River Of Time

by Jon Swain

  Rockoff, the photographer, came back from the southern sector, saying the Khmer Rouge there were grim-faced and seasoned soldiers. Their mudstained feet and uniforms showed they had not been pussyfooting around. They were disarming government soldiers, stacking all weapons into huge piles, throwing away the boots and marching the men out of the city to unknown destinations.

  It was 12.30p.m. We now felt secure enough to drive around the northern part of the city. A few of us went to the Preah Ket Mealea Hospital, a gloomy set of buildings five minutes from Le Phnom on the banks of the Mekong, where hundreds of people were being subjected to a hideous death. The doctors had not reported for work for two days. There was no one to treat the 2000 wounded and the plasma bottles and saline drips were emptying one by one.

  People were bleeding to death by the dozen in the corridors. The floors of the wards were caked with blood. The hot, fetid air was thick with flies – the sight of these swarming over the living and the dead, over the anguished faces of those who knew they were doomed to die, churned my stomach and made my mind reel. I asked a distraught nurse for an explanation. She said she had phoned the doctors. ‘They say they are coming in a short time, but they are not here yet. Maybe they are afraid.’

  These scenes of horror wiped out the work of the Scottish team who had filled a downstairs ward with sophisticated equipment and brightened it with children’s pictures.

  Upstairs was worse. The dead and the dying lay in pools of their own blood. The long corridor outside the operating theatre was literally awash with it. A man and his wife had died in each other’s arms. A few feet away, an old man was pushed hard up against the wall, his intestines tumbling out like laundry. Further down the corridor was a soldier with arm, head and stomach wounds – a Khmer Rouge who had somehow been brought in for treatment.

  A single harassed doctor fussed about impotently, stethoscope around his neck. It was easy to see that, but for our presence, he would already have gone home. Through fly-blown lips, the Khmer Rouge croaked: ‘Water, water, please get me some water.’ We could not give him any because of his stomach wound.

  Hospital workers with scrubbing-brushes and bowls of soapy water started to wash the blood off the floor. They brushed between the legs of the corpses and sent the red mixture splashing down the open lift shaft. With one accord, Sydney, Al, Pran and I sloshed our way through the blood to the exit and left.

  It was one o’clock, the hottest time of the day. We emerged into the oven-like heat to find people edging inside the buildings and running away from the front gate. There was a distinct mood of danger. We drove cautiously through the hospital grounds towards the street, but before we could reach it, there came a rush of footsteps. Half a dozen Khmer Rouge soldiers, bristling with guns, stopped the car, dragged us out and shook their rifles at us. They were boys, some perhaps twelve years old, hardly taller than their tightly held AK47 rifles. Their ignorance and fanaticism made them super-deadly.

  Their leader’s eyes were coals of hate. He was screaming and ranting, foaming at the mouth. He held his pistol against my head, finger firm on the trigger. My hands were high in the air and I was paralysed with fear. My camera, notebooks and other belongings littered the ground where the Khmer Rouge had thrown them. The seconds ticked by. Pran uttered some soothing words in Khmer. Then I was able to rejoin the others on their side of the car. A chastened, terrified group, we moved under escort to a captured APC in the street outside.

  Sydney, Al and I were forced at gunpoint into the back of the APC. The Khmer Rouge told Pran he was free to go; they were only after the ‘rich and the bourgeoisie’. He insisted on staying, as did our driver, Sarun. At the last moment, just before the top hatch and rear door were bolted, Pran talked his way inside and joined us. We sat in the gummy heat and waited for them to toss in a grenade and finish us off.

  We rode through the streets and stopped to pick up two more prisoners, Cambodians in civilian clothes. The big one with a moustache and a crew-cut wore a white T-shirt and jeans. The smaller man was wearing a sports shirt and slacks. Both were officers and quite as frightened as we were.

  The big man was second-in-command of the government navy. He tried to pass us his wallet with his ID card. We whispered that it was no use. Finally he hid it in the back of the APC among some oily rags. The small man put an ivory Buddha in his mouth as a talisman.

