When the War Was Over (42 page)

Since they built their party and revolution without the active support or legitimacy of the communist world, much less the Cambodian population, they learned to trust no one. Everything was a secret. Isolation became an asset. It contained a sense of mystery and supported an overblown idea of
their own power. Secrecy, distrust, and isolation became the
modi operandi
of the Khmer Rouge, and spawned their theories of battle and of the ideal society to follow. They believed the “enemy” was everywhere, and extreme measures were their only answers to thwarting and defeating that enemy. Hence their wartime cooperatives were prison fortresses and their soldiers were ordered to fight like kamikazes.

And with victory their vigilance was heightened, not relaxed. They followed Stalin's maxim that class struggle would intensify after victory. Despite their rhetoric, they never trusted “the people” so often extolled in their speeches. When faced with individuals the Khmer Rouge saw only enemies. They saw Cambodia's former society, the
ancien regime
, as a nest of enemies, and sought to destroy it. All human relationships were suspect. The notion of a personal life, of the rights and feelings of the individual, was denied. Individuals were not loyal to the revolution, only classes were: the peasantry, the soldiers, and the workers.

Family life had to be eliminated. The state had to usurp the authority of the family if it was to survive. The family was the most potent, hence the most feared, of all relationships of the former society. In the countryside the peasant families had had power over the basic decisions the revolution now wanted to make: what kind and how much food would be planted; when and how crops would be marketed; who would work in the fields; who would work at home.

The larger identities of the people were also suspect. The cultural and religious minorities had to abandon their distinctive ways and assimilate. They had to become new Cambodian worker-peasants, or face death. Everyone had to be the same; everyone had to be loyal to the state and to the state alone. Even the Khmer peasantry had to give up its traditions, to become like the proletariat. That meant giving up the peculiarities of village or province, and living the cooperative way of life which had to be uniform throughout the land. All relationships outside that of the individual to the state were discouraged if not outlawed—from the personal, to the family, to the minority, to the traditional provincial life of the majority.

This attack on society was done in the name of purification of a worker-peasant revolution, to protect the communist cadre from the impure elements of the old society and its enemy classes. But the definition of enemy shifted constantly as the party failed to win power and failed to achieve the desired economic miracles. A swing in party politics or a change in revolutionary theory created new categories of enemies. Fear of enemy classes was replaced by fear of enemy elements who had infiltrated the party. Ultimately, no one could
be protected, for the party found no one to trust. Angka was on a path of complete self-destruction, complete atomization of society.

Here are the stories of the victims of that search for the pure revolution.

Hout Ly Sitha and Hout Bophana were distant cousins, born and raised in East Baray, a market center of some 20,000 people and a well-known crossroad of Kompong Thom province. In 1965, when they had come of age, Ly and Bophana were betrothed and Ly left to study in a pagoda, as was expected. After five years of instruction he returned to East Baray and studied to earn a lycée diploma.

That was 1970, and war broke out. Baray district became the center of the first major battles. Lon Nol's two offensives—Chenla I and Chenla II—were aimed at claiming control over the large triangular area north of Phnom Penh that included Baray and was the geographic center of the country. In the first Chenla operation in 1970, Baray was lost to the North Vietnamese army. In the second operation one year later it was recaptured by Lon Nol troops, but it was forfeited once more in October in a counterattack by the North Vietnamese, who fought with the help of growing Khmer Rouge forces. Baray was lost in that battle for the rest of the war. In 1973, when the Khmer Rouge asserted their control over the area, it was near Baray that the Khmer communists committed some of the first reported atrocities against civilians.

Ly and Bophana fled their home after 1970, like most of the Khmer of their background. But they did not flee together. Ly joined a monastery in neighboring Kompong Cham province, a choice made by many draft-age men at the time who did not want to fight for either side. Bophana and her two sisters fled to Kompong Thom city in search of employment and a home. There, however, she was raped by a government soldier and after attempting suicide, she fled to Phnom Penh. Still pregnant, she was expected to earn the family's keep. She gave birth to a son and left him in the care of her young sister while she went out in search of a job.

For one year she knocked on doors. The city was filling up with women like her. Air Cambodia said she was too short to be an airline stewardess. A bank said she needed a top diploma to become a clerk. The family had to move to a smaller, less expensive house, and Bophana sold most of her possessions at city markets to pay for the rent and food. She had nearly given up
hope when, in early 1973, Gaetana Enders, wife of Thomas Enders, the American deputy chief of mission in Phnom Penh, opened up a welfare center for widows in the capital. It was called
La Maison des Papilions
, the House of Butterflies—“Papilion” was the childhood nickname of the Italian-born Mrs. Enders. But butterfly was also a word for prostitute in Phnom Penh and at first few women took advantage of the aid and training offered at the center because of the implication.

Bophana was not deterred. She presented herself as a widow and on Wednesdays stood in line for the rice, fish, milk, mosquito nets, soap, and sugar handed out, and she kept her family alive. She also attended the free sewing classes and passed a sewing exam. One of the Cambodian women working with this foreign charity noticed Bophana and asked if she would like to work for the charity itself and help hand out relief supplies to the refugees streaming into the city. In the criminal absurdity of war, the heavy American bombing, orchestrated by Thomas Enders, was creating a steady flow of refugees who needed the help of charities like those of Gaetana Enders.

Bophana became an employee of the charity and studied English in earnest. She became a valuable assistant and regular visitor to the charity offices near the riverfront. Her family was doing well.

