River Of Time

by Jon Swain

  I still think of the hopelessness of those embassy days with sorrow and dread. I kept a diary, which is the basis of this account – a mixture of horror, absurdity, melodrama, human courage and betrayal. I wept when I wrote it and there are moments when I weep now. The people who were in that embassy will carry the pain to the end of their days; no words of mine can help their suffering.

  For the next eleven days, we foreigners were confined to the grounds of the embassy. Our sole links with the outside world were the embassy radio and the BBC which we listened to breathlessly. It quoted a Sihanouk spokesman in Paris as giving assurances that members of the Lon Nol regime would be judged in a humanitarian way. By the time we heard that broadcast many of them had probably already been killed, no doubt brutally, begging for mercy.

  Among the foreigners who had found refuge in the embassy were twenty-two journalists, fifteen members of the Red Cross, including the Scottish medical team, six United Nations officials and a handful of other nationalities, including Americans. The leader of these so-called ‘internationals’ was Paul Ignatieff, a tall distinguished-looking Canadian who was director of the UNICEF mission in Phnom Penh.

  He came to report to us in our quarters that Dyrac had made ‘pretty significant progress’ during two meetings with the Khmer Rouge authorities who called themselves the Comité de la Ville.

  ‘The Khmer Rouge he is dealing with are very intelligent, dedicated and serious people. We are a small problem to them and it is encouraging that they have taken time out to come and see us.’ However, Friday, our first full day in captivity, ended with the looting still going on, bangs and machine-gun fire from the direction of the airport, and a fire in the west of the city; perhaps houses burning. Darkness came with us feeling bewildered and nervous.

  On Saturday morning, Michael Daly decided he had to operate on a Cambodian soldier with an infected neck wound who had been smuggled into the compound. The Khmer Rouge refused him permission to use Calmette, the French hospital next door, the only one in the city still functioning under French medical staff unable to leave.

  The operation was carried out in the embassy dining-room. Daly laid the soldier out on a sideboard covered with a linen tablecloth. He used surgical instruments off a silver tray. A lampstand became a drip support. Children peered through a window. Very delicately, he probed the man’s wound. It did not look good. Halfway through, he shook his head at me. The man haemorrhaged. His life spurted onto the tablecloth and spread in a red pool over the floor. When he died, the room was stilled. Then his wife let out a shriek that cut through us like ice. Her tears mingled with his blood on the floor. A small burial party went out into the garden and dug a grave under the embassy wall. Michael took it particularly badly and blamed the Khmer Rouge for its refusal to let him collect blood transfusion equipment from the hospital next door.

  In the afternoon we moved into the French ambassador’s residence. The salle de réception, our old abode, was given over to the French staff of Calmette. They were being thrown out. Our new quarters were luxurious, littered with chandeliers, and sharp-eyed Ignatieff had liberated cases of Scotch and champagne from the cellar. For the first time since the city’s fall, we relaxed a little, drinking while Martin Bloecher of the Asian Christian Service, a West German, played on the piano. The alcohol went through us with a rush. Food was scarce, and two bowls of rice were all I had eaten for two days. We estimated that the embassy probably contained more than a million dollars’ worth of cash and gold smuggled in suitcases by the refugees. The Khmer Rouge had abolished money and reverted to the barter system. They had ransacked the banks. There was to be no place for money in the peasant revolution. But at least one was not averse to bribery. An Indian businessman said he had paid a black-clad guerrilla US$1000 not to execute him.

  That evening, I stood near the front gate. A column of fresh troops marched into the city and refugees, crushed by fear, hurried the other way, their children giggling as they pushed trolleys of luggage down the road. For the uncomprehending young, it was a fun day. Big explosions rocked the city again. Plumes of smoke ringed it like funeral pyres. Then the staff of Calmette arrived with more accounts of Khmer Rouge cruelty and madness. For two days, they said, they had operated ceaselessly on communist wounded, looking down the barrels of guns.

  ‘The Khmer Rouge threatened to kill me if I didn’t save the life of one man,’ said Bernard Piquart, a surgeon. Others had guns put to their heads and grenades dangled before their noses. Finally the Khmer Rouge threw everyone out, after smashing in the medicine cupboards with their rifle butts.

