REGIONAL WAR—THE AMERICAN PRESENCE
To see the war in Southeast Asia as having occurred in South Viet Nam or Cambodia or North Viet Nam or Laos leads to conclusions which are necessarily untrue. To see the war in Cambodia as having spilled out of South Viet Nam is equally erroneous.
In January 1959 Hanoi directed its army to establish operation bases at Tay Ninh on the Cambodian border and in the Central Highlands east of Ratanakiri Province. By May large-scale infiltration forces were tramping out the Ho Chi Minh Trail in eastern Cambodia. By August 1960, NVA assassination teams were killing 100 to 200 local officials in South Viet Nam each month. The figure rose to between 300 and 350 each month in 1961 and to 1,000 each month in 1962. That element of the war also spilled onto Khmer territory.
1962 marked the beginning of the full-scale NVA buildup on Cambodian territory. This early heavy buildup was characterized by the bribing of local officials, local and national military leaders, and the royal family. Sihanouk, who, like Diem in South Viet Nam, would stand for no internal opposition, was not only acquiescent to Hanoi, but clearly accepted them as partners. With that acceptance, however, came the de facto forfeiture of Cambodian territory and the lessening of control over the population in areas where the Royal Cambodian Army continued to maintain a presence.
Relations between the United States and Cambodia deteriorated throughout the 1950s. In 1959, out of Bangkok, Thailand, a right-wing coup attempt was foiled by Sihanouk’s secret police. The Prince implicated the American CIA, resulting in Sihanouk’s increased suspicion of the United States, Thailand and South Viet Nam. The Prince severed relations with Bangkok in 1961 and with South Viet Nam in 1963. In November 1963, after the death by assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, Sihanouk, declaring that the CIA was targeting him next, ordered the U.S. AID office in Phnom Penh closed. At that time, Cambodian defense minister Lon Nol and economic advisor Son Sann advised Sihanouk to proceed with caution and to allow the Americans to remain.
On 17 March 1964 the American National Security Council decided to allow the U.S. Air Force to retaliate against NVA/VC sanctuaries in Cambodia. This resulted in incidents, charges and countercharges between the two countries. On 10 April 1965 four RVNAF (Republic of Viet Nam Air Force) jets, strafed two Cambodian villages, leading Sihanouk to break diplomatic relations with the United States and to establish formal relations with North Viet Nam and with the National Liberation Front (NLF), the political arm of the Viet Cong.
Attempting to cover his flanks, Sihanouk, in October 1964, entered into a mutual declaration with Red China in which the Chinese vowed to work tirelessly to strengthen Sino-Khmer friendship. Sihanouk received a military assistance agreement and China’s affirmation of Cambodia’s territorial integrity (that is, lands in the Northeast that the North Viet Namese had claimed in 1954 for the KVM). In exchange, he gave his formal agreement to allow NVA/VC forces full access to and use of eastern Cambodia.
When U.S. bombing slowed traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, Zhou Enlai personally asked Sihanouk to allow materials to be landed at Sihanoukville (Kompong Som) and to be shipped overland to Communist forces along the border. This route became known as the Sihanouk Trail. A tacit side agreement gave one third of all arriving supplies to the Prince.
Over the next few years a Chinese company, Haklee, trucked over 22,000 metric tons of arms and ammunition up Highway 4 from Kompong Som to Phnom Penh, or along coastal Highway 2 via Bokor to the VC/NVA border sanctuaries. Exactly how much was handled by Sihanouk’s army, still called neutral, is not known.
During 1965, the Krahom set up new guerrilla bases next to the North Viet Namese sanctuaries in Ratanakiri, Mondolkiri, Stung Treng and Kratie provinces. Yet, citing “lax protection and ambiguous support,” the KK split with the NVA and established a series of independent bases. By 1966 Krahom literature was calling for total social revolution. Historian Ben Kiernan reports the following translation of KK leaflets:
Today’s society is corrupt and won over by the cult of the individual, which must be abolished at all cost. We live in a sick society....All brave and honest children...must join the revolutionary party in order to move the country toward Communist socialism....The masses live in misery, bled by [the capitalists]....The aim of the revolution is the liberation of the people....To succeed it is necessary to resort to force.
