Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  Bangkok was like the dream city Chea Huon had talked about at the dam site, but instead of being a fantasy for the future, it was real and in the present. There was plenty of food. The roads were paved with asphalt. The houses had electric lights. Cranes and bulldozers did the heaviest work. Many families owned cars or motorcycles. Most important, the Thais were free. They did not have an ‘Angka’. Nobody made them go to propaganda meetings or treated them like slaves. They organized themselves. And because they were free they were far more productive than we war slaves had ever been.

  I went to the Royal Palace. It looked like the royal palace in Phnom Penh, with spires and multicoloured tile roofs. I visited temples. There were a lot of them, clean and well maintained, with many Buddha statues and monks in saffron robes. I stopped by the open-air street-corner shrine in front of the Erawan Hotel. At this shrine, a few feet from a busy intersection, where the cars and motorcycles and samlors impatiently rev their engines and then take off like road racers before the traffic light turns green, a scene of intense religious worship went on day and night. Musicians played their instruments, classical dancers danced serenely, and people crowded in to light sticks of incense and pray. The ancient and the modern lived right next to each other, and both were doing well.

  I envied the Thais. How I envied them! They had kept their traditional culture intact, while ours had been destroyed. Our temples were wrecked, our monks were killed, our books ripped apart for cigarette paper. The Thais had their past, and they were assured of a prosperous future. For most Cambodians, the future was going to mean searching in the forest for wild food, living in huts without electricity and obeying orders from soldiers. We didn’t have a modern, bustling capital like Bangkok. Compared to it, Phnom Penh had been a quiet town in the provinces.

  Back in Lumpini I began to talk with my friends. We had all noticed the same thing. Until coming to Bangkok few of us had known that a city so modern existed in all of Asia, much less in the country next door. We had always been told the reverse, that Cambodia was far ahead of its neighbours. All our leaders had told us so, from Sihanouk through Lon Nol to the Khmer Rouge.

  It was a strange contrast, we agreed: two nations with similar cultures and resources, one of them a great success, the other a total disaster. We could understand how Thailand had succeeded, but why had Cambodia failed? We had answers, but they were inadequate to our sorrow. And probably we will ask ourselves the question as long as we live, and never be satisfied by the explanations.

  This much I do know: the destruction of Cambodia could have been avoided. What led to it was politics.

  By politics I do not just mean the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge dealt the worst blow to Cambodia, but they did not destroy it by themselves. Outside countries lent a hand, most of them without realizing the effects their policies would have. It is a complicated story, going back many years.

  To begin with, France, our former colonial ruler, didn’t prepare us for independence. It didn’t give us the strong, educated middle class we needed to govern ourselves well. Then there was the United States, whose support pushed Cambodia off its neutral path to the right in 1970 and began the political unbalancing process. Once Lon Nol was in power, the United States could have forced him to cut down on corruption, and it could have stopped its own bombing, but it didn’t, until too late. The bombing and the corruption helped push Cambodia the other way, toward the left. On the communist side, China gave the Khmer Rouge weapons and an ideology. The Chinese could have stopped the Khmer Rouge from slaughtering civilians, but they didn’t try. And then there is Vietnam. Even in the 1960s and early 1970s, when the Vietnamese communists used eastern Cambodia as part of their Ho Chi Minh Trail network, they were putting their own interests first. They have always been glad to use Cambodia for their own gain.

  But sad to say, the country that is most at fault for destroying Cambodia is Cambodia itself. Pol Pot was Cambodian. Lon Nol was Cambodian and so was Sihanouk. Together the leaders of the three regimes caused a political chain reaction resulting in the downfall and maybe the extinction of our country.

  On the outside these leaders were totally different. Sihanouk the royal populist. Lon Nol the right-wing dictator. Pol Pot the ultra-communist. On the inside they were all like Chea Huon, with fantasies about the development of the country. They also shared a typically Cambodian trait: an excessive pride in being Cambodian. I do not mean a normal, healthy, patriotic pride, but a feeling of racial superiority over everybody else. Our neighbours look down at us for being dark-skinned, and sometimes we do feel inferior, but at the same time, secretly, on the inside, we Cambodians also feel better than them, and when we have a chance we try to prove it.

