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Postscript to the reports
from Pnom Penh about the crimes committed
by Peking’s stooges in Kampuchea

p A. Levin

p Komsomolskaya Pravda, March 5-6, 1979

p It was not they who headed the Khmer people in the national struggle against the colonialists, and against the imperialist aggressors. Nor was it they who led the Kampucheans to victory against the pro-American puppet regime in 1975. They only claimed to have been in the front ranks of the patriotic struggle, though in actual fact they were very much in the rear. But when the opportunity came to stab the victorious nation in the back, stab they did, without flinching.

p But who are these people? How did they manage to deceive and mislead the Khmer patriots who had fought selflessly for the freedom and independence of their country? How could they sneak their way to the helm of the Kampuchean revolution, to usurp power in the party and the government? How could it have happened that the whole country was plunged into a national catastrophe, that the Khmers were brought to the verge of extinction? And what was Peking’s part in this monstrous scheme? What was the purpose of it all?

p Questions, questions, questions. I put them to almost everybody, to everyone I met during my trip to Kampuchea. Many facts still aren’t known, and the pages describing the history of the past several years have not yet been read in full. Neither have all the facts been collected that are needed to get to the bottom of this monstrous treachery. There are no living witnesses to the crime: they were “taken care of" by the traitors, as were any incriminating documents.

p Yet the anatomy of the crime cannot be concealed now that the traitors have been exposed, especially since it was committed on such a colossal scale. There is no doubt that, in time, all the pieces will fall into place. But even now, 39 many of the facts are known and much of the evidence produced by those survivers of mass murders with whom I talked in Pnom Penh during my tour of the country suggests that Pol Pot, Ieng Sary and their retinue were essentially foreign bodies in the Kampuchean revolution; they were nothing but stooges for Peking.

p Some time ago, American magazines wrote that Pol Pot had, in his younger days, taken part in the struggle against the Japanese militarists, but what he actually did, when, and where, no one seems to know. The only thing that has been established fairly certainly is that Pol Pot, together with Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan and Son Sen (Minister of Defence of the deposed regime), with Khieu Polnari (Pol Pot’s future wife) and her sister Khieu Tirit (who later married Ieng Sary) studied in France. Then come many years that are not accounted for.

p Only in the 1960s did Pol Pot and his men appear in the jungles of Kampuchea and join the national liberation movement. Nobody knows where exactly they came from, though many believe he had spent all these years in China. It looks as though Pol Pot were very anxious to conceal this. He also kept silent about the fact that his real name is Salot Sar, and that his mother was Chinese. Neither did Ieng Sary advertise the fact that his mother was of Chinese origin, and that his father was half Chinese. It is easy to guess why they were so secretive about their parentage, for it is well known that Peking has always tried to put people of Chinese descent in the countries of South-East Asia to its own uses.

p Pol Pot clearly “benefited” from the years he spent in China. Together with Ieng Sary, and Son Sen he adopted an extreme left ideology.

p Backed by Peking, he set up the National United Front of Cambodia and the Royal Government of National Unity of Cambodia with Prince Norodom Sihanouk at the head. Leaving the Prince in the care of the Peking leaders, who promptly started brainwashing him, Pol Pot returned to Kampuchea in order to build up political capital there. The main tool, whereby he eventually attained power, was his inordinate capacity for lies and his hypocrisy.

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p “We did not know Pol Pot well enough at the time,” said Keo Tian, Minister of Information and a veteran of the liberation struggle. “He very skilfully concealed his views, and spoke about the need to fight resolutely against the Lon Nol puppet regime, and that a socialist society would certainly be built in Kampuchea. People believed him... .”

