Pol Pot (55 page)

But there the parallels end. The Viet Cong operation — like the Khmer Rouge evacuations of Oudong and Kompong Cham — was small-scale, tightly controlled and meticulously planned.

The evacuation of Phnom Penh was a shambles.

It could hardly have been otherwise. To move more than two and a half million people out of a crowded metropolis at a few hours’ notice, with nowhere for them to stay, no medical care, no government transport and little or nothing to eat, was to invite human suffering on a colossal scale. Although the great majority — the two million displaced peasants who had fled their villages to escape the war — were only too pleased to leave the slums and shanty towns and return to their rural homes, they would have preferred to go at their own pace and in their own way, not amid a river of human detritus, expelled volens nolens by an avenging power. For the others, the 600,000 or so authentic city-dwellers, who had lived in Phnom Penh since before 1970, evacuation meant leaving behind everything they held dear and entering an unknown world for which they were totally unprepared.

To confound the confusion, troops from the four different Zones responsible for occupying the city issued contradictory orders.

In the North, Koy Thuon’s forces had been informed of the evacuation order weeks in advance and began turning people out of their houses soon after midday, giving them only a few minutes to pack some food and a few pots and pans. Buildings were systematically searched; arms and valuables confiscated; and there was widespread looting. Nowhere was exempt. The locked doors of the Soviet Embassy were blown open with a B-40 rocket and the diplomats pushed out at gunpoint. Within minutes, all streets leading northward were blocked by a seething mass of townspeople, urged on by soldiers firing into the air. One of them wrote later:

It was a stupefying

sight, a human flood pouring out of the city, some people pushing their cars, others with overladen motorcycles or bicycles overflowing with bundles, and others behind little home-made carts. Most were on foot . . . The worst part of the whole march was the stopping and starting: there was such a crowd that we could never go forward more than a few yards at a time before we had to stop again. . .

April is the hottest month in Cambodia. The land swelters under a leaden sun as men and animals await the coming of the rains. In five days, the main body of the cortège had covered only eight miles:

Sick people were left by their families at the roadside. Others were killed [by the soldiers] because they could walk no further. Children who had lost their parents cried out in tears, looking for them. The dead were abandoned, covered in flies, sometimes with a piece of cloth thrown over them. Women gave birth wherever they could: in the road or under the trees. We didn’t have the energy even to think about eating. At night we fell down with

weariness and slept with everyone else at the edge of the highway. When we awoke at dawn, we realised we had been sleeping next to the bodies of some soldiers who had been killed the previous day.

The hospitals were emptied. From the episcopal palace, opposite the Hotel Phnom, François Ponchaud witnessed ‘an

hallucinatory

spectacle’:

Thousands of the sick and wounded were abandoning the city. The strongest dragged themselves pitifully along, others were carried by friends, some lying on beds pushed by their families with their plasma and IV drips bumping alongside. I shall never forget one cripple who had neither hands nor feet, writhing along the ground like a severed worm. Or a weeping father carrying his 10-year-old daughter wrapped in a sheet tied round his neck like a sling, or the man with his foot dangling at the end of a leg to which it was attached by nothing but the skin.

When Phnom Penh fell, there were an estimated 15-20,000 people in the city’s

hospitals

. Many doctors had already fled abroad and conditions in the wards were like those of the Crimean War, giving the sick and injured little hope of survival. But the evacuation decision, and the ruthlessness with which the Northerners carried it out, left them no chance at all.

Another French priest wrote of an unnerving calm, ‘no indignation, no revolt, the most complete resignation’. When the column reached the Northern Zone checkpoint at the village of Prek Phneou, army and police officers from second lieutenant up and government functionaries were asked to come forward and identify themselves. They were informed that they would be taken back to Phnom Penh to help Angkar reorganise the city. That was indeed the destination of the most senior among them, including the former Premier, Hang Thun Hak, and another ex-Minister, Pan Sothi. Both men were taken to Koy Thuon’s HQ at the Hotel Monorom and then killed. The rest were simply led across the rice-paddies into nearby scrubland and bludgeoned to death. The remainder of the column, purged of these remnants of republican power, went on to Prek Kdam, where it divided into two — one part heading along the western bank of the Great Lake, towards Pursat and Battambang in the North-Western Zone, the other towards Skoun, to be resettled in co-operatives in the Northern Zone provinces of Kompong Thom and Kompong Cham.