During this period the war hit Cambodian Mountaineers en masse, bringing about the March of Tears. Villages were burned, rice destroyed, bronze gongs stolen, livestock slaughtered, or taken. Thousands of Jarai, Mnong, Rhade and other tribal people, fleeing the onslaught of the North Viet Namese and the growing bands of KVM and KK, marched out of Ratanakiri and Mondolkiri provinces—a long, starving, destitute procession, heading into the southern Srepok Forest of Kratie Province. There they were forced to halt because the area further south was heavily populated with long-established Khmers. Where they stopped was where the indigenous South Viet Namese rebels, the Viet Cong, had long-established sanctuaries.
In the wake of Allied operations in War Zone C, a territory of South Viet Nam west of Saigon near the border, these same Viet Cong sanctuaries were rapidly expanding. The destitute Mountaineers became the first massive refugee movement in Southeast Asia to be ignored.
In the strange turn of the political process, President Lyndon Johnson, on 21 December 1965, ordered American commanders not to pursue NVA or VC units into Cambodia, and then further ordered General William Westmoreland and the American Military Assistance Command, Viet Nam (MACV), to be silent regarding the sanctuaries in Cambodia. This one act, more than any other, set up the “credibility gap” which came to haunt Johnson and every American administration since.
On 11 December 1967 LBJ recanted the latter part of this decree. The United States had reached a tacit agreement with Sihanouk—Cambodia agreed to request the VC to leave Khmer territory; America agreed to avoid acts of aggression against Cambodia and, further, to supply Sihanouk with information on the sanctuaries. But Sihanouk either did not try or was unable to force the VC to move.
CIVIL WAR AND TET 1968
Each year Cambodian disillusionment increased. Each year more and more people criticized the Prince for self-indulgent behavior improper for a devout Buddhist. By 1966 Cambodia was on the brink of civil war. On 11 March 1967 a peasant uprising erupted in Battambang Province in the village of Samlaut. The farmers were angry with high interest rates, high taxes, high inflation and low government-established prices for their crops. The system had led them into debt, and debt had meant foreclosure and the loss of their fields to the land barons. More riots broke out in Kompong Chhnang, Kompong Thom, and Kompong Speu provinces. The rioting spread to all the major and many minor population centers in government-controlled Cambodia. Sihanouk declared martial law, and placed the nation under a state of siege. Movement within the country required official passes, which meant new fees. Sihanouk decreed the nationalization of all import and export businesses, a process he had begun in 1963 but now extended to complete control. And he nationalized the internal distribution of goods.
On 18 January 1968 new riots broke out in Samlaut. Sihanouk accused bandits of instigating the riots and sent army troops and national police to incite Khmer villagers to attack the “rebels.” Many resettled ethnic Viet Namese and Mountaineers were clubbed to death. Villages were burned. Some “rebels” escaped into the southern Cardamom Mountains. Sihanouk labeled them Khmer Rouge and unleashed his troops on their lands. His Royal Cambodian Army forces burned fifty villages, killing hundreds of peasants and arresting thousands. His soldiers clubbed women to death and beheaded men, and the government paid the soldiers a bounty on each head. All across Cambodia, thousands of teachers and students exiled themselves to the forests!
On 22 January 1968, with the nation in disarray and with the second rebellion at Samlaut but four days old, Norodom Sihanouk announced to the world that he was siding with North Viet Nam and the National Liberation Front. Two months earlier he ha
d sent Royal troops onto the basalt plateau of Ratanakiri Province. There, where they had not ventured for over a year because of NVA control of the area, they rendezvoused with the provincial forces of Governor Thang Nhach. Together these units attacked six Rhade villages, slaughtering the leaders and driving the villagers off their land. This was done, according to Sihanouk, so that he could use the land to establish new rubber plantations—the rubber ostensibly being needed for export to help offset the trade deficit. But this logic is faulty. First, Sihanouk’s forces needed the permission of the NVA even to set foot on the plateau. Second, if he had actually wanted to establish plantations there, he would likely have desired the labor of the Mountaineers. And third, there is a far more sensible explanation for this action.
