Authors: Nigel Cawthorne
Remaining covert, the Khmer Rouge expanded their control behind the Vietnamese lines. They also dominated Sihanouk's united front against Lon Nol's nationalist Khmer Republic in exile in Beijing. By 1973, Pol Pot felt strong enough to strike out on his own with an intensification of the 'class struggle'. Those who opposed the formation of agricultural cooperatives in Khmer Rouge-controlled areas were branded 'feudalists' and 'capitalists' and killed. Cambodian Communists trained in Vietnam were dubbed 'Vietnamese lackeys': they too were arrested. Chinese, Islamic Cham, and other ethnic minorities were excluded; the Khmer peasantry, known as 'base people,' were elevated.
The leaders of the Khmer Rouge were Communist zealots, whose Marxism was adapted for the Third World: instead of putting the urban proletariat on a pedestal, as Karl Marx had, they taught that all goodness stemmed from the rural peasantry. Consequently, the city dwellers were going to be turned into peasants, or killed in the attempt. When the Khmer Rouge took over power in Phnom Penh, Pol Pot had promised that only a handful of 'supertraitors' would be killed. Instead, at least 1.7 million Cambodians were to die in Pol Pot's murderous ideological experiment. The officials of the previous government and army officers were to the first to be exterminated. A Khmer Rouge broadcast ordered them to present themselves at the Ministry of Information. Fearing that worse might happen to them if they did not, most turned up as ordered. All were killed.
On the afternoon of the 17th, the whole population of Phnom Penh – swollen by refugees to four times its pre-war number – was ordered to leave for the countryside. There was no transport so they would have to go on foot and were marched out of the city. Even the hospitals were emptied. Those who refused to go or were too ill to walk were killed. The country had been at war for eight years and Phnom Penh had been under siege for fifteen months. Many people had been wounded by shellfire or suffering from disease and malnutrition. For the sick and the aged, this evacuation amounted to a death march. As the great exodus stumbled out of the city into the unknown, under the watchful eyes of the impassive Khmer Rouge, the weak fell by the roadside and were left to die where they lay.
Meanwhile, the teenage soldiers looked for anyone who looked like they had been well educated or had enjoyed wealth and power. They looked for people with soft hands, or who looked well fed or well dressed. They were pulled out of the human stream and interrogated. Anyone who admitted to being one of the urban elite – a bureaucrat, a businessman, a doctor, a teacher, a lawyer, or an engineer – was shot. This was known as 'class vengeance', a favourite slogan of the Khmer Rouge.
By the evening of the 17th, the tree-lined avenues, the pavement cafés, the chic haute cuisine restaurants, the opium dens and the brothels of Cambodia's capital were empty. The city was silent, deserted. Only a handful of journalists remained behind, huddled in the French embassy. They were evacuated three weeks later.
The evacuation of Phnom Penh was not done on a whim. The decision had been made three months earlier. The leadership of the Khmer Rouge realised that they were not strong enough to run the country in a conventional sense. The Communist cadres responsible for building the new society numbered only 1,400. Even their young peasant army was not big enough to control a city whose population numbered over a million. Pol Pot reasoned that if you took those city dwellers and dispersed them across the countryside, they would be too disorganised and disorientated to offer any real resistance, leaving the Khmer Rouge with undisputed control.
Manpower was certainly needed in the countryside. The guerrilla war and American bombing had laid waste much of the land. Rice stocks were perilously low, but being fanatical anti-colonialists, it was an article of faith to the Khmer Rouge that they would not accept any aid from abroad. The economy would be rebuilt by Cambodians themselves. This would be done by turning Cambodia into one huge labour camp.
The evacuation of Phnom Penh was also seen as a great leap forward towards the ideal Communist society. At a stroke, the urban rich lost all their property and became peasants. Those who survived the death march from Phnom Penh had to re-educate themselves through backbreaking peasant labour. Anyone who could not adapt or accept the change was not worthy of the Communist paradise and deserved to die. With urban corruption eradicated, a new utopian society could flourish. Cambodia was to return to Year Zero and be rebuilt from scratch, and it would be modelled on the way of life of the Khmer peasantry.
