Pol Pot (51 page)

The war was over. The peace was about to begin.

THE YOUNG MEN

who appeared from nowhere in the centre of Phnom Penh soon after first light did all the things that victorious rebels are supposed to do. They drove about in jeeps flying a strange flag, a white cross on a blue-and-red field, acknowledging the cheers of the crowds as they passed. They seized control of key installations including the Information Ministry and the radio station, and fraternised with government troops, who threw away their weapons and waved white flags in surrender. ‘People began kissing and hugging each other,’ the French missionary François Ponchaud remembered. ‘We foreign onlookers were utterly amazed . . . Were these men, looking so well-fed and so few in number, the dreaded revolutionary troops?’ Others had doubts, too. An American photographer decided they ‘weren’t for real’. The British correspondent Jon Swain thought their leader swaggered about like ‘a playboy [in] a black uniform [that] looked as if it had been tailored by Yves St Laurent’.

None the less, a mood of euphoria took hold. People tied white handkerchiefs to the aerials of their cars and the handlebars of bikes. The armoured personnel carriers outside the Hotel Phnom were festooned with bunches of yellow

flowers. One young woman remembered neighbours singing and dancing in the streets. ‘An almost physical sense of relief led to general rejoicing,’ Ponchaud wrote. ‘No more rockets to fear. No more compulsory military service. No more of this rotten, loathed regime.’

At midday the Khmer Rouge local radio, which had been broadcasting since the spring from a small mobile transmitter near the Great Lake under the name, the ‘Voice of the FUNK of Phnom Penh City’, announced that the capital had fallen. But virtually no one in the city heard it, and it was not until half an hour later that the mysterious insurgents were able to find two technicians capable of operating the radio studios. Their leader, Hem Keth Dara, then broadcast a pre-recorded statement on behalf of the organisation he claimed to head, the Monatio or National Movement, confirming Phnom Penh’s capitulation and proposing a round-table meeting ‘to discuss a settlement’. Under his aegis, the Supreme Patriarchs of the two Buddhist sects and a senior Republican general, Mey Sichân, made

appeals for calm and for government troops to lay down their weapons. But suddenly, as Sichân was saying reassuringly that he would ‘make arrangements with representatives of the other side’ to ensure a peaceful transfer of power, another,

harsher voice

broke in. ‘We are not coming here to negotiate,’ it said. ‘We are entering the capital through force of arms.’ After that the radio went dead.

The charade was over. The Khmers Rouges, the real ones this time, had taken charge.

Hem Keth Dara and his friends were students manipulated by Lon Nol’s younger brother, Non, to make a last-ditch attempt to win a place in the new order by pretending to be revolutionary sympathisers. That such a hare-brained scheme could have been contemplated, let alone carried out, showed how utterly detached from reality the republican leaders had become. But the gamble also reflected an almost universal belief that, whatever the political colour of the new regime, after a period of transition the

of the old society would reassert themselves and life would go on much as before.

In retrospect, it is hard to understand why the Cambodian elite refused so stubbornly to see the writing on the wall.

Sihanouk’s presence at the head of the resistance was one factor. The reassurance of the FUNK’s political programme, with its artful guarantees of religious and personal freedoms, leniency toward opponents, national reconciliation and the ‘inviolability of the person, property and wealth’, drafted by Thiounn Mumm, was certainly another. So was the prominence given to Khieu Samphân, who was widely viewed as a good and honest man. Moreover, many of the Phnom Penh bourgeoisie had friends or relatives who had quietly slipped away to join the other side. But beyond all this lay a deep weariness, a belief that the new regime, whatever it was like, could not possibly be worse than what had gone before. Pin Yathay, an engineer with a senior post in the Lon Nol government, remembered arguing with his parents: ‘Some of those people are my friends . . . They’re patriots first and communists second. They will abide by the will of the people.’ Others told themselves that if things went really wrong, they could always go abroad, as the FUNK programme had promised.

