The Beginning

 CHAPTER 24

The Beginning

WHEN THE first strange soldiers walked along Monivong Boulevard early on the morning of April 17, they waved as the townspeople cheered, embraced them and wept. Small children danced around, the government ordered all troops to cease fire. At last, it seemed to those who saw the scene, the fratricide was over, guns would be laid aside, the “gentle, smiling Khmers” would reunite.

It was a cruel deception, and a short one. This first contingent was a tiny group, mostly students from Phnom Penh acting, some say, under the influence of Lon Nol’s brother Lon Non, who still apparently imagined that victory could be denied the Communists if only a new government seized power from Long Boret. In less than two hours, the Khmer Rouge themselves arrived.

They marched in from all sides of the city, those from the south arriving first. All in black, wearing checked scarves and Ho Chi Minh sandals, their most obvious qualities were their youth and their exhaustion. Hung around with bandoliers and shouldering their AK-47s, they strode through the town.

Within a few hours they had stationed themselves at strategic crossroads all over the city. They did not smile much, and the relief with which most people had begun the day began to dissipate; joy was replaced by concern, concern by trepidation, trepidation by fear.

Toward the end of the morning a platoon of the young victors marched into the grounds of the Preah Ket Melea hospital. Many of the doctors had already fled, and here, as in most other hospitals, patients lay untended in filth and agony. A mother had been sitting motionless with her children; she waved the flies off the bloated, patchy body of one dying baby. Wrapped in brown paper beside her, its feeding bottle by its head, lay the dead body of her other child. A soldier with a gaping, untreated stomach wound gasped for water he could not have swallowed. The corridors, on which bodies, alive and dead, were piled, were awash with blood and excrement.

The soldiers marched through the wards, and then they ordered all those patients who could walk to get off their beds and push out through the doors those who could not move. And so, in the heat of the day, a most dreadful parade began.

From hospitals all over the city crawled and hobbled the casualties of the war, the first victims of the “peace.” Men with no legs bumped down stairs, and levered themselves on skinny arms along the street; blind boys laid their hands on the shoulders of crippled guides, soldiers with one foot and no crutches dragged themselves away, parents carried their wounded children in plastic bags that oozed blood. Beds were pushed slowly, jolting along, the blood and plasma bottles breaking. One father stumbled through the heat with his daughter tied in a sheet around his neck. A man with a foot hanging only by skin to the end of his leg begged Father François Ponchaud, a Jesuit priest, for refuge as he passed his house. The priest refused him, feeling as he did so that he had lost the last shred of human dignity. With thousands of others the man stumbled along toward the countryside.

This was only one stage in the purification of the city. At the same time soldiers ordered everyone out of the grounds of the Hotel Phnom, where the Red Cross had hoped to establish a neutral zone. Many Cambodians and almost all the foreigners who remained in Phnom Penh now made their way to the French embassy, which, despite Sihanouk’s order to close, was still manned by the vice-consul. All together, about 800 foreigners and 600 or more Cambodians, among them Sirik Matak, now facing the consequences of his brave refusal of John Dean’s escape offer, crowded into the compound.

It afforded no refuge. Within forty-eight hours, the vice-consul was informed by the Khmer Rouge that Cambodia was owned by its people and that the new government recognized no such concepts as territoriality or diplomatic privilege; if he did not expel all the Cambodians then the lives of the foreigners would also be forfeit. Cambodian women married  to foreigners could remain; Cambodian men in the same situation could not. A few marriages were hastily arranged so that some women could acquire French citizenship. No resistance was offered. The foreigners stood and wept as their husbands, friends, lovers, servants, colleagues were hustled through the embassy gates.

Within a fortnight the foreigners were taken out of the country in trucks. Almost none of those Cambodians has ever reappeared. The new authorities later announced that Sirik Matak had been executed. So was Prime Minister Long Boret, who had surrendered to the victors with great dignity. So was Lon Nol’s brother Lon Non.

When the hospitals had been emptied, it was the turn of the ordinary townspeople and the refugees. They were ordered to abandon their houses, their apartments, their shacks, their camps. They were told to take with them only the food they could carry. Those who were separated from their families were not allowed to seek them. No demurral was allowed. As the sun began to sink that afternoon, men, women and children all over Phnom Penh straggled bemused out of the side streets and onto the highways. The roads became clogged; people could shuffle forward only a few yards at a time. In the crush, hundreds of families were split, and as they moved on more and more people fell under the strain. The old and the very young were the first to go; within a few miles of the city center more and more bodies were to be seen lying where their relatives had been forced to leave them.

Out on the roads the evacuees found that the Communists had accumulated stocks of food in places. But these and supplies of water were not adequate for more than two and a half million people. When the townspeople asked how they were to eat, where they could find drugs, where they were to go, the response was one with which they were soon to become familiar. “Angka” or “Angka Loeu”—“The Organization” or “Supreme Organization”—would provide. Angka would instruct them. The nature of Angka was not clear to the evacuees at first, but within hours millions of Cambodians had realized that its orders, transmitted through the fierce young soldiers who supervised their trek, were to be obeyed instantly, and that complaints were often met by immediate execution. As they walked into that first night of April 17, 1975, they were told that from now on only Angka ruled and that Cambodia was beginning again. This was “Year Zero.”

It is not the purpose of this book to describe conditions in Cambodia, or Democratic Kampuchea, as the country was renamed, in Year Zero.

and the years that followed it, in minute detail. * Information on conditions there has been difficult to obtain and often impossible to verify. In April 1975, Cambodia was almost completely cut off from the outside world, and for three years it hardly opened its frontiers, except to Chinese technicians and advisers. Throughout that time it was in a state of siege; the new regime was engaged in wars against the country’s past and against its external enemies.

The principal sources of news were refugees who fled to Thailand, and Radio Phnom Penh, the official voice of Democratic Kampuchea, and then refugees in Vietnam and the Vietnamese media. When the refugees first arrived in Thailand in the summer of 1975, they brought such terrible tales that there was a tendency among Western journalists and experts to dismiss them; they seemed to fit too neatly with the predictions of blood bath that American officials had been making for years in Vietnam and that had not, in the event, proved accurate there. Refugees, it was argued, inevitably decry the land they have fled. But refugees’ descriptions have often proved accurate enough; those from Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s provide two contemporary examples. Moreover, people who fled from different parts of Cambodia over a three-year period to either Thailand or Vietnam spoke of Khmer Rouge conduct in similar terms. Their accounts were indirectly underwritten by Radio Phnom Penh’s explanations of government policies and then, in 1978, by the commentaries that the Vietnamese media made on Democratic Kampuchea. When the bias of all these sources was discounted they tended to complement rather than contradict one another and provided a consistent, if not necessarily complete, account of life in Democratic Kampuchea.

"It seemed a vast and somber work camp where toil was unending, where respite and rewards were nonexistent, where families were abolished and where murder was used as a tool of social discipline. The refugees claimed that after that terrible march out of Phnom Penh and other towns the 'new people' had to write biographies of themselves. Anyone, they claimed, associated with the Lon Nol government—officers in the army, civil servants, teachers, policemen—risked death. So, they said, did those who were educated, those who questioned the Angka or complained, those who made love outside of marriage, and those who...

