When the War Was Over (26 page)

The international press witnessed and reported most of these murders, including another massacre in the town of Takeo, south of the capital. There was an international outcry, and the U.S. embassy protested to Lon Nol. His actions were upsetting the fragile alliance between the South Vietnamese government headed by President Nguyen Van Thieu; the victims of Lon Nol's pogroms were loyal to Thieu, not the communists. And it was Thieu's soldiers who were fighting the North Vietnamese on Lon Nol's borders.

A cycle of recriminations between Phnom Penh and Saigon began. Thieu's troops looted their way across the country toward Phnom Penh. In one official complaint to the Saigon regime, Phnom Penh said that South Vietnamese soldiers had stolen $10,000 worth of automobile spare parts, tires, furniture, sewing machines, and rice in one sweep through Kompong Cham province. When these troops finally reached Phnom Penh in September, fighting broke out between Cambodian and Vietnamese soldiers.

In one of their dispatches to Washington, U.S. embassy officers in Phnom Penh described a duel between Khmer police and South Vietnamese sailors that ended in one death and twelve injuries. The reporting officer
said the incident was “certain to place further strain on the already taut Government of Vietnam-Government of the Khmer Republic relations.” Cambodian officers sent to South Vietnam for training were returning with furious stories of poor treatment ranging from racial slurs to misappropriated equipment. The disputes were becoming so numerous that one respected anti-war group in the United States predicted that without a communist victory, the Vietnamese of Saigon would take over Cambodia.

The Vietnamese in Cambodia were not the only targets. Lon Nol also went after the ethnic Chinese, the other type of foreign devil in his configuration of hell. Through the local press he campaigned against the greedy Chinese merchant class. Their sons did not join the army; the merchants were taking advantage of the war situation and raising prices; their loyalty to Cambodia was in doubt, and so too was the loyalty of Sino-Khmers. One pro-government newspaper warned that the Chinese of Phnom Penh might reap the same “bitter souvenir” as the Chinese of Indonesia, who were slaughtered in the 1965 uprising.

The educated elite of the country finally began to comprehend the scope of Lon Nol's holy war. They had not taken part in the pogroms, nor had they actively protested them. During the debates over the constitution for the new republic they had tried to put an end to the notion of “racial purity.” In the first draft, Lon Nol had begun with the phrase “We, the Khmer people, descendants of the Khmer-Mon,” referring to the quasi-anthropological racial category for the Cambodian people. He also had referred to the “Angkorican era” as the apogee of Khmer civilization. Delegates to the assembly became alarmed. Few Cambodians are “pure” in the sense Lon Nol meant to put into law. While Cambodians are largely from the same racial stock, many have mixed ancestors. Besides Vietnamese and Chinese ancestors, Khmers can have relatives from groups as varied as the Portuguese, Indian, and Indonesian. One delegate rose to complain that such a constitution would be construed as racist. And racism, he said, was “the source of many evils, such as war.”

Use of the term Khmer-Mon as well as reference to Angkor could be the underpinnings for wars of foreign conquest. Now they wondered if Lon Nol had dreams of restoring the entire ancient Khmer Empire, of regaining the “lost provinces” from South Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos. The politicians promptly vetoed all the offending passages from the constitution.

Their fears were realistic. Lon Nol was one of those Cambodians who could not bring himself to call South Vietnam any name other than Kampuchea Krom, “lower Cambodia.” In the sixties, as Sihanouk's military chief, he had encouraged the Khmer Krom in South Vietnam to resist both North
and South Vietnamese, communists and noncommunists alike, for the sake of greater Cambodia. The first bulletin published by Lon Nol's Khmer-Mon Institute had prominently featured a map of the greatest extent of the old Khmer Empire.

