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p “The morning they executed Mother,” Kom went on with his bitter tale, “they made me dig a grave—not for Mother, she was burned, but for my brother. They made me do it with a knife. I was gouging at the hard ground while the soldiers stood around laughing and saying over and again: ’If you start crying, you can dig another grave too—for yourself.’ I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stop myself going for them. But I had a sister and little Nyam to look after now, both of them crippled, too!”

p Not a day passed without somebody being killed in the “commune”. “What for,” I asked. “Because they said they 52 didn’t feel well, or were late for work, or picked up a banana from the ground. The soldiers killed just for the hell of it,” Kom explained. “They killed our neighbour when he refused to get married.”

p “Get married?!" I exclaimed.

p “Yes. To a sixty-year-old nun.”

p “Why was he supposed to do that?" I asked.

p “For the sake of the struggle against religion,” Kom answered, then, after a moment’s silence, went on, “My friend was executed because he fell in love.” In Kampuchea, love was considered a serious crime. Young people were not allowed to even talk to one another.

p In the Psot “commune”, the following was the usual execution procedure. The victims were buried up to the neck and then bashed on the head with hoes. They were never shot—the bullets were being saved for the main enemy—Vietnam.

p “When did you decide to escape?" I asked Kom.

p “After they killed Mother. At any moment the soldiers would return to do away with the ’family of criminals’.”

p When I went to the camp for Kampuchean refugees to see these children, our Jeep got stuck on the country road, because there had just been heavy rain. We had to go on on foot, taking a short-cut through the jungle. About forty minutes later we were having difficulty moving ahead, the sweat dripping into our eyes and our legs as heavy as lead from tiredness. The person in the lead sometimes had to take an axe to hack a way through.

p The jungle is full of poisonous snakes and malaria mosquitoes, while even leopards and panthers are quite frequent. It was easy to understand what the children had gone through, in the four months before they got to the frontier and met the Vietnamese guards.

p “Once,” Kom recalled, “we came across a huge field full of vehicles. And there were about five Chinese standing around in uniform, with a group of Kampuchean officers running around them.”

p “Were there many Chinese in Kampuchea?" I asked.

p “Yes, very many. One of them often came to our ’commune’. He was old and fat. He didn’t talk, just gave commands.”

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p No talk, just commands—naturally, for it was China that kept the terrorists in power in Kampuchea, which they brought to a level of human suffering unprecedented in the world.

p Pnom Penh frequently claimed that the country had “ obtained economic independence”. In fact the Chinese had virtually flooded the country. Not only technical experts but military men as well.

p These Chinese military were everywhere—in artillery and tank divisions, in the airforce and the navy. It was they, dressed in Kampuchean uniforms, who guarded the capital and the government buildings, for the regime could not trust its own forces. Who, indeed, could they trust? The “top men"—Pol Pot, Ieng Sary and Defence Minister Son Sen—were relatives. The other leaders were selected also on the kinship principle. Nepotism and mutual guarantee flourished among the narrow group of people that had seized power.

p Moreover, they held this power mainly with Chinese bayonets, more precisely machine guns, tanks and artillery, which arrived in Kampuchea in an endless flow. The Peking leaders were in a belligerent mood. “The Chinese people and the People’s Liberation Army of China”, announced Chen Xilien, Deputy Premier of the Chinese State Council, “will stand firmly on the side of the people and army of Kampuchea; we will teach each other and support each other in scoring our common success.”

Everybody knows how successful they were, the result being the shameful collapse of the Pnom Penh clique!