Pol Pot (48 page)

The Khmer Rouge soldiers in the field felt the change too. No longer were deserters treated with indulgence. Now they were killed. Discipline was ferocious for all ranks. That summer, the resistance launched its first major onslaught on Phnom Penh, in which 20-25,000 men, representing half of all Khmer Rouge main-force units, were mobilised to take part. By the time the offensive was beaten back in late July, thanks largely to US bombing, at least 30 per cent were dead. To meet the growing need for cannon fodder, conscription was introduced. The casualty rate on the government side was equally horrific: 1,000 men a week dead, injured or missing, according to the Commander-in-Chief, Sosthène Fernandez. But while government units sometimes turned and ran, there was no report of any Khmer Rouge unit breaking ranks or surrendering.

US military intelligence claimed later that the forward commanders had ‘direct orders to take the city before August 1973’, when, at the behest of Congress, the American bombing runs were to end, ‘so they could prove to the world that they could humble the US.’

Pol’s insistence on an all-out assault at the height of the rainy season, when the entire area surrounding the capital was flooded and conditions for the attackers were at their worst, was certainly, in military terms, futile, and showed total disregard for the lives of his own men. Had the Khmer Rouge commanders husbanded their forces and waited until the start of the dry season in December, the result might have been very different. As it was, the South-Western Zone troops who bore the brunt of the fighting had still not recovered from their ordeal a year later.

But the Americans were wrong in concluding that Pol was bent on their humiliation. The real objective of the summer offensive was to force the hand of the Vietnamese.

Since the Paris accords, the leadership in Hanoi had been in a quandary. Pol’s refusal to negotiate a ceasefire raised the spectre that they might lose control of their prickly Cambodian allies. Their first reaction was to make

good the warning that Le Duc Tho had given Ieng Sary in February, when he had spoken of the danger of the Cambodians having to fight on with ‘no assistance from outside’. That spring the flow of arms down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from China was mysteriously interrupted. In April the Vietnamese Prime Minister, Pham Van Dong, told a Soviet diplomat that Vietnamese aid to the Cambodian communists was ‘decreasing, and its scale is now insignificant’. But squeezing the Khmer Rouge supply line did not produce the desired results. The Cambodians responded by raising the stakes. Pol gave orders that the Hanoi returnees, apart from a small minority who had proved their loyalty, should be rounded up and taken to a detention centre in Chhlong district, on the west bank of the Mekong, as suspected Vietnamese agents. At political training seminars, cadres began for the first time to speak of ‘those with Khmer bodies and Vietnamese minds’. Most of the returnees would eventually be executed.

*

Clashes between Khmer Rouge and remnant Vietnamese units escalated sharply: in July alone, there were two hundred Vietnamese casualties from incidents involving ‘friendly forces’. By late summer, only 2-3,000 Vietnamese combat troops and about 2,000 civilian cadres, plus the special units in the North-East guarding the Ho Chi Minh Trail, remained on Cambodian soil. All Vietnamese civilians, not merely refugees but also long-term residents, came under pressure to ‘return home’ on the grounds that the war in South Vietnam was now over. When the alternative was being herded into cooperatives, they needed little persuasion.

At the same time

the Khmers Rouges stepped up the military pressure. The river convoys supplying Phnom Penh came under sustained attack. Two cargo ships and several barges were sunk and eight other vessels damaged. The seaside town of Kep was captured. Takeo was surrounded.

Rockets fell for the first time on Battambang. Finally, on August 12, government forces abandoned the strategic road junction at Skoun, 25 miles north of Phnom Penh. All the main land routes in and out of Phnom Penh were now insecure or cut and the capital relied increasingly on a US airlift for food, fuel and munitions.

By the time the US bombing raids ended, refugees fleeing the countryside had swollen the population of the capital to nearly two million, three times the pre-war level. Around the city and along the banks of the Mekong as far as the Vietnamese border, the land was so pitted with craters that it looked, in the words of one diplomat, ‘like the valleys of the moon’. The Khmer Rouge attacks of that summer, undertaken in total disregard of the human and material cost, had created a momentum that was unstoppable. Kissinger later acknowledged that, after mid-1973, he had known Cambodia was lost.

