Nate Thayer

Nate Thayer Awards and Honors

Thayer’s reporting has earned him The World Press Award, the 1997 British Press Awards 2006 Scoop_of_the_Year British Press Award, and the 1998 Francis Frost Wood Award for Courage in Journalism, given by to a journalist "judged to best exemplify physical or moral courage in the practice of his or her craft."

He was a visiting scholar at the Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University 

He was the  recipient of the Center for Public Integrity  International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting oof the Year (http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/icij  http://www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/icij/journalists/profile/856/  "Upon awarding Thayer the ICIJ Award, the judges noted: :"He illuminated a page of history that would have been lost to the world had he not spent years in the Cambodian jungle, in a truly extraordinary quest for first-hand knowledge of the Khmer Rouge and their murderous leader. His investigations of the Cambodian political world required not only great risk and physical hardship but also mastery of an ever-changing cast of Political faction characters." http://www.publicintegrity.org/assets/pdf/pi_1999_03.pdf Maud S. Beelman, "Reporting Across Borders," The Public i: Newsletter of the Center for Public Integrity,Vol 7, no. 2, Mar 1999.]

According to Vaudine England of the BBC "Many of the regions greatest names in reporting made their mark in the pages of the Far Eastern Economic Review from the legendary Richard Hughes of Korean War fame, to Nate Thayer, the journalist who found Cambodias Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot."http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8268105.stm Vaudine England, "Leading Asian Magazine to Close," BBC Asia-Pacific News, September 22, 2009.]

Thayer was also the first person in 57 years to turn down a prestigious Peabody Award because he did not want to share it with ABC News  [Nightline] saying publicly lambasting American television news saying:"I in no way want my name associated with such egregious violations of journalistic and professional ethics." .http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/your-scoop-nah-its-ours-if-we-want-it-1157187.html "Your scoop? Nah. Its ours if we want it." The Independent May 25 1998.]

Thayer is also the recipient of The Overseas Press Club of America Award, as well as the Asian Society of Publishers and Editors Award for "Excellence in Reporting,"

Thayer was also honored with the SAIS-Novartis "Award for Excellence in International Reporting."

He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by The Wall Street Jounral

In 1999 Thayer established at the Hofstra Universitys Department of Journalism and Mass Media Studies in the School of Communication the Nate Thayer Scholarship given annually to "a qualified student with the best foreign story idea. Winners are selected on the basis of scholastic achievement or potential as well as economic need." http://www.hofstra.edu/pdf/1999/ho019900008.pdf Hofstra University Student Information Package, Financial Aid Section, p. 45.] http://www.hofstra.edu/Academics/Colleges/SOC/JMSPR/index.html

For those following the Khmer Rouge Trial of Nuon Chea: Background ambience behind the scenes at the time of the final collapse of the Khmer Rouge. Selected Excerpts from “Sympathy for the Devil” By Nate Thayer

For those following the Khmer Rouge trial of Nuon Chea: Background ambience behind the scenes of the final collapse of the Khmer Rouge. Selected Excerpts from “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalists Memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge” By Nate Thayer

(Copyright Nate Thayer. Excerpts from unpublished manuscript “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalists Memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge” All Rights Reserved. No publication or citation permitted without author’s express written permission.)

 

By 1994, the Khmer Rouge leadership once again evaporated into the jungle. To my frustration, my methodically constructed stable of Khmer Rouge sources was now deep in hiding. They continued to communicate with me through an elaborate network of underground  agents and Communist party cells. But it was a tortuous web, elaborately compartmentalized to obscure the identity and isolate the location of the guerrillas from their enemies. It would often take weeks, even months for a message from the jungle to get to me in Phnom Penh. Sometimes they would contact me through intermediaries by phone or deceptively postmarked mail. Other times notes would be hand-delivered by well dressed strangers who arrived at my house unannounced, politely exchanged pleasantries, decline to introduce themselves, and hand me a sealed envelope. They would then slip back out into the bustling city through the mazes of armed checkpoints, unpaid government soldiers to busy sleeping or extorting money to look for Khmer Rouge agents.

And I was always organizing my periodic trips across Cambodian government frontlines or over the Thai frontier to the guerrilla bases themselves. Even though it was a war-zone, I felt most relaxed deep in the jungles. I felt much safer under the protection of the disciplined Khmer Rouge than the unpredictable anarchy in government towns. In Phnom Penh, I slept with loaded automatic weapons by my bed and rarely left my house without a pistol and extra ammunition clips. With the guerrillas, I always slept peacefully in my hammock, tied to two trees, a symphony of whooping monkeys and insect’s overhead, surrounded by armed bodyguards who were charged with ensuring no one harmed me.

Messages from my Khmer Rouge contacts were always short and vague, the circumspect handwritten scrawls on ripped out notepaper almost palpable with intrigue and fear. “My Dear Friend, I got your message. If you can get here, we have already agreed to meet you. Ask our Thai friend who gives you this to help. You can trust him We have many difficulties and there are many things I need to talk urgently about,” read one typical unsigned note in its entirety. Even their written messages seemed to rise off the page in a clandestine whisper.

There was urgency to their missives but they always left me unfulfilled, desperate to know more. Their culture of secrecy permeated their every breathing action, their every move the instinctual second nature of a hunted animal. If you read the above message, you will notice, on second reading, there is no clue on why they wanted to meet, where the meeting was, when it would be, who it was with, or what it was about. The notes themselves, when they risked committing to paper, would not even betray whom it was from or that it was intended for me. There was a feeling off stark vulnerability whenever engaging with the Khmer Rouge under such conditions. I never knew where I was going or when I would be back. I always went anyway. All Khmer Rouge communication was like this. It is a fundamental lesson in all clandestine services: reveal nothing that isn’t absolutely necessary to accomplish your mission—and after decades in the jungles the Khmer Rouge had hones it to an art. This succeeded in leaving them firmly in control of all encounters and maximally impenetrable to their enemies.

And make no mistake. They had no doubt I was an enemy agent. Given their historically intolerant view of the likes of me, I was always keenly alert around them. If it was expedient or useful, I never had any doubt my closest Khmer Rouge sources would kill me without emotion. And they often changed their minds of whether one was a friend or foe. Most of those killed by the Khmer Rouge were loyal cadre who had been deemed, almost always out of unfounded paranoia, ‘exposed’ as an enemy agent. For Khmer Rouge cadre, it was, in fact, more dangerous to be a Khmer Rouge loyalist than their enemy. But such political thinking was fundamental to Cambodian political culture and all political leaders and parties operated under such a psychological foundation for pursuing and maintaining power. No one trusted anyone else, including one’s closest comrades. Betrayal and purges had been fundamental to Cambodian politics throughout modern history.

It is rare to meet any Cambodian who has a problem with murdering civilians as a concept. The parameters of the moral debate are simply confined to the merits of the victims. But importantly, in 1992, I had been formally deemed a potentially useful enemy by Pol Pot himself, I was told by a Khmer Rouge cadre close to the top leader. Pol Pot had ordered that a channel be kept open to me. He had deemed me useful to getting their message out in as empirical and neutral manner as they could hope for. His reasoning was that my writings were read by those world figures who were involved in forming Cambodian policy. I was guardedly comfortable with that. In Cambodia, that is the best a foreigner can hope for: A strategic enemy but tactical ally.

In 1993, some of the top cadre with whom I had become close sought permission to communicate with me without prior notification of and approval from the party. When Pol Pot agreed, this was a crucial development in improving my access. All cadre knew it was unwise to question the wisdom of Pol Pot, and followed his orders unquestionably. Pol Pot’s absolute control of all aspects of the organization’s activities presupposed that a Khmer Rouge cadre simply did not have encounters with an American, little less establish a personal relationship, without the clear approval of Pol Pot himself. The penalty for such recklessness was death.

Pol Pot’s sanction of limited access for me was the function of the quality, influence, and reputation of the primary publications I worked for. The far Eastern Economic Review, my primary employer, was the finest newsweekly on Asia—and required reading around the globe for the limited number of diplomats, officials, academics, businessmen, and journalists interested in the region.  It was authoritative and serious and scrupulous and courageous in the quality and accuracy of its in-depth, often exclusive reporting. It covered even the most obscure reaches of Asia comprehensively with depth and persistence and insight. Countries like Cambodia have few readers and advertisers and this was a key reason why most media devoted few full time resources to its coverage. When something happened in Cambodia—or elsewhere in remote corners of Asia—the Review had already provided the context and preludes that preceded the breaking news. It was also in a unique position to have in place people who had the sources and knowledge to provide superior coverage. It was a reporters magazine, driven by an eclectic group of correspondents who often had years of history in the areas they covered. The reporting was backed up by superb editing which ensured its  content was fair, comprehensive, and accurate.

The Phnom Penh Post—the first independent newspaper in Indochina since 1975—was a courageous, scrappy, and detailed bi-weekly newspaper that was read by everyone in Cambodia who was involved in any aspect of policy. It published the details and gave the space that only a local paper can provide. It was started in 1992 by my good friend Michael Hayes, an American who had no newspaper or business experience who had left his work as a humanitarian aid official with the Asia Society, and started the paper with his own life savings from scratch. I lived at the Phnom Penh Post during my years in Cambodia in a three story villa which housed the newspaper offices, production facilities, and the living quarters of Michael, his wife Kathleen, and myself. It was a center of constant hubbub, with a steady 24-hour stream of incoming journalists, varied visitors, sources, and newspaper employees producing the paper.

I also wrote for Jane’s Defence Weekly, the preeminent authority on military matters, and the Washington Post, which was required reading by everyone in Washington. Between them, the Khmer Rouge expected that, in their attempt to spread their message, an honest, accurate analysis that would have a far reaching impact would emerge. They were not often happy with my missives, but also knew that very little could be written which would further blacken their reputation. “ We believe you are serious,” they said to me more than once. They were used to being the target of often inaccurate, speculative, and invariably hostile reporting that focused only on their years in power. In contrast, we covered current issues regarding them as well. I always provided background context that included their atrocious history and current dictatorship, but they were used to this after years of unrelenting criticism. They knew full well that they were culpable, and respected my criticism of their organization as long as it was accurate and comprehensive, regardless of the requisite negative content.

Aside from my forays into the jungle, I was used to meeting more cosmopolitan Khmer Rouge political leaders and diplomats in five-star hotel lobbies and at diplomatic functions. But after 1994, two years after he withdrew the Khmer Rouge from participating in the UN election process, Pol Pot ordered them all back to the jungle. I wasn’t even sure where along the 800-kilometer swath of mountainous jungles over the Thai border my Khmer Rouge sources were hiding. Innumerable times, I travelled for days to remote villages near the Thai frontier on instruction from the Khmer Rouge to meetings. As often as not, a liaison would never materialize. Or I would be guided to an obscure guerrilla base where some mid-level cadre would spout useless propaganda already broadcast verbatim over their clandestine radio. Hungry for gossip, news, or rumour, I relentlessly pursued any source that might offer information. I flew to cities in Asia, North America, and Europe trying to glean information from shadowy sympathizers, relatives of cadre, and former guerrillas who had left the movement, and other underground operatives. I met with spies and diplomats from numerous countries charged with tracking the guerrillas. And I was constantly in contact with Cambodians of all political affiliations, whose agenda I covered equally, and who often knew of activities within the Khmer Rouge through their fellow Cambodians. Each of these encounters, sometimes involving weeks of work, would perhaps produce only a quote or single detail or a rumour to pursue or confirm. I would sort these tidbits of knowledge and carefully piece them together, constructing a portrait of what was happening in the jungle and publish it as an article. It was a frustrating, tedious, and usually fruitless business reporting on the Khmer Rouge: that is why there was effectively on one else who bothered to try. But I enjoyed the methodical challenge and it fit my personality to work alone and focus to fruition on a single task.

But for most of the world, by 1995 the Khmer Rouge leadership had simply slipped silently into the impenetrable forests of northwest Cambodia, contact severed completely, and guerrilla war resumed. Like a disturbed hornet’s nest, they dispatched small, angry squads of troops to attack around the country, emerging from the jungle to strike vulnerable government outposts, massacre ethnic Vietnamese civilians, and blow up trains and bridges. They then immediately evaporated back into the forest.

“The resistance forces are everywhere. We can attack the two-headed, one-eyed puppets and their American bosses everywhere!,” a secret 1995 internal directive by the Khmer Rouge leadership to military commanders said, referring to the fragile UN elected coalition government of co-prime ministers, and to the war wound that left Hun Sen blinded in one eye when he was a loyal lieutenant of Pol Pot. “We can cut the highway anywhere, any bridge and culvert. We are going to cut it over and over until the two headed government…and the Americans turn their tail and run.” The directive instructed: “ Cut the enemies throat! Cut the enemies throat! Cut the enemies blood arteries! Tragic fit, tragic death to all the enemies near and far!”

Nothing was subtle with the Khmer Rouge. This is how they talked in conversation, sputtering vitriol and contempt for the rest of the country who they had dehumanized simply because they weren’t loyal to them.

Westerners who stumbled into Khmer Rouge units after 1993 were regularly kidnapped and brutally executed. They included, as well as many Asian nationalities, Australians, Americans, Belgium’s, French, German, and British citizens. I was involved in every case. They all died an appalling death. I was to learn eventually that their executioners included some of my closest Khmer Rouge friends. Each and every one of their families contacted me, my telephone number given to them by their governments who were unable to assist them. They had been told I might have influence or leverage with the guerrillas and they were desperate for help in saving their husbands, sons, and daughters.

These remain some of my most painful experiences. I was not able to save any of them. I did, often after months of work, gather the grisly details of the demise of each. I remain haunted by the stricken, inconsolable anguish on the faces of their loved ones. They invariably wanted to know every last bit of gruesome information. It is equally true for the millions of Cambodians who were, in some ways, unlucky enough to survive the Khmer Rouge brutal years in power.

But, by 1995, behind the veneer of confidence and aggressiveness, there was a cancer metastasizing at the heart of the Khmer Rouge movement. I knew from the private whispers of grunt Khmer Rouge soldiers on the frontlines and forests, Pol Pot’s 1992 decision to pull out of the Paris Peace Agreements, forego the internationally recognized 1993 UN elections, and break the cease-fire, was considered by many Khmer Rouge cadres as a disastrous, perhaps fatal mistake.

Thousands of rank-and-file felt this way but seethed in silence. Expressing disagreement on such matters was suicide. But the reality was self-evident. Pol Pot and his small group of core leadership were very much like the emperor with no clothes. Instead of bringing them closer to power or peace, the Khmer Rouge were now utterly isolated, opposed by the mass of the peasantry, covert foreign military and material aid severed by China and Thailand, and at war once again. Morale was abysmal.

After two decades of war and unspeakable suffering, the hopes and opportunity for peace that came with the 1991 signing of the Paris Peace Accords had been squandered. Many Khmer Rouge cadre believed that their leaders had failed them and were deeply disappointed. Others were bitter and angry. But expressing opinion or dissent within the Khmer Rouge was unthinkable. And to add to the simmering frustration of the Khmer Rouge, in the eyes of their enemies they were increasingly not viewed  as a serious threat. For an organization that took pride—in the manner of a neighborhood gang of bullies—in forcing others to accommodate their demands through intimidation and sheer terror to be largely ignored by their enemies, was deeply demeaning. And a humiliated Khmer Rouge had the potential to strike back irrationally to demand attention. They were dangerous enough when they were rational.

After the 1993 UN elections, the Khmer Rouge’s biggest threat, in fact, came from within their own ranks. Swatting malarial mosquitoes and eating plain rice seasoned only with salt and sprinkled with dried fish boiled on an open jungle campfire, sleeping in their hammocks slung between trees in the forest, rank and file cadre listened with growing resentment to short-wave radio broadcasts of the international embracement of the government that emerged from the 1993 UN elections. Foreign companies, diplomatic recognition and international aid flooded to their enemies, bolstering their legitimacy and threatening the Khmer Rouge with becoming sidelined as a superfluous political force. The Khmer Rouge, in contrast, remained without electricity, running water, health care, schools, and, increasingly, hope that they would ever taste the fruits of peace, little less victory.

Never willing to address unpleasant realities, the Khmer Rouge went to absurd lengths to put a positive spin on their increasingly desperate conditions. “Our army, our guerrilla forces , are more and more respectable regarding their view, their political knowledge, their economical situation, their welfare, their attitude toward the peaceful relation scheme, their stance on spying activity, and their awareness of the undermining activity,” wrote the top Khmer Rouge leadership to senior commanders in a secret policy and military strategy directive in November 1995. “Thanks to these qualities, the number of our cadre are multiplying; the number of our forces increases; and our forces are more disciplined, more decisive, braver and more resolute to fighting the two-headed national traitors, slaves of the Vietnamese communists and their alliance. The slaves of the Vietnamese communists and their alliance are being swollen, decomposed, and rotten, all devoured by maggots, and having no more flesh.”

The Khmer Rouge, like all Cambodian political factions, seethed in hatred and utterly intractable absolutes. This is the bane of Cambodian political culture—not just the Khmer Rouge—and central to understanding the unending instability in Cambodia. There is no concept of compromise or common good, little less common ground. If you disagreed with the Khmer Rouge, you were a “slave” of the “national traitors.” One did not seek to just defeat the enemy, but preferred to see their bodies not just dead but “rotting” and “devoured by maggots.” You didn’t just execute someone who opposed you, you tortured and humiliated them first, and then murdered their wives and children.

Not only were the Khmer Rouge short of friends and money, but weapons and ammunition. The cessation of foreign and military aid was addressed by boastful self-delusions that they were self sufficient. In 1995, they ordered all soldiers and civilians to meet a quota of carving homemade bamboo stakes and other crude weapons. “The strategic weapons that we now call our ‘main forces’, sharp pointed soldiers, very sharp are punji sticks, and booby traps. These are the strategic weapons we experimented with and the results are highly effective. These forces are located all over, and bamboo, woods, poisons, resins, machetes, axes, and knives are all locally abundant. It can be said that factories making strategic weapons to fight the enemies exist locally and are abundant all over, in lakes and rivers.”

This was the Khmer Rouge leadership’s response to the cutoff of covert military aid from China and the 1994 UN imposed sealing of the border with trade from Thailand. To Khmer Rouge soldiers who had to face the reality of a well-armed enemy in battle, this was not only profoundly insulting, it was life threatening. Their leaders were now asserting that bamboo stakes constituted superior firepower. As a result of such preposterousness, Khmer Rouge cadre increasingly directed their resentment not so much at their enemy as at their own leaders.

Many Khmer Rouge felt their future was passing them by. Defections of frontline troops increased. Morale was abysmal. Soldiers pulled back in battle rather than risk death in a war they now had only a veneer of allegiance to. The blind loyalty of armed cadre long demanded by their faceless leadership, and enforced by fear, was on the brink of dangerously unraveling. And the Khmer Rouge leadership reacted by cracking down on their own loyalists.

Ta Mok, the Khmer Rouge top military field commander and Army chief-of-staff, not so affectionately known as “The Butcher”, lamented that “pacifism has entered our cadres” and that “there is confusion, a blending of our essence and our enemies,” referring to increasing contact with villagers in government run frontline areas and growing sympathies among his troops to end the  war. The Khmer Rouge top leadership ordered all contacts severed with villages not strictly under their control. “We have continued to exist with them, eat with them, peacefully allied with them to the point that some of our own cadres and ranks have repeatedly been put in danger. In some of our units, enemy elements comprise 50-60%.” To be deemed an “enemy element” was a spine chilling accusation.

Their leaders made clear to their subordinates, in a secret internal document distributed to frontline units at the time, that they were being closely watched. “Our first responsibility is we must be clean. Our major responsibility is to clean up our act,” warning not to sympathize with proposed negotiations to end the war which they referred to as “the peaceful relationship scheme.” "Our ranks , our cadre, must be clean, our skin clear, free of smell, no peaceful relationship scheme, no spying activity, no internal undermining, nothing to be compromised at all…”

When, that same year of 1995, the leadership ordered troops to attack and burn to the ground front-line villages in northern Siem Riep province they suspected of not being sufficiently sympathetic, more than 1000 Khmer Rouge troops defected instead of carrying out the order. When I visited, the scene was surreal. Hundreds of Khmer Rouge soldiers in pea green Chinese PLA style uniforms lounged in the markets, flirting with local village girls, their commanders firing artillery they had taken with them, now firing back at their former comrades just past the tree line that marked the border from the rice paddies to the guerrilla jungles they had inhabited for thirty some years until only days earlier. “When we went to fight, we didn’t see other nationalities,” said former Khmer Rouge battalion commander Tung Yun. “ we fought because we were ordered to do so, but in our hearts none of us wanted war anymore.” He spoke for thousands of others still in the jungles.

In an atmosphere that forbids questioning the policies of their leaders, with no outlet to vent their disappointment and debate the merits of returning to war, conditions were ripe for an internal Khmer Rouge explosion of violence.

To be honestly transparent, in retrospect, part of me viewed this growing international and domestic consensus for peace and stability as a fundamental career threat. But while I loved being a war correspondent, this war was now meaningless. The fact was, by 1994, I, too, was tired of this war. I, too, did not want to be the proverbial last person to die in a war which now clearly had no purpose other than each side trying to secure raw and maximum power. After the withdrawal of the Vietnamese occupying troops in 1991 and the United Nations forces in 1993, it was now a war without issues, stripped to the carcass of armed conflict which is simply mans raw excersize of his most primal, uncivilized instinct for power and vengeance through violence and superior force; simply a winner takes all bloody grab for power. And the rank and file on all sides knew it. The soldiers from all the political factions still at war were nothing more complicated than pawns for a few hundred powerful and rich so-called leaders who weren’t courageous enough to wage peace and just wanted all of the pie. Many rank and file on both sides refused to fight seriously when ordered to battle, firing from a safe distance and reluctant to engage in tactics which threatened their lives.

By 1995, I had only one more objective in Cambodia, and that was to meet and speak with and interview Pol Pot. And ask him two simple questions. "Why?" And "Are you sorry?" And then, I told myself, I would leave this wicked society forever.

I viewed brewing dissatisfaction within the Khmer Rouge as creating cracks in their armour, opening up potential new means of access for me. Where there was turmoil, there was increased opportunity I could wangle my way into the heart of the Khmer Rouge central command. I had found that the Khmer Rouge opened up to me when they had difficulties, which often left them with issues they wanted to clarify or explain to outsiders. Turmoil and weakness increased the possibility that they might have to play that card. And I was constantly scheming to see that the vehicle they used to do so would be me. I was always encouraging, maneuvering for, and poised to take advantage of such contacts. I approached it as an endless chess game requiring strategy and patience and an intimate knowledge of one’s opponent. I knew from viewing the chessboard that I was closing in, however slowly, on their King, Pol Pot. Obstacles were being removed and I was advancing.

For years my biggest fear was Pol Pot would die before I was able to meet him. I would wake at night, my stomach in knots, with the thoughts of years of effort being concomitantly extinguished with his last breath. Barring that, I was convinced that one day I would meet him face-to-face and Pol Pot would have to answer the questions that haunted his broken countrymen.

In 1996, through smuggled letters, meetings with their underground operatives, and visits to their guerrilla bases across the frontier Thai borders in the jungles of Cambodia’s north, I pushed harder for them to allow me access to their leadership, arguing plausibly that they clearly had to try something new. The Cambodian government and the international community were perplexed by  the silence of the Khmer Rouge leadership and unclear what they wanted. They had let no one deep into their territory for four years--since my last visit—and they could see clearly they were in a weaker position since disengaging from the outside world.

They didn’t have to be convinced that they needed to do something, but they didn’t know what. They needed to reengage their movement to the Cambodian political process. What they needed rather than their tired, failed tactics of vitriolic rhetoric and terror was, I suggested, to shed light on their internal movement to lessen the blackened mystique that had shrouded their movement and Pol Pot in for forty years. Much of that mystique was not politically threatening to them, but simply allowing access to the personalities and daily life in their control zones. My perennially repeated request was that they allow an independent, credible witness as unfettered access as possible. A fresh look from inside their territory, talking with their loyalists, couldn’t possibly result in them having a diminished reputation in the eyes of the world, I repeated to their cadres. They were already a household name worldwide synonymous with unspeakable brutality and senseless violence. In the eyes of the world and most of their countrymen, they were already the devil incarnate and they knew it. There was certainly nothing I could write that would further blacken their image.

Many Khmer Rouge cadre sympathized and were, to a degree, in awe of the sometimes ridiculous and always relentless lengths I had gone over the years attempting to access their inner sanctums and interview Pol Pot.

My persistence, I think, struck some familiar chord of revolutionary self-sacrifice-against-daunting-odds. Perhaps many of them could relate, having disappeared as eager, patriotic youths into the jungle more than twenty years earlier, waiting for naught the revolutionary victory. If they weren’t impressed, at least they were entertained by this shaved-headed American who wouldn’t go away. And if they weren’t entertained, I had regardless become a kind of fixture, like some half-mad Dennis the Menace to the Khmer Rouge’s Mr. Wilson, with whom they grew resigned to affectionately tolerate.

They had, over time, tried everything to reject me—arrested me at gunpoint, shot at me, ordered me killed, banished me, robbed me, and handed me over the border in disgust to be arrested by Thai authorities. I became rather legendary within the Khmer Rouge army, I was to learn, as this reckless, perhaps insane, rather likeable American who would appear in the oddest of circumstances. Literally nothing dissuaded me. I was fully cognizant and reconciled to the fact that there was s strong chance I would die in these jungles. I always tried to be smart with tactics, having committed to a strategy that required accepting a high level of intrinsic danger. But I never once rejected going into a war-zone simply because it was dangerous.

I continued to show up, uninvited, over the years in virtually every corner of their jungles, often where no foreigner had ever been. I arrived by foot, captured Russian military vehicles, driven by defecting government soldiers during battle, on the back of an elephant, bicycle, dirt bikes supplied by the CIA to non-communist guerrilla allies, by river in commandeered sampans, ox-cart, rented helicopter, accompanied by United Nations troops, guided by my own hired mercenaries, escorted by Thai military intelligence liaisons, with Thai businessmen who traded with the guerrillas, logging trucks, and even by taxi cab ( I can remember more than once the driver of my hired car simply refusing to go any further into the scrub and abandoning me to walk the last few miles). I once traversed the trench lines into Khmer Rouge territory driving a government military officer’s Russian jeep, adorned with full government regalia identifying the vehicle, which I had rented from a corrupt Cambodian general. I remember startled guerrilla troops popping up from bunkers, leaves and branches crudely camouflaging their helmets, as I weaved through frontline trenches and around minefields in abandoned rice paddies. I was advised by unamused Khmer Rouge commanders never, ever to do that again.

Almost always, I arrived under dangerous circumstances, through combat frontlines, from enemy-held  territory, over mountains, crossing national borders, always through a minefield, from north, south, east and west, essentially to be turned away, mainly empty-handed, time and time again. I didn’t mid the rejection. The chase itself was a fun-filled adventure, a young man’s fantasy.

My visits to the Khmer Rouge zones didn’t endear me to the government forces either, who regularly tried to kill me. Spies are ubiquitous in Cambodia. The government would know I was in Khmer rouge zones within a very short time, often within hours. I listened to government field radio reports broadcasting my location to front-line troops. They would then rocket our position. This, in turn, didn’t endear me to the guerrilla troops with whom I was visiting.

In general, I was viewed as a problem. Many had concluded my very presence was simply a pain in the ass. There was often a mood shift which seemed to elicit an inaudible groan when I would arrive.

But I was the only westerner many of the Khmer Rouge cadre  and jungle fighters had ever had contact with.  So there was the ever present animal in the zoo factor. It was not unusual for large crowds of Khmer Rouge civilians and soldiers, some walking for days, to gather at a safe distance and gawk at me for hours. Old ladies would squat and chew betel nut, spitting and exchange raucous commentary with each other. “ Are they all fat and bald?” one toothless old lady asked my bodyguard in a remote village which had never hosted a foreigner before.

I remember clearly one time squatting around a fire late at night deep in the jungle just north of the great temples of Angkor Wat, monkeys crying from the tall canopy of trees. I had walked for two weeks from Thailand with non-communist guerrillas accompanying them on a mission to attack government positions. We often encountered Khmer Rouge guerrillas who shared the jungle with their then coalition partners fighting the common enemy, the occupying Vietnamese army and their installed government in Phnom Penh. A grizzled Khmer Rouge cadre was casually drawing battle plans in the dirt with a stick, explaining to other young fighters the next morning’s attack. He pointed to a small village, thrusting his stick in the dirt and raw hatred flashing from his eyes, hissed “Tomorrow, we will turn it into a rice field!” Several minutes into the preview of the intended assault he looked across at me squatting on my haunches a few feet away from him, locked on my eyes in abrupt recognition, and lept back with a cry of terror. “Joy Marey! Barong moek Howee!” Translation: “Motherfucker! A white foreigner has arrived!” was the totality of his exact words. He literally grabbed an AK-47 assault rifle, jumped to his feet, clutched his heart and paced back and forth, taking deep breaths and cursing for a few minutes to recover. Everyone who fit my description, after all, was the enemy, of whom he had only seen pictures of over the years. And to see a vision of the devil himself, a blue-eyed, bearded, bald one, armed and dressed in combat fatigues staring at him from across the campfire deep in the jungle, was too much for him to process. The poor man never seemed quite to recover. He glared at me for days afterwards, his face furrowed in a queer mix of raw hate and confusion.

To try and keep track of the inner workings of the Khmer Rouge was not just a matter of analyzing information. That was the easier part—a skill developed by following the nuances of their historical methodology and rhetoric. The hard part was getting credible, first-hand information. Elevating secrecy to an art form, the Khmer Rouge obscured and compartmentalized all levels of information so it wouldn’t fall into the hands of the enemy, which by 1995 was a category that included every single nation on earth and most Cambodian citizens. I was keenly aware, each time I went into their territory, it was a category that clearly also included me.

