Vietnam

by Nigel Cawthorne

  The seeds of this new society already existed in the 'liberated' areas that had been under Khmer Rouge control during the war. There, they had already abolished money. Private property was outlawed and the peasants had been organised in collective farms. For the meagre rations doled out by the Khmer Rouge leadership, they had worked from dawn to dusk to support the war effort. These collectivised peasants were the Communists' 'old people' and they would instruct the 'new people' from the cities how to be good peasants and good Communists. However, those who survived the forced march from the city arrived at the collectives to find that they did not receive a warm welcome. The peasants resented the easy life city folk had lived, while they were toiling in the paddy fields.

  Once they got to work, the city people's incompetence in the fields earned them the contempt of the 'old people'. 'Base people' killed any of the 'new people' who faltered or complained. Those who were completely useless were 'eliminated' for 'economic sabotage'. Most just perished from natural causes. They were not used to the privations the peasants suffered: backbreaking labour, starvation, disease, and lack of medical care. The attitude of the Khmer Rouge was summed up in the slogan: 'If this man lives there is no profit. If he dies there is no great loss'.

  The identity of the leaders behind their murderous policy remained a mystery for a long time. Alongside the infamous Pol Pot were other Paris-educated intellectuals – Ieng Sar, Ieng Thirith and Khieu Samphan. They had set up headquarters in the ghost city of Phnom Penh and ruled the country with extreme authoritarianism. Cambodia was divided into zones with each zone's party secretary directly answerable to the central authority in Phnom Penh. Below each party secretary was a central committee and, beyond the committee, no one had ever heard of Pol Pot and his merry men. Orders were issued simply in the name of Angka,'the Organisation'.

  In March 1976, Cambodia was renamed the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea and Pol Pot and his henchmen pushed forward towards the establishment of their ideal society. Solitary eating was abolished: all food had to be consumed in communal canteens from stocks controlled by the Khmer Rouge. Any private enterprise such as picking wild fruit or vegetables to supplement your meagre diet was punishable by death, and even the consumption of lizards, toads, and earthworms was outlawed.

  Family ties were discouraged. Children in the co-operatives slept in dormitories away from their parents and were encouraged to spy on their parents and denounce them if their behaviour fell short of what was demanded by the Angka. Different members of families were assigned to different work parties and sent to opposite ends of the country. With no telephones and no postal system, once contact had been broken family members and friends were unlikely ever to come across each other again.

  The teachers and intellectuals – apart from those in the politburo – had already been exterminated. Instead of education, there was a brutal process of indoctrination. Executions were carried out either on the orders of the secret police or of the cooperative ruling committee and they were as discreet and mysterious as the Angka itself. People disappeared in the night: it was not advisable to ask where. Some were killed on pure whim. To possess thick-lensed glasses, for example, meant you had read too much, so you were the target of Pol Pot's butchers.

  The favourite method of execution was a blow to the back of the head or neck with the base of an axe-head. Bullets were in short supply. Disembowelling and burying alive were also popular, with victims usually required to dig their own graves first. Whole truckloads of people would suddenly disappear. Curiously, Khmer culture did not feature the struggle between good and evil that is the staple of Western storytelling. It stressed harmony and beauty, and the Cambodians were completely unprepared for the mindless violence that their leaders had brought back with them from France. Many Cambodians would stand in line, awaiting their turn to be struck on the back of the head. A traditionally peaceful people, they had no more intellectual defence against the Khmer Rouge's murderous strategy than they had against bombs falling from American B-52s.

  Keeping a firm grip on the reign of terror in the village was easy for the Communists. A few rotting human remains, scattered along the trails into the village, would do the job. Rumours of grotesque tortures were spread. Victims were said to have their throats cut open by razor-sharp reeds or serrated palm fronds. This had a chilling effect.

  After the 'class enemies' – anyone who had an education and anyone who had not been born a worker or a peasant – had been eliminated, the Khmer Rouge started on the ethnic and religious minorities. The Chinese, the Vietnamese, Cham Muslims were 'liquidated'. Pol Pot believed in ethnic cleansing. He believed in racial purity and minorities were systematically exterminated.

