As dawn came to Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, white sheets fluttered from windows throughout the city. Government leaders had ordered their forces to stand down, and the capital was now open to the Communist Khmer Rouge. Clad in black and wearing checked scarves, victorious Communist troops marched into the city. To the capital’s residents, the soldiers seemed strange—most came from the countryside, and few had ever seen a city as large as Phnom Penh. To the victors, the city appeared as a den of corruption and vice, the ultimate symbol of the regime’s depravity and the ruinous effects of foreign influence. Few soldiers smiled as they took control of strategic locations throughout the capital. Groups of Khmer Rouge entered the city’s hospitals, which were overflowing with wounded from the months-long siege. With little hint of mercy, the soldiers ordered patients and attendants to leave; some insisted that the evacuation was necessary to avoid imminent B-52 strikes. Men, women, and children with horrific injuries formed a gruesome procession down the staircases and out into the streets. Throughout the city, Communist soldiers pounded on the doors of homes and ordered those inside to leave immediately. They were to abandon their possessions and take only the clothes on their backs and what food they could carry. The roads out of the city were soon choked with some two million people. What few provisions the Communists gave them along the way were insufficient; the water ran out first. Bodies of the fallen were left along the sides of the road as thousands of refugees marched past. Foreigners took refuge first in the Hotel Phnom and then in the French embassy. The party forced all nonnationals out of the country within two weeks. Year Zero had begun.1
It was here in Cambodia—or Democratic Kampuchea, as the Khmer Rouge would rename the country—that the Cold War era’s darkest chapter would play out. For most Americans, the fall of Saigon was a tragedy; the fall of Phnom Penh and the butchery that followed barely registered. The regime’s extreme isolation was partly responsible for this. Khmer Rouge leaders did everything in their power to close their state off from foreign influence and eradicate its vestiges. But by 1975, many Americans both inside and outside the halls of power were eager to forget their painful involvement in Southeast Asia. Moving on was not so easy for those living in the region. Democratic Kampuchea sat at the center of a perfect storm in geopolitics. Centuries of hostility between Vietnam and Cambodia, the experience of French colonialism, and Japanese occupation during World War II formed a troubled foundation for Cambodian independence. Though its leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, had sought neutrality, the nation could not escape the tides of war sweeping through neighboring Vietnam. Hanoi, Saigon, Beijing, and Washington all helped turn Cambodia into a secondary battlefield of the Vietnam Wars.
Yet it was the Cambodians themselves who would perform most of the killing. The vicious logic of revolutionary communism would reach its apogee and begin its decline in Democratic Kampuchea as the Khmer Rouge erased the distinction between theory and practice, between utopian Marxist fantasy and cruel reality. The Khmer Rouge would link its unyielding vison of Communist revolution with a xenophobic ethnic nationalism.2 Together, these two prongs drove a reign of terror that killed nearly a quarter of the nation’s population. Compounding the tragedy, Cambodia sat at the point where America’s violent Cold War interventionism collapsed into indifference and disillusionment. The Nixon administration had pummeled much of the countryside with American bombs with little regard for what happened after. The nation of Cambodia was a casualty of both the Khmer Rouge genocide and the global Cold War. The collision of the two forces, global and local, would help transform the country into a cemetery and drive the final nail into the coffin of Third World Communist solidarity.
PEACE
When Khmer Rouge forces entered Phnom Penh on the morning of April 17, 1975, a small group of foreign correspondents remained. As the Communist troops combed through the city, searching for foreigners and hunting former government officials, the journalists (who had been confined to the French embassy) agreed to embargo their dispatches until all nonnationals had made it out of the country. Among them was New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg. The city had fallen, he wrote, to an army of peasant soldiers, “darker skinned than their city brethren, with gold in their front teeth. To them the city is a curiosity, an oddity, a carnival, where you visit but do not live.” The Khmer Rouge forced a “mammoth and grueling exodus” from the capital in a bid to stage a total peasant revolution. Communist forces rolled through the city streets waving weapons and ordering citizens to evacuate over loudspeakers. Terrified refugees took to the roads “like a human carpet.” “A once-throbbing city became an echo chamber of silent streets lined with abandoned cars and gaping, empty shops,” Schanberg wrote. “Streetlights burned eerily for a population that was no longer there.”3
The effort to empty the cities took a brutal toll. Many individuals who refused to abandon their homes were summarily shot. One witness reported seeing “two piles of bodies in civilian clothes, as if two whole families had been killed, babies and all. Two pieces of cardboard stuck out of the pile, and someone had scrawled in charcoal: For refusing to leave as they were told.” Along the roads, scores of the wounded, the elderly, and the very young perished as a result of exhaustion, malnourishment, and dehydration. It would take some of the evacuees weeks to reach their destinations. As the refugees plodded away from the capital, Khmer Rouge cadres called on them to reveal their occupations. Some of the skilled workers were taken away and sent back for service in Phnom Penh. Many of those who admitted that they had worked for the military or government were taken back to the city and shot. Not all Phnom Penh’s residents were evacuated. The Khmer Rouge rounded up government officials, military commanders, and police and executed them in large numbers. Historian Ben Kiernan places the immediate death toll at twenty thousand, half of whom died in the evacuation. Khmer Rouge forces followed a similar procedure in other cities and towns throughout Cambodia, evacuating all the country’s principal population centers in the following weeks.4
Upon hearing the news of the government’s surrender on April 17, the residents of Battambang, in the northwest, cheered. Peace had come, they hoped, and the Khmer Rouge would force food prices back down. Later that evening, when radios announced the evacuation of Phnom Penh, the mood darkened. “Would the same thing happen to us?” one student wondered. After taking Battambang, Khmer Rouge officers ordered all Lon Nol’s troops to assemble, with their weapons, in front of the prefecture on April 18. In the following days, the party sent in trucks to collect these troops to be sent for retraining. After leaving Battambang, Khmer Rouge officers stopped the convoy and ordered all passengers out of the vehicles. Soon, witnesses heard the sound of Chinese AK-47s. On April 24, Communist cadres speaking over loudspeakers gave all remaining civilians three hours to evacuate Battambang. “Anyone caught in the city after that would be killed,” one man remembered. “Even the dogs would be shot.” The roads north of the city were littered with rotting bodies. Farther along, the evacuees found the corpses of hundreds of army officers with their hands tied behind their backs.5
The refugees faced a foreign landscape. Much of the countryside had been bombed, and many of the villages were unwelcoming. Once-critical aspects of their lives in the cities (wealth, education, social status) no longer counted in postrevolutionary Cambodia. The lucky ones had family in their ancestral villages who took them in. Those who did not struggled to scrape together enough food to continue. In some places, the Khmer Rouge forced evacuees to build entirely new villages.
