When the War Was Over (Elizabeth Becker)

When the War Was Over

by Elizabeth Becker

also available in Khmer

The peasants, they wrote, were "like dry straw in the rice fields--which need only a spark to set it on fire."

As Saloth Sar and the central committee moved farther and farther away from the capital, from the eastern plains to the forlorn hills of the northeast, they were abandoning not only the culture and society that had bred their notions of revolution, but many of the ideas themselves. In the physical and political isolation, the Khmer Rouge replaced their old inherited revolutionary notions with a new policy largely based on confusion and necessity. The confusion became more and more obvious as the communists had to react to the rapidly changing situation of war. They had to throw out the old ideas--"international communism" had been of no help when they needed their allies--since concentrating on the Indochina-wide war, mostly the Vietnam War, had made them weak and cautious in their own country.

And they had next to no theory to replace the old ideas. The answer was to glorify their miserable straits, make a virtue of necessity, to make "purity" or absolute loyalty, the major consideration in an atmosphere they considered rife with traitors, and friends who might betray their movement. Thus, in their isolation, Sar and the party emphasized the nobility of fighting on meager resources, the purity of "self-sufficiency." Being pure became Sar's chief idea. It was an angry concept that easily fostered cruelty when that narrow idea of revolution nourished in the mountains was enlarged to include the whole nation.

The hidden jungles of Ratanakiri province were ideal for those ideas. The terrain was nearly impassable... French naturalist Henri Mouhot first explored the region 100 years earlier. In his diary...

"We are surrounded by forests, which are infested with elephants, buffaloes, rhinoceros, tigers and wild boars... Scorpions, centipedes, and above all, serpents, were the enemies we most dreaded, and against which precautions were chiefly requisite; but the mosquitoes and the leeches, though less dangerous, were the most troublesome, and most inveterate plagues. During the rainy season you cannot be too much on your guard; going to bed or getting up, you are ever in peril of putting hand or foot on some venomous snake..."

Even though a number of the Cambodian communists had spent their childhoods in rural villages, there were as unprepared for life in the hills as the French had been. But like the French naturalists, the communists felt the horrible conditions were more than made-up for by the kindness of the tribal people who lived there. These were the Khmer Leou, Khmer of the highlands...

Excerpt from Chapter 3 "The Path of Betrayal"
When the War Was Over
Elizabeth Becker