showing up Khmer Rouge incompetence and no one else was as well-placed to do so.
Yet the overriding lesson of Malcolm Caldwell’s death, however it occurred, was that by December 1978 security in Phnom Penh had broken down. The troops which had formerly guarded the capital had all been sent to the East, to the Highway I and Highway 7 Fronts, where they were dug into defensive positions, in an extended arc stretching from the Parrot’s Beak to the Fishhook, awaiting the Vietnamese attack. To defend the city after their departure, a former Special Zone officer named Ponlâk had been appointed military governor, with Pol’s nephew, So Hong, as his deputy. But the only troops at his disposal to man checkpoints and carry out patrols were youths barely into their teens. ‘They used to fall asleep on guard duty,’ Long Nârin remembered. ‘They’d put down their rifles and you could take them away — and then watch them panic when they woke up and found they weren’t there.’
A creeping neurosis set in. Even inside the Foreign Ministry compound, one Khmer Rouge official was so frightened of a Vietnamese attack that when he left his office each evening to go home, he made his wife, who was expecting a child, walk in front of him. ‘They won’t attack a pregnant woman,’ he told her.
On Christmas Day
of 1978, the invasion began. Vietnamese advance columns set out from Ban Me Thuot, in the Central Highlands, and from southern Laos, making for Kratie and Stung Treng. It was a replay of the Viet Cong offensive after Lon Nol’s coup in the spring of 1970, only this time it was a lot quicker. Kratie fell on December 30 and Stung Treng four days later, putting the whole of the North-East in Vietnamese hands. But that was just a feint. After an intensive air and artillery bombardment, the Vietnamese main force, consisting of more than 60,000 men, commanded by General Le Duc Anh, smashed through the Khmer Rouge defence lines on January 1, heading up Highway I and Highway 7 to Phnom Penh.
They did not have things entirely their own way. On Highway 7, in Kompong Cham, Son Sen’s forces blocked the advance for forty-eight hours. Then his headquarters were overrun and Sen himself narrowly escaped capture, taking refuge in the jungle before making his way back to Phnom Penh. Mok’s forces also put up stiff resistance at the ferry crossing of Neak Luong, and along Highway 3, from Kompong Som to Phnom Penh.
But the Cambodian strategy was fatally flawed. By putting half of Democratic Kampuchea’s best troops, more than 30,000 men, into stationary, forward positions, instead of adopting mobile, guerrilla tactics — as the Chinese had recommended and Pol had originally planned — the Khmer
Rouge High Command had offered the Vietnamese a sitting target. In less than a week, Son Sen’s defensive shield was in shreds.
As the country erupted in flames, Pol immersed himself in routine.
On December 29, with the Vietnamese already in control of the upper reaches of the Mekong, he spent the evening hosting a banquet for the chairman of the Canadian Marxist-Leninist Communist League, a tiny pro-Chinese splinter group that had rallied to the Khmer Rouge cause. Next day he took time off to meet an obscure left-wing Peruvian newspaper editor.
At that point, the fall of Kratie was announced. A bodyguard unit was despatched to prepare for an eventual withdrawal to Tasanh, in the Cardamom Mountains, south of Samlaut, where Son Sen had built a complex of underground bunkers as an emergency HQ if Phnom Penh were abandoned. They took with them the regime’s war treasury, several hundred kilograms of gold and silver confiscated after the 1975 victory.
On the evening of January 1, when it became clear that Kompong Cham was also about to fall, Pol ordered the Foreign Ministry security chief, Phi Phuon, to escort Sihanouk, Penn Nouth and their families to Sisophon. They were to leave at once. At the least sign of danger, Pol said, Phi Phuon should take the Prince and his party across the border to safety in Thailand, whence they would make their way to Beijing. Sihanouk, Phi Phuon remembered, took the news calmly. Less than an hour later, the cavalcade of two Mercedes, one each for Sihanouk and Penn Nouth, a Lincoln Continental for the entourage and two escort jeeps, set out through the darkness along the potholed road to the North-West.
The last days sped past in a blur.
Twenty-four hours after Sihanouk’s departure, the entire diplomatic corps followed. So Hong, Pol’s nephew, looking flustered and sweating profusely, told the Chinese Ambassador: ‘The front line is critical . . . We think the Vietnamese intend to push forward and bombard Phnom Penh.’ They were then all driven to Siem Reap in a fleet of government cars.