  All this time, hundreds of Cambodians were sheltering in the embassy; Pran was one of them. Since our arrival, we had managed to keep him safely with us as one of the ‘internationals’. We had also found shelter for some of the Cambodian journalists, interpreters and their families. But most were having to camp outdoors on the grass.

  I awoke the next morning to find the Scottish team playing bridge in the garden. There was the usual wisecrack about British phlegm in a tight spot. The banter did not last long. Word spread that the Khmer Rouge were reclassifying the embassy as an international regroupment centre for foreigners only. Implicit in its loss of diplomatic status was that it was no longer protected foreign territory and the Khmer Rouge soldiers could enter, without warning, at any time, and force the Cambodians out at gunpoint.

  The bridge game broke up in silence as Dyrac came to tell the Cambodians they should leave in the interests of self-preservation. He had made these poor people who had jumped over the wall welcome from the beginning. But now he was afraid; if they remained, the victorious guerrillas might force their way in to eject them. There might be uncontrollable violence and bloodshed inside the grounds. A lot of the credit for keeping the Khmer Rouge out thus far was due to François Bizot, the French ethnologist, who had lived in Cambodia for eleven years. He used his fluent Khmer to act as a go-between with the Khmer Rouge authorities headquartered in the old South Korean embassy across the boulevard. He was also frequently at the front gate to defuse tension whenever a soldier tried to come in, which was two or three times a day. It was a desperate game. The embassy was defenceless. But Bizot was a master of the technique of bluff. He was one of that rare breed of men who thrive in adversity. His kidnapping by the Khmer Rouge four years before had given him first hand experience of their methods and how to handle them. The mother of Hélène, his daughter, had left Phnom Penh for the countryside like everyone else. But he was too big a man to speak of personal tragedy amid such universal suffering.

  The news fell like a death sentence. Hundreds of Cambodians – as well as Vietnamese and Chinese who had lived their lives in Cambodia and regarded themselves as Cambodians – packed up a few belongings and prepared to leave. The odd thing was that so few of them expressed surprise at being ejected. They were numbed and resigned, and bleakly stared ahead. Here and there, some cried quietly. We shared our food with them and with heavy hearts watched them trudge towards the front gate – women, children, elderly people, friends. As they moved in a tattered column towards the Khmer Rouge soldiers waiting for them they did not look back – had they done so they would have seen many of us break down into tears. Suddenly it rained. It usually did at funerals.

  The Khmer Rouge had split up whole families – French husbands could stay, but Cambodian wives and children had to go unless they had French papers. Many wives and children of Frenchmen did not have passports, either because they had never bothered to apply or because they had married in a Cambodian ceremony under Cambodian law. There were also many common-law wives. All these the Khmer Rouge regarded as Cambodians.

  I turned round to find Doug Sapper, a decorated ex-Green Beret. ‘You know, Jon, I have been a fighting man all my life,’ he said. ‘But I am not built for this kind of stuff. I haven’t cried since I was ten years old.’

  One Cambodian couple I knew gave away their seven-month-old baby which would never survive the long march into the coun
tryside. I was too choked to look them in the face as they handed the boy to a Frenchwoman to be cared for. ‘He is my only baby. He is a beautiful baby,’ the wife sobbed, holding him in her arms for the last time and smothering his face with kisses of love and wet tears.

  The French had already collected all our passports and at the Comité de la Ville’s request were making lists of all the people in the embassy. We had to try to keep Pran with us. Sydney was insistent. Although his family was safely out of Cambodia, having been evacuated with the Americans, Pran had stayed to help Sydney cover the city’s fall for the New York Times. Now it had all gone horribly wrong and Sydney felt overwhelming responsibility for his Cambodian assistant, reinforced by the fact that Pran, with his loyalty and quickness of mind, had saved all our lives.

  We could think of only one solution: to forge a second British passport I had and give it to Pran as his own. Armed with this and a new identity, we imagined he could stay with us. That he looked Asian was not an insurmountable barrier, for he could perhaps pass himself off as a Nepalese holder of a British passport. There was a similarity of features. It was a chance but it might work.