For the time being, however, I continued to be a potentially useful enemy whose channel, by order of Pol Pot himself, remained open. I comforted myself by dwelling on the fact, particularly when I was being glared at by armed Khmer Rouge, that every Khmer Rouge cadre knew that it would be suicidal to harm someone who Pol Pot thought might be useful. My relationship with the Khmer Rouge had evolved in the early 1990’s to include, by default, nothing less than perhaps their primary liaison to the West. They did not think of me as a sympathizer. Indeed, in their perpetual state of rather astounding and logic-muddled paranoia, they had concluded that I was a paid operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. “We have discussed whether you are CIA and decided it doesn’t really matter,” one Khmer Rouge diplomat told me matter of factly once. They politely attempted to maintain the charade that they thought I was an independent journalist, but we both knew they didn’t believe it. They simply did not understand the concept of someone who did not serve the interests of—was under the control of—the government that issued ones passport. They often used the term “you” when referring to the US government or angrily condemned me for some Washington policy. I would ritually correct them. And they would apologize half-heartedly. The irony is US law forbids the CIA from recruiting journalists employed by American owned media, and the Far Eastern Economic Review was owned by Dow Jones—perhaps the most iconic symbol of world capitalism. So, while extensive, my dealings with CIA operatives were often a tortuous process themselves that rivaled the Khmer Rouge, with many having to go through acrobatic lawyer-driven hoops to receive prior permission from Washington before meeting me. Some simply ignored the directive from Langley, and I count many intelligence officials—from a broad range of competing countries—among my friends.

It was helpful that the Khmer Rouge faced a couple of basic problems that worked to my advantage. Even before they retreated back to the jungle in 1992, many governments banned their officials from any direct contact with the guerrillas or their representatives. Even at diplomatic functions and cocktail parties, the Khmer Rouge was shunned. US policy went so far as to specifically prohibit initiating contact at cocktail parties. U.S. government officials were allowed—by written directive—to return, but not offer, a verbal greetings or handshake. This tied the hands of intelligence agents or diplomats  who were on one hand tasked with gathering information on the guerrilla group, and on the other forbidden from dealing with them directly. I, of course, had no such problem.

At cocktail parties, Khmer Rouge officials would often be standing alone, clearly uncomfortable in their western suits, looking grumpy as they held a cocktail they wouldn’t drink, being ignored and eyed simultaneously, not unlike a pedophile relative at a family gathering.

I not only had no problem chatting them up, I  reveled in it. I particularly liked National Day celebrations, held by virtually every countries embassy once a year. By protocol, the entire diplomatic list and other dignitaries and select nationals of the country would be invited, including the Khmer Rouge. Those functions to which I wasn’t invited, I crashed. I have attended scores over the years. The hotel ballrooms and ambassador’s living rooms are filled with people who would normally refuse my telephone calls. It was a diplomat’s nightmare and journalists dream; stuck being chatted up by a journalist he had long tried to avoid. Often the Khmer Rouge diplomat would be found in the corner with the North Korean or some other third world pariah. Afterwards, it wasn’t unusual to be grilled by jealous but thankful diplomats who needed something to write in their cable to the home office on their rare Khmer Rouge encounter.

The second basic problem, after the Khmer Rouge retreated back to their jungle redoubts, was often simply a matter of logistics. Dialogue from the jungle is a pain in the neck. Aside from the issues of safety and political will, physical access was extremely difficult. Normal modes of contact—such as telephone, email, meetings in obscure seedy bars or fancy hotel lobbies were, of course, not possible or practical.

In 1996, I took a sabbatical from reporting from Phnom Penh to be a visiting scholar at a Washington academic think tank. It was not unrelated to a rather incendiary series of articles I had written naming both Cambodian Prime Ministers as being bankrolled by and, in exchange, giving political protection to, a major Asian heroin trafficker and organized crime figure.

One day in 1996, while in my office at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, I got a call from a friend in Europe with a message. The Khmer Rouge wanted to see me urgently. Could I come to the jungle? The message was to go to the remote sleepy Thai border town of Surin, and check into a particular hotel as soon as possible. When I arrived at the hotel, I was to call a particular phone number in Europe and give my hotel room number. I was then to wait for someone to contact me. That was the entirety of the message. It was a typical set-up for a meeting with the Khmer Rouge. No mention of who I was to meet, where I would go, when I would be contacted, or what the subject matter would concern. I didn’t even know who within the Khmer Rouge was contacting me.

The routing of the message was typical in its circuitous layers to obscure any prying eyes or ears. And it was designed for the Khmer Rouge to remain in complete control of the process of me arriving in their territory. It denied me any ability to double-cross them if I was so inclined, or to pass on sensitive information to any foreign intelligence officials. It also left me very vulnerable if something were to go wrong. There was always a palpable undercurrent of dark unease for me with these people.

A Khmer Rouge “former” diplomat in Paris, who was married to a French woman and therefore held French citizenship and was allowed to remain in France, served as one of the guerrillas primary contacts in Europe. The Khmer Rouge “former” diplomat in Paris had been contacted by another Khmer Rouge “former” diplomat living underground in Bangkok (in a safe house maintained by Thai military intelligence). That diplomat maintained human runners who would be dispatched back and forth overland across the Thai border into the jungle. The diplomat in Paris had called my friend. My friend, a Franco-Khmer, was trusted by the Khmer Rouge but not a member of the Party. He, in turn, was known to be close to me. The leadership in the jungle relayed information to me in Washington this way. None of the intermediaries were told more than they needed to know beyond getting a message to me. Even if they were inclined to talk they didn’t have any information. The “former” diplomat in Paris had one fully equipped man, trained in China as a coded communication specialist, who could transmit and receive top secret messages from a counterpart in the jungle in times of crisis.

So, as always, I told my friend to reply I would be departing immediately and to relay the message that I would check into the specific hotel as instructed in Surin, Thailand within 72 hours. I boarded a plane from Washington’s Dulles international airport that night for the 36 hour flight to Bangkok. From Bangkok it was a 10 hour drive to the border town.

From the hotel, I dialed a contact number in Europe and informed my contact simply the number of the hotel room I had checked into. No names were used. No countries were mentioned. Certainly no words intimating any outlawed guerrilla groups culpable for committing crimes against humanity were uttered. Even the name of the hotel was omitted. “How are you, my friend?” I said. “I have arrived fine. I am in number 302. I will wait here.’

“I will let my friends know now. They will contact you. Be careful.” He couldn’t tell me who, where or what to expect or when I could expect to know when I would be contacted to not to be informed, then, either, of any of these details.

Then I waited….for days. I forget how many, but several. Mainly I stayed drunk. I did sit-ups and ran in place. I left the room for one hour each afternoon to swim at a lap pool in the town. I ate rice and noodles from the lobby nightclub, which doubled as a karaoke bar, coffee shop, and whorehouse. I prepared for an interview with Pol Pot I cleaned my camera equipment and read literature and documents on the Khmer Rouge I always kept for distraction. I had read everything at least once before.

I had no idea whether I was to walk through the jungle for days, whether I would meet important leaders, including Pol Pot, or when my contacts would arrive to retrieve me.

All that uncertainty requires contingency preparation: jungle clothes, still cameras, video camera, batteries, film, notebooks, hammock, mosquito net, food, rolls of chewing tobacco, whiskey and Ziploc bags of all sizes to protect against the daily monsoon rains. Everything had to fit perfectly inside a small Khmer Rouge knapsack on my back in case I had to walk for days.

And I couldn’t really leave the hotel room not knowing when the Khmer Rouge operatives would arrive and not wanting to draw attention to myself in a town where there are very few western visitors who aren’t up to no good. The small hotel staff knew me well after years of coming though, and it was no secret what, in general, I was up to. They knew I was going to nearby Cambodia, where there was a war, but they really didn’t want to know any more than that. I would always leave the lobby, usually before dawn, not checking out, dressed in jungle clothing with a backpack and laden with camera equipment. Often, I wouldn’t return for days, muddy and dirty and accompanied by fit men in crew cuts and sunglasses. These were my Thai military intelligence escorts who ferried me across the border through a myriad of Thai checkpoints who didn’t speak much and dressed in civilian clothes. They had a particular ID card that seemed to grip any other Thai official's attention with an immediate positive response and silent accommodation. This had always precluded the hotel staff previously of inquiring who I was or what I was doing.

This time there were no Thai officials to greet me and smooth my egress across national borders.

Then one rainy morning at 0600 there was a firm knock on the door. I asked who it was: First in Thai, then in English, then in Cambodian. After a long pause, a hushed voice replied in Khmer: “It’s me.”

TO BE CONTINUED……….

Copyright Nate Thayer. Excerpts from “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalists Memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge” All Rights Reserved. No publication or citation permitted without author’s express written permission.)  

 

Excerpts from unpublished manuscript of book “Sympathy for the Devil: A journalist’s memoir from inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge” By Nate Thayer

Khmer Rouge ideology and details of who they murdered--and why. From exclusive, perviously unplublished interviews with top Khmer Rouge leaders with Nuon Chea, Ta Mok, Pol Pot, Duch, and Khieu Samphan By Nate Thayer       (Copyrighted. All rights reserved. No republication without prior permission from Author)

By Nate Thayer

Selected excerpts from unpublished manuscript of book “Sympathy for the Devil: A journalist’s memoir from inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge” By Nate Thayer

Although popularly labeled as Communists, evidence from previously unpublished interviews with all the top leadership of the Khmer Rouge show the Khmer Rouge movement and its murderous policies were founded and implemented on an amalgam of ideology and homegrown political theory uniquely Cambodian. The leading all-powerful apparatus of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea came from disparate backgrounds, political influences, and training that clearly point toward a CPK structure of organized power based on no external models. Their policies drew from the structures of  their Cambodian historical political ancestors, with influences from anti-colonialist movements, extreme nationalism, and various non Cambodian communist parties in Europe and Asia in the 1940's and 1950's. In fact it is more accurate that they had no uniform ideology when they seized power, but rather were dominated by a unique amalgam of loosely allied regional fiefdoms with little uniform central ideology, coordination or control. In effect, in April 1975, six separate armies, long void of a unifying central leadership converged on Phnom Penh, simultaneously overthrowing the Lon Nol government. These loosely coordinated regional armed  Khmer Rouhge factions then struggled against each other for dominace within the framework of the CPK to assert inlufluence and control. Once in titular power, there was a stark absence of predetermined strategy or national leadership that implemented what evolved into a bumbling, delusional, ill prepared and shockingly unskilled cadre of government leaders that was predestined to implode in disaster.

It is useful to introduce a historical overview of the KR movement and its leadership prior to them seizing power in 1975.

Cambodia in the 1960’s offered few conditions that traditionally provided fuel to ignite and sustain a communist movement. It had virtually no industrial base or manufacturing sector from which to recruit a working class base of an exploited labor force by those who owned the means of production. Almost all its peasants—85% of the population—owned their own land, eliminating the issue to recruit based on the exploitation tenant farmers by a landlord class. The country was rich in natural resources, with abundant rice crops and some of the most productive fishing waterways in the world. It was a leading exporter of rice until after the war that engulfed the country in 1970. The population was very small compared to the productive land mass and there was virtually no malnutrition or starvation. Cambodia was at peace and a delicate political neutrality, deftly juggling outside pressures of alliances during the superpower struggles that rendered much of the world allied with one of the three great powers of the era. As a result there were no Cambodian proxy armies fighting for the power interests of foreign nations. Cambodia was almost largely ethnically and religiously homogeneous, precluding racial or religious pretext to foment resentment or strife. The conditions for revolution were not abundant.

While a number of anti-colonialist movements and nationalist armed groups flourished in the 1940’s and 50’s, the signing of the French granting independence to Cambodia in 1953 and the subsequent Geneva accords in 1954, spelled the demise of virtually all the armed underground movements in Cambodia. The Cambodian branch of the Indochinese Communist Party—entirely controlled by the Vietnamese—withdrew their entire ethnic Khmer cadre to Hanoi in 1954. The anti-colonialist Khmer Issarak party evaporated. The leftist Pracheochon party and the anti-Sihanouk Democratic party were neutralized.While leftist sentiments lingered and Sihanouk’s autocratic rule kept alive a movement seeking more democratic rule, it was largely marginalized by his heavy handed tactics.

So to what does one attribute the rise of the ultra radical Communist party of Kampuchea that seized power in 1975 leaving millions of bones stacking the killing fields that testified to the Khmer Rouge unprecedented political experiment which ended with the military conquest of Cambodia by Vietnam that brought a halt to the CPK’s 3 years and 8 months in power? What was the genus of its ideology or origins in political theory that allowed them to burgeon and drove the implementation of its disastrous rule?

On September 30, 1960 a group of 10-15 men gathered at a secret meeting in the Phnom Penh railroad station for the first party Congress and formed the Communist Party of Kampuchea. For three days and nights they hammered out and approved a party line and statutes. A Central Committee was chosen with Tou Samouth as Party Secretary, Nuon Chea as Deputy Party Secretary, Saloth Sar, alias Pol Pot, as member, Ma Mong as member, Ieng Sary as member, Chong as member, and Kaev Meas as member. The more powerful sub grouping of the Standing Committee of the CPK compromised Tou Samouth, Nuon Chea, and Pol Pot. As Pol Pot was a teacher, as was Ieng Sary, (as well as both their wives, who were sisters), they were limited to working from Phnom Penh. Nuon Chea was tasked with travelling to the countryside.

According to the unpublished interviews cited from below with Nuon Chea on three separate occasions in January, February, and March 1998: “ We implemented the principle of absolute party leadership in accordance with the slogan: a protracted, difficult, hard struggle, self-reliance, self-mastery, independence…As for the party statutes, the principles of Marxist-Leninism were used and the principle of Democratic centralism. And the Party had to build from the countryside as the foundation and the towns as following behind.”

Nuon Chea’s reference to Marxist-Leninism as a guiding party principle was the sole reference I heard from any senior or other party figure of the CPK, in extensive and repeated interviews with every surviving member of the party leadership in more than ten years of research from the 1980’s to date. These included interviews with Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Ta Mok, Son Sen, Ke Pok, and Khieu Samphan, the only surviving members of the CPK Central Committee after their internal purges and end of their rule in power. They also included hundreds of interviews with other senior political cadre and military commanders who mostly had joined the movement in 1970 or the late 1960's.

Each of the leaders had their origins as members of other political parties that formed and disintegrated in the 1940’s and 1950’s.

In 1962, CPK Secretary Tou Samouth was arrested while riding his bicycle to get medicine for his sick child in Phnom Penh and taken to the home of then Sihanouk security chief Lon Nol, interrogated to reveal the names of other CPK members, tortured and executed. He had been betrayed by a government double agent, Siev Heng, who was a former Secretary general of the earlier VN dominated Communist party--the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP).

The KPRP  had effectively dissolved after the 1954 signing of the Geneva Agreements which mandated the withdrawal of armed forces to Hanoi, and the 1953 bilateral agreement of Cambodian independence between France and Cambodia, which returned Cambodia to independence from Colonial French rule.

After Tou Samouth’s execution, another Party Congress was held in 1963, and Pol Pot was named Secretary General. While logically Nuon Chea was slated to be Secretary General, he was the nephew of the traitor Siev Heng, and deep suspicions of his loyalties—given the impossible to minimize influence of family loyalty in Cambodian culture—precluded him from assuming the top post of the CPK.

The 1963 Party Congress elected Pol Pot as Secretary General, Nuon Chea as Deputy Secretary, and Ieng Sary, Chong, Keu (Sophal), Vorn Vet, Ruoh Nhem (Muol Sambath), Ta Mok, Ma Mong, and Sao Phim to the Central Committee of the CPK. The highest ranking body, the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, was comprised of Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Sao Phim, and Ieng Sary. Of these ten, six were executed by the KR once they obtained power.

Later in 1963, Prince Sihanouk, in his inimitable style, tauntingly announced that he would name 24 specific people as co Prime Ministers of his government. They were the exact list of all 24 members of the central committee of CPK including Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Khieu Samphan, and three leftist CPK supporters who were then members of Parliament, Khieu Samphan, Hou Nim, and Hou Yuon. The decision was made that most named would have to flee the city and go underground.

This splintered the party leadership undermining its ability at central organization and implementation of a coherent national policy to be in place when they seized power in 1975. It resulted in the development of essentially autonomous regional fiefdoms without any effective central party leadership. This is key to explaining the confusion and killings after 1975 when essentially six separate Khmer Rouge armies converged on Phnom Penh simultaneously. The struggle for consolidating leadership and consistent national policy cannot be overemphasized, as the political policies and ideological philosophies differed widely on the ground in the different Khmer Rouge regions throughout the country.

The leadership themselves had scarce communication or coordination with each other, with Pol Pot based in the far Northeastern province of Rattanakiri, Ta Mok based in the Southwest, Nuon Chea travelling from Phnom Penh to the countryside, and Sao Phim based on the Vietnamese border to the East.

It is instructive to note, in an analysis of the origins of the political influences of the ideology that drove the CPK policy, that the CPK didn’t fire a shot for 7 years after its founding in 1960. A spontaneous peasant uprising in 1967 in the remote Battambang district of Samlaught over abusive government tax collectors sparked the CPK to make a decision to react in support. On 17 January, 1968, the Khmer Rouge raided a police post in Samlaught, killed a handful of government soldiers, stole weapons, and fled into the jungle. It was the beginning of a nascent armed struggle that would bring Pol Pot and the CPK to power 7 years later.

And it is crucial to recognize that they chose to embark on this guerrilla war after directly rejecting the plea’s not to initiate an armed struggle by both the Chinese and Vietnamese Communist Party leadership, according to Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Nuon Chea, Khiue Samphan, and Ta Mok in independent interviews with each. “The Chinese and the Yuon (Vietnamese) told us that ‘If you decide to fight, it is like fighting your own father,’” Ta Mok told me in February 1998, referring to Sihanouk. “But we saw that if we didn’t use arms the movement would be finished. Therefore we decided that we had to mobilize the armed movement. And it wasn’t as if there was a proper leadership. The southwest was the southwest, the east was the east, enjoying independence-self mastery.”

This stands as a stark early example of the CPK refusing to follow the leadership or strategy of the international communist movement, even from the countries key to their short term tactical survival

Mok’s analysis that there was no central leadership of the Khmer Rouge forces, contributes to explaining the later purges by Pol Pot and his loyalists of most of the other senior leadership of CPK after 1975.

Of the ten members of the CPK standing committee named in 1963, 6 were executed by Pol Pot after they took power in 1975 and before they were deposed in 1979.

In 1975, when the CPK seized power (although they never publicly announced that the CPK was in fact in power until 1977—instead publicly naming a fictitious group of United Front personalities who held nearly zero internal influence in formulating State policy but represented a broad sector of well known figures, including King Sihanouk, who retained the title of Head of State while under house arrest ), they held another Party Congress and named as their standing committee members, in order of rank, Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Sao Phim, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Ta Mok, Vorn Vet, and Nheum. Of those 8 members, 3 were executed during the Khmer Rouge reign in power—Sao Phim, Vorn Vet, and Nhuem. They also named 22 members to the central committee of the CPK. Of these, 18 were ordered executed by the time the Khmer Rouge were ousted from power in 1979. The existence of the Party was never publicly acknowledged until 1977.

Among the first to be purged was Hu Yuon, who as finance minister, objected to the abolishment of markets and the use of currency. He was believed to have been executed in the months after the 1975 liberation of Phnom Penh.

Hun Nim, Minister of Information, was arrested  and executed in 1977. It wasn't the first time Hu Nim had been purged. In 1967, while a member of Parliament, Sihanouk publicly berated Nim as "a little hypocrite" whose "words carry the scent of honey, but hides his claws like a tiger", and he "had the face of a Vietnamese or Chinese." he fled to the Khmer Rouge controlled jungles. Sihanouk sdded Hu Nim would be "subjected to the military tribunal and the execution block". After Sihanouk was overthrown in 1970, and he himself joined in alliance with the Khmer Rouge he called Hu Nim "one of our greatest intellectuals. Hu Nim served as Minister of Information for the Khmer Rouge until arrested and tiortured and executed in Tuol Sleng in 1977. On a Tuol Sleng confession of 28 May, 1977 he wrote: "I have nothing to depend on, only the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Would the Party please show clemency towards me?" He also wrote "I am not a human being, I am an animal."

“You say the enemy was trying to assassinate you, but most of your central committee was executed in Tuol Sleng before your years in power were finished, “ I asked Pol Pot, “ Did they deserve to die, or was it a mistake?”

“You raise this question, but let me clarify this. These people were in the central leadership of Democratic Kampuchea, but they were not the people of Democratic Kampuchea,” Pol Pot responded. “In 1976 and 1977, that group of people you were talking about set up a coup d’état committee, especially against me. In that committee there were Vietnamese agents in the majority.”

“And among the leadership, they included whom?” I asked.

“My memory does not serve me well on that,” he answered rather incredulously, unable to remember the names of his top comrades he had ordered executed. He paused for about 30 seconds and then exclaimed, pointed his finger. “but among those who were in the coup committee were Ya. He was a Vietnamese agent since 1946.”

Ya, alias Maen San was the zone secretary for the northeast appointed in January 1976, the same month he was arrested. He was also a member of the Standing Committee of the CPK.

The confession of Ya is particularly chilling. In an S-21 (Tuol Sleng ) document dated January 10, 1976, Duch wrote a note to Ya’s interrogator that “I reported to Angkar ( a reference used either for Pol pot or Nuon Chea. However Duch said he reported only to Son Sen and Nuon Chea and never directly spoke to  Pol Pot until 1988) at ten to nine on the case of Ya based on the documents that comrade (you) provided…Angkar says that in the case that Ya remains reluctant and continues to hide his traitorous connections and activities, Angkar has decided to have him killed…Angkar has decided it is a case of having him looking down on the Party, not just down on our state security. Therefore for Ya, you can use the hot measures and for a long time. Even if those measures led to his death, comrade will not be wrongful toward Angkar’s discipline” Duch signed off with “warm revolutionary fraternity.” Pon, S-21’s top interrogator, added a note to the document in handwriting designated to be read by Ya. “Brother Ya, read this and think it through thoroughly.” The document was then given back to Ya.

Included among those executed were many top leaders of the Communist party of Kampuchea named in power in 1975. They included Ya, Vorn Vet (ranked #7), Ruo Nheum alias Muol Sambat, Chou Chet alias Thang Si, Sao Phim, Koy Thuon, alias Thuoch (ranked #5), Chey Suon alias Non Suon (ranked  #11) and Ruos Nhim. All were members of the Standing Committee of the party. Among the central Committee members of the CPK who were arrested tortured and executed included pang alias Chheum sak-aok alias Seuang, Chan, Pin, Reran alias So Sarouen, Mon, Meah Tal alias Sam Huoy, Nat alias Im Long, Koe alias Kung Sophal alias Kan, Chong, who was Ta Mok’s chief deputy and an ethnic Thai from Koh Kong whose real name was Prasith, and Phuong.

According to an October 30, 1976 party  document entitled ‘ Decision of the Central Committee on a Number of Problems: the Right to decide on extermination within and outside the ranks.” It named the following; All 6 zone heads, the 22 members of the central Committee of the CPK, the Standing Committee of the CPK, and the top leaders of the Armed Forces. Many of these same leaders would also be arrested and executed.

Duch, the head of S-21 (Tuol Sleng) blamed the genesis of the killings on Pol pot’s 1973 decision to have all leaders come from the peasantry, eliminating educated cadre from positions of influence. “ at that time many things changed, and many people were killed. After liberation in 1975, Pol Pot said        ‘We must protect our country by finding enemies within the ranks of the party. We are not strong enough to attack enemies from the outside, so we must destroy them from within.' First we arrested the people from the North, then the Southwest, then the Northwest, then the east. He used Nuon Chea to do the work. Pol Pot never directly ordered the killings. Nuon Chea was always cruel and pompous. He never explained to the cadre. He only ordered them. For arresting people, it was the everyday job of Nuon Chea and Son Sen. Pol Pot knew about S-21, but did  not direct it personally. He left that job to Nuon Chea as number 2 in the Party and Son Sen as head of the Army and Police,” Duch said. “They arrested nearly everyone by the end…it is a permanent rule,” said Duch. "Whoever is arrested must be killed.”

In May 1978, Sao Phim was ordered  arrested and killed at a secret meeting of select top party leaders. In two weeks of recorded interviews totally 40 hours with Duch, the commandant of the KR security service S-21 (Tuol Sleng) that actually carried out the orders of the top political leadership, he said. "It was brother number one (Pol Pot) who decided that Sao Phim would die…a very secret meeting was held—Pol Pot ordered it. Khieu Samphan was there—He was the notetaker. Three men and especially one man ordered it. Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan and Son Sen were at the meeting--not Ieng Sary or Vorn Vet.”

By late 1978, another sweeping purge  was starting to crest. Among high ranking victims was Vorn Vet, a Party Standing committee member who was also the deputy premier in charge of the economy. He was a long time protégé of Pol Pot, who had personally inducted him into the Communist Party. In his “confessions" under torture, he discussed his opposition to Pol Pot’s purges.

When the Vietnamese invaded in late 1978, documents found at Tuol Sleng revealed that another two senior leaders were also targeted for arrest and liquidation. One was a long time Pol Pot associate, Son Sen, the Deputy premier in charge of National Defence, Chairman of the Armed forces general Staff, and  Standing Committee member, he was head of the entire Khmer Rouge Military and Security Services. As such, he was,  along with Nuon Chea, the CPK party representative that was the link between the political leadership and the killing machine itself. He was in fact the direct supervisor of the S-21 (Tuol Sleng) torture and execution center and to whom S-21 commandant Duch reported directly. In Mid-1978, he was dispatched to command the troops fighting the Vietnamese on the eastern front, and relinquished his duties as S-21 liaison with the Party leadership to Nuon Chea. With the war going badly against Vietnam, the CPK leadership blamed not the superior military strength, troop numbers, battlefield experience, and superior firepower and morale of the Vietnamese, but Son Sen as an enemy agent because it was unfathomable that the CPK’s strategy was untenable in itself so it had to be purposeful sabotage of “enemies from within” that it wasn’t succeeding.

Another target for execution found in the files of S-21 from the last days before the Vietnamese overran Phnom Penh, showed that Ke Pok, Party Secretary and commander of the Central zone, also a member of the Standing Committee, was also targeted for arrest and execution. Ironically both were saved by the Vietnamese invasion before their arrests could be carried out.

The remaining five in the years after, all turned against each other.  Ieng Sary broke with Pol Pot in 1996 calling him a “dictator worse than Hitler” and sentencing him to death. Pol Pot and Mok announced that Ieng Sary was a “Vietnamese agent” and in turn sentenced him to death. The irony that both Pol Pot and Ieng Sary had been sentenced to death together in 1979 by the ex-Khmer Rouge installed by the Vietnamese invasion as leaders of the “Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique” went largely unnoticed. Pol Pot ordered the arrest of Nuon Chea, Son Sen and Ta Mok in November 1996, blaming them for the defection of Ieng Sary. He later ordered the execution of Son Sen and Ta Mok, succeeding in killing Son Sen. Khieu Samphan went on the clandestine radio controlled by Pol Pot calling Son Sen a “traitor and Vietnamese agent.” Ta Mok fought back and captured Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, and Nuon Chea.  Days after the execution of Son Sen, Khieu Samphan went back on the radio—this time on behalf of Ta Mok—referring to Son Sen as “comrade” and announcing that “Pol Pot” was under arrest as a “traitor.” Asked if he was a hostage of Pol Pot during the internal fighting, he said: "You could call it something like that."

So in the end, all ten of the original members of the 1963 Standing Committee of the CPK had either been arrested, murdered, or sentenced to death by each other as “traitors.” In fact by the end of Pol Pot’s rule in 1979, of the 22 members of the central committee of the CPK that were named in 1975 when they seized power, 18 had been executed or named to be executed as ‘enemy agents” from within the CPK ranks.

Many cadres who fled to Vietnam in 1977 and 1978, including current premier Hun Sen, ruling party president Chea Sim, the titular head of the original  Vietnamese installed government Heng Samrin, Interior Minister Sar Kheng, and Defence Minister Tea Banh fled in 1977 and 1978. Many were loyal officers who remained in power with the Khmer Rouge while hundreds of thousands died  at the hands of the government they were still loyal to, well after the disastrous policies and purges were implemented, not because of objection to Pol Pot’s policies, but rather because they were aware they were next on the list of targets.

During the massive purge of mid 1978 against “internal enemies” in the Party, the Khmer Rouge publicly announced that they were not just preparing for war against Vietnam, but the extermination of the entire Vietnamese race and the reseizing of territory on the Mekong Delta that had been lost centuries before. The Khmer Rouge strategy was clearly tactically, strategically and psychologically delusional. But they were no doubt serious. They announced on State radio that Cambodia, with a population of 8 million, would eliminate the entire Vietnamese population of battle hardened 60 million, and explained their crude strategy. The may 10, 1978 Khmer Rouge radio proclaimed in a public broadcast. “ The party has instructed that we destroy as many of the enemy as possible, and try to preserve our forces to the maximum. We are few in number, but we have to attack a larger force. This is our slogan:  In terms of numbers, one of us must kill 30 Vietnamese. If we can implement this slogan, we surely can win. Using these figures, one Cambodian is equal to thirty Vietnamese. And 100 Cambodians are equal to 3000 Vietnamese. We should have 2 million troops for 60 million Vietnamese. We don’t have to engage 8 million people. We need only 2 million to crush the 60 million Vietnamese, and we would still have 6 million left We must format our combat line in this manner in order to win victory. The entire army, party, and people must be made fully aware of these views, lines, and stands. We must review our history. Have the Vietnamese succeeded in swallowing Cambodia? No, they have not. We must purify our armed forces, our Party, and the masses of people in order to continue fighting the enemy in defence of Cambodian territory and the Cambodian race. If we do not try and defend our territory, then we shall lose it, and then our race will disappear. The Vietnamese will bring in one or two million people into Cambodia every year, and then we will lose our territory, and our race will be completely swallowed up.”

This official Khmer Rouge strategy was not a secret later unearthed internal party document. It was broadcast on their radio for both internal and foreign consumption Their military and political formula was patently delusional, and based on no remotely viable military strategy. It was simply ludicrous.