Lon Nol later spelled out his ideas in a slim volume entitled
Neo Khmerisme
in its official French translation. Published by the government in Phnom Penh as Lon Nol's manifesto, the work is a shallow reading of Khmer history written to glorify Cambodia and the Khmer race to the detriment of its neighbors. In one paragraph Lon Nol interpreted the fall of the Angkor Empire:

Lon Nol, the “Black Papa,” then described the current situation and the modern enemy—the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, whom he saw as the modern children of the Annamites who had conquered Kampuchea Krom. Their goal, he wrote, was to “systematically destroy our socioeconomic structure and our civilization: they want not simply to make our people subservient to them but to change our way of life, to modify our way of thinking and abolish our religious beliefs.”

He said the country was embroiled in a war for the very existence of the Khmer race and culture against an “implacable enemy . . . the most cruel and most barbaric in history.” But he had full confidence that his holy warriors would defeat the Vietnamese. “During five centuries our people have known miseries and calamities, but in the face of all these vicissitudes—occupied territory, people under domination—the Khmer, thanks to their determination, to their indomitable courage, have lifted their heads and are recovering liberty. . . . We can restore our historic glory that gave our country the titles ‘the island of power' and ‘Chenla the Rich'; it is possible that
our generation can fashion from their hands a new Khmer state, rich, independent, and powerful.”

In little time the educated class of Phnom Penh felt trapped in Lon Nol's holy war. People like the banker Mey Komphot began to remember Sihanouk, who had encouraged the people to forget their chauvinism and live in peace with their neighbors, with a new fondness. Some who had cheered the prince's demise and flocked to the new republic's side realized they had been fooled; Lon Nol had no intention of allowing Cambodia to become a democracy. It was becoming a Buddhist military state. The most popular war poster, chosen in a contest sponsored by the U.S. embassy, was an adaptation of characters from the ancient
Ramayana
epic, recast as modern characters. The demons wore the conical hat with a red star of the Vietnamese communist army, they rode upon modern tanks, not mythical animals, and they carried automatic rifles rather than swords. But they were just as powerless before the serene image of Buddha, seated upon a lotus, a halo of yellow, orange, green, and blue emanating from his holy brow and defeating the Vietnamese devils, burning on the ground and drowning at sea. Protecting Buddha at the base of his pedestal was the White Crocodile.

In the countryside the poster was used as an altarpiece; the peasants took it as an object of worship. Mistakenly, Lon Nol thought he could rally the peasants to his side in wartime simply by saying God, or Buddha, was on his side and by painting Vietnamese atheists as the enemy. He refused to believe his real opponent was a Cambodian communist movement, which had been working with the peasantry after Lon Nol oversaw the repressive
ramassage.

Lon Nol built his Buddhist holy war on a number of false ideas. His belief that the U.S. commitment to the war effort was a blank check was one of his most serious errors.

Lon Nol never received public, long-term support from the United States, there was not even a common agreement on goals. Together with his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, Richard M. Nixon devised a plan to hand over the fighting of the war to Asian soldiers after his election in 1968. American troops but not American money would be withdrawn. The United States would support its allies' war effort until American objectives had been reached—largely, the release of American prisoners of war and the complete withdrawal of American soldiers with a minimum of casualties. Widening the war into Cambodia, with the secret bombings of 1969 and the “incursion” of 1970, fit the scheme well. The Cambodian soldiers could tie down the Vietnamese communist army while American soldiers were withdrawn. The U.S. plan was exactly the opposite of the strategy of
the North Vietnamese. They were willing to fight the first bloody years of battle against Lon Nol's army in order to give the Cambodian communists time to train and build their own army.

Nixon and Kissinger had no intention of fighting a war against Asian communism to the finish, though this is not what they told their new ally in Phnom Penh. Various emissaries were sent from Washington—Alexander M. Haig, Vice President Spiro T Agnew, and even Kissinger himself—to tell Lon Nol that the American president gave his wholehearted backing to the goal of defeating the Vietnamese communists. Lon Nol ignored all evidence to the contrary: There were no formal agreements spelling out such support; the U.S. Congress had restricted American war-making powers immediately after the May 1970 U.S. incursion into Cambodia and had put it into law that no more than 200 people could work for the U.S. government in Cambodia, and had severely limited the role of the U.S. military in the country at the same time. Congress wanted the war in Cambodia to end before it began.