  Sihanouk told us again and again that we were an ‘island of peace,’ the envy of the world. He said we were a much more civilized people than the Vietnamese and the Thais. What he told us made us feel good about ourselves, but he never encouraged us to travel outside Cambodia to make our own comparisons. If we had, we might have seen how pitiful our economy was, how weak our military was, how inefficient our bureaucracy was. If we had known, and if Sihanouk had truly been interested in development, we might have been able to do something about it.

  Sihanouk’s successor was the incompetent Lon Nol. He wanted to purify everything about Cambodia – the race, the culture, the religion. He blamed the Vietnamese for Cambodia’s problems and believed the Vietnamese were racially inferior. That is why he allowed his soldiers to massacre Cambodians of Vietnamese origin. That is why he attacked North Vietnamese troops along the Vietnam-Cambodian border, even though the North Vietnamese army was the toughest in Asia. Even more than Sihanouk, Lon Nol was a dreamer.

  After Lon Nol came Pol Pot. The government swung from the extreme right to the extreme left, but on the inside the leaders were the same. Like Lon Nol, Pol Pot was a racist with fantasies of restoring Cambodia to greatness. He wanted to eliminate everybody who was not a pure Khmer of the countryside – the city intellectuals and professionals, the Chams (Cambodia’s Moslem minority), the ethnic Vietnamese, even to some extent the ethnic Chinese. The Khmer Rouge boasted of their superiority. Others were ‘beneath’ them, like lower forms of life. That is why the Khmer Rouge didn’t think twice about killing or torturing. That is why beginning in 1977 Pol Pot made the incredible mistake of attacking Vietnamese territory and massacring their civilians. Like Lon Nol before him, Pol Pot actually thought he could win.

  Sihanouk, Lon Nol, Pol Pot – each leader had a vision of Cambodia as a proud and independent country, different from its neighbours, better than any of them. Their visions were wrong. From one leader to the next, the condition of the country grew worse. By 1979 Cambodia was utterly destroyed. Next door in Thailand were paved roads, beautiful temples and more rice than the people could eat. As a refugee, the more I saw of Thailand, the angrier I became. It was the anger of a man who finds out he has been lied to all his life.

  36

  Saloth Sar

  In 1928 in Kompong Thom Province, in north-central Cambodia, a boy named Saloth Sar was born. He was of mixed Khmer and Chinese blood, like me. His parents were well-to-do farmers who owned their own land. However, his family had a rather unusual connection to Phnom Penh. One of his aunts was a concubine in the harem of King Monivong, Sihanouk’s predecessor. Another cousin had an even more glamorous position, as the ranking harem wife. Through them, Saloth Sar’s older brother got a job working in the protocol section of the royal palace.

  When he was about five years old, Saloth Sar was sent to Phnom Penh to be raised by his brother. He often visited the palace and learned to speak the royal language, a kind of ‘high’ Khmer with many complicated words and titles. He became a monk for several months, as most Cambodian boys did. He studied for six years in a temple school.

  He was not a good student. He failed the exams that would have allowed him to enroll in the best schools. He went back to his family and then off to school in Kampong Cham Province. At age ninetee
n he finished his secondary education and returned to Phnom Penh to study carpentry. He made friends with students and graduates of the elite Lycée Sisowath, where I myself studied about twenty years later, and where Huoy taught a few years after that. One of his best friends was a bright young man and organizer of student protests named Ieng Sary.

  Through connections, Saloth Sar got a scholarship to go to Paris, where he studied at a technical school, École Française de Radio-électricité. A year later Ieng Sary arrived in Paris, taking an apartment in the Latin Quarter. They met French communist intellectuals, and before long the two Cambodians started their own communist study circle. Others joined them, including a good-looking and rebellious young woman named Khieu Thirith, who was studying English literature at the Sorbonne. She married Ieng Sary. Later her sister Khieu Ponnary married Saloth Sar. The relationship between the four of them, the two sisters who married the two close friends, created the nucleus of the organization later known as the Khmer Rouge.