The “victory” was that the Khmer race would remain, in theory, with 6 million alive, ancient Khmer territory lost centuries ago would be reconquered, and current territory would be saved from fictional delusional, non-existent foreign plots of foreign designs of annexation rooted in age old historical grievances. It was nothing less than the manifestations of delusions of grandeur, still oozing the puss of the deep humiliation, resentment, and fixation for vengeance o the defeats of ancient history seared into the minds of the popular Cambodian consciousness , harking back 800 years to the forever at the forefront of contemporary political agenda of the Great Angkor Empire, which had evaporated by the 14^th century.

Pol Pot’s other major internal central policy focused singularly on the rapid creation of a patently untenable rise in agricultural production. He based his goals on the superior racial abilities of the Khmer peasants. He set unachievable quotas for rice production that were guaranteed to fail. He was obsessed  with an ability to create a superior agrarian utopia based on self-reliance on Khmer resources, which largely didn’t exist. Pol Pot’s domestic policies of agricultural production goals, regional production of rice quotas mandated by the central party, were simply unattainable. Cambodia’s mechanized resources were simply non-existent, its agricultural productive capacity and infrastructure decimated by years of warfare, and its trained human resources and technically skilled cadre with even minimum expertise  miniscule in number and capability. And anyone with foreign training and the skills, who returned from abroad upon victory to build a new society, were deemed suspected spies and most were killed. In addition, local and regional cadre who questioned the ability to meet the quota’s were deemed foreign enemy agents intent on sabotaging the revolution and arrested and executed.    “They fought against us, so we had to take measure to defend ourselves,’ Pol Pot told me in 1997, blaming “enemies from within” for sabotaging the regimes’ policy goals. He blamed starvation that killed hundreds of thousands on “enemies within our ranks” who “withheld food from the people. There was rice but they didn’t give rice to the population to eat.” The list of enemies ranged from officials of the defeated Lon Nol regime, to “internal agents” within the Party and the army, to Vietnamese, CIA, and KGB plots, often working simultaneously in coordination with one another., to his contention of six attempted coup attempts to depose him, to finally the entire nation of Vietnam.

In 1977, Khieu Samphan stressed the rejection of foreign aid as a “science. “ In the old regime did the school Children, college children, university graduates know anything about the true natural sciences? Could they tell the difference between an early crop and a six month rice crop…they relied completely on foreigners, expecting foreign equipment and even foreign experts to do their job for them. Everything was done according to foreign books and foreign standards. Therefore, it was useless and could not serve the needs of our people, nor could it be of any help building our nation. By contrast, our children in rural regions have always had useful knowledge. They can tell you which cow is tame and which cow is skittish. They can mount a buffalo from both sides. They are masters of the herd. They have practically mastered nature. Only this should be called natural science because this type of knowledge is closely connected with the realities of the nation, with the ideas of nationalism, national construction, and national defense.”

In its place he forced thousands of underfed and overworked forced labour to build poorly designed water irrigation systems, planting and harvesting at a pace that resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands from sheer overwork and exhaustion.

The ban on the use of money was also a direct consequence of the CPK hyper focus on foreign enemies trying to destroy Cambodia. "Pol Pot was convinced that only the ban of the use of money could prevent the CIA from carrying out any activity in Cambodia because in his view the CIA used money to buy people and recruit agents,” said CPK Standing Committee member and Pol Pot’s brother in law Ieng Sary after he defected in 1996.” He boasted that if we used money, his regime would not have lasted three months and so far no other country could do the same.”

In July, 1976, the Khmer Rouge embarked on a Four Year Plan in all Fields, 1977-1980.” The document acknowledged “we are extremely weak” in industry and technology, but said “technology is not the decisive factor; the determinign factors of the revolution are politics, revolutionary people, and revolutionary methods.” It also rejected  accepting foreign assistance saying we would certainly obtain some, but this would affect our political line…there would be political conditions imposed on us without fail.” The document concluded that Cambodia “had leaped over the feudalists and capitalists of every nation, and have achieved a socialist state right away.” They even said they had out achieved North Korea, China, and North Vietnam, saying “ we are faster than them…nothing is confused as it is with them…we don’t need a long time for the transformation.”

 

But while modern Cambodia bears no political or geographical resemblance to the ancient political and military and cultural antecedents of the Angkor period, the Angkor empire is crucial to understanding the motives and psychology of Pol Pot and, indeed, the modern Cambodian society that  created the Khmer Rouge rise to power, and to a significant degree the political culture that succeeded it and remains dominant today. Pol Pot’s political contemporaries almost all shifted allegiance in recent decades to serving alternately as military and political allies and adversaries to the Khmer Rouge. Sharing many similar objectives and characteristics, the political leaders succeeding and preceding Pol Pot in power, comprise a consistent modern political culture remarkably still dominated by the same cast of characters from French independence in 1953 to the present. They together share key responsibility to the disaster wrought by the Khmer Rouge and their short tenure in power.

But it reelected the sincere belief of Khmer racial and cultural and political prowess that was superior to all other nations and theories in history and this belief was carried out in all sectors of government policy.

A look at the backgrounds and statements of the leaders of the CPK provides little substantiation of the theory that there murderous policies were inspired by any allegiance to communism, but rather points instead to its roots in traditional Cambodian political themes of nationalism, anti-colonialism, vitriolic abhorrence to foreign domination, sovereignty, retaking territory lost in past centuries to neighboring powers, racial superiority of Khmers and racial hatred for foreigners, particularly Vietnamese. In detailed personal interviews with every living  member of the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the Communist party of Kampuchea, only once did I ever hear a reference to Communism as an influence in their ideological development

The leadership of the Khmer Rouge was a disparate grouping of individuals with few shared teachings, backgrounds, ideology, or unified vision

*Pol Pot was a failed radio technician student from a rural middle class background influenced by anti-colonialist and nationalist movements who dabbled in leftist politics while a student in France and was inducted into the French Communist party. Upon his return to Cambodia in the early 1950’s he was inducted into the Indochinese Communist Party by the Vietnamese, who held firm control over the communist movement in the three Indochinese countries at the time. Before joining the original formation of the  CPK in 1960, he taught school and wrote articles under pseudonyms signed “The original Khmer” and the “The nation, the People, and the Race.” The later he used to sign his radio broadcasts from the jungles in the 1980’s and 90’s.

“When I asked him about his political influences and what drove his policies during his reign, he said: I would like to say that my conscious is clear. Everything I have done is for the nation the people and the race of Cambodia. I want to tell you, I am quite satisfied with one thing: If there was no struggle carried out by us, Cambodia would have been Kampuchea Krom(a reference to areas of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam which were annexed by Vietnam in the 1700’s) in 1975.” He continued: “ during 1975-78 there were of course some conflicting views, this is true,” he obliquely responded to questions of mass murder under his rule. “There was opposition to Democratic Kampuchea, and, of course, democratic Kampuchea had to do something about that. The Vietnamese carried out activities for some time. Naturally we had to defend ourselves. They wanted kill me.”

“Who is they?” I asked.

“Mainly the Vietnamese." They knew without me they could easily swallow up Cambodia.” Pol Pot saw himself literally as the personal embodiment of the Cambodian nation. Any opposition to him was interpreted as treason against the Khmer race and Cambodian nation itself.

During the trial of Pol Pot in the jungles of Anlong Veng in northern Cambodia, in July 1997, Bang Men, around 50, hobbled up on his amputated leg and one crutch in front of the gathered crowd, Pol Pot only a few feet away, cheeks shaking trying to maintain  his composure. Bang men introduced himself as “a representative of the people.” He spoke with sincerity and passion his voice raised at the crude podium on the dirt jungle floor, into the microphone hooked up to a car battery: “ The people and masses of Anlong  Veng, tens of thousands of people, have abandoned their land, homes, their parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren for close to 20 years, with the aim of solving the problem of the nation, the race….not thinking of the danger, their lives. This struggle is an exceedingly hard and difficult struggle, which has never been encountered before in the history of our nation. In the spirit of loving the nation, of loving the race, we have strived to achieve and express this most lofty and supreme heroism, to continue the struggle. But finally, the result was not in keeping with most of our wishes, our intentions. We have been separated and lost tens of thousands, millions, and then in the period of 1996-1997, we encountered the most terrible, the most barbarous incident of Pol Pot, who continually had us study about the view, the stance, fighting, enduring to fight, the stance becoming even stronger, the situation becoming ever more difficult. They saw enemies everywhere, saw them as rotten flesh, swollen flesh, enemies surrounding them, enemies in front, enemies behind, enemies to the north, enemies to the south, enemies to the west, enemies to the east, enemies in all eight directions, enemies coming from all nine directions, around them, closing in, with no place to breathe…Pol Pot wanted to further strengthen our stance. Strengthen over and over and over, including measures to successfully kill and purge our own ranks, including strugglers in the movement of the same rank….Looking backward, Cambodia was dissolving into nothing…fighting continually and Cambodia steadily dissolving.’

*Nuon Chea was a rural peasant from Battambang province in western Cambodia who was educated in Thailand after they temporarily invaded and annexed that part of Cambodia into Thai territory. He graduated from the prestigious Thammassat University in Bangkok and joined the leftist Thai Democratic Youth League in 1946 and the Thai Communist party in 1950. That same year he joined the Vietnamese controlled Indochinese Communist Party.

*Ieng Sary was born in former Cambodian territory annexed by Vietnam for more than a century in the Mekong delta of Vietnam to a Chinese immigrant to Vietnam and an ethnic Khmer citizen of Vietnam of middle to upper class origins. He received his higher education in France and joined the French Communist Party during his studies there.

*Ta Mok was an uneducated peasant whose family ran a lumber mill in rural Cambodia, trained to be a monk, and joined the anti-colonial Democratic party in 1946 and later the anti-French underground armed movement the Khmer Issaraks.

In several interviews with Ta Mok, he expounded in straightforward detail about CPK politics and theory. He was a military man who, while ranked number three in the party hierarchy, he had no formal schooling, and his more sophisticated comrades in the leadership would cringe when he spoke of politics. But in Cambodia, whoever has the guns has the power, and Mok had just overthrown Pol Pot in a day’s long duel of life and earth.” He acknowledge that “hundreds of thousand s died. Hundreds of thousands yes. Not millions like the Americans say. He contended that the “Communist party had sucked the blood of the people” and that “Pol pot had clearly committed crimes against  humanity. But he was clear in parsing the distinctions of who was legitimately killed. “ I joined the movement when I was 16. I have no theoretical ideology. My ideology is patriotism. Before I joined the Communist party, but I had no idea what communism was!,” he said throwing his arms in the air and chuckling. “ They said the Party was a patriotic one. That is why I joined the party. Later I found out that the Communist party was sucking the blood of the people.” He added that his one regret was working with Pol Pot “whose hands are soiled with blood….each of us has our own lessons to learn from ourselves. Ours is Pol Pot.”

But there was a reason Mok earned the nickname “the Butcher.” ‘I never killed Khmers,” he said. “ Vietnamese yes.” When I asked about the purges of other of his senior KR cadre comrades he was known to have been dispatched to murder, Mok said: “ Sao Phim. He was Vietnamese,” he said bluntly referring to the former number four in the Standing Committee of the CPK who headed the eastern zone military on the Vietnamese border. The tens of thousands of ethnic Khmer soldiers who Mok commanded the killing of who were subordinates of Sao Phim Mok did not view as Khmer. “They were Vietnamese,” he said dismissively/ There is a saying in Cambodian “Kluen Khmer, Kbal Yuon.” It means “To have a Khmer Body but the mind of a Vietnamese.” Mok was deeply implicated in the purges of thousands of civilians and cadre during the KR rule. Including his own deputy who he sent to his death at Tuol Sleng. “he was Vietnamese,” Mok said. Three westerners who ventured to close to his control zone in the months before my visits, were captured and executed—two European humanitarian workers sightseeing near ancient temples and a British former military officer who was volunteering training Cambodians how to unearth buried landmines.

* Son Sen was born in South Vietnam, studied in Phnom Penh and Paris, and returned to teach at the prestigious secondary school of Lycee Sisowath in Phnom Penh. Son Sen, during the KR period was directly in charge—as Army Commander and chief of national security—for the activities of the CPK secret police, including overseeing the Tuol Sleng Torture and extermination  center

*Khieu Samphan was born in the eastern province of Svay Rieng and educated in Paris, receiving a Doctorate of Economics. He returned to Cambodia to be elected to the national Assembly, was widely idolized for his reputation as incorruptible under Sihanouk, and served briefly as his minister of commerce, before fleeing to the jungle in 1967 after public threats by Sihanouk. While serving as the public face of the Khmer Rouge, he was never a member of the CPK most powerful body, the Standing Committee. He never revealed his affiliation with the CPK.

Ina February 1978 meeting in the jungles of Anlong Veng, I sat at a roundtable over fresh fish and warm soda in Ta Mok’s house dining for three hours with Ta Mok, Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, and several other Khmer Rouge cadres. I was allowed to film and record the entire event. Mok had by then captured Pol Pot and controlled the army and therefore the power. Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan hated Mok with a passion, considering him a competent military commander but wholly ignorant of political theory and a loud and course peasant soldier.

Ta Mok began to recite the names and ranks of the Party leaders who had been executed. “ That is right, a (“a” is a pejorative Khmer term for ‘”the contemptible’) Nhim was what number> A-Chong was what number?”, referring to their ranks in the Standing Committee of the CPK. “ A-Phong was what number? Why do I want to count them all? Because I want to relate clearly that all of them were what?” he was naming top leaders arrested, tortured, and executed at Tuol Sleng. “ from number One Pol Pot to all of those I mentioned, some of them were Yuon ( a derogatory term for Vietnamese) was Pol Pot Yuon or not? I don’t know, it is not clear. But So Phim is clear. He was Yuon. From the east., he was Yuon through and through, a pure Yuon. Chong was Yuon. He was a person of the Yuon.”

Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea were seething sitting next to me and Ta Mok. Their loyalties were still with Pol Pot and they despised Ta Mok. They looked like they were about to explode. Revealing Party secrets is an offensive that had always meant certain death, and to do so in front of an American was unfathomable to them. I knew they had already concluded I was a CIA agent, but considered me a useful back channel.

Cor Bun Heng, a young intellectual, asked “ Chong was from where?

Ta Mok replied: “Koh Kong. Or CIA. It is the same.”

Mok then laughed and pointed his finger at me. “ CIA, have you heard of them?”laughing louder and more. I had been told earlier by Khmer Rouge confidantes that Mok was convinced I was Cia. I said nothing. “ So within the leadership, there were Yuon and CIA. And there were Americans. Have you heard of them?”  he asked me again, perhaps trying to be both funny and menacing.

Mok laughed again. “ A-Thuch, what was his original name?” laughing and cackling, clearly enjoying making the whole table very uncomfortable for very different reasons.

Khiue Samphan, who was decidedly not laughing and decidedly annoyed, answered; ‘Koy Thuon.’

“Koy Thuon was an American,” Mok declared.” This is what I want to explain to you, “he said to me.. “it was like this. It was a mess. And it is this that causes the talk of two million or three million killed.” Because internally things weren’t good, they carried on killings. The Yuon group wanted to kill the American group. The American group wanted to kill the Yuon group and kill the Khmers. Internally, there were these three, three parties: The American party, the Yuon party, and the Khmer party. I want to tell you this just honestly, straightforwardly.”

It was the first time Nuon Chea had ever granted an interview in the 50 years since he joined the revolution. And he wasn’t happy. Mok presided and was periodically sarcastic, animated, and demeaning towards his senior colleagues, whose expressions seethed at Mok’s flippant and derogatory remarks.  Mok put down Khieu Samphan, who was seated next to him, saying: “Pol Pot, it is like the Americans say about Khieu Samphan, that he is only a figurehead. Because where are the forces? Who is Cambodia? I am not saying this to boast. Ask the Army. Pol Pot had only himself. The forces were the Southwest,” he said referring to the zone he commanded.

I asked Nuon Chea about the alleged coup attempts against Pol Pot and Nuon Chea between 1975 and 1979. “ During the three years holding power, it was the Yuon and the henchmen of the Yuon, “ Nuon Chea replied through clenched teeth.

“What happened?” I asked. “ this is a historical matter of long past, long ago. There were assassination attempts, there were attempts to poison, from what I could gather,” Nuon Chea replied. “But most of it, some places, it is hard for me to recall. I don’t know what Ta would say,” he continued trying to avoid an answer. “ This I am telling you frankly,” Nuon says. “They accuse us.”

Ta Mok then speaks, offering specific and never before revealed details to the consternation of Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan. “okay, I’d like to tell you. This matter isn’t something that is clear and transparent, it is very difficult, because internally who was it who was in charge, who was responsible? It was Pol pot who was responsible. There wasn’t anyone else who was number one but Pol Pot. Pol Pot was number One.’ Then Mok turns to Nuon Chea, smirks, eyes twinkling in a mixture of menace and mockery.” Brother, you were number two, right?’

Nuon Chea glares, pauses, and answers curtly, “yes.”

“Yes, you were number two,” Mok repeats, “ Ieng Sary was number three. So Phim was number four. And Ta Mok was only number five. And A-Nhim was what number?” Mok goads Nuon Chea.

“don’t know what number, Ta,’ Nuon Chea says.

‘it is the number two individual who knows the most,: Mok laughs referring mockingly to Nuon Chea,” But I didn’t understand much. I just looked from the outside. I observed. I just want to express that opinion.”

END OF PART ONE FROM EXCERPTS OF “Sympathy for the devil” Unpublished book manuscript by Nate Thayer

 

More excerpts will be posted as the trial continues.

No More Creampuff Journalism-Readers react to Nate Thayer's article in Phnom Penh Post

 No More Creampuff Journalism

(Below are a series of reader reactions to an interview I did with Khmer Rouge President Khieu Samphan. It wasn't pretty, but it was witty (mostly). Included is the article that sparked the outrage, The response of Michael hayes Publisher of the PPP, and my response)

Phnom Penh Post

Letter to the Editor

Friday, 29 January 1993

I was spending some vacation time in Phnom Penh when I picked up your paper and read the "interview" with Khieu Samphan. What's going on? This guy is a mass murderer and is single-handedly blocking a U.S. $2 billion international peace effort. Yet your "reporter" Nate Thayer treats Samphan like he was some kind of elder statesman, asking him what he thinks of the current political situation. Why didn't he ask him what it feels like to kill 1,000,000 Cambodians? I've read PR handouts that hit harder than this piece of marshmallow.

Do your readers a favor-next time you interview the Khmer Rouge, send a real professional reporter-not a cream puff like this Thayer guy.

Bill Shuller, United States

Editor's Response

Phnom Penh Post

 Letter to the Editor

Friday, 29 January 1993

 

Schuler has a point. Thayer faxed the raw transcript of the text of Khieu Samphan interview from Bangkok without his questions. While the text accurately reflected the content of the interview, it did not accurately reflect the questions posed. The interview should have been presented under topical categories rather than as a question and answer. We regret the editing error.

Thayer responds:

"I've been called a puppet lackey, an intelligence operative, a right wing jerk, a communist sympathizer, and a hopeless drunk, but I have never been called a creampuff and I resent it."

- The Post welcomes comments from our readers.

 

 

Sour Creampuffs

Phnom Penh Post

Letter to the Editor

Friday, 12 February 1993

 

As a long-term resident of Cambodia who has been subjected to Mr. Thayer's Errol Flynnish style of journalism for most of that time, I must take exception to the use of the word "creampuff." It is extremely difficult to make a good creampuff in the tropics.

The term one should apply to this journalist is lightweight twerp.

Bill Lohan, Cambodia

Gentle Journalism

Phnom Penh Post

Letter to the Editor

Friday, 09 April 1993

I feeling so sorry for your reporter Kate Thayer called Gream Puff and Light Weight Werp in letters. So unfair! I read her interview with Mr. Khieu Samphan so interesting. Mr. Khieu Samphan of course is very bad man hates Vietnam people but reporter did no thing wrong. She just write down everything what she told very obedient and polite and not ask rude questions of important man her superior. Why call Gream Puff and Eroll Fling? My friends and I in the Ho Chi Minh Ladies Sewing Circle say, carry on Kate! Keep writing in your own gentle and lady like way!

Ho Chi Minh Ladies Sewing Circle

Khmer Rouge Chic 

Phnom Penh Post

Letter to the Editor

Friday, 26 February 1993

The Post editor was kind enough to take the heat of poor Nate Thayer in answer to Phil Schuler's accusation of 'cream puff journalism' (Feb. 3 Post 2/3), But I fail to see why inclusion of the questions would have mitigated the impression. Didn't Thayer write the piece as published?

In addition to the list of names Thayer says he has been called, there was 'Khmer Rouge-chic' which I applied to some of his writing (see Indochina Issues 93, August 1991), and he attracts those names because of a persistence in treating the Khmer-Rouge as just ordinary guys with good intentions.

He asks for it again in his photo (Post, same issue, p.6) of a gentle Khmer Rouge soldier tenderly offering a smoke to a Vietnamese soldier, presumably a prisoner, when there is good information that the usual fate of captured Vietnamese was death.

In his latest article, "What role for Khmer Rouge", he quotes Pol Pot's talk of February 1992, in which he should have seen that Khmer Rouge obsession with the 'Youn' was a major theme. The Khmer Rouge imagine (and since it was a secret talk to his own cadres I assume it is what Pol Pot believes, not propaganda for affect) that the 'Youn' control Cambodia, that a 'Youn' army is what they are fighting, that there is now a U.S.-'Youn' alliance with the U.S. pressuring China, through human rights issues, to join the 'Youn', and that the object of the Khmer Rouge is to liberate Cambodia from the 'Youn'.

Those are the paranoid schizophrenics who are causing such international hand-writing over how to bring them into the 'peace process'. The present Khmer Rouge leadership should be kept out and isolated until they are no longer a threat, in particular because of their Vietnam policy which promises to keep Indochina in conflict for years ahead. This is not what the international community likes to think of, for anti-Vietnamese prejudice is widespread, not only among Khmer chauvinists, and the Khmer Rouge have played a useful role which several great powers may think should not go unrewarded.

Some heat should nevertheless be taken off Nate Thayer, for he is only following a trendy line which parallels the 'peace process' and is clearly reflected in the Paris Accords and the draft documents which preceded them, all designed to treat the Khmer Rouge as ordinary people in order to use them against the State of Cambodia. Observant readers like Schuler should focus their attention and ire on the entire UNTAC operation which is destroying Cambodia and giving new opportunities to an unreconstructed Khmer Rouge leadership, precisely as Pol Pot predicted in his remarks of February 1992.

 

Khieu Samphan:Gloomy Prospects for Khmer Elections

Friday, 06 November 1992

By Nate Thayer

The following interview with Khieu Samphan, president of the Partie of Democratic Kampuchea, was conducted at the Khmer Rouge compound in Phnom Penh.


Phnom Penh Post: What's your assessment of the status of the peace process, one year after the signing of the Paris peace accords?

Khieu Samphan: Two key agreements have yet to be implemented. First, [there's] no control or verification of the withdrawal of Vietnamese forces from Cambodia. Secondly, agreements on the role of the Supreme National Council (SNC) have not been implemented.

We know that these two issues are interrelated. We have to have the SNC play a role; if the SNC has no role to play UNTAC will cooperate with the Phnom Penh regime. That is why UNTAC uses the phrase "pragmatic necessity," which means UNTAC relies on the Phnom Penh regime to implement the Paris accords.

How can UNTAC exercise the control and verification of the withdrawal of Vietnamese forces under these circumstances? Actually the Vietnamese forces, soldiers, officers, advisors and experts are the ones who maintain this regime in place. These Vietnamese forces are now in place to maintain the puppet army, secret police, and administrative apparatus.

If UNTAC relies on the Phnom Penh regime, UNTAC will not be able to find these forces, so this is the cause of the current deadlock. If we do not tackle the root cause of the current deadlock, we will not be able to break this deadlock.

Post: UNTAC may decide to hold the elections without the participation of the Partie of Democratic Kampuchea. What will it take for the PDK to join in the electoral process?

Khieu: As far as the election is concerned, if they have a plan to hold the election without the PDK (Partie of Democratic Kam-puchea), is this in accordance with the Paris agreements? What will the result of such elections be? The Vietnamese forces are still in Cambodia.

Such elections would offer Cambodia to the Vietnamese; this [all] the Cambodian people in Cambodia and living abroad will not accept.

So the question is whether UNTAC is going to hold the election without the participation of the PDK or implement the Paris agreement in its entirety. Such elections without the participation of the PDK run counter to the Paris agreement and we will oppose it.

Post: How do you assess the economic and security situation in Cambodia at present?

Khieu Samphan: Now everybody is talking about the corruption of [the Phnom Penh] regime being on the increase, and the riel has lost its value. The devaluation of the riel has created problems within all strata of the Cambodian people-between the poor and the Phnom Penh regime, state employees and the Phnom Penh regime, and soldiers of their own regime.

When UNTAC is trying to come to the rescue of the riel, this will only create problems between the Cambodian people and UNTAC.

[With] corruption and the devaluation of the riel spreading, this is a situation that creates more problems.

The Cambodian people are suffering. What will their reaction be to a situation where they see no hope? Anarchy perhaps, but the situation is they oppose the Vietnamese regime.

Let me turn to a specific problem: banditry. There are indeed elements not under any control. There are elements of the Phnom Penh army they cannot control. But [also], there is organized banditry by the Vietnamese and the Phnom Penh party.

How can we resolve this problem of banditry if the SNC continues to be denied its role? If the SNC is given its role, the Cambodian people [would] join the SNC in opposing banditry. Otherwise it will increase.

I think in any country where you have a government that is not supported, you will not be able to control banditry.

Post: How do you respond to charges that the Khmer Rouge blew up two bridges in Kompong Thom last month and is launching a dry season offensive?

Khieu Samphan: These accusations are not true.

Last year during the 14th dry season, during the whole dry season, the Vietnamese launched military operations against our forces-now they are doing the same in Battambang, Pursat, route 6, 21, 7.

During the 15th dry season there might be complicated problems. As the Vietnamese launch military attacks against our forces we will be compelled to fight back.

Post: Do you think that the peace accords are in danger of collapsing, returning Cambodia to a state of civil war?

Khieu Samphan: There is no peace now-the situation is the same as before [the signing of the Paris accords].

If they [UNTAC] have no political objective to get rid of the PDK, they will implement the Paris accords on the role of the SNC. Other measures to try to avoid giving the role to the SNC would not resolve the problem, and would be tantamount to trying to get rid of the PDK.

I am speaking very frankly here; if they try to do this, it is an abandonment of the Paris accords. We will not accept this. We should not underestimate or overlook the reaction of the Cambodian people.

I have told Akashi very clearly, if you try to paint a situation [of optimism that the peace plan is succeeding], you won't change the situation. I also try to convey that I am trying to cooperate with UNTAC.

I agree with you that we are on very dangerous ground. We are at an unpredictable juncture. I cannot say I am optimistic or not, [but] whoever does not implement the Paris agreements will encounter problems. They will increase the problems themselves.

There might be the possibility of anarchy by Cambodian people who might explode against the Vietnamese settlers themselves because of land stolen from the Cambodian people.

To sum up, UNTAC alone cannot control and verify the withdrawal of the Vietnamese forces and resolve the problem of crime in the cities, because of lack of support from the Cambodian people.

So far, [UNTAC] has tried to help the Phnom Penh party. As to when they will see that what they are doing is not working, I hope it will be soon. We hope that UNTAC will [realize that] before it is too late.

POL POT: UNREPENTANT An Exclusive Interview By Nate Thayer

POL POT: UNREPENTANT

An Exclusive Interview

Cover Story

Far Eastern Economic Review

October 30, 1997

(Three story cover package)

The world holds Pol Pot responsible for the deaths of more than 1 million Cambodians. But the former Khmer Rouge leader, now a jungle captive of ex-comrades, expresses no remorse. In an historic, exclusive interview with Nate Thayer he defends himself as a patriot. His two-hour exposition ranges over the notorious killing fields, atrocities, party intrigues and his own early life. Plus:The first ever interview with Khmer Rouge strongman Ta Mok

Day of Reckoning: Pol Pot breaks an 18-year silence to confront his past. In defending his murderous rule, he sheds new light on the dark secrets of the Khmer Rouge 

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng

Far Eastern Economic Review

October 30, 1997

P OL POT is dying. He's helped slowly out of the backseat of a blue four-wheel drive truck, then stands unsteadily in the dust of the narrow road, smiling shyly and raising his clasped hands to his face in a traditional greeting.

He needs to grasp my arm to walk the 25 meters to an open-air hut, in a clearing hacked out of the dense jungles of the Dangrek mountains. His breathing labored, he eases himself down at a simple wooden table.

A deferential young KR cadre places a plastic bottle of water and a coffee jar filled with salt in front of him. Pol Pot adjusts his traditional peasant scarf, his face drawn and eyes blinking rapidly, and looks sadly across the table at the nearest thing to an interrogator he has ever faced.

The man who presided over the Cambodian holocaust is about to give his first interview in 18 years. It's his chance to make some kind of peace with his bloodstained past, to try to atone for a four-year reign of terror that left a million or more of his countrymen dead.
He refuses.

"I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people," he rasps, his voice almost a whisper. He pauses, fixing his interviewer with an almost pleading expression. "Even now, and you can look at me, am I a savage person? My conscience is clear."

In a two-hour interview, Pol Pot is chillingly unrepentant about the horrors of his 1975-1978 rule over Cambodia. His humanity shows only when he talks about himself or his family; he describes in detail his youth, the origins of his political ideology, his health problems and his 12-year-old daughter's difficulties in school.

Grilled on his culpability for the mass murders, disease and starvation of the late 1970s - when his regime tried to turn Cambodia into a collectivist agrarian utopia - he comes back time and again with the same basic line: The KR made "mistakes," but without their unrelenting struggle Cambodia would have been swallowed by Vietnam.

"I do not reject responsibility - our movement made mistakes, like every other movement in the world. But there was another aspect that was outside our control - the enemy's activities against us. I want to tell you, I'm quite satisfied on one thing: If we had not carried out our struggle, Cambodia would have become another Kampuchea Krom in 1975," he says, referring to the Mekong Delta region, seized by Vietnam from the Khmer empire in the 17th century.