*Readers who wish to obtain a full account of the nature of Khmer Rouge rule should read Cambodia: Year Zero, by François Ponchaud. The French Jesuit lived ten years in Cambodia until May 1975 and has devoted most of his time since to trying to understand Khmer Communism."

could in any way be associated with Vietnam. The wives and families of these “traitors” faced execution too. The manner of execution was often brutal. Babies were torn apart limb from limb, pregnant women were disemboweled. Men and women were buried up to their necks in sand and left to die slowly. A common form of execution was by axe handles to the back of the neck. That saved ammunition.

During 1977 and 1978 the purges extended into the Angka itself, and so an increasing number of Khmer Rouge officials themselves began to flee to Thailand. They confirmed the stories that earlier refugees, their victims, related.

In 1978, under pressure of a new war with Vietnam, the country began to open slightly. Relations with other Southeast Asia nations were strengthened, and trade was increased. A group of Yugoslav journalists were invited to visit. They produced articles and a film in which they made only a thin attempt to disguise their dislike of the regime. Scandinavian ambassadors on a visit from Peking were dismayed by what they saw.

Three years after its fall, Phnom Penh was still an almost empty city. Some quarters were carefully tended. In others, wrecked cars lay where they had been abandoned in April 1975, and grass grew through the cobblestones. Some parks and gardens were now vegetable gardens; shops, hotels and kiosks were all closed. None of the apparatus of modern government existed; almost every office in the various ministries was deserted. About ten thousand workers were trucked in daily to run the few services essential to the Angka’s leadership. There was no postal system, no currency, no telephone. The main link to the outside world was one fortnightly flight to Peking. The few foreign diplomats stationed in Phnom Penh were confined to their houses in a single street, refused permission to communicate with each other, and denied such normal diplomatic privileges as secure mail or radio contact with their capitals.

Both the Scandinavians and the Yugoslavs noted that young people were far more in evidence than the old. In factories, lathes were worked by children so small they had to stand on boxes to reach them; at the Port of Kompong Som, small boys manned the docks and crewed fishing boats. Children were servicing Phnom Penh, and the Scandinavians said they saw only young people in the fields they passed. The diplomats refused to speculate on what had happened to the adults, but one of them said of the country, “It was like an absurd film. It was even more difficult to deny, and it demanded an attempt at explanation.”

The first act of Khmer Rouge rule—the instant evacuation of Phnom Penh and other towns in April 1975—symbolized its absolute nature. Such an action was unprecedented in recent revolutionary history. The Chinese did not empty Shanghai, the Algerians left Algiers, Castro was prepared to face up to the corruption of Havana. After the event several explanations were offered by Cambodian Communist officials. The first of them was the problem of feeding the urban population. By April 1975, Cambodia was destitute. Vast areas of the countryside were desolated by bombardment and neglect, and about three and a half million people in the cities were totally dependent upon the inadequate American airlift. U.S. government documents show that after this was ended by the rocketting of Pochentong airport on April 11, the government possessed stocks that would have fed the population for a most ten days. Private hoarding may have been considerable—François Ponchaud estimates that there may have been about one month’s supply of food in the city—but when the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh on April 17 they faced an acute food crisis.

The Communists lacked the transport necessary to move supplies into the cities, particularly Phnom Penh. As the American government itself formally acknowledged, there was no way in which the urban population could be fed in place without outside help and, specifically, without an airlift. By its nature such help could be provided only by the United States, or by the United Nations, or perhaps by the independent relief organizations. Each of these presented the Khmer Communists with obvious political problems. American aid was out of the question. The United Nations had twice denied the GRUNK a seat in the General Assembly and to retain Lon Nol there, while the relief organizations had been working, in effect, for the Khmer Rouge’s enemy, sustaining those who had fled their control. if the victims wished to seek help from none.

*The U.S. embassy's weekly summary of events for the State Department, "The Khmer Report," of April 1, 1975, noted that "Opening rice stocks March 31 amounted to 6,122 metric tons representing a nine-day supply based on daily distribution of 545 metric tons to the population at large and 100 metric tons under P.L. 480 Title II program. The rice airlift increased in the last two days to 20 and 23 sorties which compensated for interruptions on March 23 and March 28. The daily average since the inception of the airlift on February 27 now stands at 12.3 sorties/$05 metric tons." The draft U.S. AID Termination Report subsequently noted that "As of mid-April GKR [Government of the Khmer Republic] owned rice stocks to feed the estimated two to three million people who lived in Phnom Penh and the enclaves or served in the FANK (otherwise termed the 'rice-deficit population') were about 6,500 metric tons." There were, of course, other foods besides rice. A U.N. official, W. G. Sampson, later wrote that he saw abundant supplies of fish and vegetables around Phnom Penh in March 1975. of these three, the only alternative was to take the people to where at least the possibility of food existed.

But the food imperative cannot fully explain the evacuation. Other government-held towns, like Battambang, did not present the same logistical problems—yet they too were summarily emptied. Moreover, supplies in the countryside were limited. Over the past three years and in particular since the end of the American bombing in 1973, the Khmer Rouge had repaired some of the worst damage in the areas they controlled, had rigorously collectivized agriculture, and had accumulated some rice stocks. Exactly how large these were is not known, but there is no evidence that they were adequate to feed the population of the entire country for long. The starvation the people experienced through the summer of 1975 was, according to refugees, far worse than anything during the war.

Furthermore, even if abundant stocks in the countryside had existed, they might have explained the principle of the evacuation, but not its absolute, brutal nature, its failure to make provision for the sick, the very young and the old. Such behavior was dictated by political priorities. To understand these one has to consider such factors as the comparative sizes of the forces involved and the expectations the Cambodian Communists held of their enemies.

The reactions of the world outside to a Khmer Rouge victory must have been nearly impossible for the men in the jungle to predict. But the historical fear of Khmer leaders that their country would be swallowed up can scarcely have been more acute than in April 1975. To the west were 44 million Thais with a strong army and economy, and the backing of the United States. To the east was Vietnam, which was about to be reunited after thirty years into a nation of 48 million with all the captured military hardware that the United States had poured in over the past decade. In the middle there were somewhere between seven and eight million Khmers, almost all of them exhausted, about half of them crammed into the towns. Huge areas of the countryside, particularly the eastern borders with Vietnam, were uninhabited and undefended.

Although the North Vietnamese had, at Chinese insistence, allowed more supplies of arms down the Trail, relations between them and the Khmer Rouge leadership had continued to deteriorate through 1974 and early 1975. Almost the whole length of the frontier, including the offshore islands, where oil deposits were thought to lie, was in dispute. We know now that the indigenous Cambodian Communists feared that Hanoi intended to incorporate a socialist Cambodia into a Vietnamese-dominated Indochinese Federation. Radio Phnom Penh has declared that "they wanted to swallow us in 1970, but they could not. They entered into negotiations in 1973 in an attempt to swallow us, but they could not succeed. They tried again in 1975." According to the Cambodians, Hanoi's plan in 1975 was to capture Saigon and then immediately march upon Phnom Penh "in order to impose their control over us. This time again, they were a step behind Cambodia. Cambodia won victory before them." Saigon fell thirteen days after Phnom Penh.

