Outsiders have asked, in the years since 1975, how a people known as the “smiling, gentle Khmers” could have produced such a holocaust. The image of a bucolic, carefree people was, of course, simplistic—an illusion that foreigners preferred to see. All cultures are complex and all have their hidden savage sides waiting to erupt. The Nazi horror in World War II and the 1947 partition of India in which Hindus and Moslems slaughtered each other by the thousands are but two vivid examples. Nonetheless, the Khmer Rouge terror may have touched a level of cruelty not seen before in our lifetime. It was Cambodians endlessly killing other Cambodians.
Even the victims could not fathom whence the Khmer Rouge had come or how they had been created. “I look at them and do not know them,” Pran says. “To me, they are not Khmers.”
With their cruelty, the Khmer Rouge brought a new language—words with a dehumanized ring, a mechanical robotlike quality, euphemisms for atrocity, words that people had never heard before. There was the omnipresent Angka—the word for the Khmer Rouge regime itself. It means simply “the organization.” No explanations were ever given for policy, just “Angka says” or “Angka orders.” People were called opakar, or “instruments.” The Khmer nation was called “machine,” from the French or English—strange for a government trying to erase the colonial past.
And then there was a sinister word, a word with a deceptively polite sound, sneur, which means “invite” or “ask.” The Khmer Rouge would come to someone’s house, Pran explains, and sneur someone’s son to study or to be educated. Lulled by the gentleness of the request, many went without a protest. But people quickly realized that those who had been sneured never came back; the word took on a new meaning: “take away and kill.”
Fear and suspicion became the essence of existence. To trust anyone was to risk one’s life. People stopped having meaningful conversations, even secretly, even inside their own family. (In July 1979, when Pran decided to make his escape attempt, he was too fearful to tell his mother or sister, who were the only survivors in his family. He was not afraid they would inform on him, but maybe the conversation would be overheard. Or maybe his family would say something inadvertently that would spell trouble for him. “You get used to keeping secrets,” he says. “You decide it’s better not to tell anything to anybody. I was afraid. Maybe my mother tries to talk me out of it. She worries, she loves me, I am her only son left. What if someone hears her talking?”)
In the spring of 1977, a group of “moderates” in the Khmer Rouge leadership plotted a coup. They were discovered by the ruling group and wiped out. But Angka did not stop there. Fresh troops were sent to every district to replace and sometimes execute “untrustworthy” ones. The search was intensified for people like Pran, educated people from the Western-oriented past. The cold and wooden teenaged troops did not need evidence; their slaughter was wholesale—teachers, village chiefs, students, sometimes whole villages.
In late 1977, Pran made a move to another village, spurred by these fresh upheavals throughout the country, a new wave of purges and killings, and disquietude on his part that some fanatic villagers in Dam Dek were growing suspicious of him. “There were more killings in 1977 than in 1975,” Pran says. “I saw many arrested in my village, hands tied behind their backs, crying for their lives. I got chills down my back, like fever. I kept on talking softly, pretending to support Angka. I prayed every day and every night, in my mind.” As the radical fervor grew in Dam Dek, Pran looked for a way out.
During 1976 and 1977, he had become acquainted with the commune chief and others in the village of Bat Dangkor, four miles to the north. They seemed to him “not so pro-Communist and more compatible.”
Movement from place to place was rigidly controlled and rarely allowed by the Khmer Rouge, but somehow, through gentle pleading and by playing the empty-headed worker, he got permission to move.
Life immediately improved for Pran. Though his work regimen remained severe and food was still not plentiful, his commune chief, a twenty-seven-year-old named Phat who had lost his love for the Khmer Rouge, took a liking to him. Pran became his houseboy, carrying water, chopping firewood, bathing the children, building the fire, washing clothes, and cooking. The days were long, but Pran felt somewhat protected. “I did everything to please him,” Pran says. “I was like a slave.”