On the 4th, the Vietnamese offensive paused. The diplomats returned to their embassies, and Sihanouk and Penn Nouth were brought back from the Thai border. Then the advance resumed. The following evening,
Pol met Sihanouk
at the former French Governor-General’s Residence, now known as House No. 1, and asked him to go to the UN to plead Cambodia’s cause before the Security Council. The meeting, which was followed by a banquet, lasted four hours. It was the first time the Prince had been exposed at length to Pol’s magnetic personality and despite himself he was impressed. ‘He was waiting for me, smiling, outside the massive door of the residence,’ Sihanouk wrote later. ‘He placed his hands
together and greeted me in the traditional manner, with a slight genuflexion, just like in the old society . . . Then immaculately dressed servants served us tea and petits fours with fresh orange juice.’ Sihanouk noted that the Khmer Rouge leader employed the special court vocabulary, speaking ‘easily and with flair . . . He had a certain charisma . . . and an eloquence that was “sweet and persuasive”.’ Pol assured him that the Vietnamese had walked into a trap. The Khmer Rouge army, he said, was deliberately luring them deep inside Cambodian territory. ‘It’s a stratagem to make them think that militarily we are very weak,’ he explained. ‘Once they are all within our borders, we will cut them up into little pieces . . . drowning them in a flood of popular resistance until they are leached out like salt in running water.’
He had spoken
in similar vein in a radio broadcast earlier the same day, in which he accused the Vietnamese of ‘trying to exterminate our Cambodian race’, and predicted that they would perish ‘in a volcano of national indignation’.
Sihanouk took this as just another of the deceits which underlay so many extraordinary Khmer Rouge statements. But it seems on this occasion he was wrong.
Pol was certainly aware that Cambodia’s forward defences had failed. He was making a virtue out of necessity: mobile warfare was the only option left. But he evidently remained convinced that once Phnom Penh had been abandoned and the Vietnamese army tried to occupy the hinterland, it would bog down and become an easy target for Khmer Rouge guerrillas. The Vietnamese offensive, he declared, ‘will last for only a short period of time’. Other leaders shared this view. Khieu Samphân thought ‘we would just be leaving Phnom Penh temporarily, and then we’d be back’. At the Foreign Ministry, So Hong told colleagues that it would ‘all be over in a few weeks’. That may have been whistling in the dark. But it also reflected a widespread belief that, as In Sopheap put it, ‘the army had the situation in hand’.
The
Chinese knew differently
. Their technicians at the rubber plantation in Chhup, in the Eastern Zone, had already reported by radio that ‘there was basically no more army.’ They headed for Kompong Som, where a Chinese merchant ship was waiting to evacuate them.
None the less, on Saturday January 6, the Chinese Civil Air Administration maintained its scheduled weekly flight to Phnom Penh. It brought out Sihanouk, his entourage and about a hundred Chinese experts and other visitors, including a group of hapless Chinese acrobats who had been touring Cambodia when the invasion began. A plan to send two more planes to fly out Chinese technicians from Battambang was abandoned when it was realised that the runway there was too short.
Khieu Samphân and Son Sen were at the airport to bid the Prince farewell. So were the Chinese and Yugoslav ambassadors. Not long afterwards, they too would depart.
Son Sen left the city
that evening, making his way through Vietnamese lines to Kompong Cham, where he tried to rally what remained of the Khmer Rouge divisions on the Eastern Front. Pol, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphân, accompanied by several jeep-loads of bodyguards,
set out at dawn
the following morning — Sunday January 7 — for Pursat, near the Great Lake, midway between Phnom Penh and Battambang. Pol travelled in a Chevrolet, which was higher off the ground and rode the potholes better than the Mercedes of his companions. Ieng Sary made for Battambang aboard a
special train
carrying several hundred Foreign Ministry personnel together with the Ministry archives, which had been hastily packed the previous day.
Many of the other ministries, including one of the biggest, Social Affairs, which had 2,000 staff members and was headed by Sary’s wife, Khieu Thirith, were never informed that an evacuation was under way. Later trains were supposed to take out medical personnel from the city’s four main hospitals — but most of the patients, including large numbers of severely wounded soldiers, were left behind because there was no room in the wagons. ‘It was indescribable,’ one man wrote later, ‘a picture of human misery . . . The platforms were clogged with convoys of soldiers, with the injured, and with people desperately trying to flee.’ Soon after 7 a.m. the same morning, the forty or so diplomats in the city left by road for the second time, together with six hundred Chinese technicians and about fifty North Koreans who had been working on agricultural and hydroelectric projects. They were accompanied by the Chief of Protocol, Son Sen’s younger brother, Nikân, and a handful of other officials. They, too, headed for the Thai border, which they reached without incident the following day. After that, the only senior Khmer Rouge figure remaining in Phom Penh was Mok, whom Pol had belatedly ordered to help Ponlâk, the military governor, assure the city’s defence. Shortly after 8 a.m. Mok was seen near the Foreign Ministry driving a jeep. But a few hours later, he also decided that nothing could be achieved by staying and set out for his old base on Mount Aural.