The seeds of this new society already existed in the 'liberated' areas that had been under Khmer Rouge control during the war. There, they had already abolished money. Private property was outlawed and the peasants had been organised in collective farms. For the meagre rations doled out by the Khmer Rouge leadership, they had worked from dawn to dusk to support the war effort. These collectivised peasants were the Communists' 'old people' and they would instruct the 'new people' from the cities how to be good peasants and good Communists. However, those who survived the forced march from the city arrived at the collectives to find that they did not receive a warm welcome. The peasants resented the easy life city folk had lived, while they were toiling in the paddy fields.
Once they got to work, the city people's incompetence in the fields earned them the contempt of the 'old people'. 'Base people' killed any of the 'new people' who faltered or complained. Those who were completely useless were 'eliminated' for 'economic sabotage'. Most just perished from natural causes. They were not used to the privations the peasants suffered: backbreaking labour, starvation, disease, and lack of medical care. The attitude of the Khmer Rouge was summed up in the slogan: 'If this man lives there is no profit. If he dies there is no great loss'.
The identity of the leaders behind their murderous policy remained a mystery for a long time. Alongside the infamous Pol Pot were other Paris-educated intellectuals – Ieng Sar, Ieng Thirith and Khieu Samphan. They had set up headquarters in the ghost city of Phnom Penh and ruled the country with extreme authoritarianism. Cambodia was divided into zones with each zone's party secretary directly answerable to the central authority in Phnom Penh. Below each party secretary was a central committee and, beyond the committee, no one had ever heard of Pol Pot and his merry men. Orders were issued simply in the name of Angka,'the Organisation'.
In March 1976, Cambodia was renamed the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea and Pol Pot and his henchmen pushed forward towards the establishment of their ideal society. Solitary eating was abolished: all food had to be consumed in communal canteens from stocks controlled by the Khmer Rouge. Any private enterprise such as picking wild fruit or vegetables to supplement your meagre diet was punishable by death, and even the consumption of lizards, toads, and earthworms was outlawed.
Family ties were discouraged. Children in the co-operatives slept in dormitories away from their parents and were encouraged to spy on their parents and denounce them if their behaviour fell short of what was demanded by the Angka. Different members of families were assigned to different work parties and sent to opposite ends of the country. With no telephones and no postal system, once contact had been broken family members and friends were unlikely ever to come across each other again.
The teachers and intellectuals – apart from those in the politburo – had already been exterminated. Instead of education, there was a brutal process of indoctrination. Executions were carried out either on the orders of the secret police or of the cooperative ruling committee and they were as discreet and mysterious as the Angka itself. People disappeared in the night: it was not advisable to ask where. Some were killed on pure whim. To possess thick-lensed glasses, for example, meant you had read too much, so you were the target of Pol Pot's butchers.
The favourite method of execution was a blow to the back of the head or neck with the base of an axe-head. Bullets were in short supply. Disembowelling and burying alive were also popular, with victims usually required to dig their own graves first. Whole truckloads of people would suddenly disappear. Curiously, Khmer culture did not feature the struggle between good and evil that is the staple of Western storytelling. It stressed harmony and beauty, and the Cambodians were completely unprepared for the mindless violence that their leaders had brought back with them from France. Many Cambodians would stand in line, awaiting their turn to be struck on the back of the head. A traditionally peaceful people, they had no more intellectual defence against the Khmer Rouge's murderous strategy than they had against bombs falling from American B-52s.
Keeping a firm grip on the reign of terror in the village was easy for the Communists. A few rotting human remains, scattered along the trails into the village, would do the job. Rumours of grotesque tortures were spread. Victims were said to have their throats cut open by razor-sharp reeds or serrated palm fronds. This had a chilling effect.
After the 'class enemies' – anyone who had an education and anyone who had not been born a worker or a peasant – had been eliminated, the Khmer Rouge started on the ethnic and religious minorities. The Chinese, the Vietnamese, Cham Muslims were 'liquidated'. Pol Pot believed in ethnic cleansing. He believed in racial purity and minorities were systematically exterminated.
