Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  The Khmer Rouge were never military geniuses, but they were brave. Half a million pounds of bombs fell on their territory, some of the heaviest bombing the world has ever seen, but it didn’t stop them. When they attacked, they used human waves. They didn’t care how many they lost – they just kept attacking and attacking, even when it was impossible to win. It was easy to find replacements for the soldiers they lost – the American bombing had displaced so many families that peasant boys from all around Cambodia were trying to join. To convince their new recruits that the sacrifices were necessary, the Khmer Rouge told them that they were supermen, the best in the world, the only ones who could defeat the American imperialists. The young soldiers believed it. These were the brainwashed teenagers I first saw on April 17, 1975, when they took over Phnom Penh.

  Six days after the takeover, on April 23, 1975, the commander-in-chief arrived by jeep in the capital. There was no parade for him, no celebration. The rank and file did not even know who he was. He kept his identity a secret. Saloth Sar, previously known as the ‘Original Khmer’ and ‘Brother Number One,’ took his final pseudonym: Pol Pot.

  You know what happened next. He decided to put the rest of the country into collectives, just like the liberated zones, only he deceived us about his plans So the ‘temporary’ exodus from Phnom Penh became a permanent one, and gradually we ‘new’ people were resettled in rural cooperatives and deprived of our religion, our rights, our families and our personal property, just as the peasants in the liberated zones had been.

  Pol Pot and his inner circle were very confident. They thought they could take a war-torn, bankrupt, agricultural country and turn it into an industrial power without any help from the outside world or from technical ‘experts’. They adopted the idea from Mao Tse-tung, whom they admired, and possibly also from Stalin, who had tried something similar in the Soviet Union. Being proud and ignorant in a typically Cambodian way, they decided to push the idea to its farthest extremes. They planned to exploit the latent energies of the people by making us work harder and ‘freeing’ us from responsibilities like cooking meals and raising children. Unfortunately Pol Pot the maker of policy was the same as Saloth Sar the mediocre student. He did not realize that Mao’s Cultural Revolution was already a disaster and that Stalin’s attempts had set the Soviet economy back by decades. He did not examine the idea to see if it was practical. It was senseless to build huge canal systems and dams without using engineers, but then Pol Pot was like that. He tried to make reality fit politics instead of the other way around.

  During this period Pol Pot made no move to help his own family. At least one and perhaps both of the concubines related to him died in the countryside. His younger brother died of starvation. His older brother, who had taken care of him in his early days in Phnom Penh, survived the Khmer Rouge years without ever knowing that Saloth Sar and the head of Angka were one and the same.

  If the reports are true, Pol Pot kept a string of houses in Phnom Penh. He moved from one to the next, never announcing where he was staying, to avoid assassination. He kept the lowest of low profiles, seldom appearing in public. Until September 1977 he didn’t announce that ‘Angka’ was the Communist Party of Kampuchea or that he was the nation’s leader. He had no children, none of the family life that most people think of as normal. His wife’s hair turned white; she went insane, and she was placed under special care.

  Many have wondered whether Pol Pot himself was insane. If this were true, it would help explain the madness of his regime. And certainly his secrecy, tying and lack of common sense point to psychological problems. I myself think he suffered from paranoid delusions. But Cambodians who knew him personally had a far different impression. They saw a neatly groomed, soft-spoken man who smiled often, just like Chev. They say he had tiny, soft, almost feminine hands. Most of all, they remember something special about his character. They said he was easy to trust.

  With Pol Pot keeping a low profile, the unofficial ‘first couple’ in Phnom Penh were Ieng Sary, now minister of foreign affairs, and his wife, Thirith, the minister of social affairs. They had bodyguards, chauffeurs, cooks and maids. They had soap, shoes, medicines, all the things that we war slaves didn’t. They ate the best food in the country, in a special ‘common kitchen’ with the other top leaders. Ieng Sary became fat. His oldest daughter became a ‘doctor’ in Phnom Penh, though she had no real training, while real doctors like me were unable to practise in the countryside.

