When the War Was Over (79 page)

At first glance the hotel appeared in better shape than during the war years; the grounds were immaculate. Once past the semicircular driveway and into the lobby I realized the hotel mirrored the rest of the city—the facade was bright, the interior decrepit. Old travel posters still adorned the entranceway, but there had been little upkeep. By instinct I went up to the desk. There were no keys. Suddenly a man appeared and started speaking to me in Khmer, and I could not understand him. He shooed me out with his arms raised. This time I headed toward Wat Phnom itself.

There I was greeted by two smiling young cadre on bicycles, and I took their pictures. This interlude was brief; soon they, too, suggested, through gestures, that I not venture further.

I turned back and started heading for the guest house, realizing I was hot, tired, confused, and nervous. The more I looked for the old Cambodia the more it eluded me. Another young cadre came toward me on a moped, and I waved him over, asking for a ride. He stopped and I hopped on the back, gesturing down Monivong toward the guest house. It was my last naive attempt to re-create the old city I had known, where I could trust a stranger to take me home safely.

The cadre might have done that, but he was stopped by the appearance of my guards. I had been missed at morning roll call. I was ordered off the moped and into the Mercedes, then sped back to the house. From then on the front gates were ordered locked at all times.

Now it was impossible to reconcile the city I had known with this new Phnom Penh. Its open charm had been famous throughout the region; Phnom Penh was synonymous with hospitality, grace, and the special seduction of a Buddhist, Asian city that had refused to follow the crassly sprawling path of Bangkok and Manila. There was also the flip side of the capital, the greed, corruption, the hidden violence, and the seeming insensitivity to the poverty of others. These things lived side by side, as they did within the Khmer people. It didn't matter if one loved the country and its mystery, as I did, or found it hopelessly decadent and superstitious, as did many others. Cambodia for everyone was unforgettable.

Back at the guest house I promised to follow the rules; I was putting the others in jeopardy We breakfasted at the house. We ate all of our meals together in the dining room. The food was ferried to us on a motorcycle from an unseen kitchen somewhere nearby and delivered to our back door. We were served by a staff of three Cambodians: a young steward and two young women housekeepers. We also had our own chauffeur, and bodyguards.

Finally Thiounn Prasith arrived to begin our formal education. Dudman and I had met Prasith when he traveled to New York with Ieng Sary; neither of us had known how close he was to the minister of foreign affairs, how he had been friends with Pol Pot himself during their Paris student days. That morning he was the first familiar face we had seen since arriving.

Prasith is taller and fairer than most Khmers. His bearing seemed nearly regal in comparison with the other revolutionaries we had met. For the rest of the trip he was to be our bridge to the country, our guide and interpreter, the man trusted to transmit the best image of Cambodia to foreign journalists. The fact that Prasith was put in charge of us was the first sign that our trip had indeed been given high priority.

He began with a briefing. We sat around the dining room table carefully writing down statistics he produced on the country's economic miracles; statements he made about the history of the conflict with Vietnam; theories he described about the direction of the Cambodian revolution. Always, however, he returned to the subject of the treacherous Vietnamese. He brought along extra copies of the regime's “Black Paper” about Vietnamese aggression and assigned it to us for our evening reading. At the end we asked about human rights. He smiled. “You'll see,” he said. “There is no problem about the human rights. You worry so much about the Lon Nol traitors and not about the 90 percent of the people who are better off because of the revolution.”

The remainder of the day and the following day were taken up with largely tourist attractions. Our routine was the same as for the earlier “friendship delegations” from Sweden, Yugoslavia, and Belgium. Always, however, there was a message. We were taken to the royal palace and the Silver Pagoda, where Prasith lectured to us on French cultural imperialism, the subject which seemed the most important for him. He accused the French of pillaging the country for statues and treasures. French historians, he said, rewrote Cambodian history to glorify the Vietnamese or themselves. He said nothing about the Americans. He preferred, perhaps for new political reasons, to reserve his hatred for the French colonials, whom he knew well. Coincidentally, I noticed that the only foreign mission occupied by the Khmer Rouge was the former French embassy, which was used as a dormitory. The other embassies were either left vacant like the old American embassy or used by new foreign representatives. But when we passed the French embassy, black pajamas were hanging out to dry on the balconies and cadre were walking in the grounds.

From the palace we went across the street to the national museum, which was also built by the French in the Khmer style. Prasith wanted us to note
how the museum had been preserved, how the revolution proudly cared for the country's history. A few pieces were missing; Prasith said this was due to looting immediately after the war. Otherwise most of the priceless objects were left in place. But they were not protected. Bats screeched from vaults overhead inside the peaked roof. Cobwebs and dust decorated the carved heads of Angkor kings. Bird excrement streaked the faces of other relics.

That evening after dinner we were taken to view propaganda films. The screening began at ten o'clock. We drove through the dark silent streets. Street lamps were lit in only a few sections of the city. We passed several shops where women were hunched over treadle sewing machines stitching together blue pajama suits. There was no sign of any other life. So far we had heard no children, seen nothing but young cadre and workers. There were no foodstalls, no families, no young people playing sports, even sidewalk games, no one out on a walk, not even dogs or cats playing in alleyways.

