by John Pilger
Italy was the first country I came to from Australia thirty years ago. I got off the ship at Genoa and lived here for most of that year; and the civilisation, kindness and sardonic way of the Italians have enriched my life ever since, and once again offer a future. In the early days, I travelled with two compatriots, one of whom bore the fine name of Bernardo Giuliano and was a distant relative of the Sicilian gunman, Salvatore Giuliano. Bernie, a gentle taciturn man who spoke with an Australian country drawl, managed to perplex everyone he met by not understanding a word of Italian. We three ran a small freelance organisation, grandly called INTEREP. Our offices were in numerous pensioni, youth hostels and fields. We wrote about pasta, opera and cars; and no one paid us.
My favourite city then was Siena in Tuscany; and some years later I was introduced to the rib of mountains that runs eastward from the vast plain of the Val Di Chiana to the upper valley of the Tiber. This is where the hill tribes are; the Antolinis and Rossis and Vallis. The beauty of the place is announced by Cortona, an Etruscan town that, inside its walls, is Renaissance Italy in every modern sense. For as long as I can remember, the comune at Cortona has routinely provided art and music, scholarship and politics from all over the world, as a public service. The municipal library is world renowned. Last week, in the Piazza della Repubblica, the mayor, Ilio Pasqui, made Alexander Dubček an honorary citizen; almost everybody came.
Like most of Tuscany, Cortona has been communist-run for years, and the Italian Communist Party (PCI) emblem is fixed to the wall opposite the clock tower. The PCI, which recently changed its name to the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), today holds half the thirty seats in the comune, with the Socialists providing a majority. Those at present issuing blanket inanities about communism might reflect upon the achievements of this decidedly non-Stalinist variant in Italy, where mass support for ‘Eurocommunism’ has helped modern democracy to flourish where it matters most to people: not in central government but in the regions, cities and towns.
An American writer and friend, Nancy Jenkins, who used to live here, once described the time of year when the Tuscan summer ‘seems to turn and settle on itself like a tawny country cat curling in the warmth of the sun . . .’ That is the time now. Along from Cortona, just before you come to the Miracle Nun’s place, the swimming pool owned by the local parish sits deserted in a saddle of the mountains like a Hockney painting superimposed on countryside. The last of the Rossi brothers, Guido, stands on his balcony at Teverina, a handkerchief around his throat where he had an operation for cancer, rendering him silent. Beneath him is the Virgin lit up in her place on his facing stone wall. His wife, a jolly woman, died last year; and I sometimes think about him alone in that cavernous place.
This is the time when assorted feuds come to a head as the grapes ripen; and much of the wine will be terrible as usual. (Once, I said to a visitor, ‘See that wine you’re drinking; it comes from the vines just over there.’ To which he replied, ‘Doesn’t really travel, does it?’)
As for Bruno, he is inspecting the threshing machine, whose duplicate is in the museum of folklore in Cortona. He’ll soon hitch it to his old tractor and will it into action. But now it is Sunday, and he is sitting with his cronies outside the local bottega, where they are fixtures every week. He is wearing his new brown suit; his shoes are polished, his jacket over his shoulders, a glass in his hand. ‘Wild boars’, he mumbles as a greeting, ‘hate music.’
September 6, 1991
IX
CAMBODIA
RETURN TO YEAR ZERO
‘IT IS MY duty’, wrote the correspondent of The Times at the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Belsen, ‘to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind.’ That was how I felt in the summer of 1979. During twenty-two years as a journalist, most of them spent in transit at places of uncertainty and upheaval, I had not seen anything to compare with what I saw then in Cambodia.1
My aircraft flew low, following the unravelling of the Mekong River west from Vietnam. Once over Cambodia, there appeared to be no one, no movement, not even an animal, as if the great population of Asia had stopped at the border. Nothing seemed to have been planted nor was growing, except the forest, and mangrove, and lines of tall wild grass. On the edge of towns this grass would follow straight lines, as though planned. Fertilised by human compost – by the remains of thousands upon thousands of men, women and children – these lines marked common graves in a nation where as many as a million-and-a-half people, one-fifth of the population, were ‘missing’.