Pol Pot even claims that the notorious Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, where the KR meticulously documented their torture and execution of 16,000 suspected "enemies," was a Vietnamese propaganda exhibit.

Yet the rare trip into the KR stronghold of Anlong Veng yielded some stunning revelations. The KR commander who ousted Pol Pot in June, Ta Mok, acknowledged in his first interview ever that "hundreds of thousands" of people had died during the group's time in power. Neither he nor other KR leaders interviewed would admit personal responsibility; instead, they point fingers at Pol Pot or one another.

Pol Pot does admit that he ordered the killing of his longtime comrade-in-arms Son Sen, slain on June 10 along with 14 family members, including grandchildren. "You know for the other people, the babies, the young ones, I did not order them to be killed. For Son Sen and his family, yes. I feel sorry for that. That was a mistake that occurred when we put our plan into practice. I feel sorry. You asked me to say something." Then he says abruptly: "Now I want to talk about the present situation in Cambodia."

It was Son Sen's killing that brought about Pol Pot's ouster from the helm of the revolutionary movement he led for 37 years. Ta Mok, who was also targeted but escaped, arrested Pol Pot on June 19. Five weeks later, Pol Pot was brought before a "people's tribunal" in Anlong Veng and sentenced to life imprisonment for Son Sen's murder.

The KR decided to make Pol Pot's ouster public, hoping to win international support for their battle against the government of Premier Hun Sen. They allowed this journalist to witness the July 25 tribunal, the first time Pol Pot had been seen by a journalist in 18 years. But an interview with the deposed leader took months more to arrange, through intensive contacts with a series of secret operatives both inside and outside of Anlong Veng. It took place on October 16.

For now, that's as far as the KR will go. Pol Pot is not going to be turned over to an international tribunal to face charges of crimes against humanity, Ta Mok said in a separate interview. "I will turn Pol Pot over no problem, if you bring Hun Sen and they go together," he says, setting an unrealistic condition.

Trial or no trial, Pol Pot's line of defence is the same: His youthful, inexperienced movement made "mistakes" under pressure from its enemies, but they saved the country from Vietnamese annexation. Asked whether he wanted to apologize for the suffering he caused, he looks genuinely confused, has the interpreter repeat the question, and answers: "No."

"We had no other choice. Naturally we had to defend ourselves," he says. "The Vietnamese... wanted to assassinate me because they knew without me they could easily swallow up Cambodia."

The anti-Vietnamese rhetoric isn't surprising: the ultra-nationalism of the KR became evident when they started raiding the territory of their erstwhile Vietnamese communist allies in Vietnam in the years after seizing power. But Pol Pot reveals that distrust between the two communist movements dates back to at least 1970, when Le Duan and other Vietnamese leaders tried to persuade him to take nominal command of a combined Cambodian-Vietnamese-Laotian army to fight the American-backed governments in Phnom Penh and Saigon.

"Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, they told us: 'You don't have to fight. You should wait until the Vietnamese victory then the Vietnamese will come and liberate you'," Pol Pot says.

Instead, he raced to beat the Vietnamese to victory. He says that by capturing Phnom Penh on April 17, two weeks before the communist victory in Saigon, the KR saved Cambodia from Vietnamese communist occupation. And immediately, he contends, he took steps to balance Vietnamese influence in Cambodia. "In May 1975, I sent my foreign minister to Thailand because I knew that the east is very savage... what I wanted was to have a friend in the West. Vietnam was furious at me."

There may be truth in Pol Pot's claim that Vietnam had designs on Cambodia. But he goes on, outrageously, to blame even the mass starvation during his rule on the Vietnamese. Nobody knows the precise figure, but during their 1975-1978 rule the "Democratic Kampuchea" regime killed perhaps 200,000 people, many from its own ranks. For every person executed, perhaps seven more died of starvation or disease as a result of the KR's inept central policies.

"To say that millions died is too much. Another aspect you have to know is that Vietnamese agents, they were there. There was rice, but they didn't give rice to the population," Pol Pot claims.

Even more outrageous is Pol Pot's claim that Phnom Penh's notorious Tuol Sleng prison was a "Vietnamese exhibition" set up for propaganda purposes after Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978 and drove the KR from power. Scholars say the KR documented each of the 16,000 people whom they tortured and executed, often on Pol Pot's direct orders.

In fact, admissions he makes in the interview link Pol Pot directly to Tuol Sleng. He acknowledges that he ordered the arrest and murder of political enemies, accusing them of collusion with Vietnam. These included Vorn Vet, Hu Num, and Hu Yuon, fellow standing committee members killed after the KR took power. "Those people were in the central leadership of Democratic Kampuchea, but they were not the people of Democratic Kampuchea," he says. "In 1976... that group of people you were talking about, they set up a coup d'etat committee, especially against me. In that committee there were Vietnamese agents in the majority." He names "Comrade Ya" - the nom de guerre of Men San, who commanded the northeast region - as chief conspirator.

KR documents obtained by the Post show that Ya was tortured to death on Pol Pot's orders at the Phnom Penh prison. In a handwritten September 1976 note accompanying a "confession" extracted from Ya under torture, notorious Tuol Sleng chief Duch writes that he "reported this morning at 0910 to the Organization about Ya." The Organization is how Pol Pot was officially known.

"The Organization decided that if this guy continues stubbornly to hide his traitorous linkages and activities, that he should be executed and not allowed to play games any more ... Therefore, with this Ya you can forcefully use the hot method and for prolonged periods, even if you slip and it kills him." The document ends with a chilling addendum: "Ya to read so that he can think it over carefully."

Pol Pot demonstrated that same willingness to turn on his closest comrades 21 years later, when he ordered the killing of Son Sen, his longtime defense minister. In a soft monotone that contrasts starkly with the subject matter, he tried to justify the murder, saying that he had discovered proof that Son Sen was conspiring against him. The principle evidence? "The brother of Son Sen, Son Chhum... even let his daughter marry people who worked with Hun Sen. So the connection has been established."
Pol Pot's paranoia may have helped him survive as a guerrilla fighter, but it ultimately led his movement to self-destruct, fracturing into rival factions. It's a process that began soon after the group took power, and resumed with new intensity in mid-1996. As a result, separate KR groups are now scattered throughout the country, many of them aligned with Funcinpec or the CPP - whose premier, Hun Sen, himself defected from the KR in 1978.

"Pol Pot's stance got even loftier, and our territory got even smaller," says an elderly Anlong Veng villager. "He saw enemies as rotten flesh, swollen flesh. He saw enemies surrounding. Enemies in front, enemies behind, enemies to the north, enemies to the south... leaving us no place to breathe."
Indeed, only six of the original 22 members of the Democratic Kampuchea party central committee survived their years in power unscathed, according to documents obtained from Tuol Sleng. The rest died, or survived only because they were rescued from Tuol Sleng, ironically, by the invading Vietnamese army.

After that, the KR rose from the ashes, with military or political support from China, Asean and Western powers opposed to Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia. They capitalized on the animosity towards Vietnam that permeates Cambodian society.

But since the 1993 UN-run elections, which the KR boycotted, the movement's cannibalization has resumed. Of the nine younger military commanders chosen in 1985 to form the new generation of leadership, six have defected to the Cambodian government and two were arrested for killing Son Sen. In August 1996, senior leader Ieng Sary and more than half of the KR fighters in the northwest broke with Pol Pot, Son Sen, Ta Mok and Khieu Samphan, rallying around the town of Pailin.

While Khieu Samphan is officially head of the KR remnant in Anlong Veng, Ta Mok is clearly the strongman. In fact, Khieu Samphan seems to retain sympathy for Pol Pot. On June 12, in a clandestine radio broadcast, he called Son Sen a "traitor." Asked if he was a hostage of Pol Pot when he made that broadcast, Samphan replies unconvincingly: "You could call it something like that." He refuses to elaborate.

The turmoil has shaken the movement to its core. "All of us - our parents, our children - are poor peasants. We agreed to abandon everything for many years to join the struggle," says Khem Nuon, Ta Mok's chief-of-staff. "And ultimately, in order to kill each other? How can that be?"

So has the KR movement truly turned on its master, Pol Pot? Certainly Ta Mok says so: "Pol Pot's hands are filled with blood." And from Pol Pot's own words, the answer also seems yes. "For me it is over. Over politically, and over as a human being."

Since his sentencing, Pol Pot says he has been confined to a wood-and-thatch hut, where he's virtually bedridden and sometimes on oxygen. When he discusses his health problems he becomes animated, a contrast to the implacable way he discussed those who died under his rule. "You look at me from the outside, you don't know what I have suffered. If you allow me, I would like to tell you about my sickness.

"One night around 2 a.m. I woke up to go to the bathroom," he says, describing an apparent stroke he suffered in late 1995. "My left eye was closed. I thought that maybe nothing was wrong. But when I came back my eye just did not work any more... Now my left side from my head to my toe does not work. And my left eye is 95 percent blind. That is why when I walk it is not normal."

As the interview nears its second hour, Pol Pot often licks his parched lips and sips from his glass of water. Sometimes he becomes annoyed when he is interrupted or his answers are challenged. But he never raises his voice. And he seems eager to elicit sympathy. "In Khmer we have a saying that when one is both quite sick and old there remains only one thing, that you die."

Pol Pot says his days are bleak. His books have been confiscated, and he rarely gets out of bed. "I have nothing to do now," he says, adding that the hut is plagued with mosquitoes.

He listens to the radio every morning: both the clandestine Democratic Kampuchea radio and the Voice of America. "I want to listen to VOA every night as well, but sometimes I fall asleep," he says, complaining that the morning broadcast isn't as interesting as the evening one.

"I feel a little bit bored, but I have become used to that. You know, I can't even play with my daughter or my wife any more because in the morning, even after I wake up, I can't get out of bed. I stay still while my wife occupies herself with gardening and sewing. My daughter gathers wood and works in the kitchen. But we are together for dinner... We dine together at a small table."

He speaks with fatherly affection of his only child, aged 12. "She is a good daughter, a good person. She gets along with the others quite well. "But he says she isn't doing as well in some school subjects as others. On that score, "she is like me." When she grows up, will she be proud to say she is the daughter of Pol Pot? "I don't know about that. It's up to history to judge," he responds.

Then Pol Pot, with an engaging smile, apologizes and says he needs to go back to the hut and lie down. "I feel very, very tired," he says.

He is helped to his feet, unable to rise on his own. As he's assisted down the steps and along the jungle path, he pauses to offer pleasantries to hovering cadres, who remain grim-faced. Then he raises his hands together again in a polite farewell. Before climbing back into the truck, he turns to one of his captors and says softly: "I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country."

 

On the Stand

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng

Far Eastern Economic Review

October 30, 1997

There are good reasons to be worried when coming face-to-face with the man responsible for one of the worst mass murders in history. But Nate Thayer was most worries that Pol Pot wouldn’t talk, or would cut off the interview after a few minutes. So from the outset he hit Pol Pot with the big question: Does he admit guilt for his murderous 1975-78 rule? It was a question that Thayer pressed again and again. Because Pol Pot is more likely to die than be turned over to an international tribunal, the jungle interview may be as close to a courtroom as he ever gets.

Thayer’s interpreter, a senior Khmer Rouge cadre, tried to beg out of his translating duties, perhaps anticipating the tone of the questions. Thayer speaks conversational Khmer, but he prevailed upon the interpreter to translate both the questions and answers while a tape recorder and television camera rolled. Here are excerpts, starting with Thayer’s opening questions.

 

Q Nate Thayer: He knows he is accused of leading and organization that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and that he has been condemned by most of the world for it. Is he a mass murderer, or what has he contributed to his country?

A Pol Pot: I think that you can raise all of the questions at one time, and some questions I think that I can answer connecting one to another to simplify things. But it's up to you...

Q: I'm interested in the issues of the time he was in power between 1975 and 1979. The millions of people who indeed did suffer during that time, and whether he feels that he's fairly accused. That's one question, let's start with.

A: Yes, I want to reply. Your question is not unfamiliar. That question has been raised time and again: I would like to say first that my conscience is clear. Everything I have done and contributed is first for the nation and the people and the race of Cambodia.

[Pol Pot then spoke about how the Vietnamese wanted to take over Cambodia, adding "they wanted to assassinate me because they knew without me they could easily swallow up Cambodia".]

Q: I would like to hear all of that, and if he's willing to stay here for hours, I am too. But if we could please deal with this first. As you know, most of the world thinks that you're responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Cambodians who didn't deserve to suffer. Could you answer that question directly? Do you feel that you were indeed responsible for crimes against humanity, against your own people?

A: I'm going to reply. I want to tell you clearly. First, I would like to tell you that I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people. Even now, and you can look at me, am I savage person? My conscience is clear... As I told you before, they fought against us, so we had to take measures to defend ourselves...

Q: You have an opportunity here, a historical opportunity. You know well that during your years in power, your policies - agrarian experiments, social and political organizations, the direct executions of many thousands of people - that many families suffered. The country itself also suffered because of your policies. Your fellow Cambodians want to know whether you feel any remorse, whether you acknowledge that you made very serious mistakes while you were in power?

A: There are two sides to it, as I told you: There's what we did wrong, and what we did right. The mistake is that we did some things against the people - by us and also by the enemy - but the other side, as I told you, is that without our struggle there would be no Cambodia right now.

Q: But for all those hundreds of thousands who suffered - not just died but suffered from forced labor, from lack of food, from what were clearly failed central policies while you were in power - don't you think that they deserve an apology?

A: For the wrong things of our struggle, as I told you, for the wrong things, it has been written in the book. This is a testimony before history.

Q: Which book?

A: The book is the "The Right and Wrong of Democratic Kampuchea". [Pol Pot was apparently referring to a political tract released by the Democratic Kampuchea movement, as the Khmer Rouge calls themselves, in the late 1980s.]

Q: But that acknowledged only 30,000 deaths. All independent scholars, from all political ideologies, acknowledge a minimum of hundreds of thousands of people who died as a result of failed central policies while you were in power...That is a fact. While you were in sole power-and all the other members of your standing committee say you were in full power-thousands of people died because of failed social policies of your government. Are you willing to acknowledge that fact?

A: As I told you, that was written in the book, and I'm tired of talking about it...

Q: Let's talk about Tuol Sleng. There is overwhelming evidence that you had overall responsibility for Tuol Sleng. Sixteen thousand people who signed confessions were executed, including women and children who were suspected CIA, KGB, Vietnamese agents. Were you responsible for Toul Sleng and do you really believe that those 16,000 - including women and children - were agents of a foreign government?

A: I was at the top. I made only big decisions on big issues. I want to tell you - Tuol Sleng was a Vietnamese exhibition; a journalist wrote that. People talk about Tuol Sleng, Tuol Sleng, Toul Sleng, but when we look at the pictures, the pictures are the same. When I first heard about Tuol Sleng, it was on VOA [Voice of America]. I listened twice. And there are documents talking about someone who did research about the skeletons of the people... They said when you look closely at the skulls, they are smaller than the skulls of the Khmer people.

Q: Are you saying that you never heard of Tuol Sleng before 1979?

A: No, I never heard of it. And those two researchers, they said that those skeletons, they were more than 10 years old.

Q: Sir, let me say that there is overwhelming scientific evidence, overwhelming proof that thousands of people, Cambodians, were executed at Toul Sleng while you were in control of Phnom Penh. There is no dispute among anybody else in the world outside of Anlong Veng, perhaps, that it is true.

 A:[No response.]

 

Forbidden City: New strongman Ta Mok Reaches out of isolation

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng

Far Eastern Economic Review

October 30, 1997

 

TA MOK, the one-legged Khmer Rouge general known to the outside world as "the butcher," smiles and chuckles warmly as he welcomes the first journalist he has ever met.

During a three-hour interview over a luncheon of fish and Pringles potato chips specially imported for the occasion, the man who overthrew Pol Pot speaks with a peasant's directness and the ease of a man in total control.

His words, though, are sometimes as chilling as his laugh is warm. In an unprecedented admission by a KR leader, he says "hundreds of thousands" died during the revolutionary regime's 1975-78 rule, though he blames their deaths on Pol Pot.

As for the thousands of fellow KR that his forces killed during the purges of 1978, he shrugs. Their leader, he explains, had been discovered to be Vietnamese.

The new KR strongman can seem a study in contradictions. He has earned a fearsome reputation as a military chief, but in person he comes across as grandfatherly. He is clearly revered by many of the approximately 60,000 people living under his control around Anlong Veng. It's and area almost completely isolated by mountains and dense, land-mine-strewn jungles, but Mok's development projects seem to have turned it into one of the more prosperous swaths of countryside in Cambodia.
But for Mok, 71, there's no contradiction. He's a peasant leader who defends what he sees as the interests of his people. And like Pol Pot, that includes an obsession with the perceived threat of Vietnamese domination. Mok would kill a Vietnamese intruder with the nonchalance with which a farmer plucks a leech off a bare leg.

Mok believes that what his people need now is international support for their guerrilla war against Premier Hun Sen. To that end, he has agreed to an unprecedented interview. Sitting in a wooden pavilion freshly painted with revolutionary slogans, he talks about supporting "liberal democracy." It's not clear if he really understands the term, but since he ousted Pol Pot in June, cadres say he has allowed new freedoms in the guerrilla zone.

The potential benefits of world acceptance are plainly evident form the hard-packed dirt logging road that snakes down the Dongrek escarpment from Thailand to Anlong Veng. Millions of dollars' worth of logs lie by the roadside, blocked from going anywhere by an international agreement that bars the export of timber without central government permission.

That permission isn't about to come: The central government is at war with the KR. Evidence of past battles is everywhere: The few concrete buildings in Anlong Veng are pockmarked by bullets and shrapnel, and government tanks disabled during intense fighting two years ago sprawl in the roadway, political graffiti now adorning their turrets.

Yet Anlong Veng is more than a battlefield. A two-day tour shows a wealth of agricultural projects, making it one of the more developed rural areas in Cambodia. Sophisticated dams, irrigating systems and other water projects are everywhere. Tractors and earth-moving vehicles imported through Thailand work the land.

Water spills over new concrete dams into rivers where dozens of villagers, many missing limbs from mines, haul in large fish with nets.

"The people here love grandfather because he cares very much about the well-being of the poor," says Noun Nov, a cadre in his 40s. Like many others in Anlong Veng, Nov has followed Mok since his mid-teens.

Indeed, Mok says it was his passion for rural development projects ("My hobby is agriculture") that cost him his leg. He stepped on a mine when building a road. "I was inspecting a road project. I was behind a bulldozer," he recalls, shifting his artificial limb.

Is this the one place where the KR's ideology, which caused the death of perhaps one million Cambodians in the 1970s, actually works? Hardly. Mok denies that he ever embraced communism. "I was a monk," he says, and when he was just 16 he was recruited into the resistance. "When I joined the Communist Party of Cambodia, I did not know what communism was," he says with a burst of laugher. "They told me the party is a patriotic one. That is why I joined the party. Later on I found that the Communist Party was sucking the blood of the people.

"When we talk about economic life, I have no theoretical ideology," says Mok. " What is policy? When we talk about life we talk about land and water. For the people, having these is having freedom and democracy."

Actually, KR cadres say Mok has introduced new freedoms in Anlong Veng in the four months since he ousted Pol Pot. Previously, there were no schools, while now scores of brightly dressed schoolchildren carrying notebooks can be seen casually returning home from lessons. Listening to radio other than the clandestine guerrilla station was forbidden; now they can listen freely to foreign broadcasts. "We can even watch TV," one cadre exclaims proudly.

Ironically, there are signs that opening up has spawned social problems the puritanical KR never faced before. Mok has responded in a characteristically KR way: "No Gambling" has been added to revolutionary slogans such as "Defeat for the Contemptible Yuon Enemy Aggressors" adorning the walls of Anlong Veng.

That's not the only new slogan. "Defeat for the Traitor Pol Pot Whose Hands Are Stained With Blood," "Long Live the Emerging Democracy," and "Cambodians Don't Kill Cambodians" are all freshly painted. Mok, who has basically spent his entire life in the jungle, seems to think the appearance of the new slogans will be enough to inspire Cambodians to rally in support of is movement.

"Reports reach me everyday saying that the new policy that 'Cambodians Don't Kill Cambodians' is a magic slogan indeed," he says.

Of course, killing Cambodians was exactly what the KR did during their years when Mok was at the very core of the leadership. Mok denies personal culpability for the mass murder of those years - a denial that scholars say is patently untrue. But in an unprecedented admission by a senior KR leader, he does admit that the regime committed wide-scale abuses.

"It is clear that Pol Pot has committed crimes against humanity," he says. "I don't agree with the American figure that millions died, but hundreds of thousands, yes."

Mok's venom for Pol Pot seems genuine and personal. Yet his denials of personal responsibility ring false, scholars say. For example, he claims no involvement in the Tuol Sleng prison. "Pol Pot alone was in charge of the prison," he insists.

Academics who are analyzing documents seized at Tuol Sleng, including 16,000 signed "confessions" of people who were tortured and executed there, say there's no doubt that Mok both ordered arrests and viewed " confessions". "His fingerprints are all over the place. The proof is irrefutable," says Stephen Heder, a professor at the University of London.

Mok's "butcher" nickname may have been earned in 1978. As commander of the southwestern zone of Cambodia and fifth-ranking party leader, he was ordered by Pol Pot to purge KR cadres from the eastern zone who were accused of conspiring with Vietnam. Zone commander Sao Phim and thousands of his loyalists were killed.

Asked about this brutal purge, Mok makes clear that he believes anyone associated with the Vietnamese is a fair target for murder. "I learned from documents produced by Pol Pot that Sao Phim was Vietnamese," he says of the fourth-ranking party leader.

Mok shrugs again in reference to two other leaders, Hu Num and Hu Yuon, who were killed under torture. "Sao Phim I can understand. This man was Vietnamese," he says, but he then adds that the deaths of "Hu Nim and Hu Yuon I do not understand."

Mok's virulent anti-Vietnamese statements come as no surprise. In 1993, his troops carried out numerous massacres of Vietnamese. "I have never taken a nap in my life, in order to go faster than the Vietnamese, to beat the Vietnamese, to not allow the Vietnamese to attack us," he says. He considers anyone working with Hun Sen or the CPP to be Vietnamese and thus a legitimate target for murder.
That may explain why the straight-talking guerrilla chief seems to feel no guilt for his role in the horrors of 1975-78. Asked about the deaths of those years, he laughs and waves his hand dismissively. "If my hands were stained with the blood of my compatriots, why would the people love me? Go ask them yourself."

Mok says that if he had the chance to live life differently, he would not have joined with Pol Pot, whose "hands are soiled with blood".

Yet his rejection of the long-time KR supremo seems rooted not in the crimes of the 1970s but those on June 1997, when Pol Pot ordered the killing of Son Sen and attempted to murder Mok in a power struggle.

Since the 1993 UN-sponsored elections, the KR had been fracturing, and Pol Pot had moved his base of operations, first from Trat in the southwest, to Pailin, then to Phnom Chhat in the northwest, Mok says. "From Phnom Chhat he came to ask me to stay here. Then....he tried to kill me and the people of Anlong Veng. How can I trust him?"

After nearly three hours talking about the revolutionary movement that has been his world for more than half a century, Mok says Pol Pot has been taken to a mountainside location and is waiting to be interviewed. "Ask Pol Pot whether he recognizes his faults. Ask him why he has assassinated his fellow Cambodians. After all that he has done, what more does he want?" Mok says, scoffing at the man he served for decades. He then asks the interviewer: "Can you still say that Pol Pot and I are not estranged?"

 

 

My Education: How Saloth Sar became Pol Pot

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng

Far Eastern Economic Review

October 30, 1997

The bones stacked in the Killing fields dotting Cambodia testify to the results of Pol Pot's 1975-1978 experiment in radical agrarian reform. Until now, however, the ideology that drove it has been left largely to the realm of speculation. Some scholars have described Pol Pot as a Cultural Revolution-style Maoist, while others have conjectured that a youthful grape-picking trip to Tito's Yugoslavia planted the seeds for his later break with the mainstream Marxists of the Soviet Union and Vietnam.

But Pol Pot tells his own story differently. He claims that as a student in France in 1949-53, he was influenced by a range of progressive movements-including, ironically, that of non-violent Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi.

In his first interview with a foreign journalist in 18 years, Pol Pot may have refused to repent for the horror of his rule, but he was clearly concerned with what the history books say about his personal life. He became animated in talking about his youth and family, after remaining impassive during questioning about the abuses of his rule.

Historians haven't even been able to agree on the ultra-secretive Pol Pot's birthday: Some say May 25, 1925, while others put it on the same day in 1927. Pol Pot said neither was correct: He was born in January 1925. "January-I remember, because my mother wrote it in chalk on the wall of the house, next to the cupboard," he said in Khmer, adding "janvier" in French to make sure there was no mistake. He had lied about his age, he said, to remain eligible for a scholarship.

Born Saloth Sar in Kampong Thom province, he attended secondary school in Phnom Penh and won a scholarship to France in 1949. Clearly defensive of his status as an "intellectual," Pol Pot volunteered that biographer David Chandler was "not entirely accurate" when characterizing him as a poor student. "I was not a bad student. I was average . . . I studied just enough to keep my scholarship. The rest of the time I just read books," he said.

It was those books, as well as the leftist student movements brewing in Europe in the years after World War II, that gave Pol Pot his early political education. "I looked at the second-hand books that were on sale along the Seine River, the old books that I loved to read," he recalled. "When I got money from my scholarship, I had to spend it on rent and food, so I only had 20 or 25 francs left to spend.

But I got a lot of books to read. For example, La Grande Revolution Francaise. I did not understand it all, but I just read. At the same time I saw the movement in India of Mahatma Gandhi. He was well known and I was very pleased with that. And later on Nehru.

"I started as a nationalist and then patriot and then I read progressive books. Before that time, I never read L'Humanite [the French communist party newspaper]. It scared me, " he smiled, "But I got used to it because of the student movement."

Pol Pot said there was nothing political about his trip or trips to Yugoslavia in the early 1950s. "I went to Yugoslavia because it was vacation time and I had no money. They organized a brigade... I paid just 2,000 francs, including everything. It wasn't influenced by any ideology. We just went for pleasure.

The next year . . . I went camping. So I cannot tell you of any single influence. Maybe it's a little from here, a little from there."

Pol Pot said his real political awakening, though, came upon his return home to Cambodia. "Before I went to France, my relatives, they lived comfortably. They were middle peasants. When I came back, I went to my village by bus. When I got off the bus, I met someone with a wagon. He asked my name and he said: 'Ah- you've come back!' And I look at him and see he's my uncle. And he asks me 'Do you want to go home?' I was shocked. Before he had a piece of land and a buffalo, now he had become a rickshaw-puller... I met and talked with the relatives who used to have land and buffaloes and had nothing now... What influenced me most was the actual situation in Cambodia."

The secrecy that made the Khmer Rouge so effective was, Pol Pot said, second nature to him. "Since my boyhood, I never talked about myself ... That was my nature. I was taciturn ... I'm quite modest. I don't want to tell people that I'm a leader ... I didn't tell anybody, not my brother, not my sister, because I didn't want to worry them. If anything happened to me, I didn't want them to have any connection to it. So some people think that I don't care about them. But on the contrary, I respect, I love my relatives. But I never revealed my political thinking to them."

Pol Pot said that it was as much "by chance" as anything that he became leader of the Cambodian communist party in 1960, when Tou Samouth disappeared. "There was nobody else to become secretary of the party, so I had to take charge," he said.

He vehemently denied that he had killed his "best friend", explaining in detail how Tou Samouth had been betrayed and arrested when he left his safe house in Phnom Penh to fetch medicine for his sick child. Tou Samouth was taken to the house of Lon Nol - the military commander who would later lead Cambodia- and interrogated for a week, Pol Pot said. "At that time I was his aide. If Tou Samouth had talked, I would have been arrested. He was killed at Stung Meanchey pagoda. We loved each other."

POL POT: THE END By Nate Thayer

POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

Far Eastern Economic Review

By Nate Thayer

August 7, 1997

In a stunning journalistic achievement, REVIEW correspondent Nate Thayer comes face-to-face with the elusive Pol Pot, architect of Cambodia’s killing fields. In a story packed with exclusive photos, Thayer describes Pol Pot’s jungle “trial,” and reveals the turmoil within the Khmer Rouge. Separate stories profile Pol Pot, introduce the new Khmer Rouge leadership, and shed new light on Cambodia’s deadly July coup and the suspected drug baron who financed it.

BROTHER NUMBER ZERO

On Other Pages:

19: Pol Pot Unmasked

21: New Face of the Khmer Rouge

22: Casualties of Hun Sen’s Coup

23: The Money Man Behind the Coup

24: On History’s Front Line

Pol Pot caused the deaths of more than a million Cambodians. But when he turned on his longtime military commander, Ta Mok, that was one Cambodian too many

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng, Cambodia

After a series of furtive rendezvous, using coded messages over mobile phones, I slipped into one of the most impenetrable, malarial-ridden and landmine-strewn jungles of the world: Khmer Rouge-controlled northern Cambodia. I was hoping to interview Pol Pot, one of the century’s most notorious and elusive mass murderers.

What I did not fathom, as I entered the Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng at 12:12 p.m. on July 25, was that I was about to witness nothing less than history.

“Long live! Long live! Long live the new strategy!” hundreds of voices chanted in unison. The clenched fists of the crowds pumped toward the sky, as a smiling middle-aged Khmer Rouge cadre led me toward an open-air mass meeting hall. Old artillery pieces and a captured Russian tank stood nearby.

“Crush! Crush! Crush! Pol Pot and his clique!” shouted the crowd on cue as we approached, their fists striking down towards the ground.

There, slumped in a simple wooden chair, grasping a long bamboo cane and a rattan fan, an anguished old man,  frail and struggling to maintain his dignity, was watching his life vision crumble in utter, final defeat.

This was how the “people’s tribunal’ began for Pol Pot, reviled around the world for personally orchestrating a reign of terror that left more than a million human beings dead and shattered the lives of many millions more.

