Distant Voices (53 page)

On my return in 1989, I drove into Phnom Penh with Heng. Every bridge leading into the city had been destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, except one which is now the city's artery and its monument to Year Zero. ‘On the morning of April 17, 1975,' said Heng, ‘the Khmer Rouge came down our street, banging on the doors, ordering us to get out. The whole city was being evacuated, pushed out. My mother, father and I got to the bridge at five o'clock, and it took us two hours to cross it with guns in our backs. During the night a woman gave birth to twins; when the guards told us to get up and move on, the new babies were left in the grass to die. The mother died later, I was told.'

Heng is one of the few people to have retained his real name. Most people have a number of aliases, or entirely new identities. Everybody remembers the moment when a list of names was read out by the Khmer Rouge. You waited for your name, and to hear it was to prepare for death. Heng is
a government servant. As we spoke, he had just heard the news that fifty people had been taken off two trains by the Khmer Rouge. A list was compiled on the spot and government servants were shot dead.

Fear is a presence in Cambodia. Once, as I set out from London for Cambodia, I was told that Vietnamese intelligence had intercepted a Khmer Rouge death list and that my name was on it. Three weeks later, returning on an empty road to Phnom Penh, David and I ran into a Khmer Rouge ambush. We narrowly escaped, and the snapshot I carry in my mind is that of armed men in black lying on their bellies, motionless beneath a truck, aiming point blank at us.

It was a glimpse, no more, of what people in Cambodia continually live with; and it is contagious. Addressing the puzzle of my dream as we sat together in the frayed foyer of the Monorom Hotel, Heng said, ‘You are beginning to dream as we do. You are touched by what we fear is coming. You see, we are a people walking around like sleepwalkers in a world shaped by the shadows of the past and by forces from outside,
never
by ourselves.' Visitors are often struck by the apparent normality of Phnom Penh, the spectacle of people trading, building and repairing, thronging at a cinema, waiting for a bus. But this, too, is part of the dream-state. Watch the eddies of panic when masonry falls from a building denied renovation since the first American bomb fell twenty-one years ago; or people immobilised when a burst of automatic fire is heard in the distance; or the traffic stopped by legless people demonstrating for food.

In Cambodia the surreal and the real merge. A few miles from Phnom Penh are the green hillocks of my dream, in which the bodies of as many as 20,000 people were dumped after they had been tortured and murdered, usually by skull fracture. Many were photographed at the point of death by members of Pol Pot's gestapo, S-21. Many were small children. It is their bone fragments that speckle the earth white.

Further east is Kandal Stung, a market town that was ‘carpet-bombed', where protruding stone foundations resemble
an excavation of antiquity. There is nobody there now. At the provincial hospital at Kampong Cham, where children die because an international embargo proscribes life-saving equipment and drugs, one ward appears about to collapse. According to a doctor, it was hit by an American bomb in the early 1970s.

At the ferry town of Neak Loeung the main street is comprised almost entirely of façades, although people have come back. The bombing of Neak Loeung was described by the US Defense Department as a ‘mistake'. To rectify it the then American ambassador to Cambodia, Emory Swank, drove to the ruins in a large car and passed out $100 bills to relatives of the dead and missing: that sum apparently being the going rate in Washington for a Cambodian life.
³

New evidence from US government documents, declassified in 1987, leaves no doubt that the bombing of Cambodia caused such widespread death and devastation that it was critical in Pol Pot's drive for power. ‘They are using damage caused by B52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda,' the CIA director of operations reported on May 2, 1973. ‘This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of a number of young men. Residents [ . . . ] say the propaganda campaign has been effective with refugees in areas that have been subject to B52 strikes.'
⁴
What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot completed.