  There was no time to lose. Using a razor-blade, Al Rockoff scraped off my picture and replaced it with one of Pran. For glue, we used a gummy mixture of water and rice. More difficult was erasing my name. In the end we had to compromise: Pran became John Ancketill Brewer – my first three names. It was quite a mouthful to pronounce for a Briton, let alone a Cambodian turned Nepalese; he walked around the building repeating ‘John Ancketill Brewer’ until he was reasonably word perfect. Duly doctored, his British passport, number C352165, issued by the British embassy, Saigon, on 11 December 1973, was handed in to the consulate and we settled down to wait and hope.

  A little while later, a group of solemn-faced embassy officials came to see us. Shaking their heads sadly, they gave back my passport, saying it was a good try but they had seen through the forgery immediately. They imagined the Khmer Rouge would too. What would Pran do in a confrontation? Would he be able to bluff it out? The next few hours were a nightmare as we agonised what to do. In the end Pran took the decision for us.

  People were still leaving the city. We could see them toiling down the road outside, bedraggled and broken. But the numbers were dwindling. Pran decided the longer he was identified with foreigners in the embassy the tougher time he would have afterwards justifying himself to the Khmer Rouge. He would leave with the next batch of Cambodians who were even then packing their things in preparation for departure and try to make it across the border to Thailand.

  We said goodbye to Pran, with whom we had shared the bitterest and most frightening minutes of our lives. Sydney gave him a lot of money, several thousand dollars. We gave him the rest of our food. He wore his chroma over his shoulders. There was a profound silence. There were tears. He joined the other Cambodians at the embassy gates. The gates swung back and Pran and the other Cambodians passed through, holding each other, trying to be brave, their belongings in the back of a Toyota pickup which they started to push down the road.

  He had taught us what friendship meant and when his luck ran out we had nothing to give him except money and food. Our abandonment of him confirmed in me the belief that we journalists were in the end just privileged passengers in transit through Cambodia’s landscape of hell. We were eyewitnesses to a great human tragedy none of us could comprehend. We had betrayed our Cambodian friends. We had been unable to save those who had saved us. We were protected simply because our skins were white. I felt ashamed.

  All this time, Prince Sirik Matak was a fugitive in the embassy. Ever since the day of Phnom Penh’s fall and his request for political asylum, he had been hiding in a tiny storeroom beneath the stairs in the consulate building. The French had told him to keep the door locked and to open it only to a coded series of knocks. The Khmer Rouge had condemned Matak to death as one of the ‘arch traitors’. Harbouring him was a huge risk, but Dyrac believed it was his duty as consul to protect the prince and a Cambodian general who had sought asylum at the same time. Dyrac rather naïvely counted on being able to keep the two men secret from the Khmer Rouge. But they now told him to hand over the prince and the general or they would come in and drag them out at gunpoint.

  With a heavy heart, Dyrac, accompanied by Bizot, went to the storeroom and knocked on the door in code. It opened and at once the two men were overcome by a stench of human faeces. The prince had been cooped up inside this airless chamber for three days. Unable to leave, he had used a drawer as a lavatory.

  He was stripped down to a singlet and shorts. Bizot explained the situation; Dyrac was too overcome to speak. At once, the prince stood up, threw open an attaché case on the desk before him, looked the Frenchmen in the eye and said, ‘I know what I must do.’ Bizot was afraid the prince was reaching for a pistol to shoot himself. Instinctively, he turned the key in the door, ‘Don’t do that,’ he said. But the prince took out only a beige T-shirt and a pair of trousers, which he slipped on without another word. Then, with great dignity, he said to the two Frenchmen, ‘I am ready now.’

  So Prince Sirik Matak walked out of the embassy and into the hands of the Khmer Rouge. He knew he was walking out to die. He was old and thin. But he walked erect, upright and strong like a proud tree. His lips were set firm, and as he passed the threshold he turned to Migot, a Frenchman guarding the gate, shook his hand, and said with a touching calmness, ‘I am not afraid. I am ready to explain and to give account of what I have done.’ The Khmer Rouge had come for him with rifles in an army lorry drawn up outside the gate. They looked at him with curiosity, but not evilly. The engine was throbbing and the rain was falling steadily. He got in and was driven away. The general, by contrast, a roly-poly man, was escorted out quaking with fear. ‘It’s very sad, but what else could we do?’ said Dyrac, who turned the prince out so as not to compromise our chances of survival. ‘Nous ne sommes plus les hommes’ – and I saw that Dyrac, who had been a prisoner of the Germans, and knew what it was like to suffer, was weeping and his face was dead white.