Troops from the other Zone commands had been less well briefed.

South-Western and Special Zone units received the evacuation order only on April 16 or, in some cases, the early morning of April 17, and at first there was a mix-up about how long it was to last. Some soldiers assured residents that they would be allowed to return after three hours, with the result that many simply closed their doors and stayed put. Hospitals in the

southern districts of the capital continued functioning, and when eventually it was made clear that everyone would have to leave, the troops gave people time to pack and let them take as much as they could carry Looting was rare and when, years later, former residents of these areas returned, they found their homes much as they had left them: one man reported that the only item missing was a file of photographs and newspaper cuttings about his student days in Paris, which had been removed from a locked cabinet.

Initially the southward evacuation was even slower than that by the northern route. Many people were still only a few hundred yards from their homes seventy-two hours after setting out. This was in part deliberate. As the tide of humanity unfurled along Highway I, towards Svay Rieng, and Highway 2, to Takeo and the lower reaches of the Bassac river, many dragged their feet in the hope that after three days they would be allowed to return. The Khmers Rouges responded with random killings, and recalcitrants were executed in public as a warning to the rest. But on the whole the South-Westerners, who answered to Mok and Chou Chet, used the velvet glove more than an iron fist. One deportee remembered them ‘shepherding [us] quietly along, without too much brutality’. Pin Yathay found them ‘as polite as they were implacable’.

Mok’s troops allowed them to make for their home villages, even if it meant leaving the main column. Yathay was able to drive his car as far as Koh Thom, forty-five miles south of Phnom Penh, and when eventually it was confiscated he was given a receipt. In the North, such niceties were unknown. The South-Westerners were also more selective in their treatment of republican soldiers. Some, but not all, senior officers were killed, and junior officers and NCOs were spared. The Special Zone troops on Highways 3 and 4, leading to Kampot and Kompong Som, who answered to Vorn Vet, adopted a similar approach.

Eastern Zone units were even less well-informed about the modalities of the evacuation than the other groups, no doubt because originally they were not intended to enter the city at all.

On the afternoon of April 17, a senior Eastern Zone officer assured an emissary from the Buddhist Patriarch, Huot That: ‘I can give you my word of honour that I have never heard of this [evacuation] order. It is an imperialist manoeuvre . . . to sow seeds of panic among the population.’ But when, later, Mey Mann went to the headquarters of Chan Chakrey’s 170th division and asked point-blank whether he and other ‘progressive figures’ in the communists’ urban support network could stay in the city, Chakrey said he would have to consult higher authorities. Two days later, the answer came. ‘The

say no,’

Chakrey told him

, rapping out the words as if to distance himself from a message with which he disagreed.

’You must leave with the others.’ Deportees who travelled eastwards down Highway I gave glowing accounts of their treatment by the green-uniformed Easterners who, in contrast to the callousness of the men in black, ‘helped everyone who was overloaded . . . carrying babies for the mothers [like] good commie soldiers!’ But it was a difference of style, not of policy. Once the evacuation order had been passed down, Eastern Zone units, like everyone else, ensured that the areas under their control were emptied of inhabitants.

Mann went with his family to his home village in Prey Veng. Thiounn Mumm’s brother Chum, and his brother-in-law, the former Prime Minister Chean Vâm, were sent to a co-operative in the Special Zone. Pol’s brother, Loth Suong, the palace official with whom he had lived as a child in Phnom Penh, joined the crowds walking north and eventually reached a co-operative in a remote area of Kompong Thom. There he was reunited with his youngest sibling, Nhep, and their sister Roeung, King Monivong’s concubine.