  In Paris, Saloth Sar is said to have kept a photograph of Joseph Stalin in his room. He contributed articles to a Khmer-language magazine for radicals, signing himself ‘Original Khmer’. For a man of mixed race, this was a strange pseudonym – probably an early sign of the racial fanaticism that marked his career. Certainly he was far more involved in politics than in his studies. After he failed three exams at the technical school, his scholarship was withdrawn. He returned to Cambodia, with a stop in Tito’s Yugoslavia on the way.

  By the time of his return, war was under way in Vietnam, with the French colonial forces battling Ho Chi Minh’s Vietminh guerrillas. Saloth Sar enlisted in an underground organization called the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP), which had been founded while he was in Paris. The membership was a mixture of Vietnamese and Cambodians. When he joined his cell in eastern Cambodia, he was dismayed to find that Vietnamese controlled everything and expected the Cambodians to serve them. He worked in the kitchen and hauled human wastes from the privies. It was the same kind of menial work that Huoy and I did much later under the Khmer Rouge, but unlike us, Saloth Sar wasn’t grateful for the easy work assignments. The Original Khmer resented the Vietnamese, and the jobs they gave him reinforced his lifelong grudge.

  In 1953, without direct help from the Indochinese communists, Sihanouk won independence from France. The next year he went to the Geneva conference as the leader of a sovereign state. France agreed to give independence to its last two Indochinese colonies, Laos and Vietnam. A line was drawn across Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel, temporarily separating it into a communist north and a noncommunist south. Later, when the South Vietnamese insisted that the separation was permanent, the stage was set for the war of the 1960s and 1970s, when the northern communists tried to reunify the country.

  For the Cambodian communists, a long, hard period had begun. Sihanouk outmanoeuvred them at every turn. He abdicated as king, ran for prime minister as a prince and was elected easily. His foreign policy of left-leaning neutralism won him the friendship of China and the USSR, who gave him their aid and ignored the Cambodian communists of the ICP. Domestically, Sihanouk created an illusion of political freedom. He allowed the communists to participate in an aboveground leftist political party, the Pracheachon Group. He coopted their most respected communist intellectuals, inviting two of them from the Paris study circle to serve in his cabinet. At the same time, without any publicity, he conducted a ‘war in the shadows’. His secret police murdered communists without trials and without announcements before or afterward. Sihanouk even had the head communist, a man who knew all the rural networks, working for him as a spy.

  In Phnom Penh the communists’ situation was bad but not hopeless. The police didn’t seem to know the identities of low-echelon party members like Saloth Sar. Saloth Sar and his relative-by-marriage Ieng Sary taught in an aboveground school, Kampuchea Bot. It was a good school, with high standards. (I myself took a math course there, during a vacation, while I was living in Takeo. I do not remember either man.) The wives of the two men taught at government schools, contributing most of their salaries to a French-language newspaper, L’Observateur, which was owned by a communist. The newspaper editor was one of their study circle friends with a cabinet post, Khieu Samphan, who had a reputation for integrity and independent thought.

  Like Sihanouk, what the communists did in public and what they did in private were totally different. In their underground lives as party members they held clandestine meetings to indoctrinate new recruits and organize factory workers. In their aboveground lives they were hardworking members of bourgeois society. They all had mixed Khmer and Chinese blood. They were all intellectuals and city dwellers. And that is what is oddest about them, that they were bourgeois, well educated, mixed-race and urban. Fifteen years later these same people were the leaders of an anti-city, anti-intellectual, racist revolutionary movement. In those fifteen years they were totally transformed.

  In 1960 they met in empty railroad cars near the Phnom Penh train station to form what came to be called the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). Unlike the old Indochinese Communist Party, the CPK was totally free of the Vietnamese. Not long after, their overall leader, the man who had been a spy, defected openly to Sihanouk, and his successor was assassinated. Suddenly there was room at the top for younger, ambitious men. In 1963 Saloth Sar was elected party secretary, or leader. He had matured since student days into a man who was confident, secretive and highly manipulative. He seldom used his real name. His pseudonym among party members was ‘Brother Number One’.