Lon Non, who through his role in government intelligence was one of the best-informed men in the country, was not alone in judging that it was worth the risk of staying on. Prime Minister Long Boret, although listed as one of the arch-traitors the Khmers Rouges would execute, also declined to leave. So did Boret’s predecessor, Hang Thun Hak, who had known Saloth Sâr as a student. None of them seemed to have any inkling of what was about to be unleashed. Or, if they did, they refused to think about it.

While Hem Keth Dara and his followers were being disarmed, men and women in black of a very different stamp moved

soundlessly

through the city, methodically taking control of each intersection, collecting weapons, searching vehicles and ordering government troops to remove their uniforms. Son Sen’s younger brother, Nikân, was with the vanguard, entering the city with a Special Zone division:

We moved in from all sides. Altogether there were fourteen different jumping-off points for the final push. The main concentration was in the West . . . That was where the bulk of our forces were based. Son Sen divided his time between his HQ at Ra Smach and a forward post on Mt Chitrous, from which he was able to watch the advance. We had expected the town to fall between 10.30 a.m. and noon, but in fact it was an hour earlier. For us, it was such joy and happiness! All our strategic objectives had been met. I remember thinking how everything would change, how the peasants would finally have a better life . . .

Mok’s South-Western Zone troops advanced from the south, up Highways 2 and 3. Special Zone forces came in from the west, past Pochentong Airport, where resistance from a government paratroop regiment delayed them for several hours. Northern Zone troops took the area around the French Embassy and the Hotel Phnom, as far south as the railway station. Chan Chakrey’s Eastern Zone division — which was originally supposed to stay on the far bank of the Mekong — occupied the riverfront area up to Boulevard Norodom, including the Royal Palace.

To Nikân, ‘it was a perfect victory. Justice was on our side.’

To the population at large, the carnival atmosphere — the ‘village fete’ that Sihanouk had predicted when peace finally returned — soon yielded to alarm and a sinking sense of dread. ‘I had a physical sensation,’ François Ponchaud wrote later, ‘that a

slab of lead

had suddenly fallen on to the city.’

The

newcomers

were ‘covered in jungle grime, wearing ill-fitting black pajama uniforms with colourful headbands or peaked Mao caps’, one woman remembered. ‘They seemed ill at ease . . . [with] a wary, exhausted look.’ To the Khmer journalist Dith Pran, they were from ‘a different world . . . They never smiled at all. They didn’t even look like Cambodians.’ Ponchaud, too, remembered their faces, ‘worn and expressionless, speaking not a single word and surrounded by a deathly silence’, as they marched in Indian file along the boulevards as though the city were a forest.

They were indeed from a different world — the world which Michael Vickery had glimpsed a dozen years earlier in the dirt-poor villages of Banteay Chhmar, where illiterate, near-destitute peasants lived as their ancestors had, without running water or electricity, without schools, without

mechanical devices of any kind, without even a proper road, wholly untouched by the surface modernity that the Sihanouk years had brought to the towns and villages along the main highways. These were boys from the Cardamoms, from Koh Kong and Pursat, from the hills north of Siem Reap, Preah Vihear and Stung Treng, where, in the words of a rich peasant, ‘they had

never seen money

, they didn’t know what a car was.’ In those benighted regions of the Cambodian hinterland the Khmers Rouges had built their strongholds and recruited their first followers. They were places which town-dwellers never visited and whose very existence they found hard to imagine. Yet peasants from such areas were no less Khmer than their city cousins, and to Pol and his colleagues in the CPK leadership, they were purer and more authentic, the primal gene-pool from which the revolution would be forged. These poorest of the poor became the model for all the rest. Those from better-off regions, who joined the revolution later and in time made up the vast majority of the Khmer Rouge soldiery, were pressed into the same mould.

Two Cambodias, which until then had been kept rigorously apart, collided that April day in 1975.