p Pol Pot and his associates were truly master liars. In Pnoin Penh I found a booklet in a dark red cover entitled The Armed Struggle and the Life of the Khmer People in the Liberated Areas. It was a collection of photo-stories published by the National United Front back in 1972. The first part dealt with the achievements of the patriotic forces in the struggle against the reactionary pro-American Lon Nol regime. The pictures in the second part of the book told about the crimes committed by the Lon Nol troops and American soldiers against Kampuchean civilians: demolished houses and pagodas, murdered children, women and old people. One of the photographs showed two Kampuchean women killed in a bombing raid. The caption under the picture read: “Lon Nol lied brazenly, saying they were killed by the Vietnamese aggressors!" The third section of the book was about the life of the Kampuchean population in the liberated areas: smiling young men and women, a class of schoolchildren, a dance class rehearsing, a public meeting in support of the National United Front of Cambodia.

p The Kampucheans believed what the book of pictures in the red cover said. Indeed, who would have thought then that, three years later, the men who had exposed the crimes of the Lon Nol puppet regime would perpetrate still more monstrous crimes against their own people. Who could foresee that those who promised the Kampucheans a peaceful and happy life would close down all the schools, would “outlaw” such things as dancing, and even laughing? Who could have known that the men who had called the Vietnamese their comrades-inarms would make an about-face and call them aggressors, would order them killed and their villages reduced to ashes?

p Today we know exactly who, in those early days, was aware of all that: Pol Pot and his closest associates, plus, no doubt, the rulers in Peking. They were also planning the 41 mass murder of Kampucheans and the unleashing of a Kampuchean-Vietnamese war. There is no other way to explain why the Kampuchean troops border provocations against the Vietnamese armed forces began only a few days after Pol Pot took over. He and his Peking masters planned to fit their actions to their words.

p But the bridled anti-Vietnamese propaganda, the brutal murder of Vietnamese civilians, and the genocide in Kampuchea began much later. Meanwhile Pol Pot continued his lying. Here is an excerpt from a letter he sent on October 3, 1974 to the Central Committee of the Vietnam Workers’ Party (now the Communist Party of Vietnam.—/l.L.). “The Kampuchean revolution has lately mounted an offensive to achieve a victory of strategic importance over the US imperialists and the reactionary Pnom Penh clique. This means that our Party is pursuing a correct policy and that our people are fighting resolutely and courageously under our Party’s leadership. But all our victories would have been impossible without the support of our brothers and comrades-in-arms, the Party and people of Vietnam.”

p A few months earlier, on March 4, 1974, Pol Pot had written to the Vietnamese leaders: “I want to assure you, frankly and with an open heart, that, whatever the circumstances, I shall remain loyal to the great solidarity and the great revolutionary fraternal friendship between Kampuchea and Vietnam.”

p Pol Pot lied to the Kampucheans and he lied to the Vietnamese. Pretending to be a friend of the true fighters for the freedom and independence of Kampuchea, he shamelessly borrowed their words, if not their thoughts, in order to win their trust and then betray it.

April 1975 and the Kampucheans looked forward for victory and the long-awaited peace. Nobody suspected treachery. Or rather, very few people did. Significantly, even then, some more far-sighted people had seen through the leaders of the now deposed regime, and discerned the true face of Pol Pot and others, though it was carefully concealed under a “revolutionary” mask. Such people began to vanish one by one, without trace. . . .

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p The nation was condemned to death by the Chinese leaders, with Pol Pot and Ieng Sary as the chief executioners. After the regime’s downfall when the world became aware of the mammoth proportions of its crime, the Peking leaders pretended that they had not known what was really going on, had known nothing about massacres and the genocide. This is an outright lie. The Chinese leaders not only knew about it, they even sanctioned the mass murders and genocide. Why? For what purpose? They wanted the Kampuchean people exterminated and ten million Chinese resettled in Kampuchea. I learned about this monstrous plan from Kampuchean comrades during my stay in Pnom Penh. Since the Peking leaders regarded Kampuchea as part of Chinese territory, they deemed it their right to decide the nation’s fate. Thus on April 17, 1975, the Chinese began to carry out the death sentence they had passed on Kampuchea.