The crude podium held a microphone, and crackling loudspeakers—powered by a car battery lying on the earthen floor—began to spew humiliating public denunciations of the long-time Khmer Rouge leader.

A shocking number of participants stood on crude wooden stumps, sat in home-made wheelchairs, or were missing eyes—sacrifices to the revolutionary cause of Pol Pot. Others, their arms blown off by landmines, were unable to join the frequent clapping as speaker after speaker denounced the man once venerated as “Brother Number One.”

“Our ultimate goal today is that the international community should understand that we are no longer Khmer Rouge and we are not Pol Potists!,” roared Ta Neou, the governor of the approximately 60,000 civilians who live in the area, which was under Pol Pot’s control until weeks ago.

The carefully orchestrated performance evoked the image of a grainy, black-and-white film clip from China’s Cultural Revolution. But the message was starkly different. “Long live the emergence of the democracy movement!” shouted individuals in the crowd, periodically interrupting leaders offering carefully crafted speeches at the microphone. A chorus would repeat the slogan, followed by prolonged applause by the roughly 500 participants. “Crush! Crush! Crush! Pol Pot and his murderous clique!”

Pol Pot sat alone, near three other manacled loyalists. Many in the crowd of women, children, and uniformed guerrillas seemed more interested at gazing at the first Westerner they had ever seen than in watching the traumatized old man sitting alone in a chair.

Each speaker, seemingly chosen to represent a sector of society—a farmer, an intellectual, a soldier, a woman—got up to denounce and humiliate Pol Pot “and his clique.”

Pol Pot often seemed close to tears as the vitriol was unleashed. In contrast,  three  younger army commanders put on trial alongside him had menacing, almost arrogant expressions, staring coldly into the eyes of the speakers, the crowd and the visiting reporter.

“We have sacrificed everything for the sake of the movement,” Ta Neou continued, “Our parents and all of us are children of peasants and farmers, we have sacrificed everything for the sake of the movement, but at the end we kill each other.”

Pol Pot, who ruled Cambodia for more than three years and ruled the Khmer Rouge for more than three decades, is genuinely finished. He has been denounced and imprisoned by his own movement. Not for the 1975-1978 Cambodian genocide, but for turning on his own comrades in an attempted purge in June, according to speakers at his trial.

Those commanders, led by longtime military commander Ta Mok, struck back and took Pol Pot prisoner after the purge failed. The tribunal sentenced Pol Pot to life imprisonment, but ruled out turning him over to international courts, where he could face charges of crimes against humanity.

The Khmer Rouge of Anlong Veng have good reason to try and distance themselves from the notorious Pol Pot. They want to attract international support for their struggle to unseat Cambodian premier Hun Sen. That is why they let a foreign reporter witness the show trial, the first time a journalist had entered Anlong Veng and left alive.

Yet lengthy interviews with Khmer Rouge cadre left little doubt that his ouster was authentic. Still, the cadres clearly saw it as a tragedy, and continued to treat the 72-year-old Pol Pot with Gentle respect.

The fall of Pol Pot underlines the view that the Khmer Rouge movement that ruled Cambodia in the 1970’s essentially no longer exists. The original leaders have largely been replaced by younger ones less steeped in communist ideology, and the movement has fractured into numerous factions, many of whom are allied with the mainstream political parties contesting power in Phnom Penh.

“It no longer makes any sense whatsoever to call whatever remains a Khmer Rouge movement,” says Stephen Heder, a Cambodian Scholar at the University of London’s School of Advanced International Studies. “Because of the realignment of forces over the last several years, the concept of a Khmer Rouge movement as we know it no longer has any meaning.”

But that doesn’t mean the Khmer Rouge have become irrelevant in Cambodia. The aggressive courting of Khmer Rouge factions by Cambodia’s rival premiers, Hun Sen and Prince Norodom Ranariddh, was central to the July 5-6 coup in Phnom Penh. In fact, the REVIEW has learned, the Khmer Rouge finalized their alliance with Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party on July 4. Worried that the balance of power would be tipped in his rival’s favour, Hun Sen ousted Ranariddh the next day.

 

Photo: Nate Thayer

Pol Pot also opposed those negotiations, and it led to his downfall, according to Khmer Rouge cadre interviewed in Anlong Veng. Virtually the entire leadership favoured a political deal with the royalist Funcinpec, but Pol Pot was opposed, said Gen. Khmer Nuon, who is now the Khmer Rouge’s army chief of staff.

“Domestically and internationally, Pol Pot has his own personal problems to take care of,” Khem Nuon said, referring to Pol Pot’s blood-soaked reputation. “He has no way out. That is why he keeps dragging this movement toward the darkness.”

The visit to Anlong Veng opened an unprecedented window into the inner workings of one of the world’s most secretive guerrilla movements. The Khmer Rouge have splintered dramatically since July 1996, when forces in western Cambodia, representing almost half the movement, broke with Pol Pot’s northern forces headquartered at Anlong Veng. The western split was headed by Ieng Sary, Pol Pot’s brother-in-law and longtime comrade-in-arms.

Khem Nuon said the western split was aimed against Pol Pot himself, but the 72-year-old leader blamed his top leaders—Ta Mok, Nuon Chea, and Son Sen—for losing the west by failing to heal the rift. “ So Pol Pot asked Mao—over there,” Khem Nuon explained, pointing to a young Khmer Rouge cadre standing listening to the interview,” to shoot Ta Mok and burn him—last October—to leave no evidence.”

The grim-faced young cadre, who looked capable of such a deed, nodded in agreement with his commander. But he didn’t carry out Pol Pot’s order. Because Ta Mok, who is known to the outside world as “The Butcher,” is immensely popular with the troops and civilians under his control. So Much so, Khem Nuon said, that Pol Pot saw him as a threat. “All the combatants here are under Ta Mok and they really like him a lot because he is so helpful to them in terms of standard of living. He built roads, bridges, dams within this area,” Khem Nuon said. “This is the reason Pol Pot wanted to get rid of Ta Mok.”

Pol Pot turned to two senior military field commanders, Gen. Sarouen and Gen. San, and attempted to consolidate power against Ta Mok. He called a mass meeting on February 25 of this year, and had them declared the new political and military leaders, replacing Ta Mok, Khem Nuon said. “What is the main cause that steered our people to rise up against Pol Pot? One, the leadership and the grip on power by Pol Pot was so long. All the power was within his hands,” Khem Nuon said. “Pol pot took decisions without even consulting the top leadership.”

About the same time, according to Cambodian government sources and diplomats, secret negotiations accelerated between envoys of Prince Ranariddh and elements of the Khmer Rouge in Anlong Veng. Most of these efforts were conducted by Ta Mok loyalists—often behind Pol Pot’s back—and the top royalist military commander, Gen. Nyek Bun Chhay. By May, the faction agreed in principle to join in alliance.

Increasingly isolated, Pol Pot launched a desperate attempt on June 9 to scuttle the peace deal by purging Ta Mok and other top leaders. That night, longtime defence minister Son Sen and 14 of his relatives, including a five-year-old child, were shot dead by Sarouen’s men, according to both Khmer Rouge and intelligence sources. “On the 9^th of June at 12:15 a.m., Pol Pot issued a direct order to take two Toyota pick-up trucks loaded with 20-30 soldiers to kill Mr. Son Sen,” said Khem Nuon.

The killings sparked several days of turmoil, with commanders fleeing into the jungle in disarray. But they rallied behind Ta Mok and trapped Pol Pot and his band of 300 remaining supporters on June 15, Khem Nuon said. Four days later, they had surrendered.

With Pol Pot neutralized, the remaining Khmer Rouge leadership moved rapidly forward to finalize a secret, tactical, political and military alliance with Ranariddh’s political faction. The two factions were allies against Hun Sen’s Phnom Penh government in a decade-long guerrilla war before Cambodia’s 1991 peace treaty.

The deal was closed July 4 in Anlong Veng. Hun Sen, learning about Funcinpec’s new alliance through his agents, launched his deadly coup the next morning, according to Cambodian political cadres and Asian intelligence sources. It has tipped Cambodia, which enjoyed four years of relative peace after 1993 United nations-sponsored elections, back into the throes of the warfare that seems to define this nation of 10 million people.

Hun Sen has claimed the entire tribunal was stage-managed by Pol Pot himself. Khem Nuon paints a very different picture, but he did say that Pol Pot had ‘consented’ to having a foreign reporter witness the mass meeting, as a way of acknowledging his guilt for moving against his comrades.

“ Pol Pot did himself confess to me clearly, after his arrest,” Khem Nuon said. “ When I met him the first time, he embraced me and burst into tears and said: ‘It is the right thing comrade that this has happened,’ and then he cried. It was on June 21, 1997, and he told me: ‘I am wrong, comrade, all the mistakes were made by me, alone,’ and then he cried.”

“ Pol Pot told me that this is the end of his life, he has nothing left, but he begged me to allow him to live,” Khem Nuon continued. “ I also want to make clear that if Pol Pot was vested with any credibility or respect, he would not have shown up and let you see him like you just did today.”

: I told him this morning that you were going to be here,” to witness his condemnation, Khem Nuon told the REVIEW. “ I told him that we want to prove to the world that we no longer want to associate ourselves with him. Then he consented.”

As the “People’s Tribunal of Anlong Veng” continued into its second hour, the new leaders somberly paced on the outskirts of the crowd, concerned by the deteriorating health of a now clearly weak and traumatized Pol Pot. Guerrilla officials acknowledged that Pol Pot suffered from serious heart disease and high blood pressure long before the events of recent days.

Khem Nuon said relatives and friends of those killed on June 9-10 wanted the blood of Pol Pot and his co-defendants San, Khon, and Sarouen—said to have carried out the murders on his orders. “ You notice that here today nobody was allowed to carry a weapon to this meeting, otherwise they would have been killed by the mob already,” Khem Nuon said.

But the cadre who overthrew Pol Pot seemed anguished as they watched the white-haired old man, who was dressed in loose cotton clothes with a blue-and-white Cambodian scarf looped around his neck. Confusion and sadness were etched on men who had spent their entire adult lives following Pol Pot from Cambodia’s jungles to its capital and back again.

“ We have put an end to the leadership which has betrayed our organization and the people,” Mak Ben, a bespectacled French-educated economist, dressed in a green Chinese-style military uniform, said from the podium. “ They are completely gone, as of right now, the Pol Pot regime has ended.”

“ Having acknowledged the betrayal of our group in recent months by Pol Pot and his clique,” the loudspeaker roared into the nearby forest, then Pol Pot’s crimes were read out. They included the murder of Son Sen, the attempted murder and ‘detention’ of Ta Mok and Nuon Chea, and “destroying the policy of national reconciliation,” a reference to the attempt to block the Funcinpec deal.

“These are the criminal acts—the betrayal by Pol Pot and his clique—against the people, the armed forces, and our cadre. In conclusion, we all decide to condemn and sentence this clique to life imprisonment.”

He immediately was helped up, unable to walk unassisted, by a guard in Chinese-style military fatigues. “ get someone under his other arm, get him more help,” Khem Nuon ordered. Patting his heart, Khem Nuon added: “ I am worried that he may die from the stress.”

Some people respectfully bowed, as if to royalty, as Pol Pot walked 25 meters to a waiting vehicle. “ I said what I said with a very heavy heart,” said Tep Kunnal, an emerging political leader, as he walked slowly away with his head bowed after denouncing Pol Pot. “ It is very, very difficult for me, but it had to be done. Before there were two dangers for Cambodia. Pol Pot and the Vietnamese puppet Hun Sen. Now there is only one.”

The cadres suggested that I ask Pol Pot questions while he was led away, but balked at translating when told the questions I wanted to pose. “ I cannot ask such a question to the leaders. You must ask them in Khmer yourself. It is better.”

Pol Pot, perhaps never to be seen alive again, was helped into a Toyota Landcruiser with tinted windows—captured booty from UN peacekeeping soldiers prior to the 1993 elections. Seconds after the trial ended, a torrential rain began.

 

POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

 

POL POT UNMASKED: He was obsessed with secrecy and total control

By Nate Thayer in Bangkok, Thailand

Far Eastern Economic Review

August 7, 1997

Pol Pot, whose name is synonymous with the Cambodian genocide, exercized total control over the Khmer Rouge for more than three decades from behind a wall of impenetrable secrecy.

By putting him on trial, his former comrades-in-arms have unmasked a man who shunned exposure, even when he was premier of Cambodia. They have also broken the vice-like grip on the movement he retained through a combination of charisma and utter ruthlessness.

Born to a peasant family in Kampong Thom on May 18t, 1925, Saloth Sar—Pol Pot’s real name—was educated at a Buddhist monastery before entering technical school in Phnom Penh. His clandestine life began in his teens, when he joined the anti-French resistance movement in Indochina during World War ll.  By 1946, he was a member of the underground Indochinese Communist Party.

In 1949, he won a scholarship to study radio electronics in Paris, where he was active in radical student politics. His studies, apparently, took a back seat and he failed his exams three years in a row. He spent one summer picking grapes in Tito’s Yugoslavia, where he may have acquired his radical communism that challenged Soviet-style orthodoxy.

It was also during his sojourn in France that he charmed Khieu Ponnary, whose sister was married to Ieng Sary, another future Khmer Rouge leader.

Returning to Phnom Penh with no degree, Pol Pot taught at a private secondary school and wrote articles for left-wing publications that he signed, “The Original Khmer.” His underground activities went farther than that, however. He became a senior member of the Cambodian Communist Party at its founding congress in 1960, and was named secretary in 1963 after the mysterious death of Tou Samouth.

It was then that his secret life became his whole life. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, no longer content to belittle the Cambodian communists as “me Khmer Rouges”—“My Red Khmers”—was stepping up police pressure. Pol Pot and his comrades fled into the jungle, leaving no trace. “When a secret is kept secret, 50% of the battle is won,” Pol Pot once said.

Twelve years later, after fighting first Sihanouk’s army and then American-backed troops of Gen. Lon Nol, the battle was won. On April 17, 1975, Pol Pot’s army of peasants, clad in simple black-cotton uniforms, marched into Phnom Penh. Finally, Pol Pot could put his ideas into action.

The result was one of the most brutal and disastrous social experiments in history. After emptying the capital at gunpoint, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge tried to transform Cambodia into a communal agrarian utopia, but instead turned the country into a vast slave-labour camp. More than one million Cambodians—out of a population of some 7 million—were executed, tortured, or starved to death under the Khmer Rouge reign of terror.

The educated were the first to be slain. But later, as the reign of terror turned on itself, waves of purges decimated the ranks of Khmer Rouge cadres. Anyone who could pose a threat to Pol Pot was killed.

Through it all, Pol Pot stayed behind his mask. When it was announced in 1976 that Pol Pot had been named premier of “Democratic Kampuchea,” as the country was renamed, American intelligence officials—who had been fighting the Khmer Rouge for years—could not figure out who he was.

“Secret work is fundamental,” Nuon Chea, the party’s number 2, told a visiting Danish delegation in 1977, the only time Nuon Chea was seen in public.

Nevertheless, a personality cult started to spring up around him in May 1978, pushed by cadres eager to show their loyalty as purges spiraled. Tens of thousands of Khmer Rouge cadres were executed as Pol Pot eliminated competition. His power was clearly growing, Chandler says: whereas he was addressed as ‘Elder Brother Pol” or “Brother Number One” soon after taking power, that gradually changed to “Uncle Secretary” or “party centre” to “Leading Apparatus” to, finally, the “High Organization.”

Pol Pot’s radical ideas were nourished by a five month sojourn in China in 1965-66, when the country was in ferment leading up to the Great proletarian Cultural Revolution. His admiration for the Gang of Four was mutual: Pol Pot went to China after his 1975 victory and met Mao Zedong, who congratulated him on his speedy revolution.

While Pol Pot’s thinking may have been influenced by his foreign experiences, at its root it is deeply Khmer. And in Pol Pot’s case, that means a visceral hatred of Vietnam, the much larger neighbor that seized the Mekong Delta from the medieval Khmer empire. Egged on by that HATRED, Khmer Rouge guerrillas carried out raids into southern Vietnam, triggering the December 1978 Vietnamese invasion.

Pol Pot again fled into the jungle, after ruling for three years, eight months, and 20 days. Reverting to form, he took the code name “81.” Until July 25, 1997, he hadn’t been seen by foreign journalists since 1979, when he was filmed by Naoki Mabuchi, a Japanese photographer with close ties to the Khmer Rouge.

Pol Pot officially retired from his official posts in 1985, but there was never any question that remained in total control of the movement. Cadres who have heard him speak say he is an amazing orator, making speeches so resonant in revolutionary and patriotic spirit that they bring his listeners to tears. Yet he refrained from appearing publicly.

Now, it appears Pol Pot has lost both his mask and his powers. That doesn’t auger well for the movement he helped found, and which is now in danger of segmenting further. As Nuon Chea said in his 1977 interview: “The leadership apparatus must be defended at any price…as long as the leadership is there, the party will not die.”

 

POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

NEXT GENERATION: Khmer Rouge put on a new face

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng, Cambodia

Far Eastern Economic Review

August 7, 1997

A tiger, according to Gen. Khem Nuon, can indeed change its stripes. And if foreigners doubt that the Khmer Rouge movement has  done just that, he said, they should come and see for themselves in the jungles of Northern Cambodia.

That is the message that the movement’s new military chief-of-staff wanted to send in an unprecedented interview at his headquarters of Anlong Veng. “ From now on, we are going to open this area free for foreigners, so they can see the real facts about our movement,” he said.

Anyone who accepts that invitation will find a mixed picture. Clearly, the purge of Pol Pot and a generational transfer of leadership has profoundly changed the secretive movement. In the interview, Khem Nuon spoke with openness about the past “crimes” and future plans, and he showed no interest in communist ideology.

At the same time, however, the group continues to sound the drum of rabid anti-Vietnamese ultra nationalism, and remains bent on the overthrow of Cambodian premier Hun Sen. Some of the older leaders who orchestrated the 1975-78 Cambodian reign of terror still wield influence, and younger cadres talk of “democracy” rang hollow against the backdrop of a Cultural revolution-style show trial.

The movement is opening up for a reason: It wants to build alliances both within the country and overseas for its crusade against Hun Sen and the “Vietnamese aggressors” that it claims are still occupying the country. Specifically, it wants to join forces with Funcinpec—whose leader co-Premier Prince Norodom Ranariddh, was ousted by Hun Sen in a July 5-6 coup—as well as with other political parties opposed to Hun Sen.

But Khem Nuon and other new leaders are aware that if they’re going to have any hope of winning Western support, they have to break with the movement’s blood-soaked past. “ The reason we put an end to the Pol Pot regime is because we want the international community to see and help us in our struggle with other movements in order to fight against Hun Sen and the Vietnamese,” Khem Nuon said.

To an international community that equates the Khmer Rouge with genocide, it’s going to be a hard sell. But Khem Nuon says the Khmer Rouge—or, more precisely, Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea Party—no longer exists. The movement is now called the National Solidarity Party.

“ If they still call me Khmer Rouge they haven’t seen what I have just done. I am the one who destroyed Pol Pot, who has been in power for many years,” he said after the group’s longtime leader was publicly denounced. “ Even the United States and the Vietnamese failed to get rid of him, but I can. So how can you call me the Khmer Rouge?”

In an unprecedented admission, he said that “crimes” had been committed during the Khmer Rouge’s nearly four year rule of Cambodia. But even when pressed, he would not go much farther, Blaming individuals rather than the group. “ We do condemn those who have committed crimes, which were not right,” Khem Nuon said. “ At the time I committed no crimes, only Pol Pot and some of his close people. Now they are gone, while Pol Pot is arrested. Some of them have defected to the Vietnamese side, and the rest I don’t know where they are.”

According to Khem Nuon and other Cadres, the movement is now led by a nine-member standing committee that includes only one member of the old guard: Khieu Samphan, the head of the committee, a diplomat who for years has been the public face of the Khmer Rouge. Khem Nuon, who’s aged about 50, is the second-ranking member, but his power is bolstered by his being the top military figure.

Yet Khem Nuon freely acknowledges that older leaders such as Gen. Ta Mok and Nuon Chea, who were key members of the murderous 1975-78 Khmer Rouge regime, still have a say in “all important matters.” Khem Nuon, who did military training in China, is the right-hand-man of the one-legged Ta Mok. “I’m the one who is in charge of the armed forces right now, but I keep consulting him all the time,” he said.

Once Hun Sen is driven out, the National Solidarity party would be happy to participate in democratic elections, Khem Nuon said. Tep Kunnal, another top-ranking standing committee figure, also spoke of liberal democracy as desirable. It seems that the new generation is driven less by communist ideology than by the ultra nationalism that has long under laid politics in a country squeezed between more powerful neighbors.

Khem Nuon claims there are 10,000 guerrillas and 60,000 civilians loyal to the movement around Anlong Veng. “Our movement is pure and clean,” he said. “ I hope the international community will help us.” For starters, he urged, “ Please ask them to stop calling us ‘Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.’”

 

====================

POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

Harrowing Tales: Hun Sen’s forces torture and kill former allies

By Nate Thayer in Samrong, Cambodia and Bangkok

Far Eastern Economic Review

August 7, 1997

 

At the jungle hide-out along the Thai-Cambodian border, Gen. Serei Kosal, stuttering and wide-eyed with fear, relates five-days of flight from Phnom Penh through the Cambodian countryside. He was one of the top military officers targeted for arrest by Hun Sen, Cambodia’s second prime minister, who deposed the first prime minister, prince Norodom Ranariddh, in the July 5-6 coup.

Gen. Serei fled the capital on the morning of July 5 by commandeering a military aircraft to the western city of Battambang. From there, he travelled three days by foot with no food until he reached resistance-controlled zones along the Thai border. Claiming 700 troops under his command, he vowed to organize guerrilla war.

He was lucky to have escaped: The coup left scores dead, including two of his fellow generals, and hundreds arrested. Thousands of others are fleeing or in hiding.

“ We need a safe haven to protect our people from killing and arrest,” said Serei, dressed in borrowed shorts and shoeless. “ Hun Sen is hunting down our people, killing them, arresting them. Why hasn’t the world condemned the coup makers and acted in support of democracy and against the dictators?”

His bewilderment is shared by other Ranariddh loyalists who are flocking to north and northwest Cambodia to seek sanctuary and organize guerrilla resistance. They are joined daily in these jungles and remote villages near the Thai border by opposition-party members, journalists, and other civilians. Many relate harrowing tales of witnessing summary executions, atrocities, and the arrest of anyone suspected of affiliation with Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party.

From their accounts and evidence gathered by human rights officials, a grim picture is emerging of torture and summary execution by Hun Sen and his cohorts, many of whom are former Khmer Rouge soldiers who took part in the “killing fields” of the late 1970’s. Equally disturbing are allegations that foreign embassies refused help to Cambodians who feared for their lives in the first days after the coup when many of the killings occurred.

International human rights officials in Phnom Penh say they had confirmed 36 executions by mid-July and were verifying a dozen others. “ We have had many cases of bodies found, hands tied behind their back, with bullets in the head. But sometimes we arrive too late for the bodies and there are only ashes. They are literally incinerating the evidence,” said a senior Western human rights investigator in Phnom Penh. United Nations officials say they know of another 30 Funcinpec supporters who were tortured and forced to drink sewage.

Investigators say at least 617 people have been detained in Phnom Penh and another 271 are known to have been arrested outside the capital. They say the evidence beginning to trickle in is “only the tip of the iceberg,” but includes specific information linking Hun Sen’s top lieutenants to unspeakable acts of torture and murder.

Gen. Chau Sambath, a military advisor to Ranariddh, was captured while trying to flee the capital by motorcycle. According to human rights officials and Cambodian intelligence officers, Sambath was taken to Hun Sen’s personal compound on July 8 where he was tortured, then executed. The sources say his fingernails were pulled off and his tongue ripped out before he was killed by Gen. Him Bun Heang, chief of security for Hun Sen and head of his personal bodyguard. “ They wanted to know the military radio frequencies of Funcinpec leaders, so they tortured him at Hun Sen’s house,” said a senior Cambodian military intelligence officer. “ They pulled his tongue out of his head with pliers when he wouldn’t talk.”

Another Funcinpec general, secretary of state at the Ministry of Interior Ho Sok, was executed on the grounds of the ministry by the bodyguards of National Police Chief Gen. Hok Lundy, a loyalist of Hun Sen. According to Amnesty International, Ho Sok was arrested “ while attempting to find a country that would give him asylum.” He had taken refuge at the embassy of an Asean country, but was expelled at the request of Hun Sen’s aides and arrested as he drove to the luxury Cambodiana hotel, where many foreigners and Funcinpec officials had fled in the days after the coup. A Ministry of Interior spokesman confirmed the killing, saying it was done by “people who were angry with him.”

At least five bodyguards of Gen. Nyek Bun Chhay, the commander of Funcinpec forces, had their eyes gouged out while they were under interrogation, then executed, according to Western human rights officials and Cambodian military sources. After 14 days of flight through the countryside Nyek Bun Chhay has since arrived at the jungle headquarters and commands the resistance army.

Hundreds have already arrived in Thailand, including scores of Funcinpec officials, at least 24 members of parliament, journalists associated with independent newspapers, and officials of other political parties.

“The soldiers came to my house with rocket launchers looking for my steering committee members, putting their pictures on TV and posted in military offices,” said Sam Rainsy, Cambodia’s most prominent opposition politician and head of the Khmer Nation party. “ There is a campaign to destroy the KNP. The soldiers told people at my office ‘ We will not even let a baby asleep in a hammock stay alive.’ This is real Khmer Rouge language We cannot operate anymore. Democracy is finished.” More than 1000 of his party workers are now amassed at a jungle encampment along the Thai border under the protection of Funcinpec troops still loyal to Ranariddh.

“Killing and repression are going on on a very large scale. Hun Sen is a murderous prime minister,” Ranariddh told the REVIEW in Bangkok on July 20. “ I hope that the U.S. congress will call for a cessation of all aid to Hun Sen.”

But international condemnation of the coup has been decidedly muted, with the major donor countries still considering whether to support a government controlled by Hun Sen. If he maintains a credible coalition by co-opting ministers from Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party, he may win that support.

The ambivalence of major Western governments was foreshadowed by the reaction of their embassies in Phnom Penh during the coup—a response that has been criticized bitterly by Cambodian and human rights officials. They say the American and Australian embassies refused entry to Cambodian government officials who sought refuge on embassy grounds. The U.S. embassy also “flatly refused” requests of political asylum for some members of parliament or to issue them with emergency visas.

“We begged visas from Western embassies. We begged them to open their gates for people who were clearly targeted for persecution, and the Americans, the Australians, flatly said no,” said a foreign human rights official in Phnom Penh. “ These are the embassies who have pushed people to exercise their rights, have said they supported human rights and free expression and opposition politics, but when these very values are trampled upon and those who exercised their  rights were targeted, they did nothing to help.”

American embassy sources said they had no clearance from Washington to offer political asylum and claim they were not approached directly by any Cambodians for sanctuary on embassy grounds.

The U.S. also set up a sanctuary on the grounds of the Cambodiana hotel in downtown Phnom Penh during the fighting that raged in the city. Some Cambodian parliamentarians who have since fled the country said they were denied access to the sanctuary in the hotel’s ballroom. The correspondent for Voice of America, Cambodian citizen Som Sattana, was refused access to the ballroom by embassy personnel, despite having received death threats, according to human rights workers. He has since left the country.

“We set up a U.S. embassy reception centre at the Cambodiana hotel early on Sunday (July 6) for American citizens,” said an embassy spokeswoman, who added: “ We were not open for visas during the fighting.”

The able to flee are regrouping in newly formed resistance zones in northern Cambodia. Several thousand heavily armed troops backed by tanks and artillery control a swath of territory across several provinces abutting the Thai border, including the contested northwestern provincial capital of Samrong.

Hundreds of Funcinpec members, exhausted from days of trekking across the country to reach Funcinpec-controlled areas, spoke of being hunted by Hun Sen’s forces. “ They are arresting people in their houses, in the jungle, along the road—anybody they think works for Funcinpec,” said Sok Nuon, a policeman who fled from Kampong Chhnang province.

Gen. Long Sereirath, formerly deputy commander of the 5th Military Region in the north, fought his way out of Siem Riep city four days after the coup. He said he went without food for three days before reaching Samrong. “ We will blow up key bridges to keep them from coming north with artillery,” he said, but added that his forces were desperately low on ammunition.

His commander, Lt. Gen. Khan Savouen, who is now leading resistance forces, appealed for foreign assistance from his front-line command post near national Route 6 in Siem Riep province.” We will fight even if we don’t get foreign assistance,” he said, surrounded by Russian T-54 tanks, armoured personnel carriers, heavy artillery and anti-aircraft guns. Heavy fighting raged a few kilometers away and his position was overrun the day after the REVIEW interviewed him.

 

POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

DUBIOUS DONOR

Money man: Theng Bunma sent cash and gold for Hun Sen’s coup

By Nate Thayer

Far Eastern Economic Review

August 7, 1997

How much does it take to buy a coup? In Cambodia, the going rate seems to be $1 million. Suspected drug baron Theng Bunma said he gave that much in cash and gold to Second Prime Minister Hun Sen to fund the putsch which toppled co-premier Norodom Ranariddh.

“For the clash of 6^th of July, 1997, I called Mr. Hun Sen and I talked to him. I gave him $1 million dollars to do whatever to control the situation,” said Bunma in an interview with Australian Channel 7 television.” He asked me if I had the money. I said no, but I would send 100 kilograms of gold in a plane into Cambodia.’ In return for his generosity, Bunma, reputed to be Cambodia’s richest businessman, enjoyed a perk of being a big-time coup financier: More than 300 hundred of Hun Sen’s troops, backed by tanks, were dispatched to protect Bunma’s property during the coup.

“ I say what the second prime minister did was correct. Why? One reason, take the example of my hotel. The other side wanted to destroy it, the government put three tanks and soldiers around to protect it,” he said. Asked whether Bunma had given the government the money, Cambodian Secretary of State for Information Khieu Kanharith replied:” Why would he give us a million dollars? I do not know what we are supposed to do with this money—it’s nothing, we need $100 million to finance the redevelopment of the whole country.”

