Pol Pot (42 page)

It would be wrong to suggest that the intensity of the bombing brutalized Cambodians and thereby contributed to the nature of the regime which Pol and his colleagues installed. A far greater quantity of high explosive fell on Vietnam, yet the Vietnamese did not establish a system like that of the Khmers Rouges. The bombing may have helped create a climate conducive to extremism. But the ground war would have done that anyway. The Khmers Rouges were not ‘bombed back into the Stone Age’. Even had there been no B-52 strikes at all, it is unlikely that Democratic Kampuchea would have been a significantly different place.

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Instead, the B-52S placed a millstone round the government’s neck by inundating the cities with a demoralised detritus of human misery that the authorities could not relieve, and gave the Khmers Rouges a propaganda windfall which they exploited to the hilt — taking peasants for political education lessons among the bomb craters and shrapnel, explaining to them that Lon Nol had sold Cambodia to the Americans 111 order to stay in power and that the US, like Vietnam and Thailand, was bent on the country’s annihilation so that, when the war was over, Cambodia would cease to exist. ‘What they said was credible because there were just so many huge bombs,’ one man remembered. ‘That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over.’ In warfare, destruction breeds hatred; hatred is assuaged by more destruction. Villagers who had lost family members or seen their homes destroyed in bombing raids were filled with hatred. The ranks of the Khmers Rouges grew — to an estimated 12,000 regular soldiers at the end of 1970 and four times that number two years later — while on the government side, as corruption escalated to levels unheard of even in Sihanouk’s day, the moral high ground was definitively lost.

In the everyday chronicle of the fighting, especially in the early days, both sides showed unsuspected strengths and weaknesses. Government troops, poorly trained, badly officered and often unpaid, sometimes fought with astonishing bravery.

The French

archaeologist Francois Bizot witnessed one such clash in which a sergeant whose unit was on guard duty at a

bridge on the outskirts of Siem Reap got the better of a mixed Khmer Rouge-Viet Cong detachment:

[He] had the black skin of the true Khmer, very dark with a coppery sheen. Hard eyes, a square chin, and short teeth, like blocks worn down from the top . . . His half-open shirt revealed ritual tattoos, and he wore a tangle of necklaces, bearing images of the Buddha, tigers’ teeth and amulets, which knocked against each other, giving off a protective clinking which we would hear all night . . . The sergeant busied himself, giving orders, checking the foxholes where the young men under his command [were dug in]. . .

Suddenly, a voice resonated through a loud-hailer . . . ‘Comrades! We are brothers! We are fighting for Sihanouk and to liberate our beloved homeland!’. . .

The man spoke with a Phnom Penh accent: ‘Comrades!’ he said again. ‘You are here in a miserable hole while Lon Nol sleeps with his wife in bed . . .’ It was a technique that had proved itself elsewhere and the attackers did not expect much resistance. But they hadn’t reckoned with the obstinacy of the sergeant, who bounded from one hole to the next, putting spine into the men who were paralysed by fear . . . In the darkness, the encirclement tightened . . . and the voice reverberated again, this time more boldly. ‘Comrades, look at me! I am your brother! Let’s talk! I will show myself to you unarmed! Don’t fire, but watch!’ . . . Fifty yards away, a man stood up, holding out his right arm and shining a pocket-lamp onto his own face . . . Mesmerised by his courage, no one dared move.

Seconds later a violent explosion shook the air. The sergeant had thrown a grenade . . . setting off a fusillade in all directions which continued [until] the sunrise put the attackers to flight.

More typical were two big land offensives, both baptised ‘Chenla’ after an ancient Khmer kingdom of that name, which Lon Nol launched to try to relieve the provincial capital of Kompong Thom, besieged by communist forces. They were commanded by an eccentric figure named

Um Savuth

, ‘an astonishing personality, a thin, twisted man who walked with a long white cane, [who] drove his jeep at terrifying speeds and was nearly always drunk’. As a young officer he had ordered a subordinate to place a cat on his head, retire to a distance and then shoot it off, a moment of high spirits which blew away part of his brain and left him paralysed down one side of his body. One US adviser maintained that ‘Savuth drunk was better than most Cambodian officers sober’, but that was as much a reflection on the calibre of the Cambodian officer corps as on Savuth’s own qualities.