  Sydney also had a talisman; a crumpled bit of yellow cloth, an artificial rose that had been a gift from his daughter a couple of weeks before. ‘As long as I’ve got this, we will be all right,’ he said, forcing a thin smile. I did not share his faith.

  I was still young enough to believe that death, even in Cambodia, happens mostly to others. Now I was faced with death myself. I had coped with it a number of times on the battlefield, but this was different. To have my head blown off by a teenage soldier at close range when the war was over seemed a ridiculous, ineffectual and unfair ending to life. I longed to be told it was all make-believe. I cursed myself for ever having left the security of the hotel to see the casualties in the hospital and wished that the clock could be turned back a couple of hours. The same emotions must have run through the minds of all those other journalists in the minutes before they were murdered by the Khmer Rouge.

  We were prisoners inside the APC for about twenty-five minutes, sweating like pigs in the heat. But time no longer existed; I was already beginning to feel remote from the world outside. I thought of the wastefulness of my life, the people I loved and would never see again. I prayed softly. I know that I wanted desperately to live but I am struck by our lack of protests or resistance. Of course, they would have done no good. The young Khmer Rouge had eyes as cold as stone and were determined to kill us. We were condemned men. Our deaths would be squalid. But surely we should not have gone like lambs to slaughter.

  The top hatch unfolded with a clang and a man pointing a gun at me screamed, ‘We are not Vietnamese. We don’t like Vietnamese.’ It was an odd thing to say. I had been speaking in French only to establish that I was not American. Perhaps he thought I had been talking in Vietnamese. Evidently he harboured the traditional Cambodian hatred for their Vietnamese neighbours.

  The wretched minutes ticked by. At 1.40p.m., the APC shuddered to a halt. Bolts slid back. The rear door was opened. I saw water and a pair of Khmer Rouge soldiers, pointing rifles, beckoning us out. We stared at one another. We were sure this was journey’s end; we would be executed and our bodies tossed into the Mekong.

  Eyes blinking, we stepped into the sunlight. Immediately Pran began to talk. He talked and talked. He spoke softly and firmly, telling the Khmer Rouge that we were neutral journalists, there to witness their historic ‘liberation’ of Phnom Penh and Cambodia. By and by, the tension went out of the air. We were ordered to stand across the street from the river and wait. We drank water from a bucket and watched people stream out of the city up Route Five.

  We assumed they were refugees from the war returning to their homes now the fighting was over. In fact, the Khmer Rouge had issued orders for the entire city to be evacuated. They had also started to loot, a process that continued for days. As we stood there, guerrillas drove past in cars heaped high with cigarettes, soft drinks and wines. Few knew how to drive: the crash of gearboxes was the prevailing sound. In other circumstances, their efforts would have been hilarious; now they were grotesque: the peasant boys with death at the tips of their fingers were behaving like spoilt brats. They seemed every bit as irresponsible as the Cambodian army they had defeated.

  At 3.30 a man of authority ordered us to be released, and most of our belongings were returned. The Khmer Rouge kept the car, my notebooks, films and hotel key. We were too tired to argue. Hitching a ride with two Frenchmen, we drove straight to the Ministry of Information, where we understood there was to be a news conference. We left behind the two Cambodian prisoners. I remember them standing limply on the riverbank, beseeching looks in their eyes. They knew they were condemned to die, and there was
nothing we could do. We made a feeble sign of pity and abandoned them to their fate.

  Talking his way into our APC was a singular act of courage by Pran. His grim loyalty to Sydney, our inability to save him later and his miraculous survival is, of course, now well documented in The Killing Fields. Inevitably, I have not seen him for a while, but whenever I have, it has been in Cambodia and a celebration of an old comradeship born in those minutes of extreme danger when we were very close to death. I owed him my life that day.

  At the Ministry of Information, the scene was menacing and tense, markedly different from the morning. The hardline Khmer Rouge had now taken over. Dara, the flashy early leader, was there, but he had been disarmed and was a semi-prisoner. The cocky expression had vanished and he looked tired and uneasy. Fifty prisoners were lined up in front of the building. They included Lon Non – Marshal Lon Nol’s younger brother and one of the most notoriously corrupt, hated members of the old regime. (I learned later that he was behind Dara’s far-fetched attempt to seize power.) There were several generals and the director of Long Boret’s cabinet. Of the prime minister himself, there was not yet a sign.