In Hanoi the Vietnamese Politburo was compelled to make a painful reassessment. The Khmers Rouges now controlled more than two-thirds of Cambodia’s territory and almost half its population. With US bombers grounded, it was clear that they would win whatever Vietnam did. Hanoi’s original strategy — to establish a unified communist Vietnam, which would then ‘liberate’ its younger siblings, Laos and Cambodia, earning their undying gratitude — was dead in the water. By continuing to push Pol to start peace talks which he did not want or need, the Vietnamese communists risked losing what little goodwill from the Khmers Rouges remained.

The arms flow along the Ho Chi Minh Trail was quietly restored.

Other gestures followed. Vietnamese heavy artillery was despatched to help in the siege of Kompong Cham. A South Vietnamese NLF delegation toured the Eastern Zone and was given a red-carpet welcome from Pol himself, Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphân, Hou Yuon and other CPK luminaries. But the damage had been done. In July 1973, the CPK Central Committee held its annual plenum at K-30, Pol’s new headquarters a few miles north of S-71, which had been abandoned the previous winter. The delegates agreed that in future Vietnam should be treated ‘as a friend, but a

friend with a conflict

’.

That autumn, Pol travelled again to the Special Zone, where a new forward base had been established near the village of

Chrok Sdêch

, ‘The Gate of the King’, in the eastern foothills of the Cardamom Mountains, on the old royal road from Oudong to Pursat. The area was thickly forested, crisscrossed by tracks no wider than an ox-cart, which were hidden from the air by a dense canopy of foliage of immense tropical hardwoods. As the crow flies, it lies about thirty miles north-west of Phnom Penh.

Pol and his entourage lived in thatched huts, built beside a stream amid a cluster of century-old mango trees. Mok’s South-Western Zone troops had set up their main camp, equipped with bunkers and trenches for protection against bombing, in rough, broken country, studded with rocky outcrops, a few miles further into the hills. Thiounn Thioeunn ran a military hospital, with six long barrack-like wards, in the nearby village of Boeng Var. Down the cart-track leading southward towards Phnom Penh was Vorn Vet’s Special Zone headquarters, concealed in a grove of sugar palms that towered over the surrounding plain.

In theory, operational control of the Khmer Rouge army lay with Son Sen, whom Pol had summoned from the North-East to resume his role as Chief of Staff. His command post was ten miles to the south-east, near the railway halt of Ra Smach on the now abandoned main line from Phnom Penh to Battambang. It was in an area dotted with giant anthills up to twenty feet high, with trees and clumps of bamboo growing out of their sides. Sen’s brother, Nikân, recounted:

We built

the command offices half-underground, with trenches and bolt-holes inside the anthills, and a system of tunnels to communicate from one anthill to the next. When there were bombing raids, we hid inside — as though we were ants ourselves. Then, when the danger was past, we would emerge and resume our work. Usually when we built trenches, we lined them with wood and a layer of rice-husks to absorb the Shockwaves from the bombs. But earth that has been worked by ants resists the blast even better. And the bamboos provided camouflage.

Messages were carried to the front by courier. Pol distrusted radio traffic for fear of enemy monitoring. Although the resistance had captured US-made transceivers from Lon Nol’s forces, they were used mainly to listen in to enemy communications and occasionally to mislead enemy commanders, as on one notable occasion when a quick-witted Khmer Rouge operator tricked the navigator of an air-force transport plane into parachuting a precious cargo of 105-mm artillery shells, destined for government forces, into a resistance-held area, by providing false map co-ordinates. At battalion level and below, Khmer Rouge forces had no radio equipment. Where the Chinese communists, at a similar stage in their civil war, had used bugles to communicate, the Cambodians employed wooden flutes, whose banshee-like wails, echoing through the night air, instilled terror into their opponents.

Pol took two major decisions during his stay at Chrok Sdêch.

