The officers were initially told to stay at home and await further instructions. Five days after the city’s fall, on April 23, they were ordered to report, wearing dress uniform, for departure to Phnom Penh to greet Prince Sihanouk, who was about to return from Beijing. Several prominent local businessmen were asked to join them. As they headed down Highway 5 towards the capital, the convoy stopped near Mount Thippadey. There, according to one of the few survivors, they were machine-gunned by Khmer Rouge executioners hiding in ditches by the roadside.
Similar massacres occurred throughout the North-West. At Pailin, the gem-mining town on the Thai border, the Khmers Rouges arrived on April 20, ‘People [streamed] in from neighbouring villages’, one resident remembered. ‘They were all singing and dancing for joy, beating drums to make noise and shouting, “Long live peace!” . . . [They] sang and danced all night long as though it was the New Year.’ As in Battambang, prices in the markets were slashed. The officers from the republican garrison, about forty in all, were taken off in trucks ‘to help train our soldiers to drive tanks, operate radios and use artillery’. At the Samlaut crossroads, fifteen miles to the east, they were all killed. So were eighty city officials. On April 26, the townspeople were driven out. Most were rehoused in primitive settlements in the jungle on either side of the Pailin—Battambang highway. Those who went further encountered a flood of people coming from the opposite direction — the inhabitants of Battambang, which had been evacuated two
days earlier. They, too, were marched deep into the forest, often miles from the nearest road, where they built themselves bamboo huts and began preparing for the planting season to grow food for the coming year.
In the course of these first weeks, the deportees were progressively stripped of their possessions. In some cases, individual Khmer Rouge soldiers ‘requested’ them: woe betide the rash owner who refused, for such ‘requests’, in the stilted, saccharine jargon which the revolutionary movement affected, were always made in the name of
Angkar
, a term which the deportees were now hearing for the first time and did not understand beyond associating it with fear. Pin Yathay recalled how his sister was forced to give up her motorcycle:
’Angkar needs that motorbike,’ the soldier repeated . . . Then, as polite as ever . . . he said: ‘Angkar
proposes
to borrow it from you. Do you accept, yes or no?’ [She replied:] ‘I’m sorry . . . I need it. How else can I carry my baggage?’ The soldier’s eyes widened. He unslung his rifle [and] said: ‘You dare say “no” to Angkar?’ . . . Then suddenly he fired into the air right in front of her face . . . She burst into tears [and] ran to my mother, who took her in her arms. The soldier glared round at us all, as if daring us to move. I was frozen with fear . . . [Then he] settled the rifle back on his shoulder, slowly untied [my sister’s] baggage, handed it carefully to my father, mounted, kicked the engine into life and rode off.
For the better-off, who owned cars or trucks, there was a second stage in this creeping pauperisation. Many had left Phnom Penh and other towns with vehicles ‘overflowing with bundles of clothing, curtains, and incongruous but treasured items — cookers, sofas, cupboards . . . symbols of former wealth [like] televisions and tape-decks.’ Haing Ngor, later to achieve fame in the film
The Killing Fields,
contemplated the efflux of consumer durables and thought how strange were the things people valued and that they should fail to realise that electric fans and televisions would be of no use in villages without electricity. In the event, these cherished icons of the consumer society never got that far. When the order came for private cars and trucks to be abandoned, their contents were left scattered by the roadside: refrigerators, suitcases, sewing machines, armchairs — even a grand piano, which was sighted three years later, the lacquer peeling from its frame, marooned in the middle of a rice-field. For some it was all too much. Several deportees remembered seeing ‘a
shiny new Peugeot
, driving down the riverbank’:
It was one of those events that happened faster than its meaning can be absorbed . . . The car drove into the water with a splash and floated forward,
until the river current spun it round and took it slowly downstream. There were people inside. A man in the driver’s seat, a woman beside him and children looking out the back with their hands pressed against the windows. All the doors and windows stayed closed. Nobody got out . . . We just stared as the car settled lower and the waters closed over the roof. A rich family committing suicide.