The heavy troop movement was a diversion. It masked other heavy troop stagings and maneuvers—that of the NVA divisions which on 30 January crossed the border along Highway 19 and assaulted Kontum and Pleiku in South Viet Nam. Was Sihanouk an active party in the 1968 Tet offensive? He prattled about Cambodian neutrality, but his speech of 22 January and his military actions put him entirely in support of the NVA. After the ARVN, American forces and South Viet Namese local militias repelled, counterattacked and destroyed much of the VC and NVA attacking force, Sihanouk backpedaled to verbal neutrality. On 1 May 1968 he appointed the pro-Western general Lon Nol as defense minister. In June the KK attacked the Northern Corridor town of Baray. In July Lon Nol was promoted to deputy prime minister. In August, Sihanouk did an overt about-face and blamed “foreigners” (the NVA) for the uprisings in the northeastern provinces. At first the Prince called the insurgents Pathet Lao. Later he charged they were Khmer Rouge. In December, Lon Nol was again promoted, now to acting prime minister, but by then the Royal government had lost control of 60 percent of Cambodia’s land to the KK, the KVM or the NVA.
An aside to the Tet offensive: According to KK propaganda, the NVA attempted, even while the KK was launching its most sweeping attacks ever in Cambodia, to assassinate the leaders of the KK and to unite all Khmer Communist activity under Hanoi’s rule.
THE CHINESE INFLUENCE
The significance of Chinese influence on the Krahom cannot be overstated. It is more reasonable to see the Cambodian holocaust of 1975 to 1979 as the culmination and apex of the Chinese Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution than to see it as the result of a society driven insane by American B-52 bombings.
As noted, Pol Pot associated with Mao Zedong during the planning phase for the Great Leap Forward. The Great Leap Forward led to approximately 30 million deaths in 1960 alone. Perhaps a million people were killed outright. 29 million were sacrificed to drastic land tenure policies. Essentially, the Chinese were driven from established, fertile fields into forest areas to establish new farmland. Without proper tools, without preestablished, engineered plans, with nothing but their will as decreed from Peking, they were set to work. The first year they cut the forests down but were unable, without established irrigation, to raise a significant crop. They began to starve. Then heavy rains came. The newly stripped lands eroded. Silt clogged established irrigation canals and killed productive paddies downstream. A dry year followed and 29 million people starved to death. Fifteen years later the same policy infected Cambodia.
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which began in 1966 was also a model for Cambodia. The policies were less agrarian “reform” than a stripping away of China’s traditional culture. The war on culture envisioned turning traditional allegiances on their head—the primacy of parents, family, village and culture was replaced by the monolithic party-state and its inviolable interpretation of realities. Children became Mao’s political instruments, his foot soldiers in the “Liberation and Struggle.” Indeed, 1966 is considered a “Children’s Crusade.”
Nightly, youth, peasants, anyone that could be coerced, sat through political indoctrination sessions or self-criticism sessions known as “struggles.” In Cambodia such sessions would be called kosangs. To own a book became a crime. To own a Western book was punishable by death. Libraries across the country were ransacked and books burned in huge bonfires. Similar policies, along with mass atrocities, were being used in Cambodia by the KK by 1968.
ANGKAR
In 1968 Krahom yotheas, soldiers, referred to their faction as “the Movement,” or “the Organization.” It was common for Southeast Asian Communists to call their parties “organization” while proselytizing, in order to hide their Communism from the masses. In Khmer, “organization” is angkar or angka.
PART ONE
THE KINGDOM OF CAMBODIA
If genocide is to be prevented in the future, we must understand how it happened in the past, not only in terms of the killers and the killed but of the bystanders.
—Arthur Morse, While Six Million Died
CHAPTER ONE
WORRY FURROWS CREASED CAHUOM Chhuon’s forehead. He was trapped, held in an amorphous iridescent blue, almost black, dream. Images parted, blurry, as if he were looking through deep water, as if he were at the bottom of a great basin. To one side a massive fuzzy maw stretched mechanically open, bit down, then slowly opened, rhythmically, like the breathing of a fish in a stream, the mouth pulsing, open closed open closed, not breathing but biting, ingesting all which entered the current. To the other side the basin floor rose. Colors, people emerged. They were all there by the side of the river. His entire family, Sok, Vathana, Yani and the boys, all, but much younger, even his father, strong, large, powerful. There too were distant relatives, neighbors, friends from the far reaches of Cambodia, even the Mountaineer, Y Ksar from Plei Srepok, all gathered as if for a great celebration. But the occasion was not happy.
