Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
of his illusions. Just before leaving Cambodia, he had reluctantly given a radio interview
that he would regret until his return to Phnom Penh in 2008. “Every place we visited,”
he told DK radio, “we saw the Kampuchean people working arduously and busily with
a great sense of responsibility in order to build a new society free from misery, famine,
disease, injustice, and oppression …”
37
The same month that Bergström was in Cambodia, DK repression was reaching its ter-
rifying crescendo. Pol Pot and his colleagues, holed up in their empty capital, lived in a
dreamscape, haunted by real and imaginary threats. Purges begat purges, generating lists
of enemies that kept the turbines of S-21 humming with terrifying efficiency. Under the
control of a disciplined, ascetic cadre named Comrade Duch, Tuol Sleng ultimately can-
nibalized much of the regime's senior leadership. “S-21 was the end of the line,” Duch
later told the filmmaker and Khmer Rouge survivor Rithy Panh. “People who got sent
there were already corpses.”
38
Khmer Rouge suspicions centered on the traditional enemy—Vietnam. By late 1976,
DK was referring to its former mentor and ally as an “aggressor” and “enemy” of the Kh-
the former Cambodian territories in the Mekong Delta. In 1977 Cambodian troops began
cross-border raids in which they sacked Vietnamese villages and butchered their inhabit-
ants. At the same time, the CPK Party Center embarked on a wholesale purge of cadres
in the Eastern Zone bordering Vietnam, who were accused of being Vietnamese spies,
of having “Khmer bodies and Vietnamese minds.” The purges uncovered so many “en-
emies” that in April 1978 trucks delivering prisoners to S-21 were being turned away.
40
Many Eastern Zone personnel revolted or fled into Vietnam to avoid the purges. Among
them was a 24-year-old regimental officer named Hun Sen, soon to begin his rapid climb
to the apex of Cambodian politics.
China, the main supporter of the Khmer Rouge, saw little reason to discourage Pol
Pot's warmongering. Relations between Beijing and Hanoi had soured since the
mid-1970s as a reunified Vietnam drifted into the Soviet orbit. For China, DK was a coun-
try which could be dependably expected to resist the expansion of Soviet power in South-
east Asia. For their own part, the war-weary Vietnamese hoped that the conflicts with DK
could be overcome through negotiations. It was a futile hope. On December 31, 1977, the
regime broke off diplomatic relations with Hanoi. When the Cambodian troops launched
their invasion, Pol Pot predicted, they would “kill the enemy at will” and leave nothing
but “piles of the enemy's bones.”
41
In early 1978, Hanoi started making preparations to remove the DK regime by force. At
former US army bases in southern Vietnam, officers began molding Cambodian defectors
and other communist veterans into a guerrilla army. On December 2, in a clearing on a