Bunma also said he gave $50,000 dollars each to three leaders of a renegade faction of Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party “to encourage them”—Siem Riep governor Toan Chhay, Banteay Meanchey provincial governor Duong Khem and Minister of State Ung Phan.

The tycoon has denied allegations by the United States that he is involved in heroin trafficking.

Frantic calls from Regent's Rm 406-Cambodian coup 1994 By Nate Thayer

Frantic calls from Regent's Rm 406

Phnom Penh Post

By Nate Thayer

Friday, 15 July 1994

The Post's Nate Thayer describes how he shared Prince Chakrapong's final hours in Cambodia after receiving a dramatic 6:30 am phone call.

Loyalist troops had taken positions throughout the capital on the night of July 2 as rumors swept the city that a coup attempt was imminent. Heavily armed soldiers were positioned outside the homes of government leaders and military installations by dark, and the children of senior officials were ordered to stay out of the city nightclubs.

Officials confirmed "there will be trouble tonight" and spoke of a coup attempt.

At 3:00 am government forces surrounded the houses of the alleged putsch leaders, who they named as former Interior Minister Sin Song and former Deputy Prime Minister Prince Norodom Chakrapong.

Their houses were invaded, and weapons and communication equipment seized. Sin Song was arrested and allegedly confessed to his role in launching a coup. Chakrapong had fled his house hours before security forces arrived.

At 6:30 am a call to this reporter said "call this number" and hung up. A jittery voice answered after I dialed the mobile phone. "This is Prince Chakrapong. Please, please help me," he said in a frightened broken whisper, "Come right away to the Regent hotel. They have surrounded me. They are trying to kill me."

In the 20 minutes it took for me to arrive, the Prince called me seven times begging for me to come quickly. "I am alone. Please, before they kill me, come now. Call the American Embassy and tell them my life is in danger."

He was obviously hoping that a foreign presence might prevent the security forces from harming him.

Government troops and security forces armed with machine guns, rocket launchers, and carrying walkie talkies were positioned on the street corners and entrance ways around the hotel near Monivong Boulevard when I arrived on the otherwise quiet early Sunday morning. But no one tried to stop me, probably thinking I was a hotel guest.

Inside, hotel workers, white with fear, stared blankly in response to my inquiry of where the alleged coup leader was staying. But maids hovering in an upstairs hallway, opened Room 401.

A disheveled, barefoot, and petrified son of King Sihanouk was found emerging from a crawl space above the ceiling of his hotel room, begging for help.

"Please, they are trying to arrest me. They will kill me. I am innocent. Please tell the American Ambassador to come right away. I need protection," the wide-eyed Prince said, near tears, and jittery from lack of sleep. He was alone. The bed was still made, and the curtains were drawn. A ceiling panel was removed revealing a small dark crawl space. A chair was under it to allow one to climb up. He said troops had been surrounding him since 3:00 am.

"I hear the rumor that I plan to make a coup d'etat. I am innocent. I have nothing in my hands. I have no political influence now. I have no troops," he said. "Please don't leave me."

So began a four-and-a-half-hour drama that, after scores of frantic phone calls and negotiations, ended with the Prince being whisked to the airport by military escort and forcibly exiled via a scheduled Malaysia Airlines flight to Kuala Lumpur.

Frightened hotel staff hovered in hallways and peeked out of rooms in the otherwise completely silent hotel.

Realizing that there was no press or diplomats aware of the developments, and I was alone with a hunted, hated alleged coup plotter. Surrounded by troops clearly prepared to invade, I opted to rent my own room down the hall, with a better view of the troops, street, and hotel entrance way.

I went downstairs to the front desk asked for Room 406 and handed over cash. The desk clerk stared with a furrowed brow look of fear and alarm, said nothing, and handed me the key.

I thought that it might diminish the incentive of the troops outside to act precipitously if I was in a room rented under my own name, and buy time to interview the Prince. The Prince thought it was a great idea and came over to Room 406.

I made a quiet call to senior government contacts and diplomats informing them of the situation, hoping that they would get the message to the troops downstairs - quickly.

My phone rang a few minutes later, saying that Co-Prime Minister Ranariddh was aware I was with the man who allegedly was trying to topple his government and assassinate top officials.

The three mobile phones in my room rang constantly. More than 40 calls came in within the first two hours, as Chakrapong desperately tried to delay the troops from arresting him, and attempted to convince US Ambassador Charles Twining to give him political asylum.

Chakrapong repeatedly denied to me that he was involved in any coup attempt, cursed the leaders of the government, begged for my help and asked me not to leave him if the troops invaded.

He fielded phone calls constantly on his two phones, often listening silently and hanging up, speaking in English, French, and Khmer.

King Norodom Sihanouk rang from Beijing. "I am alright Papa, but the situation is bad. They have surrounded me," he said at one point.

As more calls came in he broke down and again moist-eyed. He looked dejected as Queen Norodom Monineath Sihanouk kept him up to date from Beijing with the state of her negotiations with government leaders over allowing him exile.

"It is not the Queen, but as my parents. It is not politics, it is as a son," he told me when asked whether King Sihanouk and Queen Monineath supported him.

For the first two hours, he was in fear of his life, convinced that if arrested he would be killed.

"They tell me that if we criticize the government, we are serving the interests of the Khmer Rouge. If I am arrested, the embassies must stay with me, to keep looking for me. Please don't let them take me anywhere. Please don't leave me alone," he said to me.

The Prince asked me to contact the US Embassy to request political asylum. I give him the mobile telephone number of the US Ambassador Charles Twining. He calls and Twining is put on the phone. "I ask your protection, your excellency. It is a human right. If you don't come to protect me I prefer not to go outside. I prefer to die here. I will stay here in the room. How can I trust them if they bring me somewhere?", he says to Twining.

Prince Chakrapong's face shows that the American Ambassadors response is not positive. "Please your excellency, if they bring me outside, if they arrest me, they will kill me."

Chakrapong hung up from Twining and went to look outside. The street was quiet save for troops standing guard. "Twining says 'you are not an American citizen, we cannot help you,' " he said.

"They say this is a liberal democracy," staring from behind the curtain down at the soldiers, "They are silencing all opposition now. We will all be accused of serving the interests of the Khmer Rouge. The whole world must know that this regime accuses me without proof. If the free world helps this regime it is the end of democracy."

Another American diplomat called my phone: "Tell Chakrapong he is not a US citizen. As long as the government proceeds in a legal fashion regarding his human rights, there is nothing we can do to interfere in a sovereign government."

But the American message of rejection of official protection was clear.

Crying young hotel maids burst into the room at one point: "The soldiers are coming. They are inside now."

A disheveled Prince - barefoot, shirt unbuttoned, sleepless, and dejected-began to put on his shoes. He handed me his wallet and mobile telephones and asked me to give them to his daughters. "Please make sure my daughters are alright. The soldiers invaded my house last night and they were there."

But the soldiers didn't come in. And the phones rang incessantly, sometimes three at the same time. At one point, Chakrapong had King Sihanouk on the line in one hand, and Twining on the other.

The Queen was still negotiating for safe passage out of the country.

Finally Prime Minister Ranariddh - Chakrapong's nemesis and half brother - agreed to allow the Prince to leave the country. "If I am allowed to join my family in Malaysia, I will accept," he said at one point.

By 10 am we saw Twining, other diplomats, and press begin to gather on the street, to the great relief of the Prince.

"I have given ten years of my life for my country for nothing. They are looking for a plane for me," he said after hanging up from a call from the queen.

"I want you to tell them I am innocent. I am a military man. I know how to make a coup. Now, I have no power and no forces. How can I make a coup? If I was to do something would I stay here in Phnom Penh?

"I left last night with no bodyguards to come to the hotel because I felt something was wrong. Like when I was in the jungle. I knew on the battlefield when something bad would happen. But I was not afraid because I was innocent."

The military called from downstairs to say that the troops were coming to our room now and that the Prince would be allowed to leave the country.

He turned to me: "Please do not leave me. I will only leave if you go with me to the airport in the same car. They may not take me to the airport."

There was a strong knock on the door and I went to open it. A score of heavily armed soldiers and security police waited in the hallway as Twining and Co-Minister of Interior You Hockry entered alone. The four of us sat down.

Hockry asked me to leave. Prince Chakrapong asked that I stay. I said nothing.

"We will promise your safety to the airport. I promise there will be no guns on the plane. The best thing for us it to bring you safely to the airport," Hokry told the Prince.

Men were sent to get passports and luggage at Chakrapong's house. A Malaysian Airlines plane was held on the tarmac at Pochentong as Chakrapong was assured that he would be allowed to safely leave the country.

The behavior of several Ministry of Interior police, who were poised to arrest the Prince until minutes before, now went through a bizarre somersault. They entered the room crouched on their knees and hands clasped to their heads in deference to Royalty as they went about their business preparing to send him to exile.

The Interior Minister said that Chakrapong's alleged collaborator, Sin Song, had confessed. "I think that one or two people cannot do this kind of thing. There will be more arrests," he said. Chakrapong stared blankly, with a mixed expression of anger and fear.

At one point, while, we waited for the motorcade and luggage downstairs, Twining turned to Hockry.

"I just remembered, there will be a fireworks display this afternoon at the fourth of July celebration," he said, suddenly realizing that, as a jittery city emerged from an attempted coup, explosions in the city might not be timely.

"Do you have authorization?" the Minister shot back to the Ambassador, with an alarmed look on his face.

When the mobile phone rang to say that the motorcade of troops was ready, we left the room to walk to the street. Hotel staff and soldiers clasped their hands and knelt in respect as Chakrapong was led by a bevy of sunglassed, automatic weapon-toting officials through a throng of cameras waiting on the street.

Shoved into a sleek Toyota with black tinted windows, we were whisked to the airport in a convoy of a score of cars, including one with Twining. Streets were blocked off and hundreds of people lined them to watch the motorcade pass. The plane was waiting at the airport, full of curious passengers, as Chakrapong was whisked on board and the flight departed.

He called several hours later from Malaysia saying: " I want to thank you sincerely for saving my life. They would have killed me if you had not come. I am innocent. I was not involved in anything. Tell them I am innocent."

Publisher's note to readers:Re: Govt criminal complaint against the Phnom Penh Post for "incitement"

Publisher's note to readers

Phnom Penh Post

Michael Hayes

(A comment from Phnom Post Editor and Publisher Michael Hayes after the government announced they had filed criminal complaints against him and the paper for an article "Security jitters while the PM's away" charging the paper with "disinformation, incitement and creating insecurity and instability." They demanded to know the names of my sources. The Phnom Penh Post was a courageous and ground breaking factor in emerging expression of peaceful dissent and debating public policy--a concept long unfamiliar to the country.)

Friday, 08 September 1995 14:00

S INCE the announcement by the Ministry of Information (MOI) that a complaint had been lodged against me for an article we ran entitled "Security jitters while PMs away," written by Nate Thayer (PPPost: March 24, l995), our office has received dozens of inquiries from around the world and here in Cambodia on the situation vis-a-vis this case.

For readers who may not have seen any of the various news stories, the situation - in brief - is as follows:

The initial public announcement was made by the MOI on August 24.

According to an MOI spokesman, Leng Sochea, the government has filed a complaint with the municipal court asking them to press criminal charges against me, as publisher of the PPPost, for disinformation, incitement and creating insecurity and instability.

If tried and convicted, I could be fined and possibly jailed. As well, the PPPost could be closed down permanently.

Government lawyer Kao Bun Hong, on behalf of the two Prime Ministers, filed the complaint in a letter dated April 21, although it is not known when the court officially received the letter. A court official has said a judge is investigating the case to decide whether to press charges under Article 62 - dis-information - of the UNTAC Press Law.

Under current Cambodian law the court has six months to review the case and decide whether this or other charges will be brought against me, or none at all.

As a part of the court's investigation into the case I can be called in to answer questions before a final decision is made on prosecution.

To date, I have not been officially notified in writing by the court that the investigation is proceeding or that I will be summoned to answer questions, or whether or not I will be prosecuted.

I'm pleased to note with gratitude that in a faxed response to a letter of concern about this situation from Julio Jeldres, H.M. King Norodom Sihanouk wrote on August 25 that while he could not change the course of the case, His Majesty "shall, however, have the right and the duty to grant an amnesty to the journalists sentenced."

In a meeting I had with Kao Bun Hong on September 2, I was told that the government wanted to know who the unnamed sources were cited in the story.

According to the recently passed press law, which was signed into law by Assembly President and Acting Head of State Chea Sim on August 31, journalists are protected by law from having to reveal their sources.

In the absence of any official written notification on this case from either the government or the court, I have been refraining from making any statements to the press except to say that I stand behind the accuracy of the story in question.

Readers will be kept abreast of any significant developments regarding this case. Many, many, many thanks to all those, both within the RGC and without, who have expressed their support in the last two weeks.

The First Year (The Phnom Penh Post) By Sarah Colm

The First Year

Friday, 19 July 2002

Phnom Penh Post

It was January 1992. Two men were drinking and talking in their rattan chairs on the verandah of the Renakse Hotel, and invited me over. One of them, Nate, introduced the other to me by saying: "This is Michael. He's going to start the first English-language newspaper in Cambodia."

A few conversations later I found myself in the managing editor's chair of the Phnom Penh Post.
I had just moved to Cambodia to work as a stringer for the San Francisco Examiner after finishing the better part of a decade in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, where I had edited the neighborhood newspaper, the Tenderloin Times. The paper was published not only in English but in Khmer, Lao, and Vietnamese to serve the inner city's booming refugee population.

By abandoning the uncertainties of freelance journalism for the even more risky undertaking of helping to start up a newspaper in Cambodia, I joined a team of three: Michael, Kathleen, and Chap Narith. Despite the scarcity of staff persons on the masthead, there was plenty of support around town for the newspaper in the early days.

It seemed that just about everyone wanted to get something published in the first issue, with several of the local hacks competing for who was going to pen the gossip column, now institutionalized as The Gecko. Soon enough the Post was able to hire some reporters, with some of Cambodia's best journalists coming on board that first year, including Mang Channo, Moeun Chhean Nariddh, and Ker Munthit.

This was Cambodia before its first national elections, before the blossoming of an independent press, before a quarter-million refugees had been repatriated from Thai refugee camps. It was a place where you couldn't count on having electricity every day, even in Phnom Penh; where curfews were often imposed in the city at night, and where you took a chance of soldiers leveling their rifle or rocket launcher at you if didn't slow down for a checkpoint on the provincial highways.

International relief workers had only recently moved their offices from cramped quarters in the Monorom and Samaki (Le Royal) hotels to individual villas in Boeung Keng Kang. No one had mobile phones and getting through on a landline was difficult. The option was often a "human phone call": one visit to set up an appointment with a source and a second one to conduct the actual interview. Sending an international fax was problematic; email non-existent.

Putting out the first issue of the Post was very, very difficult. After Michael found an office for the Post, monks from Wat Botum were asked to come bless the newspaper and new offices. Shortly after the robed ones flicked holy water over all the new computer equipment one of us-I won't say who-mistakenly plugged the laser printer into the wrong voltage, destroying it.

A new printer-and stories-arrived just in time for us to publish the first edition in advance of our main competition, the Cambodia Times, making the Post Cambodia's first English-language paper to publish since 1975.

Setbacks that seemed huge at the time-brownouts and blackouts, equipment failures, bureaucratic obstacles in getting government approval to publish-were soon but dim memories as we slogged through rubber deadlines and all-night production binges.

Like many, I have a visceral memory of those first days and nights at the Post: the generator chanka-chanking away 23 hours a day, the noise ricocheting up the concrete stairway of the office to fill the entire building-and our crania-with sound; working during the peak of the hot season with the windows closed to keep the racket out and the smoke from several chain smokers in.

Newsgathering got only slightly easier after UNTAC arrived. Our press passes entitled us to ride the UN's Russian helicopters and C-130 transport planes for free, enabling day trips to Preah Vihear or Koh Nhek, but few of us traveled after dark if we could help it. Journalists gathered for press conferences by Khmer Rouge officials at the compound next to the Palace (now the site of Kantha Bopha hospital), or for UNTAC spokesperson Eric Fault's noon-time briefings, where UPI reporter Sue Downey pecked furiously away on her laptop as others dozed off their hangovers.

In the evenings the draw for journalists and UN workers was the No Problem Café or the Gecko Bar. This was Phnom Penh before the FCC and the Lucky Market; a time when the city's present-day restaurant district across the "Japanese Bridge" was a deserted muddy strip, accessible only by boat because the bridge was still shattered from a sapper raid during the war.

This was a time when the Post's offices housed not only computers, desks, and filing cabinets but also some of the paper's most important contributors and sources. Nate Thayer lived there, as did Michael, Kathleen, and Steve Heder. Foreign war correspondents from other eras often slung hammocks on the roof when they came to town, along with Montagnard leaders from North Carolina, who had come to meet FULRO fighters who had surrendered to the UN in Mondolkiri. Coming to work some mornings I'd see Khmer Rouge cadre squatting in the front yard of the office, waiting to talk to Nate.
While Cambodia-and the Phnom Penh Post-have both changed dramatically in the last decade, the reckless but gutsy vision that gave birth to the paper still remains. Let's hope that the Post remains among the vanguard of the country's press scene for another ten years.

Sara worked at the Post in 1992 as the paper's first managing editor. She is now a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch.

A non-standard view of the 'coup' Michael Vickery Phnom Penh Post

A non-standard view of the 'coup'

Phnom Penh Post

Friday, 29 August 1997 

Michael Vickery, associate professor of history at Universiti Sains Malaysia, condemns journalists' coverage of the recent fighting in Phnom Penh, and the Pol Pot trial.

BACK in 1993 it was said that journalists swarmed into town hoping to see blood, and left disappointed. Now they have seen some blood, and they certainly know what to do with it - grease their own personal Vietnam syndromes by kicking a Cambodian leadership which, like Vietnam, has refused to kowtow.

'Strong Man' Hun Sen, they say, moved to wipe out his opposition because he feared the results of next year's election. UNTAC's $2 billion was wasted, because it didn't buy compliance with what the West wanted in Cambodia. Those FUNCINPEC figures who chose Hun Sen over Ranariddh are 'quislings', although when they returned to Cambodia after 1991 they were hailed as the best elements of FUNCINPEC, as they no doubt are.

Totally ignored is the build-up to the events of July 5-6. Although journalists cannot always be historians and sociologists, they must pay some attention or their simple-minded recording of the 'facts' of the moment (always partial because choices must be made, and therefore inevitably partisan) leads them into gross misinterpretations, not to say disinformation.

No doubt for journalists the 1980s are such ancient history that they cannot be accused of bias for forgetting them. All Cambodian political figures, however, know, and do not forget, that the entire so-called peace process evolution was intended to get rid of the CPP, even at the risk of giving the Khmer Rouge a place in the government. The Paris Agreement and the 1993 election only came about because the People's Republic of Kampuchea/State of Cambodia (PRK/SOC) managed to defeat cruder schemes. And in spite of $2 billion and a whole gaggle of experts, the conduct of balloting and counting was sloppy enough to give the CPP reason to claim fraud.

It is, however, disinformation just to say that Ranariddh won but Hun Sen refused to move out. Representation was proportional and the coalition was mandated by Paris and UNTAC rules concerning the new Constitution. The modalities of forming the coalition, of course, were not parliamentary, but the position retained by the CPP was in accord with its votes, 38% against 45%. This is the minimum background

It was disinformation not to at least acknowledge in passing that weeks ago Ranariddh boasted that he would use new KR allies to further his own policies, especially and most dangerously, against Vietnam. It was disinformation not to note that ever since 1993 the royalists had been plotting to undermine Hun Sen as much as he, no doubt, had been plotting to stay ahead of them. The post-election secession was under Ranariddh's brother Chakrapong, just dumped by the CPP, and directly instigated by an important non-CPP higher-level personality. Hun Sen outplayed them and got credit for putting down the secession. All through 1994 various royalist schemes were hatched to undermine the CPP by bringing the KR into the government via a back door; and in July of that year a royalist coup was barely nipped in the bud.

The royalists, moreover, seem to have got what they asked for. As said in the CPP White Paper edited by a US legal expert, and as supported in Mike Fowler's presentation of the case (PPP 12-24 July 1997), the royalists had been trying to provoke such an incident, apparently overconfident of success, and Hun Sen had a good legal case against them, if only he had resorted to the courts rather than to violence. I wonder what courts he could have used. The Phnom Penh foreign community and the international press have already condemned the Cambodian courts as nothing but rubber stamps for the government, and they would have denounced any verdict in Hun Sen's favor as dishonest; and probably no international court would have taken the case.

Incidentally, the White Paper remarks were already widely held among serious diplomats during my last visit to Phnom Penh in December 1996.

Of course, we should all rejoice in the overthrow of Pol Pot by Nate Thayer and the emergence of the Khmer Rouge as born again liberal democrats. Nate, a volunteer PR man for the Khmer Rouge since, at least, his "Cambodia: Misperceptions and Peace" (Washington Quarterly, Spring 1991) has outdone himself with "Cambodia's Peace was Just a Day Away" in the Washington Post on August 17 [a version of which was published as "Secret talks lead to final purge" in the last PP Post]. Going beyond the usual PR, it is the most devious and dishonest piece of pseudo-journalism I have seen in a long time.

In order to present the scene as "a watershed moment" which would have meant peace for "this country's tortured history" (a cliché usual among hacks apologizing for the torturers) Nate talks about the KR abandoning "their war against Cambodia's government" and agreeing "to a formal 'surrender' ceremony in which their forces would join the Cambodian army".

That is straight Nate PR hype. In the finer print further on the KR themselves, at least, appear more honest.

In his Far Eastern Economic Review special (7 Aug) Nate was less devious with, "the Khmer Rouge finalized their alliance with Ranariddh's FUNCINPEC party on July 4", after negotiations between Ta Mok and FUNCINPEC general Nhek Bun Chhay in which the KR "agreed in principle to join in alliance [with FUNCINPEC]".

In the Washington Post, Nate put a different spin on the story, "the guerrillas finally had agreed to integrate their troops into the army [sic] and recognize the government". Nate deviously substituted 'the government' for 'FUNCINPEC' and its armed faction for 'the army'.

However, further on, Nate says that the KR were adamantly opposed to working with Hun Sen, whom they kept calling a puppet, and what they agreed to was not integrating forces and joining the government, but only that "the military units changed into government uniforms and pledged allegiance to the king, the government and the constitution, but were not forced to disperse from their territory". They would keep their own strategic base in Anlong Veng. Similarly it was agreed, not that the KR would join with the government, but "could join the National United Front coalition of anti-Hun Sen political opposition parties".

It was precisely what Hun Sen claimed, a FUNCINPEC-KR alliance against him, along with delivery of weapons and ammunition by FUNCINPEC to the KR.

It is thus egregious to say that only now, after Hun Sen's coup, "the forces loyal to Ranariddh have begun to form a military coalition with former Khmer Rouge fighters". That was what they had agreed to on July 4.

Not only would the Ranariddh-KR coalition not have brought peace to Cambodia, it could have embroiled Vietnam as well, for reports of KR radio broadcasts indicate that nothing of their traditional policy has changed. Hatred of Vietnam as the main enemy continues; and several weeks ago Ranariddh boasted of using defecting KR in his own anti-Vietnamese plans.

The Pol Pot trial scam shows again that the KR, as I wrote in 1991 (Indochina Issues) are adroit at winning the hearts and minds of the western press corps. As Thayer wrote, Tep Kunnal, a new KR front man, "is knowledgeable about US politics". The scam has some chance of success because for various reasons all opponents of Democratic Kampuchea have personalized its record with the name Pol Pot, ignoring that what happened in 1975-79 could not have been the work of one man, but was influenced by Cambodia's history and the structure of its society.

For Vietnam and the new PRK state in 1979, it was simply the easiest way to quickly assure the demonization of their enemies; for other Cambodians it was a way to avoid examination and self-criticism of their own society; for concerned western regimes it was a way to escape from their own responsibility in the destruction of Cambodia; and for academic specialists, at least in English-speaking milieus, concentration on personalities rather than social and economic structures was an ingrained habit in their work. Thus both among the Cambodian population and western observers 'Pol Potism' as an aberration of one evil man, or at most a small coterie, replaced 'Democratic Kampuchea', which should have been viewed as an unfortunate episode in Cambodia's integration into the modern world requiring close study and explanation in its totality.

Contrary to Thayer's hype, a number of persons who viewed the film, including both Cambodians and foreigners, and one leading Cambodia scholar, did not think Pol Pot appeared tearful or contrite, and at the end he was shown considerable deference by his 'accusers'. The audience was mostly women and children chanting slogans; key leaders - Ta Mok, Khieu Samphan, and Nuon Chea - were not present; Thayer could not (whether for linguistic or political reasons is not clear) ask Pol Pot any questions, and he simply reproduced what he was told by the directors and producers of the show concerning the alleged splits in the KR. Even then it is clear that not much is new. Peasantism and nationalism are still the KR themes, as they always were, and now they claim to be for liberal democracy and the free market.

So, one might ask, and this is indeed what they want us to ask, what is wrong with a KR-royalist alliance based on peasant welfare, nationalism and the free market?

For one thing, we have seen much of it before. Their policies were always in principle pro-peasant, yet they severely damaged peasant livelihood. Now, with a small population dependent on them, and vast wealth from timber sales over the years, it is easy to subsidize their way into popularity among those peasants. This gives no clue to what they would do in agriculture if they again controlled the country, or whether they have learned the requisite lessons from their previous experience. So far, their free market activity has meant stealing the national forests and selling them across the border, and if this is what Cambodia has to hope from them, the country might just as well stick with its current rulers. As for their commitment to liberal democracy, I think we may fairly disbelieve.

Moreover, in a poor country with an overwhelming majority of poor peasants in its population, a free market and liberal democracy work counter to peasant welfare, as may be seen from several examples in the real world.

As for nationalism, that means aggravated hatred of Vietnam, which was probably the single most destructive element of DK policies, and the motive for most of the officially sanctioned executions.

Those Phnom Penh diplomats who last December indicated that their worry for next year was an unholy alliance of Ranariddh, Rainsy and the Khmer Rouge which might do well in the election on a platform of anti-Vietnamese chauvinism were correct, and if Hun Sen has averted that we should all be pleased.

Nate Thayer, however, has put his finger on certain matters which deserve attention. Unlike those journalists who just want to see blood in Phnom Penh, and who time and again reserve their worst invective, not for the real KR, but for Hun Sen because once upon a time, before 1977, he was in the Khmer Rouge army, and unlike the western statesmen who throughout the 1980s publicly excoriated the KR while facilitating backhanders to them across the Thai border, Thayer believes in what he promotes. He sees that most of Cambodia's population, who are poor peasants, live in misery, ignored by most of their political and economic rulers. And Thayer thinks that what he sees as the new reformed KR may have some of the right answers.

At least, the Phnom Penh government and the interested foreign organizations should be giving serious attention to the social problems of large impoverished groups in the Cambodian population, including peasants, the urban mass, and the soldiers. In the events of July 5-6 there were disturbing reminders of April 1975. As reported by Robin McDowell of AP on 7 July, "Doctors at one hospital said patients were being discharged early to go home to protect their belongings. At another, struck by shelling over the weekend, doctors had abandoned their patients. By today, all the hospital's mattresses, furniture and equipment had been looted". Let us not forget that one of the reasons for the dispersal of hospitals by the victorious KR was because over half of Cambodia's doctors had fled the country before 17 April.

The looting which accompanied the coup was not in order to reward the troops. Quite obviously it could not be controlled, and civilians were involved as enthusiastically as soldiers. It showed a violent hatred by the poor, both soldiers and civilians, against the small privileged sector which has become indecently and pretentiously rich since 1991.

The Khmer Rouge won in 1975 because they had the support of those poor sectors of Cambodia, and Phnom Penh as a city, abstracting from the fate of particular individuals, deserved what happened in April 1975. The events of July 5-6, indicate that it might all happen again, whether or not Pol Pot has been put away, and whether or not the Khmer Rouge have reformed. Indeed, if a KR-royalist alliance should win an election, and put into effect the liberal democracy and free market they now praise, they might in the end find themselves victims of popular rage from out of the depths. After the anti-Vietnamese chauvinism which seems to be growing, what most worries me is that all factions, the KR, the royalists, the CPP, and the prominent dissident Pen Sovann, have been touting the same economic doctrines, which in the former Soviet Union have led, since 1991, to the realization of the old Cold War cliché about regimes making war on their own people.

Coup debate Letter to the Editor Michael Vickery on Nate Thayer

Coup debate 111

Friday, 23 September 1994 

Letter to the Editor

Phnom Penh Post

Unfortunately, Chris Horwood, in his entirely justifiable 'attack' on Phnom Penh Post (3/17, 26 Aug-8 Sept, p.9), did not say enough, and did not say it right, permitting Nate Thayer to respond disingenuously, further misleading PPP readers - not the first time this has happened. The question is not whether Chakrapong and Sin Song were guilty, or whether Thayer thinks they were innocent. What comes through in Thayer's report is that he is more sympathetic to them than to the government, even if they were guilty. The purpose behind Thayer's article was to discredit the CPP, and this was also the purpose of his interview with Sar Kheng, which he mischievously, brought up as a balance against his coverage of Chakrapong.

Questions? Thayer's first sentences expressed disbelief in the government line on the "alleged coup", 'reporting', without the slightest evidence, that it involved "at the least .. powerful elements of the security forces", an attribution which excludes both Chak-rapong and Sin Song. The first sentence in his second paragraph, that " more questions were raised than answered by the govern-ment's explanation", was also without evidence other than his own speculations, and a dishonest swipe at the government. And, the coup "has exposed a traumatic - and dangerous - split in the Cambodian people's Party", again without explanation to enlighten PPP readers. Need I go on ? Virtually every paragraph, if not every sentence, contains an editorial; and I would have no objection in principle, although I might still argue against Thayer's reasoning, if his piece had been presented as a PPP editorial, or Op-Ed, but not as front-page news.