While the cadres reshaped the face of the Cambodian countryside, party leaders set up their new government in the nearly deserted capital of Phnom Penh. Although they were disappointed by the absence of large stores of military hardware, the destruction in the capital reinforced their determination to rebuild Cambodia as a utopian Marxist state. It was a state in which the deposed monarch, Prince Sihanouk, would have little influence. Having seized Phnom Penh, Khmer Rouge leaders had little use for the prince, who would spend much of his time outside the country. The real power in Cambodia now lay in the hands of Angkar (the organization) and its supreme leaders, Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, and Khieu Samphan.6
Pol Pot’s arrival in the capital was a closely guarded secret. He and the Khmer Rouge leadership were taken to the old French rail station, which had been transformed into a fortress. Inside the walls of this colonial building, the party leaders laid down the foundations of the new state. When night came, they placed sleeping mats across the floors. The evacuation had been necessary, they later argued, in order to neutralize any foreign spies operating in the capital. In this goal the move had been brutally effective: a CIA official in Saigon later lamented that the evacuation had “left American espionage networks throughout the country broken and useless.” More than this, the party’s decision to empty the cities served “to preserve the political position of cadres and combatants,” a Central Committee study reported, “to avoid a solution of peaceful evolution which could corrode [the revolution] from within; to fight corruption, degradation and debauchery; to get the urban population to take part in [agricultural] production; [and] to remove Sihanouk’s support base.” In one fell swoop, students and intellectuals had been “extricated from the filth of imperialist and colonialist culture,” the document continued, while “the system of private property and material goods [was] swept away.” Pol Pot intended to transform the nation into an agrarian powerhouse. “Agriculture is the key both to nation-building and national defence,” he announced. This total socialist revolution was to take place, moreover, with scant foreign assistance. Outside aid would corrupt the purity of the Khmer Rouge’s revolution and undermine Cambodia’s independence.7 While Mao Zedong advised Pol Pot to find his own course rather than copy the Chinese model, the Khmer Rouge were already well on their way toward crafting their vision of a new state.8
One month later, Pol Pot and the party leaders emerged to present their plan for building the new Democratic Kampuchea. Party officials from across the country converged on the athletic stadium north of Phnom Penh for a five-day meeting starting on May 20, 1975. Here, Angkar delivered its vision for the revolutionary state. It was a telling indication of that state’s nature that most of those in attendance did not ultimately survive the Communists’ four years in power. One account of the meeting delineated eight main points of Pol Pot’s program:
Others remembered these points as well as blanket hostility toward “money, schools, and hospitals.” The Khmer Rouge outlined a stark vision for the country: an antiurban, anti-Buddhist, xenophobic, anticapitalist society. The political apparatus would also take extreme measures to root out and destroy any individuals who opposed its vision for Democratic Kampuchea. Even more chilling, the party announced the division of the population into two groups. Individuals who had lived in Khmer Rouge–controlled areas prior to the fall of Phnom Penh were entitled to full rights. Those who did not were “candidates” for this status. The beleaguered evacuees from the capital and other major cities would have to prove themselves worthy of membership in the new Democratic Kampuchea.9
The party divided Cambodia into seven zones: the Northwest, North, Northeast, East, Southwest, West, and Center. These were holdovers from the civil war during which the Khmer Rouge had forced peasants into defensive cooperatives. Movement across these zones was strictly policed, and the harvest placed under party control. Within this administrative system, outsiders were viewed with hostility, Cambodia’s borders were fortified, and booby-trapped buffer zones were established. From 1975 onward, the party transformed this wartime necessity into the structure of state control in Democratic Kampuchea. Khmer Rouge secretaries within each zone held formidable power, exercising control over both the security apparatus and the local economy. While they functioned as integral parts of the larger party structure, Khmer Rouge leadership within the zones exercised some autonomy from the party center in Phnom Penh. In the coming years, Pol Pot and his comrades in the capital would endeavor to extend as much control over the zones as possible.10
Those in the countryside lived a severe life. Villagers, many of whom were already struggling from the effects of the civil war and the American bombing campaign, were now saddled with the added burden of feeding and housing refugees from the cities. These “old people” were in a better position than the “new people,” who had to adapt to a completely new form of existence. The Khmer Rouge authorities divided the population into groups of ten to fifteen families headed by a chief. Each family was given a plot of land in the forest, which it had to clear in order to begin cultivating maize, cassava, and yams. The party nationalized most of the rice paddies. The refugees from Cambodia’s cities had few if any farming tools, a fact that exacerbated the difficulty of the labor. Workers toiled long hours building dikes, plowing fields, and clearing forests. Unexploded ordinance from the war made the work all the more dangerous. Despite these efforts, food remained in short supply. “On the road to Phnom Srok,” reported one witness, “there were tens of thousands of people from Phnom Penh, all gaunt and lifeless, marching in columns several kilometers long.” The party reduced rice rations in many areas to 180 grams (approximately 230 calories) every two days. Disease spread quickly through the population due to malnourishment and poor sanitation.11