Pol’s favourite brother, Chhay, had spent the previous few years editing a republican newspaper. On the way north he collapsed and died, becoming just one more meaningless statistic on the balance sheet of those for whom the deportation became a death march. Altogether it is estimated that some 20,000 people lost their lives during the evacuation of Phnom Penh. The figure itself, while appalling, is not exceptional in the aftermath of a civil war. In France in 1945, in the first months after the German retreat, 100,000 people died in revenge killings, murders and the settling of scores between those who had collaborated and those who had not. The population of France being seven times that of Cambodia, the proportion of deaths was not that different. But in France, the killings, the forced suicides, the shaming of women who had shared their beds with the enemy, were the work of individuals, acting alone or in mobs. In Cambodia it was the result of a deliberate policy decision taken by the country’s highest authorities: Pol and the CPK Standing Committee.

Day One of the new regime was marked by sporadic clashes between the different Khmer Rouge units in Phnom Penh along the boundaries of the areas each controlled.

Some were straightforward turf fights. Others stemmed from uncertainties over individual soldiers’ identities in an army without uniforms or badges of rank, a problem graphically illustrated by the Hem Keth Dara incident. In theory all Khmers Rouges carried identification papers, but that was little help when most of the guards manning the checkpoints were illiterate. A recurrent image in city-dwellers’ accounts of this period is of

a black-clad male or female combatant, glaring suspiciously at a passport or some other official document, held upside down.

Scattered pockets of resistance came from remnants of Lon Nol’s forces. There were also incidents involving looters. Parallel to the urban exodus, peasants from co-operatives in the Special Zone and the South-West streamed into the city to loot ‘useful goods’ — axes, hoes, spades, fencing wire and sacks of rice. The departing townspeople looted, too. And there were ‘authorised’ looters. Pol’s aide, Phi Phuon, drove in with a group of bodyguards from Sdok Toel and returned with an American jeep and a Land-Rover to expand the Party Secretary’s motor pool. Other units raided the city’s pharmacies, taking truckloads of drugs to Thiounn Thioeunn’s field hospital near the village of Bek Chan and to the Zone command posts.

On Day Two — Friday, April 18 — Son Sen and his staff drove in from Ra Smach and established their headquarters at the Phnom Penh railway station.

One of his first acts was to summon the division commanders from all four Zones to delineate clear limits for each sector. Tensions continued, and during the weekend, in one of the strangest incidents of that week, the National Bank was blown up with dynamite. Francois Bizot, at the French Consulate a mile further north, remembered ‘a

fearful explosion

shaking the air’ followed by a huge column of smoke climbing into the sky. It was never completely clear who was responsible, but the bank was at the limit of Eastern and South-West Zone control. The likeliest explanation is that it was pillaged by men from Chakrey’s Eastern Zone headquarters. The perpetrators allegedly made off with 200 kg of gold and then blew up the building to make the theft appear to be the work of gangsters profiting from the confusion.

*

After this incident, co-ordination improved and open clashes between troops from different units ceased.

New guidelines were also issued to harmonise the evacuation procedures in different parts of the city. No longer could people choose for themselves which road to take. Those in the north went north, up Highway 5, even if their home villages lay in a quite different direction; those in the west were marched along Highways 3 or 4, towards Kampot or Kompong Speu; those in the south towards Takeo or Svay Rieng. The entreaties of husbands and wives or parents and children who happened to

find themselves in different parts of the city were ignored: they went the same way as everyone else in their sector. Searches were stepped up for those trying to stay behind. The old and bedridden were simply killed.

Similar scenes, with local variations, occurred all over Cambodia.

The only major Zone command not to have sent troops to the battle for Phnom Penh was the North-West. On April 18, its soldiers occupied Battambang, where they acted more circumspectly, but even more brutally, than the Northerners in the capital. Soon after arriving, they ordered the prices of foodstuffs in the market to be cut fifty to a hundredfold, to the delight of the population and the despair of the Chinese stallholders. The acting provincial governor, a republican colonel, then appealed over the radio to all soldiers to report with their arms to the Prefectural Office. There they were divided into three groups: officers, NCOs and enlisted men. Most of the latter were marched westwards, towards Samlaut, and set to clearing the forest for new settlements and paddy-fields. But some of the NCOs were taken away in trucks, one group leaving for Siem Reap, another for Phnom Penh, supposedly for retraining. About twenty miles out of the city, they were ordered to get off and assemble in nearby fields, where their arms were bound and they were killed.