There was also the fear of aggressive American reaction to the defeat of Lon Nol. The CIA had had agents in the last enclaves held by the government. Communist leaders later said they feared that these networks would have remained behind in radio contact with controllers in Thailand, under orders to exploit discontent, sabotage Communist policies, provoke insurrections and incite food riots. The fear was justified. In his book, Decent Interval, the former CIA agent Frank Snepp describes how the Khmer Rouge decision to evacuate the towns broke all the agency's spy rings. One CIA agent has separately recounted how he listened in Bangkok in April 1975 as one of his operatives in Kompong Speu screamed over her radio: "They are breaking down the door. What should I do with the radio?" He did not reply. "What should I do?" she cried again. He still said nothing. Her last words were, "You people are worse than the French."

As the Khmer Rouge herded the population out of Phnom Penh some cadres explained to the people that the United States was about to bomb Cambodia again—this time the cities, not the countryside. Such a prediction might now sound absurd; it may not have seemed so there and then. There was the Christmas 1972 bombing of Hanoi as precedent, and throughout the final stages of the war Kissinger and Ford had warned that the United States could not afford such a blow to its credibility as defeat in Indochina. Had not Kissinger himself espoused the need for irrational and unpredictable behavior in international politics? Was he not the architect of the "Madman Theory" of war? We know, from their own accounts, that the North Vietnamese leaders—who had considerable worldliness and understanding of American politics—feared almost until the end that their 1975 drive on Saigon would provoke armed American intervention. To men who had lived for up to twelve years in the dark mountains and jungles of Cambodia, with almost no direct contact with the world outside, and who had felt the impact of the American bombardment, the laws passed by the U.S. Congress almost three years before must have seemed slight protection. The way in which the United States reacted to the Cambodian seizure of an American container ship, the S.S. Mayaguez, on May 12, 1975, and immediately bombed Cambodia again (with Kissinger demanding B-52 strikes against the country) to reassert American “toughness,” showed that these laws were indeed inadequate and American intentions unpredictable.

The uncertainties of external threat can only have been compounded by enormous problems of internal social and political control. The army had been rebuilt since that devastating summer of 1973, when American air power had ravaged it. But the slaughter had only abated since then, it had not ended. By the best accounts the army numbered around 70,000 regulars at the start of the year, many of them politically inexperienced boys and girls. How many died in the final three months is not known, but Communist casualties were, as always, terrible. As on the Lon Nol side, children were thrust continually into the war with almost no military training and no ideological commitment. The Party’s cadres were hardened now, but they were still not numerous. (Pung Peng Cheng, Sihanouk’s chef du cabinet, estimated that by the end of the war they numbered around one thousand.) Many of them were fully occupied in administering the four million or so people who already lived (often unwillingly, to judge by the refugee movements in 1974) in the “liberated” areas. They were too few to be able to supervise the raw army once the discipline that war imposes had gone.

 The Communists, according to Pung Peng Cheng, did not expect the 1975 dry season to bring them victory when it began on January 1. By the middle of February, however, it was clear to Khmer Rouge leaders that what John Gunther Dean called "an uncontrolled solution"—their total victory—was imminent. They took the decision to empty the cities at the Second National Congress of the Front, which met at the end of that month. How they would have behaved had their assumption of power been more orderly, gradual, or controlled, is impossible to assess. The Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea, Pol Pot (previously known as Saloth Sar) subsequently admitted that the evacuation had been an unplanned reaction to the unfolding of events. But the towns, of course, were incompatible with the new society that they intended to construct.

*The Mayaguez incident provided in microcosm an illustration of the way in which U.S. policy toward Cambodia had been conducted since 1969. A synopsis of the affair, based principally on Pentagon documents declassified under the Freedom of Information Act, is included in the Notes.

on the ruins of Sihanouk's and Lon Nol's Cambodia. Khieu Samphan had denounced them in his 1959 thesis. They were the Sodomites that men like Saloth Sar, Ieng Sary, Hou Youn, Hu Nim and Khieu Samphan himself had rejected. They had also become the fortresses from which they had been pursued in the sixties and from which outright war had been launched against them in the seventies. Khmer Rouge leaders later explained that they greatly feared the corrupting effects the towns would have upon their untamed troops. Pol Pot declared that the evacuation was "one of the important factors" in safeguarding "the fruits of the revolution. . . . [It] was decided before victory was won, that is, in February, 1975, because we knew that before the smashing of all sorts of enemy spy organizations, our strength was not enough to defend the revolutionary regime." Implicitly confirming refugee accounts of the ferocity with which perceived "enemies" had since been pursued, Pol Pot continued, "Judging from the struggles waged from 1976 to 1977, the enemy's secret-agent network lying low in our country was very massive and complicated. But when we crushed them, it was difficult for them to stage a comeback. Their forces were scattered in various cooperatives that are in our grip. Thus we have the initiative in our hands."

Refugees have constantly spoken of the starvation as well as the terror they have endured since April 1975. The government's determination to carry the Maoist principle of self-reliance to lengths of which Mao himself had never dreamed, made this inevitable. But any government would have been confronted with almost insurmountable problems of food and agriculture in April 1975. Their scale was well described in the draft Termination Report prepared by the U.S. AID team. It was written just after John Gunther Dean and his staff fled Phnom Penh, and it reflects to some extent the anguish of junior officials forced to implement policies they felt were destructive.

The report noted that "Cambodia slipped in less than five years from a significant exporter of rice to large-scale imports, and when these ended in April 1975, to the brink of starvation." The country faced famine. "To avert a major food disaster Cambodia needs from 175,000 to 250,000 metric tons of milled rice to cover the period July 7 to mid-February 1976." Yet the vast bulk of Cambodia's rice would not be harvested until December. "Even with completely favorable natural conditions, the prospects for a harvest this year good enough to move Cambodia very far back toward rice self-sufficiency are not good. . . . Too much damage had been done. The report noted that the land would be seriously overgrown, seed and fuel would be short, and that up to 75 percent of draft animals had been destroyed by the war. Moreover, most of the planting would have to be done "by the hard labor of seriously malnourished people. . . . Without substantial foreign aid the task will be brutally difficult and the food-supply crisis can be expected to extend over the next two or three years. . . ."

Given how the Khmer Rouge actually behaved, U.S. AID's conclusion was significant:

If ever a country needed to beat its swords into plowshares in a race to save itself from hunger, it is Cambodia. The prospects that it can or will do so are poor. . . . Therefore, without large-scale external food and equipment assistance there will be widespread starvation between now and next February. . . . Slave labor and starvation rations for half the nation's people (probably heaviest among those who supported the republic) will be a cruel necessity for this year, and general deprivation and suffering will stretch over the next two or three years before Cambodia can get back to rice self-sufficiency.