  Within a few months, Brother Number One, Ieng Sary and most of the other ranking communists left Phnom Penh when Sihanouk started a crackdown. A few stayed, like Khieu Samphan, who was forced out of Sihanouk’s cabinet but kept his seat in the National Assembly and became well known for his spartan way of life. When I was a schoolboy I used to see Khieu Samphan riding a bicycle around the city instead of driving a car. Idealistic intellectuals like my teacher Chea Huon admired him and joined the party at about this time. Then in 1967 there was another crackdown. Khieu Samphan escaped from Phnom Penh by hiding in a farmer’s cart, but Chea Huon wasn’t as lucky. I visited him in jail, not knowing anything about his secret life or about the ‘war in the shadows’. Few did.

  When they left Phnom Penh the Khmer Rouge leaders set up camp in the mountainous areas near the Vietnamese border. They had few weapons and no vehicles to speak of. When they wanted to travel they either walked or rode on elephants. They recruited dark-skinned mountain people, who had always been oppressed by lowlanders and who were happy to fight Phnom Penh. Life was hard and unglamorous. The mountain forests were infested with malaria and snakes. They never had enough to eat.

  By the mid-1960s the second war in Vietnam was fully under way. The North Vietnamese used eastern Cambodia as part of their Ho Chi Minh Trail, but they gave the Khmer Rouge only token supplies for the use of the territory. China and the USSR didn’t send aid either; they were still backing Sihanouk.

  The Khmer Rouge would have been nothing but a half-forgotten, ragged band of guerrillas in the hills if it hadn’t been for the 1970 coup. When Sihanouk was overthrown, and then unexpectedly joined them as a figurehead, the Khmer Rouge became politically significant overnight. They got weapons from the Chinese and the North Vietnamese. They got training from North Vietnamese and from Cambodian communists who had lived in North Vietnam for many years. Peasants joined them because they thought they were joining Sihanouk. The Khmer Rouge began growing rapidly. In this vulnerable period the North Vietnamese did most of their fighting for them.

  The Khmer Rouge never trusted Sihanouk, and they kept him almost totally out of touch with their operations. He spent most of his time in Peking, more than fifteen hundred miles away, attended by people like Penn Nouth – the lawyer who had obtained my brother Pheng Huor’s release from prison a few years before.

  In 1973 the governments of North Vietnam and China arranged for Sihanouk to visit the ‘liberate
d zone’ of Cambodia. Sihanouk travelled down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. He dressed for the photographers in black clothes with rubber-tyre sandals so he would look like one of the Khmer Rouge. He spent a month attending banquets and ceremonies in his honour, and the whole time he thought that the leader of the Khmer Rouge was Khieu Samphan, because that was what the Khmer Rouge wanted everyone to think. To Sihanouk, Saloth Sar was an unimportant figure in the second or third ranks of leadership. Later, Sihanouk recalled that Saloth Sar was the most polite of the Khmer Rouge and the only one who spoke to him in the flattering ‘high’ Khmer of the royal palace. It was a game of deceptions inside deceptions: Sihanouk was the figurehead who assumed that Khieu Samphan was the real leader; but in reality, Khieu Samphan was only fronting for Saloth Sar, or ‘Brother Number One’.

  The Khmer Rouge were experts at deception. Resenting the North Vietnamese but unable to get rid of them for the moment, they decided to purge their own ranks of the communist Cambodians who had lived in North Vietnam and recently returned. The Khmer Rouge scattered these men around the country, then invited them to attend ‘meetings’ from which they never returned. Everything was secret. It was like the ‘war in the shadows’. The deaths were never announced, and it was only when most of the veterans had already been liquidated that the rest suspected that their lives were in danger.

  The Khmer Rouge soldiers’ code of behaviour was a deception too, though it served a practical purpose. It showed the common people that the Khmer Rouge behaved better than the officials of the Lon Nol regime, and this helped the Khmer Rouge win popular support. But once the Khmer Rouge had that support, they began to take away the peasants’ rights in the ‘liberated’ zones. They put the peasants in cooperatives with mass acreage to farm. They made them listen to long, boring propaganda speeches and made them give their private property to Angka. And they took away for execution those who disagreed. Few escaped to tell their stories, and few of us in Phnom Penh knew how brutal the communists really were. We only heard the good things, like how the Khmer Rouge never stole a single grain of rice.