When the War Was Over (31 page)

This was how the Khmer Rouge won the “rice war.” Their cooperatives kept track of the rice and goods available, and the state or “Angka” tried to distribute them as equitably as circumstances allowed. The overall impression was that everyone was in the war together. This system stood in stark contrast to Phnom Penh, where greed and corruption created a hungry, nearly starving refugee population living next to a fat and rich elite and to a middle class that stumbled along, trying to stay above the poverty line while maintaining the pretense that nothing was dramatically wrong, and carrying on daily affairs with little mention of “the war.”

The opposing attitudes toward feeding the people were outgrowths of the military strategies adopted by each side and mirrored the policies of their allies. The army of Lon Nol was entirely dependent on the United States for food as well as arms and failed to protect farmers trying to raise crops. The Khmer Republic claimed to be fighting to win over people, not territory, and fields were abandoned. By 1974 only the northwest grew sizable quantities of rice within Khmer Republic-held territory, and that grain was sold to the black market destined for Thailand or the Khmer Rouge, or whoever was the highest bidder.

Phnom Penh's policy toward civilians was criminal neglect. Wartime Phnom Penh was a seedy city in which army officers and subordinates fleeced refugees at roadblocks set up at the city's entrances. They confiscated anything of value and bought young girls, asking for virgins, to stock their brothels. Rice riots had begun as early as 1972, and the food situation was so desperate by 1973 that the U.S. embassy cabled to Washington weekly reports of available rice stocks in the city.

With the escalation of war following the Vietnam peace accords, Phnom Penh soon became the city of refugees. By 1974 the United States had delegated the task of caring for the homeless to private American charities, which had to plan, build, staff, and purchase everything for the expanding population.
Though dedicated, like their few embassy counterparts, these relief workers were overwhelmed by the size and hopelessness of their task. Lon Nol's army lost battles, and the United States was unable to import enough food for the refugees. Malnutrition was commonplace among the children.

The population poured into Phnom Penh. The choice was posed in extremes: Risk starvation as a refugee in the Khmer Republic or give your soul to Angka in exchange for the assurance of being fed something. Run away from the forced collectivization of the countryside so your child can starve to death in Phnom Penh.

Khmer society and culture were battered both in the new cooperatives and in the Khmer Republic. Emergency needs of war could not justify the system of cooperatives. All those things that had marked the Khmer life were disappearing under the requirement that life be devoted entirely to raising food. Without marketplaces, festivals, or time to relax, people no longer met friends, shared gossip or meals. The family disappeared. Teenage children were separated from their families. The refugees interviewed by Quinn seemed to have withered from loneliness. They were isolated from friends and family in the cooperative and cut off entirely from those outside. Cable lines were cut, travel and mail were prohibited, and underground courier systems dried up. Authority, loyalty, all sense of identity were monopolized by Angka.

Religion was suppressed in the name of conservation. All religious and social celebrations were prohibited, and Buddhism was derided as backward and feudal. Marriage was more or less outlawed, so the party could induct young men and women into the army more easily. Gaiety was suspect. Flirting was banned and punished as severely as gambling. Bright clothes, jewelry, and any “extravagance” of dress were forbidden: Black or drab-colored pajamas and sarongs were the uniform. As Quinn wrote, these rules hit the Muslim minority, the Chams, especially hard. Their dress and the women's jewelry and hair styles were part of their religion and identity. Events would prove this not a coincidence. Minorities—Chinese, Cham, or Vietnamese—would be greatly endangered as the Khmer Rouge expressed their nationalism more urgently.

And there was the terror. The refugees told Quinn they feared making a wrong move or unknowingly saying the wrong thing and finding themselves faced with death. There were no exact laws or rules overseen by courts and judges; only swift unacknowledged punishment for disobedience or dissent.
Nor were party members exempt. If cadre argued against forced relocations, they were taken away and killed. No one knew what would trigger the anger of Angka, what punishment would be imposed. The only certainty was that death would be secret.

The Khmer Rouge never admitted to kidnapping or killing people. Cadre pretended to know nothing about the people who were dragged away at night and disappeared. They neither denied nor admitted responsibility. In this atmosphere of terror, the people did not know who was empowered to order an execution or why someone was selected for death. Frantic relatives were brushed aside when they searched for the missing. Soon people knew not to ask. Dread and fear enveloped many of the cooperatives. Stories filtered back that some of the disappeared had been executed, others sent to prisons where they were likely to suffer and die from malnutrition or malaria. But no one knew for certain.