That is very nearly how refugees and, by implication, the Phnom Penh Radio described what has happened in Cambodia since April 1975. Throughout 1975 the population (particularly the "new people" from the towns) suffered terribly from lack of food; hundreds of thousands may well have died of starvation and of disease. Western medicine was discarded, and there were almost no drugs in the country; at one stage the Prime Minister himself admitted that traditional herbal remedies had been ineffective and that 80 percent of the people were suffering from malaria. In 1976 slightly more food was available and Chinese quinine was imported. The 1977 harvest was poor, but by the summer of 1978 Radio Phnom Penh was claiming that every Cambodian received 900 grams of rice a day. Refugees asserted that daily rations were usually much less, but certainly rice supplies should by then have been adequate. Immense efforts had been made to rebuild the country’s agricultural system, and the eleventh century rather than the 1960s was the model.

The civilization of Angkor was founded upon the control of water in an area where the monsoon is too heavy and too short. The enormous reservoirs, intricate canals and careful dams prevented flooding, created hydraulic power, allowed the building of the wats, increased rice production, and provided year-long labor for the slave population. It was the dams and the canals—not the wats—that the Siamese invaders destroyed. Between 1969 and 1975 the agricultural system had been destroyed again, and in April 1975 the entire population was mobilized to construct a new one.

Phnom Penh Radio emphasized the importance of irrigation, and the population was directed to build new dams and canals. "The key question in agriculture is the water supply. Solidarity groups are building dams, digging ditches, constructing checkerboards of new field embankments. In the fertile northwest ... they are building ditches several kilometers long. These are also used as communications lines. Seedlings are transported along them in boats sailing to distant fields."

During the Angkor period agriculture supported the city. This time—as Khieu Samphan's 1959 thesis had proposed—it was eventually intended to sustain industrialization. "Grow, grow everything," the radio exhorted. "Particular attention must be paid to rice, for rice means everything. Rice means steel, factories, energy, fuel and tractors." Only a strong agricultural base could provide the people of Democratic Kampuchea with the independence or "sovereignty" they required and deserved. The people must "master" everything—the elements, production, territory; they must "rely on our own strength," "defend and construct the country," and "take our destiny in our hands."

The nature of those hands was drastically changed; the creation of a new Cambodian man was even more important than the construction of a new Cambodian economy. The old individualism, which had contributed to the corruption of former regimes, was replaced by collectivism; the old villages, where life revolved around the seasons, the pagoda and respect for the monarchy, gave way to work camps or cooperatives controlled by the Angka.

Family life was subordinate to that of the cooperative. Men and women often lived apart. Food was gathered and cooked centrally; from January 1977, meals were eaten communally. The chairman of the cooperative, usually a Khmer Rouge veteran, was responsible for production. In most areas work began before dawn at around 5 A.M. and continued until dark with a break for lighter work in the shade of the trees in the heat of the day. In some areas floodlighting or a full moon meant that an extra shift was added. As the radio said, “Democratic Kampuchea is one huge work site; wherever one may be, something is being built.”

All forms of address that betokened social or family relationships were abolished, and names were simplified. Father, mother, doctor were all replaced by “comrade.” Theravada Buddhism, which had been so closely integrated into every aspect of Cambodian life since the thirteenth century, was abolished as the state religion. Article 20 of the new 1976 constitution declared, “Every Cambodian has the right to worship according to any religion and the right not to worship according to any religion. Reactionary religion, which is detrimental to Democratic Cambodia and the Cambodian people, is absolutely forbidden.” The bonzes were driven from their wats, derobed of their saffron and sent into the fields; they were dismissed by the radio and by cadres as parasites. The wats became rice stores.

Refugees who came to Thailand during the first year after April 1975 said that political instruction was then minimal—partly perhaps because fifteen-year-olds with AK-47s do not necessarily have much to say, and partly because communications with the central government developed slowly. Subsequently, the training of new cadres allowed the spread of political education. Evenings not spent at work were devoted to group sessions in which workers “reflect on their lives” and “learn from their experience at work.” Every ten days, larger educative sessions were called.

At first the Angka was everything—the source of all power, of all influence, of all decisions. As François Ponchaud has pointed out, the radio spoke of it in terms of almost religious respect. The Angka was "believed in," it was "loved," its "blessings" were "remembered," it was the source of all happiness and inspiration. This "happiness" of the Cambodian people, now that the inequalities and the exploitations of the past were renounced, was constantly acclaimed by the radio. For the first time, the people were told, they were free of all corrupt and thieving outsiders. Until now they had been oppressed and wretched, in particular under the yoke of the fascist Lon Nol and his imperialist supporters. Now, at last, Kampucheans had mastered their soil and were free to live joyously and independently. "The imperialists, the capitalists and the feudalists utterly destroyed our national soul for hundreds of years. Now our soul has risen again, thanks to our revolutionary Angka." "For thousands of years the colonialists, imperialists and reactionary feudalists have dragged us through the mud. Now we have regained our honor, our dignity; now we smell good again."

The radio constantly declared that Kampucheans reflected the revolutionary spirit, the spirit of Angka, "a spirit of combative struggle, economy, inventiveness and a very high level of renunciation." "Renunciation," said the refugees, had three components: "renunciation of personal attitudes," "renunciation of material goods," and "renunciation "of personal behavior." The individual must find complete joy in working for the Angka, must forswear personal property, family relationships and such attitudes as pride, contempt, envy.

As during the war, special attention was paid to the development of children. They were often brought up communally; if they still lived with their parents, they were taught to have no regard for the concept of family and to treat their relations simply as anyone else in the group. Parents, on the other hand, were taught to honor their "comrade children," whose spirits are uncorrupted by the past. Children were often used as spies within villages; the radio has said that many of them "have held aloft their spirit of vigilance and creativity [and] ... have become engaged in patrolling their villages and communes with the highest revolutionary spirit."

From the moment of victory in April 1975 it was clear that the new rulers had no place for Sihanouk in Democratic Kampuchea. He was not officially informed of the capture of Phnom Penh; a wire-service message was given him at an embassy reception in Peking. He refused to believe the first reports of the evacuation of the cities, denouncing them as Western lies. After that he received no word at all from his country, and to avoid the persistence of reporters he went into "voluntary exile" in North Korea to be spared "indiscreet questions." It is said that in his conviction that he would never again go home he wrote a song called "Farewell Cambodia."

It seemed that the revolutionary leadership did not seek his return; his popularity could only have been destabilizing. However, Chou En-lai apparently insisted on it, and Sihanouk agreed, with some trepidation, after Khieu Samphan came to Pyong Yang and promised that he could remain head of state for life. Chou congratulated the Prince on his courage and patriotism, and on September 9 Sihanouk flew home with his wife, Monique, but without the entourage that had supported him in Peking. He was quoted by the Associated Press as saying to friends, "My return to Cambodia does not mean that I approve the cruel policy of the Khmer Rouge, but I must sacrifice my own views out of consideration for China and His Excellency Chou En-lai, who have done so much for Cambodia and myself."

