When the War Was Over (30 page)

The sole picture of women in the pamphlet is of the wives of Ieng Sary and Saloth Sar: Khieu Thirith and her sister Khieu Ponnary. Thirith is identified as the wife of Ieng Sary, but Ponnary's marriage to Sar goes unmentioned. Although Ponnary is only nine years older than Thirith she looks like her mother. Ponnary's hair is a shocking gray. Her thin face appears haunted. While Thirith looks straight into the camera, Ponnary fixes her gaze to some distant point. Her arms dangle limply at her side. This posed photograph cannot hide her condition: Ponnary is going mad in the service of her husband's revolution.

At the end of this section Son Sen is shown poring over maps and briefing papers at military command headquarters. It is a declaration that he is the party's chosen military leader. The Paris group had presented itself to the cognoscenti as the leaders of the revolution by asserting their command
over its premier institution, the army. The army had become the fraternity that bound together the uprooted peasants and intellectuals who had abandoned their farms or their city careers. It is in the army that the peasants and refugees from the city learn their political indoctrination and education. The most promising youth were steered toward positions of leadership in the army, not held back in safe jobs in the rear. Proving oneself in battle was as great a proof as any for a revolutionary.

The youth had to become the spearhead of the revolution, and the revolution had to be based in the army. The ethics of militarism buttressed Marxist-Leninist doctrine. As in neighboring Vietnam, the Cambodian communists found that in wartime they preferred to recruit new party members first from the army, then from civilians. In the army these youth could throw off their “old farmer” or middle-class origins and claim membership in the proletariat as long as they fought well. In the army, the explosive mix of peasant and intellectual created intolerance and violence, a dedication to the protection of Khmer blood and soil that would mark the Khmer Rouge on the battlefield.

The next stage of the Cambodian War was brought about by the Paris Peace Accords, signed on January 27, 1973, by the United States and North Vietnam. The negotiations had lasted four years, the length of President Nixon's first term in office, and brought benefits only to Washington and Hanoi. The Americans achieved their goals of ending active involvement in the war and winning back the Americans held as prisoners of war. The North Vietnamese won the withdrawal of American troops from South Vietnam and an end to American bombing of North Vietnam without having to withdraw North Vietnamese troops from the south. A cease-fire was declared in the south.

Lon Nol invited his opponents to join him in a cease-fire, at least. But the Khmer Rouge refused to take part in these negotiations on the assumption that a suspension of hostilities in Cambodia would rob them of their chief strategic advantage—the semi-isolation of Phnom Penh from other Khmer Republic-held territory and from its supply points in South Vietnam and Thailand. The United States agreed to end all bombing in Laos once a cease-fire agreement was reached in that country, which was achieved one month later, in February 1973.

The consequences in Cambodia were immediate and dramatic and took the country by surprise. By staying out of the negotiations the Khmer Rouge inadvertently made Cambodia the new focal point of the Second Indochina War. The accords led to the quick withdrawal of most Vietnamese
communist troops from the interior of Cambodia. They returned to Vietnam or clustered along the common border and thereafter left most of the fighting to their Khmer Rouge allies. Soon after, by accident or design, arms shipments designated for the Khmer Rouge were delayed or failed to arrive in Cambodia from the Ho Chi Minh trail. Finally the Cambodian War was being fought between Cambodia's armies, and it quickly escalated.

The second major consequence of the accords was the prohibition against American military involvement in Vietnam and Laos. Cambodia became the only arena for American bomber jets, and in February 1973, showers of explosive bombs began to fall from American B-52s and fighter jets. The North Vietnamese had warned the Khmer communists of this possibility; the Khmer Rouge decided the accords were one more betrayal by their communist allies. But they were silent on the matter in public. On the ground they devised a simple and harsh plan to protect themselves from the bombs and from new “betrayal” by the Vietnamese, a plan to isolate themselves even further, to dig in for the fight of their lives and make any sacrifices necessary.

The Khmer Rouge ordered everyone in their zones grouped into strict cooperatives, fortresses that locked up the people, the harvest, and all material possessions for the exclusive use of the party and the revolution. No one would be allowed to leave or enter these cooperatives or their zones without the permission of the party. All strangers would be viewed as enemies. The villages would become rural forts administered under strict martial laws. Everyone would be expected to work relentlessly for the war cause. Everything grown or produced in the cooperatives would be used for the Khmer revolution, and no one, particularly not the Vietnamese communists, would be allowed to buy Khmer produce. There would be no contact with the outside world: Rights of speech and travel were abolished. Money was abolished to make illegal sales worthless. A system of terror was instituted.

Saloth Sar described the strategic purpose behind the cooperatives:

Founding cooperatives became an act of war. In one stroke the Khmer Rouge solved a host of military, economic, and social problems. With nearly
complete control, they were able to coordinate work hours to the American bombs. “It helped our people organize their hours of agricultural production. If there was bombing in the day, they all worked at night and vice versa,” Thiounn Prasith explained. Since the Vietnamese communists were now openly considered spoilers if not enemies of the revolution, the cooperative's strict rules prevented the Vietnamese from having any contact with the Cambodians, a prohibition which obviously held for Lon Nol's soldiers as well.

The cooperative solution quieted peasant suspicions that these outsiders would draft all their able-bodied men, and many women, and leave them unable to raise the food they needed to survive. With their cooperatives the Khmer Rouge were promising that no one would starve—not the young husband at the front nor his parents, wife, and small children at home. What was available was shared more or less equally. There was not enough but the Khmer Rouge believed the people were up to the sacrifice and that it was the only way to win the “rice war” that was being waged parallel to the military operations. Victory would be won by the side that could feed its people and army.