Khmer Rouge goals were nothing less than utopian. A document drafted in the spring of 1976 revealed that the party planned to more than double the average harvest to three metric tons of rice per hectare. The party center had chosen to launch its own Great Leap Forward, in a blatant, though unacknowledged, attempt to emulate China’s example, while expecting to avoid the disastrous results. The document made it clear, moreover, that these changes should be carried out with brutal efficiency by granting the leadership the “Authority to Smash (People) Inside and Outside the Ranks” of the party.12 A report published several months later referenced the “Super Great Leap Forward,” in which the party aimed to dramatically increase food production and to undermine popular resistance to its plans. Citing one example, the report discussed complaints against the use of “No. 1 fertilizer [human excrement]. They say people have never used excrement before, and now the revolution uses it to make fertilizer. . . . But if we go down personally and explain cause and effect to them, they will understand.” The party would combine these efforts with an ongoing campaign to eradicate “any remnants that are not proletarian, and not collective, or are still private.”13
Pol Pot and his comrades turned Cambodia, in the words of one journalist, into a “slave state.” Under the Khmer Rouge, the country was transformed into a massive labor camp; one survivor described it as a “prison without walls.” The ultimate purpose was to create an entirely new Cambodia, to realize a complete revolution in Khmer society. The three goals of peasant revolution, agrarian development, and national defense formed integral and mutually reinforcing aspects of the Khmer Rouge’s program. The Khmer Rouge pursued these goals ruthlessly, slaughtering any and all who stood in their way. The party first sought to destroy Cambodia’s “feudal” elite, which Pol Pot and his comrades argued had oppressed the nation for centuries. Markets, private property, and currency were all eradicated; the cities were emptied; and the nation was transformed into a society of peasants. In this same vein, the party sought to banish foreign influence from Cambodia. Sihanouk’s attempts at development had been disastrous, and economic autarky seemed the best path for the nation. The Khmer Rouge’s second goal was to “build” Cambodia into a prosperous nation. In contrast to Sihanouk and Lon Nol’s industrial modernization projects, the Khmer Rouge focused on agrarian development through collective agriculture. The party worked to reshape the population into an agrarian machine. “The characteristics of peasants,” Pol Pot wrote, “are often negligence, lack of zeal and lack of self-confidence. They know only how to work by following orders.” Every aspect of daily life must, in theory, come under the Khmer Rouge’s control—diet, agricultural work, sleeping and waking, and even marriage became the domain of the party. By channeling its power into every dimension of peasant life, the Khmer Rouge sought to remake the nation into a productive instrument of party control.14
The third goal in the Khmer Rouge’s plan called for the defense of the nation. Cambodia was a comparatively weak state flanked by more powerful neighbors, Thailand and Vietnam. French colonialism and the recent American war had only served to inflame the party’s desire for independence. The party’s alliance with Hanoi had forced the people to tolerate the intrusive Vietnamese presence on Cambodian soil. Lon Nol’s alliance with Washington had brought the devastating B-52 strikes. Added to this mixture was the deep-seated xenophobia of Pol Pot and his comrades. The years of taking orders from Hanoi’s agents in Cambodia had exacted a toll on the Khmer Rouge. In the wake of the Khmer Rouge’s overwhelming victory over the Lon Nol regime, it was time for Cambodia to claim its independence and rebuild itself as a great nation.15 Khmer Rouge leaders believed they had good reason to be optimistic in this regard. An official report from 1976, for example, noted that Cambodia enjoyed certain advantages. “Compared to other countries, we have very many more qualities,” the report argued. “First, they have no hay. Second, they have no grass. In other countries, they use hay in various other ways, not to feed cows.”16
“AN INDENTURED AGRARIAN STATE”
Ultimately, the party center sought to achieve this total revolution at a rapid pace. Another document from 1976 insisted that “socialism must be built, as rapidly as possible, taking us from a backward agriculture to a modern one in five to ten years, and from an agricultural base to an industrial one in fifteen to twenty years.” This was necessary, party leaders explained, in order to defend the country from the “enemies” to the east and west: “[T]hey will persist with a vengeance and penetrate our territory, if we are weak.”17
The Khmer Rouge created what Kiernan calls “an indentured agrarian state.” While many peasants supported the revolution in its early stages, Pol Pot’s clique of intellectuals led it. And when famine began in the coming years, most of peasantry’s support disappeared. The nation became “a gigantic workshop.” Brutal discipline forced the population throughout the country into arduous labor in fields and rice paddies. No wages were paid, and no leisure was permitted. The party forced the majority of the population into “thatch huts or barrack-style houses,” separated from their families and often from their spouses. Meals were strictly regimented as part of the party’s effort to exercise total control over daily existence. Far from being a revolution led by and for the peasantry, Kiernan writes, the system created by the Khmer Rouge deprived Cambodians of “three of the most cherished features of their lifestyle: land, family, and religion.”18
