Against the Ages - Hun Sen's Cambodia - page 21

By 1973, as Becker wrote, there were already signs that Sar and the Khmer Rouge
leadership were striking out into more radical territory. That year a small topic, titled
Regrets for the Khmer Soul , appeared for sale in Phnom Penh. Before long, everybody
was reading it, from pedicab drivers to high government officials. Its author was Ith Sarin,
a former teacher and defector who had produced a rare first-hand account of the policies
of the angkar —the mysterious Khmer Rouge “organization” which ruled the liberated
zones.According to Sarin, the Khmer Rouge had won support among the rural people by
building dikes, ponds, houses, and bunkers to provide shelter during US bombing raids.
In the areas under its control, Angkar was omniscient and beyond criticism. Life was
strictly regimented; communist cadres forced the population to wear black, banned idle
chatter, and severely punished any violations of their orders. 17 Sarin also noted down a
chilling phrase that would soon become ubiquitous: “ Angkar ,” it was said, “has as many
eyes as a pineapple and cannot make mistakes.” 18
At around the same time, Kenneth Quinn, a young US foreign service officer stationed
in South Vietnam, sent a 45-page airgram to Washington detailing the Khmer Rouge
policies in southern Cambodia. Quinn, an Ohio native working as a rural development
officer in the Mekong Delta, was then based in Chau Doc, a Mekong River town close
to the Cambodian border. The previous year, he had hiked up Nui Sam, a nearby hill dot-
ted with Buddhist shrines that commanded views far over the Cambodian plains. What
he saw on that Saturday in June 1973 shocked him: “All the Cambodian villages that you
could see—you could see out probably fifteen to twenty miles—every village, every one,
was on fire on the same day. I had no idea what was going on, other than these strange
columns of black smoke pouring up into the sky.” 19 Cambodian refugees soon poured
over the border into Vietnam, fleeing the conflagration. Intrigued, Quinn starting speak-
ing to them.
Like Sarin's account, Quinn's findings suggested the unique fanaticism of the Khmer
Rouge and their virtual independence from Vietnam. Refugees described how the Cam-
bodian communists marched them out of their villages, which were razed to prevent their
return, and then forced them into collective labor brigades. Violence and terror were used
to strip away old attitudes and impose a new “collective” consciousness. “Death sen-
tences are relatively common,” Quinn wrote. “Usually people are arrested and simply
never show up again, or are given six months in jail and then die there.” 20 When Quinn's
prescient airgram reached Washington in February 1974, however, it was ignored. Like
Becker's article, his analysis ran counter to the conventional wisdom, which was that the
Cambodian insurgency was being controlled from Hanoi. “It was a hard sell,” he recalled
later. “Even after the Khmer Rouge took over, people would still treat me politely when
I would talk about the horror. Nobody believed me, because no one would accept it—no
one.” 21