Survival in the Killing Fields (7 page)

She left the two of us to eat together and went into the kitchen as usual. Huoy and I sat down and began to eat. I kept my eyes on the food, not meeting Huoy’s gaze.

We had rice with the usual side dishes. As always, excellent home-style Cambodian cooking.

Halfway through the meal, Huoy said, ‘Sweet, are you still angry at me?’

I helped myself to another piece of fish and put it on my plate next to the rice.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Then please, look at me.’

‘I know what you look like.’ I was still looking at the plate.

‘Don’t hurt me,’ she said. I still looked down at the plate.

Startled, I felt the touch of her fingers on my cheek. I glanced at her arm reaching across the table and then into her enormous brown eyes. ‘No, I wouldn’t hurt you,’ I said
nervously. ‘I just asked you – ‘

‘Hush,’ she said, and the gaze that answered mine held a depth of sadness and wisdom that I had never seen in anyone before. ‘Don’t bring back bad memories.’

I reached over to stroke her hair.

Huoy had shown she cared for me. The rock had tried to work loose, but the paper wrapped it even tighter than before.

She went to her classes, I went to medical school and we saw each other in the evenings. We were heading on converging courses, ones that in normal times would bring us eventually to marriage.
Engrossed in our daily lives, we could not imagine that an event was about to happen that would set off a chain reaction, push Cambodia into tragedy and affect us to the core of our beings.

In early March 1970 Cambodia was still an island of peace. Politically it was neutral. But all around it was war, or the equipment of war. To the east and southeast was South
Vietnam, where the North Vietnamese and the Americans were mired in a struggle that neither seemed able to win. To the north was Laos, mountainous and landlocked, where the communists and royalists
waged a smaller war backed by the same outside powers. To the west and northwest was Thailand, where the Americans based B-52s and other warplanes. In the middle of all this was Cambodia, a small
country, roughly the size of the state of Washington or one third the size of France.

By Western standards Cambodia was poor and primitive. Most of our people were peasants living off the land. We waited passively for the rains to fill up our rice paddies. We caught tiny fish and
foraged for wild foods. Even our wealthiest class, made up of merchants and corrupt government officials in Phnom Penh, wasn’t really rich. For all its charm, for all its flower beds and wide
boulevards, Phnom Penh was a quiet place where not much happened beyond the morning bustle in the markets and the long lunchtime siestas. And yet how lucky we were, compared to our neighbours!
Cambodia was at peace. Nobody had to live in ‘strategic hamlets’ surrounded by barbed wire. We could live where we wanted and do what we wanted. Few were oppressed, beyond the level of
oppression and corruption normal for Asian societies. Life ran on in its age-old patterns. In the midmorning, the monks made their silent rounds collecting alms. In the middle of the day, the
farmers came in from their fields to rest in the shade under their houses, and old women chewed betel nut and wove their own cloth on looms. At night the villages resounded with the music of
homemade instruments and drums.

To me and the people I knew, the war seemed far away. Never mind that the South Vietnamese border was only a few hours’ drive from Phnom Penh. We were used to that. Never mind that the
Vietnamese communists had a network of hidden roads, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, along the Cambodia-South Vietnam border. We were vaguely aware of it, but our press didn’t remind us of it often.
We had had no idea at all that communist supplies were arriving in the ocean port of Sihanoukville, that the Americans had been sending Special Forces teams across the South Vietnamese border or
that US B-52s had been dropping bombs in Cambodia for nearly a year. Nobody told us that. Most Cambodians were like me. We were from villages. Our horizons were bounded by rice fields and
trees.

We had been at peace because of one man, Norodom Sihanouk. The French appointed him king when he was a schoolboy, expecting that he would be easy to control, but Sihanouk outmanoeuvred them,
just as he outmanoeuvred everyone else. After negotiating our independence in 1953, by hinting at revolution if France refused, Sihanouk abdicated as king and ran for election. He won by a huge
margin and continued to be the country’s leader. Domestically he kept the support of the dark-skinned ethnic Khmers, who made up the majority of the population, by appealing to their racial
pride and by telling everyone over and over how lucky we were to be Cambodians, descendants of the ancient empire at Angkor. But he also protected the rights of the light-skinned minorities, the
ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese. In foreign policy he played the communist powers against the Western powers, accepting aid from all of them until 1965, when he cut ties with the United States after
what he felt was an insult to his pride. He leaned to the left after that, but officially he kept Cambodia neutral and nonaligned. The American government didn’t like him because he
wouldn’t let US troops come openly into Cambodia to fight the North Vietnamese.