Restrictions extended to every level. The Khmer Rouge viewed Western medicine with suspicion; some cadres believed that wearing eyeglasses or having light skin or uncalloused hands indicated that an individual was a capitalist. The party prohibited the use of language that suggested hierarchy, historian David Chandler wrote, and introduced a “syrupy politeness on commands. People taken off to be killed . . . were asked to ‘help us collect fruit’ or to ‘come with us for further study.’” It was not uncommon for villagers to simply disappear without warning; nor was it unusual for Cambodians to discover the bodies of victims dumped in the forests. Under the Pol Pot regime, the rhyme “Angkar kills but never explains” became popular. As the workers toiled long hours in the fields, they were forced to sing choruses of revolutionary songs. Doing so, cadres explained, would lift their spirits. After completing their work, Cambodians returned to their dwellings, where they ate gruel with meager rations of rice. Meanwhile, the leaders of Democratic Kampuchea directed a steady stream of indoctrination through political meetings and party-controlled radio broadcasts touting the virtues of the revolution. To guard against dissent, the party enlisted young men and women to conduct surveillance against villagers and to report any signs of opposition. A crushing blow to national morale arrived in 1976, when the party sent much of the rice harvest to China in exchange for military aid.19
Leaders in the United States had known of Khmer Rouge atrocities even before the fall of Phnom Penh. A paper from February 1975 blamed much of the brutality on Vietnamese cadres inside Cambodia who subjected the local population to “a rigid Stalinist pattern, press-ganging the people and killing and terrorizing peasants and monks.” And the Cambodian Communists were perhaps even worse. The paper reported that their campaign of terror against the population was “perhaps unparalleled since the Nazi era.” U.S. officials cited reports that the Khmer Rouge had killed thousands, including children, using knives, bayonets, and firearms, and dumped the bodies in mass graves in the forest. “The evidence is clear that a large-scale blood bath . . . would surely be the Communists’ policy following a Communist victory.”20 But even as they watched their predictions come true, leaders in Washington had little remaining credibility in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. As Kissinger lamented, “We have reached a point where if people run extermination camps, unless you have international inspection it is not recognized by the liberal community [in the United States].”21 In 1976, the CIA concluded that the Khmer Rouge government had become “the most extreme of the world’s totalitarian regimes.” The forced evacuation of Cambodia’s cities had been carried out with “unprecedented cruelty,” resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, “including almost the entire educated stratum.” The Khmer Rouge had taken a different course than other successful Communist revolutions, orchestrating the “complete abolition of private ownership and the departure from a money economy,” and refusing to align with Beijing or Moscow. The extreme secrecy surrounding the party leadership was perhaps the most conspicuous feature of the revolution. The result, the CIA concluded, amounted to the creation of a “unique ‘Cambodian model.’”22
Citing a State Department report from Thailand in May 1975, President Gerald Ford’s national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, noted that Cambodia was “under the control of a xenophobic collective leadership dedicated to attaining a radical change in the social, political, and economic makeup of the country in the shortest time possible.” The regime was executing teachers, students, and former soldiers who had served under Lon Nol. Anyone, for that matter, “who shows any sign of being educated also risks arrest or execution.” In many cases, the families of the accused also fell victim to the executioners. The killers typically beat the victims to death using “hoe handles or other blunt instruments.” The regime appeared to be on a quest to eradicate all knowledge as it burned books, destroyed libraries, and closed down schools. Khmer Rouge leaders also targeted organized religion, casting Buddhist monks out of their pagodas and using the buildings for grain storage. Widespread malaria, dysentery, and cholera plagued those who managed to escape the regime’s direct wrath. “In several areas,” Scowcroft continued, “the family unit is being destroyed with children permanently separated from their parents and husbands and wives placed in separate work groups.” In an effort to carry out a total revolution, Pol Pot and his comrades sought to eradicate the structure of the Cambodian family.23 The regime found children especially useful. “Only children can purely serve the revolution and eliminate reactionism,” a Khmer Rouge official claimed, “since they are young, obedient, loyal, and active.” The regime deliberately staged executions in front of children as both a warning and an example. For the party, young people represented a blank slate: they were relatively naïve, compliant, and less attached to the social order of prerevolutionary Cambodia. Children served as ideal spies and informants.24
However, none of this precluded a rapprochement between the Khmer Rouge and Washington—at least as far as U.S. policymakers were concerned. Officials in the Ford administration worried about the potential for Hanoi to expand Vietnam’s influence. To block Hanoi’s bid for regional power, the Ford administration hoped to reconcile with the Khmer Rouge and support a greater Chinese presence in Southeast Asia. “Our strategy is to get the Chinese into Laos and Cambodia as a barrier to the Vietnamese. I asked the Chinese to take over in Laos,” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told Thailand’s foreign minister in late 1975. “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them.” He then added, “Tell them the latter part, but don’t tell them what I said before.”25 President Jimmy Carter’s administration would follow a similar course. As Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, remembered, “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.”26 Having chosen to focus on the Cold War geopolitical struggle, American leaders were willing to overlook local atrocities in pursuit of global priorities.
