Khmer Rouge Poised to Rule Again, a Decade After the ‘Killing Fields’

Fingering the scars left by manacles on his feet, arms and neck, Pon Piseth said simply: “I will never forget the Khmer Rouge.”

Pon Piseth was a law student in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975. He spent 18 months in prison just for being an educated person, then was taken in a truck to be “freed” with 375 other prisoners. As each bowed in the traditional Cambodian gesture of gratitude, he was clubbed with a hoe handle by a guard. Pon Piseth was the only survivor.

Pon Piseth now works as a legal adviser in this sprawling refugee camp along the Thai border. The camp’s population of 170,000 makes it the largest Cambodian city after Phnom Penh.

“One day, the Cambodian people will realize that the Khmer Rouge killed their people, their relatives,” Pon Piseth said. “The international community cannot allow Pol Pot to return to power. No matter what they say, I believe this man is still bad.”

Like many Cambodians these days, Pon Piseth contemplates with a sense of anxiety the possibility that the Khmer Rouge, led by the notorious Pol Pot, may in fact return to power in Cambodia a decade after being driven out by an invasion from Vietnam.

Could the group that transformed Cambodia into the “killing fields,” a genocide in which more than 1 million people are believed to have died of butchery, hunger and disease, actually be permitted to regain its hold over the country?

“It’s a distinct possibility,” a Western diplomat in Bangkok said.

A Role for Khmer Rouge

Washington has officially objected to the Khmer Rouge’s regaining power. The State Department said last week that “the United States is totally opposed to a return to dominance in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge.” But Secretary of State James A. Baker III conceded in Senate testimony in March that “the Khmer Rouge will have to be given some role in a new Cambodian government.”

The immediate cause of the latest round of speculation about Cambodia’s future was Vietnam’s announcement April 5 that it will unconditionally pull the remainder of its troops out of the country by the end of September, more than a year earlier than previously announced. Vietnam says it has 50,000 troops in Cambodia, while Western analysts put the figure at 60,000 to 70,000.

Vietnam’s withdrawal and the power vacuum it will inevitably create have placed a large question mark over the survival of the Cambodian government of Premier Hun Sen. The regime was installed by Hanoi to replace Pol Pot’s government after the latter was driven out in December, 1978.

Hun Sen, himself a former member of the Khmer Rouge, held inconclusive talks in early May with Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was deposed from power in 1970 and now nominally heads the three-party resistance movement opposed to the Vietnam-backed government. The coalition was formed in 1982 when China, which had continued to recognize the Pol Pot regime as the legitimate authority in Cambodia after the Vietnamese invasion, forced the Khmer Rouge to include Sihanouk and another non-Communist faction, the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front led by former Premier Son Sann.

Hun Sen and Sihanouk agreed to several cosmetic changes in Cambodia’s constitution, but they failed to reach agreement on the question of power-sharing after the Vietnamese withdrawal.

Sihanouk began to show frustration with his alliance with the Khmer Rouge, saying that its only goal is the continuation of the war. Sihanouk said he would be willing to return to Cambodia as head of state and enter into a partnership with the Hun Sen government if certain conditions are met.

Hun Sen maintains that the main problem is what he calls “the Pol Pot danger,” with the likelihood that there will be civil war after Vietnam’s September pullout.

If that happens, Phnom Penh’s army of 45,000 to 60,000 soldiers, supported by a militia of about 100,000, would be left to defend towns and villages without Vietnamese help. And of the three resistance forces arrayed against it, the Khmer Rouge is by far the strongest.

Estimates of Khmer Rouge military strength vary widely, from 25,000 hardened fighters up to as high as 40,000. An additional 10,000 people are believed to serve in support positions, and 90,000 civilians in camps along the Thai border are under firm Khmer Rouge control. In contrast, Sihanouk’s army is only about 10,000 strong, and Son Sann has about 15,000 troops.