The urban elite discovered with horror how primitive the conquering forces were. Soldiers drank water from

toilet bowls

, thinking they were what city people used instead of wells. ‘

They were scared

of anything in a bottle or a tin,’ a young factory worker remembered. ‘Something in a tin had made one of them sick, so they mistook a can of sardines, with a picture of a fish on it, for fish poison.’ Some of them tried to drink cans of motor oil; others ate toothpaste. The archaeologist François Bizot, returning to his house after a Khmer Rouge unit had carried out a search, found broken chairs, smashed glass and, in the bathroom, a bidet overflowing with

excrement

. Decades afterwards, Thiounn Mumm, who had been a Khmer Rouge minister, still shook his head over the way the children of high-ranking peasant cadres wiped their bottoms with tree-branches after relieving themselves and left the soiled sticks lying around the house.

The soldiers were equally repelled by what they saw as urban vice.

Many of them were teenagers, some only twelve or thirteen years old, not much taller than the AK47S they carried manfully on their shoulders. In their eyes, city girls wearing lipstick and youths with long hair were prostitutes and perverts, the proof of all they had heard about the bourgeoisie’s loathsome ways. Had not Hou Yuon warned, in a broadcast three months before the city fell: ‘If you, brothers and friends, continue to live in the extremely anti-national and arch-corrupt militarist, dictatorial and fascist republic, you can be sure of dying uselessly . . . Your only way out is to follow the path of resolute struggle’? By ignoring such appeals and

remaining in enemy territory, Phnom Penh’s inhabitants had shown where their true loyalties lay. Now they were ‘prisoners of war’ and everything they possessed was legitimate war booty. Shortly before the final assault, division commanders from the South-West, the East, the Special Zone and the North had ordered their troops not to loot or to kill unless they met with resistance. In the event, for many of them, the temptation was too great.

It was not money

or jewels they coveted: a bemused city-dweller watched one man open a packet containing 10,000 US dollars and throw it disgustedly into the river, unwilling to touch such imperialist filth. They wanted cars and motor-bikes, whose unfortunate owners were asked politely but firmly to ‘lend them to the revolution’, whereupon, having no knowledge of gears or steering wheels, they drove them straight into trees or walls, walking away bruised and laughing to try all over again. Crashed and abandoned vehicles were stripped of their tyres, which were cut up to make rubber sandals. Ballpoint pens with click-in tips were especially coveted, and Ponchaud saw young guerrillas ‘with four or five wristwatches on one arm’. The troops broke into Chinese merchants’ stores and slashed open bales of cloth, not out of vandalism, as some city people thought, but to make bags to hold their newly acquired gadgets. Television sets, fridges and expensive furnishings — emblems of the bourgeoisie — were ignored or thrown aside.

Hate played its part in the events that followed, and some of those involved later admitted as much. But it was not the dominant emotion that day. More common, especially among the younger troops, was a slow, sullen anger, directed against the city and all its works.

‘The city is bad

because there is money in the city,’ a Khmer Rouge cadre told Ponchaud. ‘People can be reformed, but not cities. By sweating to clear the land, sowing and harvesting crops, men will learn the real value of things.’

The anger of the young men who had emerged from the jungle was directed at those who had continued living in comfort, oblivious to their misery, while they had fought against all odds to defeat the ‘imperialists and reactionaries’. It was directed against those who were better-educated or better-off. Above all it was directed at anyone and anything linked to the

American bombing

of their villages.

In Battambang

, communist troops tore apart two T-28 bombers with their bare hands. ‘They would have eaten them if they could,’ one resident wrote later. At Pochentong Airport, where Mey Mak’s unit was based, the troops systematically smashed every runway light before anyone could stop them.

‘There was

something excessive

about their anger,’ a Phnom Penh doctor reflected. ‘Something had happened to these people in their years in the forests. They had been transformed.’

Right:
The only known picture of Saloth Sâr as a young man, taken at Kep, probably in 1954, when he was twenty-nine.