Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
But within hours the atmosphere changed. The Khmer Rouge suddenly ordered the en-
tire population to evacuate, claiming the Americans were about to bomb the city. Young
soldiers walked the streets with bullhorns mounted on pedicabs, shouting the evacuation
order. Others went door-to-door forcing inhabitants out of their homes and into a frenzied
exodus along the highways. “Go, go, go!” urged the voices on the loudspeakers. “You will
forgetting to take any rice, fish, or pots and pans to cook them in. Hospitals were emptied
at gunpoint, and their patients, some still with IV lines attached, were pressed into the
sinister procession.
In the fierce dry season heat, the evacuation from Phnom Penh became a death-march.
Kassie Neou was swept into a crowd moving southward out of the city, leaving him no
time to locate his wife. As the crowd moved south, dead bodies started appearing by
the roadside—the victims of starvation and dehydration. Others started going missing at
night. It rapidly became clear that the “new people” from the city were being singled out
for harsh treatment. For the Khmer Rouge, city-dwellers bore the original sin of associ-
ation with the “parasitic” urban culture spawned by US imperialism. All the accoutre-
ments of city life, right down to glasses and knowledge of foreign languages, were sud-
denly marks of the spy and saboteur. Along the roadside, Kassie had his family discard
their Western-style clothes and pose as a family of peasants from Battambang. “I star-
ted changing my identity, behavior, mannerisms,” he said, “the way I talked, the way I
walked, the way I dressed.” An estimated 20,000 people died in the evacuation of Phnom
Penh.
26
Sihanouk returned to the city in September. After five years away he was disturbed
to find the graceful capital, with its tree-lined boulevards and golden spires, empty and
quiet. Sihanouk's communist allies were in a triumphant mood, crowing that they would
soon embark on a “super great leap forward” that would outpace even the achievements
of China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Khieu Samphan and Son Sen, the new
army's commander-in-chief, told him that Cambodia's name would “be written in golden
letters in world history as the first country that succeeded in communization without use-
less steps.”
27
As Sihanouk had feared, the authorities of Democratic Kampuchea soon cast him
aside. In April 1976, Sihanouk resigned in frustration and was shut up in a small house in
the grounds of the Royal Palace, where he remained imprisoned for the next three years
with his wife, his mother-in-law, and other relatives who had accompanied him home.
More than a dozen members of Sihanouk's family would eventually perish under DK.
His Chinese patrons, meanwhile, provided vital shipments of economic and military aid
that kept the regime afloat. In the coming years, Beijing would send as many as 15,000
Chinese advisors to DK, along with artillery, tanks, and other materiel.
28