  The Khmer Rouge leaders lived in a section of Phnom Penh that had been cleaned up and restored for their use. Their public behaviour was quiet and restrained. They hardly ever drank liquor. They bathed frequently and wore clean clothes. They spoke in soft voices and hardly ever showed either happiness or anger. They didn’t do their own killing.

  Except for their part of Phnom Penh, the city was empty. Where the open-air stalls had been next to the central market, banana trees were planted. Where the French cathedral had been there was only a flat field; every stone had been removed, and to outward appearances the cathedral might never have existed. The hulks of cars lay broken and rusting in piles around the city, and weeds grew everywhere.

  Meanwhile, in an apartment in the Royal Palace, Sihanouk lived under house arrest. His story is strange and pathetic.

  Sihanouk returned from Peking in September 1975 for a short visit, seeing only relatives. As the ceremonial President of Democratic Kampuchea, he then travelled to the United Nations, where he dismissed as ‘rumours’ the reports of violence and executions in Cambodia. Accepting his public statements, not knowing that Sihanouk privately believed that the reports were true, hundreds of foreign-trained Cambodians returned home to serve their country. Most were executed.

  Sihanouk returned to the Royal Palace and house arrest. A year later he resigned from his ceremonial post. The Khmer Rouge kept him and his wife alive in their guarded apartment but sent five of his children and eleven of his grandchildren out into the countryside, where all of them died or were murdered.

  Khieu Samphan, his only visitor, gave Sihanouk a high-quality Grundig radio set. Cut off from all other contact, unable to leave the apartment, Sihanouk listened to the propaganda songs, the boasts about ‘mastering’ the rice paddies, the false statistics of Radio Phnom Penh. He tuned to the broadcasts of the Voice of America and the Deutsche Welle. He tape-recorded the foreign news programmes, listening to them again and again, trying to piece together what was happening in Cambodia. But nobody knew what was happening in Cambodia, not even the Khmer Rouge.

  The Khmer Rouge headquarters, known as the Centre, issued orders and collected reports from all over the countryside, but many of the orders were not carried out, and the production reports were falsified to meet expectations. At every level of the regime, cadre learned quickly that real results weren’t as important as praising Angka, appearing zealous and echoing the ‘correct line’.

  In fact, conditions varied immensely from one cooperative to the next and from one zone to the next because the leaders in each place operated more or less as they chose. The Northwest Zone, where Huoy and I lived, had some of the worst leaders and worst conditions. In other parts of the country the leaders were more pragmatic. As long as they stayed in power, few people under them died from starvation or execution. But these leaders could not count on staying in power.

  To Pol Pot, the zone leaders and most other high-ranking party members were rivals and potential enemies. It didn’t matter that the men under suspicion were fellow veterans of a long and difficult revolutionary struggle. One of the first to go was Hou Youn, who had been a member of the communist study circle in Paris in the early 1950s and who advocated a less extreme reorganization of the countryside. Then came Hu Nim, another member of the study circle and later the Democratic Kampuchea minister of information; and Nhim Ros, commander of the Northwest Zone. The purge of the Northwest Zone was ‘vertical,’ as many of them were, reaching down to lower and lower subordinates. Chea Huon learned of the purge in
time and fled. But Chey and Uncle Seng were too late.

  In most purges the leaders and their subordinates were not simply executed. First they were tortured and made to ‘confess’ to crimes they had never committed. In Phnom Penh the headquarters for torture was a few blocks from my old bachelor apartment, on the premises of a school I knew as Lycée Tuol Svay Prey. It was renamed S.21, though it became better known as Tuol Sleng, meaning ‘Hill of the Poison Tree’, the name it was given by the next regime.

  Unlike the rural prisons I was sent to, the S.21 torturers kept detailed records. Their false ‘confessions’ and photographs of the victims exist to this day. Another difference with the prisons I went to was the S.21 population. Most of the twenty thousand who died there were not ‘new’ people but actual Khmer Rouge. Imagine what it was like for them to write out the first, honest version of their biographies – and then, after a few sessions, confess to spying for the CIA or Hanoi, confess to anything at all to stop the interrogators from beating them again or reattaching the electric prods. Before they died they must have asked themselves, like a scream that echoed inside their heads, ‘Why?’ Why was Angka doing this, when they had obeyed its rules? And they never knew why, any more than the rest of us did.