The next day we were taken farther afield, up the Tonle Sap River on a former pleasure boat still sporting ruffled curtains and soft sedan cushions. We passed riverbanks crowded with vegetable gardens, we passed oil refineries and rubber factories and more banana fields. The morning breeze was still cool when we arrived at our destination—a “fishing cooperative” which to the unknowing eye looked like a simple collection of fishing boats. Prasith translated as the fishermen told us of their bountiful catch, how the fish were shared equally, how good the revolution had been to them.

We were then taken to the former military headquarters of Lon Nol, which had been transformed into a war museum. A young soldier from the Southwestern Zone reviewed the war for us in Sosthènes Fernandez's old office, using the maps of the former commander-in-chief to show how easily the Khmer Rouge defeated the Khmer Republic. The highlight, however, was the recent booty taken from the Vietnamese—tanks as well as masks, which the Khmer Rouge said were used by the Vietnamese, who, they claimed, sprayed a mysterious lethal gas on the Cambodian troops.

We had one more scheduled appointment in Phnom Penh before leaving for the countryside the next day. We visited the Institute for Scientific Training and Information, the closest thing to an academic school in the country and the brainchild of Prasith's acclaimed brother—Thiounn Mumm.

We were greeted at the gates by a young man who used only his revolutionary name, Khon. He was introduced as the twenty-eight-year-old president of the college. This was not exactly a charade. In Democratic Kampuchea we constantly met with this phenomenon. A politically proven and correct cadre, usually an army veteran, was accorded control over a
project. Intellectuals had to be in second place; they did not represent the people. We met Mumm a few minutes later. Mumm deferred to Khon. By rank Mumm was only the head of the committee of the college. In fact, unbeknownst to us Mumm had stood beside Pol Pot himself at a party conference a few months earlier and described the new educational system to the assembled party leaders. But in this setting, before foreign journalists, it was crucial that the people, personified by Khon, be given the primary role.

This play-acting continued. Prasith and Mumm did not greet each other as friends, much less brothers. Khon, the cadre, asked Mumm to brief us on the college and its role in revolutionary Cambodia. Mumm dutifully said the common people were the students at this college, which he said was begun in 1977. There were shops for machines, electrical equipment, and repair of both; a foundry; an assembly line for spray pumps used to spread insecticides. Mumm described the average school day, the lessons students memorize, their holidays, the “strategic crops” they grew (sweet potatoes, vegetables, and water lilies). He noted all this in Khmer, which his brother, Prasith, translated into English.

Finally I interrupted Prasith and asked why he and his brother were behaving like strangers. Could the two of them explain how they, as scions of an elite family, had become members of the elite of revolutionary Cambodia? The response was a bit patronizing. Mumm said that “normally an intellectual revolutionary does not like to give out his diploma . . . discuss his background.”

He admitted to holding a Ph.D. from the École Polytechnique in Paris, and that was all. He smiled a very handsome smile and took us to meet his students. Right away we realized these model students were the child factory workers we had seen in the film made earlier in the year by the Yugoslav journalists, the children shown standing atop boxes and repairing engines. On television, and right then in these “classrooms,” they looked like Dickensian waifs, seven- and eight-year-olds performing what amounted to child labor.

In Mumm's eyes they were otherwise, the young vanguard of a totally new experiment in technological education. The classroom was decorated with banners proclaiming: “We the Communist Party Are Correct and Clear-Sighted” or “To Be Determined Is to Always Carry Out Work Very Rapidly and by Leaps and Bounds.” Mumm proudly claimed that these youngsters were already superior to European engineers. “In Europe there are many engineers who cannot do this, who cannot thread wires in a dynamo.”

He said the revolution rejected all engineers and technicians of the old society because they “had not the consciousness to build the country for the
needs of the people . . . they wanted a high standard of living, that was our experience before liberation. So we have to follow another way.”

The answer was this class of barefoot children, nervously trying to repair broken mechanical parts, memorizing how to thread wires in a dynamo. The old method of educating engineers was too timely and costly, Mumm said. He wanted to put these youngsters to work immediately on repair and construction, rote work, or practical work in his parlance, and augment their labor with six-month stretches of education. Mumm claimed that after the first six months of teaching these nearly illiterate children basic calculation and science, they would have the scientific training of a third-class baccalaureate in Paris. It was on these highly delusionary grounds that Mumm was creating the new class of revolutionary technocrats.

Six months of training, six months of practice in cooperatives, six months of work in a factory, then back to Mumm's college for eighteen months of “theory,” including history and geography as well as mathematics. At the end of this stretch, Mumm declared, they would be qualified technicians and sent for one year of factory work. Then he would call them back to the college for another eighteen months of study and their education would be complete.

This plan had nothing to do with the reality of Democratic Kampuchea, as we would later discover. It was devised entirely outside the constantly changing world of the revolution, in which cadre were purged and the party line was diverted so frequently that few leaders, even some in the top circle, understood the direction of the country.

But Mumm had been brought out to provide us with a theoretical basis for the revolution so we could better understand the sights we were about to see on our countryside journey.

It was in that capacity that Mumm delivered a short speech on the origins of Khmer civilization as well as the Cambodian revolution. “Our civilization is 8,800 years old—like Rome. So we have this tradition of being independent, sovereign, and self-reliant. We have copied no one. . . . It is totally different from ancient India, like our revolution is now. It is being carried out according to the concrete [actual] situation in the country. It is not a copy of any other revolution. We succeeded to win victory over the U.S. We will succeed to win victory over the Vietnamese backed by the Soviet Union. . . . Now, in this revolution, we have the opportunity to express Cambodian culture for the first time.”