  From the beginning of 1977, the Khmer Rouge executioners turned in on themselves. Pol Pot ordered the systematic extermination of CPK members who were thought to have a petty bourgeois or intellectual background. They were accused of deviance. S-21 – a secret security apparatus – tortured fellow party members into confessing that they were CIA agents. Veteran peasant leaders were put to death, after 'confessing' to being agents of the Vietnamese. Those in the party from a 'bourgeois' background were the first to be picked out. Minor party officials were blamed for the continuing failure of the economy, though everyone else saw that the real blame lay with the murderous system itself. They paid with their lives. Pol Pot's aim was to kill almost all surviving CPK veterans, believing that that the whole party apparatus must be replaced for his policies to succeed.

  Food shortages continued, because agriculture was now in the hands of people who knew nothing about it. Irrigation projects and dams were build by hand without engineers and experts to supervise the work: they were all dead. When the first rain came, these massive civil-engineering projects that had cost thousands of lives in their construction were simply swept away. As far as the party was concerned, these failures could not be the fault of the system. They were sabotage by enemies of the state. The Khmer Rouge became consumed by paranoia, and dozens of torture centres were set up around the country, the most notorious of which was Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh, where expert Khmer Rouge torturers 'uncovered' conspiracies that usually implicated more people who would suffer their tender mercies. Tens of thousands died horribly.

  The killings became so indiscriminate and widespread that, by mid-1977, Pol Pot himself tried to call a halt. In September 1977, he went public for the first time, making clear his own dominant role in the Communist Party that was now running Kampuchea. In an address to the people, he claimed to have liberated them from 2,000 years of 'despair and hopelessness'. But most of his speech was devoted to the need to defend Kampuchea against foreign aggression.

  The Khmer Rouge had always distrusted the Vietnamese who, in pre-colonial times, had dominated the region. There had been border clashes immediately after the fall of Phnom Penh back in 1975. In the autumn of 1977, the border conflicts flared up again. The Khmer Rouge central committee sent out a new instruction: purge all those who had contact with Hanoi. More party members died.

  At the same time, Pol Pot had ordered incursions into Vietnam, in an attempt to redraw the Cambodian–Vietnamese border. The Eastern Zone committee came under suspicion as their region actually butted up against Vietnamese territory. Pol Pot maintained they were not doing enough to resist the highly efficient Vietnamese Army, who had, after all, ousted the US.

  The Eastern Zone was one of the seven major administrative areas where the conditions were better than in the rest of the country. Pol Pot had long feared that opposition might coalesce around the zone chief there, Sao Pheum. Fearing that resistance would plunge Kampuchea into a fully fledged civil war, Pheum committed suicide. At the beginning of 1978, the Eastern Zone leadership was purged, but some escaped the Khmer Rouge executioners by fleeing across the border into Vietnam. To maintain control, Pol Pot set the other zone chiefs at each other's throats, favouring Ta Mok, leader of the Southwest Zone and the country's most efficient killer. Nevertheless, by late 19
78, Ta Mok's cadres were also marked for extermination. No one was safe.

  One of those who fled from the Eastern Zone was Heng Samrin. A former CPK commissar, he organised the Kampuchean National United Front for National Salvation in exile. With credible Cambodian leadership in their territory, the Vietnamese took a hand. They feared that the excesses of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were undermining their victory in Vietnam and inviting renewed foreign intervention. On 21 December 1978, Kampuchea was 'liberated' once more – this time with a full-scale Vietnamese invasion. One hundred thousand Vietnamese supported 20,000 United Front troops.

  On 7 January 1979, Samrin declared the People's Republic of Kampuchea, supplanting the CPK's Democratic Kampuchea. In response, 85,000 Chinese troops – later reinforced to 200,000 – invaded Vietnam from the north. Even though Vietnam's main force was in Kampuchea, a 60,000-man defensive force, comprising largely border guards and regional forces, held off the People's Liberation Army, which had not seen active service since the end of the Korean War in 1953. After overrunning Lang Son on 5 March, the Chinese decided that Vietnam had been punished enough for the invasion of Cambodia and withdrew.