His first attempt

to reach Kompong Thom foundered when his combat battalions, with their families straggling along behind, set out northwards along a narrow, raised causeway between flooded rice-paddies. The

extended line made a perfect target for communist artillery, and Viet Cong sappers blew up the bridges behind them faster than they could be repaired. Thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered. After two months, Lon Nol declared victory and, with some difficulty, the survivors were brought home. The second attempt was initially more successful. Savuth’s forces reached Kompong Thom and duly ‘liberated’ it. In the process, however, the American commander in Saigon, General Creighton Abrams, noted grimly, ‘they opened a front forty miles long and two feet wide’ which the Vietnamese promptly cut in half. As Savuth’s men fled across the rice-fields, abandoning their equipment, including tanks, armoured personnel carriers, lorries, scout cars, 105-mm howitzers which they neglected to spike and countless lighter weapons, hundreds died. Savuth told friends afterwards that he had found the Vietnamese troops ‘impressive’, and had been amazed by the amount of American weaponry they were carrying.

The Khmer Rouge forces were a mixed bunch too. Alongside veterans of the civil war of the late 1960s were raw recruits from the villages no better than the cannon fodder of Lon Nol’s army. But where Lon Nol, from the summer of 1970, had introduced conscription, the Khmer Rouge recruits in the early days were all volunteers. Some, like Pol’s future secretary, Mey Mak, joined because they liked the idea of becoming soldiers. Others became guerrillas ‘because the girls teased us if we stayed behind — they said boys should be at the front’. Yet others went to fight for Sihanouk, or because their friends did so, or simply to get out of their villages. Their first memories of the resistance were usually much the same:

I remember

that they came to the village — it was a mixed group of Khmers and Vietnamese — and they just asked people to join. So I joined. They were all in uniform — the Khmers wore black clothes; the Vietnamese had green uniforms. It was in 1971 some time . . . maybe in May or June . . . They didn’t give us any training. They just picked me to be a group leader, gave me a gun and then put me in a truck and sent me off to the battlefield . . . I fought in three battles — in Angkor Borei; in Prey Pk’oam, and Takoep. I was terrified. After those three battles, I hung my rifle on a tree and fled back home. There were so many people who were killed in those battles. It was infantry fighting. I killed some enemy soldiers myself — I shot them. But I was afraid that I would die too if I stayed in the resistance army. It was the sight of all the bodies that made me run away . . . I was a group leader for about three months before I deserted. When I got home, nothing happened to me. The village chief didn’t say anything. After a while, people came to look for me to ask me to rejoin my unit. But I didn’t go.

There were nuances. Some remembered the Viet Cong

wearing black

like everyone else. Most new recruits were terrorised by their first battles, but

not all deserted. Enough did so, however, for deserters to be treated leniently. The iron discipline which already existed within the Party did not yet extend to poor peasant soldiers. There were differences in training, too. The majority received none.

But for those

judged capable of becoming commanders, there were intensive six-month courses, nominally under a Khmer Rouge cadre but with instruction given by Khmer-speaking Vietnamese. Mey Mak attended one such course at a forest encampment in Tramkak, the home district of the South-Western Zone leader, Mok. Six hundred men took part, he remembered. Mok’s son-in-law, Muth, was in charge, and the Vietnamese taught ‘combat technique . . . how to use weapons, how to crawl undetected, strategy and tactics for attack’. There were also political education meetings, at which the instructors — again Vietnamese — explained that the Khmers must fight to liberate their country from the Americans and to free the people from the oppressing classes.