p Pol Pot and his confederates had prepared the ground for this plan. Thorn Boreth, a battalion commander from Preiveng, told me:

p “Long before 1975 I felt that Pol Pot and his associates had begun to follow a political line directed against the veterans of the national liberation movement. The party organisation of our district held regular meetings criticising all those who had taken part in the resistance movement against the French colonialists. Young people were forced to accuse them. We were told that only the young could understand the leaders’ new revolutionary course, that the older generation of revolutionaries had absorbed too much Vietnamese ideology and were unable to understand local conditions. We believed all those tales and thought our older comrades would have to readjust to keep up with the times. They were taken away to attend ’political courses’, so we were told. If anyone asked, why a particular comrade had not come back, he was told that after finishing the course, the absent comrade had been reassigned to another province. By 1975, there was not a single veteran revolutionary left in our party organisation. But nobody gave a serious thought to this, and nobody found anything odd about 43 it. We were constantly being told that the leaders were thinking a lot about us and that all we had to do was to carry out their instructions and directives. When the campaign began against the veteran revolutionaries, we noticed that the little red book of Mao’s quotations was being circulated in growing numbers. We were forced to study it and were told that the little red book contained all that was necessary for the development of the Kampuchean revolution.”

p As I was told later, the “political courses" were just a pretext for quietly disposing of the old revolutionary cadres without arousing suspicion. The participants in the resistance movement against the French colonialists, and then all those who had so staunchly fought against the US aggressors and the puppets of the American imperialists, were put to death. All the killings were done in the jungle, with no one around to see. These people posed a great danger to Pol Pot, and constituted a serious obstacle to the realisation of the plans conceived in Peking. Deeply imbued with the ideas of MarxismLeninism, and brought up in the spirit of friendship and battle-field solidarity with the Vietnamese Communists, who had shared all the hardships of the struggle against the common enemy, they would not have been taken in by a handful of renegades. They would not have allowed anyone to mislead the new generation of Kampucheans, who iwere politically immature and not sufficiently versed in the revolutionary struggle, the people who, on Pol Pot’s orders, brought their picks down on the heads of their countrymen.

p As the victory over the pro-American regime drew closer, thanks to the courage of the Kampuchean people and their common struggle with the Vietnamese (and not owing to Pol Pot’s services in this struggle, as he later insisted), the purges—both horizontally and vertically became more and more extensive. Pol Pot was in a hurry to get rid of potential opponents at all levels of party leadership.

p He was still afraid to attack the top leaders of the liberation struggle, but their fate had also been decided. Soon after Pol Pot took power, Hu Yun, Minister of Internal Affairs, Hu Nim, Minister of Information in the Royal Government of National Unity of Cambodia that had been set up in Peking, 44 and certain other reportedly “moderate” leaders vanished without trace. At the same time, Pol Pot removed Prince Sihanouk from the political scene, since he wielded considerable influence over the peasant masses, and was a sort of banner in the struggle against the Lon Nol regime. The “banner” faded and turned to tatters, so it was no longer needed. The Prince was sent away, out of the capital, to the province of Siem Reap where he lived under house arrest. After Pol Pot was deposed, Peking again tried to present Prince Sihanouk as the symbol of the Kampuchean nation (or rather the deposed regime), this time at the United Nations. But the “banner” had long since become no more than a faded rag that left the world organisation unimpressed.

p Let us go back to the leaders of the regime. There were only a few of them: Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, Son Sen. Their wives also held top posts in the state, which bore the quaint name of Democratic Kampuchea. It was these eight people, tied together as they were with the bonds of kinship and their joint crimes, that wielded full power in the country. The road to realisation of Peking’s assignment was thus open and Kampuchea was turned into a giant slaughterhouse. Pol Pot’s lies and hypocrisy, which had for a long time served him as a means for gaining power, were now unnecessary, and he began to say what he thought. He removed his revolutionary mask (although he still claims to be a revolutionary) and announced that one million of the eight million Kampucheans would be quite sufficient for building a “socialist society such as the world has never seen".

p Pol Pot was no theoretician, however. He merely executed the will of his superiors and moved towards his objective as doggedly as a police agent paid a lot of money to do his boss’s will. The mass murders in Kampuchea, the extermination of whole segments of the population, the genocide on a nationwide scale in a country that Pol Pot called his native land, make one think that Kampuchea was not really his homeland, even if he was born there. It seems that all Kampucheans were in his way, that he wanted to get rid of them. And the one million he would have magnanimously allowed to exist, would apparently have been expected to work for the Chinese who 45 intended to move into the country. After all, colonists have always needed natives to do chores for them.