We made our approach into what had been the international airport at Phnom Penh. At the edge of the forest there appeared a pyramid of rusting cars like objects in a mirage. The pile included ambulances, a fire engine, police cars, refrigerators, washing-machines, generators, television sets, telephones and typewriters. ‘Here lies the modern age,’ a headstone might have read, ‘abandoned April 17, 1975, Year Zero.’ From that date, anybody who had owned such ‘luxuries’, anybody who had lived in a city or town, anybody with more than a basic education or who had acquired a modern skill, anybody who knew or worked for foreigners, was in danger. Many would die.
Year Zero was the dawn of an age in which, in extremis, there would be no families, no sentiment, no expression of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music: only work and death. ‘If our people can build Angkor Wat,’ said Pol Pot in 1977, ‘they can do anything.’2 In that year he killed probably more of his people than during all of his reign. Xenophobic and racist, he might have modelled himself on one of the despotic kings who ruled Angkor, the Khmer empire, between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. He was an admirer of Mao Tse-tung and the Gang of Four; and it is not improbable that much as Mao had seen himself as the greatest emperor of China, so Pol Pot saw himself as another Mao, directing his own red guard to purify all elites, subversives and revisionists. In the end he created little more than a slave state.
In my first hours in Phnom Penh I took no photographs; incredulity saw to that. I had no sense of people, of even the remnants of a population; the few human shapes I glimpsed seemed incoherent images, detached from the city itself. On catching sight of me, they would flit into the refuge of a courtyard or a cinema or a filling station. Only when I pursued several, and watched them forage, did I see that they were children. One child about ten years old – although age was difficult to judge – ran into a wardrobe lying on its side which was his or her shelter. In an abandoned Esso station an old woman and three emaciated children squatted around a pot containing a mixture of roots and leaves, which bubbled over a fire fuelled with paper money: thousands of snapping, crackling, brand-new banknotes lay in the gutters, sluiced there by the afternoon rains, from the destroyed Bank of Cambodia.
During the coming weeks one sound remained in my consciousness day and night: the soft, almost lilting sound of starving, sick children approaching death. In the eight months since the Vietnamese liberation, only three relief planes had come from the West – none had been sent by Western governments, the International Red Cross or the United Nations – in spite of appeals from the new regime in Phnom Penh. By the end of October, the tenth month, UNICEF and the Red Cross had sent 100 tons of relief; or as the Red Cross in Geneva preferred to call it, ‘more than’ 100 tons. In effect, nothing. Few geopolitical games have been as cynical and bereft of civilised behaviour as that which isolated and punished the people of Cambodia, and continues to do so in 1992. It is a game that beckons a second holocaust in Asia.
David Munro and I go back to Cambodia as often as we can. David and I have together made five documentary films about Cambodia; and our long friendship is committed to telling Cambodia’s story until the world repays its blood debt, and there is peace. During each visit I sleep only a few hours every night. Lying bathed in sweat, waiting for sunrise, listening to the hammer blows of rain, I fall in and out of a dream-state which has assumed an unwelcome familiarity. In the passageway outside ther
e is the sound of something being dragged on flagstones, like a bundle. This is followed by the urgent flip-flop of rubber sandals and by indistinct voices, as if conferring; then by the sound of a voice that soon becomes recognisable as the rise and fall of sobbing. The dream moves on to a setting in the countryside, which is lush and green as the sun burns away skeins of mist, revealing pieces of cloth fluttering from earth that is speckled white.
I have talked to my friend, Chay Song Heng, about this. Heng spent three and a half years as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, pretending to be an idiot so that the guards would not suspect him of being educated and kill him. Confined to a rice-growing ‘co-operative’ and banned from speaking all but compliances, he imagined he was ‘a friend of the moon’. He studied the lunar phases and kept a mental record of the hours, days, months and years. ‘When liberation came on December 25, 1978,’ he said, ‘can you imagine, I was only two days wrong!’