At Pochtentong airport he was greeted with honors and driven through the town to one of his homes. He later told friends that he was appalled by the echoing emptiness of the city he had built, with just a few pedestrians.

trains, a few bicycles, very few cars and scores of soldiers silhouetted on balconies and roof tops. One of the rare sorties he was allowed was to a textile factory that had resumed production near Pochentong. Women workers fell at his feet crying. After that he was kept pretty much to his quarters.

The Prince was allowed to preside over one meeting of the government but not to take any real part in it. However, the new leadership did still have one task for him—to journey abroad and add some luster to the regime. He flew back to Peking and told his cabinet and family about life in the new Cambodia. Without exception these men and women, who had worked with him throughout the war, bade him farewell and set off on the Trans Siberian railway, bound mostly for an uncertain, penurious future in Paris.

Sihanouk himself flew to New York to denounce the United States at the U.N. General Assembly. Then in Paris he gave a talk to a small group of correspondents. Sitting under a photograph of himself being handed an AK-47 rifle by Khieu Samphan, flanked by Khmer Rouge associates, he gave an unconvincing account of the glories of the new regime. Everything the Khmer Rouge had done was "très raisonnable," and he was looking forward to returning. There would be 300,000 people in the capital eventually; this was ideal. (In 1978, there appear to have been only between ten and twenty thousand.) The evacuation was a good decision—starvation made it essential. Socialism in Cambodia was also fine; after all, Buddha was "a real socialist." Asked about reports of massacres he laughed his high laugh and said, "I was not there, but I do not think so. Our government has succeeded perfectly in establishing authority and order. Panic exists only in the minds of some ugly Cambodians in Thailand and Paris. They fight over their nightclubs there."

As for himself, he lived alone with Monique. “Food is brought to me every morning by the food service of the army. I have three little revolutionary cooks working for me and my aunt is teaching them cuisine. I sleep in the bed I once had made for my hero, General de Gaulle. As I am very small, I am very comfortable. I just tell you this little detail for the lady readers.” He claimed that Phnom Penh was fine now; it was not Sodom or Gomorrah but “Spartan with no nightclubs, no taxi girls.” in 

the future he would be like the Queen of England inspecting schools and receiving ambassadors. "That keeps me quite busy, you know. And the revolutionaries who took arms and fought the United States—they deserve the government."

One month later he was in Peking's Friendship store for foreigners. Surrounded as usual by a small group of men and women, he was buying wooden animals for a trip he was about to make to sympathetic African countries. He said he was looking forward to it, but had no time to talk— he was so very busy. In January 1976, he returned with his wife and two children to Phnom Penh just in time to declare the new constitution, which abolished the monarchy of the last thousand years—"excellent."

In February 1976, Chou En-lai, Sihanouk's great friend and supporter, died. Sihanouk's protection was gone, the "Gang of Four" was in the ascendant in Peking, and Khieu Samphan's promise of life tenure of the presidency was forgotten. The Prince was immediately removed from office, and Khieu Samphan replaced him. In an emotional address over Radio Phnom Penh on April 4, 1976, Sihanouk declared, "It has been my great pride and honor from March 1970, to this day to accompany the most beloved Cambodian people in the great and prestigious historical march which is now leading Cambodia to a new era in which the people are the only true masters of their destiny and of the nation and fatherland. ... All my wishes have been resolved without exception." The Council of Ministers expressed "regret" at his decision to retire "so as to have more time for the private life of his family," but they accepted it and proposed to build him a monument; he was awarded a pension of $8,000 a year—in a country where there is no currency.

Then the Prince disappeared. For over a year nothing was heard of him and some of his friends in the West began to fear for his life. Etienne Manach tried to discover his whereabouts; so did Senator Mansfield. Then, it seems, President Tito, an old comrade from the early days of the Nonaligned movement, insisted that his ambassador to Phnom Penh be allowed to confirm that the Prince was still alive. The Yugoslav diplomat was taken from his embassy and driven past Sihanouk's house, where the Prince could be seen in his garden. In 1978, as the war with Vietnam worsened and the men of Phnom Penh came under increasing pressure, they began to exploit Sihanouk's old appeal among the population; his name was attached to several denunciations of Hanoi.

The precise makeup of the government that succeeded Sihanouk was at first unclear. Refugees spoke much more of Angka than of individual. leaders. Names like Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary and Pol Pot did not readily come from their lips, nor did the Radio at first make much mention of them. Despite the obvious emphasis on collective measures, it was not until 1977 that the leading role of the Communist Party was acknowledged.

What happened among those few men and women who came out of the fields and the forests into the capital they had emptied in April 1975 is not yet known. But it is certain that the struggle among them was intense. Their disputes were influenced, above all, by the fighting that broke out immediately with their former Vietnamese allies and, to a lesser extent, by the upheavals in Chinese politics that followed the death of Chou En-lai and then that of Mao Tse-tung. It was not until the second half of 1977, by which time the struggle with the Vietnamese had intensified to the point of war, that the composition of the government began to become clear.

In some ways the new rulers of Phnom Penh conformed to Cambodian tradition; they were drawn from a tiny, inbred and self-perpetuating oligarchy. Lon Nol had replaced Sihanouk's scheming court with an equally scheming and much more corrupt military-bourgeois clique. The new elite was equally unrepresentative of Cambodian society. By 1978 the government appears to have been in the hands of about ten people related not only by intellectual training and shared revolutionary experience but also by marriage. The government was led by Pol Pot, the Secretary of the Cambodian Communist Party since 1963. Now he was Prime Minister as well. In charge of foreign affairs was Ieng Sary; defense was in the hands of Son Sen. The important post of Minister of Education, Culture and Information was held by Yun Yat, Son Sen's wife. The Minister of Social Action was Khieu Thirith, the wife of Ieng Sary. Her sister, Khieu Ponlary, was married to Pol Pot and ran the Association of Democratic Women of Kampuchea. The Vietnamese referred to them as either "the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique" or as "The Gang of Six." "All power is in the hands of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary and their wives who, to crown it, are sisters," commented Nhan Dan, the Vietnamese party paper in September 1978. "This kind of regime is cynically termed a ‘democratic’ regime."

The Vietnamese army paper published a profile of Pol Pot, noting accurately that "those who watched the Yugoslav television film on Democratic Cambodia could see that Pol Pot was the only smiling Cambodian in the film." "When did you first come to know about Pol Pot?" I asked a Cambodian. He said, "When I came home from the rice field one day I saw my two-year-old child lying dead in a heap of ashes with a half- finished piece of pumpkin soaked in blood in his mouth and my wife dying of a head wound. She was panting and whispering to me... "Try to find the murderer of our son and revenge me and our son." Then, I found out about Pol Pot.

"Pol Pot," the paper continued, "became famous following the bloody purges involving not only hundreds of thousands of civilians killed and dealt with like rubbish and the disappearance in a way that is hard to understand of basic and middle-level cadres in the ruling machinery, but also of some of the well-known Cambodian leaders... It seems that the Cultural Revolution has been copied by Phnom Penh in a hasty, but no less horrible manner.

"Pol Pot is a quiet man. We know of only a small number of talks he has delivered over the radio and some guiding documents he has written... In commanding a new group of cadres who assumed their duties in August 1977, Pol Pot told them about the Party-building task: 'Although a million lives have been wasted, our Party does not feel sorry. Our party needs to be strong.'"