THE KILLING FIELDS
Meanwhile, the slaughter in Cambodia continued. If there was an epicenter of the Khmer Rouge nightmare, it was the notorious prison known as Tuol Sleng. The facility occupied the former Tuol Svay Prey High School, in southwest Phnom Penh. Tuol Sleng, designated S-21 in official party correspondence, represented the inner sanctum of Democratic Kampuchea. While Democratic Kampuchea was closed to the world, S-21 was shut off from the wider nation. Its mission consisted of incarcerating and investigating inmates, passing sentences, and carrying out counterintelligence operations against suspected enemies. In practice, S-21 served as a torture and execution center. Those who ran the facility had no interest in rehabilitation and no inmates were granted release. Rather, all prisoners were slated for execution after months of brutal interrogation. More than fourteen thousand Cambodians would be tortured and killed in Tuol Sleng during its three and a half years of operation. S-21’s commandant, Kang Keck Ieu (aka Duch), was a former mathematics teacher from Kompong Thom who had fallen in with the Khmer Rouge during Sihanouk’s reign. As the chief of security in Sector 33, Duch personally beat prisoners during interrogations. By October 1975, he had been placed in charge of Tuol Sleng. By all accounts, he was a man obsessed with conspiracies and fears of internal subversion. Tuol Sleng’s staff was divided into three main units, tasked with interrogation, documentation, and defense. Discipline for both guards and interrogators at S-21 was strict, and the hours long. Among their other duties, guards were instructed not to speak with prisoners or learn their names, and to prevent the inmates from committing suicide.27
Prisoners were segregated by gender and importance. The most important captives received limited special treatment. Those important enough to require prolonged interrogation were shackled to the floor in cinder-block cells six feet long and two and a half feet wide. Less important inmates were chained to the floor in classrooms, with their ankle irons connected by long poles. Women and children were generally kept for only brief periods before being executed; men deemed to possess important information suffered longer interrogations. Interrogators deprived subjects of sleep, beat them with electric cords, and forced them to eat excrement. Their goal was to extract suitable confessions from the victims before they were killed. In his zealous quest to root out and destroy the enemies of the revolution, Duch kept meticulous records. Medical notebooks found at the facility suggest that staff performed experiments on prisoners. Some inmates were apparently bled to death; reports of vivisections on anesthetized captives for instructional purposes in other parts of the country give us reason to believe that similar operations may have been performed at Tuol Sleng. A substantial number of prisoners died from starvation, disease, or injuries suffered during interrogation before S-21’s administrators were able to execute them.28
Initially, the staff at S-21 buried their victims in an impromptu cemetery on the grounds of the prison. Soon, as the death toll mounted, more room was required. The Khmer Rouge designated a new killing field at Choeung Ek, nine miles southwest of Phnom Penh. The party sent its most hardened cadres to work at Choeung Ek: “men who were able to do anything.” Daily executions on the grounds ranged from a few dozen into the hundreds. Witnesses later remembered the stench of bodies, excrement, and urine that hung in the air. Once every few weeks, several trucks would arrive at Tuol Sleng. Doomed prisoners were loaded onto the vehicles one at a time. Upon arrival at the killing fields, guards shoved the victims, still bound and blindfolded, off the trucks and onto the ground. After referencing their names against lists, executioners separated the victims into small groups before leading them to shallow prepared ditches. “They were ordered to kneel down at the edge of the hole,” one of the executioners remembered. “Their hands were tied behind them. They were beaten on the neck with an iron ox-cart axle, sometimes with one blow, sometimes with two.” The ghastly scene repeated itself night after night beneath electric lights that illuminated the grounds.29
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF DEMOCRATIC KAMPUCHEA
In pursuit of total revolution, the Khmer Rouge overturned centuries of Cambodian history. It destroyed political and social structures throughout the country and transformed the nation into a forced labor camp in an effort to build Democratic Kampuchea into an agrarian powerhouse. The party’s goals were as ambitious as they were unrealistic. Ultimately, the Cambodian people would pay the price for the Khmer Rouge’s fantasies.
The hunger that followed the evacuation of the cities grew worse in the coming months and years. The shortfall in the rice crop was exacerbated by Pol Pot’s decision to continue exporting grain as a critical source of revenue. Revolutionary defense required a strong military, and a strong military did not come cheaply. However, the heart of the problem rested on a cruel irony: despite its centralized planning and punishing work regime, Democratic Kampuchea’s system of collective farms and slave labor was not as productive as the prerevolutionary order. The party took the most able-bodied Cambodians away from the crops to dig ditches and build irrigation works. Those who remained, virtual slaves, worked only hard enough to avoid punishment. Famine and disease, which plagued one-third to one-half of the nation, made matters worse. So, too, did the tendency of local party officials to exaggerate the size of their yields in order to avoid punishment at the hands of the regime. By some estimates, Democratic Kampuchea was only 60 percent as productive as prerevolutionary Cambodia.
As famine set in throughout the countryside, Pol Pot refused to question the party’s policies. “There are people in charge,” he announced, “who question the stance of the independence-mastery and self-reliance.” If the party solves this problem, “we will be able to advance.” The problem, according to party leaders, lay not in the Khmer Rouge sociopolitical model but, rather, in its implementation. The time had come for the Khmer Rouge to clean house.30
Over the course of 1976 and 1977, the Khmer Rouge devoured a large number of its top officials in a sweeping series of purges. The increasingly isolated and paranoid Khmer Rouge ruling clique feared that it was surrounded by conspirators. The first purge, sparked by economic troubles, focused on the Northern Zone and its head. Koy Thuon, minister of commerce, was the former chief of the Northern Zone, a relative moderate within the party, and a known philanderer. The party came to focus on him as the source of its economic problems. A series of bombings in February 1976 in Siem Reap, a city formerly under Koy Thuon’s control, compounded these suspicions. Theories explaining the explosions ranged from attacks from U.S. fighter-bombers, Thai warplanes, Vietnamese jets, or even Cambodian aircraft seeking to eliminate suspected mutineers in the city. In April, two grenades exploded outside the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, further escalating concerns of a possible rebellion. Soon afterward, Koy Thuon disappeared. The party later claimed that he had been placed under house arrest. He was accused of allowing “petty bourgeois” elements to “infiltrate” Democratic Kampuchea and thereby undermine the development of a strong Communist economy. The following January, Khmer Rouge leaders increased the charges to espionage for the CIA and hauled Koy Thuon off to S-21. By April 1977, 112 officials from the Northern Zone were incarcerated with him.31