As news it was impermissible to speculate that "the coup was organized at the highest level by dominant figures within the CPP", and sourcing to "some intelligence analysts and government officials" is without value, particularly after Thayer had named government officials with a variety of opinions. Equally slippery was to suggest it was because the CPP "are unused to dispute or dissent", as though they were the only Cambodian faction with that weakness.

One point neglected by Thayer is equally revealing of his purpose. Nowhere in his front page article, nor even in the page 8 article which directly touched on the subject, did he mention that Chakrapong and Sin Song have been sulking for months because they were dropped from the CPP lists of victorious election candidates in May 1993 and have been trying ever since to regain seats in the National Assembly.

What Thayer did say about the events of May-June last year is even more shady than his speculations about the coup this July, and the disingenuosness goes right to the 'highest level' of PPP editorship. Thayer says that the June 1993 secession led by Chakrapong and Sin Song, following their dismissal by the CPP, "had the covert backing of their Cambodian People's Party leaders - including Hun Sen, Chea Sim, and Sar Kheng". This is the umpteenth time Thayer has written this, without, so far as I have seen, presenting any evidence. The accusation in fact goes back to a confidential analysis by Stephen Heder under his Untac cover, and it had to be confidential because it was so lacking in substance. At the time I prepared a counter analysis, distributed on June 24-25 1993 to PPP and to other journalists, Embassies and Untac offices.

Thayer has ignored the counter argument, and his employers allow him to get away with it, thereby misleading readers like Horwood, who know no better than to repeat with Thayer that the "secession movement.. played a vital role in forcing Funcinpec to accept a greater involvement in government of the defeated CPP".

On this subject Thayer, supported by Michael Hayes, has been exercising self-censorship every time he puts pen to paper.

- Michael Vickery, Penang.

Motley crew moves out on jungle mission By Nate Thayer

Motley crew moves out on jungle mission

Phnom Penh Post

(The following is four separate stories on The march 1994 hunt for the Kouprey in one issue of the Phnom Penh Post: The analysis; the factual overview; the scientific report; and the editorial)

Friday, 22 April 1994

By Nate Thayer

Nate Thayer documents the human side of The Great Kouprey Chase

When the hunter in possession of the cow skull was asked to point out on the map where he had found it, his reply should have given us an idea of what we were getting ourselves into. " I don't know where on the map," he said cheerfully," but we call it 'the place of the dead foreigner'."

And when local villagers pointed us in the direction of a Khmer Rouge controlled town to interview the village chief, we probably should have suspected something when our man emerged from his hut in full Khmer Rouge uniform save the American bomber pilot's leather jacket, speaking a language entirely unknown to our interpreter.

This trip was the culmination of six previous field surveys since 1991 in which dozens of villagers and hunters were interviewed and other data collected on the beast's possible whereabouts. These early exploratory trips pinpointed the Kouprey as living pretty much in the middle of some of the most forbidding terrain anywhere, never under any government control and inhabited for decades by a variety of guerrilla groups fighting a series of governments. This was an area, it seemed, where beast and man went mainly to hide. And in this lost province with no road, water or scheduled air access to the rest of Cambodia, with a population of 60,000, of which only two percent are ethnic Khmer. The remainder are a collection of 10 distinct cultures.

It became increasingly clear that the reason why no one had sighted The Cow in three decades was because no one was fool enough to launch an expedition to go where the beast had sought refuge in. But we decided to try anyway.

After compiling a team of expert jungle trackers, scientists, security troops, elephant mahouts, and one of the most motley and ridiculous looking groups of armed journalists in recent memory, we marched cluelessly into Khmer Rouge controlled jungles along the old Ho Chi Minh trail.

While they were very friendly, the population of the last village before we disappeared for eleven days in the jungle did not, logically, believe for one moment that we were who we claimed to be or that we were doing what we claimed to be doing. They had seen this movie before. Armed foreigners trekking through their village was a concept they were familiar with. Pieces of downed American warplanes piled in the village, which they had gathered from their jungle to salvage as scrap, testified to this.

Of our 26-man team, 18 (12 soldiers and six elephant drivers) had lived their entire lives in Mondolkiri province. Also, none had been anywhere near where we were going.

Our four trackers were former guerrilla soldiers of FULRO, the anti-communist "lost army" that operated out of these jungles for 17 years until late 1992, when they were discovered by the United Nations and received political asylum in the US. They were more than happy to leave factory jobs in North Carolina for a couple weeks to trek through their old haunts. Each had seen the cow in recent years and said it tasted really good.

The journalists thought the trip was a great idea until we actually started. It became clear to most, after the first day when we walked 12 hours and 30 km with no water, that this was a really stupid idea. There were several early casualties from heat prostration and other manifestations of badly out of shape bodies addled by long histories of drug and alcohol abuse. Others moaned about the lack of helicopter support. Others failed to see the humor in sleeping at recently abandoned Khmer Rouge basecamps.

Our group communicated with each other in Khmer, Lao, Thai, English, French, Rade, and M'nong. We ate lizards and American military rations bought in Phnom Penh.

But despite the surface madness of it all, the focus remained on the extraordinary array of wildlife and beauty of the region.

We saw scores of wild animals, none of which seemed remotely concerned by our presence, such as rare Banteng and Gaur. Lizards could be picked up by hand mildly puzzled by our interest in them. Fresh tiger tracks were seen regularly along our path. Rains would bring out symphonies of strange night insects and thousands of frogs, whose din would require shouting for us humans to communicate with each other. Elephant bones missing the tusks spoke of poachers.

When eventually one of our teams confronted an armed Khmer Rouge fighter, who shared the mountain where we saw what appeared to be Kouprey tracks, the guerrilla soldier stared at us with apparent shock. The poor man was very confused. He retreated.

We regrouped at a small stream where our forward teams had set up a camp. After trying, and failing, to come up with a plausible idea of how to explain to the probably now terribly nonplussed guerrilla unit that we were just looking for a cow, we decided not to push it. We are not sure if any Kouprey saw us. But if one did, its extremely likely that its first thought was that our entire team would actually be better off locked up in a zoo-and hopefully as far away as possible from the endangered cow section.

Jungle trek evidence resurrects the Kouprey

By Michael Hayes

Friday, 22 April 1994

THE remote northeastern jungles of Cambodia's Mondolkiri province is home to one of the largest populations of Asia's rarest and most threatened wildlife, a two-week 150 km jungle field survey completed this month has determined.

The Cambodian Kouprey Research Project, a non-profit all-volunteer organization launched to document the existence of one of the world's rarest animals, has concluded that the Kouprey still lives in the isolated forests of the country's northeast.

There has been no documented sighting since 1967 of the bovine, declared Cambodia's national animal by His Majesty King Norodom Sihanouk in 1963. It was only documented as a species in 1935, and has been the subject of a series of international efforts to save it from extinction in recent decades.

The field study, completed in early April, culminated more than a year of efforts with the full support of the Royal Government and Mondolkiri provincial authorities.

First Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh has taken a keen interest in the project and loaned his personal plane to ferry equipment and expedition team members from Phnom Penh to Sen Monoram, Mondolkiri's provincial capital. Corporate support was also received in the form of a grant from the British company Enterprise Oil.

While no sighting of the rare forest ox was achieved, other data collected suggested that less than a dozen still exist in a small 25 square kilometer region of Mondolkiri.

The study also concluded that a large number of other endangered animals also exist in the area. These include one of the largest populations of Asian elephants and Sumatran tigers in Asia, as well as a number of other birds, bovines, and reptiles.

The area surveyed by the expedition is devoid of any permanent human settlements, although widespread evidence was found indicating that hunters pass through the region regularly and are posing a major threat to the survival of the wildlife present. Bones of poached elephants, wild cattle, forest pigs and other species were identified by the team.

The Cambodian Kouprey Research Project is the brainchild of American journalist Nate Thayer. Plans are underway for a second expedition to the region in May.

 

Vet: Ten head of Kouprey in Mondolkiri

Friday, 22 April 1994  

Leading vetenarian Maurizio Dioli analyses the findings of the expedition.

From March 27 to April 7, l994 the Cambodian Kouprey Research Project undertook an expedition in Mondolkiri Province in an attempt to ascertain whether or not Cambodia's national animal, the Kouprey (Bos Sauveli) existed there. Based on an analysis of the trip's findings, the major conclusion of the trip is that it is almost certain that a very small population of Kouprey (less than 10 head) are still surviving in the area surveyed.

What follows is a brief report on the trip, the methodology undertaken and a summary of the trip's findings. Because of the uniqueness of the Kouprey and the fact that divulging the precise location of rare endangered species almost always results for a number of reasons in an increased mortality of that species, the exact location of the sighting area is not being released beyond that fact that it was in a remote corner of Mondolkiri Province.

Methodology 

Because of the extreme rarity of the Kouprey it was decided that a classic systematic survey of areas in which Kouprey have been known to exist was not appropriate. Rather, an approach focusing on first hand, reliable sightings during 1992-93 were collected from hunters, poachers and Khmer Rouge guerillas. Based on these sightings it was possible to pinpoint a particular area of a few square kilometers where the probability of encountering the Kouprey was high.

An aerial survey of the area in question was not considered since the Kouprey, like many other wild bovid, retreats to thick patches of forest during the day (especially during the dry season) and therefore is not visible from the air.

Using a field survey method, the team hired six elephants to transport equipment and provisions to set up a base camp from which foot patrols were undertaken to survey the surrounding region. The survey routes were chosen to allow close inspection of wildlife meeting points: salt licks and watering holes. Priority was also given to preferred grazing areas of wild cattle: open areas and open dipterocarps forest where old grasses have been burnt and palatable, freshly sprouted grasses were common. Dry open areas with burned grass and dry dipterocarp forest were not surveyed accurately. Overall, during a nine day survey period, more that 150 kms were covered by foot.

The Geography

The survey area consisted of gently undulating hills with a general elevation of 200-300 meters above sea level. Vegetation was largely open deciduous dipterocarp forest, with thicker forest along river beds or in the hills. Wide open areas of grassland were also present. Salt licks, termite hills and mud holes were a common feature. Generally it was determined that water was readilly available at numerous waterholes and in scattered pools in dry river beds.

All of the survey area indicated signs of periodic burning. It is interesting to note that it seems that the majority of burning was caused by "cold fires", i.e. fires started as soon as there is enough material to catch fire at the beginning of the dry season. The area was devoid of any permanent human settlements and several days walk from the nearest village but signs of hunters and Khmer Rouge patrols were encountered repeatedly.

Results

While the objective of sighting and photographing a Kouprey was not achieved, the survey succeeded in individuating an area inhabited by a relatively large number of three different species of wild cattle.

The analysis of numerous fresh footprints, grazed grasses and excrement indicate unequivically that the survey area is populated by two species of wild cattle: a large size bovine, the Gaur; and a medium size bovine, the Banteng (both animals were actually sighted). Water buffalos were not
present in the area and sightings have never been recorded by trackers familiar with the region.

The interesting and exciting discovery was a series of footprints that by their shape and dimensions could not be attributed to either the Gaur or the Banteng. These footprints fit the description of Kouprey tracks described by Wharton after his survey in 1957.

They were as wide as they were long, rounded and their dimensions ranged from 90x90 mm to 110x110 mm.

Estimates of herd population sizes of the three species of wild bovids in the survey area are difficult to determine. After an overall analysis of footprints seen and including sightings made by the team's guides over a previous ten-year period, it is estimated that there are approximately 40-50 Banteng, 10-15 Gaur and six-eight Kouprey living in the area.

Several skeletons of wild cattle were found during the survey. In most cases the removal from the skull of the frontal bones supporting the horns and clear signs of knife markings on many other bones strongly suggest poaching as a cause of death.

Proof of the existence of numerous other animals was also achieved with a complete list provided below.

Conclusion

1. As stated initially, it is almost certain that a very small population of Kouprey (less than 10) is still surviving in the area surveyed.
2. All of the wild bovid are almost exclusively nocturnal in their feeding habits.
3. Large numbers of dried footprints indicate that many wild cattle live in the area during the wet season and are not migrating to other areas.
4. Hunting for trophies and meat with automatic weapons is confirmed and is severely threatening the existence of the remaining populations of wild bovid.
5. Burning still plays a major role in maintaining open forest areas and in providing wild cattle (grazers) with an important source of food during the dry season.

Maurizio Dioli is a veternarian by training and spent ten years in East Africa which included extensive field work tracking and identifying wildlife in the region.

Editorial

Phnom Penh Post

By Publisher Michael Hayes

Friday, 22 April 1994

T HE most ambitious effort in more than four decades to document the existence of Cambodia's national animal, the Kouprey, has determined, with a high degree of certainty, that the world's rarest bovine does in fact exist in small numbers in remote corners of Mondolkiri province.

More importantly, the Thayer Expedition has documented categorically the existence of other species in signifacent numbers including the gaur, banteng, barking deer, wild pig, Asian wild dog, red headed vulture, whooly-necked stork, red junglefowl and peacock, all of which are rapidly approaching "endangered species" status throughout Asia.

While the Kouprey was not actually sighted by the Thayer expedition, evidence collected from animal tracks and recent sightings indicates that the Kouprey is alive and extremely endangered with perhaps as few as six to 10 animals surviving precariously in virtually uninhabited jungle areas in one of the Kingdom's most isolated districts.

Based on this new information, the Royal Government has a unique opportunity to act quickly and definitively to safeguard an important national symbol, a step that would not only guarantee the survival of the Kouprey but which in the long run would be of immense benefit to the nation.

His Majesty The King, the Royal Government, the recalcitrant Khmer Rouge and all friends of Cambodia must act now to save the Kouprey. To wait even one minute longer would be sheer folly.

To the point, the government needs to declare the northeast corner of Mondolkiri Province as a national reserve or wildlife park and take whatever measures necessary to protect the animals which still exist there.

The animals in Mondolkiri are rapidly vanishing from their shrinking enclaves. However, Cambodia, unlike many other nations in this part of Asia, still retains significant populations of rare species which stand head and shoulders above what exists elsewhere regionally.

The most saleable argument, among many, for safeguarding this wildlife is the long-term potential for engendering revenues as a result of the worldwide interest in wildlife tourism, of which the Kingdom is still well-placed to take advantage. In a nutshell, people all over the world are willing to spend thousands of dollars to see rare wild animals in their native habitat.

The opportunity for a bold expression of visionary leadership is waiting to be grasped. The Khmer people will only reap the benefits of such action for centuries to come.

What better reason is there to grab (gently) the cow by the horns? And, more to the point, which Khmer will go down in history as the individual who had the foresight to protect for eternity one of the Kingdom's most treasured national symbols?

"Pol Pot, I Presume." Nate Thayer, Wall Street Journal

"Pol Pot, I Presume."  

Nate Thayer, Wall Street Journal

August 1, 1997

Nate Thayer, a reporter for the Far Eastern Economic Review, garnered
world-wide attention after becoming the first Western correspondent in almost
20 years to see former Cambodian dictator Pol Pot. What follows is his own
account, condensed from the Aug. 7 issue of the magazine, which, like The Wall
Street Journal, is owned by Dow Jones & Co.

After a series of furtive rendezvous, using coded messages over mobile phones,
I had slipped into one of the most impenetrable, malaria-ridden and land
mine-strewn jungles of the world: Khmer Rouge-controlled northern Cambodia. I
was hoping to interview Pol Pot, one of the century's most notorious and
elusive mass murderers.

As I entered the Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng on July 25, hundreds of
voices chanted in unison: "Long live! Long live! Long live the new strategy!" The clenched fists of the crowd pumped toward the sky, as a smiling, middle-aged Khmer Rouge cadre led me toward an open-air meeting hall. Crackling loudspeakers, powered by a car battery lying on the earthen floor, began to spew denunciations of the longtime Khmer Rouge leader. "Crush! Crush! Crush! Pol Pot and his clique!" shouted the crowd on cue as we approached, their fists striking down toward the ground.

Final Defeat

A shocking number of the participants stood on crude wooden stumps, sat in home-made wheelchairs, or were missing eyes--sacrifices to the revolutionary cause of Pol Pot. Others, their arms blown off by landmines, were unable  join the frequent clapping as speaker after speaker denounced the man once venerated as "Brother Number One."

The carefully orchestrated performance evoked grainy film clips of China's Cultural Revolution. But the message was starkly different. "Long live the emergence of the democracy movement!" shouted individuals in the crowd. A chorus would repeat the slogan, followed by prolonged applause from the roughly 500 participants. Each speaker, seemingly chosen to represent a sector of society--a farmer, an intellectual, a soldier, a woman--got up to denounce and humiliate Pol Pot "and his clique."

Pol Pot sat alone, near three manacled loyalists, and often seemed close to tears as the vitriol was unleashed. In contrast, the three younger army commanders on trial alongside him had menacing expressions, staring coldly into the eyes of the speakers.

Pol Pot, who ruled Cambodia for more than three years and ruled the Khmer Rouge for more than three decades, was denounced and imprisoned by his own movement. Not for the 1975-78 Cambodian genocide, but for turning on his own comrades in an attempted purge in June.

The Khmer Rouge of Anlong Veng have good reason to distance themselves from Pol Pot: They want to attract international support for their struggle to unseat Cambodian Premier Hun Sen. That's why they allowed a foreign reporter to witness the show trial, the first time a journalist has entered Anlong Veng and left alive. Still the cadres clearly saw Pol Pot's ouster as a tragedy, and continued to treat the 72-year-old former leader with gentle respect.

The fall of Pol Pot underlines the view that the original Khmer Rouge movement which ruled Cambodia in the 1970s essentially no longer exists. But that doesn't mean that the Khmer Rouge have become irrelevant in Cambodia. The aggressive courting of remaining Khmer Rouge factions by Cambodia's rival premiers, Hun Sen and Prince Norodom Ranariddh, was central to the July 5-6 coup in Phnom Penh. In fact, the Khmer Rouge had finalized their alliance with Ranariddh's Funcinpec Party on July 4. Worried that the balance of power would be tipped in his rival's favor, Hun Sen ousted Ranariddh the next day.

Virtually the entire Khmer Rouge leadership favored a deal with Funcinpec, but Pol Pot was opposed, said Gen. Im Nguon, who is now the Khmer Rouge's army chief of staff. "Domestically and internationally, Pol Pot has his own personal problems to take care of," he said, referring to Pol Pot's blood-soaked reputation. "He has no way out. That's why he keeps dragging this movement toward the darkness."

The Khmer Rouge had splintered dramatically since July 1996, when forces in western Cambodia, representing half the movement, broke with Pol Pot's northern forces headquartered in Anlong Veng. The western split was headed by Ieng Sary, Pol Pot's brother-in-law and longtime comrade-in-arms. Im Nguon said the split was aimed against Pol Pot himself, but the 72-year-old leader blamed his top leaders--Ta Mok, Nuon Chea and Son Sen--for failing to heal the rift.

"So Pol Pot asked Mao--over there," Im Nguon explained, pointing at a young Khmer Rouge cadre, "to shoot Ta Mok and burn him--last October--to leave no evidence."

The grim-faced young cadre, who looked capable of such a deed, nodded in agreement with his commander. But he didn't carry out Pol Pot's order. Ta Mok, who is known to the outside world as "the butcher," is immensely popular with the troops and civilians under his control. So much so, Im Nguon said, that Pol Pot saw him as a threat. "They really like him a lot because he is so helpful to them in terms of standard of living. He built roads, bridges, dams within this area," Im Nguon said.

Pol Pot turned to two senior military field commanders, Gen. Sarouen and Gen. San, attempting to consolidate power against Ta Mok. On Feb. 25 he had them declared the new military and political leaders, replacing Ta Mok, Im Nguon said. About the same time, according to both Cambodian government sources and diplomats, secret negotiations accelerated between envoys of Prince Ranariddh and elements of the Khmer Rouge in Anlong Veng. Most of these efforts were conducted by Ta Mok loyalists--often behind Pol Pot's back--and the top royalist military commander, Gen. Nyek Bun Chhay. By May, the faction agreed in principle to join in alliance.

Increasingly isolated, on June 9 Pol Pot launched a desperate attempt to scuttle the peace deal by purging Ta Mok and other top leaders. That night, longtime defense minister Son Sen and 14 of his relatives, including a five-year-old child, were shot dead by Gen. Sarouen's men, according to both Khmer Rouge and intelligence sources. The killings sparked several days of turmoil, with commanders fleeing into the jungle in disarray. But they rallied
behind Ta Mok and trapped Pol Pot and his band of about 300 remaining supporters on June 15, Im Nguon said. Four days later, they had surrendered.

With Pol Pot neutralized, the remaining Khmer Rouge leadership moved rapidly to finalize a secret political and military alliance with Funcinpec on July 4. Hun Sen, learning about Funcinpec's new alliance through his agents, launched his deadly coup the next morning.

Hun Sen has claimed the tribunal I witnessed was stage-managed by Pol Pot himself. Im Nguon paints a very different picture, but he did say that Pol Pot had "consented" to having a foreign reporter witness the mass meeting, as a way of acknowledging his guilt for moving against his comrades. "Pol Pot did himself confess to me clearly, after his arrest," Im Nguon said. "When I met him the first time, he embraced me and burst into tears. . . . He told me: 'I am wrong, comrade; all the mistakes were made by me, alone,' and then he cried."

"Pol Pot told me that this is the end of his life, he has nothing left, but he begged me to allow him to live," Im Nguon continued. "I also want to make clear that if Pol Pot was vested with any credibility or respect, he would not have shown up and let you see him like you just did today."

Life Imprisonment

As the "People's Tribunal of Anlong Veng" continued into its second hour, a loudspeaker roared into the nearby forest: "These are the criminal acts--the betrayal by Pol Pot and his clique--against the people, armed forces, and our cadre. In conclusion, we all decide to condemn and sentence this clique to life imprisonment."

Pol Pot, unable to walk unassisted, was helped up by a guard in Chinese-style military fatigues. Some people respectfully bowed, as if to royalty, as Pol Pot walked 25 yards to a waiting vehicle. The cadres suggested that I ask Pol Pot questions while he was led away, but balked at translating when told the questions I wanted to pose. Pol Pot, perhaps never to be seen alive again, was helped into a Toyota Landcruiser with tinted windows--captured booty from United Nations peacekeeping soldiers prior to the 1993 elections. Seconds after the trial ended, a torrential rain began.

Khmer Rouge Might Turn in Pol Pot --Nate Thayer

 (Authors note: This was the release of the Story in the Far Eastern Economic Review the day before Pol Pot committed Suicide. He listened to the report on VOA Khmer language service at 8:00pm April 15, 1998. After ingesting poison, he was declared dead at 10:15PM that night. Khmer Rouge leaders contacted me 5 minutes later desperate for answers on how to handle the death of the last card in the deck they had to negotiate their survival (note time difference: 2:19pm EST is translated to 3:19am Cambodia time the following day)

Khmer Rouge Might Turn in Pol Pot
Tuesday, April 14, 1998; 2:19 p.m. EDT

HONG KONG (AP) -- Cambodia's Khmer Rouge officials have told a Hong
Kong-based magazine they want to hand their former leader Pol Pot over
to an international tribunal.

Meanwhile, Cambodia's army says it has trapped remaining Khmer Rouge
forces in the mountains near the Thai border, and is poised to finish
them off.

The Far Eastern Economic Review reported in its latest issue that the
Khmer Rouge rebels have asked Review correspondent Nate Thayer for
advice on how to deliver the notorious Pol Pot to the authorities.

Gen. Khem Nuon reportedly made the request Saturday during an interview
with Thayer at the Thai-Cambodian border.

Khmer Rouge forces have held Pol Pot, 73, under house arrest since June,
when they ousted him in a bloody internal power struggle.

Thayer interviewed Pol Pot last year after attending a communist-style
``People's Tribunal'' where the rebels denounced the former leader.

Gen. Nuon reportedly said the Khmer Rouge was unable to contact the
United Sates or other countries, and asked Thayer to put them in contact
with the ``right people.''

Thayer suggested they contact the International Committee of the Red
Cross, the report said.

Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge captured the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh
in 1975 and ruled Cambodia until 1979, presiding over the deaths of an
estimated 2 million people. A Vietnamese invasion in 1979 forced the
Khmer Rouge to retreat back to the jungle.

There have been calls for Pol Pot to be brought before the International
Court of Justice in the Hague to stand trial for war crimes and crimes
against humanity.

The rebels hope handing Pol Pot to the authorities will bring food,
medicine and other international support for the beleaguered Khmer
Rouge.

According to Cambodian military sources, the army is currently hammering
the Khmer Rouge guerillas near their former mountain stronghold along
the Thai border.

Reports indicate Khmer Rouge head Ta Mok and an undetermined number of
hard-line guerillas are holed up in the jungle peaks and attempting a
last desperate stand.

Most of the government forces are made up of Khmer Rouge defectors, who
oppose their former comrades' refusal to strike a peace deal with Phnom
Penh.

Some 5,000 defectors are waiting out the fighting 25 miles south of the
battle zone. The government said they will send them and their families
home when it is safe.

Hell on the Ho Chi Minh Trail: SOF Finds Elephants, Tigers and Khmer Rouge--but No Cow Nate Thayer

Hell on the Ho Chi Minh Trail: SOF Finds Elephants, Tigers and Khmer Rouge--but No Cow

Soldier of Fortune magazine

By Robert K. Brown & Robert MacKenzie

August 1994

Photos by Tim Page

Lurch, jolt, lurch, jolt. Riding elephants for 12 hours a day at three klicks an hour was proving to be a mind-and but numbing experience as we moved through the desolate Cambodian Savanna-type jungle. Ant-covered bamboo slapped our faces in rhythm to the lurching gait of the elephants. Thank God and Gargoyle sunglasses we still had our eyes.

It was becoming another pointless, painful misadventure. There had been a point to it all, but at this juncture, after hours on the back of a "lurch, jolt" elephant, we found the purpose growing less and less noble.

Like most adventures it initially sounded more intriguing and glamorous than it was turning out to be--like jumping from a perfectly good airplane, where, while shuffling to the door, the bile trying to claw its way up your throat, you ask yourself once again, " Why am I doing this?"

It all started a few months ago when Nate Thayer, a young journalist whose career SOF helped launch, called the office.

"Brown, how ya doin'? How'd you like to go on a scientific expedition...to locate a species of cow that was thought to be extinct for 50 years?"

Well, we always thought cows were for eating, or if wild, e.g. Cape buffalo, for shooting and then eating. And a scientific expedition? Ho, hum. Dullsville. Maybe we are getting along in years, but the notion had as much appeal as Kissing Hillary Rodham on the ear.

The ever-resourceful Thayer has been pushing the envelope for years: He's had malaria 16 times; keeps a motorbike hidden on the Thai-Cambo border and periodically drives unannounced into Khmer Rouge country. He has also managed to get blown up when his truck hit a land mine, killing 10 of the other 12 passengers; and when he positioned himself to the right-rear of a recoilless rifle shooting Burmese from a Karen bunker, instead of a Pulitzer-prize winning photo he got a snap of the bunker ceiling and lost 95% hearing in one ear...you, know, that sort of envelope-pushing. Thayer must have sensed we were less than enthusiastic. So he started upping the ante.

"Brown, we'll chopper into the base camp; use elephants to recon."

On an interest level of one to 10, that's about a two.

"We're going into KR country in eastern Cambodia, near the Vietnamese border, along the Ho Chi Minh trail."

Interest level now at five.

“We’ll be carrying AKs and whatever else is necessary.”

Interest level six.

“Our tracker/scouts will be former FULRO (United Front for the Struggle of Oppressed races) Montagnards who fought the NVA for 17 years after Saigon fell,” he continued.

“If we find that extinct cow, we will all be famous.”

Thayer sensed Brown wavering.

“And there are marauding tigers in the AO. We’ll need someone to deal with that threat. An AK, even on full auto, won’t do the job quick enough. We need a big caliber gun and someone who knows how to use it.”

Bingo! Level 10.5 Brown bit and Thayer sank the hook, but, now, as our elephantine convoy continued to lurch and jolt through the bamboo like a sailor on leave, we both wished he had spit it out.

PHOTO LEFT: Nate Thayer, former SOF author and presently Cambodian correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, organized ‘scientific’ expedition to locate species of bovine, the Kouprey, thought extinct for 50 years. Thayer, AKA Col Kurtz, was so disorganized he made RKB look like role model for German General Staff

PHOTO LEFT: One of Thayer’s more bizarre concepts was to place rubber masks, modeled here by ‘Col, Kurtz’ himself, with lights behind them on trees facing away from camp to frighten tigers. Cooler heads determined it was unnecessary to implement this concept.

PHOTO TOP: Maj. Robert Mackenzie, ten-year veteran of Rhodesian SAS, and Robert K. Brown logged more ‘elephant time’ than anyone could possibly want. Only access was by foot and elephant; Promised helicopters never materialized. MacKenzie carries Chinese Type 56-1 AK and Brown, whose mission was to summarily terminate any marauding tigers, is armed with Ruger .375 H&H Magnum with 1.5x-6x Bausch and Lomb scope

After losing several thousand dollars’ worth of camera gear to thieves who work at the pricey Sukhothai Hotel in Bangkok, we arrived in Phnom Penh to be greeted by Tim Page, a crazy Brit film shooter who made his bones big time as a combat photographer in the ‘Nam, and Thayer, whom we quickly labeled “Colonel Kurtz.” Thayer bamboozled Brown’s Ruger .375 H&H through customs, prattling about being a friend of the King; a close friend of the Prime Minister. Whatever works.

PHOTO ABOVE: Thayer was/is an operator par excellence. Who else could lay on the Cambodian equivalent of Air Force One to transport our motley crew from Phnom Penh to jump-off point at Sen Monorom, dreadful capital of Mondolkiri province of eastern Cambodia. This particular aircraft serves as personal transport for King Sihanouk, who had blessed expedition. Dude with parasol—just what you need for Khmer Rouge territory—is Mike Hayes, editor of the Phnom Penh Post

PHOTO ABOVE: Team plots next elephant recon at insect-farm base-camp located on Ho Chi Minh trail about 20 klicks from Vietnamese border. Leader of Montagnard scout/tracker team, in yellow T-shirt, fought NVA for 17 years after Saigon surrendered.