As well as cars and consumer goods, money itself lost its value. For some days, traders continued to set up stalls, offering cakes, cigarettes, barbecued chicken and eggs, fruit and vegetables, laid out on tarpaulins by the roadside, for ever-increasing quantities of the old Lon Nol riels. The Khmer Rouge might warn that the old currency had been abolished, but market instincts died hard. Only when it became clear that riels were useless, and the roads passing through the suburbs were, in the words of one deportee, ‘covered in a thick carpet of banknotes’ whose usefulness was now limited to lighting fires, did the traders finally resort to barter.
By this stage, rich and poor alike were reduced to taking only what they could carry on their backs. And the levelling-down continued. On every road leading out of Phnom Penh or Battambang or smaller provincial towns, checkpoints were set up where each deportee’s baggage was searched. Cameras, radios, tape recorders, wristwatches, books in any language, documents, foreign currency — in short, all those things which, in former times, set the elite apart from the peasantry as defined by the condition of the very poorest among them — were confiscated. There were no body searches, partly because it was assumed (often correctly) that, at the mere mention of Angkar, people would obey to the letter, and partly, it seems, because to have soldiers body-searching deportees, especially women, would have violated the communists’ moral code. As a result, many families managed to hide jewellery, gold and medicines, and even in some cases dollars, which would later serve as a medium of exchange for favours from village cadres and for extra food, until that resource, too, was exhausted.
For those who survived the march and the spot checks to which former army officers and civil servants were subjected, there remained one further test. When they reached their home villages, or in some cases even before, adult deportees were required to write a short autobiography This was a technique devised by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s to test applicants for Party membership and as a vehicle for self-criticism during rectification campaigns. In the 1940s and ‘50s the Viet Minh went a step further, making the repeated writing of life-stories the central plank of a sophisticated process of indoctrination aimed at non-communist intellectuals. The Cambodian communists took the process to its logical extreme, eventually requiring virtually everyone in the country to write out a personal history
describing their family background, their activities since childhood, and above all how they had spent the years when Lon Nol was in power. Educated people were judged by the style and language they employed as well as the content of what they wrote. Scribes assisted the illiterate. As ever, Khmer Rouge cadres promised clemency, assuring all who had held posts in the republican administration that, if they were honest about their past, the new regime would make use of their talents.
Many fell into the trap. But what happened to them next varied enormously, depending on who they were and, above all, to which part of the country the exodus had brought them.
Technicians and skilled workers
were sent away in lorries after being promised that their families would be allowed to join them later. When nothing further was heard from them, many deportees concluded that they had been killed. In fact, most were taken to Phnom Penh to help restore production in the factories where they had worked previously. In provincial towns, where the evacuation was on a smaller scale and consequently better managed, factory employees were told at the outset to remain at their places of work.
Former military men, civil servants, architects, doctors, engineers, lawyers, schoolteachers and university students were sent for ‘re-education’. For the first two categories, this was often a euphemism for death. But not always. At Sramar Leav, in Takeo province, in the heart of Mok’s Southwestern Zone, reputedly a tough area, those who had served in the army and the civil service under the Lon Nol regime were assigned separate living quarters but otherwise treated identically to other deportees. In a commune in the supposedly liberal East, sixty former civil servants and professional people underwent a three-month ‘re-education course’ consisting of intense physical labour, a starvation diet and repeated interrogations. All but three died. In the North-West and the North, where the evacuation itself had been conducted with especial harshness, all those with university training underwent re-education involving extremely hard physical labour for between three months and a year. Yet in both Zones large numbers of intellectuals survived.
The evacuation of Cambodia’s towns and its immediate consequences — the relocation of the entire population to the countryside; the killing of former opponents; the reform or elimination of all regarded as potentially hostile — were an almost perfect paradigm for the three years, eight months and twenty days of Khmer Rouge rule that followed.