Thousands of those who had survived the bombing were force-marched west. They were singled out as ‘Vietnamese in Khmer bodies' – because they lived in the eastern zone, close to Vietnam. Like the Jews who were made to wear yellow stars, they had to wear special blue scarves and became known as the ‘blue-scarves people'. Like the Jews they were decimated.
⁵

Svay Toeu is one of the poorest villages, where people live in houses of mud and straw. Several led me to a cigar-shaped object the length of a man, on which children were playing. It was a bomb from a B52, which had lain there for sixteen years with only its detonator removed. Beyond it a necklace of craters extended to the horizon. At dusk we walked back
through the village to a shrine made entirely with human skulls. About five hundred were arranged in wooden tiers, and there was a separate pile of tiny skulls. The moonlight caught a line of watching faces, as still and silent as the trees in which there are no birds. They were children and women; in areas such as this, where the killing was unrelenting, up to 70 per cent of adults are women.

Many of the widows still describe, obsessively, their husbands' violent deaths and the cries of their smallest children denied food; and how they were then forced to marry a man they did not know. Such traumas are said to have caused an epidemic of genital herpes and stopped menstruation.

I first visited Kompong Speu in 1979, as famine swept much of Cambodia. Since then the hospital has been rebuilt and schools reopened; and there are pictures of tranquillity, as saffron-robed monks stroll along the edge of a paddy, past playing children and their bullock. And yet, in the great shadows that follow the afternoon rain, the ‘men in black' are back; and the night is theirs for the taking.

Here people who have resisted have had their villages burned down. Others now live in ‘zones of free Kampuchea', where men and women are separated and forced into marriage, and the able-bodied are marched to Thailand and back, carrying boxes of ammunition. Those who have tried to escape have been shot. Others have stepped on land-mines. Beside the road, old men dig First World War-style trenches. They stop and watch, standing shoulder-deep, as if marking their own graves.

I know of no one in Cambodia who has doubts about what Pol Pot will do if, or when, he returns in the Trojan Horse the West, and the United Nations, is building for him. What he commands is not significant support, as some commentators have suggested, but significant fear. Certainly, as Western diplomacy has worked to accommodate the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot has been laying his plans in his secret enclave in southern Thailand. We hear little about his strategy, which is surprising as most of the reporting of Indo-China originates in Thailand. It is as if the phantom persona
the Khmer Rouge have contrived for the ‘Great Master' has been accepted by the outside world, especially its media.

Roger Normand, fieldwork editor of the
Harvard Human Rights Journal,
has interviewed numerous senior Khmer Rouge cadre and battlefield commanders. Thanks to his patient researches, it is possible to understand the essence of Pol Pot's strategy; this is, above all, to fool Western governments and to take power in whatever guise and however long it takes. In 1990 Normand obtained the briefing notes of Pol Pot's clandestine speeches and lectures to his leadership, in the barracks of Zone 87. They show Pol Pot's conscious use of the veto the West has given him over the ‘peace process'. In one speech he outlined his plans to ‘delay the elections' until his forces controlled the countryside, and he warned of the danger of accepting a political settlement before his cadre had ‘prepared' the people and could ‘lead the balloting'.

Pol Pot's public face, Khieu Samphan – who was his president during the genocide, and who in pinstriped suit has since smiled his way around the world at the ‘peace conferences' that have been crucial to the tactic of delay – dropped in on one of these briefing sessions. ‘I am so busy I have no time to eat,' he said, ‘because the outside world keeps demanding a political end to the war in Kampuchea. I could end the war now if I wanted, because the outside world is waiting for me, but I am buying time to give you comrades the opportunity to carry out all your [military] tasks.'

At this point Pol Pot interrupted and said that ‘to end the war politically' would make his ‘movement fade away' and ‘we must prevent this from happening. . . . We shall push a liberal capitalist line,' he said, ‘but we are not changing our true nature.'
⁶

This ‘true nature' was demonstrated during Pol Pot's reign when, in pursuit of a ‘pure, agrarian nation', he wiped out more than a million-and-a-half people, including 15 per cent of the rural population whose interests he glorified.
⁷
The Khmer Rouge slogan was: ‘Preserve them – no profit. Exterminate them – no loss. We will burn the old grass and the new will grow.' When Khieu Samphan was asked what ‘
mistakes' the Khmer Rouge had made, he replied, ‘We were too slow to move against our enemies.'
⁸
That is, they failed to kill enough people. Ben Kiernan, associate professor of South-East Asian history at Yale, has examined the Normand papers as part of his study of Pol Pot's preparations for the reconquest of Cambodia. ‘Pol Pot', he says, ‘is playing the international community for suckers.'
⁹