Since taking refuge in Thailand, the Khmer Rouge has been fed and armed by China and Thailand. Vietnam has hinted that it will send troops back to Cambodia if this aid is continued after September, but neither China nor Thailand has given any public assurances that the aid will stop.

Military analysts say that the Khmer Rouge appear to have stockpiled weapons inside Cambodia recently, while adopting a relatively low military profile during the period of diplomatic maneuvering. The implication is that even with a cutoff of Thai and Chinese aid, the Khmer Rouge could continue to wage a guerrilla war for as long as 18 months.

A steady trickle of defectors from the Khmer Rouge continues to arrive in refugee camps controlled by other groups, such as Site 2. In addition to telling stories about hardships in the Khmer Rouge camps, the defectors appear certain that the Khmer Rouge will not settle for anything short of total victory.

“It’s clear the Khmer Rouge hasn’t changed anything,” said Rath Vong, a 31-year-old refugee who arrived at this camp at the end of March after nine years of living under the Khmer Rouge. “Now they say they are in favor of a coalition government, but we are worried about the future. Pol Pot will take power by force.”

Officially, Pol Pot has retired as the leader of Democratic Kampuchea, as the Khmer Rouge call themselves.

But many Western and Asian diplomats in Bangkok concur with the Vietnamese assertion that Pol Pot’s resignation, along with the abolition of the Communist Party in 1982, were window dressing to appease international opinion after the excesses committed during the Khmer Rouge reign of terror from 1975 to early 1979.

Studied in Paris

Pol Pot is the nom de guerre adopted by an engineering student named Saloth Sar after he returned from studying in Paris in the 1950s and joined the Indochina Communist Party. Although he has not been seen by a Westerner in nearly eight years, Pol Pot is believed by most Western analysts to be the overall commander of the Khmer Rouge, drifting across the border into Thailand from hide-outs inside Cambodia. He reportedly requires periodic hospitalization for recurrent malaria and hepatitis.

The rest of the Khmer Rouge leadership is also said to be almost unchanged, despite the long period of exile. Members include Ieng Sary, the infamous “Brother No. 2” who was Pol Pot’s foreign minister, and Ta Mok, a peg-legged regional commander who was regarded as the Khmer Rouge’s worst butcher.

The Hun Sen government itself includes a number of former Khmer Rouge officials considered responsible for atrocities.

Some countries have suggested that a possible solution to the Cambodian stalemate would be to force Pol Pot and his associates to go into exile in China, while lower-level cadres would be absorbed into a coalition government in Phnom Penh. This theory seems naive to Western officials familiar with the loyalty and discipline of Khmer Rouge cadres.

For its part, the Khmer Rouge suggests that it has transformed itself after years of resistance fighting. At Site 8, a refugee camp 100 miles south of here, the group is attempting to project a new image of openness.

There are four Khmer Rouge camps along the border open to the U.N. Border Relief Organization and perhaps a dozen others that are off limits to all Westerners.

Unlike other Khmer Rouge camps, Site 8 in the last year permitted the opening of a market, a Buddhist pagoda and schools. Under Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge had banned money and private property and made learning a capital offense.

“The Communist Party of Kampuchea was created for the progress of the Cambodian people, but there was no progress, and it was necessary to choose another system,” said Mey Mann, a school principal at Site 8 who knew Pol Pot in their student days in Paris.

Sek Son, the camp commander, acknowledges that the Khmer Rouge committed “wrongs” while in power--about as far as anyone will go toward acknowledging the mass killings. Among the errors, according to Sek Son: “We displaced too many people from the cities and didn’t have enough food or medicine.”

Now the Khmer Rouge officially espouses a “parliamentary system of government like in Great Britain,” while converting the economy to “liberal capitalism” and respecting freedom of speech and religion, Sek Son said.

Relief workers in the region say that, while there are now no signs of continued killing, the picture emerging from occasional visits to other Khmer Rouge camps suggests that the impression conveyed by Site 8 is misleading.

“The Khmer Rouge believe people belong to them, like cattle,” one relief worker said. “There are no signs of a fundamental change in their way of thinking.”