Apart from blood and marital ties, the principal characteristics shared by these and many other leaders of the Cambodian government were their French education in the fifties and their graduation into the maquis in the year 1963. Those who, like Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim, fled Phnom Penh only in 1967, had played important roles during the war, but by 1977 they had all been eclipsed by the men of 1963. Khieu Samphan’s duties as Chief of State were largely ceremonial, Hu Nim and Hu Yuon had disappeared altogether. According to Hanoi they had been executed.

Such exclusivity and other features of the Khmer Communist party remained mysterious. But some of its philosophy was elucidated by Pol Pot when he emerged as the country’s undisputed leader—after he had disappeared for months—in September 1977. His five-hour speech over Radio Phnom Penh and his subsequent press conference in Peking provided the first detailed account of how the Khmer Rouge saw its own history.

He acknowledged for the first time that Democratic Kampuchea was run not just by the Angka but by a Marxist government, and that the Communist Party of Kampuchea was a Leninist organization in the vanguard of the revolution. Some of his rhetoric came straight from Mao, and the speech openly aligned Cambodia with China. As well as stressing self-reliance and collectivism, he spoke in strong terms of the persecution that the Khmer Communists had faced and overcome. The rift with Vietnam was not yet publicly proclaimed, but Pol Pot made obvious attempts to disassociate Cambodian Communism from that of its neighbor. It was  Pol Pot also described with bitterness the ruthlessness with which Sihanouk's police and army ("the enemy") had pursued the maquis in the sixties, and he emphasized the theme that the war and the revolution had unleashed a vast anger accumulated during long years of persecution. He acknowledged the undoubted truth that it was only the war that had made the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia, what it was today. In 1970, he said, "Our force was still relatively isolated and inadequate. The situation underwent a tremendous change after the Lon Nol clique staged the reactionary coup of March 18, 1970. The whole nation quickly swung over to the side of the revolution ... a broad national united front was thus formed ... changes also took place in the world attitude toward us ... this situation enabled our nationwide struggle to develop apace."

 

In talking of the new national anthem, he said, "Its essence is in the blood of our entire people, of those who fell for centuries past. The blood call has been incorporated into the national anthem ... the blood has been turned into class and national indignation." It still had an outlet. The evacuation of the cities had scattered the enemies of the revolution but still, he declared, "In our new Cambodian society there also exist life-and-death contradictions, as enemies ... are still planted among us to carry out subversive activities against our revolution."

By 1977, it seemed, the regime’s zeal was directed more against those suspected of sympathy with Vietnam than against those suspected of harboring a reactionary past. The poor relations between the two Communist parties deteriorated further with their captures of Phnom Penh and Saigon. The exact course of events cannot yet be determined, but the public claims of the two sides, after their disputes became public in 1978, can help chart its direction.

In April 1975 the Vietnamese were still in the sanctuaries just inside

The official translation of the national anthem of Democratic Kampuchea reads:

Bright red Blood which covers towns and plains

Of Kampuchea, our motherland,

Sublime Blood of Workers and peasants,

Sublime Blood of revolutionary men and women fighters!

The Blood changing into unrelenting hatred

And resolute struggle.

On April 17th, under the Flag of the Revolution,

Free from slavery!

Cambodia’s eastern border that Sihanouk had given them in 1965 when, in Radio Phnom Penh’s sarcastic words, "they had nowhere to stay in South Vietnam." Their refusal to depart "shows how ungrateful they are." Quarrels over the offshore islands and their promised oil deposits proved even more intractable. The Cambodians demanded that the Brevi line, which the French had drawn through the sea in 1939 for administrative purposes, be accepted as the border. The Vietnamese refused. The Cambodians laid claim to the large Vietnamese island of Phu Quoc and the Vietnamese occupied several islands of the Wai group, which Cambodia had controlled. In June 1975 Pol Pot flew to Hanoi and Peking in a vain attempt to find a solution. Talks continued sporadically, and the Vietnamese returned the Wai islands. But in May 1976, discussions over the frontier broke down completely, because, according to Phnom Penh, the Vietnamese presented a new draft map "which took away a vast part of Cambodia’s territorial sea."

Skirmishing increased through 1976 and early 1977, and Radio Phnom Penh broadcast oblique references to the need for self-defense along the eastern border. The Cambodians have since claimed that the Vietnamese attempted several coup d’états, using cadres trained in Vietnam in the fifties and sixties, against the Phnom Penh government. There is good reason to believe that this is so. After one serious attempt in April 1977, the fortnightly flight from Peking was stopped for a time, and later the North Korean leader Kim Il Sung congratulated Phnom Penh’s rulers on eradicating traitors in their midst. It was now that rigorous purges within the Angka itself began, and thousands more people died, accused of being agents of Vietnam.

The fighting along the border worsened through 1977, and in September that year General Giap flew from Hanoi to inspect the area. Cambodia claimed that Vietnam then began to attack in force. This is how Vietnam, for its part, described a Khmer Rouge attack on a Vietnamese village in October 1977:

All the houses were surrounded by Cambodian soldiers, who immediately opened fire and used machetes, axes, sabers and sharpened sticks to slay the villagers... A fleeing child was caught by a soldier who cut off his leg and threw him into the flames. All seven members of Mrs. Truong Thi Rot’s family were beheaded. Rot was disemboweled and had a seven-month fetus placed on her chest. All eight members of Nguyen Van Tam’s family were beheaded and the heads were put on a table for amusement. All eight persons in Nguyen Thi Nganh's house were disemboweled, the intestines piled in one shocking heap. Mr. Quang's wife was also disemboweled. The killers took out her five-month fetus, then cut off her breast and chopped her body in three parts. Her two-year-old boy was torn in two and dumped into a well.

Such accounts are fairly characteristic of the way in which totalitarian governments speak of their enemies in wartime, but in this case they gain credibility both from refugee stories of life inside Cambodia and from the way in which the Khmer Rouge are known to have behaved in disputed villages along the Thai border. After a similar incident there, the foreign ministry in Phnom Penh merely asserted that the village was Cambodian anyway, and so of no concern to anyone else.

At the end of 1977, Phnom Penh denounced Hanoi publicly, broke diplomatic relations, and treated the world to the unprecedented spectacle of two fraternal socialist nations at war. The Vietnamese immediately launched a massive invasion in January 1978. They attacked in main-force units, using tanks and artillery left behind by the Americans. The Cambodians relied upon the guerrilla methods with which they had repelled the Vietnamese a century before and with which the Viet Cong had, in the past, so successfully resisted American attacks. Tactical and logistical mistakes by Vietnamese commanders, together with fierce resistance by the Cambodians, halted the drive.

There was no way of knowing exactly how the fighting ebbed and flowed across the frontier through the 1978 dry season. Journalists were taken to the Vietnamese side of the border. Ha Thien, a pretty little harbor on the South China Sea, was deserted; its 30,000 people had fled from the Khmers. Tinh Binh, further east, was a ghost town, the wind banging the shutters, dogs roaming the streets. In Moc Hoa, the district capital of Kien Tuong province, the bulk of the population was evacuated.