While the Khmer Rouge manufactured imagined enemies at home, it created real ones abroad. After 1975, the uneasy partnership between the Cambodian revolutionaries and Hanoi quickly deteriorated. In the weeks following the fall of Phnom Penh, Khmer Rouge forces had attacked islands in the Gulf of Thailand that had been disputed with Vietnam. On Poulo Panjang, Cambodian soldiers massacred several hundred Vietnamese civilians and destroyed their villages. A Vietnamese counterattack retook the island, but it was too late to save the local inhabitants. While Cambodian marines fought for control of the territorial islands, Pol Pot issued orders to expel ethnic Vietnamese from the country and fortified Cambodia’s borders with its western neighbor. Although Hanoi and Phnom Penh soon papered over their differences, these early clashes were merely a hint of greater troubles to come. Sporadic skirmishes increased in 1977 and reached a symbolic crescendo in late April, when Khmer Rouge forces launched a series of raids against the Vietnamese province of An Giang. Marauding Cambodian soldiers slaughtered scores of villagers in a brutal display of the Khmer Rouge’s animosity toward its former patrons. Hanoi responded by launching retaliatory air strikes and mobilizing its forces along the border. Relations between the two countries worsened over the summer.32
On September 24, 1977, Phnom Penh launched another major attack, this time against Tay Ninh Province in Vietnam, massacring hundreds of civilians and laying waste to villages along the border. A Hungarian journalist based in Hanoi who visited the villages two days later described a macabre scene. “In house after house bloated, rotting bodies of men[,] women and children lay strewn about. Some were beheaded, some had their bellies ripped open, some were missing limbs, others eyes.” The carnage along the border seemed to confirm the worst rumors about the holocaust unfolding inside Democratic Kampuchea. Months later, the area still lay in ruins: a landscape of charred buildings, abandoned rice paddies, and “hundreds of graves.”33 As his troops battled the Vietnamese, Pol Pot told leaders in Beijing that the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Cuba were working together to attack Kampuchea. In addition to invasion plans, Pol Pot insisted, “They are also preparing to assassinate our leadership with high-accuracy guns and poison.” Hanoi hoped to take over all of Southeast Asia, he warned, and the peoples of Cambodia and Laos looked to Beijing for support in their efforts to resist.34
Hanoi responded by launching an incursion into Cambodia designed to push Khmer Rouge troops back from the border and exact revenge. Vietnamese columns struck into Cambodia and then quickly retreated. The Cambodian units that pursued them were slaughtered by another force of Vietnamese troops lying in wait. In December, Hanoi launched a second and larger invasion composed of infantry divisions, T-54 tanks, artillery, and armored personnel carriers. The vastly superior Vietnamese units butchered Cambodian forces and pushed deep into the country. With the situation on the battlefield appearing increasingly grim, the Khmer Rouge turned to the realm of diplomacy. On December 31, 1977, Phnom Penh radio announced the invasion as the start of a massive propaganda campaign against Hanoi. Having made a convincing show of military force, Vietnamese leaders elected to withdraw, hoping that Phnom Penh was now chastened. They would be disappointed.35
While Pol Pot and his comrades heralded the Vietnamese withdrawal as a major victory, the party leadership recognized that its forces had been overwhelmed on the battlefield. This failure sparked a second major round of purges, which focused on the Eastern Zone. The party had found its scapegoat for the nation’s poor economic performance in Koy Thuon; now it needed someone to blame for the setbacks in the border war. That person became So Phim, head of the Eastern Zone. The Vietnamese victories, Pol Pot concluded, had come as a result of Phim’s treachery: he had “opened the way” to the invaders. Sensing the danger, Phim warned his officers in March 1978 to be on guard. The party had arrested a number of loyal officials. By mid-April, more than four hundred Eastern Zone cadres had been arrested and taken to S-21. In May, Phnom Penh radio called on the nation to “purify our armed forces, our Party, and the masses of the people.” Phim still had faith in Pol Pot, however; he concluded that the spate of arrests must be the result of some mistake. As the purge continued, Phim sent envoys to Phnom Penh, all of whom were arrested. On May 25, the party sent a military force to attack the Eastern Zone and capture Phim. Still believing that the party had made some sort of mistake, Phim tried to arrange a meeting with Pol Pot. In answer, the party sent two boatloads of marines. The troops failed to capture Phim, but one managed to shoot him in the stomach. As government forces closed in, aircraft dropped leaflets proclaiming Phim a traitor. He was finally cornered at sunset on June 3. Knowing that the end had come, Phim shot himself. Soldiers then murdered his wife and children.36
Although it shifted blame away from the party center, the purge weakened the Khmer Rouge’s military forces in the east. Instead of a realistic military strategy, the party indulged in fantasies of miraculous victory. In May 1978, Pol Pot called on the population to prepare for the wholesale destruction of Vietnam:
One of us must kill thirty Vietnamese. . . . Using these figures, one Cambodian soldier is equal to 30 Vietnamese soldiers. . . . We should have two million troops for 60 million Vietnamese. However, two million troops would be more than enough to fight the Vietnamese, because Vietnam has only 50 million inhabitants. . . . We need only 2 million troops to crush the 50 million Vietnamese, and we would still have six million people left. We must formulate our combat line in this manner, in order to win victory. . . . We absolutely must implement the slogan of one against thirty.37
