When the War Was Over (34 page)

The story of Democratic Kampuchea is of necessity a fractured series of tragedies that do not add up to a whole. Each witness is limited by the narrowness of his experience during the revolution and by the guilt and confusion each Cambodian who endured this period feels. The party elite lived in one milieu with its own concepts, the peasant revolutionaries lived another life with another idea of the fruits of revolution, a middle-class evacuee lived a far poorer life. Diplomats and the rare foreign visitors saw one Democratic
Kampuchea, the jailers at extermination centers another. Each has a piece of the puzzle to contribute, but all are plagued by the questions: Who is responsible? Who could have prevented the catastrophe? Why was there no popular uprising?

The man best situated to provide answers was one of the more reclusive tyrants in history. Pol Pot made few speeches and gave even fewer interviews while in power. Most of his accomplices have been as reticent to discuss what went on and why during the reign of Democratic Kampuchea until years after it collapsed and their accounts are full of dubious allegations and claims.

Even with these handicaps a picture can be drawn of the ultimate revolution. It begins at the center.

Pol Pot and the party inner sanctum—the standing committee of the central committee—were literally in charge at the center. In fact, in party parlance this top party leadership was referred to simply as the Center. Pol Pot's first, pressing task was to consolidate a central power to unify the nation. The zones created to fight the war remained too independent. The armies had to be unified into one national army under party control; the zone leaders—the zone party secretaries—had to submit to more direct central control than they were used to.

Pol Pot and Ieng Sary discovered on their first tour of the city that the capital's war booty was less than they had expected, according to Ieng Sary. They had expected to find a greater cache of military hardware. The two men had to pick their way through the debris, and Sary says he was stunned by all that was not in Phnom Penh. Their soldiers, according to orders, had begun the systematic destruction. They piled up automobiles, air conditioners, refrigerators. Mountains of appliances were left to rust, others were cannibalized for parts, still others were thrown onto bonfires. Storefronts were turned into warehouses where items for future use were stored: wooden tables in one building, chairs in another, desks and cabinets in others. When Cambodia made its great leap the storefronts could be emptied and the goods distributed, so the theory went. Some libraries were ransacked, others padlocked, and there were reports of book burnings.

Most government buildings, the royal palace and museum, and a number of apartments remained open and were designated the offices and homes of the revolutionary regime. Several hundred party cadre and soldiers were detached to Phnom Penh to clean up the small area that would make up the
capital. Streets, sidewalks, and buildings were made spotless. The regime found engineers who knew the city's electrical system and put them to work repairing the grid for their buildings instead of killing them or sending them to the rice fields.

All else was ignored or picked apart. The now obsolete central market was planted in banana trees. The front yards of empty mansions became vegetable gardens. Blocks of houses were dismantled for wood. But when the leaders assessed their stockpiles, it was less than they had expected.

First, the United States gave Phnom Penh only a fraction of the aid lavished on Saigon. And because the Khmer Rouge final offensive had been so violent, the city was battered and spoiled. The Khmer Rouge's nearly three-year blockade of the Mekong River and its later attacks on Pochentong Airport had starved the city of supplies. The bombardment had damaged crucial services and destroyed valuable property. The hospitals were in disrepair and had no inventory. The Khmer Rouge propaganda had been filled with reference to the starving city, the collapsing regime, the dirt and the decadence, but even they were surprised at the extent of the city's decline, according to Sary.

It was in direct contrast to the situation in Saigon when the North Vietnamese marched into that city on April 30. They found a city brimming with goods, a sound industrial base, a military stockpile that instantly placed Vietnam at the top of the class in Asian fighting fields, and nearly six months' worth of food supplies sufficient for the entire population. The four million people of Saigon needed to ask for only 135,000 extra tons during the rest of the year. After the 1968 Tet Offensive, Saigon had seen little fighting; the battles were fought farther into the countryside and the Americans had been able to ship supplies in regularly to the city.

The Khmer Rouge inherited a Phnom Penh with less than one week's supply of rice for its two million people and none of the booty in Saigon. U.S. aid to Lon Nol had totaled $1.6 billion, of which over $1 billion was military aid, a very small amount compared to the $159.42 billion spent on the Vietnam War. And American military aid covered only basic equipment—no fighter jets or tanks, only T-28 propeller airplanes, a few damaged helicopters and armored personnel carriers, and no cannons larger than 155-millimeter howitzers. There had never been American aid to build up industries, modern living quarters, or modern military headquarters. Instead of booty they found a wasteland. The communication system was 60 to 80 percent damaged or destroyed. The railways were in need of major repair. The highways and roads were gutted and unusable for miles. Half of
the farmlands were fallow or damaged from fighting or bombing. Most of the country's small-scale industries had run out of raw materials. There were no inventories of food, medicine, or spare parts.

The people were in bad shape. Many were beaten down, exhausted from nervousness as well as fatigue from the final siege of Phnom Penh. Half of them, some 3,389,000 people, had been uprooted from their homes. Officially half a million Cambodians died on the Lon Nol side of the war; another 600,000 were said to have died in Khmer Rouge zones. War had disabled and handicapped hundreds of thousands more.

The party decided not to accept offers of medicine and food from international organizations that might have saved any number of these people. The Khmer Rouge declined the offers of help, saying it was not necessary; in fact, food and medicine were needed desperately, but the Khmer Rouge were wedded to the notion of “self-sufficiency” and convinced that those offers were simply means for foreign powers to manipulate and subvert countries like Cambodia. There was also a sense of misplaced pride. The Khmer Rouge repeatedly said they would not be “beggars” and accept international handouts, regardless of how many Cambodians died to uphold Khmer Rouge dignity. However, Cambodia did accept critical supplies from China.

