When the War Was Over (63 page)

Tao, the Sino-Khmer, remembered the shift. “They changed the line over the loudspeaker, in mass meetings, everywhere. They wanted everyone to support them. I believe they saw how startled the people were, how frightened they were, and this was not good because they needed soldiers.”

With restrictions between the old and new dropped, the army was now in a position to draft all young men, not only those who met the previous political criteria. These new recruits, many of them barely adolescents, were given little training—sometimes no more than two or three days—and then sent off to the front. The new army of Democratic Kampuchea resembled Lon Nol's old forces in its sloppy training and its air of hysteria more than it did the old Khmer Rouge force that had won the 1970—1975 war.

Fighting continued along the border in the summer, and the battles of July and August were fierce confrontations. People like Tao knew of the battles from rumors reaching cooperatives and not from the official propaganda broadcast over the ubiquitous loudspeakers. Tao thought the Vietnamese had invaded in the summer; there could be no other explanation for the army's appetite for more and more soldiers.

“After they took all the bachelors they drafted the really young males, boys really. Then they drafted the married young men. . . . Then they started drafting the old peasants, older men,” he said.

Tao and his fellow Sino-Khmers escaped the draft because the Khmer Rouge did not trust them in their army ranks. Despite the Vietnamese rhetoric that China was ordering the Cambodians into battle and was the true brain behind the war, the reality for Han Tao was otherwise. “To the last we Chinese were treated differently,” he said. “The Cambodians didn't want us in their army. We were still Chinks.”

Moreover, desite Pol Pot's reference in Beijing to the influence of Maoist thought on the Cambodian revolution, the party was suspicious of Chinese intentions. One survivor who worked in the foreign ministry claims she was criticized for her admiration of China. “But China is not a true friend,” a party figure told her, “[China] wants to colonize us.”

And Ieng Sary and other party figures continued to tell their cadre in closed private sessions that only Cambodia was following the correct revolutionary path. By 1978, after the overthrow of the Gang of Four, Sary said China was following the same path as revisionist Russia.

The army recruited Khmer soldiers and requisitioned material for the war. In the northwest that summer, Sisopha, the former nurse's aide who had become boss of a labor gang, grew fearful. Even though she had worked her way into the good graces of the Southwestern Zone cadre following the purge of the Northwestern Zone, she found there was scant reward for her,
her family, or anyone else. Rice disappeared suddenly from their diet. Unbeknownst to her, Son Sen had ordered large stocks of rice diverted from distribution in the cooperatives and stockpiled, instead, for the army. Rice was gathered up in all regions and stored in depots. Caches were set aside in the western hills should the government be forced to evacuate Phnom Penh.

Pol Pot had already declared 1978 the turning point of the revolution, the first stable year and a springboard for future success. The reality for Sisopha was: “We had to work hard, very hard, harder than before that summer. And we only had beans and red corn to eat, no rice.”

Moreover that summer the rains were heavy. Throughout peninsular Southeast Asia—in Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and southern Vietnam—the monsoon rains became floods. In August the rains destroyed much of the crop in Vietnam and Laos and damaged fields in Thailand and Cambodia. Some 200 people were reported killed because of the rains. Vietnam and Laos asked for emergency food relief. The Thai government said the flooding was the worst in recent memory. The waters of the Mekong River rose so high the river could not drain the fields of the four nations. Democratic Kampuchea, however, claimed the flood had not affected the country's ability to feed itself. “We are not beggars like the Vietnamese asking for food.” The official radio reported that the rice crop had not been “greatly impaired” by the flooding.

The people in the countryside, the people who had survived the more than three years of Pol Pot's revolution and the previous five years of war, saw the rains as a portent. The floods and typhoons of 1978, they said, pointed to new trouble ahead.

Slowly, as it was coming to an end, the revolution became better known to the people. The separate, divided universes of the old and the new, the favored and unfavored, were merging. The final push to quickly create a “prosperous nation with happy people” began in Phnom Penh in July. Ieng Sary declared this final stage in a speech to cadre and said that with the Vietnamese threat hovering over the country and the purge of the traitors, particularly So Phim, Cambodia was ready to move ahead, quickly. There was a sudden urgency to reach perfection.

