When the War Was Over (36 page)

In many regards, Ta Mok was the most provincial of the zone leaders, the least willing to see beyond the needs of himself and the Southwestern Zone. He slavishly protected his zone from interference by the Center or the other zones, to the annoyance of many. He was one of the newest members of the standing committee and at first he stayed out of the disputes and intrigues
that broke out when the Center began doubting the loyalty of various zone leaders. Although his zone was powerful, his political profile was low, and the Center considered Ta Mok neither a threat nor a liability, not a problem that needed urgent attention nor a major figure who warranted a prize payoff.

The Eastern Zone, the next largest, was led by So Phim, who was much closer to the top leadership in 1975. It covered land east of the Mekong River, comprising all or parts of the strategic provinces of Prey Veng, Svay Rieng, Kompong Cham, and Kratie. This was the home of those sanctuaries of the Vietnamese communists that the U.S. Army tried so desperately to destroy. Here were lucrative rubber plantations and important rice-growing areas. More important, the Eastern Zone was the flashpoint of Khmer-Vietnamese relations.

Both the Eastern and Southwestern Zones bordered on Vietnam, although the Eastern border was longer and much more difficult to defend than that of the Southwestern Zone. The Eastern Zone was also the center of Vietnamese-Cambodian contacts—between communist and noncommunist and for military, political, and commercial purposes. From the days when Sihanouk forced the Vietnamese communists to accept the established boundaries in return for his cooperation in their war, this area has been considered the land the Vietnamese would take over and settle if given a chance.

Eastern Zone leader So Phim had a record of deftly handling the Vietnamese without giving up Cambodian integrity. He too was a veteran of the First Indochina War, like Mok, but there the similarities end. He had started out as a soldier in the colonial army but had defected to the communists. Phim was capable of ruthlessness but not on the scale of Mok, and he was as likeable as Mok was unlikeable. He was more respected in the party and was thought to be more disciplined. After Geneva he was selected to go into exile in Vietnam, but he returned after only a few months in the north to organize revolutionaries in the Eastern Zone.

He was successful enough in the fifties to be chosen a member of the central committee at the 1060 party congress. At the 1963 meeting, when Pol Pot moved up to become secretary, Phim moved up as well and became a member of the standing committee. By then he was a crucial go-between with the Vietnamese. Much of the training and liaison between the Cambodians and Vietnamese was coordinated through Phim and the Eastern Zone. It had become the gateway between the two movements, and in 1969, when Sihanouk launched his all-out war against the Cambodian communists, Phim took refuge in Vietnam. He returned to Cambodia following the 1970
coup. His zone was the first to be under complete communist control in the war, with the help of the Vietnamese.

But Phim was just as capable of turning against the Vietnamese. He was put in charge of most of the Khmers who returned from the long exile in North Vietnam, and he showed little sympathy for them from the start, giving them positions of little importance. Eventually he had most of them imprisoned in “reeducation camps,” which turned out to be temporary internments before they were murdered. He is associated with the wing of the party that felt Vietnam could be a valuable wartime ally but could have no say in the conduct of the Cambodian revolution, especially not through the “fifth column” of the Khmers returned from Hanoi.

“They [the Eastern Zone leaders] made an issue of how proud they were of having carried out the struggle inside the country, living and dying inside the country, going hungry and starving, being right with the people sharing weal and woe while we had run off to somebody else's country,” said Hem Samin, one of the few Khmer returnees who survived. “There was nothing but insults, open and direct insults—talk about the God-damned Vietnamese in Khmer skin. . . . We couldn't make any reply because we knew that if we replied, our reply, like ourselves, would be short-lived. . . . They could off you any hour of the day or night.”

So Phim oversaw the purge not only of these Khmer returnees but of the Cham Muslim minority in his zone. The Eastern Zone was home to many of the Cham people, who had never been integrated into Cambodian society, much less revolutionary Democratic Kampuchea. Their executions and near extinction became one of the sorriest tales of the revolution. “[So Phim] was mean, vicious,” said Samin. “If he didn't like some soldier he wouldn't hesitate to blow the guy away, bang.”

Reportedly Phim had his personal driver and his personal physician executed shortly after the war because they had “made mistakes.”

Because So Phim had the confidence of the party and oversaw one of the most important zones, he had been able to adopt an independent stance on a number of issues during the war. He set up a reward system that allowed peasants to keep large shares of their harvest, a practice he tried to maintain in peace. He was a stern and forceful military leader whose soldiers were considered among the best disciplined. He outfitted his army in distinctive gray uniforms to separate them from all the other Khmer Rouge soldiers, who wore black pajamas. (Lon Nol officers dubbed the Eastern Zone soldiers the “gray vultures”; all the other Khmer Rouge troops were called “watercrows.”) The Eastern Zone army was fierce, but there were not as
many tales of rampant terrorism or arbitrary arrests, although ethnic minorities and real or imagined enemies were killed. Phim, his army, and his cooperatives emerged as models of the Khmer Rouge ethic at war's end.

And Phim was rewarded. Although he had to give up two of his three army divisions to the Center, he was allowed to create one replacement division, dubbed Division 4, under a cadre named Heng Samrin. Phim was named first vice-chairman of the state presidium when the government was announced in 1976 and he was given the spoils that came from the purge of a rival zone secretary. Phim was as close to the inner circle as any zone secretary, and Pol Pot and the party expected Phim to lead the other zones in the upcoming reconstruction efforts and in defending the country from the Vietnamese who were just on the other side of the Eastern Zone border.

The only other zone leader of Phim's stature was Nhim Ros, secretary of the Northwestern Zone. He was of a lowly birth, the son of peasants, and a veteran from the days of the First Indochina War. He had joined the Khmer Issarak and became a communist, outlasting the independent Issaraks who had made the northwest their base. He had organized and led the zone through difficult periods. The Northwestern Zone had proved to be the wild card for the communists—unpredictable, volatile, but essential in any development scheme because of the richness of its rice fields.