  Nobody was safe from the purges – nobody but Pol Pot and a few he trusted, like Ieng Sary and his wife.

  A colleague of theirs named So Phim was a member of the innermost circle of power – the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea and commander of the Eastern Zone. And So Phim was as ruthless as any zone leader could be. He executed monks. He slaughtered whole villages of Moslem Chams. Unluckily for him the Eastern Zone was next to the Vietnamese border. When Pol Pot ordered him to carry out border raids on the Vietnamese, So Phim obeyed, but he was not entirely successful. After all, the Vietnamese are difficult to defeat. But in Pol Pot’s suspicious mind, So Phim failed because he was a Vietnamese agent. Four hundred Eastern Zone cadre were ordered to Phnom Penh, then imprisoned and tortured in S.21. And So Phim must have asked himself, ‘Why?’ He must have asked ‘Why?’ again when his midlevel military leaders were called to meetings and never came back. When he himself was called to a ‘meeting’, he refused. Two brigades loyal to the Centre attacked.

  Desperately, So Phim went into hiding and contacted Pol Pot by radio. He could not believe that Pol Pot was issuing these orders. It had to be somebody else’s fault. He trusted Pol Pot. Everybody did. They had been comrades for twenty years. Pol Pot agreed to meet face-to-face with him, two old friends ironing out their problems. But instead of Pol Pot showing up for the meeting, boatloads of soldiers appeared, firing their weapons. So Phim committed suicide. His wife and children were shot as they were preparing his body for burial. Only a few of his aides escaped into the jungle. One of them was a division commander named Heng Samrin.

  Pol Pot created enemies, and it is hard to say why. Perhaps he needed someone to blame when reality didn’t match his politics. Or perhaps he created enemies to destroy, like a man who is truly paranoid. Eventually he created so many enemies that the regime started falling apart. With the government unable to meet any of its production goals, he needed more and more enemies to blame, and finally he created his ultimate enemy: Vietnam.

  At first the Vietnamese weren’t interested in fighting the Khmer Rouge. They were busy with their own problems, reuniting the North and South, ‘re-educating’ the masses, reviving their shabby economy. But the Khmer Rouge kept attacking their border, slaughtering their civilians, raping their women, killing infants. And eventually the Vietnamese decided to solve two problems at one blow: get rid of the Cambodian regime that was causing the nuisance, and bring fertile new territory under Vietnamese control. Vietnam is overpopulated. It has about sixty million people and a hard time feeding them. Cambodia is underpopulated. It has perhaps a tenth that many people and is capable of producing far more rice and fish than it consumes.

  The Vietnamese invaded on December 25, 1978, with fourteen divisions and air support. Nothing could stop them.

  On the night of January 5, 1979, when the sounds of combat could be heard in Phnom Penh, Pol Pot asked his house prisoner Sihanouk to talk with him. When they met, Pol Pot saluted him with his palms together in the sompeah, the very gesture his regime had outlawed. Then Pol Pot knelt as he had been taught in the Royal Palace as a child, bringing his left foot forward, then bending his right knee toward the floor. In his soft, ingratiating voice he apologized to Sihanouk for not being able to receive him sooner. He said he had been busy. He hoped Sihanouk understood. He was sure the Vietnamese would be defeated, but he wanted Sihanouk to help on the diplomatic front. Would he mind going to the United Nations, to hold on to Democratic Kampuchea’s seat? Sihanouk, astonished, had the presence of mind to agree. He left the country by plane, going first to Peking. The next day the Vietnamese entered Phnom Penh.

  As the Vietnamese advanced the Khmer Rouge retreated toward the caches of food and ammunition they had prepared in the mountains. They burned rice fields and rice warehouses to deprive the Vietnamese of food to eat. And as the two armies moved farther and farther west, civilians began to travel, and they saw with their own eyes the condition the country was in.

