p How can this cruelty be explained? This wholesale extermination of the people can be compared to the crimes of the nazis, who were particularly cruel where the population offered any active resistance. In 1978, the centre of the movement against the Pol Pot dictatorship was moved to the socalled 203rd military zone consisting of the towns of Swairieng, Preyveng and Kampong Cham. This region includes what is known as the “duck’s beak"—a strip of land stretching deep into Vietnamese territory. For many years, right up to 1975, liberation forces from Kampuchea and Vietnam fought in joint units against American intervention here, where the tradition of strong friendship with Vietnam is very much alive. When, in 1977, Pol Pot declared Vietnam a “damned enemy”, when the many graves of Vietnamese who had perished in Kampuchea were publicly desecrated, when the border war against the SRV broke out, armed resistance was organised in the 203rd military zone. Whole battalions joined the fight against Pol Pot’s headquarters.

The regime dispatched to Preyveng several regiments with orders to carry out repressions and punitive expeditions and to protect the camps. The collapse of the uprising culminated in the complete elimination of the 203rd military zone and in mass murders, the scope of which has yet to be definitively determined. The city of Preyveng itself, like almost all the other more or less large cities in the country, is still completely empty. There was garbage in the streets, abandoned 164 houses, and the water system, as we were to learn later, had been poisoned in the most loathsome manner. There was no water or electricity. It is thus clear why the cities that were totally evacuated by Pol Pot cannot be repopulated at present. First, problems pertaining to sanitary conditions and the fight against disease, as well as to public security have to be solved.