This commune chief had a radio, and sometimes at night—maybe once a week—Pran and four or five trusted friends would gather around it with him and surreptitiously listen to the Voice of America. The V.O.A. came on at 8:30 p.m., and it was on these broadcasts that Pran learned of the fierce fighting throughout 1978 between the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese army along the border with Vietnam.
Though both governments were Communist, the Cambodians and Vietnamese were centuries-old ethnic enemies, and now the Chinese were supporting the Khmer Rouge and the Russians were supporting the Vietnamese. Vietnam, in its propaganda broadcasts, called Cambodia “a land of blood and tears, hell on earth,” and announced the formation of a new “front” to “liberate” Cambodia. Pran took some hope from this; anything was better than the insane Khmer Rouge.
Finally, in December, he learned on the V.O.A. that the Vietnamese had invaded Cambodia in force. On January 7, 1979, they took Phnom Penh. Three days later, they reached the Siem Reap area, and the Khmer Rouge units around Pran’s village took flight.
After about a week of careful watching, Pran was persuaded that the Vietnamese were not killing civilians and were allowing people to return to their home villages. So, his spirits up but still cautious, he left Bat Dangkor by moonlight and, smiling a lot at his “liberators” on the way, he walked the twenty-odd miles to the town of Siem Reap to search for his family.
What he found was what most Cambodians found when they returned home: a few survivors but most of their family members dead. Of his mother and father, three brothers, two sisters, and numerous nephews and nieces, only his sixty-three-year-old mother, one sister, a sister-in-law, and five nieces and nephews were alive. One brother, nineteen, had been executed for being a student, the other two for being military officers in the Lon Nol army. One sister had been killed for being the wife of an officer. The sister who survived still had three children; a fourth child was lost to starvation.
Pran’s father, a retired public-works official, had died of starvation in late 1975, about the same time that Pran was caught and beaten for stealing the pocketful of rice in Dam Dek. As he lay dying, he called out for Pran’s wife, Ser Moeun, who had been close to him and had often brought him special treats from her kitchen. “Ser Moeun, Ser Moeun,” he rambled deliriously as his life slipped away, “bring me some of your food and cake.”
As Pran re-explored Siem Reap, people kept walking up to him in astonishment, saying, “I thought you died. How did you stay alive?” “Because of my education and background,” he says, “no one could believe I could survive.”
The reasons for their disbelief lay all around Siem Reap; they were called the “killing fields.” “One day soon after I came back,” Pran recalls, “two women from my village went looking for firewood in the forest. They found bones and skulls everywhere among the trees and in the wells. When they came back they told me about it and said they would take me there and show me. They asked me, ‘Are you afraid of ghosts?’ I told them, ‘No, why should I be afraid? The ghosts may be my brothers or my sister.’”
So Pran went to see the killing fields. Each of the two main execution areas alone, he says, held the bones of four to five thousand bodies, thinly covered by a layer of earth.
“In the water wells, the bodies were like soup bones in broth,” he says. “And you could always tell the killing grounds because the grass grew taller and greener where the bodies were buried.”
Similar reports have come from every village in Cambodia: tall green grass and choked wells.
The Vietnamese “liberators,” having seized the main towns, set up a client Cambodian government in Phnom Penh and were looking for adm
inistrators to help them govern throughout the country. In Siem Reap, local villagers who knew Pran’s skills asked for him as their administrative chief, and the two Vietnamese governors of the province agreed. He became, in effect, the mayor of Siem Reap township, which held about ten thousand people. “I took the job out of pity for my people,” he says. “They wanted a Cambodian in charge, so I take it to lift them up. There were so few intellectuals still alive. If I don’t do it, who will lead and help my people?”
In his new job, Pran wore a khaki uniform with a Soviet-style military cap and carried an AK-47 automatic rifle. Every week he had to give a speech, cleared first by the Vietnamese, to a different section of the population in his township. “I don’t talk politics,” he says. “I just talk about nationalism, about how you have to work for food. I urge people to work because of the starvation and the low economy.”
