The Cambodians were torn between the fear that their Vietnamese allies would withdraw as soon as the war ended, leaving them high and dry, as had happened in 1954, and the even greater fear that they would stay. The ancestral dread of Vietnamese domination, shared by Sihanouk and Lon Nol, emerged in 1970 as one of the driving forces of CPK policy. But for
the communists the threat came not from enemies but from friends, not from adversaries but from allies — which was far more insidious.
From the outset, the civil war in Cambodia was marked by savagery. A week after the coup, peasant demonstrations broke out in Kompong Cham and a number of local officials were beaten to death. Troops opened fire to disperse rioting crowds. Next day, March 26, a mob sacked the governor’s mansion and the courthouse. Radio Phnom Penh described it as ‘a provocation by people with a Viet Cong mentality’, which raised the tension another notch. At dusk, two local MPs arrived from Phnom Penh to try to mediate. They were set upon and killed. Their livers were then cut out and borne in triumph to a local restaurateur who was ordered to cook them. Afterwards pieces were handed out to the crowd. The same evening Lon Nol’s half-brother, Nil, was slain in similar circumstances at a nearby rubber plantation. His liver, too, was cooked and eaten.
That night about a thousand people from Kompong Cham set out in lorries and buses for Phnom Penh, bearing portraits of Sihanouk. At the city outskirts they were joined by another column from Siem Reap. Again troops opened fire to drive them back. Some 10,000 peasants, following on foot, then sacked the government offices at Skoun. This time the army used heavy weaponry, killing and wounding about sixty people. At the weekend, another two hundred died when troops with tanks and armoured cars broke up protest marches in Takeo and Prey Veng.
In the provinces, the repression had predictable results. ‘I ran away with my teachers and fellow-students,’ one young demonstrator recalled. ‘Fifty or sixty of us met up [in the jungle] . . . We hated the troops for what they had done and we wanted to fight back.’ Sihanouk’s appeal of March 23 prompted a wave of desertions from the army, most notably in Kratie, where the local commander sent all his men home and handed control of the region to the resistance. Viet Cong propagandists played recordings of the Prince’s broadcast in the villages. To the peasants, the coup was sacrilege.
In Phnom Penh the reaction was quite different.
The middle classes heaved a sigh of relief that at last they were rid of the playboy Prince with ‘his damn film shows’, as one young man put it, ‘and endless radio speeches in that singsong voice’.
For them, too, the point of reference was the French Revolution, with Sihanouk in the role of Louis XVI. But their model was the revolution of Mirabeau in 1789, when the bourgeoisie seized power, not that of Robespierre and Saint-Just. At heart, in 1970, Cambodia remained a feudal country, and the coup was seen in feudal terms. In the first months, moreover, it was middle-class youths who provided the core of the regime’s
support. After a couple of days’ military training at the city’s golf course, they were bussed down towards the border to face the Viet Cong. ‘Every day they could be seen setting out,’ one observer wrote, ‘hanging on the sides of Coca-Cola trucks or brightly painted buses, wearing shower clogs or sandals, shorts or blue jeans, parts of very old French uniforms or oversized American fatigues.’ They carried sticks and cardboard suitcases, and occasionally a rifle.
When cannon fodder
was found to be no defence against the hereditary enemy, Lon Nol’s government vented its fury on Vietnamese civilians. A curfew was declared — for Vietnamese only — and, ‘for their own safety’, families were herded into makeshift camps. Unlike the pre-coup demonstrations, in which Vietnamese had lost property but no one had been hurt or killed, this time there were full-scale pogroms. In the space of a single morning, four hundred bodies, with gunshot wounds and hands bound behind their backs, were counted floating down the Mekong river at the ferry point of Neak Luong, just below Phnom Penh. That same day, April 10, at Prasaut, in the Parrot’s Beak, camp inmates were told of an imminent Viet Cong attack and ordered to flee. As they ran, Cambodian guards opened fire with machine-guns. At least 3,000 people, all males over the age of fifteen, were rounded up in Vietnamese villages in the suburbs north of Phnom Penh, taken downriver and shot. The women left behind were raped. A few days later, Vietnamese ‘refugees’ being housed at a primary school in Takeo province met a similar fate. Mark Frankland of the London
Observer
witnessed the aftermath:
It looked and smelt
like a slaughterhouse . . . The cement floor was covered with pools of coagulated blood. Three corpses covered with bloody clothing were in one corner. About 40 Vietnamese men and boys lay or squatted on the far side of the classroom, as far as possible from the several hundred Cambodian soldiers milling around in the open . . . It was difficult to see exactly how many were wounded since everyone had been splattered with blood. One man . . . had stuffed clothes into an open stomach wound . . . The inside of the classroom’s single wall was peppered with bullet holes, but not the outside.