There was also an element of revenge. To the Khmer Rouge, the North Vietnamese by signing the accords had released American jets to bomb Cambodia. Now they too would suffer the consequences. North Vietnamese troops no longer traveled through Cambodia freely. They no longer fed on Cambodian rice. “The Vietnamese were the biggest problem [in 1973],” Prasith said, indulging in historical hyperbole. “They would buy the rice. So we abolished money. If the people did not need money, if they lived in a cooperative where everything was provided for them by the state, they would not sell rice to the Vietnamese.”

The undeclared war between Khmer and Vietnamese communists had begun. Years later, Le Duc Tho, one of the top Vietnamese communist leaders, acknowledged the damage wrought by the dramatic shift in Khmer Rouge strategy: “After 1973 the Vietnamese forces were faced with obstacles created by the Cambodian communists to their moving about and purchasing foodstuffs.”

Despite Prasith's later claim that the Vietnamese were the biggest problem in 1973, the war was fought against the Khmer Republic. To understand how the Khmer Rouge took over full responsibility for the communist side of the Cambodian War and, in little more than two years, defeated Phnom Penh, one has to look inside these cooperatives. They were not the socialist farming communities described in Hou Youn's pamphlet, but military encampments that became models for the “New Society.”

The Khmer Rouge sealed off their zones by creating miles-wide tracts of no-man's-land. Peasants who lived in these buffer zones were herded to cooperatives deep inside Khmer Rouge territory or to wilderness areas where they were forced to start anew, clearing jungles and preparing fields in appalling circumstances with little material assistance from the communists. The buffer zones were laid with booby traps and patrolled around the clock.

Strict surveillance of these “borders” was matched by equally tight control over the cooperatives. Soon people began to “disappear.” Those caught attempting to cross from either direction without permission were not seen again. From Beijing, Prince Sihanouk declared he could not guarantee protection for any foreigner traveling to the “other side” of the war. The first scent of an indescribable fear filled the “liberated zones.” The days of deliberate, vaguely altruistic organizing by the Khmer Rouge were passing. “Stories carried back by those people who survived earlier relocations [to create the buffer zones] told of people dying en route and forced labor after their arrival [to new wilderness areas],” wrote Kenneth M. Quinn, an American foreign service officer who interviewed Khmer refugees from these zones.

Quinn was stationed in Can Tho province in South Vietnam near the Cambodian border, in charge of following Vietnamese political events. In early 1973 he was puzzled by the sudden change in cross-border black-market trade. It had dried up, almost overnight. When his Vietnamese sources could not explain this mystery, Quinn started interviewing the Cambodian refugees who were stealing into Vietnam. The result of his work, based on interviews spanning the period from March 1973 to January 1974, was a thirty-seven-page classified State Department airgram entitled “The Khmer Krahom [Red Khmer] Program to Create a Communist Society in Southern Cambodia.” It is the chief record of the Cambodian wartime cooperative movement.

Quinn's study of the cooperative movement read as if it were a blueprint for the system the Khmer Rouge adopted once they came to power. The forced relocations presaged the evacuation of Phnom Penh; the sealing of the borders and self-imposed isolation were duplicated nationwide; the tales of the “disappeared” and extreme restrictions on everyday life were an early warning of the terror and purges that characterized the Khmer Rouge regime; and the deep root of support for the revolution in the poorer peasantry and the youth explained who were the benefactors. Quinn's refugees also gave a hint of the party's future oppression of minorities and, strikingly, the fierce antagonism toward the Vietnamese communists.

Quinn admits he does not understand the reason behind the problem he discovered between the Vietnamese and Cambodian communists:

But in 1973, the administration in Washington largely ignored this study, and it had little impact on the American embassy in Phnom Penh. Quinn was not a Cambodian specialist, and the import of his analysis was unwelcome. It had little direct bearing on the war at hand. Like Ith Sarin, Quinn questioned Washington's assumption that the communists were one solid bloc, perhaps a quarrelsome one. Policymakers had grown weary of “bloodbath” stories that regularly came to naught. And, as one bureaucrat explained, Quinn had submitted his findings on a low-classified airgram. “If he felt it was so important he should have flagged us with a higher classification.”

Quinn's story confirms and continues the report by Ith Sarin, albeit in a different section of the country. Quinn's refugees largely fled from southern and eastern Cambodia; Sarin had traveled in the northwestern and central regions. According to Quinn, the physical landscape changed little under the cooperative system. People were organized around existing villages; most lived in their houses and worked the same fields. The issue of ownership was sidestepped for the moment. However, everything in the cooperatives—land, homes, clinics, schools, pagodas—was under the control of the cooperative committee, an arm of the party, like the army.

Quinn describes how that control was aimed toward “restructuring Khmer society” with intensive political training of youth, mounting “a major attack on the family, one of the major elements of traditional Cambodian society”; he notes that “perhaps the most significant socio-cultural reformation the [Khmer Rouge] have attempted is an attack on religion in general and the Theravada Buddhist Church and clergy in particular.”

Groups of twenty or more families were organized into “production teams” to work the land. A committee of three, approved by the party, ran the cooperative and controlled disposition of the harvest: specific allotments for laborers, for state granaries, and for the battlefront. Money and markets were abolished. In their place, the cooperatives established state stores where goods were bartered. These stores were stocked with cloth, fuel, utensils, and so forth by the Khmer Rouge through an exclusive import-export system. Purchasing agents of the party handled the sale and distribution of everything from rice and vegetables to medicines and rubber. Hence the disappearance of the cross-border trade that prompted Quinn's study.