IN 1975, A new country was born, Democratic Kampuchea, and with it, a new society. The Khmer Rouge were going to return Cambodia to the ancient glories of the lost Khmer empire. Under the guise of a radical communist revolution the construction of a massive irrigation system was to be the first step to a great agrarian society based on rice production.
The Khmer Rouge drove the population hard; they were treated as little more than slaves. In some areas the people were given just five hours rest from labouring in the fields. The work was broken up with three meals of rice gruel that lasted twenty minutes, little more than a few grains of rice in soupy water. In the evenings they would be made to attend political lectures where they were told of the glories of their new revolution.
As Democratic Kampuchea turned the clocks back there were to be no towns, no money, no cars, no religion, no holidays, no schools. In the new society all traces of individuality were to be eradicated. Families were split up, men and women were segregated, the women had to cut short their hair and everyone had to wear black. There was to be no love except love for the Organisation and the nation, and all marriages had to be approved–many were forced. Aside from China, communication with the outside world was severed. The country was plunged into a world of surveillance and fear. Those in any way connected with the old regime were herded into trucks and taken to be executed. The middle classes and the educated from the former regime were singled out together with teachers, students, doctors, engineers, lawyers, professors, bankers, dancers and businessmen. Children were separated from their parents, indoctrinated and taught to spy on their mothers and fathers, reporting back to the cadre with information about what their family had been talking about. Then their parents would disappear.
Cambodia was to be truly independent and self-sufficient. All things foreign were forbidden. In the empty cities, air conditioners, refrigerators, fire engines, ambulances, television sets were all branded ‘reactionary’ or ‘alien’ and were gathered from all over Phnom Penh and tossed into ditches or piled up and left to bake in the heat.
It was all part of Pol Pot’s vision. With one great leap, a classless society was to arise from the ashes of the old. Cambodia was to become the world’s most progressive and radical communist revolution. And the way that this was to be achieved was simple: murder, on a scale never before seen in history. A prison network spread like a cobweb across the country, centred at the headquarters of ‘S-21’, and at its helm was Comrade Duch.
It had been exactly five years since Duch had been in Phnom Penh. Now in 1975, the grounds of his old lycée had been planted with coconut trees and vegetables. The deserted sports field was planted with sugar cane. Down beside the river the temple which he had stayed in as a student no longer echoed with the rhythmic chant of the monks, their quarters abandoned. He wandered about the streets and explored some of the buildings. Now he could go anywhere he wanted. It was quiet. In one building he came across a book entitled La Torture, by Alec Mellor, detailing the emergence of torture in modern France. Duch took it with him. The book was later kept in the room used for the interrogation of foreigners at Tuol Sleng.
While Duch walked through the streets of the capital, Sokheang crossed the small river from Laos into his liberated homeland. After a journey by boat down the Mekong they eventually arrived at a new camp, known as B-20, which had been designated as a kind of assembly point and liaison office for returning Khmer Rouge supporters. They had been classified as ‘the group of intellectuals’. They were then moved to B-16. All the camps in the area came under the direct supervision of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, producing food, and providing logistical support as well as stockpiling ammunition, salt and prahok, or fish paste. Sokheang’s group was comprised of students and diplomats as well as ministers of what had been the resistance–the Khmer Rouge’s political and diplomatic front. They had returned from Czechoslovakia, France, East Germany, Yugoslavia and North Korea. They were told to take new revolutionary names. Sokheang took the name Comrade Yuth, from Prayuth, which means combat.
After several days of whispered speculation about their future they were called to a meeting. Comrade Phum addressed the group. He explained the political situation to them, how Phnom Penh had been taken, the evacuation and what was happening throughout the country. What fate awaited them, however, remained a mystery–they were told nothing. Comrade Phum suggested that they go to the remote province of Preah Vihear. They all agreed.
They had to wait for several days before enough cars could be assembled for the journey. By the time the convoy been arranged, Sokheang was suffering cold sweats and fevers. He had come down with malaria.
They began the journey to Preah Vihear in the afternoon when the heat was at its most unforgiving. The fields were deserted and the road virtually empty as they rumbled slowly through the scorched landscape. He was shocked. ‘Everywhere I looked I saw the devastation left by the war,’ he said. But he was too sick to take much in. When they got to Kompong Thom at dusk, there wasn’t a soul to be seen. Sokheang retired with a raging fever. The following morning they continued north to Preah Vihear province. Eventually they came to the small town of Rovieng, their final destination.
Rovieng had been liberated earlier in the war. It was an area of ‘base people’ and considered something of a model region. Here Sokheang and his comrades were well received. Soon after, Sokheang had become delirious and had to be hospitalised. He was taken to the zone hospital where he was kept for just over a month, until he had made a complete recovery.
The young nurses were supervised by older, more experienced personnel, ‘and the food was better than at the cooperatives,’ he said. There was a large stock of western medicine and even traditional massage for patients. It was very different from hospitals in other parts of the country, where staff, most of whom were teenagers, had little or no training. While peasant children carried out operations, real doctors tilled in the fields, desperately trying to conceal their identities.
