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p M. llyinsky

p Izvestia, January 23, 1979

p Pnom Penh is gradually beginning to come to life. People who had hidden from the terror of Pol Pot’s soldiers have finally emerged. For weeks many of them had not seen the light of day; feeding themselves on stores of beans, they somehow managed to avoid reprisals and stay alive.

p One woman, tears streaming down her cheeks, said that she no longer remembered how long she had spent in basements on the outskirts of Pnom Penh. Her entire family had been killed but she had managed to escape. This was. apparently in late November.

p “She must have spent more than a month underground,” said a soldier of the patriotic army who accidentally came across her.

p The woman was afraid to open her eyes as she might be blinded by the daylight. Despite the tropical heat, her body was trembling violently. The fear resulting from what she had seen in Pnom Penh over the past few years had not subsided. How hard it was for her even to imagine that the long awaited liberation had finally come. But it was no dream. It was complete deliverance.

p The survivors in Pnom Penh were virtual skeletons, just skin and bones, like those who survived the nazi death camps.

p Every day in various districts of Pnom Penh the freedom fighters are discovering more and more evidence of the horrible crimes committed by the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique. Dozens of corpses bound in chains were found in one of the capital’s former schools, right in the centre of the town. I have old photographs of this school, called Tuolsleng, showing hundreds of children. It is hard to imagine that it was in this building that the prison guards of Pol Pot subjected people to monstrous mediaeval tortures. The soldiers who came to the halls of this former school in the first hours after liberation found prison cells and numerous corpses. Prisoners were maimed beyond recognition; many of them had their hands tied behind their back with barbed wire. 142 All were naked. The putrid smell of human flesh still hangs in the air.

p Mankind will never forget the Pol Pot clique’s crimes. American GI army shovels and Chinese picks were used in this former school, which served the pro-Maoist regime as a prison and interrogation centre. Ditches were found outside in which the prisoners from Pol Pot’s torture chambers were covered with lime and buried.

p The barbarous crimes of the puppet regime incurred the wrath of the Kampuchean people. Remnants of the Pol Pot gang are still being caught in the region of the Kardamom Range. After committing such vile crimes, the cutthroats and their accomplices are still trying to escape retribution. Their actions only increase their guilt before the popular government, which has given all its enemies an opportunity to lay down their weapons and come forward. Guided by humanitarian principles, it has promised them inviolability if they surrender of their own accord.

p Despite the tremendous difficulties, long-suffering Kampuchea is beginning to rebuild a peaceful life. Pnom Penh’s Pochentong Airport has been cleared. The red banner with the five golden towers now flies over it, symbolising the civilisation of Angkor Wat. The patriots’ flags also top Cham Karmon Palace, the central municipal market and the polytechnical institute.

p Life is returning to normal in the provinces as well. A few days ago Chea Sim, Deputy Chairman of the Central Committee of the Kampuchea United Front for National Salvation, visited Kampong Cham, a town to the northeast of Pnom Penh. The inhabitants informed him that most families had already returned from the concentration camps to their native villages. Some 285 self-administration committees have been set up in populated areas. Mutual assistance production groups are being formed in rural areas. The peasants are going back to the fields. The free labour, that has replaced the more than three years of forced labour under the supervision of the Pol Pot secret police, is imbuing the peasants with confidence in the national government and is filling them with enthusiasm.

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p The country’s rubber plantations, which had been severely damaged, have now come back to life. I might add that, prior to 1970, approximately 20,000 people were employed in Kampuchea’s rubber industry, which accounted for 40 per cent of the nation’s exports. The rubber plantations, concentrated primarily in the Chup district, were subjected to napalm bombing raids by the American aggressors.

p On Peking’s instructions, in April 1975 the Pol Pot regime began barbarously exploiting what remained of the plantations. The workers were kept under guard and lived in inhuman conditions. In the Chup district, for example, the Pol Pot regime created 17 so-called labour villages, whose inhabitants worked an average of 14-15 hours daily, without any days off. They lived in barracks and were fed only two cans of rice skilly a day. The so-called Chinese advisers and experts, who lived near the plantations in comfortable villas, saw to it that all the fruits of this slave labour were shipped to China.

p During its stay in power, at the prompting of the Chinese advisers, the Pol Pot regime, exterminated an average of 400 to 500 persons in each of the villages of the Chup district. In villages under the code numbers of 14, 18, 36, and 48 every second plantation worker was killed. A common grave for 300 persons was discovered in village No. 46.

In April and May 1978, over two thousand workers took up arms against the pro-Maoist clique. It was with tears of joy that the plantation workers met the revolutionary army units who freed them from enslavement and oppression. They managed to prevent the Maoists from destroying the Chup latex-processing plant. A people’s committee has already been set up here and it has begun to run this rich region of the country. Soon new rubber-bearing plants will grow here—the sprouts of a new life in the much-suffering land of the Khmers.