  Pol Pot's first wife, the ideologue whose crazy ideas had underpinned Year Zero, went mad. Pol Pot himself abandoned Phnom Penh and took to the jungles where, with the backing of the US, Chinese and British governments, he and his cohorts continued to exercise considerable political influence. The Vietnamese intervention in Cambodia was not the end of Pol Pot's atrocities. For arcane political reasons, the world embargoed Vietnam until it withdrew its troops. The Khmer Rouge fought on, killing and maiming with the indiscriminate use of land mines. It was only in 1998 that Pol Pot was captured. He was tried, but he died of natural causes before he could be punished for the atrocities he had committed.

  No one knows how many people died in the killing fields of Pol Pot's Kampuchea, or what proportion of deaths were due to malnutrition and disease – much of which was cause by ideology-led dislocation – as against deliberate execution. But available figures suggest that around 21 per cent of the population of Cambodia died under Pol Pot's regime. Some 50 per cent of the country's Chinese population were slaughtered, along with 30 per cent of the Islamic Cham. A quarter of the Khmer forcibly evacuated from the urban areas perished. Khmer peasant 'base people' lost probably 15 per cent. Of the Khmer Republic elite and the original CPK cadre, 75 per cent or more were exterminated. Perhaps as many as two million people died at the hands of their own countrymen, making Cambodia's Year Zero a greater human catastrophe, per capita, than Hitler's Germany. Unexploded ordinance and the indiscriminate use of land mines has ensured that the Khmer Rouge's toll of death and maiming will also continue to rise for a long time to come.

  EPILOGUE

  DURING THE VIETNAM WAR 46,370 US servicemen died in battle. More than 10,000 died from noncombat-related causes, while a further 300,000 were wounded. Australian casualties ran at 496 killed and 2,398 wounded, and the ARVN lost 2.5 per cent of its manpower each year, amounting to 185,000 soldiers killed between 1961 and the January 1973 ceasefire.

  Accurate figures for NVA losses have never been established but estimates have put the figure as high as 900,000 – that is over 15 times US losses and nearly five times the South Vietnamese army's losses. That did not prevent them from invading into Cambodia to put an end to the murderous regime of Pol Pot in 1978 and stoutly defending Vietnam's northern border against a Chinese attack in 1979.

  Senator Edward Kennedy's committee on refugees estimated that around 430,000 South Vietnamese civilians were killed between 1965 and 1974, and over a million injured or wounded. Later estimates reduced this to 250,000 killed and 900,000 wounded. Even this lower estimate means that five civilians lost their lives for each American killed in South Vietnam alone. Estimates for the number of civilians killed in Southeast Asia during the American involvement there stand at over a million.

  In June 1974, the US Department of Defense estimated that the total cost of the war had been $145 billion at 1974 prices. However, there were other hidden costs – the inflation that the war economy brought, lost production, interest on loans, and continuing benefits for Vietnam veterans. The true cost of the war, it has been estimated, was something like $300 billion – around $1,100 for every American citizen. Aircraft losses were particularly expensive: the US lost 4,865 helicopters, costing a quarter of a million dollars each.

  Shells cost around $100 each, but at the height of the fighting ten thousand – a million dollars' worth – were being loosed off each day. Two millions tons of shells were expended in all. Eight million tons of bombs were dropped on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, four times the amount dropped during the whole of World War II. A B-52 dropped $800,000-worth of bombs out of its bomb-bay doors on each mission. During 1966 alone, 148,000 missions were flown over North Vietnam, costing $1.25 billion, even leaving aside the cost of the 818 aircraft lost. A further 3,720 fixed wing aircraft were lost. That year, American bombing was estimated to have caused $130 million of damage. In other words, for every dollar's-worth of damage it caused the US had to spend $9.6.

  Between 1965 and 1971 North Vietnam's defence budget ran to $3.56 billion. The Soviet Union contributed a further $1.66 billion and the Chinese $670 million. That gave the Communists a total of $5.89 billion. They won. The South, who lost, spent seventeen times that amount, while the US squandered fifty times the Communists' outlay. The Australian government got off lightly, spending something in the order of $A500 million.