The United Nations has provided Pol Pot's vehicle of return. Although the Khmer Rouge government ceased to exist in January 1979, its representatives continued to occupy Cambodia's seat at the United Nations. Their right to do so was defended and promoted by the United States as part of their new alliance with China (Pol Pot's principal underwriter and Vietnam's ancient foe), their cold war with the Soviet Union and their revenge on Vietnam. In 1981 President Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said, ‘I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot.' The United States, he added, ‘winked publicly' as China sent arms to the Khmer Rouge through Thailand.
¹⁰

By January 1980, the United States had begun secretly funding Pol Pot. The extent of this support – $85 million from 1980 to 1986 – was revealed six years later in correspondence between Congressional lawyer Jonathan Winer, counsel to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. Winer said the information had come from the Congressional Research Service. When copies of his letter were circulated the Reagan Administration was furious. Then, without adequately explaining why, Winer repudiated the statistics, while not disputing that they had come from the Congressional Research Service. However, in a second letter to Noam Chomsky, Winer repeated the original charge, which, he told me, was ‘absolutely correct'.
¹¹

As a cover for its secret war against Cambodia, Washington set up the Kampuchean Emergency Group, known as KEG, in the American embassy in Bangkok and on the border. KEG's job was to ‘monitor' the distribution of Western humanitarian supplies sent to the refugee camps in
Thailand and to ensure that Khmer Rouge bases were fed. Although ostensibly a State Department operation, its principals were intelligence officers with long experience in Indo-China.

Two American relief aid workers, Linda Mason and Roger Brown, later wrote, ‘The US Government insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed . . . the US preferred that the Khmer Rouge operation benefit from the credibility of an internationally known relief operation.'
¹²
Under American pressure, the World Food Programme handed over $12 million worth of food to the Thai Army to pass on to the Khmer Rouge. ‘20,000 to 40,000 Pol Pot guerrillas benefited,' according to former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke.
¹³

I witnessed this. In 1980 a film crew and I travelled in a UN convoy of forty trucks, seventeen loaded with food, seventeen with seed and the rest with ‘goodies', which was the term UN people used for their assorted largesse. We headed for Phnom Chat, a Khmer Rouge operations base set in forest just inside Cambodia and bunkered with land-mines. The UN official leading the convoy, Phyllis Gestrin, a University of Texas psychology professor, was worried and clearly disliked what she was doing. ‘I don't want to think what this aid is doing,' she said. ‘I don't trust these blackshirts.' She could barely suppress her fear and demonstrated it by driving her Land Rover across a suspected minefield and into a tree. ‘Oh man,' she said, ‘this place gives me the creeps. Let's get it over with.' At that, she turned the Land Rover around and pointed it back along the track. ‘We always position it so we can get out fast,' she said.

After the trucks had dropped their ‘goodies' in a clearing Phyllis solicited the signature of a man who had watched in bemused silence from a thatched shelter. ‘Well, I guess what I've got here is a receipt,' she said, with a nervous laugh. ‘Not bad, from a butcher like him . . .' The ‘butcher' was the base commander, who demanded that the foreign aid people address him as ‘
Monsieur le Président
'. They also knew him as ‘Pol Pot's Himmler'.

In 1979 I had seen in Siem Reap province the mass grave of several thousand people shortly after it was unearthed. Many of the corpses had been beaten to death, as their splintered skulls clearly showed. Now, smiling before me was Pol Pot's governor of the province at the time of that mass murder. His name, he told me, was Nam Phann, which was a military alias. He was eager to confirm that Western aid had nourished and restored the Khmer Rouge. ‘Thank you very much,' he said, ‘and we wish for more.' I asked him whom he regarded as his allies in the world. ‘Oh,' he replied, ‘China, the ASEAN
^fn1
nations . . . and the United States.'