That month the intellectuals held at a camp outside Phnom Penh were told that their poor treatment had been a mistake. From that time onward, their well-being would be personally guaranteed by Ieng Sary and the foreign ministry. They were promised working days of eight hours only, and a real day of rest every ten days. They hoped that the massacre of intellectuals was over. It was not. After a brief respite, men and women were being hauled off, their hands bound, and their deaths assured.

The intellectuals, most of whom had returned from overseas, thought they were being “rescued” by the very people who had betrayed them in the first place. Now, while these people accepted what liberalization was offered them, they hated Sary for every minute they had spent in his revolution. Whether they had rallied to his side when he was a student leader, or when he was a teacher, or later when he was a ranking member of the communist party, they all saw him as the traitor of what had been for them an honorable cause. These were the modern Cambodians who had been appalled by Sihanouk's corruption, who had wanted to improve—not destroy—the Khmer way of life.

They knew, at this stage, to accept the changes without comment. First they were told who was to blame for their previous mistreatment. They were given “documents” that purported to prove that Koy Thuon, the Northern Zone leader, had been an agent of the CIA; that So Phim had been an agent of Vietnam; that these and other traitors had caused havoc and confusion that had led to their misfortune. Thiounn Mumm lectured the intellectuals on the regime's “love” of the people. If any policies of the previous three years had caused grief in the country, it was the fault of these traitors, who had misinterpreted the revolutionary path in order to subvert it.

Throughout Phnom Penh, at the intellectuals' camp and in government offices, various leaders known for their severity were replaced with more moderate cadre. Ieng Sary spoke to the intellectuals to put the changes in perspective. “My comrades,” he said, “we are all in the same boat.” That boat was the nation and the revolution of Cambodia, which was under siege by Vietnam. Sary dismissed the idea that the party was somehow behind the massacres of the intellectuals. “The word ‘prison' doesn't exist in our vocabulary,” he said.

In September, Pol Pot gave a major address at a party conference in the capital. He unveiled his plan for “rapidly” industrializing the country, mechanizing agriculture, and inaugurating a revolutionary educational system. At one stage, Thiounn Mumm shared the podium with Pol Pot to explain this educational program. Mumm had been put in charge of technical education, another sign of Sary's influence over this last-gasp liberalization effort. Mumm put an intellectual's gloss on the program, which was little more than establishing a basic trade school in the capital.

That same month a group of intellectuals was taken on a tour of irrigation projects in Battambang province along with cadre from Phnom Penh who had not been outside the city since the revolution began. It was a privilege unimaginable just months earlier, and for some it brought the realization that the people in the countryside had suffered worse than they.

There were more attempts to ingratiate. The party's anniversary in September was celebrated with food and parties. The foreign ministry offices made a great feast and attended the cinema. The party transferred the uncle of Thiounn Mumm from a cooperative near Oudong to the intellectuals' camp so he could prepare a feast. He had managed the old Hôtel le Royale in Phnom Penh for years, and on this anniversary day he was permitted to test his old skills and bake a cake. The camp was allowed to eat
en famille
instead of in the usual fashion of segregation of men from women and adults from children. It was a simple, exquisite joy.

By October 1978 the two camps of intellectuals and former diplomats were merged and the liberalizations of life speeded up. In November the world seemed to have opened up again—for intellectuals and for some people elsewhere in Cambodia. Suddenly there was food to eat. Baskets of food. Fish, meat, vegetables, and eggs. Food people had not seen since the revolution began. The intellectuals and diplomats were given fish and meat every day. Sisopha, in the far-off Northwestern Zone, reported the same phenomenon. “Like a surprise, the rice came. A lot of rice with chickens, eggs, and coconuts. There were lots of melons. We didn't know where the food came from. Some people ate so much they died. I don't know why or how but they ate until they died.”