Village after village on either side of the border was empty, their rice fields left untended. Refugees huddled under tents; everywhere there were freshly dug graves. To the correspondents this Third Indochina War looked very like the First and Second. To the people themselves it may have felt even worse.

As the fighting continued, so did the purges within the Angka. Hanoi claimed that by early 1978 all the "Hanoi-Khmers" who had been sent back down the Trail after March 1970, and whose politics clearly clashed with those of the indigenous maquis, had been murdered. There is no reason to believe that this is false. "It is most enraging," said Hanoi.

Radio, "to see that on the bodies of those murdered there are inscriptions reading 'Convicted for (sympathy) with Vietnam.'"

The Vietnamese army paper's profile of Pol Pot stated that:

In 1970 when Lon Nol staged a coup to overthrow Sihanouk... Pol Pot himself went over to our base asking us to help... When the time came to liberate Phnom Penh, Pol Pot had six divisions in hand. Clad in black pajamas and wearing a striped scarf around his neck, Pol Pot once said with half-closed eyes and with a smile on his face: "How close our two fraternal countries are! What you comrades have done will be recorded in our country's history..." Although we did not see his eyes clearly, we felt the tone of his words to be [honest]. But [after liberation] Pol Pot... ordered the arrest of all leading cadres of the divisions and units that had been trained by Vietnam... All Khmer cadres who returned from Vietnam to participate in the fight against the U.S. aggressors and their puppets to save the country have been murdered... Anyone who happens to speak a single word of Vietnamese is considered as committing a crime.

In another broadcast Hanoi said,

What grieves us most is the case of 250 children of Khmer cadres who were sent to study in Hanoi during the war. They were called home by their parents after Cambodia was liberated. They were all killed by Cambodian troops only some 300 meters inside the border. They screamed, cried and yelled to Vietnamese cadres on the other side of the border, "Please come and help us, uncles." But the Vietnamese uncles stood powerless.

Such accusations were not denied by the Cambodians. Indeed, Radio Phnom Penh exulted that "the Party has flushed out the Khmer-Vietnamese running dogs of the aggressor, expansionist and annexationist Vietnamese enemy who have sneaked their way into the ranks of our party... our youths have basically smashed and wiped out these agents."

By the middle of 1978 Hanoi was openly inciting the Cambodian people to rise and overthrow "the clique... the most disgusting murderers in the latter half of this century." The Vietnamese organized a resistance movement in the eastern provinces, said to be under the control of So Phim, who was formerly in the Khmer Communist leadership.

Each side asserted that the border disputes were only a minor part of the struggle. Hanoi declared that the rulers of Phnom Penh wished to distract their own and other people's attention from the suffering they [of Phnom Penh] had imposed upon Cambodia. Phnom Penh continued to claim that the war was caused by the Vietnamese Communists' old ambition of imposing a federation dominated by Hanoi on all Indochina. Hanoi's intention was "to annex Cambodian territory within a fixed period of time and eliminate the Cambodian race by Vietnamizing it." Radio Phnom Penh described how this threat could best be met: every Cambodian should kill thirty Vietnamese. This would eliminate the disparity in the sizes of the two nations.

The war between the two countries was slowed by unusually severe flooding during the 1978 rainy season, but at the end of the year, when the waters receded, the Vietnamese embarked on a new invasion of Cambodia's northeast. Pol Pot admitted in an interview that "some of our places may fall into their hands but since they will meet many difficulties, the longer they fight the more they will be worn down." Hanoi certainly appeared to hope that international distaste for the Khmer Rouge government would mute criticism of its offensive. But it must have been daunted not only by the courage with which the Cambodians had fought even for this or that hostile conquered country, but also by the attitude of the Khmer Rouge's only sponsor, Peking.

A Cambodia independent of Vietnam had been a principle of Chinese foreign policy at least since the Geneva Conference of 1954. China had been the Cambodian Communists' only reasonably consistent supporter throughout the 1970–75 war, and when it ended only China was allowed real access to the country. Conversely, China's relations with Vietnam had deteriorated after Nixon's 1972 visit to Peking and after Hanoi's victory in 1975. Peking, evidently fearing the power of a united Vietnam, cut off all military aid to its southern neighbor. The Vietnamese then turned increasingly to the Soviet Union, and at the same time the Chinese began to build up the Cambodian army. The Vietnamese claimed that China encouraged Khmer Rouge harassment along the border and that Peking's purpose was "to provoke a disease that is not fatal to us, but would keep us always sick." Vietnam's fears of encirclement by China and Cambodia matched Chinese fears of encirclement by the USSR and a pro-Soviet Vietnam.

Throughout the first half of 1978, relations between Peking and Hanoi deteriorated rapidly. After Hanoi imposed severe restrictions on private dedicated rapidly. After Hanoi imposed severe restrictions on private business in Vietnam, about 150,000 Chinese fled to China. The Vietnam else blamed the exodus on groundless fears aroused by Chinese propaganda; Peking asserted that the Chinese were being persecuted. China cut off economic aid; Vietnam's three consulates in China were closed. Talks broke down, and by the end of the summer there was skirmishing along the Chinese-Vietnamese border. Vietnam asked its people to prepare for "a large-scale war of aggression."

It was in this context that the future of the Pol Pot regime had to be considered. One Vietnamese commentary claimed that "the reactionary Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique is a bloodthirsty lackey clique, badly needed by the Chinese authorities to carry out their expansionist policy in Southeast Asia. The Chinese authorities are using the barbarous social system in Cambodia as a tool to oppose Vietnam and undermine its activities and then to proceed toward conquering all Southeast Asia."

By the middle of 1978 it was unclear how far the Chinese were still prepared to underwrite the Phnom Penh regime. Relations cannot have been improved by the fact that Phnom Penh had hailed the rise of the "Gang of Four" and the fall of Teng Hsiao-ping in 1976, nor by the Khmer Rouge's wholesale murder of Chinese residents of Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge's image abroad did not accord well with the broadly based foreign policy of entente that China pursued. Western leaders, including President Carter's Adviser for National Security Affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski, complained to Peking and asked that the Chinese moderate Cambodian conduct. The British, American, Canadian and Norwegian governments submitted detailed dossiers on human-rights abuses in Cambodia to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva. Amnesty International also asked the Commission for an investigation. As a result of pressure of this sort, Western diplomats in Peking believed that China began to try, in the summer of 1978, to persuade Pol Pot to soften his sectarian policies and create a broad-based front that would involve even Sihanouk once again.

As a result, the Prince’s name was attached to more ritualistic denunciations of the Vietnamese and at the end of September Phnom Penh announced that he had attended a “banquet” with Pol Pot. In other concessions to world opinion, Ieng Sary invited Kurt Waldheim, the United Nations Secretary General, to Cambodia and the first American journalists were then allowed in. When the Vietnamese attacked in December, Cambodia was more vulnerable to being swallowed by its old enemy than at any time since the French imposed their protectorate in 1864. At the end of 1978 it seemed just possible that this weakness, together with the displeasure of China, might finally force the regime to eschew some of its more draconian policies. Sihanouk was the only man who had ever given Cambodia the semblance of peace, and the Chinese had always recognized his worth. If they could now compel his successors at least to pay lip service to their old enemy, perhaps power would one day be restored to him. It was only a glimmer of hope, but in Democratic Kampuchea hope was a scarce commodity by 1978.