His worry rose. He felt besieged. People were in small groups, some in the shade beneath the trees, some in the sun at the edge of the road leading back to Phum Sath Din, some at the river’s edge. Only his older brother spoke to him, listened to him, but it was as if he, Cahuom Chhuon, were not really there but only a body like his and that body spoke a foreign tongue. He tried to call his brother, to explain, to warn....He did not know of what. Something. Something very important. Something to be done. The people looked to him, to that body? He felt responsible but he was not there? Why? Why could he not reach them? Why was his brother resisting? He must reach them.
They milled around behind his brother, milled, not as a mob but more as if guests at a wedding, yet without happiness, without laughter, without the traditional feast. Behind them the river was brown. The sky turned mist green, green from the lush forest growth through which he watched. Dusk was upon them. Chhuon shuddered, stiffened. The waters of the Srepok, swollen by monsoon rains, roared over rapids. To his nose came the rancid aroma of river mud. Then a terrible, foul stench which made him retch. Then, on the river, in the river, all fallen into the quick current, frightened, not fighting the flow, riding the rushing water—Sok, Vathana, whole families fallen into the stream, sucked down current. From one bank tigers slashed mighty claws, from the other crocodiles slithered. Then, in the water, elephants, massive, swimming down upon them, coursing more quickly than water flow, overtaking him, them all, crushing them beneath their immensity, smashing them into rocks, into banks in their frenzy, he popping up like a cork, riding the empty water. Alone.
Phum Sath Din, Stung Treng Province, Cambodia, 5 August 1968—The sound of a heavy truck struggling through mud woke Cahuom Chhuon from his restless dreaming. He lay on his back on the sleeping mat. It was very dark in the house. Chhuon’s children lay side to side on a second mat. Chhuon listened. The truck was close, just across the river. He raised his arms, crossed his forearms over his face. Every day, he thought. The truck passed. Chhuon brought his arms to his sides, folded his hands over his navel. He thought deeply, meditated, attempting to resee the dream, attempting to sink back into the restless disturbing journey. Later, he thought, if I can recall it, I will tell the khrou, or perhaps the monk. He dozed.
“ssst,” Samnan
g hissed to Samay.
“ssshh,” the older boy hushed his brother.
“ssst,” Samnang whispered again. Chhuon coughed in his sleep.
“ssshh,” Mayana whispered to both, “you’ll wake papa.”
“he talks in his sleep,” Samay said.
“i know,” Samnang hissed, “i was awake, i never sleep.”
“ssh!” Vathana’s hiss was quick, terse, “it’s not time to get up.”
Very quietly, so the girls couldn’t hear, Samnang whispered to his brother, “samay.”
“eh?”
“does the devil really have a great ledger for recording all the evil deeds we do?”
“you think of things like that at this hour, eh? go back to sleep, look how you disturb papa.”
“samay,” Samnang whispered again, “why can’t a monk and a girl come in contact?”
“sleep,” Samay ordered, “if you didn’t put bad thoughts into your head, you would sleep like peou.” Again all was silent.
At six o’clock Chhuon rose quietly, moved to the door of the bamboo, wood and thatch home. His mother snored quietly in her small area of the central room. Snuggled next to her was Sakhon, Chhuon’s three-year-old son. Ever since the death of his father three months earlier Chhuon’s mother had withdrawn into deep lamentation, reaching out only to this youngest grandchild. Chhuon’s wife, Neang Thi Sok, lay asleep on her mat against the near wall. I should wake her to start the fire, he thought, but he did not disturb her. The other children slept along the far wall. Chhuon looked at them: Vathana, lovely, tiny, not five feet tall, eighteen, arranged to be married to the second son of his brother’s associate, a wealthy shipper with a section of pier on the Mekong at Neak Luong; Samay, his eldest son, fifteen, ready to leave the family for two years Sangha study with the monks; Samnang, almost twelve, a smart, agile though distant boy who Chhuon determined should follow him in business; and Mayana, Yani, eight, the image of her mother. Chhuon looked again at his mother and Sakhon, whom they called Peou, a nickname which simply designates last child. He lifted a tiny statuette of Buddha which had been carved from one of his father’s teeth. It hung from a cotton cord about his neck. He kissed the Buddha seven times, once for each of his children, and he thanked the Blessed One for having spared five of the seven.
For the Sake of All Living Things Page 2