In Cambodia, Sihanouk was immensely popular. We barely noticed his faults, like allowing corruption to go unpunished, and keeping incompetent people in the government. Few of us were educated
enough to care. When he spoke to us in his loud, high-pitched voice, shouting and gesturing wildly, eyes bulging with excitement, we listened with respect.

Sihanouk loved drama of every kind. He made movies starring himself. He supported the Royal Ballet; the ballerinas were his concubines. He held huge rallies near his palace, where he heard the
complaints of the common people, then called the guilty government officials in and scolded them on the spot. And every year he held a ceremony at the place where the Mekong and the Tonle Sap
rivers join and then separate again. At the precise moment when the current reversed and the water began to flow uphill toward Tonle Sap lake, he blessed the waters, which made the water’s
reversal seem like something he had caused magically (though, of course, the moon’s tidal pull on the rainy-season floods made it happen). Foreigners called him ‘Prince’ Sihanouk,
because he had officially abdicated, but we still called him ‘King.’ Many peasants believed he was a god.

The trouble began on March 11, 1970, when Sihanouk was out of the country and the press was playing up the North Vietnamese sanctuaries along the eastern border. I was attending a lecture when
the protest march started. When I caught up to it later, rioting was under way. Young lycée students were throwing papers, filing cabinets, desks and chairs out of the second floor of the
North Vietnamese embassy. They tossed bundles of currency on the street below. They lowered the North Vietnamese flag from its flagpole and burned it. They did the same at the embassy of the
Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam, or Viet Cong, which was located nearby. ‘Vietnamese stay out of Cambodia!’ the students shouted. ‘Don’t invade
Cambodia again!’

The riot had less to do with contemporary politics than with an old, old racial grudge against the Vietnamese. Cambodia and Vietnam had fought many wars over the centuries. We Cambodians
remembered our defeats and waited for revenge – even those of us who were not ‘pure’ Khmer but a mixture of Chinese and Khmer. We all knew the legend of the cooking stones.
According to the legend, Vietnamese soldiers took three Cambodians captive long ago and buried them alive up to their necks with just their heads sticking out of the ground. Then the Vietnamese
made a fire between the heads and set a kettle on top of the heads as cookstones. Whether this had actually happened or not, most Cambodians believed it as fact. And in this riot, the resentment
against Vietnamese of all kinds, communist and noncommunist, from the North and from the South, and even against Cambodians of Vietnamese descent, got rolled into one.

The riot put Phnom Penh in an uproar. Here was the capital of a supposedly neutral country attacking the embassies of its neighbours. Sihanouk cabled from Paris to try to stop it. He knew what
people like me didn’t – that the rioters, for all their deep feelings, had been manipulated by hidden organizers like puppets on strings. But in his absence officials of his government
continued to push the North Vietnamese. The two highest-ranking officials were Sihanouk’s royal rival, Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak, and General Lon Nol, who was prime minister and also
minister of defence and minister of information. Lon Nol was a dark-skinned man who liked his troops to call him ‘Black Papa’. He was proud of being Khmer, and he hated the Vietnamese
as much as the rioters themselves. He gave the Vietnamese communists three days to leave their sanctuaries along the border.

Of course, the North Vietnamese didn’t leave. If they could fight successfully against a superpower like the United States, why should they obey a government with a tiny military like
Cambodia’s? In Phnom Penh the excitement and uncertainty rose. The airport closed. Armoured cars and tanks took up positions on the streets. On March 17 there was a big rally and parade. I
was in it, carrying a sign, shouting for the Vietnamese to go home. Everybody on the street was anti-Vietnamese and pro-Sihanouk. We all felt the same – students, journalists, police, army.
What we had forgotten was that Sihanouk himself had carefully balanced the Vietnamese communists and the Western powers to keep Cambodia neutral. He had also protected ethnic Vietnamese-Cambodians
from persecution.