p For all its monstrous savagery, the plan was also devilishly subtle.

p The entire population of Kampuchea was divided into three categories. The third, and lowest of them, stood for people who had once served in the Lon Nol regime. These included intellectuals, former big traders, businessmen. The second (a higher category) included all the other residents of the regions controlled by the Lon Nol administration. The first, or highest, category consisted of the population that, at that time, lived in the liberated areas.

p People in the second and third categories were declared enemies of the nation and were all to be annihilated. Also slated for execution were any “pro-Vietnamese elements”, mostly the population of the regions bordering on Vietnam, and all Kampucheans of Vietnamese descent.

p The men whom Peking and Pol Pot intended to carry out their criminal designs were picked from among the illiterate peasants of the first category and from among the young and ideologically immature soldiers of the “liberation forces”. To trick them into submission, the Pol Pot administration told them that the main reason for their hard life in the past and the principal obstacle to their future happiness were the people of the cities, all those belonging to the third category. According to the theory propounded by these criminals, killing was necessary in order to defeat the enemies. The flywheel of mass murder was, according to the authors of this pseudotheory, to gain momentum, but needed a push to get it started. A solution was finally found and the witch-hunt began. The exposure and destruction of “enemies” was encouraged in every way. For every murder its perpetrator was thanked publicly; he was also promoted, thus further whetting his zeal. The flyweel spun faster and faster. The desire to exterminate “ enemies" grew, as did the intoxication of doing so with impunity. The logic was simple: “You were my neighbour, but you could read and write; you had a profession and I was a little man, and nobody really cared if I existed at all; I had to grovel before you. But now it is I who will decide your fate!” 46 The killers were drunk on the blood they spilled, and this in turn aroused their basest instincts. The leaders of the regime no longer had to inculcate the “idea” in their subordinates. Mass murder became the norm. But there was still another element, besides the “idea” and the intoxication with power—• and that element was fear. A person who, day in day out, has killed his fellow citizens cannot help being afraid of those around him. He anticipates some reaction and regards everybody as his personal enemy. Such a reaction is, of course, only to be expected, for people cannot walk in fear of their lives all the time. Some just complained about their lot, others killed their tormentors, yet others escaped into the jungle, to neighbouring Vietnam and Thailand where they took refuge from the nightmare. “I killed so as not be killed myself,” said an arrested Pol Pot functionary, when foreign journalists, including myself, were allowed to meet such people. “I was afraid that I would be killed by the villagers, and I also feared my superiors. Many of us were executed for being too soft.”

p Thus the machinery of extermination was switched on to “automatic control”, which did not, of course, stop the leaders of the regime from adding fuel to the fire, in order to keep the destructive process going. The hysterical yelling about Vietnam’s alleged attempts to engulf Kampuchea did its job. The Pol Pot soldiers ran berserk when they raided frontier towns and villages on the Vietnamese side. Peking’s leaders did not lack resourcefulness this time, either. Since the Kampucheans were going to be wiped off the face of the earth as a nation anyway, why shouldn’t they, in the process, help implement Peking’s anti-Vietnamese plans?

p The Chinese leaders kept a watchful eye on what was going on in Kampuchea. The trips that the leaders of the Kampuchean regime made to Peking, the visits to Kampuchea by the emissaries of the “Celestial Empire" and the presence of a large contingent of Chinese experts and servicemen exploded their claims to ignorance. What actually happened was that Peking turned Kampuchea into a giant laboratory for testing its political, economic and military concepts.

The tragedy of the Kampuchean people serves as additional 47 proof that Maoism is dangerous for the world. Peking calls itself a friend of oppressed people fighting for their liberation. This is a downright lie! Peking has betrayed those people at every opportunity, whenever such betrayal has suited its purpose. And it continues to do so, with the help of renegades and opportunists of the lowest order.