  An unidentified youngish man in black, clearly a Khmer Rouge leader, bawled through a bullhorn at the prisoners, dividing them into three groups – military, political and civilians.

  The group of guerrillas training their guns on them were tough, strong-looking, in jungle green, soft Mao hats and Ho Chi Minh sandals. Each was a walking arsenal. To us they looked like soldiers from another planet, as vicious as the group who had seized us that afternoon. Their leader talked to the prisoners. He told them there were only seven ‘arch traitors’ and the others were not captives, but surrendered people. He pledged there would be no reprisals.

  As he talked, a squad of soldiers, no more than fourteen years old, crouched in combat positions among the trees, menacing us and the prisoners with their guns. Some were digging weapon pits. Then three old ladies from the Cambodian Red Cross came forward and offered their co-operation. They too might have come from another world, for they were dressed up in their finery – silk sarongs and blouses, silver belts, jasmine in their hair – as if for a party.

  The Khmer Rouge leader made a short statement. He said he represented the armed forces and wished to thank all the ‘people in the world who love peace and justice’, including the American people, for their support. Asked if Americans would be killed, as the US embassy had predicted, he said: ‘We respect prisoners of war. That is our military position.’ But he did not know what the Khmer Rouge political leaders planned. He was a soldier whose job was to secure the city. The politicians would come later. As he spoke, gunfire still rattled through some quarters.

  A few minutes later, a black Citroën pulled up and Long Boret got out, his eyes puffy and red, his face empty of expression. When we asked him how he was, he muttered a short, incoherent sentence. His thoughts were elsewhere. Dazed, legs wobbling, he surrendered to the Khmer Rouge and joined the line of prisoners. I could not fail to admire his courage.

  In the hours that followed, the Khmer Rouge killed Long Boret and the other officials whom we saw surrender at the Ministry of Information, probably with extreme brutality.

  Without warning, Khmer Rouge soldiers forced their way into our quarters at the Hôtel Le Phnom and harshly told André Pasquier of the Red Cross to empty the place within half an hour. Wild soldiers rushed through the Scottish medical team’s operating theatre in black hordes, demanding cartons of medicines. They rummaged through the cupboards. They drank the bottles of intravenous serum. One of the nurses stripped a wounded government soldier of his uniform and put it roughly over a dead man. Otherwise the soldier would have been shot.

  Pandemonium gripped the hotel. People ran in all directions. What did it mean? Where would they go? The consensus among the foreigners was to seek the security of the French embassy, half a mile down Monivong boulevard. The Cambodian refugees in the garden had no such choice. Gathering their cooking pots, they set out for the countryside. So, too, did the hotel staff who clutched imploringly at our arms. ‘Don’t abandon us.’ Their words come back to haunt me now, for most of them are dead.

  It was time to say goodbye to the hotel. Forgetting all thoughts of getting into my room and collecting my belongings – the Khmer Rouge had taken my key anyway – I joined the trail of refugees on the road outside. As we headed along the boulevard towards the embassy, a fresh battalion of troops marched Indian-file into the town. They were well-armed, disciplined, marching with the swagger of victors; soft-faced boys with malevolent eyes which stared straight ahead.

  The French embassy was surrounded by a high wall. As dusk closed in on this Thursday, 17 April, people rushed to climb over and into the embassy. In a few seconds, they were scrabbling for a foothold, hanging by their fingertips, passing over their children and belongings in a mad stampede. An Indian fell and broke his leg in the crush. All the while, people were streaming out of the city in their thousands. The darkening street was thick with humans. Abandoned cars, discarded shoes, littered their path.

  An unthinking madness was taking over. In its zest for revolution, the Khmer Rouge soldier-peasantry was not embarking on the bloodbath predicted by the Americans. Instead, it was emptying the city of its people. There clearly was a discipline: a cold-blooded discipline which said the Khmer Rouge new order was the only one; that anything in its way had to be eliminated. It was not a discipline which respected human life or property.

