When the War Was Over (57 page)

The Khmer Rouge were creating this threat from Vietnam. Disagreements and potential conflicts abounded between Phnom Penh and Hanoi. The two countries had yet to settle their 1975 border dispute that had led to the
Mayaguez
fiasco. Cambodia refused to entertain discussion or negotiations with the Vietnamese on their proposal to establish special relations between the two countries. But those problems might have simmered for years without bursting into a confrontation.

In 1977 the Pol Pot regime decided it was strong enough to press the border issue with Vietnam. Having eliminated the “petty bourgeois” threat but failed to solve Cambodia's problems, the leadership became convinced there must be other enemies “boring from within.” Suspicion fell on zone secretaries, including those who were vulnerable to fantastic allegations that their old contacts with the Vietnamese had turned them into “Vietnamese agents.” The Khmer Rouge were searching for a new enemy to blame for the awful problems overwhelming their country.

In the first months of 1977 the Khmer Rouge adopted an aggressive border policy and forcibly occupied disputed territory on the Thai and Vietnamese borders. News of the attacks reached the west. Thai villagers residing in what Phnom Penh considered Cambodian territory were brutally murdered. But Thailand was not the same kind of threat as Vietnam. There was no history of Thai interference in Cambodian communist politics.

And the Thais did not possess the military might nor the will of the Vietnamese. During his rule, Sihanouk had won back the mountain temple of Preah Vihear from Thailand by pleading Cambodia's case at the World Court; Thailand had accepted the ruling in Cambodia's favor. Neither Sihanouk shut up in the royal palace nor the Khmer Rouge officers patrolling the eastern borders with Vietnam would have accepted news of an imminent Thai invasion with the belief or the fear that rumors of war with Vietnam raised.

An attack by Vietnam was one of the few threats that could strike a chord in the desperate, jumbled minds of all Cambodians in 1977. After two years under the Khmer Rouge, after the five previous years of disastrous warfare, history and reality were utterly confused. The people were living in isolation wards, cut off from all objective sources of information or news. They knew next to nothing about the leaders still hiding behind the mask of Angka. The official radio broadcast only crude propaganda reports about the country and the world.

Angka and the previous Khmer leaders—Prince Sihanouk and Lon Nol—were scrambled together in their minds in circles of incomprehension, along with the country's old allies and enemies. Few could remember whether the United States, China, or Vietnam had been a “friend” or “enemy” under the various Cambodian regimes. During the modern period those labels had changed sufficiently to raise doubts and questions in the most literate minds who had followed Cambodian politics. Most Cambodians, moreover, had been shut out of politics and remembered only vaguely the muffled results of Sihanouk's balancing acts of diplomacy, Lon Nol's holy war against the Vietnamese, and the Khmer Rouge war-era denunciations of the United States.

Few Cambodians, however, had escaped the insistent colonial and later nationalist teachings that instilled in them a cultural fear of the Vietnamese and the warnings that the Khmers were a threatened race. The Khmer Rouge both used those fears and were used by them. They settled on imagining a Vietnamese threat almost reflexively. Lon Nol had prepared the ground for them during the war. And the Khmer Rouge did not try to counter any of the old, ferocious images of the Vietnamese once they came to power. Nor had they encouraged their own cadre to view the Vietnamese as trustworthy comrades. The Khmer Rouge leadership gave some credit to the Chinese, but the Vietnamese were kept at a safe distance in their propaganda after 1975.

Now, as they sought to blame a foreign power for their own problems, the Khmer Rouge capitalized on Lon Nol's ugly stories of Vietnamese savagery
as well as fear in the party itself of Vietnamese intentions. After the middle of 1977, Phnom Penh proclaimed that Vietnam was preparing to act upon its oldest ambitions to “swallow up” Cambodia. But unlike the more prudent Vietnamese, who were simultaneously raising the specter of a traditional Chinese threat to themselves, the Cambodians overstepped the mark. They not only opened the wounds of an old rivalry, they attacked Vietnam and dared the Vietnamese to take advantage of “an historic opportunity.”

The Khmer Rouge preparations for border warfare took on unusual and often contradictory dimensions. As always, it resulted in awful slaughter. Pol Pot believed he had finally consolidated his power and was ready to confront all comers so he brought his party out in the open. In September 1977, on the anniversary of the party, Pol Pot declared that the country was run by the Communist Party of Kampuchea and that he was the party's leader. (He had already been named the prime minister in 1976.) He then went on to Bejing and Pyongyang to show himself to the world and warn of trouble ahead. This satisfied the Chinese demand that Phnom Penh clarify and begin improving its world image, particularly if the Khmer Rouge were preparing to fight the Vietnamese.

From the end of 1977 through 1978 the Khmer Rouge, through miscalculation and stupidity, transformed what they hoped would be a useful, limited border dispute with Vietnam into a full war, in part by saying only total war would fend off the Vietnamese threat. They made it inevitable that Cambodia's worst fears would be realized. It was more than a case of self-fulfilling prophecy, it was the culmination of the mentality that had guided Democratic Kampuchea. The Khmer Rouge instigated the border war both to keep Vietnam at bay and to show that they were the ultimate nationalists and saviors of Cambodia. They hoped to control and use the dispute to solidify their regime. Instead, they proved themselves too mad to control the war and the ultimate traitors by literally inviting the Vietnamese to walk in and take over Cambodia.