In May 1974, Ly returned to Phnom Penh to study at the Buddhist Institute, the famous center begun decades earlier by the French. It was now a refuge for young men avoiding the increasingly savage war. By chance, Ly and Bophana met at a pagoda ceremony. He was now a saffron-robed monk with the shaved head and timeless quiet manner of the Buddhist clergy. She was a poised, Westernized Cambodian. She had shed her shy, provincial manner, cut her waist-length hair to her shoulders, and adopted the direct gaze of a working woman. Photographs of her show a beautiful woman. They met a second time, a few months later, and then Ly vanished from the city without telling her goodbye.

In the last months of the war Bophana worked constantly for the charity, distributing relief supplies and attending meetings with the few foreigners who remained to work with the refugees. In January 1975 she was appointed secretary of the charity. In April the Americans left the city, and a few days later the Khmer Rouge marched in victoriously.

During the chaotic evacuation, Bophana and her grandmother, who had come to live with them, became separated from the rest of her family, and she never saw them again. She obeyed the Khmer Rouge orders to return to her home village and joined the dusty columns north to Kompong Thom province. Her native East Baray was a bastion of the Khmer Rouge. The communists had controlled it most of the war and had organized a strong
cooperative system. Bophana, with her smooth, fair skin and her Western ways and attitudes, was an obvious target of resentment. She had not spent the war years dodging bombs and bullets, working in the demanding hot sun, and going without. Now she would. She was put at the bottom of the cooperative hierarchy and, at first, given nothing to eat. She had to forage for her food. Old friends secretly brought her food at night and during the day she performed the tasks appointed to her. She was wise enough to keep her Phnom Penh history secret. And she did not mention Ly. No one knew she had worked for a foreign woman's charity in Phnom Penh, and she did not know whether Ly was alive.

The wife of the cooperative leader, who had been the old village chief, began to suspect Bophana of moral crimes. She said Bophana had been a prostitute during the war in Phnom Penh and wondered if she did not gamble with the Khmer Rouge cadre at night. Bophana lost weight and became ill from worry, fatigue, and hunger. Then in September Ly came back to East Baray to see his mother and Bophana's life changed for the better.

Ly had been defrocked in July 1975 but he had been given a decent position with the Khmer Rouge thanks to his cousin, a Khmer Rouge soldier who had joined the army of Koy Thuon in the Northern Zone. Now Ly, too, was a cadre. His orange robes had been replaced by black pajamas and a pistol. His name had been changed from Hout Ly Sitha to Comrade Deth. As Deth, he had been assigned to work for Koy Thuon, now in charge of the economy after the war's end. While at the ministry, Deth learned Bophana had returned to Barai and on a home-leave to visit with his mother he discovered Bophana, half starved and under suspicion as a spy.

Bophana, overwhelmed with her good fortune, lived with Comrade Deth as his wife. But he soon had to return to the ministry and she wrote the first of a series of forbidden letters to her husband. She knew she was breaking some of the most fundamental rules of the revolution, endangering herself and her husband.

Deth declared the still-beautiful Bophana to be his long-lost wife and moved her into the more comfortable home of his mother and grandmother. His father had died before the war. Foolishly, Deth decided to build a life with Bophana in the chaos of the revolution. The village “old people” could not dispute Deth or countermand him on the matter of his family. He was a ranking cadre. But they did not believe him. Bophana had never mentioned Deth in the five months she had lived in the cooperative. And Deth's family had not claimed her, either. But this was the first stage of the revolution, the party had not convened its congress, and the cooperative's old people, while asserting their power over the new people from Phnom Penh, were too respectful of Angka to challenge one of its cadre. Bophana was allowed to live with Deth's family and enjoy the status of the wife of a cadre.

Deth and Bophana spent the rest of their short lives breaking the most sensitive of Khmer Rouge rules. They plotted their reunion in revealing letters written late at night and delivered surreptitiously by friends. Those letters form an extremely rare, intimate account of the first months of the revolution, of the fruitless attempts of one man and one woman to live as husband and wife, before they, or anyone, knew the penalty for their “crimes.”

Bophana and Deth wrote as star-crossed lovers and not as historians. And they wrote as Cambodians; he may have been a ranking Khmer Rouge cadre, she a Westernized relief worker, but when their lives became a series of unending ordeals, they reached back to the classic epic of their culture to find a model for behavior. They patterned themselves after Rama and Sita, the hero and heroine of the
Ramayana,
the devotional story that has taught generations of Indians, Cambodians, and other Southeast Asians the ideal virtues of duty and love in the face of separation and adversity.

Bophana referred to herself as “Sita” in some of her letters to Deth. She signed herself “Sita Deth,” the Sita of Deth in Khmer language, the pure, dutiful wife of Deth. And like the Sita in the epic, Bophana was put to tests beyond one's imagination. In the
Ramayana,
Sita is carried off by the evil Ravana and saved by her husband, Rama, only to have her virtue doubted. She is banished and finally must submit to the test of fire to prove her virtue. She walks through the fire unscathed, but asks mother earth to swallow her up; she has gone through too many humiliations. Bophana and other Cambodian girls were raised on the stories of Sita's pure, unerring devotion to Rama. During the revolution Bophana thought constantly of Sita's tests.

Deth left Bophana in his mother's house and returned to the temporary headquarters of the commerce ministry, waiting with the whole office for assignment to permanent headquarters in Phnom Penh. Bophana became
the dutiful daughter-in-law. Deth promised her that when he was relocated in Phnom Penh he would send for her and they would set up their own home in Phnom Penh. He told her to insist that they were officially married in 1970. “Otherwise,” he warned her in a letter, “Angka would never approve of a new evacuee marrying a cadre.”

Her next letter to him at his provincial headquarters is still optimistic. She boldly writes the first part in English, leaving evidence of her and his education:

“Dear Darling! I have just received your letter and some things that you sent to me this afternoon with great pleasure. Deary! You don't worry about me. Nowadays I am well but I miss you very much.”