The government denied point-blank that any massacres had taken place. Those who died, officials said, were the victims of cross-fire during attacks by the Viet Cong. It was an archetypal Khmer reaction. In a culture where people go to immense lengths to avoid causing others loss of face — where a man’s instinctive reaction in the face of the slightest conflict is to pull back, be it at the cost of sacrificing his own interests — embarrassing questions are simply not asked. If uncouth Westerners insist on doing so, they should not be
surprised when they are told lies. In Khmer terms, they have put their interlocutor in a situation from which a lie provides the
only possible way out
.
*
The corollary of this visceral desire to avoid confrontation at all costs is that debate and argument do not function as a means of resolving differences. Between the extremes of acquiescence and violence there is no middle ground. The French archaeologist Bernard-Philippe
Groslier
, who spent his life studying Angkor, wrote of Cambodia that ‘beneath a carefree surface there slumber savage forces and disconcerting cruelties which may blaze up in outbreaks of passionate brutality’. Sihanouk himself acknowledged that ‘the Khmers can be violent, their gentleness and good fellowship can hide
terrible explosions
’. The one is the inescapable complement of the other. When the strains and pressures of existence reach a point where there is no longer the possibility of graceful withdrawal, when the smiling facade cracks, violence — ‘running amok’, as Sihanouk put it — becomes the only alternative. It is not an aberration. It is an intrinsic part of Khmer behaviour — the same reflex that leads a kindly middle-aged woman to pour nitric acid over the body of a teenage girl who has become a rival for her husband’s affections or a villager to tear out another man’s liver. In normal times, the line of fracture remains hidden. Once crossed, it is the signal for appalling acts of inhumanity undertaken without remorse.
In 1970, all of Cambodia, city and countryside, prince and peasant, crossed that line.
Eight weeks after the coup, Lon Nol made a
radio broadcast
announcing the start of a chiliastic religious war against the Vietnamese communists. They were ‘the enemies of Buddha’, he declared. All Vietnamese, communist or not, must leave the country and return ‘home’. The pogroms, which Lon Nol had halted after horrified protests abroad, not least from his South Vietnamese allies, were now followed by mass deportations. Over the next year, 250,000 Vietnamese residents of Cambodia were forced to abandon their homes and belongings — ‘to be taken care of
by their neighbours’, as the government cynically put it — and placed in concentration camps pending their expulsion. And still the violence did not stop. In May, a Khmer general took about a hundred camp inmates, including women and children, to Khieu Samphân’ sold constituency of Saang. There he forced them to march, holding white flags, towards Viet Cong positions, using megaphones to urge the communists to surrender while acting as a human shield for the Cambodian soldiers behind. The Viet Cong were unimpressed. They opened up with machine-guns and the ‘new tactic of . . . psychological warfare’, as the general had explained it, collapsed in a bloody heap. Christian churches, frequented mainly by Vietnamese converts, were bombed by the Cambodian air force on the grounds that they might provide refuge for communist guerrillas.
There was a price
to be paid for this policy of hate. The South Vietnamese troops who had flooded across the border in April were ill-disciplined even in their own country. In Cambodia they had a massacre of their compatriots to avenge. American forces pulled back as planned by late June. The South Vietnamese stayed on to terrorise the countryside — raping Khmer women, stealing cattle, pillaging homes. The result was a recruiting opportunity made in heaven for the Khmers Rouges. The Viet Cong had been exemplary guests, leaving payment for anything they took and going to enormous lengths to avoid offending against Khmer customs. Lon Nol’s South Vietnamese allies were bandits. Before long, tens of thousands of villagers voted with their feet, swelling the population under communist control and sending their sons to join the resistance army.