Previously the Khmer Rouge had destroyed the society in order to save it, had created and then massacred “enemies” in defense of their notion of revolution. Now they were gambling with the entire country in order to protect it. They were, in fact, marching toward an apocalypse.

Even though Pol Pot's belief in his own infallibility led him to think he was stronger than ever, this was the opposite of the truth. From the records kept on rice production, Pol Pot was given figures that showed the country's
harvest was improving—in 1976 some 1,900,000 tons of rice were produced, in 1977 some 2,700,000 tons, theoretically doubling the rice available for consumption. The validity of these figures is highly questionable, however. Cooperatives were required to send reports to their superiors every ten days, and cooperatives learned early that if the reports did not square with expectations they would be punished.

The people who slaved to grow that rice certainly were not reaping the benefits. Not only was the harvest undoubtedly smaller than Center figures, but ever larger amounts were confiscated by the Center to feed the army and the areas that registered deficits, and—according to the government—for export to China, Singapore, and Africa. Moreover, by the middle of 1977, the Center informed all the zones that they had to implement the earlier order enforcing communal dining, the move that further diminished the amount of food for the people.

In the middle of 1977, with the people weaker, more prone to disease, and more discouraged by the revolution, the Center ordered that the population be pushed further. Armed with their arbitrary and optimistic figures about agricultural production, the Center declared that by July 1977 the country was self-sufficient in food and ready for the second phase of development—building up modern agriculture. The people were becoming “masters of the water” due to the construction of flimsy new irrigation systems, according to the party. The base of the revolution was declared economically and politically stable, the two areas being indistinguishable in their minds.

The new four-year plan for 1977 through 1980 promised to take badly needed resources away from the cooperatives to be invested in the state farms and plantations whose produce eventually would feed new agroindustry. The plan emphasized production for sugar refineries and textile, plywood, glass, cement, rubber, and jute factories. State farms and plantations had been established beginning in 1976, using mobile youth brigades. The fruits of this industrialization were to be exported, however, again robbing the people of the benefits of their labor. Processed rubber along with jute and kapok were to become major export items to help fill the depleted government treasury.

This was criminal perversion of the self-sufficiency the Khmer Rouge claimed as the moral and economic genius of their revolution. The regime had cut the country off from the benefits of the international marketplace, but not from the travesties. Self-sufficiency was a lie. Without Chinese aid, Democratic Kampuchea could not have survived. The regime was using its
own people as cheap slave labor and selling their goods to the Chinese, who hardly gave them market rates in return. Instead of wisely procuring goods needed in their country from the international market and concentrating on native industry and produce, the regime forced the people to make absolutely everything they needed by hand. Then the regime took away the best that was produced and sold it at reduced prices abroad. It was not a system of self-sufficiency but of self-destruction.

In 1977 the government implemented a national work schedule that theoretically guaranteed three days of rest for the first time—the 10th, 20th, and 30th of each month. More often than not, cooperatives either ignored the schedule or used those days to hold mass meetings for “political education” that revolved around harvest schedules and quotas and during which criticisms were meted out. In fact, the work schedule continued harsh and uncompromising.

Without saying it, the Khmer Rouge exhibited the strong biases of the urban bourgeoisie they claimed to despise. Their attitudes were a new wrinkle on the old French colonial notion that since the lazy Cambodian peasants could pluck food off the trees and somehow survive, they refused to work hard and get ahead as was required if Cambodia was to become modern. The Khmer Rouge criticized the old system for allowing women to stay home and teenagers to study without earning their keep. Thiounn Prasith, spokesman at the foreign ministry, exemplified this attitude: “In the former society, peasants worked only three or four months a year. With two buffalos they could produce only five tons of rice. Now with the cooperatives we have organized them so they can work all year round. . . . In the old society the wife stayed at home and only the husband worked. Now everybody works. . . . Especially the young girls and boys who only danced and ate in the old society.”

Only a former member of the aristocracy like Prasith could believe that rural women “did not work” in the old society, that raising a family, keeping a home, and sharing in the backbreaking labor of rural life were not “work.” Nor did the majority of Cambodia's youth fritter away their time, particularly in rural Cambodia, where most had to quit school early to help their families in the fields.

Just as absurd was the assumption that modern education was useless in Cambodia's quest for rapid development and modernization in Pol Pot's revolution. There are ideological roots to this idea, emanating from China and fully expressed by the know-nothingness of the Cultural Revolution. But by 1977 there was a practical reason for keeping schools closed and the youth
working in the fields, the army, and the bureaucracy. The regime trusted fewer and fewer adults, the purges were killing off the older cadre, and as always, the regime turned to the young blank tablets of Cambodian teenagers to run their revolution. As Prasith boasted: “You can see that all the revolutionary workers are young. . . . Revolution creates a new generation.”

The “revolutionary youth” were younger and younger. In July 1977, after the regime had declared the revolutionary base secure, the party opened up its ranks for new recruits who were nearly all young teenagers.

At the same time the Center shifted tactics and targets. The regime tried to put an end to “class warfare” within the cooperatives: There had been too many disruptions, too much chaos and bloodshed beyond the Center's control, and too great a loss in production. Now the Center put its full force behind a new witch hunt within its own party and bureaucratic ranks. The “intellectuals” having been swept away, the new target was Veterans who could be accused of favoring the peasants as well as working for the Vietnamese. Phnom Penh was preparing for a border war with Vietnam and wanted no traitors in positions of importance. The security police eventually centered its investigation on the Eastern Zone, where the war would be fought and where traitors would be the most harmful.