The zone had never been a stronghold of the communists, but it was northwestern peasants at Samlaut who rose up against Sihanouk and Lon Nol in 1967, triggering the communist decision to launch a full-scale armed struggle. The northwestern peasants did not follow their own lead. Throughout the civil war the northwest, and Battambang province in particular, remained stubbornly on the side of the Khmer Republic. By 1975 the Khmer Rouge had failed to establish a solid cooperative system or a strong army in the northwest. But Nhim, as a respected veteran, was named second vice-chairman of the state presidium directly below So Phim. Despite the poor showings during the war, Nhim's Northwestern Zone was considered the potential showcase of postwar Cambodia. It had been the rice bowl of the country before the revolution; after the party unleashed the energy of the people, it was predicted that it would outperform all the other zones. Those high expectations would prove to be Nhim's downfall.

The secretary of the Special Zone around Phnom Penh during the war was Vorn Veth, who immediately lost his position after the war as the central committee took over Phnom Penh. Vorn Veth had been a student in Phnom Penh during the First Indochina War and had joined the maquis for the last year of that war. He returned to the capital where he was groomed
by Pol Pot and eventually became secretary of the Phnom Penh committee. In 1963 he became a member of the party's central committee, and he was part of the inner circle thereafter. Vorn Veth made valiant but futile attempts to keep a network of communists in Phnom Penh after 1969 when Sihanouk and Lon Nol hunted down his agents in the city, killing many in the streets. During the war he acquitted himself well, in the party's eyes, and was tapped to stay in the capital for the reconstruction effort, eventually taking over command of the nation's industry and much of the economy.

The other major zone secretary during the war had been Koy Thuon, secretary of the Northern Zone, where the central committee was headquartered during the war. Koy Thuon was a former teacher from Kompong Cham in eastern Cambodia and the most intellectual of the zone secretaries. His is the gaunt, frowning face in the 1972 pamphlet that introduced Pol Pot, then Saloth Sar, and Nuon Chea to the world. Perhaps because he was under constant scrutiny by the top party leaders and because his zone could be assessed as no other, Koy Thuon was the first zone leader targeted as an enemy.

His old Northern Zone very soon would be redrawn into a new Northern Zone and a Central Zone. Koy Thuon was brought down to Phnom Penh and put in charge of the economy, an extremely difficult job in the chaos that descended once the Khmer Rouge took power and began to demand the impossible from the people.

Those were the key zone leaders as the country was poised to begin the second revolution. The others—Kae Pok in the Central Zone, Men San in the Northeastern Zone, later Kang Chap in the new Northern Zone, and Chou Chet in the new Western Zone—took supporting roles in the power plays over the months and years ahead.

Below the zone leaders were the Khmer Rouge themselves, men and women largely of peasant background and with varying experience—some that went as far back as the independence movement that began with the Japanese occupation. The mainstay of the party was the soldiers, the veterans of the 1970-1975 war. Veterans were trusted with top positions in cooperatives and in industry and made up the bulk of the party membership. As in neighboring Vietnam, the party preferred to recruit its members from the army, and was run at the top by intellectuals and peasants who had proved themselves under fire. All doubted the loyalties and instincts of the bourgeoisie.

The Khmer Rouge began their second revolution on the day they won the first. The first phase of their postwar strategy, the period of “war communism,”
lasted until they formally devised a program at their Fourth Party Congress in January 1976.

With the evacuation and forced migration to the countryside, the Khmer Rouge applied their wartime policies in peace. Everything done in the first year had been tried in the zones since the 1973 cooperative movement. The vocabulary and mentality of war continued. There was no lull after victory; the people were expected to work even harder and defeat “enemies.” Enemies were either unnamed spies working for foreign agents, or those with enemy traits that would undermine the revolution—such as a lust for private property, family virtues, or personal gain. These were class enemies. The party would make sharper distinctions in the next phase when they declared full-scale class war and instructed the security police to watch out for agents of the Soviet KGB, the American CIA, and, later, the Vietnamese communists.

The revolutionary language established in war was now imposed in peace. Traditional, complicated honorifics to distinguish family members, respected elders of the community, and religious figures were erased from the language. People were now comrades, aunts or uncles, fathers or mothers. Military phrases replaced ordinary domestic language. The word that once meant “work” now meant “struggle.” The people no longer planted their fields, they “struggled” to plant and plow and even “struggled” to catch fish. They did not build dikes, they “launched offensives” to build them. They did not celebrate good weather, they proclaimed victory over the elements. Food they once planted to supplement their diet—water lilies, bananas, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, and yams—now became “strategic crops” because they grew easily and fed soldiers. And, above all, the people did battle with their bad traits.

The Khmer Rouge rationalized these tactics as an ingenious shortcut to socialism. In the first issue of their journal
Tung Padevat
(“Revolutionary Flags”) to appear after the April 17, 1975, victory, they congratulated themselves for devising a plan that eliminated capitalism in one stroke. The party leaders wrote that by evacuating the people and sending them to cooperatives in the countryside they had created socialism and eliminated capitalism in Cambodia. Their argument was that private property was the linchpin of a capitalist society, and by emptying Phnom Penh of the people who owned private property, private property itself vanished, and with it capitalism. Cambodia could no longer be considered a capitalist society without private property. According to the article, “If we had kept Phnom Penh, [private property] would have had much strength. . . . We were stronger, had more influence than the private sector when we were in the countryside. But in
Phnom Penh we would have become their [private property owners'] satellite. However, we did not keep them in Phnom Penh and private property has no power.”