This was not a system of open retribution against collaborators with the enemy; it bore no resemblance to the revenge taken by French citizens against Nazi sympathizers following World War II. Nor was it similar to the political “reign of terror” policies of other communist revolutions which encouraged peasants to kill “counterrevolutionary” landlords as an act of revolution. Mao Zedong had described such a policy in his “Hunan Report” of 1927: “When the local bullies and evil gentry were at the height of their power, they killed peasants without batting an eyelid . . . how can one say that the peasants should not now rise and shoot one or two of them, and bring about a small-scale reign of terror in suppressing the counterrevolutionaries?” During the revolutionary wars of China and Vietnam, some political executions were done openly, the accused forced to stand before peasants and admit guilt, the peasants who were assigned to punish, sometimes forgiving them. Khmer Rouge terror was of another order, and certainly not about to find its way onto an official document.

All Khmer Rouge officials at all levels throughout the country took part in the terror campaigns during the war. As Saloth Sar and his comrades said later, their revolution was the “work of God, for it is too imposing for mere humans . . . of great and purest character, unprecedented in the millenary history of our country.” No enemies or opponents of the revolution could stand in the way. The party was going to “ensure the perenniality of Kampuchea's race.”

The Khmer Rouge had reached the dead end of their logic. Isolated and betrayed for so many years, they had become confused and then angry and bitter. Cruelty, as embodied by the concept of purity—either as a pure communist,
pure Cambodian, or pure loyalist—had replaced thinking. Racial salvation, “national honor and dignity,” the restoration of control over “our national territory and our race” became the public themes of the revolution, even to the point of mentioning how “we have already lost Kampuchea Krom,” or South Vietnam. Saloth Sar had become Lon Nol without the sorcery.

By their own admission, 1973 was the first year the Khmer Rouge “fought alone on the Cambodian front,” in some cases refusing North Vietnamese attempts to aid them in a battle. They adopted the Vietnamese communist strategy and stayed as close as possible to Lon Nol's soldiers during the American B-52 bombing campaign to avoid being targeted. They mounted a three-sided attack on Phnom Penh in the thick of bombardments, fighting like madmen even though they must have known that the American Congress and the public were demanding an end to the bombing.

The Khmer Rouge struck from the south, threatening key defense positions on Route One, the highway that connects Phnom Penh to Saigon. Only heavy U.S. bombardments saved the Khmer Republic forces. By April 1973 the Khmer Rouge were within artillery and mortar range of the capital, prompting the first major evacuation of foreigners from Phnom Penh. Gas and electricity began to be rationed in the capital; the Khmer Rouge attacks on the Mekong River and the convoys that supplied Phnom Penh were taking their toll. Phnom Penh was under siege, and despite optimistic utterances from the American embassy, the city would never return to normal.

Through May and June the Khmer Rouge kept up their attacks, first along Route Five in the north, then, in July, on Phnom Penh. From the east, northwest, and north they pounded the Republic's defenses, and only massive American bombing kept them from breaking through. Windows in the capital rattled from the three-part rumble of nearby B-52 strikes. The Khmer Rouge siege subsided, and Congress shortly thereafter forced the end of U.S. aerial attacks on August 15. The Republic was left naked and vulnerable and with the awesome knowledge that they faced an army of fellow Khmer who were possessed by a determination bordering on the demonic.

The months of American bombing had had a powerful impact on the Khmer Rouge, perhaps more psychological than physical. They said that
malaria killed more of their soldiers during the period than bombing (malaria had been the chief killer of French colonial troops as well). But the bombing was their baptism into the ranks of Indochinese revolutionary heroes. In their own eyes, they became the premier victims of U.S. imperialism. They told the Chinese that no revolutionary army had suffered as they had during the U.S. bombing campaign, a claim they made even to the North Vietnamese, who had suffered U.S. bombs for years. Le Duc Tho retorted dryly that “the amount of U.S. bombs dropped in Laos and North Vietnam was much more than that dropped in [Cambodia].”

But Khmer Rouge psychology had pivoted too long on the notion that no communist party had suffered the pain and neglect they had—an obvious complement to their view that no country had been as humiliated as Cambodia had been over the centuries. To have survived the bombing was visible confirmation of their superhuman determination. No country or party, especially not the Vietnamese, could claim otherwise. Ieng Thirith said this forcefully: “Our country suffered much more than Vietnam [at the hands of the United States] . . . much more devastation than Vietnam because of the 200 days and 200 nights of bombing. It is not true that Vietnam suffered more [from U.S. bombing]. They did not have 200 days of bombing, 200 nights without interruption—no.”

American reaction buttressed their feelings, as did the carnage left in the wake of 539,129 tons of bombs dropped. The U.S. procedure for targeting had been inept: The maps were often wrong, affecting the accuracy of the bombers. The targets were selected in a slipshod fashion by the Khmer Republic forces and the high command, who used air strikes rather than commit their own infantry. Their intelligence about Khmer Rouge troop movement was consistently wrong. Innocent villages were destroyed, and the tragic sequence ended with the bombing of the Khmer Republic's base at Neak Luong on the Mekong River, a “misbombing” that came to symbolize America's inept solutions to the complications of the Second Indochina War.