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p The 400-odd streets and lanes of Kampuchea’s capital, bounded by marshy lowlands where the Tonle Sap and Bassac rivers flow into the two branches of the Mekong, were deserted. At Pochentong Airport we boarded a bus and spent several hours driving around Pnom Penh’s 50 square kilometres. We saw modern office buildings, villas and cottages 152 nestling amidst lush banana trees and coconut palms, but not a soul was in sight.

p Such was the scene that met the liberating forces. The revolutionary army’s first column broke into Pnom Penh from the south along Highway No. 1, across the still standing Monivong Bridge spanning the Bassac River. Advance scout units marched without let-up or hindrance down the arrowstraight central avenue that transects Pnom Penh from north to south. Some of these units subsequently turned east along the thoroughfare leading out of the capital towards Pochentong International Airport and occupied the building of the former Chinese embassy en route. Heaps of ashes from hastily burned papers cluttered the trim lawns in front of the building, surprisingly reminiscent of the former US embassy in Saigon. Behind the anti-grenade railings, the thick windowpanes of this three-storey building gleamed dully. It was over this rectangular cube which stands, incidentally, in the street named after Mao Zedong, that Kampuchean patriots first hoisted in Pnom Penh the scarlet banner emblazoned with the five golden towers of Angkor Wat.

p It was in the Chinese embassy’s luxuriously carpeted “green room”, with its porcelain vases and painted silk screens, that Hang Sarin, commander of the 1st Division of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and chairman of Pnom Penh’s Military Administrative Committee, received the first group of foreign newsmen to visit the Kampuchean capital since its liberation. Pnom Penh’s new mayor wore a light-green tunic with sleeves rolled up above the elbows and no insignia of any kind—the men of the people’s army still wear all sorts of uniforms—and his forage cap was tilted back. Waiting for the cameras to cease their clicking, he said:

p “It gives me great pleasure to welcome you, comrades, to this liberated city. I apologise for having to receive you here in this building, but it is virtually the only one in Pnom Penh where one can see visitors. In the past three and a half years, the city’s inhabitants have all either been killed or deported to remote provinces to the so-called ’cooperatives’. Considering the present transport situation, it will take some time to bring them back. No more than about 200 or 300 people 153 live here today, mostly power plant and waterworks personnel who had hidden in the suburbs and who have been able to get part of the damaged utilities going again. Yet it is still a tough job living here.”

p “Does the Military Administrative Committee have any plans for ’bringing Pnom Penh’s life back to normal?" asked.

p “We do have a general plan,” Hang Sarin said. “We shall start by providing everything necessary to bring the population back, and when they do return we shall reopen the schools and hospitals, start the factories and small enterprises, and get the shops working once again. For even such simple things as pots and cups have become a problem since the ’communalisation of utensils’ by the Pol Pot regime. It is no exaggeration to say that we will have to infuse life back into this dead city.”

p It is, indeed, a dead city. In the neighbourhood of the huge semi-circle described by Khemarak-Phoumin Street, the longest in Pnom Penh, the liberating forces discovered thousands of corpses chained to iron rings cemented into the floor or to iron beds, tables and water pipes. Crushed and mangled bodies were found in hotels, on the field of the Olympic stadium, in homes, and even in schools, where the classrooms had been divided by brick partitions into hundreds of solitary confinement cells. In the centre of town, in the deserted square in front of a petrol station by the terraced building of Pnom Penh’s central market, I noticed the remains of burnt bodies.

p In the buildings of the Tuolsleng school, which the Pol Pot regime had converted into the central political prison, the stench of dead bodies was overpowering. In the former staff room, I was shown iron filing cases with cards giving the names and backgrounds of thousands of murdered people. Heaped on the floor were piles of file cards with photographs taken in profile and in full face; they also gave the name, number and date of imprisonment. Indexed as No. 665 was a 14-year-old boy who had entered this “school” on June 28, 1978. It was impossible to identify the mutilated corpses found in the Tuolsleng school.

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“Such was the last fight put up by the Pol Pot soldiers in Pnoni Penh,” our guide Dzu Po of the 1st Division II.Q. said. “They vented their fury on these defenceless, manacled prisoners, too scared to put up a fight against our armed forces. On the very eve of our arrival, nearly all of them, including the Peking ’cultural revolution experts’, ran away. We took the capital without meeting any resistance.”