Silence, Subterfuge and Surveillance

Phnom-Penh opens its doors ever so slightly: Pompeii without the ashes

The shroud of terror and darkness that has enveloped Cambodia ever since it fell to the Communist Khmer Rouge in April 1975 lifted slightly last week, but in a way that was at once tragic and bizarre. After a three-year refusal by Cambodia's new rulers to admit Western news correspondents to Democratic Kampuchea--as Cambodia now calls itself--two American reporters, Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Elizabeth Becker of the Washington Post, returned to the U.S. with detailed accounts of a two-week visit. A third member of their party, British Scholar Malcolm Caldwell, 47, did not leave Cambodia alive. He was shot to death by antigovernment guerrillas.

Dudman, 60, and Becker, 31, were experienced reporters who had covered the Indochina war in both Viet Nam and Cambodia for extended periods. Their 1,000-mile trip through eleven of Cambodia's 19 provinces was clearly an attempt by the Cambodian regime to counteract its worldwide image as a merciless, anonymous and genocidal regime. That image has been fed by the accounts of postrevolutionary life given by thousands of refugees in neighboring Thailand and Viet Nam. Caldwell, a lecturer in Southeast Asian economic history at the University of London, accompanied the reporters as a sympathetic student of Cambodia's agrarian revolution. An avowed Marxist, he supported the brutal, enforced depopulation of Cambodia's cities in 1975 as economically and politically essential.

Caldwell was murdered on the last night of the trip, when three armed intruders burst into the guest house where the visitors were quartered. Dudman and Becker luckily escaped the gunfire, but Caldwell was caught in his room and died there. Who the assailants were may never be known, but the Cambodians immediately offered their own theory. Said the Westerners' official guide in Phnom-Penh, Thiounn Prasith: "Our enemies know of the importance of your visit and wanted to show the world that Cambodia could not protect her friends."

In the days before the killing, the touring trio found themselves constantly surrounded by official silence, subterfuge and surveillance. On foot, even in Phnom-Penh, they were usually flanked by two young men in khaki shirts with pistols tucked into their belts. Often they were not even allowed out of their guest house. On the road, their government-supplied Mercedes 200 sedan was always both preceded and followed by at least a carload of armed guards. Government officials explained that there was a constant danger of assassination attempts on Cambodian officials by "the Vietnamese and their agents" even in Phnom-Penh itself.

Another problem the visitors faced was the almost theatrical performance that took place whenever they requested interviews with ordinary Cambodians. A scene of uncomfortable-looking workers feasting sumptuously in a factory canteen was described even by the sympathetic Caldwell as "a charade." On other occasions a searching question by the Americans would elicit a long response in Khmer that would then be interpreted by the accompanying official as "I don't know." Phnom-Penh, said Dudman, had "the eerie quiet of a dead place--a Hiroshima without the destruction, a Pompeii without the ashes ... My first impression was that the total population of the capital could not be more than a very few thousand. The usual estimate of 20,000 seemed high, and the official figure of 200,000 given by the Cambodians and the Chinese seemed ridiculous."

Whenever they traveled, wrote Dudman, "we sought an answer to the central question being asked by much of the outside world: What has happened to the middle-and upper-class city dwellers since the Communist takeover? Repeated interrogation produced no clear answer to the question of 'auto-genocide,' the term used by some critics for an alleged methodical execution of much of the entire class of former professionals, tradesmen, civil servants and soldiers. There were indications in both directions. The Cambodian revolution evidently has forced [those city dwellers] to conform to an austere standard of hard manual labor: no money, no mail system, no telephone service, no books, almost no individual property, no advanced education, little or no religion, and none of the freedoms accepted or at least professed by most of the rest of the world." One Cambodian admitted to Dudman that he had seen some "travelers" who looked wealthy and that he had recognized a "rich person" working in the rice fields.

Nowhere could Dudman find any information proving or disproving refugee claims that as many as 2 million Cambodians have been executed since 1975. "leng Sary, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, did not bother to deny the charges. But he objected to the emphasis by outsiders wanting to know about the 5% to 20% of Cambodians who were well off before the revolution and their seeming lack of interest in the majority who were poor. Some killing, added Sary, could not be avoided, but considering the 'complicated situation' after the war, the Communist Party had 'solved the problem in good condition' and 'had avoided many more killings.' " What the Cambodians clearly wanted to impress upon the foreigners was not lost on any of them: Democratic Kampuchea's desperate struggle to survive in its rag-tag war with Viet Nam. At Krek the journalists came within two miles of small-arms fighting near Route 7, close to the Vietnamese border. The small town had reportedly been in Vietnamese hands, yet all was peaceful. Still, Cambodia's leaders seemed to the Americans to be more obsessed with the Vietnamese danger than with internal unrest or their grim image abroad. Premier Pol Pot told Dudman and Becker in an interview that was virtually a nonstop polemic against Hanoi: "Viet Nam has the ambition to swallow Kampuchea. If we were to become a satellite of Viet Nam, it would be a danger to Southeast Asia and the world, because Viet Nam is a Soviet puppet carrying out the strategy of Soviet international expansionism."

Pol Pot has reason to be alarmed. What started as sporadic border clashes between Khmer Rouge troops and the victorious North Vietnamese in mid-1975 has in the past few months become an all-out attempt by Hanoi's forces to topple his regime and install its own puppet Cambodian government. Barely a month ago, Hanoi cranked into existence a 14-member anti-Pol Pot group called the Kampuchean National United Front for National Salvation, which has promised to abolish the wholesale harvest seizures, communal meals and forced marriages that Cambodian refugees have complained about. The front, headed by Heng Samrin, 45, a trusted Pol Pot commissar until last spring, when he staged an abortive coup, boasts a rebel news agency and radio, as well as headquarters in Cambodian territory occupied by Vietnamese forces. Meanwhile, Hanoi has reportedly fielded 100,000 soldiers in 13 or 14 divisions against Cambodia, including 40,000 fresh troops recently moved into position for an assault from southern Laos. U.S. officials believe a dry-season offensive has already begun along parts of the Viet Nam-Cambodian border.

It may have been in a desperate attempt to gain international support against such a Vietnamese assault that Cambodia last week embarked on its oddest scheme yet to end its self-imposed isolation: a twice-weekly six-hour tourist excursion from Bangkok to the exquisite Cambodian temple complex of Angkor Wat, 140 miles northwest of Phnom-Penh. The round trip, arranged in Bangkok by former Thai Foreign Minister Chatichai Choonhavan, costs an unproletarian $225. On the inaugural flight last week was TIME's Hong Kong correspondent, David DeVoss, who reported that "at first security was so tight, visitors spent most of the afternoon at the airport terminal. At one point, even the open-windowed toilets were placed off limits by 15-year-old militiamen, and reporters could only occasionally go outside to breathe. When the Cambodians permitted us a visit to the main temple, the bus driver was so uneasy about the possibilities of an ambush that he tended to careen erratically among the temple clusters. One driver was so anxious to cross the Angkor Thorn moat leading to one of the temple complexes that he banged his bus against the bridge railing."

The tourists will probably keep coming, and the Cambodians may partly achieve their objective, which is only incidentally to gain much needed foreign exchange. As So Hong, Cambodia's Secretary-General of the Foreign Ministry, said when he greeted the first nervous tourists: "We hope that in opening ourselves to the world, we will improve our image. We have many erroneous impressions to correct." And a few valid ones to live down too.

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