The pogroms were not the regime’s only self-inflicted wound.
In April, Lon Nol had announced that the monarchy would be abolished. ‘An oracle has predicted,’ he said, ‘that everybody will enjoy equal rights . . . The bad king will flee, a comet will appear . . . and Cambodia will become a republic.’ To many peasants that meant nothing less than the end of the world as they knew it. ‘How shall we tend our rice-paddies, now that the King is not here to make it rain?’ Father Ponchaud, the Catholic missionary, was asked. Sihanouk, despite his abdication, was the ‘Master of Life’, the Brahmanic overlord whose symbolic power held the Khmer nation together. To a medieval people, his overthrow was a cosmic event. Had a new king been crowned, as Prince Sirik Matak wished, the outcome might have been different. But Lon Ncl, encouraged by his younger brother, Sâr’s old schoolmate Lon Non, and by a group of intellectuals led by the anti-monarchist Keng Vannsak, decided that the regeneration of Buddhism required a complete break wi:h the past. In this he was not wrong: many of the country’s ills stemmed from the feudal system which the monarchy perpetuated. But in practice Cambodia was no more
ready for republican democracy than England under Henry the Eighth. The proclamation of the Khmer Republic was a monumental strategic error, definitively alienating the rural population.
The slide over the edge of reason, into the abyss, was not confined to the regime in Phnom Penh. If, to Lon Nol’s government, all Vietnamese were communists, to the Khmers Rouges all foreigners were enemies. By the end of April, twenty-six Western journalists had ‘gone missing’ in Cambodia. Those fortunate enough to end up in the hands of the Viet Cong were usually freed, as was the practice in Vietnam, at a moment of maximum political advantage to their captors. With three exceptions, all those captured during the war by the Khmers Rouges — priests and aid personnel, as well as journalists — were killed. Once again it was a matter of ‘drawing a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves’.
As the fateful year, 1970, lengthened, attitudes on both sides hardened.
This was not inevitable. It was not just a response to the widening war. Each side was deliberately cutting loose from its traditional points of reference: the monarchy, in Lon Nol’s case; the legacy of Indochinese communism in the case of the Khmers Rouges. The normal restraints on thought and behaviour were eroding, Cambodia was moving into unknown territory.
Sâr bade farewell
to his Vietnamese escort at K-12, at the southern end of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in June. He and Khieu Ponnary, accompanied by Pâng and their two Khmer bodyguards, had made the entire journey once again on foot, travelling across the Annamite cordillera and then through Attopeu in southern Laos.
Ponnary had started behaving oddly while they were still in Beijing. A Chinese official who met her then remembered her being ‘
so anti-Vietnamese
it wasn’t possible even to mention the word “Vietnam” in her presence’. He wondered at the time what had happened to make her so unbalanced. By the time they set out from Hanoi she was seriously ill and for the last weeks of the journey she had to be carried on a
stretcher
. Only much later was her illness diagnosed as chronic paranoid
schizophrenia
. By then it was too late to attempt treatment.
Sâr’s cook
, Moeun, recalled an aide putting out a glass of water for him one day. ‘She screamed at him not to drink it because the Vietnamese had put poison in it,’ Moeun said. ‘Then she took the glass away, and brought him another one. I remember the look of pity on his face.’ After the initial acute spasm, Ponnary appeared to recover, but periodically afterwards suffered bouts of agitation and restlessness when ‘she would shout that Vietnamese troops were coming and they were going to kill us’. Eventually Sâr, who at the best of times suffered from insomnia, sent her to stay with Moeun whenever she had an attack to prevent her keeping
him awake all night as she ranted in fear at imaginary enemies. For some years, she enjoyed long periods of normalcy, when she appeared completely lucid. But over time she developed the classic symptoms of the illness, withdrawing into herself, refusing to wash or to respond to those around her, and growing obsessed by nightmarish visions of Vietnamese atrocities.
The root causes of paranoid schizophrenia are poorly understood. It is known, however, that stress often acts as a catalyst, rendering the condition acute. In Ponnary’s case, an early and basic cause of stress was undoubtedly her sterility.