By then the war in Cambodia had lasted eight and a half years. No one knew how many Khmers had died. * Casualties during 1970–75 were not counted; one figure that has often been cited is 500,000, but this could be an exaggeration. By the beginning of 1975, about five hundred people were thought to be dying on each side every week. It is even harder to assess the number of deaths over the natural rate since April 1975. Estimates have ranged from several hundred thousand to two million. Father Ponchaud, who had by then interviewed over a thousand refugees, himself believed that the higher figure was more accurate by spring 1978, and that, as a result of starvation, disease and execution, around a quarter of the population had died. This was what the Vietnamese claimed. Comparable figures for the United States would be fifty million deaths; for Britain, fourteen million. Such a massacre is hard to imagine, and the figure could not be verified. But, in a sense, this was not critical. What was important was to establish whether an atrocity had taken place. Given the burden of evidence, it was impossible not to agree with Hanoi’s assertions that "In Cambodia, a former island of peace... no one smiles today. Now the land is soaked with blood and tears... Cambodia is hell on earth."

All wars are designed to arouse anger, and almost all soldiers are taught to hate and to dehumanize their enemy. Veterans of the combat zone are often possessed of a mad rage to destroy, and to avenge their fallen comrades. It does not always happen, however, that victorious armies have endured such punishment as was inflicted upon the Khmer Rouge. Nor does it always happen that such an immature and tiny force comes to power after its country’s social order has been obliterated, and the nation faces the danger of takeover by a former ally, its ancient enemy. In Cambodia that did take place. In the last eight years, degree, law, moderation had been fors sworn. The war and the causes for which it was fought had brought desolation while nurturing and then giving power to a little group of zealots sustained by Manichean fear.

*Population figures for the country have always been inadequate. In 1970 the generally accepted estimate was about seven million. In 1974 a report by the U.N. Economic and Social Commission put the population in 1974 at 7.9 million.

On Christmas Day 1978 their fears were realized. Under the transparent banner of a new "Kampuchean National United Front for National Salvation," the Vietnamese launched a dry season blitzkrieg toward Phnom Penh. Cambodian positions fell with extraordinary speed and the Khmer Rouge finally realized that they could not do without Sihanouk. He was dispatched to plead Kampuchea's case to the world. But, like Kissinger before them, the Communists had turned to the Prince too late. On January 7, 1979, hours after he arrived in Peking, Phnom Penh was captured and the Vietnamese installed a new "People's Revolutionary Council" to govern Cambodia on Hanoi's terms. The Khmer Rouge leaders fled to the jungles whence they had emerged less than four years before, vowing that they would mount a new guerrilla war against the enemy in Phnom Penh.

The Chinese leadership promised to support the Khmer Rouge in their struggle against "hegemonism" and accorded Sihanouk the same respect they had always shown him. Both in China and then at the United Nations, the Prince demonstrated that his consistency still lay in his concern for Cambodia. He wept when he was asked about Khmer Rouge abuses of power; the regime, he said, had denied his people "the basic rights of humanity: the right to be loved, to choose your wife and to be with your wife all the time; to have classical justice with lawyers; to be judged publicly." At the same time, however, he praised the Communists for their resistance to Vietnam and promised he would support their fight from abroad.

In an interview with the author in New York, Sihanouk reflected on the events of the last ten years. "In the sixties Cambodia survived because Lyndon Johnson rejected all the requests of his military that the United States invade Cambodia and remove Sihanouk. He thought the consequences would be very dangerous. But Nixon accepted those ideas. I did not know about the B-52 bombing in 1969. In 1968, I had told Chester Bowles, en passant, that the United States could bomb Vietnamese sanctuaries, but the question of a big B-52 campaign was never raised. I was not happy when the Vietnamese came further and further into Cambodia in 1969. Nor was Lon Nol. But what separated me and Lon Nol in 1970 was that he wanted to make war against the Communists and invite the United States into Cambodia. I knew that if we did so we would be completely involved in the Vietnamese war, we would lose our peace, and everything in Cambodia would be destroyed.

"If the United States had refused to help Lon Nol after the coup, he would have collapsed. Sihanouk would have returned and stopped the war. It didn’t happen because Nixon and Kissinger did not want Sihanouk."

back. Nixon called Cambodia his "best investment." Kissinger hated me. For most of the war he refused to see me—until the Khmer Rouge were so strong it was too late. In 1970 the Khmer Rouge were only a few hundreds. In 1973 the Vietnamese tried to make them negotiate but it was too dangerous for them. They would then have had to share power and they wanted it all alone. They got it in 1975.

During his three years of house arrest since then, said Sihanouk, "I did not really know what was happening in my country. The BBC and Voice of America said it was terrible; every day I had to think about the possibility of being executed." Asked to explain the brutality, he spread his hands in a gesture of incomprehension and said, "Well, many of the soldiers I saw were only twelve or thirteen years old. Then their leaders were very ambitious. They wanted their names in history. They wanted to establish the most advanced and purest form of communism in the world. They told me that was their plan."

For the future he was uncertain. He now had to speak out in defense of the Pol Pot regime "because, despite its abuses of human rights, it is the genuine and the only government of Cambodia. It sprang from popular resistance to the United States and Lon Nol. If I fought against it, I would be a traitor. I feel capable of negotiating a settlement with Hanoi; I know the Vietnamese well. But Pol Pot will not allow it. In future, we shall see. If we don’t find a solution soon the Vietnamese will be in Cambodia forever.

Asked about the lessons of recent history, Sihanouk said that there was no one country to be blamed for the state of his nation. "There are only two men responsible for the tragedy in Cambodia today, Mr. Nixon and Dr. Kissinger. Lon Nol was nothing without them and the Khmer Rouge were nothing without Lon Nol. Mr. Nixon and Dr. Kissinger gave the Khmer Rouge involuntary aid because the people had to support the Communist patriots against Lon Nol. By expanding the war into Cambodia, Nixon and Kissinger killed a lot of Americans and many other people; they spent enormous sums of money—$4 billion—and the results were the opposite of what they wanted. They demoralized America, they lost all of Indochina to the Communists, and they created the Khmer Rouge."

One hundred and twenty years ago, in 1859, Henri Mouhot, the French naturalist, noted: "The present state of Cambodia is deplorable and its future menacing... The population is excessively reduced by the incessant wars carried on against neighboring states." By 1979 incessant wars had once again reduced the population; once again the state of Cambodia

"was deplorable, its future menacing. 'The humble people of Cambodia are the most wonderful in the world,' said Sihanouk in New York. 'Their great misfortune is that they always have terrible leaders who make them suffer. I am not sure that I was much better myself, but perhaps I was the least bad.'"