As the purges continued across the border, leaders in Hanoi decided that the time had come to deal with Democratic Kampuchea. In February 1978, they began building a Cambodian resistance organization that would aid in the fight against the Khmer Rouge and form the nucleus of a new regime in Phnom Penh. Most of the Cambodians who had trained in Hanoi in the 1950s and ’60s had returned to Cambodia and were murdered in the purges. Hanoi gathered those who had remained in Vietnam, along with escapees from Democratic Kampuchea. By the end of the spring, the Vietnamese had built a network of secret camps, many of which occupied former American bases. In April, Hanoi commissioned the First Brigade of the Cambodian exile army, the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation.38
As tensions between Vietnam and Cambodia mounted, Hanoi ramped up its rhetoric. In September, Vietnamese prime minister Pham Van Dong delivered a speech denouncing the regime in Phnom Penh. “They have turned the whole of Kampuchea into a hell on earth,” he announced, “a gigantic concentration camp, in which all elementary human rights, all ordinary activities of a society, all activities of family life, and all cultural and religious activities, are abolished.” Khmer Rouge policies amounted to “genocide” against the Cambodian people. But Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were supported by Beijing, which viewed the Khmer Rouge as “suitable instruments for carrying out its great-nation expansionist scheme” and hegemonic ambitions in Southeast Asia. The clashes along the Vietnamese border were part of Beijing’s strategy to undermine Hanoi, as was the systematic destruction of villages and the massacre of Vietnamese villagers.39 Beijing, in turn, claimed that Hanoi harbored hegemonic ambitions in Southeast Asia “in close coordination” with the Soviet Union. Beyond attacking Cambodia in a bid to “annex” that nation, Beijing said, Vietnamese forces were making incursions across the border into China and killing a number of Chinese citizens along the frontier. Hanoi had also “brutally persecuted and expelled” thousands of ethnic Chinese from Vietnam.40
In mid-December, the CIA warned that after Hanoi’s failed efforts to reach a “modus vivendi with the present regime in Phnom Penh” and after months of costly border clashes, Vietnamese forces were poised to attack. Considering the weakness of the Khmer Rouge and Beijing’s limited control over the situation, a report predicted, “the prognosis for the Pol Pot regime is not good.” Vietnamese troops “could easily be in Phnom Penh in a matter of days, if not hours.” The Chinese hoped to prevent an open war with Hanoi, but they were also determined to “resist further Vietnamese expansion in the region” and to block an increase in Soviet influence in Southeast Asia. The signing of the November 1978 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between Hanoi and Moscow exacerbated Beijing’s concerns. The PRC’s credibility as a Great Power in Southeast Asia was now on the line. Rising tensions were threatening to spark a war that could have “larger consequences outside the realm of Southeast Asia.” If clashes between Vietnam and Cambodia drew China into a conflict with Hanoi, the CIA report warned, Soviet leaders might feel the need to provoke “some sort of military confrontation on the Sino-Soviet border.” The risk of a larger war now came into view.41
On December 21, 1978, Hanoi launched its invasion. Vietnamese forces stormed into the northeastern highlands toward Stung Treng. Four days later, Hanoi’s main invasion force crashed across the border into Cambodia. In all, the invasion was made up of fourteen Vietnamese divisions with heavy armor and air support. Using the “open lotus” tactic employed in the 1975 fall of Saigon, Hanoi’s units penetrated deep into Cambodian territory, flowing around defensive fortifications to attack Khmer Rouge command posts. They then “blossomed out” and attacked entrenched units from the rear. The assault overwhelmed Pol Pot’s troops. But this was not simply a display of force or a punitive raid. Rather, the Vietnamese were intent on toppling the regime in Phnom Penh. While Hanoi denied reports of the invasion, arguing that the units fighting in Cambodia were members of the Salvation Front, Vietnamese forces drove deeper into the country. Hanoi installed a puppet regime in the “liberated” territory, under the name the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) and headed by Heng Samrin. Refugees from the Khmer Rouge terror filled the PRK’s ranks. The fall of the Khmer Rouge and the death of any semblance of a pan-Asian Communist movement had arrived.42
THE THIRD INDOCHINA WAR
On January 7, 1979, Vietnamese units entered Phnom Penh. Khmer Rouge defenses had crumbled before Hanoi’s onslaught, and Cambodia now lay open to the invaders. The Khmer Rouge leadership had fled Phnom Penh, along with thousands of their followers. An eerie silence hung in the air throughout a city that had once been home to millions. The capital’s streets were littered with rusted-out cars, abandoned appliances, broken televisions and typewriters, and worthless paper currency. The only signs of life appeared around a few factories and barracks ringed by barbed wire. Several hundred workers, hopeful that the violence was now really over, remained to welcome the victors. The staff of S-21, who also remained, were not so happy to see the Vietnamese. Two Vietnamese journalists, having noticed the stench of rotting corpses, discovered the prison. Inside, they found the bodies of fourteen recently executed prisoners. Some were chained to beds with their throats slit, the blood on the floor still wet. In room after room, they found shackles, tiny prison cells, and Tuol Sleng’s archive, which the staff had failed to destroy. As Vietnamese authorities burned the bodies and began to comb through the documents, the horrors of S-21 began to emerge. The wider world was slow to accept the reports emanating from occupied Phnom Penh. To many in the international community, Hanoi’s invasion bore the mark of a heavy-handed attempt to exert Vietnamese authority in the wider region. Rumors of Khmer Rouge atrocities seemed so outlandish that they were initially dismissed as propaganda.43
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was among the nations that viewed the Vietnamese invasion with concern. Beijing was growing increasingly worried about Hanoi’s willingness to assert itself in the region. Sometime in late November or early December, China’s leadership appears to have resolved to attack Vietnam. The war in Cambodia appeared to confirm the PRC’s worst fears. In the next months, Chinese leaders began making their case for war against Vietnam. On February 12, 1979, Beijing’s representative to the United Nations, Chen Chu, delivered a statement to the Vietnamese embassy in China and the UN Security Council detailing a list of grievances against Vietnam. Under cover of darkness or dense fog, Hanoi’s forces had infiltrated across China’s border, set land mines and roadblocks, and launched artillery attacks on Chinese positions along the frontier. Vietnamese troops had attacked villagers, border guards, and houses in a series of “rabid provocations” that had left scores dead. “The Vietnamese authorities must stop their military provocations against China,” Chen warned; “otherwise they must be held responsible for all the consequences arising therefrom.”44 Hanoi responded by accusing Chinese forces of more than two thousand incursions between 1974 and 1977 as part of a long history of “dark schemes” and encroachment into Vietnam. Beijing’s provocations increased dramatically, Vietnamese officials charged, over the course of 1978 and the early months of 1979. These raids, along with artillery barrages, had killed scores of Vietnamese. Indications that the Chinese were massing large troop formations along the border suggested that even larger clashes were about to come. In pursuing these “hostile designs” and “big-nation expansionist ambitions,” Hanoi warned, Beijing was risking “peace and stability in Southeast Asia and in the world.”45