  Fernand Scheller, chief of the UN Development Project (UNDP) in Phnom Penh, told me, ‘What the Khmer Rouge are doing is pure and simple genocide. They will kill more people this way than if there had been fighting in the city. The next rice crop is not until December and anyway, without outside help they can grow only enough to feed thirty per cent of the population.’ He had forty-two people standing by in Bangkok to come in. ‘I am ready to help them – not them, the people. What is going on now is an example of demagoguery that makes one vomit.’

  Scheller nearly wept when his Cambodian family and workers were banished with everyone else to the countryside. ‘I have spent the whole day betraying my friends,’ he said.

  I awoke the next morning to find the Khmer Rouge were tipping the patients out of the hospitals like garbage into the streets. Bandaged men and women hobbled past the embassy, holding each other up. Wives pushed wounded soldier husbands down the street on wheeled hospital beds, some with serum drips and blood plasma bottles still attached. In five years of war, this was the greatest caravan of human misery I saw. The entire city was being emptied of its people: the old, the sick, the infirm, the hungry, the orphans, the little children, without exception. There were an estimated 20,000 wounded in Phnom Penh’s hospitals at the end of the war. The Khmer Rouge must have known that few could survive the trek into the countryside; one could only conclude that they had no humanitarian instincts.

  Murray Carmichael, the Scottish anaesthetist, said three-quarters of the medical team’s work had been destroyed. Much of its time had been spent treating patients badly operated on, confined to bed, thin and wasting away. ‘We taught them to walk again, put them on traction and got some unity into their bones. The Khmer Rouge told them to leave in ten minutes. These people have no compassion, no humanity. They are just here to do it their own way and it’s nasty.’ The team had performed only one operation under the new regime, saving a man who had been shot through the throat. ‘Then we had to abandon him.’

  It seemed that only the French embassy would remain, and for how long? Already about 1500 people were sheltering in it and more refugees were still jumping over the wall. We foreigners were relatively well-off having taken over the function room. The air-conditioning and water supply were still working, but the large and elegant compound outside was choked with hundreds of Cambodians, Vietnamese and Chinese, camping like gypsies on the grass, hungry and afraid. Many French families were living in cars which they had driven into the grounds; there were about one h
undred of these makeshift homes. The spacious gardens of tamarinds and palms were black with people; smoke rose from scores of wood fires; the embassy was like one giant camp site. Dogs and children were everywhere. The embassy gates were now locked, but still crowds tried to enter.

  Jean Dyrac, the French consul, had been on the radio to Paris all night seeking instructions. I have seldom seen so much anguish on a man’s face as he constantly turned people away from the gates. A tricolore hanging limply from a pole spelt out the message that the embassy was sovereign French territory. But what did French sovereignty matter amidst this revolutionary mayhem and the dumb power of the gun?

  Then the water in the compound ran out. Khmer Rouge soldiers were outside the gates demanding to come in. One man entered, dressed in black, shook hands with Dyrac and went inside the chancery. There was a lot of sporadic shooting in the city. The Khmer Rouge seemed to be using more ammunition than they did during the war. Soldiers drove up and down outside the embassy in half-tracks, peering through its walls. A US Phantom made two passes overhead, presumably on a photo-reconnaissance flight which we hoped would not provoke Khmer Rouge retaliation.

  Each had his tale of terror to tell about the clearing of the city. The people in Adolphe Lesnik’s building spent a hair-raising night hiding in the darkness from drunken soldiers who had invaded the car park and were playing with the cars like delinquent children, tooting horns, fiddling with the lights.

  An hour before dawn, five black-clothed women forced their way in a frenzy into the building, firing into the air, and gave everyone ten minutes to get out. When the deadline expired, they fired another burst through the window and pointed their rifles at Lesnik’s stomach. He understood and made for the door. One of the women snatched his watch and indicated she wanted the keys to all cars. ‘It was all done by sign language, fingers and guns,’ he said. In forty years in Asia, Lesnik, the director of an Anglo-French tobacco company, had been an unwilling witness to much human misery. In the 1930s he had seen the Japanese war in Manchuria. In World War Two he had been imprisoned in China. In 1947 he was in Shanghai when it fell to the communists. Now he said, ‘This is enough. I’m going home to Montpellier.’