Like the new people in the Northwestern Zone, the intellectuals had to control their appetites carefully when their diets were suddenly enriched with daily meat and fish. Many of the men and women looked like skeletons from eating their regular rations of rice gruel and
petit cochon,
the name bestowed on the rats they caught and dined on. Flesh hung on their bodies; their skeletons appeared to have shrunk from the years of malnutrition. Their eyes bulged. They had escaped death, barely, and most felt it had been chance, not politics, that had saved them. As they grew stronger they had to control their anger as well.

Ieng Sary gave the intellectuals a small library with books in French and the pronouncements of Pol Pot in French and English. They were even granted the right to elect their own camp leaders in democratic fashion. Ieng Sary himself presided over the nomination and election. It seemed unreal, and it was.

Ieng Sary was the mastermind behind most of the liberalizations meant to convince the outside world that Democratic Kampuchea was a stable, well-run nation. Undoubtedly Sary had strong Chinese support for his initiatives. He used his new mandate to protect his friends as well as the intellectuals and diplomats in the Phnom Penh camps.

But his ministry was being used to house suspect cadre marked for further investigation and purges. As far as Pol Pot was concerned, the continuing military setbacks with the Vietnamese combined with the fundamental economic problems showing up despite the altered records were proof that there were traitors everywhere. And in his way of thinking, this meant that the “traitors” had to be the men in charge of the faltering economy and the losing armed forces. In early November, he ordered the arrest, torture, and execution of Von Vet, the deputy premier for the economy. It didn't matter that Von Vet had been personally recruited into the communist party by Pol Pot. There were fewer and fewer brakes on his murderous logic. He subsquently ordered the executions of everyone associated with Von Vet.

Pol Pot then cast suspicion on Son Sen, and by extension, those close to him including his brother Ni Kan who held the largely ceremonial post of chief of protocol at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under Ieng Sary. This was unfortunate for Sary since he had just gotten permission to “open up the country” to foreign guests without realizing his chief of protocol, who would be a regular chaperone of those guests, had jumped to the top of Pol Pot's list of suspected traitors.

Sary had gone to New York in October for the United Nations General Assembly to unveil Democratic Kampuchea's new look and use it against Vietnam. At the United Nations, Sary held a rare news conference, at which he made two announcements: that he had invited UN Secretary Kurt Waldheim to visit Cambodia and investigate charges of human rights abuses and that he would shortly issue invitations to foreign journalists for the same purpose. He also distributed photographs of Prince Norodom Sihanouk and his wife, Princess Monique. The world still viewed Sihanouk as a major leader of the third world, and these pictures were meant to answer questions about Sihanouk's whereabouts—there had been numerous rumors that he had been killed—and show Sihanouk's support for the revolution. Those photographs showed Sihanouk was alive, but the expression on his face revealed something less than happiness. Both he and Monique looked nervous and guarded, weary rather than ebullient.

Sary also distributed Cambodia's “Black Paper,” subtitled “Facts and Evidences of the Acts of Aggression and Annexation of Vietnam Against Kampuchea.” The “Black Paper” was the crux of Sary's mission. It purported to prove that Vietnam was solely responsible for the ominous threat of war between the two countries. But the document was an unreliable blend of abbreviated history, paranoia, and unexplained references to plots and traitorous networks that none but a few experts could follow, much less verify.

The invitation to Waldheim was delivered as Cambodia's response to growing international pressure to put an end to the killing in the country. Britain had led the protest the year earlier, with the U.S. Congress also calling for investigation by its own government.

Sary's invitation to Waldheim was a shock. Amnesty International immediately welcomed it, but Waldheim turned down Sary, saying that he could travel to Cambodia only if Vietnam also issued him an invitation; that is, if Vietnam agreed to the proposed trip. Waldheim said that since the UN was also considering measures to defuse the conflict between those two countries, a trip solely to Cambodia might be viewed as favoritism. Vietnamese officials, secretly preoccupied with war preparations to invade Cambodia, said they were in no position to invite Waldheim. Sary's move had failed. He undoubtedly believed that if Waldheim was in Cambodia, Vietnam could not possibly invade the country.