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p V. Skvorfsov

p New Times, No. 7, 1979

p The weary interpreter hastily jotted down something in Khmer writing in his notebook. The light breeze coming in through the windows that opened onto Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square fluttered the paper badge of a participant in the session of the Presidential Committee of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation. In the lobbies of the Congress Palace, where the AAPSO was meeting, Roh Samay, General Secretary of the Kampuchea United Front for National Salvation and head of the country’s delegation, was holding a press conference.

p “I joined the liberation movement in February 1950, becoming a liaison agent in a guerrilla unit fighting against 150 the French colonialists,” he related. “After Kampuchea became independent in 1953, I continued my revolutionary activities. When the P’ront was organised in early December 1978, I joined it and was subsequently elected General Secretary of its Central Committee.”

p “Where is your family now?" one of the newsmen inquired.

p For several moments Roll Samay stared at the vase of asters standing on the coffee table before him.

p “There were five of us in my family, but I had no idea what had happened to the others right up to January 7, when Pnom Penh and the whole country overthrew the dictatorship. I was then told that they had all perished.”

p They were only a few of the three million Karnpucheans put to death by the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique in the three and a half years of its rule. Such was the result of this experiment in “radical social revolution" and the “purging of society" staged in this country of eight million. Yet there is much that goes far beyond plain figures.

p Several days before I met Roh Samay, I visited a refugee camp in the Vietnamese province of Tay Ninh deep in the jungle close to the Kampuchean border. Women, old people, children and emaciated men crowded around carts heaped high with sacks of rice and waited for the elected committee to start handing out the food. One of the camp militants, 35-year-old Sen Mot, who had once worked on a rubber plantation near Kampong Cham, told me the chilling story of the massacre of Kosphot’s 2,111 inhabitants. Herded into several barns, they were machine-gunned for refusing to part with their children, for refusing to dwell in a communal hut and refusing to marry as the authorities prescribed. Only nine people survived the inferno, and only one of these, Sen Mot, managed to evade the punitive cordons and reach the Vietnamese border.

p “Have you any idea who ruled the country? Do you know who Pol Pot and Ieng Sary are?" I asked a young Khmer woman by the name of Ton Yon.

p ”No, I don’t know who you are talking about,” she said. “But I do know who cut off the hair of our women and who killed my husband before my eyes and tried to take my 151 children away from me. In the Koki community where I lived, which is near Pnom Penh, the people who ran things were Tan Sung, Sarnta Lok and Tap Ho, and they came from an outfit they called the Angka Loeu. Are those the men you mean?”

p “Ordinary people were chased out into the fields and made to carry gaudy portraits of Pol Pot, without anyone even bothering to tell them who he was,” Hok Vase, a former teacher from the Pnom Penh Descartes school interjected. “Here in this refugee camp there are more than 800 children of school age whom I have only just begun teaching how to read and write, though some of them are already 14 years old.”

p The sight of all those angry faces explained why the dictatorship that had implanted a new type of slavery, collapsed in the space of a few weeks, even though it enjoyed Peking’s massive military, economic, political and moral backing. Anger and outrage caused thousands of peasants, workers, intellectuals and even representatives of the national bourgeoisie to rise up in movement that swept the country as rapidly as the Tonle Thorn, as the Mekong River is called in Kampuchea, bursts its banks during the spring floods.

p “In just three years,” Roh Samay told newsmen, “my country was completely wrecked. You want to know how the revolutionary army was welcomed in Pnom Penh? There was no one to welcome it; the capital was empty.”

We saw that with our own eyes when we visited Pnom Penh several days later.