the intelligentsia assumed the Khmer Rouge were more nationalist than communist, hence less dangerous. However, it had been more than a decade since Komphot and the rest of Phnom Penh had seen the Khmer Rouge leaders. They began disappearing from the capital during a witch hunt begun in 1963 by Prince Norodom Sihanouk. By 1967 all the prominent figures had abandoned the city for the jungle and a war of resistance. They left behind romantic reputations that haunted the Phnom Penh of Komphot's generation and colored expectations of what would happen once the war ended.

Komphot had created an unshakable fantasy about the Khmer Rouge and their plans after the war. He ignored wartime propaganda that cast them as ogres and held the view common in his circles that these nationalist Cambodians represented something resembling the Yugoslav variant of communism. If they won and established a communist government, Komphot reasoned, they would welcome the talents and support of professionals like Komphot. He knew little about communism or about the Khmer Rouge.

The Khmer Rouge promoted such illusions by exercising their power behind a united front army and government based in Beijing since 1970 and theoretically headed by the non-communist Prince Norodom Sihanouk.

What appeared as a weakness—the communists' inability to proclaim straightforwardly who they were because Sihanouk was their movement's figurehead—proved a master strategy. The Khmer Rouge did not appear to be a radical alternative to what had come before, merely a new variation on familiar Cambodian politicians. Thus, the Cambodian people followed the initial instructions of the Khmer Rouge when the war ended, obeyed their drastic orders in 1975, and marched into a life more miserable than any could imagine.

There had been clues, but they were easily overlooked. Komphot had heard stories of Khmer Rouge atrocities, but he had seen atrocities committed by the Phnom Penh government troops as well. Soldiers of the Khmer Republic's army (FANK in acronym) were known to behead the Khmer Rouge soldiers they captured, to slice open their bodies and eat their still-warm livers or disfigure them in revenge. Some commanders tried to prevent this practice, sanctioned by Cambodian custom. But atrocities were common enough for foreign photographers and reporters regularly to record the evidence, though after 1973, American publications refused to
print more atrocity photographs. Both sides were harsh to civilians and soldiers alike. Cruelty seemed a tactic of both armies, and Komphot assumed it would be abandoned after victory.

Fundamentally Komphot believed there would have been no war in Cambodia without the war in Vietnam. If the Vietnam War ended, so would Cambodia's and there would be peace. Komphot had to have faith in the Khmer Rouge because he had little else to believe in. All the other leaders of modern Cambodia had proved to be failures. Underlying that disappointment was his conviction, again common, that his relatively bountiful country had been betrayed by poor leadership. Allow the people and the country to develop without such figures and Cambodia would become one of the blessed nations of the world. Ironically, he and the Khmer Rouge shared that opinion but had drastically different concepts of the “people” and good leadership.