Heng is a translator and interpreter of English. His weekly government salary is enough to buy one can of Coca-Cola, so he takes classes in one of Phnom Penh’s ‘England-language streets’. He is a diminutive man, who walks with a bounce, although I have now and then seen him tremble and his eyes reflect acute anxiety. ‘In the Pol Pot years,’ he said, ‘I used to walk to the corner of the paddy in the evening. There I would practise my English. I would say to myself – well, mumble actually, in case I was overheard – “Good morning, Heng, and how are you this morning?” and I’d reply, “I’m quite well, thank you, apart from the difficulty of living. I am a captive in my own country, and I am condemned for nothing. But they have neither my brain, nor my soul.” By the way, do you know “The Cat and the Moon” by W. B. Yeats? I recited that to myself many times.’
The cat went here and there
and the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up . . .
On my return in 1989, I drove into Phnom Penh with Heng. Every bridge leading into the city had been destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, except one which is now the city’s artery and its monument to Year Zero. ‘On the morning of April 17, 1975,’ said Heng, ‘the Khmer Rouge came down our street, banging on the doors, ordering us to get out. The whole city was being evacuated, pushed out. My mother, father and I got to the bridge at five o’clock, and it took us two hours to cross it with guns in our backs. During the night a woman gave birth to twins; when the guards told us to get up and move on, the new babies were left in the grass to die. The mother died later, I was told.’
Heng is one of the few people to have retained his real name. Most people have a number of aliases, or entirely new identities. Everybody remembers the moment when a list of names was read out by the Khmer Rouge. You waited for your name, and to hear it was to prepare for death. Heng is a government servant. As we spoke, he had just heard the news that fifty people had been taken off two trains by the Khmer Rouge. A list was compiled on the spot and government servants were shot dead.
Fear is a presence in Cambodia. Once, as I set out from London for Cambodia, I was told that Vietnamese intelligence had intercepted a Khmer Rouge death list and that my name was on it. Three weeks later, returning on an empty road to Phnom Penh, David and I ran into a Khmer Rouge ambush. We narrowly escaped, and the snapshot I carry in my mind is that of armed men in black lying on their bellies, motionless beneath a truck, aiming point blank at us.
It was a glimpse, no more, of what people in Cambodia continually live with; and it is contagious. Addressing the puzzle of my dream as we sat together in the frayed foyer of the Monorom Hotel, Heng said, ‘You are beginning to dream as we do. You are touched by what we fear is coming. You see, we are a people walking around like sleepwalkers in a world shaped by the shadows of the past and by forces from outside, never by ourselves.’ Visitors are often struck by the apparent normality of Phnom Penh, the spectacle of people trading, building and repairing, thronging at a cinema, waiting for a bus. But this, too, is part of the dream-state. Watch the eddies of panic when masonry falls from a building denied renovation since the first American bomb fell twenty-one years ago; or people immobilised when a burst of automatic fire is heard in the distance; or the traffic stopped by legless people demonstrating for food.
In Cambodia the surreal and the real merge. A few miles from Phnom Penh are the green hillocks of my dream, in which the bodies of as many as 20,000 people were dumped after they had been tortured and murdered, usually by skull fracture. Many were photographed at the point of death by members of Pol Pot’s gestapo, S-21. Many were small children. It is their bone fragments that speckle the earth white.
Further east is Kandal Stung, a market town that was ‘carpet-bombed’, where protruding stone foundations resemble an excavation of antiquity. There is nobody there now. At the provincial hospital at Kampong Cham, where children die because an international embargo proscribes life-saving equipment and drugs, one ward appears about to collapse. According to a doctor, it was hit by an American bomb in the early 1970s.