On February 17, 1979, some six weeks after the fall of Phnom Penh, hundreds of heavy guns of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) unleashed a punishing barrage against Vietnamese forces along the border. “It is the consistent position of the Chinese government and the people that we will not attack unless we are attacked,” Beijing’s official Xinhua News Agency announced. “If we are attacked we will certainly counterattack. . . . We do not want a single inch of Vietnamese territory, but neither will we tolerate wanton incursions into Chinese territory.” Following these opening volleys, 85,000 Chinese soldiers swarmed across the forested hills along the border at twenty-six different points. The “human wave” attacks that had proved so successful against the Americans in Korea now collapsed into bloody chaos amid the tangle of tunnels and defense bunkers built by the Vietnamese along the frontier. Hidden Vietnamese machine guns directed a spray of fire toward the advancing Chinese ranks as they stumbled through minefields and fell victim to booby traps. After the heavy losses of their initial thrust, PLA commanders adopted a more methodical approach, advancing slowly behind heavy armor and seizing four provincial capitals. The Chinese began their assault on the last capital along the border, Lang Son, on February 27. For the better part of a week, PLA troops fought vicious street battles through the city. When the guns fell silent, much of the capital had been leveled and dead bodies lay strewn amid the wreckage. After overwhelming the Vietnamese defenders, Beijing sent in demolition teams to complete the destruction. PLA units destroyed schools, hospitals, government buildings, and bridges throughout the region in an effort to “teach Vietnam a lesson,” destroy Hanoi’s defenses along the border, and force Vietnamese troops out of Cambodia.46
On March 6, Beijing declared victory and began withdrawing its forces. However, the PRC’s losses (between ten thousand and twenty thousand killed) were at odds with this triumphal façade. Like the French and the Americans before them, the Chinese had received in Vietnam more than they bargained for. Hanoi also declared victory, though its thousands of casualties and the devastation in the northern provinces cast a shadow on this supposed triumph. Ultimately, there was no winner in the Third Indochina War—aside from, perhaps, those Cambodians who were saved from the Khmer Rouge.
In addition to the thousands killed, the war destroyed the last pretenses of pan-Asian Communist solidarity. Hanoi and Beijing were more fearful of one another than of the United States. Chinese leaders worried about Soviet ambitions as well. The following month, Beijing’s foreign minister, Huang Hua, warned UN secretary-general Kurt Waldheim that the world situation had grown increasingly tense. Washington had adopted a “defensive position while the Soviet Union . . . assumed an offensive posture.” Western leaders had naïvely placed their faith in superpower détente while Moscow had increased its power. The Soviets had “succeeded in lulling Europe . . . ; this super power had increased its activity at the flanks.” While Cuban forces (allied with the Soviet Union) fought in Africa, the Kremlin had its eyes on “Western Asia: Yemen, Afghanistan and Iran.” Likewise, Moscow was working through Hanoi to destabilize Southeast Asia in the hope of turning Indochina into a “Soviet military base.” He explained that the “Vietnamese were the Cubans of Asia but rather more dangerous.” The recent round of fighting in Southeast Asia was the result of increased Soviet aggression around the world. Ultimately, Huang warned, the Kremlin hoped to push into the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia before linking these two thrusts in the Strait of Malacca.47 There was no longer any doubt that Beijing recognized Moscow as the greatest threat to its interests. This transformation had fundamentally altered the dynamics of conflict in the Cold War world.
In April, CIA analysts painted a picture of Communist forces in disarray. The “Vietnamese are the big losers,” the report argued. “They are accepted as aggressors in Kampuchea; ‘hegemonists’ throughout Indochina. . . . [Most local Southeast Asian nations regard] them as [the] principal threat to individual and regional stability.” As Hanoi’s main supporters, the Soviets also appeared as a threat: “[T]hey suffer in Asian eyes both from close identification with Vietnam and failing to provide sufficient aid to their Vietnamese ally.” Moreover, “Chinese charges of Soviet ‘hegemonism’ appear credible.” The war with Hanoi had paid some dividends to Beijing. China had proved that it was no “paper tiger” and had shown itself willing to use force against Vietnam.48
With the Soviets, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Khmer Rouge at one another’s throats, the Americans emerged as the big winners. Less than a decade after its humiliating defeat in Vietnam, the United States found itself in a surprisingly strong geostrategic position in Asia.
THE SERIES OF COMMUNIST VICTORIES IN EAST ASIA had come to an end. The wave of mass violence that swept through the Indian Ocean rim between 1965 and 1979 killed more than six million people.49 The Indo-Asian bloodbaths of the middle Cold War also demolished global Communist solidarity. The Sino-Soviet split fueled much of the period’s violence, just as that same violence exacerbated the rift between Beijing and Moscow. Beijing’s growing animosity toward the Kremlin, the massacre of the PKI in Indonesia, the Sino-Soviet border clashes of 1969, and the PRC’s inability to control Hanoi helped convince Chinese leaders to seek rapprochement with Washington. Beginning with the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 and carrying through to the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979, leaders in both Washington and Beijing forged an unlikely partnership in a struggle against the Soviet Union and its allies. The wars in Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Cambodia tore the Communist world apart and laid waste to the Third World Communist project.
For a new generation of revolutionaries, secular radicalism had lost much of its appeal. As the Chinese, Cambodians, and Vietnamese buried their dead, a new constellation of revolutionary forces rose in the west, over the Iranian Plateau, across the plains of Mesopotamia, and along the shores of the Mediterranean. The Cold War era’s third great wave of killing had already begun.