  Cambodia did not exist anymore. Atomic bombs could not have destroyed more of it than civil war and communism. Everything that had been wrecked by the civil war of 1970–75 was unrepaired and further eroded – the flattened villages, the blown-up bridges, the roads cut with trenches, the washouts caused by the rains. Mile after mile of rice paddies lay abandoned and untended, pockmarked with bomb craters. The canals and dams the war slaves built were eroding to shallow ditches and useless mounds of clay. The towns and the cities were empty and abandoned. The temples had been destroyed. Rubbish and piles of rusting cars lay in heaps. There were no telephones or telegraphs, no postal services. In Phnom Penh itself there was little or no water and electricity and little functioning machinery of any kind. No typewriters. Not even pens and paper. There had been deaths in almost every family in the country. Widows and orphans wandered about the countryside, dazed, too hurt to cry.

  How many survived nobody knew. The prewar population estimates had been vague – six or seven million, maybe as high as eight million. Amnesty International cites estimates that a million or more died in the civil war, before the communist takeover, and that between one and two million died under the Khmer Rouge. If that is true, the combination of civil war and revolution killed somewhere between a quarter and a half of Cambodia’s population.

  Among people and groups important to me, the ratio of deaths to survivors was much higher than for the country as a whole. Of 50,000 monks, less than 3,000 survived and returned to their former temples. Of 527 graduates of the medical school in Phnom Penh (my thesis, accepted in early 1975, was number 527, so there were at least that many graduates), about 40 survived. Of the 7,000 people living in my home village, Samrong Yong, before the war, about 550 survived, from what I have been able to discover.

  Of the 41 people in my immediate family, including my parents, my brothers and sisters and their spouses and children, plus Huoy and her mother and me, only 9 survived. That is a death rate of 78 per cent and a survival rate of 22 per cent.

  When the Vietnamese invaded it was time to heal the country. But communists are better at waging war than waging peace. The invaders and their ‘National United Front for the Salvation of Kampuchea’ had no plans for reconstruction. The Front’s puppet leader, Heng Samrin, had been a Khmer Rouge until the year before. His foreign minister, a one-eyed twenty-seven-year-old named Hun Sen, had also been a Khmer Rouge until defecting to the Vietnamese to avoid being purged. Six months after the ‘liberation’ of Phnom Penh, Hun Sen finally met with international agencies to consider accepting emergency aid. The outside world was eager to help, but most of the aid that eventually got through to Phnom Penh was seized by the new regime and never reached the common people.

  The Vietnamese loo
ted factories of equipment, warehouses of rice and homes of furniture. And as they pushed the Khmer Rouge farther back, they tightened their control over civilians in the ‘liberated’ territories. For example, in Siem Reap Province, near the ancient ruins of Angkor, a man named Dith Pran accepted a job as major of a small town because he wanted to help his people. But the Vietnamese checked on his political background and found that he had once worked for an American newspaper. To them this was worse than if he had worked for the Khmer Rouge. Dith Pran lost his job. He was afraid for his life, and later he left for Thailand.

  Or take another example of tightened control, the hospital in Battambang City. At first, after the invasion, Cambodian doctors ran the hospital entirely by themselves. I joined the staff at the end of this period. When the Heng Samrin governor called a meeting, I left for Thailand. It turned out that my suspicions were right. After the meeting Vietnamese ‘advisers’ took over the hospital administration. Some of the remaining doctors left for Thai refugee camps. Others who were more prepared to collaborate joined the staff. One of them was Pen Tip.

  In the countryside the Vietnamese tried to collectivize agriculture. They said that oxcarts and oxen, water buffalo and ploughs belonged to those who had taken care of them under the Khmer Rouge regime, not to those who had owned them originally. They said that land belonged to the government, not to individuals. They pushed peasants to farm in ‘mutual aid teams’ of ten to thirty families each. The peasants hated this. They wanted to farm individually, as they had for centuries, before the Khmer Rouge.