Molyda Szymusiak, who wrote a book of her experiences at the time, depicted a hospital she was brought to in Battambang province as a dark room full of the dying that reeked of decay and excrement. She described how a swollen corpse was moved from a bamboo bed to make way for her. The day nurse, a child, administered the same injection of an unspecified fluid to all the patients regardless of their complaint. On being given her shot, Molyda immediately felt her heart race and she fell unconscious. The Khmer Rouge doctors had been centrally appointed and displayed a cruel indifference towards the sick. Cures seemed experimental. Patients were bombarded day and night with loud revolutionary music. The smell of death hung in the air like a pall as corpses were buried in shallow graves nearby.
After being discharged from hospital, Sokheang was dispatched with several others to work alongside the ‘base people’ in the fields. They also made trips to the mountain to look for bamboo and timber. Life was hard, ‘but the people were very good with us,’ he said. The local people weren’t exactly sure who these people in new revolutionary clothing were. And no-one dared ask. They knew by the way they spoke they weren’t tomada or ordinary. ‘We later learned that the people were informed that we were guests of the Organisation,’ said Sokheang.
Sokheang made a strong impression on his new hosts. He was more vocal in his support than the others and spoke up during political seminars and in the self-criticism sessions. So forthright and determined was he that he earned the name Chiv thos, meaning a new kind of person, a revolutionary of the future.
We had returned to Sokheang’s balcony, le salon where, with supplies of cigarettes and Thai beer, we talked into the night. ‘There are two times in my life that I can remember that I was very, very happy,’ he began. ‘The first time was when I got my first diploma, my first degree. The second time was when I learned about the victory of April 17. Because I thought that this was a beginning. So what I had dreamt of before could be realised. ‘My worst moment during Khmer Rouge time was at the beginning, when I had just arrived.’ He had expected to go directly to Phnom Penh to be reunited with his family, believing that they would have a good life together, serving the people and the revolution. But instead of being able to put to use what he had learned abroad, he was put to work as a labourer.
He licked the length of his cigarette and lit up. ‘I was so upset when I arrived, faced the reality of the revolution,’ he said. ‘I mean the whole thing was not like I expected when I was Paris or Beijing.
‘I realised that our expectations were wrong, completely wrong. I had no idea where my family was.’ He slapped his thigh. ‘Of course we were prepared to face difficulties. But they sent us to the jungle! This was the first thing that was unacceptable. This wasn’t what we were led to believe would happen, at least they have to put us in a safe place with sufficient food with everything, with . . .’ he rubbed his thumb and forefinger repeatedly as if reaching for the words, ‘the minimum necessary.’ He only learned of the evacuation of the towns and cities on his trusty radio. ‘My heart sank when I heard this.’ They were now under the direct control of the Organisation and they knew that they had to be careful. He never dared ask to be reunited with his family. I asked him why not.
‘Because we tested the atmosphere . . .’ he said. ‘The atmosphere in each camp was quiet, like a cemetery. People always worked quietly on the fields.’
Why didn’t he feel free to talk since they were so-called ‘guests’ of the revolution?
‘At every step we had to be very, very careful.’
Although they lived a privileged life in comparison to the majority of the population, although not explicit, the warning signs were all around, in the tone of voice, in the absence of any rules or regulations. The atmosphere was tense and intimidating. ‘It took me more than a year to come to terms with it and let it go. But I still believed that it couldn’t go on like that for ever,’ said Sokheang, ‘that it would change one day.’ But it was too late, the borders were sealed and everyone was being closely watched.
Eight months after his arrival in Cambodia, Sokheang was told to gather his belongings. The Organisation had ordered him to go to Phnom Penh.
Back in Paris others felt the fear too. A year after the Khmer Rouge victory Ho, Sokheang’s old friend from his student days in France, was still working at the embassy there. Missing his wife who had already returned, he began to make the necessary arrangements to go back to Cambodia. But he was unsure. ‘I couldn’t make up my mind at first,’ he said one afternoon in Phnom Penh. ‘I didn’t have any news from her and had many questions in my mind.’ Already there were a few refugees in Paris, ‘and there were rumours’.
There were about forty people on board the otherwise empty plane. As it came to a halt on the airstrip he peered through the window. It was deserted. The carcasses of Lon Nol planes lay where they had been destroyed. Two cadres from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs appeared to meet him. ‘It was a very cold and oppressive atmosphere,’ he said. ‘They wore black and immediately I knew there was something wrong.’ Their passports were taken from them and thrown in a bin in front of them. Then, he said, ‘I felt it was too late.’
Another group who arrived at the airport were taken directly to Tuol Sleng because, declared Ieng Sary, the Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister, they ‘had come back from outside the country and thus are separated from the movement’.
Just as the stone faces of the great protector, Jayavarman VII, had looked down upon his subjects, the faceless Organisation monitored the population of Democratic Kampuchea. Through fear and secrecy the Khmer Rouge bound the people in mute obedience. One by one, as they toiled away in the fields, they began to disappear. And some of them were sent to Phnom Penh, the domain of the Higher Organisation, and to Comrade Duch.