At the ferry town of Neak Loeung the main street is comprised almost entirely of façades, although people have come back. The bombing of Neak Loeung was described by the US Defense Department as a ‘mistake’. To rectify it the then American ambassador to Cambodia, Emory Swank, drove to the ruins in a large car and passed out $100 bills to relatives of the dead and missing: that sum apparently being the going rate in Washington for a Cambodian life.3
New evidence from US government documents, declassified in 1987, leaves no doubt that the bombing of Cambodia caused such widespread death and devastation that it was critical in Pol Pot’s drive for power. ‘They are using damage caused by B52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda,’ the CIA director of operations reported on May 2, 1973. ‘This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of a number of young men. Residents [ . . . ] say the propaganda campaign has been effective with refugees in areas that have been subject to B52 strikes.’4 What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot completed.
Thousands of those who had survived the bombing were force-marched west. They were singled out as ‘Vietnamese in Khmer bodies’ – because they lived in the eastern zone, close to Vietnam. Like the Jews who were made to wear yellow stars, they had to wear special blue scarves and became known as the ‘blue-scarves people’. Like the Jews they were decimated.5
Svay Toeu is one of the poorest villages, where people live in houses of mud and straw. Several led me to a cigar-shaped object the length of a man, on which children were playing. It was a bomb from a B52, which had lain there for sixteen years with only its detonator removed. Beyond it a necklace of craters extended to the horizon. At dusk we walked back through the village to a shrine made entirely with human skulls. About five hundred were arranged in wooden tiers, and there was a separate pile of tiny skulls. The moonlight caught a line of watching faces, as still and silent as the trees in which there are no birds. They were children and women; in areas such as this, where the killing was unrelenting, up to 70 per cent of adults are women.
Many of the widows still describe, obsessively, their husbands’ violent deaths and the cries of their smallest children denied food; and how they were then forced to marry a man they did not know. Such traumas are said to have caused an epidemic of genital herpes and stopped menstruation.
I first visited Kompong Speu in 1979, as famine swept much of Cambodia. Since then the hospital has been rebuilt and schools reopened; and there are pictures of tranquillity, as saffron-robed monks stroll along the edge of a paddy, past playing children and their bullock. And yet, in the great shadows that follow the afternoon rain, the ‘men in black’ are back; and the night is theirs for the taking.
Here people who have resisted have had their villages burned down. Others now live in ‘zones of free Kampuchea’, where men and women are separated and forced into marriage, and the able-bodied are marched to Thailand and back, carrying boxes of ammunition. Those who have tried to escape h
ave been shot. Others have stepped on land-mines. Beside the road, old men dig First World War-style trenches. They stop and watch, standing shoulder-deep, as if marking their own graves.
I know of no one in Cambodia who has doubts about what Pol Pot will do if, or when, he returns in the Trojan Horse the West, and the United Nations, is building for him. What he commands is not significant support, as some commentators have suggested, but significant fear. Certainly, as Western diplomacy has worked to accommodate the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot has been laying his plans in his secret enclave in southern Thailand. We hear little about his strategy, which is surprising as most of the reporting of Indo-China originates in Thailand. It is as if the phantom persona the Khmer Rouge have contrived for the ‘Great Master’ has been accepted by the outside world, especially its media.
Roger Normand, fieldwork editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal, has interviewed numerous senior Khmer Rouge cadre and battlefield commanders. Thanks to his patient researches, it is possible to understand the essence of Pol Pot’s strategy; this is, above all, to fool Western governments and to take power in whatever guise and however long it takes. In 1990 Normand obtained the briefing notes of Pol Pot’s clandestine speeches and lectures to his leadership, in the barracks of Zone 87. They show Pol Pot’s conscious use of the veto the West has given him over the ‘peace process’. In one speech he outlined his plans to ‘delay the elections’ until his forces controlled the countryside, and he warned of the danger of accepting a political settlement before his cadre had ‘prepared’ the people and could ‘lead the balloting’.