Monday, May. 19, 1975Time Magazine (USA)The curtain of silence that has concealed Cambodia from Western eyes ever since the Khmer Rouge capture of Phnom-Penh on April 17 opened briefly last week, revealing a shocking portrait of a nation in torturous upheaval. Eyewitness reports by the few Western journalists who stayed on in the Cambodian capital after the closing down of the American embassy indicated that the country's new Communist masters have proved to be far more ruthless, if not more cruel and sadistic in their exercise of power than most Western experts had expected.
Phnom-Penh has become a ghost city, forcibly and quickly emptied of most of its 2 million inhabitants. Perhaps as many as half of Cambodia's 7.6 million people have become victims of a massive dislocation, a forced march of city dwellers who have been ordered by the Khmer Rouge government to take to the roads and paths and become rice growers in the countryside. Even hospitals have been evacuated, and doctors stopped in mid-surgery, so that the patients, some limping, some crawling, could take their part in the newly proclaimed "peasant revolution."
Naive Glee. Eyewitness accounts contained scenes of savage contrast. Many of the Khmer Rouge soldiers who first entered Phnom-Penh were country boys who joyfully climbed aboard abandoned automobiles and rammed them, more by accident than design, against walls or telegraph poles; with naive glee, they looted stores for wristwatches but threw jewelry away because they had no use for it. Yet their leaders appeared to be tough disciplinarians who were more concerned about ideology than about the plight of the country's war-weary people. There were also reports of public executions, but these were not confirmed by eyewitnesses.
Cambodia's new leaders were apparently driven by a xenophobic determination to rid the country of foreign influence, not just the taint of "Americans and other imperialist lackeys" but also the influence of even the Chinese and North Vietnamese. Moscow, which had maintained diplomatic relations with the former Lon Nol government almost to the end, was rejected utterly: the second floor of the Soviet embassy was strafed with machine-gunfire, and the seven Russian diplomats there ordered to go to the French embassy compound to be evacuated with the other foreigners. From that precarious vantage point, they saw hundreds of thousands of Cambodians moved out of the capital, as Sydney H. Schanberg of the New York Times (see THE PRESS) put it, "in stunned silence—walking, bicycling, pushing cars that had run out of fuel, covering the roads like a human carpet."
The enforced mass exodus from the capital was carried out, it seemed, in desperate, mindless haste. The rice harvest will not be in until November. What will the millions of refugees in the countryside eat between now and then? If the new government refuses foreign aid, as it has said it will do, who will provide the seed for next year's crop? "Was this just cold brutality," wrote Schanberg, who stayed behind when Phnom-Penh fell last month, "a cruel and sadistic imposition of the law of the jungle? ... Or is it possible that, seen through the eyes of the peasant soldiers and revolutionaries, the forced evacuation of the cities is a harsh necessity? Or was the policy both cruel and ideological?"
The foreign survivors were obviously of two minds. One Western doctor suggested that the Communists had evacuated the hospitals because "they could not cope with all the patients—they do not have the doctors—so they apparently decided to throw them all out and blame any deaths on the old regime." Another foreign observer called the exodus "pure and simple genocide. They will kill more people this way than if there had been hand-to-hand fighting in the city."
The early hours of the rebel take-over were a time of wild unreality. Westerners and Cambodian civilians gathered at the Hotel Le Phnom cheered as the first Khmer Rouge soldiers arrived. They were smiling and friendly, and the euphoria lasted for several hours. Only later did foreigners and city dwellers alike realize that these first soldiers were actually members of a 200-man private band led by a daredevil freelance general, Hem Keth Dara, 29, and not really part of the Khmer Rouge at all. They were quickly replaced by tough, disciplined soldiers, heavily laden with arms, who swept through the city with loudspeakers. "Leave your homes immediately!" they ordered. When their instructions were not quickly obeyed, the soldiers sometimes punctuated them with random rifle shots. The frenzied evacuation of the city was soon under way. At the Information Ministry, Schanberg reported, a stern young officer held a formal press conference for Western journalists. Present were some Cambodian prisoners, many of whom had been ranking members of the old regime. Among them was former Premier Long Boret, who had elected to stay behind to help negotiate the surrender. The Khmer Rouge officer insisted that there would be no reprisals, but few of the prisoners appeared to be convinced by his soothing words.