The two Vietnamese governors, Nhien and Linh, praised him often and showed him considerable respect, “because I helped them a lot to set up the administration. Sometimes they even embraced me.” But Pran never stopped thinking about escape. It was during this period that he had cautiously approached the East German correspondent Gerhard Leo and asked him to carry that message—“Dith Pran survivor”—to me. The Vietnamese governors had directed Pran to arrange a welcoming committee of fifty villagers for the journalists, which is how Pran came to be there.
While cheered somewhat by the arrival of the foreigners, he was reluctant at first to approach the group, out of fear that giving away his New York Times background might put him in jeopardy. But then he saw Leo walking away from the main group to take some pictures and heard him speaking in French mixed with English. “I was afraid by now of all Communists,” he said, “but when he was alone I decided to take a risk because he’s a long-nose [Westerner].”
Five months later, Pran’s fears were realized. His Vietnamese superiors somehow discovered, perhaps through an informer, that he had worked for American journalists. They called him in, told him he was politically “unclean,” said his mind was tainted by “unrevolutionary thoughts,” and forced him to resign his job. On July 15, 1979, an election was held in Siem Reap to fill Pran’s post. He grew increasingly nervous about what the Vietnamese might do to him now that they had found him out.
***
The news about Pran from Gerhard Leo in April 1979 put me in a state of euphoria, but it also made me desperate. I knew he had been safe on February 15, but I had no clue as to what was happening to him now. So I began exploring every possible way to get further news of him, to get a message to him, to get him out of the country. Through friends, I quietly sounded out the Vietnamese, but they were unwilling to help, saying it was a domestic Cambodian matter.
I renewed my contacts with international agencies, some of whom were just then making efforts to open relief programs inside Cambodia. The next several months were marked by many long-distance telephone calls, cables in coded language, the passing of money to my contacts in the event bribes were necessary on Pran’s behalf once they got inside Cambodia, and, throughout, the private help of Henry Kamm, The Times’s correspondent in Bangkok, whose dedicated and gifted reporting—perhaps more than any other factor—had made the world aware of the enormity of the refugee problem in Indochina.
In July, my contacts, who were now in Phnom Penh but who could not get to the Siem Reap area, reported that third parties had seen Pran again there on May 7. A later report, in August, said he was okay in the latter part of July, working in some vague capacity for the Vietnamese-installed province committee. Also in August, my contacts sent a cautiously worded letter to Pran through a third party who was going to Siem Reap. It said that I had received his message of survival from Gerhard Leo, that I and his family were “anxious” about “your health,” and that if possible he should send either a verbal or written reply back to my contacts in Phnom Penh. My sources were convinced that Pran received this letter—which would have been the first confirmation to him since April 1975 that I had been searching for him and now knew he was alive. But no reply came back from him as I waited nervously through August and September; my contacts were due to come out of Cambodia in early October, and I kept reassuring myself that they would be carrying direct news from Pran.
Pran never did get that letter. In fact, until our reunion on October 9, I was never able to get word to him that his message had reached me or to give him any sign at all of my long search for him. We were functioning in two different worlds, each darkened to the other. While I was counting on his remaining safe and fixed in Siem Reap as I maneuvered through my contacts to extract him from the country through official channels, he took the step he had been planning and dreaming of for four and a half years—he made his move for the border.
On July 29, his relationship with the Vietnamese having broken down, he slipped quietly out of Siem Reap for the village of Phum Trom, forty miles to the northwest. He headed for Phum Trom because he had heard that the anti-Communist resistance, known as Sereika (“liberation”), was active there and was helping people to escape. After six weeks of preparation in that village, he and eleven other men set out before dawn on a morning in mid-September.
In a straight line, the border with Thailand to the north was only about thirty-five miles away. But their route was as the snake crawls—sixty miles—weaving and turning and climbing across brambled jungle and rocky hills to avoid roving bands of Khmer Rouge guerrillas, Vietnamese patrols, deadly punji traps (sharpened bamboo stakes smeared with toxic matter and covered with leaves and brush) and unmarked mine fields.