Thus, by the middle of Sunday morning, the rulers of Democratic Kampuchea had stolen furtively away, abandoning the capital to its own devices. The population of 40,000 workers and soldiers, plus the military units based in the immediate vicinity, was left, leaderless, to fend for itself.
The chaos and disorganisation of the final days — the sheer incompetence of Pol’s administration; the absence of any coherent plan for resistance; the
refusal to confront the reality of Phnom Penh’s imminent fall; the failure to evacuate the wounded — showed the bankruptcy of the regime. It was doomed, whatever the circumstances, because it did not know how to rule.
Khmer Rouge policy, right up to the last hours, remained wholly consistent with everything that had gone before. The priority accorded to getting Sihanouk to safety, to protecting Pol and the other leaders, was merely the practical application of the principle expounded by Nuon Chea months before: ‘If we lose members but retain the leadership, we can continue to win.’ The corollary — that ordinary people were expendable — had been Khmer Rouge practice ever since the evacuation of Phnom Penh in April 1975. The lack of concern over loss of life and over the squandering of material resources was exactly the same as three and a half years earlier.
Yet if there were one, overriding reason for the collapse of Democratic Kampuchea in January 1979, it lay in the leadership’s mania for secrecy.
Pol simply could not bring himself to tell the Cambodian people what was going on, even if it meant the destruction of the regime. The radio broadcast he made early on the morning of Friday January 5 was as revealing for its omissions as for anything he said. Apart from two brief references to ‘temporary difficulties’, he gave no hint that large parts of Cambodia were already under Vietnamese occupation. On the contrary, he implied that the ‘valiant and invincible Cambodian army’ was successfully resisting the aggressors. Still less was there any practical advice to the population about how to respond to the Vietnamese advance. Instead he intoned ritualistic formulae about ‘relying on the worker-peasant alliance’, developing production and strengthening national unity. It was a textbook example of how not to rally a nation to resist, and it followed months of similar mistakes. Pol had known since September that it was only a matter of time before the Vietnamese invaded. Yet apart from establishing a fallback base for the leadership at Tasanh, he had made no contingency plans. In a regime where mistrust had been institutionalised, trusting the population, or even the military, was unthinkable. Outside the inner circle formed by Pol, Nuon Chea, Mok, Ieng Sary and Son Sen, no one was adequately informed. Mey Mak, then head of civil aviation at Pochentong, remembered:
Did we have
any advance warning that the Vietnamese were so close? Well, two or three days before, on January 3 or 4, [the air-force commander] Mang Met told us to be prepared to deal with ‘disturbances’. . . But he didn’t say anything about Vietnamese soldiers. We knew that something was wrong, because, two weeks earlier, some of the pilots had told us that Vietnamese troops were in Memot . . . And then, Sihanouk left on January 6. But I thought that was [like the trips he had made] in 1975 . . . I still didn’t have
any idea that the Vietnamese were about to attack Phnom Penh. I knew they were in Kompong Cham. But if you listened to the radio, it spoke every day about the Vietnamese being beaten back — it never talked about our forces retreating or anything like that. So even though there were rumours — people said the Vietnamese had reached this far, or had overrun that place — we still didn’t really believe it. They were simply rumours.
Apart from Mang Met and his two deputies, Lvey and Phal, no one at Pochentong knew that the Vietnamese were approaching. No attempt was made to rebase the air force at Battambang, to move out the fuel reserves or even to fly out any of the planes. When the Vietnamese arrived, every aircraft the Cambodians possessed was lined up on the tarmac, theirs for the taking. Hundreds of armoured vehicles, quantities of munitions and strategic grain reserves fell into Vietnamese hands because, ‘to maintain secrecy’, no one had been ordered to move them. Confidential Party documents, which should have been destroyed, were left behind. Even the most secret of all the Khmer Rouge institutions — the S-21 interrogation centre at Tuol Sleng — continued its evil work, oblivious of the danger, until it was almost too late.