That most city-dwellers were taken completely by surprise merely showed how little attention they, and the outside world, had paid to the
Khmers Rouges and their methods during their long years in the wilderness. What happened in mid-April 1975 was the fruit of policies that had been in gestation since the 1960s and had their origins in a still earlier time. It was not fortuitous that six of the principal Zone leaders — Ruos Nhim and Kong Sophal in the North-West; Pauk in the North; Ney Sarann in the North-East; So Phim in the East; and Mok in the South-West — had started their revolutionary careers as Issaraks during the war against the French.
They showed the same extreme single-mindedness, the same excessive simplification, the same ruthlessness and contempt for human life, as the rebels of thirty years earlier. They also showed the same fractiousness and diversity. Unlike orthodox communist states, where decision-making is highly centralised and implementation is in theory monolithic, Khmer Rouge Cambodia was unruly. That combination of attributes would prove one of the most enduring features of Pol’s regime and eventually a prime cause of its downfall. Directives from the CPK Standing Committee were obeyed, but each Zone interpreted them in its own fashion. Hence the welter of conflicting signals during the evacuation of Phnom Penh. What was true of the Zones was also true at lower levels. A battalion commander from the South-West maintained that ‘whether different units were soft or strict depended on the individual commanders — not on the Zone they came from’. Deportees might be treated harshly in the supposedly moderate East, or with moderation in the supposedly harsh North.
The prevailing image of the Khmers Rouges as uniformly mindless automatons, bent on destruction, was fundamentally wrong. What the deportees themselves experienced was a mosaic of idealism and butchery, exaltation and horror, compassion and brutality, that defies easy generalisation. That, too, would continue throughout the Khmer Rouge years.
Even those who acted most harshly oscillated between thuggery and nerveless calm. The young soldier who furiously loosed off a volley in the face of Pin Yathay’s sister as he stole her motor-bike, afterwards ‘slowly untied [her] baggage and handed it carefully to [her] father’. At one level it was the eternal Khmer dichotomy between serenity and uncontrollable violence, with no middle ground between. ‘We try to stay polite,’ Haing Ngor explained, ‘because it is easier that way. To be in conflict forces us to treat each other as enemies, and then we lose control.’ In a revolutionary context, where violence was the norm, the politeness of the Khmers Rouges was all the more telling. Often it had a sinister coloration: a woman overheard a soldier telling a group of prisoners who had just been savagely beaten: ‘“So you don’t feel too well? Just wait, you’ll feel better in a little while . . .” Those
sugary words
, that irony, I recognised all that, it was the way the soldiers talked.’
Yet there were
also cadres who were genuinely ‘not
oppressive or threatening [but] quiet and polite’. The two were not necessarily in conflict. Pin Yathay noted that the soldiers went about their work, ‘preparing death with unfailing courtesy’.
Alongside terror and cruelty, virtually every deportee had a story to tell of at least one ‘decent’ Khmer Rouge, who offered help when it was least expected. A young woman recalled a black-garbed cadre who noticed her sick niece and ‘in an inexplicable
humane gesture
, used his influence to secure the streptomycin that saved [her]’. Another deportee remembered
a soldier helping
a small boy and his elderly grandmother at a Phnom Penh hospital. ‘He left them alone for five minutes, then came back with a hospital cart loaded with ten big loaves of bread, some grilled fish and some pork.’ Haing Ngor recognised a regional Secretary in the North-West as one of his former teachers, a man who had lived ‘a simple, spartan life . . . He was very pure and intellectual . . . typical of the idealists who joined the communists in the 1960s and then vanished into the forests.’
There were many reasons for the disparities in Khmer Rouge behaviour.
One was the entrenched individualism of Khmer society. Despite constant indoctrination and ferocious discipline, the communist troops remained Khmers, heirs to a culture which holds — in contrast to that of China and Vietnam — that each family, each individual, is an island, and its primary task is to defend its own. To such a people uniformity does not come easily, especially not to those among them who hold a particle of power. It produced, in the case of the Khmers Rouges, a system which was not so much ‘communist’ as inherently unpredictable. The replacement of a cadre, the vagary of fate that led a deportee to settle in one village rather than another, could mean literally the difference between life and death. Capriciousness and uncertainty were as characteristic of the Khmer Rouge regime as violence and barbarism.