  No one knows the precise details of Sirik Matak’s fate and the Khmer Rouge are not telling. But that he died horribly is almost certain. It is reported that he was taken to a stadium about half a mile away and killed there along with other high-ranking officials of the Lon Nol regime.

  That night, Jean-Jacques Cazaux married his Cambodian girlfriend, Thani Pho, to give her French nationality in the hope of saving her skin. The consul backdated the marriage to 12 April, to trick the Khmer Rouge. I shall never understand why there were not many more such weddings, for there were plenty of French passports in the embassy. Our hearts were heavy. But we fêted the wedding with embassy champagne and a Dundee cake.

  Outside, the atmosphere was sinister. Headlamps ablaze, trucks of soldiers went up and down, searching for people hiding in the city. Gunfire crashed in the suburbs. We were witnesses perhaps to the deaths of thousands; the destruction of a way of life.

  In the morning, the 150 Montagnards also had to leave the compound. These hill people had fought for the Americans in Vietnam and Cambodia for ten years and this was the end of the road. They shouldered their pots and pans and buried their money and valuables. They harboured no illusions about the fate awaiting them.

  A mother screamed over the four-day-old baby she had to leave behind. She pressed jewellery into our hands and clasped us for comfort. Tears were running down our cheeks.

  It was not a lack of bravery that had beaten them. They were a lost people. A Frenchwoman sobbed over her five children and the Montagnard husband she could not follow. ‘My babies, my babies,’ she cried.

  Ragged, but proud, the Montagnards moved out.

  Now Khmer Rouge soldiers with guns moved in and searched the compound, as we had feared. They looked and poked and did not smile. They called all remaining Asians to check their nationalities and told them they, too, had to leave. Then they changed their minds, playing on our tattered nerves.


  Dyrac had raised the question of urgent evacuation with Paris. An intensely humble and decent man, he was often at loggerheads with some of the hard-headed French colons who had lost all their worldly possessions in Cambodia and despised his ponderous style. We owed him much.

  There were also those with whom we, who had abandoned our Cambodian friends, did not wish to pass the time of day. One was Shane Tarr, a twenty-four-year-old New Zealander and his Cambodian wife (who, if she was lucky, would be able to stay). He was full of self-righteous and nauseating revolutionary rhetoric and extolled the deeds of the ‘liberation forces’. That the Khmer Rouge had kicked two million people out into the countryside without making adequate provision to feed them; looted the city; ripped off watches, radios, cars; and executed people, did not trouble his conscience. ‘They are not looting. They are expropriating private property,’ he said. ‘The people give up their things willingly.’

  But when it came down to it he was as bourgeois and in need of creature comforts as the rest of us. Nearly always first in line for the food which we ate at 3p.m. – a soggy mixture of rice sprinkled with fragments of meat or vegetable – he complained bitterly when the air-conditioning stopped. And he did little work. He and his wife, Chou Meng, fraternised with the Khmer Rouge guards over the walls. The more paranoid among us worried they might be passing on our little secrets. He had a low opinion of the capitalist press; as we had of his hypocrisy. He was shunned.

  With no end to our internment in sight, the shortage of food was becoming serious. Reluctantly, Jean Menta, a Corsican adventurer, and Borella, the mercenary who had been keeping a low profile in case he was recognised, strangled and skinned the embassy cat. The poor creature put up a spirited fight and both men were badly scratched. A few of us ate it, curried. The meat was tender like chicken. It was clear that after a few more weeks of this we would be real savages. (We already were as far as one cat-loving woman from Yorkshire was concerned, for in that queer English way that sometimes puts animals before human beings she wrote a letter afterwards in which she condemned me as a ‘murderer’, and completely ignored the sufferings of the Cambodian people.)