p Attaching the insulting label of “enemy” to dissidents and their physical destruction are methods of government tested long ago by the Maoists, and flourishing today in Kampuchea. Millions of people have fallen 67 victim to the persecution and brutal reprisals. The Voice of Vietnam radio station once said: “The leaders of the Pnom Penh administration, which calls itself revolutionary, claim to be pursuing some ’special course’ in restructuring Kampuchean society. In -fact this amounts to an extremist, narrow national internal and foreign policy reminiscent of mediaeval barbarousness.”
p According to many of those who managed to escape, officials began to speak increasingly openly about the need to exterminate a large number of Kampucheans.
p The refugee Sen Smean recounted that the head of his district announced at a meeting in early 1977 that 10,000 of the district’s 15,000 inhabitants would have to be executed as enemies and that 6,000 of them had already been killed. “The old grass must be dug up and burned to let the new shoots through,” he said.
p According to all eye-witnesses, it was the civil servants, soldiers and officers of the former government, as well as those who were called the intelligentsia in Kampuchea, that is people with even a minimal education, who were the first to be exterminated. Apparently the regime equally methodically set about killing women and children. The refugee San Daravong said that, at the end of last year, he had witnessed the murder of 108 women and children of former soldiers in the village of Khba Le, 10 miles from the town of Siem Reap, among the ancient temples of Angkor-Wat.
p He said that the victims had been taken off to a dam in groups of ten, with their hands tied behind their backs, and then were beaten to death by the soldiers with truncheons. Some little children were thrown into the air and caught on bayonets, others were taken by the legs and their heads bashed against the ground.
p The witness Ok Yum recounted that he had escaped from Siem Reap Province. According to him, in April 1977, to mark the second anniversary of their victory, the authorities slaughtered the entire population of his village, among some 350 families in the district as a whole.
p From The New York Times
68p “Among the hundreds of thousands of other people I herded out of Pnom Penh. We went on foot, under the blazing sun, carrying our children, household utensils and clothes—everything we had managed to grab together in the rush. We were emaciated, hungry, ragged, walking under the malicious cries and laughter of soldiers in black-shirts. They gave us no time to rest. The further we went, the more dead bodies we saw at the sides of the road. The children were crying, and those of us who could still walk were half-fainting. In five days we came to the Morivong bridge. Here, by a tree, I saw a pregnant woman. She was lying on a piece of white cloth and was writhing in her labour pains, crying ’Help me! Save me!’ By the bridge a soldier just stood laughing. My wife ran up to the woman and delivered the baby for her. The second the birth was over, the soldier came over, pushed my wife aside with his rifle-butt, and fired a round above the woman’s head. ’Gome on! Get going!’ he shouted and the poor woman, clasping the baby to her breast, had to walk along with us, hardly able to stand on her feet.
p “Then I heard children crying in a nearby building, an orphanage. The doors had been shut tight and locked on the outside. The people who worked there had apparently run away. Dozens of little hands were reaching through the iron bars on the windows, begging for help. ’Mama! Save me! Mama! Save me!’ we could hear. I looked in through a window and saw a terrible sight. The tiniest babies were lying still in their cots. Many others were still alive, crying and writhing, but they were obviously dying. Some of the slightly older children were crawling about looking for food and water, while others were lying immobile with swollen stomachs—and no one bothered to help the poor little things. ’Of Kampuchea’s eight million people,’ Pol Pot declared shortly after the country’s liberation, ’we only need one million.’ Well, about three million they did manage to annihilate through hunger, sickness and execution.”
p From the recollections of a Kampuchean refugee
69p Pen Sing, 33 years old, was assistant commander of a battalion. He is thin and wounded in battle. This is what he recounted.
p “The Kampuchean leaders are acting very cruelly. The political commissars told us the names of the ’enemies’ that had been executed. Enemy meant all those who dared to criticise or had previously served in the armed forces. I know that once they executed two very young people simply because they were in love. They even grudged bullets, killing them with sticks and hoes.”
p We met 35-year-old Sik Non in a refugee camp near a fishing village by the Kampuchean border. He had previously worked for the National Sugar Company as chief accountant, but was sent, with his wife, to a labour camp. There he worked as a smith, while his wife hoed the ground. This short, sickly man had seen the corpses of his brutally murdered friends. Terrible tragedies had taken place before his very eyes. “The guards,” he recounts, “separated out the office workers, professors, and doctors, and sent them to do the hardest jobs. Then they waited for them to commit the slightest misdemeanor or what was considered a criminal act. One man was killed because he picked up a banana, another because he tried to catch fish in the river.” After two years of suffering and fear, Sik Non decided to escape. When the prisoners were sent to work at the foot of Mount Ral, he managed to let his wife know what he intended to do. With a group of 28 people he fled to the north. They walked and walked for 14 days. Once, he left the refugees sitting round a fire. Suddenly he heard a shot, then more shots and explosions. Two hours later when Sik Non returned to the fire, there were only dead bodies there, including that of his wife.
p From the Italian newspaper Corriere delta Sera
p Comparison with Hitler’s Germany cannot be avoided. Just like in Nazi Germany, the authorities here make desperate efforts to conceal the more terrible aspects of their “plan” from the rest of the world. But since the Pnom Penh 70 rulers’ plan is even more “total” than that of the nazis, it is kept even more secret: even the names of the Angka Loeu members are not revealed.
From the American newspaper Wall Street Journal
Notes