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p M. llyinski

p Izvestia, January 17, 1979

p As soon as the conversation turned to Kampuchea’s veteran Communists, the Khmers’ faces fell.. ..

p The secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Tusamut, had disappeared without trace: liquidated by the Pol Pot clique. The veteran Communist Son Ngok Minh was poisoned in Peking in December 1972. Sienan, former Kampuchea’s ambassador to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, 35 was executed in Pnom Penh by the Pol Pot clique. Insivut, a diplomat, was shot in Pnom Penh immediately after returning from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Journalist Khum was killed with a hoe at Swairieng. Also murdered was Sophim, former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. . . .

p For more than three years, this ancient land was in mourning. During its first year in power, the Pol Pot clique exterminated more, than 800 thousand people, though nobody kept track of the exact numbers. Most political analysts in Indochina believe, however, that in the 44 months the Pol Pot regime was in power, about three million civilians were killed in Kampuchea, while the Cham national minority was all but exterminated. Even the most absurd piece of false information sent anonymously to the security police was quite sufficient grounds for the soansrokis—security agents—to kill a person. The most widely used instrument of murder was the ordinary hoe.

p One of the Pol Pot security police documents captured during the liberation of Kampuchea shows that, if an agent failed to kill an enemy of the regime, he himself was to be executed. The scythe of death cut wide swathes through the entire population. Hundreds of corpses were carried downstream by the waters of the Mekong and its tributary, the Bassak. The killing of civilians began virtually the same day that the armed forces entered Pnom Penh, on April 17, 1975. Even children who had come out with bunches of flowers to meet Pol Pot’s troops were dispersed with rifle butts. Almost all the residents of the capital were driven out of the city. Pnom Penh, which was one of the most beautiful cities in South-East Asia, was turned into a vast cemetery. Wheeling around Pnom Penh in those April days were Chinese Jeeps with loudspeakers, blaring out the new government’s orders: “All residents must leave the city for good. Anyone found in Pnom Penh will be shot immediately.”

p Plundering was rife. Many buildings in the capital were surrounded by barbed wire. In those dismal days of 1975, on Peking’s orders, the new regime initiated the monstrous experiment of building an unprecedented society without cities, 36 without families, and without personal property, and without human dignity. That was the start of the “great leap" back to the Middle Ages. All human rights were trampled upon, and Kampuchea was turned into one huge prison.

p I asked Roh Samay, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Kampuchea United Front for National Salvation, about the initial period of the resistance movement against this brutal regime. He replied that the resistance movement had emerged back in September 1975, with a popular uprising in the province of Siem Reap. It was drowned in blood. In one small village alone, more than 300 men were killed in a single day.

p In 1976, the resistance movement spread to the provinces of Battambang, Siem Reap, Kandal and Kahkong. Again the security forces heaped cruel reprisals on the people, burning whole villages and killing even distant relatives of the rebels.

p “Even children?" I asked.

p “Yes. So that they would not be able to avenge their murdered fathers and grandfathers.”

p In 1977, the uprising spread to eight of the 19 provinces in Kampuchea. In May, 1978, the first areas of the country were liberated.

p The Pol Pot clique in Pnom Penh circulated letters ordering the extermination of all dissidents, and elimination of all people of Vietnamese origin. “No mercy for the enemies. Soft-heartedness is a crime,” it read.

p Hundreds of thousands of people sought refuge from reprisals by escaping to socialist Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. The refugees I met told me that groups of up to a thousand had left their homes. Very often they were ambushed and killed by Pol Pot’s soldiers, without either trial or investigation. Only a few out of every hundred would-be refugees from the regime’s iron vice actually survived. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of people left Kampuchea and thus saved their lives.

p Here is the story of a refugee that makes the blood run cold.

p A forty-three-year-old teacher of the Khmer language from the province of Swairieng said that, back in the summer of 37 1975, he was forced to give up his profession and to do work in the rice fields. That was what happened to all Kampuchean intellectuals and professional people, he said.

p “We thought we were lucky, for most intellectuals were killed by Pol Pot’s soldiers.”

p Those soldiers and officers of the Lon Nol pro-American regime who had been taken prisoner were shot on the spot. They were led out of towns and villages and then mowed down by machine-gun fire.

p “I myself saw 20 former Lon Nol soldiers being disposed of in this way in Swairieng.”

p Old folk, unable to work, were also killed. They were beaten to death with sticks and hoes, to the cheers of Pol Pot’s soldiers. The same teacher told me that he had once seen a pregnant woman, with three little children clinging to her skirt. In her desperation the woman stole a handful of rice from the public kitchen to give to her starving family. She was immediately seized by the Angka Loeu men, savagely beaten and then forced to dig a long ditch. When she had dug two metres deep, she fell in unconscious, but nobody even tried to help her. Her executioners filled in the ditch, burying her alive.

I have heard many similar stories from Kampuchean refugees, and the conclusion that had to be drawn was that behind every one of these crimes perpetrated by the puppet Pol Pot clique stood Maoist China, which sent more than a billion yuan’s worth of assistance to this anti-popular regime every year. More than 20 thousand Chinese advisers were in Kampuchea, and these most certainly shut their eyes to the humiliation and torture the regime inflicted not only on indigenous residents, but also on Kampucheans of Chinese descent. Peking propaganda trumpeted on about non-existent reprisals against ethnic Chinese in Vietnam, yet deliberately kept silent about the orgy of murder and terror in Kampuchea.