Fallen City. After the surrender of the city, Red Cross authorities had tried to convert the Hotel Le Phnom into a protected international zone. But at 5 p.m. on the day of the takeover, Khmer Rouge troops ordered the hotel evacuated within 30 minutes. Hundreds of foreigners fled to the French embassy compound; most of them remained there for 13 days, while fires and shooting broke out sporadically in the fallen city.
The scene within the compound, where about 1,300 foreigners and Cambodians sought shelter, was one of deprivation, acrimony and tedium. There was no running water, and food was limited. Though the Khmer Rouge guards stole a few watches and other valuables, they generally treated the foreigners correctly if sternly. As the days passed, one baby was born, another died. When the seven Russian diplomats arrived from their abandoned embassy, they were loaded down with huge supplies of tinned meat and vodka. They refused to share the goods with the other inmates, thereby becoming the bitter tar gets of Westerners' jokes about revisionist influence.
The most heartbreaking moment, the journalists reported, came when the Khmer Rouge ordered the 500 Cambodians in the group to leave the compound and join the peasant revolution. Wives were separated from husbands, husbands from families. About 150 Montagnards, the mountain tribesmen from Viet Nam, also had to leave. One of them told American Businessman Douglas Sapper that since he had fought with them in Viet Nam, he was their blood brother. A Montagnard officer's wife pressed the American to take her five-day-old baby, asking him to raise it. "They asked me for help I couldn't give," Sapper said last week. "I've never felt so completely powerless. I don't ever in my life want to go through that again."
Terrible Regret. The first group of about 580 foreigners was evacuated two weeks ago, but journalists who left Cambodia at that time agreed to withhold their stories until the second group of 550 arrived safely in Thailand last week. Apparently because they did not want to accept foreign help, the Khmer Rouge refused an offer by France to provide an evacuation plane. They insisted that all the foreigners, including the aged and sick, endure a 250-mile truck ride to the Cambodian border. Instead of using a direct route, the evacuees rode along winding dirt roads that had served as the guerrillas' supply routes during years of fighting. To Correspondent Schanberg, it appeared that "these areas had been developed and organized over a long period and had remained untouched sanctuaries throughout the war." He gained the impression that "the countryside organization was much stronger than anyone on the other side had imagined."
When the first convoy of 25 trucks reached its destination, said Sapper, there was "an indescribable happiness walking across that bridge into Thailand," but also a terrible regret because "I left behind too many people who I know will not come out well." At the moment, indeed, the fate of the Cambodian people that he and other foreigners left behind is an agonizingly unanswerable question. The makeup of the new government is not yet clear, and the danger of factional fighting appears great. A fortnight ago, the Khmer Rouge leadership reportedly held a "national congress" in Phnom-Penh, with Khieu Samphan, the military commander and Deputy Premier, in attendance. Few Khmer Rouge leaders have publicly mentioned Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Though he remains the titular head of the new government, it is hard to imagine the temperamental but still popular prince fitting easily into the present company in Phnom-Penh.
Nor does anyone know to what extent the new rulers will carry out vengeful reprisals. The foreign evacuees saw a few bodies on the roads and highways last week, but these could have been "accidental" victims of the forced march to the countryside. What seems certain is that Cambodia's period of zealous self-imposed isolation will continue. Radio Phnom-Penh reported last week that the nation's new leaders were busy campaigning to "clear the country of the filth and garbage left behind by the war of aggression." Though it also spoke of rebuilding the country's industry, the broadcast left little doubt that the government's chief aim would be to restore farm production so that Cambodia might be "completely independent of all foreigners." Meanwhile, the ousted President of the fallen Cambodian government, Marshal Lon Nol, was quietly adjusting to a new life with his family in a $103,000 bungalow in suburban Honolulu. At Camp Pendleton, Calif., the man who replaced him briefly as head of state, Saukham Khoy, 60, disclosed that Lon Nol had been paid $1 million by his own government to leave the country on April 1. "It was a good buy," Saukham Khoy insisted last week. In Hawaii, Lon Nol had no comment.