From the beginning of 1977, the Khmer Rouge executioners turned in on themselves. Pol Pot ordered the systematic extermination of CPK members who were thought to have a petty bourgeois or intellectual background. They were accused of deviance. S-21 – a secret security apparatus – tortured fellow party members into confessing that they were CIA agents. Veteran peasant leaders were put to death, after 'confessing' to being agents of the Vietnamese. Those in the party from a 'bourgeois' background were the first to be picked out. Minor party officials were blamed for the continuing failure of the economy, though everyone else saw that the real blame lay with the murderous system itself. They paid with their lives. Pol Pot's aim was to kill almost all surviving CPK veterans, believing that that the whole party apparatus must be replaced for his policies to succeed.
Food shortages continued, because agriculture was now in the hands of people who knew nothing about it. Irrigation projects and dams were build by hand without engineers and experts to supervise the work: they were all dead. When the first rain came, these massive civil-engineering projects that had cost thousands of lives in their construction were simply swept away. As far as the party was concerned, these failures could not be the fault of the system. They were sabotage by enemies of the state. The Khmer Rouge became consumed by paranoia, and dozens of torture centres were set up around the country, the most notorious of which was Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh, where expert Khmer Rouge torturers 'uncovered' conspiracies that usually implicated more people who would suffer their tender mercies. Tens of thousands died horribly.
The killings became so indiscriminate and widespread that, by mid-1977, Pol Pot himself tried to call a halt. In September 1977, he went public for the first time, making clear his own dominant role in the Communist Party that was now running Kampuchea. In an address to the people, he claimed to have liberated them from 2,000 years of 'despair and hopelessness'. But most of his speech was devoted to the need to defend Kampuchea against foreign aggression.
The Khmer Rouge had always distrusted the Vietnamese who, in pre-colonial times, had dominated the region. There had been border clashes immediately after the fall of Phnom Penh back in 1975. In the autumn of 1977, the border conflicts flared up again. The Khmer Rouge central committee sent out a new instruction: purge all those who had contact with Hanoi. More party members died.
At the same time, Pol Pot had ordered incursions into Vietnam, in an attempt to redraw the Cambodian–Vietnamese border. The Eastern Zone committee came under suspicion as their region actually butted up against Vietnamese territory. Pol Pot maintained they were not doing enough to resist the highly efficient Vietnamese Army, who had, after all, ousted the US.
The Eastern Zone was one of the seven major administrative areas where the conditions were better than in the rest of the country. Pol Pot had long feared that opposition might coalesce around the zone chief there, Sao Pheum. Fearing that resistance would plunge Kampuchea into a fully fledged civil war, Pheum committed suicide. At the beginning of 1978, the Eastern Zone leadership was purged, but some escaped the Khmer Rouge executioners by fleeing across the border into Vietnam. To maintain control, Pol Pot set the other zone chiefs at each other's throats, favouring Ta Mok, leader of the Southwest Zone and the country's most efficient killer. Nevertheless, by late 1978, Ta Mok's cadres were also marked for extermination. No one was safe.
One of those who fled from the Eastern Zone was Heng Samrin. A former CPK commissar, he organised the Kampuchean National United Front for National Salvation in exile. With credible Cambodian leadership in their territory, the Vietnamese took a hand. They feared that the excesses of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were undermining their victory in Vietnam and inviting renewed foreign intervention. On 21 December 1978, Kampuchea was 'liberated' once more – this time with a full-scale Vietnamese invasion. One hundred thousand Vietnamese supported 20,000 United Front troops.
On 7 January 1979, Samrin declared the People's Republic of Kampuchea, supplanting the CPK's Democratic Kampuchea. In response, 85,000 Chinese troops – later reinforced to 200,000 – invaded Vietnam from the north. Even though Vietnam's main force was in Kampuchea, a 60,000-man defensive force, comprising largely border guards and regional forces, held off the People's Liberation Army, which had not seen active service since the end of the Korean War in 1953. After overrunning Lang Son on 5 March, the Chinese decided that Vietnam had been punished enough for the invasion of Cambodia and withdrew.