At noon on the second day of their exodus, they stopped briefly to rest. When they rose to start again, Pran, who had been toward the end of the single file, by happenstance began walking third in line. A few minutes later, the two men in front of him, only fifteen feet ahead, were dead; they had stepped on a mine. A piece of shrapnel hit Pran in the left side, but it was only a flesh wound and he was able to run on with the others.
They reached the border on the fourth day. Pran’s companions had clandestine contacts there; he did not. So, afraid of being arrested by Thai authorities if he crossed over, he waited for seventeen days just a few hundred yards on the Cambodian side—in a no-man’s-land where he was reasonably safe—watching for the right moment to get across and into the sanctuary of a Cambodian refugee camp fifteen miles away. (During this frustrating wait, he sent letters to me through a courier, who was supposed to mail them from the nearby town of Prasat. Only one ever reached me, and it arrived long after our reunion.)
On the seventeenth day—October 3—with the help of friends who provided him with a uniform worn by the Cambodian resistance, which satisfied the Thais, he crossed the frontier and made it to the refugee camp.
Although finally free, he was still insecure because he was an “illegal”—an unregistered refugee—and could technically be pushed back into Cambodia (the Thais had done this to several thousand Cambodians some months before). Pran instantly searched out an American relief official in the camp, Ruth Ellison, told her his history, and asked her to get word to me through the American Embassy or The Times’s correspondent in Bangkok. Miss Ellison, who, with her mother and father, had been working in the camp for years, representing a missionary group, called an embassy official as soon as she reached her home in Surin that night. He called Henry Kamm, who called my office. It was Thursday morning, October 4. I was not in yet, and he left no message except that I should call him. My attempts to reach him through the day were unsuccessful, and I was jumpy and tense all day, one moment conjuring up my wildest hope, that Pran had escaped, and the next moment trying to curb my excitement and ease the letdown should the news be innocuous or worse.
***
At 7:50 p.m., I try to phone Henry again. I get him this time and he says quickly: “Pran is out. He’s in Thailand, in the refugee camp at Surin.” Skyrockets go off in my head. I can hear Henry saying something about what he is doing at the American Embassy
to speed up Pran’s entry into the United States, but then I can’t grasp it. I’m crying at my desk, and it doesn’t matter.
I call Ser Moeun as soon as the Bangkok call is over. It is only 5 p.m. in San Francisco and she is not home yet from her job as clerk in a bank. I get the eldest son, Titony, and blurt out the news. “Hey!” he shouts, as American as a fifty-yard touchdown pass, “aaaaaaaaaallll riiiiight!” Then he turns to his sister and two brothers: “Hey, you guys! Our dad is out of Cambodia! Our dad is out of Cambodia!” They cheer and yell and bang on something. Then I call the Drypolchers and my wife. A few hours later, I get Ser Moeun. The telephone holds a lot of happiness that night.
The next few days are like a dream. I leave on the first available plane for Bangkok to get to Pran. I am high on the miracle but still full of anxiety about getting him across the last bureaucratic barriers, into this country. My plane is three hours late taking off, and it looks as if I have no chance to make my connecting flight in Athens, but that plane is very late, too, and I get on it just in time. I start believing in omens and symbols, for everything is going my way. As I enter my Bangkok hotel room on Sunday afternoon, October 7, the first thing my eyes light on is a magazine called Business in Thailand lying on an end table. On the cover, its lead article is billboarded in large bold type: PRAWN ON THE WAY.
There is more good fortune at the American Embassy’s refugee office, where Pran’s case has been given priority and the staff is being spectacularly helpful. By midday Monday, Pran has been put on a special list that will get him out of the refugee camp on Wednesday and down to Bangkok for final processing. With that done, I can leave for the border area, three hundred miles and six hours to the northeast. But without Thai government papers authorizing me to visit the camp, I shall have to wait until the next morning, Tuesday, when the relief worker, Ruth Ellison, can take me in “unofficially” with her. I go to bed in a run-down hotel in Surin shortly after midnight, but I cannot sleep. Finally I give up the attempt and rise at 4 a.m.
The Death and Life of Dith Pran Page 6