A dance of deceit and manipulation ensued between the American president and the U.S. Congress, and between the president and his ally Lon Nol in Phnom Penh. American officials in Cambodia were treated like proconsuls in deference to Phnom Penh's complete reliance on U.S. aid. But in Washington, the Nixon administration hid the cost and scope of the U.S. involvement, purposely confusing the nature and seriousness of the war until objectives in Vietnam were reached. What aid was available was sent first to the military, where it could be best disguised and where U.S. interests centered. The Americans gave no humanitarian aid until 1972, and then not nearly enough to care for the growing number of refugees, the wounded in crowded hospitals, and the thousands going hungry as rice fields became battlefields.

The chief concern of the Nixon administration remained how to withdraw from Vietnam without appearing to lose. News reports about the complexity of the Cambodian War and the incompetence, corruption, and illusions of Lon Nol were unwelcome and ignored in Washington. William Harben, the political officer who wrote the study of Lon Nol and questioned the American role in Cambodia, was removed from his duties at the embassy in Phnom Penh. All Washington wanted to know about Lon Nol was that he controlled the army and was willing to fight the Vietnamese communists.

As a result, the American war effort in Cambodia regularly worked to the opponent's advantage. The various U.S. bombing campaigns were a prime example. The original secret and illegal 1969 bombing raids inside Cambodia
were intended to destroy Vietcong sanctuaries and relieve pressure on the Americans and South Vietnamese soldiers in South Vietnam. When the United States mounted the same strikes in the border area after the 1970 coup, the raids theoretically were intended to help Lon Nol's troops fight the Vietnamese. They had the contrary effect.

In order to avoid these American bombing raids, the Vietnamese communist forces moved deeper and deeper inside Khmer territory, creating an even more serious threat to the Phnom Penh army. Before the coup the Vietnamese had had to show some respect for Sihanouk's “neutrality” by not straying too far from the agreed-upon sanctuary areas. With Lon Nol in power, the Vietnamese felt no reason to respect territorial boundaries, much less neutrality. Despite questions about Cambodian territorial integrity from their Khmer Rouge allies, the North Vietnamese stretched across Cambodia, fighting the first two years of the war against Lon Nol and taking charge over a great deal of Cambodian territory.

Moreover, the civilians fled from the areas targeted for American bombing, not willing to stay anywhere near the unpredictable terror in the sky. They abandoned large tracts of land in the eastern provinces, which were easily recaptured by the Vietnamese communists and used by the fledgling Khmer communist army as rearguard training bases. Lon Nol's own officers complained that these raids were counterproductive, but they were ignored by their leader. Lon Nol was grateful for any and all American support and only asked for more.

He pursued his war plans without a real strategy. (The Americans only occasionally tried to suggest to Lon Nol that he could devise better military plans.) He continued to rely on sorcery and ignore his commanding officers, exercising his growing secular and divine powers when he encountered dissent. When questioned, he invoked the rule of
kboun,
divine inspiration. When politicians interfered, he began usurping civilian power. In less than two years he effectively destroyed the capability of his own forces and in about the same time took over complete control of the government.

The disaster began in August 1970, when Lon Nol ordered his army's first major offensive of the war. The North Vietnamese had already taken over half of the country's territory. Lon Nol instructed his army to devise a strategy to recapture the lost areas, particularly in the east. He settled on a campaign to open up a road link from the capital to the eastern town of Skuon. Lon Nol's army was dispatched, and the fighting against the North Vietnamese ended in a draw with Lon Nol no nearer his goal of recapturing the eastern section of Cambodia.