Against the Ages - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 20

swathes of the Cambodian countryside. From 1965 until 1973, the US dropped 2.7 milli-
on tons of ordnance on Cambodia, more than the Allies dropped during the entire Second
World War. 12
On the ground, the B-52 sorties sowed terror among the rural population, killed tens
of thousands, and drove many more into the arms of the Khmer Rouge. Lumphat, the re-
mote provincial capital of Ratanakkiri in northeast Cambodia, was abandoned in the late
1960s after being bombed into rubble by the B-52s. Today the town remains little more
than a village, its past dimly visible in the shattered infrastructure built during the Sihan-
ouk years: a shrapnel-scarred water-tower and smashed concrete classrooms slumbering
in the jungle behind a faded sign still announcing, with haunting optimism, the “Samdech
Eav Junior High School.” Policy-makers in Washington saw this destruction as the neces-
sary price of victory in Vietnam. In a theater of toppling dominoes, Cambodia remained,
in William Shawcross's eternal phrase, a “sideshow.” 13
“Who are the Khmer Rouge?” When Elizabeth Becker posed the question to readers of
the Washington Post in March 1974, little was known about the communist movement
that now controlled more than three-quarters of Cambodia's territory. Aside from Sihan-
ouk, who headed the government-in-exile from Beijing, the identity of the CPK's top
leadership was shadowy. Prominent leftists like Khieu Samphan had leading roles in the
resistance front, but the limited extent of their activities suggested the existence of a high-
er authority. For the first time, Becker identified the head of the party as Saloth Sar,
the leftist school teacher who had disappeared during government crackdowns in 1963.
(He wouldn't take the name Pol Pot until 1976). She also wrote of the growing discord
between the Khmer communists and their Vietnamese mentors, contradicting the prevail-
ing American view that the Khmer Rouge were subservient to Hanoi. 14 It would later turn
out that Sar's rise to the CPK leadership had indeed marked a decisive shift in power to-
ward a faction of communists who were highly suspicious of the Vietnamese—a tension
that would flare into open enmity after 1975. But for the time being, US officials simply
assumed that the Khmer Rouge took their orders from Vietnam.
Even Sihanouk stressed the benign intentions of the Khmer Rouge. Leading commun-
ists like Khieu Samphan had served as ministers in his government during the 1960s, and
he thought he knew them well. In early 1973 the prince and his wife Monique toured the
CPK's “liberated zone,” posing with pasted-on smiles in the black pajamas worn by the
communist troops. He later wrote to several Democrats in the US, reassuring them (and
maybe also himself) that the Khmer Rouge would not set up a communist system after
coming to power, “but a Swedish type of kingdom.” 15 In private he was more pessimistic,
predicting that the Khmer Rouge would spit him out “like a cherry pit” once they gained
power. 16