  There were other costs for the Vietnamese. Around eighteen million of them lost their homes because of the war. Some 3 per cent of the area of the South was totally devastated, while 32 per cent was severely damaged by explosives and defoliants. One fifth of all the timberland was destroyed and, by 1975, there were more than twenty million bomb and shell craters covering some 350,000 acres in all. At the end of the war an estimated 27,000 tons of unexploded bombs and shells were littered throughout the country, which remain an ever-present danger to farmers tilling their fields, people walking in the jungle and children out playing. There were seventeen million pieces of live ordinance cleared from the area along the DMZ and the McNamara line. They were removed in the cheapest way possible, using human mine detectors, mostly former AVRN soldiers. It is said more than 1,700 men were killed or maimed in this operation. And the widespread use of defoliants – 18 million gallons in all – has left a legacy of severely handicapped and malformed babies.

  The imposition of a strict Communist regime in the South meant that former soldiers, government officials and businessmen, along with bar girls and prostitutes were sent to re-education camps. It has been estimated that as many as 50,000 were still being detained as political prisoners in 1986. To transform Saigon, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City, to a socialist haven 700,000 were forced to move out into the 'New Economic Zones'. It is estimated that, in all, 1.3 million people were relocated from urban areas to make a life for themselves in the countryside, with all its attendant hardships, while the lasts remnants of Western culture were rooted out. Religion was suppressed and there was inevitable friction as Southerners resented being ordered around by Northerners. In 1977, the US vetoed Vietnam's application to join the United Nations. After the invasion of Cambodia, the rest of the world shunned Vietnam as an aggressor. America imposed a trade embargo and the US and Japan blocked loans to Vietnam from the IMF and the World Bank. The Vietnamese economy became a basket case and, by August 1979, an estimated 865,000 people had fled the country. Some 250,000 of these were ethnic Chinese who found themselves persecuted by the Hanoi government and made the long trek north into China. The rest took to the open sea in open craft in the hope of washing up on friendly shores. Many of these 'boat people' did not make it, falling victim to storms, matchwood boats and pirates, but by 1979, over 120,000 had reached Malaysia and 60,000 were in Hong Kong, then still a British colony. There were 40,000 in Indonesia, 30,000 in Thailand and 11,000 in the Philippines. Simply providing t
hem with food and shelter put enormous strains on their hosts. In July 1979, a conference was convened in Geneva to try to persuade the Vietnamese to stem the flow of refugees. But in 1984, a fresh round of repression unleashed a new wave of boat people on the high seas. Some were forcibly returned, but most were found permanent homes in non-Communist countries.

  While much of Southeast Asia had been devastated by the war, America had benefited economically – government bonds floated to support the war effort fuelled the boom of the 1980s and 1990s. However, politically and psychologically the US had been damaged. It had been split in two by the anti-war movement and, in the end, a super-power had been humiliated by what America itself had dismissed as an army of peasants. In the process, the high ideals that were enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution had been tarnished. By the time the war was over, the politicians who had prosecuted it were out of office. Lyndon Johnson himself died on 22 January 1973, just as the Paris Peace Accords were being finalised. Those who bore the guilt for the war were the veterans, many of whom found themselves shunned for years after.

  America's trauma was reflected most vividly in the attitude of Hollywood, which had avoided the awkward topic of Vietnam since the shameless propaganda of The Green Berets in 1968. Although In the Year of the Pig, putting the anti-war case, won an Oscar the following year, this was hardly mass market entertainment. Even though a younger generation of movie makers began producing movies with a distinctly hippy vision of the world, such as Easy Rider and Alice's Restaurant in 1969, Vietnam was conspicuous by its absence. Instead directors made their comments through black comedies such as Catch 22 and M*A*S*H, both made in 1970 and set in World War II and Korea respectively. Westerns such as The Wild Bunch (1969), Soldier Blue (1970) and Ulzana's Raid (1972) also betray anti-war sympathies.