The Khmers Rouges’ weaknesses in those first years were more than compensated for by the strengths of their allies. It did not matter if most of their recruits were untrained, if there were not enough weapons to go round and if some of them deserted. Throughout 1970 and 1971, the brunt of the fighting in Cambodia was borne by the Vietnamese. The Khmers Rouges were a leavening, to make Vietnamese units appear more acceptable to the population at large, or, if they fought separately, an auxiliary force, to occupy the terrain once the Vietnamese had passed. It was not a Khmer Rouge unit that stormed the airport on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, but Vietnamese commandos from the elite Dac Cong brigade who, in a four-hour assault which left at least forty dead, blew up the whole of Lon Nol’s air force — ten MiG-17S, five T-28 trainers, ten transport aircraft and eight helicopters — and two ammunition dumps. The same group later destroyed 60 per cent of Cambodia’s oil refinery storage in a raid on Kompong Som.

All that stood between Lon Nol and defeat, one American military historian commented bleakly, ‘was US aid, Allied airpower and [the] 11,000 South Vietnamese troops [still] in south-eastern Cambodia’, the latter being in any case a mixed blessing, given their propensity for slaughtering Cambodian civilians.

Unlike the communists, Lon Nol did not have the backing of ground troops provided by his principal ally. Even for Nixon, that was politically impossible. When Kissinger’s military assistant, General Alexander Haig, informed Lon Nol early on in the conflict of the limits of US involvement, the Prime Minister began to weep. ‘He walked across to the window and stood there, his shoulders shaking, his face turned away.’ It was the fatal error of the coup that Nol and Sirik Matak had set in motion. They had

staked all on the support of a government whose overriding preoccupation was not to be drawn further into the Indochinese quagmire but to get out.

In these circumstances, the American panacea was to bomb, until Congress ended that option too. But bombing without ground support was no more effective in Cambodia than it had been in Vietnam, or would be in any of the conflicts American presidents would subsequently launch, claiming they could win victories without body-bags flying home.

In the end, even if the US had sent in troops, it would probably have done no more than drag out the inevitable. But victory in Cambodia was never the Americans’ goal. If it had been, the US would have replaced Lon Nol, who suffered a debilitating stroke in the spring of 1971, leaving him, as the US Ambassador, Emory Swank, reported in cablese, ‘not in emotional or physical state to bear burdens of his office’. The Nixon White House did no such thing. Instead it made sure that the ailing marshal would stagger on for four more

surrealistic years

, submitting his generals to long harangues about ancient Khmer history, setting up a special bureau to teach his troops ‘traditional Khmer-Mon occult practices of warfare’, and eventually, when all else failed, having a line of coloured sand drawn around Phnom Penh to give the city magical protection.

To the Nixon administration, Cambodia was a means of gaining time to extract US troops from Vietnam. Time was vital for the Khmers Rouges too. Nixon’s endgame was exactly what they needed.

At the beginning of November 1970, Pol, Khieu Ponnary, their entourage and bodyguards, about a hundred people in all, accompanied by Koy Thuon and other Northern Zone cadres, arrived at their new base, codenamed K-1, at Dângkda, north-east of Speu commune. It was spartan. There were three stilt-houses, thatched with palm leaves: one for Pol; one for Nuon Chea; the third for ‘invited guests’. The guards and lower-ranking cadres were billeted in the surrounding forest.

For the next twelve months, everything Pol did was geared to one overriding priority: the creation of a Khmer communist army and administration capable of assuming the conduct of the war when the peace talks in Paris between the US and North Vietnam produced a settlement in the south and Hanoi’s forces withdrew. The implications of this strategy were threefold.

Militarily it meant hurrying slowly, consolidating advantages on the ground before attempting further advance. As a result, throughout 1971, the battlefield situation remained unchanged: communist forces continued to hold more than half Cambodia’s territory; Lon Nol’s rare offensives were repulsed or, where they succeeded, the terrain was reoccupied after government units withdrew; but there were no major gains.