The first was systematically to tighten the noose around the capital by cutting, as far as possible, road and river communications with the rest of

the country, in preparation for an all-out offensive either the following spring or, if that proved impossible, during the dry season a year later. The second was to tighten security in the Special Zone to prevent infiltration by government spies. This had become a real problem. Serge Thion, a French sympathiser who had visited the Special Zone a year earlier, had been astonished by the ease with which people could cross between government and communist-controlled areas. As a result, Lon Nol’s intelligence service was remarkably well informed.

*

Now all that changed. Kong Duong, then a sixteen-year-old student at the Lycée Yukanthor in Phnom Penh, recalled what happened when he tried to visit relatives near Oudong the following spring:

I had a guide

from the liberated zone, a peasant who had come to take me across. But we were both arrested by the

the village militia. They said we were spies . . . My arms were bound behind me and they used a length of rope to pull me along. They sat me down under a tree . . . Then they announced that they’d caught a spy — and all the villagers came to look. When my sister and brother-in-law saw it was me, they came up and vouched for me. That was my good luck — because I was arrested at 4 p.m. If there’d been no one around who could recognise me and say who I was, I’d have been killed. They asked me questions. ‘Where are you from? What do you do? How long have you been a spy? You are here to find out where are the places to bomb!’ It was the militia chief of the commune who decided I should be spared. But if later I had turned out to be a spy after all, my brother-in-law and his whole family would have been executed. The guide who had brought me over wasn’t so lucky. When we were arrested we were separated. He was taken to another village. No one knew him there and he was killed.

Purges also began among the local population. Duong, who afterwards spent fifteen years as a Khmer Rouge cadre, remembered how in his village ‘they killed anyone who had an education’. It was not that they had been ordered to do so. But that was how the peasants interpreted the call

for heightened vigilance. ‘To them, rich people and educated people were the same: they both looked down on the poor.’

New prisons were built — one near Vorn Vet’s headquarters; two others further up in the mountains, beyond Chrok Sdêch — where alleged infiltrators, if they survived the militia, were sent for interrogation. Long afterwards local people still shivered at the names of these places — Sdok Srat, Phnom Prateat and K’mab — ‘to which men were taken, but none came back’. Monks arriving from the capital were also viewed as potential spies and confined to a holding centre in the village of Dom Kveth. Ethnic Chinese and Sino-Khmers, who had at first been among the strongest supporters of the resistance, were now denounced as ‘capitalists who suck the Cambodian people’s blood’. There was growing concern, too, about the attitude of the Chams, who were numerous in the Special Zone. In November 1973, a Cham revolt had broken out in the East, in protest against the communists’ attempts to force them to abandon their customs and live in co-operatives like everyone else. At the end of the year, most of the leaders of the movement were still in hiding in the jungle. The Zone Secretary, So Phim, acting on Pol’s instructions, gave orders that those captured be treated with

exemplary severity

:

The leaders must be tortured fiercely in order that we may obtain a complete understanding of their organisation. Then we should wait for a time before deciding what to do with them. Lower-level leaders should also be tortured harshly, but they need not be killed . . . Their followers should be re-educated . . . Then they can be released to act as political bait and kept under surveillance . . . All methods, and all political and military measures, must be employed . . . to prevent them hiding and regrouping their forces.

This idea that all who diverged from the revolution were human vermin and should be treated accordingly, analogous to the medieval Christian notion that sinners merit the torments of Hell, also coloured the Party’s attitude to the inhabitants of Phnom Penh, including the peasant refugees who had streamed into the city. They had chosen their side, sitting out the US bombing in safety while the revolutionaries were blown to smithereens. They therefore merited whatever punishment rained down on them. From late December 1973, Chinese-made 107– and 122–mm rockets were fired into the city, often falling on the poorest quarters and causing hundreds of casualties. The following spring, these were supplemented by captured 105-mm artillery, firing at maximum range from positions south of the capital. Already in 1971 and 1972, the Viet Cong had launched occasional rocket attacks as a means of psychological warfare, to demonstrate that the Lon Nol government was incapable of protecting the population. Now it became a daily blitz of indiscriminate terror.