At lunch the following day I was having my usual bowl of sour-and-spicy noodle soup. My friend Sam Kwil, a journalist for one of the newspapers, and I were chatting when there was an
announcement on the radio: The National Assembly had passed a vote of no confidence against Sihanouk.

Suddenly the food wasn’t tasty anymore.

I looked around the restaurant. Everybody was staring with disbelief at the radio. Overthrow Sihanouk? Impossible! I took the radio from its stand and brought it to my table and turned up the
volume. We waited. Then the announcement was repeated, and the hope that we had heard wrong disappeared.

Sirik Matak and Lon Nol were behind the coup. They had the support of only a tiny minority, the Phnom Penh elite, which couldn’t become as rich as it wanted because Sihanouk and his family
controlled all the top jobs. My journalist friend Sam Kwil, who was very well informed, told me that Sirik Matak and Lon Nol probably had help from the CIA. He said that Lon Nol wasn’t smart
enough to use racism against the Vietnamese as a way to destabilize the country, and then use the instability as the excuse for a coup. I agreed. But nobody has ever proved that the CIA was
involved.

In a short time a new government emerged, with Lon Nol as its chief of state. Soon the government-owned television and radio station and the newspapers that were friendly to it accused Sihanouk
of corruption and other crimes. But the attempt to discredit Sihanouk didn’t stop there. Back in Samrong Yong, my sister Chhay Thao’s husband, a teacher, took me to see a pigsty. There,
partially buried under manure, was a statue of Sihanouk, its head severed from its body.

My brother-in-law said the same thing had happened to the statue of Sihanouk in the neighbouring town of Chambak. He had helped topple it himself.

‘We got orders to destroy it,’ he explained. ‘I didn’t want to, but the orders came from high up. From
very
high up. We had to obey.’

Next, the regime gave an order to all the teachers in the country. Huoy heard about it in her teacher training and became very upset. The teachers were supposed to tell their pupils that
Sihanouk was a corrupt traitor. The pupils were supposed to repeat this to their parents. And this was where the backlash began.

All across Cambodia that week, parents scolded and beat their children. It was not just because the parents were loyal to Sihanouk, though they were. It was because Cambodian society was like a
family on a big scale. Just like a father who was the head of the family, Sihanouk was the head of Cambodia, the Royal Father. For little children to say that he was bad was disrespectful.
Indirectly, it criticized their own fathers.

Anti-Lon Nol demonstrations began. This time the demonstrators were not students but dark-skinned, tattooed farmers and villagers, wearing shorts and kramas and Buddha charms. Sihanouk was their
god-king. Even if he could not be restored to power, they wanted his statues restored. They held signs, and some of them had knives and hatchets and machetes, but they didn’t have guns. They
marched from Samrong Yong to Chambak, and in Chambak Lon Nol’s army opened fire on them with machine guns. The dead were carried away in hammocks tied at either end to thick bamboo poles. It
was the same in the rest of the country. Near Phnom Penh, the soldiers opened fire on other demonstrators who were waiting next to a bridge. Up the Mekong River in the town of Kompong Cham, an
angry mob seized one of Lon Nol’s brothers. They killed him, cut his liver out and forced a restaurant owner to fry the liver and feed the slices to the crowd.

Surely the country had run amok. Surely peaceful, sleepy Cambodia was being overwhelmed by the forces of
kum.
But in a few weeks a kind of peace returned. Most Cambodians didn’t
dislike the new regime enough to fight it. And practically speaking, there was little to be done. Lon Nol, the former commander of the armed forces, used his military to enforce his rule.

Unlike Sihanouk, Lon Nol was on friendly terms with the US government. He let it do whatever it wanted. In late April 1970, without even notifying Lon Nol first, American and the South
Vietnamese forces invaded an area along the Cambodian-South Vietnamese border to try to destroy the communist sanctuaries.

At first the invasion was tremendously popular in Phnom Penh; we thought the Americans were strong enough to kick the North Vietnamese out. But we were wrong. After the Americans and South
Vietnamese pulled back to South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese remained. A few tall, red-faced, long-nosed American advisers became a daily sight around the central government buildings and in the
major hotels, and American equipment began arriving for the Cambodian military in larger and larger quantities.