The party also decided against repairing much of the damage to the city and country. It would require money and material the Khmer Rouge did not have. Moreover, the party leaders in Phnom Penh realized that some of the destruction was to their advantage. There was less chance of escape or rebellion if the roads were gutted and there were no buses or automobiles. Without telephone or telegraph and mail service, communication lines would be reestablished so that Phnom Penh controlled all contacts within the country.

One of the first chores was to establish this monopoly on information and communication. The central leadership took over distribution of goods and inventorying goods. There were plans for distribution points in zones, regions, and districts, but only through central control. The same was true for monitoring intelligence and dispatching orders or messages. Phnom Penh made sure that the zones, military posts, and special facilities were linked by primitive telegraph lines to the capital and not to each other. Each part would be answerable to the center, with no intermediaries. They ruled in this manner to the end.

It was a wasteful, redundant arrangement that may have satisfied the leaders' desire for direct control but hardly aided in unifying the country into one economic system. For example, the country's only seaport, Kompong Som on the Gulf of Siam, received all orders directly from Phnom Penh and had
almost no contact with regional authorities at the nearby Ream naval base. If Kompong Som dockworkers needed additional trucks to offload a shipment from China, the port authorities had to petition Phnom Penh for the trucks, and Phnom Penh then had to order Ream to dispatch them.

Directing this traffic and the reconstruction of the country was Pol Pot and the standing committee. Pol Pot made Phnom Penh his home at the start. He had several residences, all secret, and he never slept in the same bed two consecutive nights, or so the legend goes. From the beginning he was afraid of would-be assassins. Khieu Ponnary, his wife, was nearly mad by the time her husband's army won the war. She was put under special care in a separate house in the city. Her sister, Ieng Thirith, wife of Sary, was to become the “First Lady” of the revolution.

Thirith, Sary, and their children were the most visible top figures of the revolution. She was the first woman given a cabinet position, he became the Khmer Rouge foreign minister. The family's gathering in Phnom Penh was a reunion after ten years' separation.

Their three daughters and one son had been left in the care of Thirith's mother and younger sister in 1965 when Thirith quit Phnom Penh to join her husband in the maquis. After the 1970 coup the children were moved out of Phnom Penh to a Khmer Rouge zone. Ith Sarin, the former school inspector, saw them during his stay with the Khmer Rouge that produced
Regrets for the Khmer Soul
. They were still under the care of their grandmother and aunt. “I never saw my children for ten years,” Thirith said later. After the 1975 reunion she did not let them out of her sight.

While her party was forcibly breaking apart families in the countryside, Thirith arranged for her four grown children to be housed near her and share in the privileged life of the new Phnom Penh elite. The First Family established and exemplified the revolutionary leadership lifestyle in Phnom Penh. Their children, with dubious credentials, were given sought-after positions: The eldest daughter became a physician in the capital, although she was not trained as such. The two other daughters became pharmacists. One worked in a traditional medical center on the outskirts of the city, the other in a Phnom Penh laboratory producing vaccines. The son became a Khmer Rouge pilot at Pochentong Airport. When the doctor daughter gave birth in 1977, Thirith was present to hold her first grandchild. The children were often made guides for foreign visitors. Other younger children of wellplaced figures were housed in special dormitories where they were given exemplary care and visited regularly by their parents.

Outwardly the new Phnom Penh was meant to resemble the “cooperative” style of living being established in the countryside. The thousands of soldiers, cadre, and workers resettled in the capital were billeted in dormitories and ate their meals in a common canteen, but the modern city apartment blocks and sturdy old houses with electricity, running water, mosquito nets, and, for a few, air conditioning could hardly be compared to the lean-tos, hammocks, and bare ground of many cooperatives in the countryside.

Thirith and Sary said they were pleased with the cooperative style of life. But they had the equivalent of private suites, and maids to clean their rooms and cook their meals. They had their own chauffeurs, bodyguards, and aides-de-camp. Sary's clothes were tailored in China; Thirith had her choice of material for sarongs and blouses. The baggy black pajamas of their jungle years were things of the past—for them. Soap, shampoo, all the imported goods forbidden to the vast majority of their fellow Khmers were theirs when available. They ate their meals in a “common” dining room shared with other top figures, and the food was the best the country offered. Thirith nevertheless felt qualified to judge the efficacy of communal life, which she claimed to share with the common people.

“It is easier for the workers. They have no need to cook. They just do the work and then they come back and eat. . . . [The poor people] had never been served before, now they were served. Before the women had to work, to come home and search for the fish, the rice, to cook it, care for the children. This was terrible. In communal living they only have to come home from work and eat,” she said proudly.

What may have been “terrible” for Thirith was the joy of life for most other women and men—raising their own children, caring for their homes, preparing the meals that shape a Khmer day. But Thirith was forging the new, modern life for Kampuchean worker-peasants and the Kampuchean worker-peasant family. She was eventually named the first and only minister of social affairs. Perhaps unconsciously, she helped institute the harsh life she had endured with great pain during the years of hiding and warfare—broken families, meager food rations, little medical care, awful sanitation, boring weeks, months, and years with no break from work, fear, and fatigue.