 

We headquartered on the second floor of an old mildewy French villa that serves as an office for the English-language daily, the Phnom Penh Post.

As we dumped our gear on the floor, Thayer popped beers and said, “Welcome to the freest country in the world!”

Our puzzled glances prompted him to open a large cabinet containing an old French MAT-49 sub gun, a selective-fire Chinese M-14, several AKs, an M-79 grenade launcher and cases of ammo. Obviously no 4473s required here.

As if too reinforce his assertion, Thayer rolled and lit up a joint, continuing, “Anything you want. You can get a 50-kilo bale of pot at the market; there is an opium den down the street and you can pick up a case of AIDS without much difficulty.” Hmmm.

One might define freedom that way: all in the light of what you are smoking. The arsenal was intriguing, but we passed on the offer of dope and communicable disease.

Thayer’s prior planning primarily consisted of drinking, smoking, and banging the local bimbos. Even though Tim Page had assumed S-4 responsibility and acquired a fair amount of equipment, there would be considerable delay. Food, weapons, communications and transport were among ‘minor details’ not resolved for our 25-man foray into the KR-controlled, tiger-infested jungle.

PHOTO ABOVE: Brown examines wreckage of U.S. aircraft shot down over Ho Chi Minh trail. U.S. POW/MIA search teams had already visited crash site. Photo; Robert MacKenzie

PHOTO ABOVE: MacKenzie administers first aid to results of Brown’s folly—failure to apply moleskin when hotspots started to develop from new boots. Lesson learned.

Over the next days, we cleaned weapons and scrounged equipment in Phnom Penh markets, and met other expedition members. An experienced Italian veterinarian and author of the definitive book on camels, Maurizio “Mo” Dioli was the scientific member. Mo, Phnom Penh Post publisher Mike Hayes, his reporter Ker Munthit, and a Thai TV cameraman Praparn were ready to go. We awaited the four-man team of FULRO Montagnards with American escort from stateside.

We marked time visiting the battle-zone at Pailin (watch for a sit-rep next issue) and catching some rays. As we tanned, the plan evolved to final form. Alternative transportation had to be organized: The three Cambodian choppers Thayer promised were not to be—the Cambodian army only has three choppers. But continued shopping/scrounging had us at operational status when the Montagnards arrived.

Thayer had convinced Cambodia’s Prime Minister of the expedition’s merit, so we had a government airplane. The first staging point was at Sen Monorom in Mondolkiri province, where the governor organized a truck for the next leg and provided a 12-man detachment of Cambodian paramilitary police because of Khmer Rouge in the area. The governor issued the Montagnards AK-47s to increase expedition firepower. The SOF team members brought their own.

The next morning our party and supplies boarded a clapped-out truck and headed north on a dirt road. Most Cambodian roads boast only dirt and potholes; this road ran more to potholes and less to dirt. The plan was to drive until we ran out of road, to be met by elephants arranged by the provincial governor.

But, no elephants. By the time some showed up, we had lost another day.

We hung out at the trail head in hammocks, impressing local villagers. They were so impressed the headman invited us for rice wine (as Third-World villages go, it could have been worse) and a pitch for American aid, lest his village vanish. The chief had three wives and the village was knee-deep in children and pregnant children; vanishing didn’t seem imminent.

At daybreak we continued north. All walked except the overweight American who escorted the Montagnards. By mid-afternoon, it approached 100 degrees. We became separated into two groups, since elephants walk more slowly than men. The command element, the English speaking Montagnard and Thayer, were two hours behind. We were told to expect a river a couple hours out. By 1400 there was still no river, so we stopped and waited for “the leaders.” When they appeared at 1600, the priority was water, so we moved west towards the nearest watercourse.

PHOTO ABOVE: Members of Montagnard team pose with MacKenzie and RKB prior to patrol. Cambodian (center) in olive drab is member of 12-man security unit provided by provincial governor

BELOW PHOTO: Another member of the Cambodian security team, less than thrilled with his assignment. These troops, who had fought for the communist Cambodian/Vietnamese-supported government, did not inspire confidence. They were responsible for the only round fired-an AD which resulted in their giggling a great deal.  ’Nuff said.

An hour of bush bashing brought us to the blue line on their map, and huge pools of water. Soon elephants were in one pool, Cambodian soldiers in another and the expedition was drawing water from a third. A Third-World car wash was underway in the elephant pool with much splashing and frolicking as the mahouts scrubbed their charges.

We reached the proposed base site the next day and pitched camp. The following day we split into two groups to search for the cow. Both groups saw herds of Banteng, another wild ox with which the legendary Kouprey often cohabits. One group also saw packs of wild dogs and wild boar, but no cow yet. The next morning, as we were getting ready to leave our overnight site, Thayer’s walkie-talkie crackled with the words we didn’t want to hear—a sentry had spotted a Khmer Rouge soldier, who had also spotted him. The sentry returned to camp firmly convinced the KR was not alone and that this did not bode well for our mission.

 Despite Thayer’s assurance from the KR representative that the area commander was aware of and approved our mission, there was no certainty all local Khmer Rouge commanders had the word. On return we had a hurried conference to discuss options.

We could continue stumbling through the bush looking for the Kouprey; we could try to talk to the KR and assess the situation we could bugger out. The SOF mission opted for the second choice since the KR surely knew we were there and showed no hostile intent. Prevailing sentiment, however, was that no one wanted to get killed looking for a cow, so everyone upped sticked and returned to base camp: The KRs reputation for ferocity and unpredictability was enough to tip the scales in favor of flight.

 

PHOTO: Robert MacKenzie: Elephants are primary transport in isolated areas of eastern Cambodia. Tenderly cared for by their mahouts, elephants are their only major possession, only means of livelihood, and are passed from father to son. Our elephants ranged in age from 25 to 50, their mahouts from 18 to 70.

Elephants came equipped with box of wood slats and bamboo about three feet square and 18 inches deep. Carved in the shape of elephants back, box sits on thick cushion of fibrous bark, secured by bamboo cables, one of which runs around the tail, with another around the chest; a plaited rope of bark and bamboo goes around the neck. Cargo capacity is about 500 pounds, including the mahout. Elephants walk all day, foraging as they go, but need 12 hours rest between marches to relax and forage. “Speed” on trail is about 3 klicks an hour, during which time they eat everything from grass to tree roots.

At night elephants were loosed to forage, encumbered by a 13-foot chain heavy enough to gouge a furrow in the ground, making it easy to track them if the wandered off.

Boarding the ponderous critters is accomplished in one of two ways, depending on agility of boarders: if nimble, like Mackenzie, the mahout would have elephant extend front foot and passenger would step on and climb up. If old and decrepit, like Brown, elephant would belly down in the dirt—front feet forward and read feet backward—at which point passenger could be shoved into box by available bystanders.

Things were not well back at camp. Suffering from the heat, Page had convinced himself he was in serious danger of dying and needed a helicopter casevac. News of KR in the area corroborated his premonition and strengthened his demand to go home. The American Montagnard advisor was also down with excess heat and poundage—another candidate for casevac. With no radios to call the non—existent helicopter, we sent them out by elephant the next day. The TV shooter—with several hours of footage already, and the Post reporter with a deadline, also returned with three of the elephants and four of the Cambodian cops.

The remaining crew spent the next several days looking for the Kouprey in an area clearly devoid of any animal life (but far from the KR), as there was neither hoof print or cow pie anywhere in the barren landscape. But, as we could not convince the semi-intrepid Montagnard leader to go back where we had seen herds of cows and the lone rifleman, we ended the futile search and returned to base. We broke camp in the evening in order to get an early start back to Sen Monoram.

PHOTO BELOW: Another member of the Cambodian security team with RPG-7. Maybe we would run into armor-plated elephants?

Photo above: Maurizio Dioli, only ‘scientific’ member of the abortive expedition, is Italian veterinarian with 10 years of experience in northern Africa and the author of definitive books on camels. His sad/PO’d demeanor sums up the whole trip

PHOTO ABOVE: Elephants take a dunk with assistance from their mahouts. Riding elephants was an interesting experience—but once is too often

 

Late that night, the dry season ended and in the next hour more than three inches of rain inundated our campsite, now devoid of tarps. Amid curses and mutterings around the camp, our hammocks took water in at a slow but constant rate and did not let out.

As the noise of the storm faded, it was replaced by a din such as we had never heard during many campaigns on many continents: The rain was reveille to all the frogs in Cambodia, who had been waiting underground for the monsoons. Hundreds of thousands of frog voices in varying tones, timbres, pitches and strengths joined in a vast jungle cacophony loud enough to elicit sympathetic vibrations in the intrepid expeditioners’ chest cavities. It was an incredible, surreal experience—national geographic should have been there to record it.

Musing on the phenomenon, MacKenzie tipped more water from his hammock and wrapped himself in a sodden but still effective poncho liner, finally drifting off into a broken sleep to dream of giant frogs. We won’t be back again for a second try.

Robert K. Brown is SOF’s Publisher/Editor. Robert MacKenzie is an SOF contributing Editor for Unconventional Operations. They’re still friends.

Cambodian Border Massacre-Nate Thayer Soldier of Fortune magazine

SOF Frontline Report

Cambodian Border Massacre

American Crosses the Line to Save Lives

Text and Photos by George Jones (aka Nate Thayer)

Soldier of Fortune magazine

October 1989

(Back to Bangkok: A few months ago, George Jones was a desk jockey in an eastern state bureaucracy with prospects of steady work, good pay, and engaged to be married. Reconsidering, Jones pulled the pin, went to Southeast Asia with a camera and started covering myriad mini-wars as a freelance photojournalist. SOF publisher Bob Brown recently met him in Bangkok, and as a result we are able to offer Jones' first SOF story, about free-lance journalism on the weird and wild Cambodian border.)

 

I was not in a very good mood. I had just been kicked out of the Khmer People's Liberation Front (KPNLF) main civilian base camp by the Thai military authorities.

Site Two had been closed to all non-essential personnel, including medical and United Nations workers, for several days as a result of daily Vietnamese shelling but I managed to get in that morning and was waiting with the terrified civilian population for the expected daily dose of big gun intimidation. Around noon the first 107mm rockets landed, killing one man and injuring a workman and a young child. They were probably coming from the former KPNLF base of San Ro, about 2 1/2 kilometers to the southeast, which had been captured during the previous Vietnamese dry season offensive. A woman showed me the trajectory of one piece of shrapnel which had gone through 17 bamboo and dry thatch huts in the densely populated camp, passing within a meter of her sleeping baby.

A "Situation Four" had been called, meaning too late to evacuate--take immediate cover. But the Thai authorities had heard I was there, located me, and escorted me to the perimeter. U.S. Vice president Dan Quayle was scheduled to visit the camp the following week as a show of support to the Non-Communist Resistance, but as I was riding out on my motorcycle, it was clear that the Secret Service folks scheduled to arrive in a few days would be looking for a change of venue. The Quayle visit was subsequently cancelled, moved several hundred kilometers to the civilian encampment of the other non-communist resistance, the Armee Nationale Sihanoukiste (ANS).

I returned to the Thai border town of Tapraya, 30 kilometers to the south of Site Two, not sure how I was going to spend the rest of my day. I stopped by a radio base station operated by a fellow I knew. Prasart was a well-connected former Thai military officer who had a love for electronics--radios in particular. Although he coordinates a complex system of radio field communication for the border relief effort, he has a number of two-way radios he monitors simultaneously, including those of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Thai military, and the Khmer resistance. He speaks fluent Thai, Khmer, and English. If anything is developing on this border region Prasart is often the first to know.

"George, you always seem to show up when things are interesting," he said with a smile.

"Why, what's going on/" I replied.

"You know there is a Situation Four in Site Two," he said.

"I know. I just came from there."

"Well, I just got word there are wounded coming out from north of Phnom Chhat," he continued, referring to the Khmer Rouge headquarters of the 519 Division located about ten kilometers to the southeast. "It looks like the casualties are heavy. I just called papa and Whiskey for permission to send ambulances to a pickup point," he said, referring to the Red Cross and United Nations field directors. “I think you might want to get down there."

He gave me rough coordinates and I was off. There is no way to properly cover the war in Cambodia without a motorcycle, especially in the rainy season. Many areas are simply not accessible by car, and it can take hours to walk to many of the guerrilla bases once the roads end. This was just such a time, I thought, as I maneuvered through the two kilometers of rice paddies towards where the wounded were supposedly coming out.

There was a sense of controlled chaos when I arrived. In a clearing on the edge of rice paddy, about 50 people were gathered, most of them wounded. There were a few Khmer Rouge soldiers with their familiar Chinese Kalashnikovs and their green uniforms, who seemed to be monitoring the scene. The rest included about a dozen medical workers who, not being able to go to work at Site Two, had received a message over their compulsory hand-held radios that there were wounded in need of attention near Tapraya. There were no Red Cross ambulances yet and no coordination. The relief workers were doing the best they could with limited equipment. Most of them worked in hospital and primary-medical care facilities in Site Two.

With a population of 174,000, Site Two is the second largest Cambodian city in the world, behind Phnom Penh, despite the fact that it is a refugee camp several kilometers inside Thailand. Like any city, there is a need for an extensive medical infrastructure, and these folks have come from all over the world to volunteer their expertise. It has been said that Site Two has access to better medical care than any other comparable rural population in Southeast Asia. The Doctors and nurses there that day were not battlefield medics, however, and for most of them this was a new experience. The most severely wounded were treated first, with IVs attached after vital signs were ascertained. One doctor was squeezing an IV bottle with both hands, attempting to speed the process of replenishing a man who had lost a lot of blood.

I walked among the wounded taking pictures and asking questions in my broken Cambodian. Apparently, a group of more than 100 Cambodians, escorted by about 20 Khmer Rouge soldiers, were ambushed about 5 kilometers inside Cambodia by Vietnamese-backed Heng samrin troops. The dispute was over control of a lucrative cattle trading market, and casualties were primarily Cambodian cattle traders who had refused for the fifth (and the last) time to pay 'taxes' to take their cattle through government-controlled territory to markets in Thailand. The traders had come into Thailand in the morning, sold their cattle for between 4,000 and 12,000 Bhat each ($160-480 US dollars) and were returning for the four-day-and-four-night walk through the jungle to their homes. What they did not know was as soon as they passed through on their way to the Thai border, the Heng Samrin troops had set up an ambush site. With trip-wire activated mines set up along the path, a group of about 100 were killed or wounded within a matter of seconds. Those that were not hit by the shrapnel of mines were ambushed by a platoon-sized group of Heng samrin soldiers laying in wait with rifles and B-40 rocket propelled grenades. Except for the 20 or so Khmer Rouge soldiers, the rest were unarmed. The wounded I talked to said that more than five were killed in the initial attack and that many more were wounded. Many of the wounded fled into the jungle, trying to avoid the assault on the survivors. Many of the more seriously wounded were not able to get out, and probably were hiding in the jungle, unaware that medical help awaited them if they could make it to Thailand. Only 35 out of the more than 120 had made it and dusk was approaching.

 I walked over to a Khmer Rouge with an AK and started snapping a few pictures. "No pictures," he immediately barked, as he turned his back.

I followed him and smiled a friendly smile. “Fuck you, asshole. You are in Thai territory and you can't do a thing about it if I take your picture," I said, knowing full well he didn't understand a thing.

There was a satisfaction in telling the Khmer Rouge to go to hell. Many journalists were killed during the fighting in Cambodia in the 1970's, some of them disappearing into Khmer Rouge-held areas, never to be heard from again. They tend to see all westerners as the enemy, and there had been plenty of times they had taken my film at gunpoint, accused me of being CIA, and even arrested me. Not to mention that out of the thousands of Cambodians I have met over the years, I have yet to meet one who didn't lose a family member or friend during the three and a half years the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia. These were clearly some of the most offensive thugs to get together an army and take over a government in my lifetime. Besides, this Khmer Rouge unit had the task of protecting the traders on their return to Cambodia, and they obviously didn't do a heck of a job. So, fuck you, asshole.

As I was interviewing the wounded, there were intermittent arrivals of more, some on makeshift stretchers (a hammock tied to a bamboo pole), some walking, and a few on the back of motorcycles. I went up to a fellow who seemed to be coordinating the retrieval of the wounded to try to get more information. It was getting dark, he said, but there were many more wounded still in the jungle. The problem was that Heng samrin troops were still in the area and the Khmer Rouge were refusing to send troops in to assist in the retrieval of the severely wounded. No one had been to the massacre site, but there would be attempt come daybreak.

"Could I come along," I inquired. After a check with his compatriots, he returned and said yes. I was to meet him at dawn.

By the end of the day, 38 wounded had emerged from the Cambodian jungle, been delivered to the International Committee of the Red Cross, and taken to the ICRC surgical hospital at the U.N. refugee camp of Khao I Dang 30 kilometers south of Tapraya. But there were many more wounded, and it could only be hoped that a rescue team could get to them before the Heng samrin troops, or before they died of their injuries. That was the task of those I was to accompany the next morning.

From our meeting point the next morning, I accompanied a group of four or five Thais in a pickup truck several klicks southeast toward the Khmer Rouge military base of Phnom Chhat. I wasn't sure who these Thais were or exactly what they did for a living but you learn not to ask too many questions on the border, and as long as they knew what they were doing I really didn't need to know. We abandoned the pickup several kilometers after we left the last real road, unable to move the vehicle forward over the scrub terrain. We got out and started walking through lightly wooded terrain, with elephant grass, brush, and thin trees. It was a strange area, with no huts or cultivated land for several klicks behind us. Minutes into the walk, three people appeared walking towards us from the east. One had shrapnel wounds to the legs, and the other two were assisting him to the Red Cross ambulance on stand-by near Tapraya. After spending the night in the jungle, he had come over the border at daybreak and had run into the other two. There were more wounded across the border, he was sure of it. Since they were over an hour’s walk to the ambulance, we sent our driver to accompany him in the truck.

We walked another 45 minutes to a small clearing, passing one body near the path. He had died the night before, I was informed. Coming with a group of several wounded, he had succumbed to his wounds here, and they left him at this spot while the others continued towards medical help.

At the clearing we met up with a ragtag group of six men, bringing our group to a total of 11, including myself. I was happy to see Noi, the fellow who I had seen just the night before when he had approved my request to accompany them to the massacre site. He was an impressive fellow, exuding quite confidence, and clearly in charge. Only in his early 20's, I was to find out that Noi was the leader of a three-man Thai ground intelligence unit, whose job was to monitor the Khmer military situation in this area of the border. He was an intelligence grunt, who passed the information to some office in the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet. He had regular interface with the Khmer Rouge, the KPNLF, and the Vietnamese-backed Heng Samrin troops of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. Given that all three of these groups regularly attack each other, Noi's ability to move among the factions was impressive. He was just the type of guy I like to know in my line of work.

Noi laid out the itinerary: He had sent an emissary to the Khmer Rouge military commander to request troops to accompany us into Cambodia to the massacre site. We were to wait here until they returned. The massacre site was about six kilometers east, and the path was heavily mined. We would have a trained mine expert whose job it was to detect mines, and defuse them or lead us around them but it would be slow moving. The area where we were going was long controlled by Heng Samrin troops. No one had been to the massacre site yet, and we did not know what to expect. Our mission was to retrieve wounded, since more than 60 people were still unaccounted for, and those that were not killed were probably still in the area. If the Heng Samrin troops saw us, they would probably shoot us. Noi promised to do his best to avoid that possibility.

Our group of 11 was a strange and motley one indeed. A mix of Thais, Khmer Rouge, and a few who were fluent in both languages. None were in uniform, some were barefoot, others had Ho Chi Minh sandals. Noi wore a pair of relatively new military-issue combat boots, a white tee shirt and fatigue pants with a canteen attached. All of them had huge knives or sickles. There were a couple of guns and grenades among us. Everyone was quite sullen, some whittling wood with their knives, others rolling cigarettes with newsprint and raw tobacco, and still others eating plain cooked rice from small bags tied to their waist. There were sporadic rockets landing to the south of us, but they didn't seem to merit more than a brief turn of the head from our group. Twice the dull thud of a landmine detonated in the direction we were to go, and a few would get up to assess the situation, walking a few meters to stare intently into the jungle, only to return to squat with the group. No one spoke much. I had little idea of what was going on. I had met a few of these folks briefly the day before, but I had no idea exactly what any of them were doing in this no man's land about five kilometers from the nearest cultivated land. Since none of them spoke a word of English, we were communicating in my smattering of Khmer mixed with a few Thai words.

The emissaries Noi dispatched to the Khmer Rouge base camp returned in about an hour. We had been refused troops. The Khmer Rouge had said it was "too dangerous," according to Noi, and besides, they didn't want to travel with a Westerner.

But we had our human mine-detector and we began the next leg of our journey. In single file, we began to walk. Two scouts were sent ahead about 20 meters, and the Khmer Rouge fellow trained in mine detection was, of course, in front of the group. The jungle quickly became denser. Along the single path, less than two feet wide, visibility was about ten meters.

We were less than fifty meters into the jungle when a wave from the scouts brought us to a halt. They had discovered the first mines, buried on the path. They marked the spot with a simple X scratched in the dirt with a stick and put a couple of sticks on either side, guiding us around it. As I passed by, I tried not to ponder the fact that, to me, it looked no different than the rest of the path.

The jungle became progressively thicker, visibility decreasing to a few meters. We walked slowly. I felt guilty as I carefully placed my feet in the footprints of the fellow ahead of me. At one point I passed him, simply walking around him, stepping off the narrow path in the process. A whispered command came from ahead. Noi came back to me. 'Stay on the path no matter what." he said firmly as if he were talking to a child. His "you don’t get it, do you/" look made me feel foolish.

Hell, I thought, I am a city boy from Massachusetts. We don't have jungles where ZI come from, and we certainly don't have mines. I wouldn't know the difference between a claymore and a half-buried Budweiser can. I have no military training. Hell, I don't even have any photography training. Even if I do manage to get some good shots, I don't know whether anyone will buy them. I have not forgotten the times before that I have photographed firefights only to be offered 25 bucks apiece for the best ones. "Good pictures," they say,” But, frankly, a firefight in Cambodia isn't of much interest in Peoria."

We were waved to a halt. More mines, the relayed whisper confirmed. About three meters ahead, our Khmer Rouge human mine detector went to work. Savuth, only 19, had no family, and had lived in the Khmer Rouge border bases since the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia in 1979. I was impressed. He was like a coon dog. Wielding only a thin bamboo stick and a determined gaze, he found more than a dozen areas that were mined that day. Some locations had several devices, with trip wires positioned on alternate routes around the mined path. Savuth motioned to me to come to him. “Right here," he pointed to a spot in front of us. I looked intently, but saw nothing. He reached down and gingerly cradled a thin green wire stretched about three inches above the ground in some light brush. He followed the wire gently with his fingers off the path, poking the ground and digging gently with his stick at suspicious dirt. About a meter off the path, the wire led to a spring detonated Type 69. Savuth untied the wire from the mine and then proceeded to deactivate the spring detonator. He handed the mine to me." You want it?" he said. “I have plenty."

I am sure he did. The Thai-Cambodian border has served as a refuge for more than a generation of guerrilla fighters, starting with the anti-French Issareks shortly after World War II. During the 1970's, a number of small groups of anti-Khmer Rouge resistance fled to the mountainous sanctuaries of the Dong Rak escarpment. When the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia on Christmas day 1978, hundreds of thousands fled to the border area, developing an armed resistance that now numbers more than 60,000. The first thing every unit does when they take over a piece of real estate is surround the perimeter with mines. The annual Vietnamese dry-season offensive has dislodged scores of camps during the ten-year-old war. But the mines stay behind, and the ritual is repeated as the guerrillas move to new sanctuaries. After so many years, the Cambodian border region has been turned into a series of mined paths that snake through vast areas, long abandoned, where every step is fraught with danger. The refugee camps have thousands of mine victims, and bustling workshops that are devoted strictly to churning out wooden legs. Often one will see a new mine victim helping to carve his own prosthesis in these surreal workshops, which are virtually a cottage industry on the Cambodian border of the 1980'.

We had been walking for almost an hour when the lead scouts again brought us to a halt. I looked ahead and saw 10 meters ahead of us what I instantly recognized as the infamous "K-5." "K-5" is a barbed-wire barricade that runs more than 100 kilometers in the jungle parallel to the Thai border. It is a sophisticated barrier system, surrounded by mines on both sides with wire activated devices that run through the fencing itself. Shaped like an inverted V, the pinnacle is more than a meter-and-a-half off the ground, with one fence perpendicular to the ground in the middle, with booby-trapped wire fencing coming down from the peak on both sides at a 45 degree angle, reaching the ground about 7 feet apart. After the Vietnamese launched their crushing 1984-85 dry-season offensive, routing virtually every resistance base camp, they built this barrier several klicks inside Cambodia, to prevent the resistance from launching attacks from their new sanctuaries inside Thailand. It has proven very effective, eliminating many infiltration routes. I had heard many soldiers speaking of the disruption that K-5 had caused them in their forays into the Cambodian interior.

Ironically, it also proved a boost to the resistance as well. Thousands of Cambodians were conscripted into forced work brigades by the Vietnamese to build this barrier in the jungle. Thousands of people contracted malaria in these brigades, and hundreds stepped on mines. There was vast resentment by civilians throughout Cambodia, as people returned to their home provinces with horror stories from the west. Hundreds of young men fled to sanctuary of the resistance camps rather than be subjected to the labor brigades.

K-5 was an impressive structure but the fence had been cut, with a gap of about a meter, in the spot we were. It was in an area that was lightly forested, and then fence disappeared into the trees going in both directions. Savuth showed me two more Type 69's and trip wires that disappeared into the fencing. He added the deactivated mines to his collection. "Why," I inquired, “exactly are you saving those things?" It seemed that Savuth had a broader job description than I realized. Not only was he skilled in detecting and defusing these cylindrical nightmares, but he was charged with re-depositing them under some path somewhere else in the jungle as well. Waste not, want not, I thought, happy that Savuth was able to take a break from the flip side of his job to accompany us that day.

There was sober evidence we were nearing the massacre site. A man lay dead just off the path, with obvious shrapnel wounds to his legs and arms. He hadn't been dead long, probably unable to continue, succumbing to his wounds suffered in the initial attack. There were also a couple of traditional Cambodian scarves lying on the ground, bloodied and dirty. Several spent B-40 RPGs lay just off the path.

We paused at K-5 for about 30 minutes, while the area was scoured for mines, and two scouts went ahead to assess the area. I could see them walking about 25 meters on the other side of K-5, crouching and listening. Noi squatted next to me. “The wounded who came out yesterday said the attack took place about one-and-a-half klicks east of here,” he said soberly. “This area is controlled by Heng Samrin. Two wounded who came out this morning said that they were still active in the area. We will try to get to the site to see if there are any more wounded. We will stay there only long enough to retrieve them. It is very dangerous. If there are any troops, or if there is gunfire, we will come back in this direction.”

The scouts came back and we were given the OK to proceed. I noticed that the tension level of the guides increased markedly. I also noticed that four of our group declined to proceed, opting to wait for our return.

Within a hundred meters, the lead scout motioned for us to get down, and everyone sank to a crouch, leaving us still clearly visible in the shallow scrub surrounding the path. Although the area was medium forest, the terrain was rolling, offering numerous hidden sanctuaries less than ten meters from the path. It occurred to me that the platoon that lay in wait for the traders yesterday could easily be within meters of us on either side, with ample concealment. I didn’t dwell on it. We moved slowly and gradually quickened the pace. It seemed that the guides knew where we were going and were trying to get it over with, calculating that the risk factor was diminished proportionally to the amount of time we spent in the area

Within a twenty minute span we were twice ordered to hit the ground as someone thought they had heard sounds or saw movement off to the side. There was increased evidence that we were closing in on our objective. Two more bodies lying off the path spoke volumes of the recent chaos. Pieces of clothing, brand-new tape players still in their boxes shattered by shrapnel, packages of dried noodles and other small items lay on the path, obviously dropped by people fleeing the area.

I moved up to the front of the line, staying immediately behind the scout, checking my camera for the proper settings. The scout came to an abrupt halt. Ten meters in front of us the path was strewn with bodies. As I came up to the first one I was overwhelmed by the smell of death. Spitting out the air in my lungs and trying to hold my breath, I got off some quick shots, and counted bodies strung in a row on the path. They obviously had been walking single file when the mines went off. It wasn’t hard to see what happened. The mines had been placed on either side of the path, parallel to it for about ten meters. The first person in the line set off the trip wire, detonating all the mines on the path. We were told they were claymores and Type 69s. The platoon of Heng Samrin was lying in wait, and then opened fire as the wounded started running away from the initial explosion. Off the path were several groups of bodies. There was a pile of six only two meters from the path.  Another grouping of about ten lay a little further away in the other direction. There were several other clusters of legs and heads and arms. I counted 32 bodies in all, but some of them were piled on top of each other and it was difficult to make an accurate body count. I stood over one body that had a number of shrapnel wounds. Looking closer, I picked up a spent AK cartridge laying next to his head. There was a clean hole near his temple with a ring of burns surrounding the entrance wound. Someone had finished him off while he lay wounded, I thought.

The lead scout next to me suddenly fell to the ground on all fours, looking toward the tree line and an embankment about 15 meters to the north. Everyone silently followed suit. I clearly saw someone move in the clump of trees, and my heart raced. We were totally unprotected, lying in the middle of a minefield. The scout had just told me not to venture closer to the clusters of bodies lying off the path, because sometimes soldiers booby-trap the bodies after an incident. I saw someone stick his head up in the tree line and then duck down. I snapped a picture for the hell of it, knowing that it would only show a cluster of trees, and couldn’t possibly reflect the tension of the moment. The jungle was silent for what seemed like forever. No one knew quite what to do. Our scout whistled softly in the direction of the movement. Again, a head appeared from behind the trees, and then an arm waved—motioning us to come closer to him. No words were exchanged and the jungle remained silent.

“Who are you,” our scout whispered loudly in Cambodian, "Where are you going?” Jesus Christ, I thought, what thee fuck do you mean “where are you going?”  We are lying in a minefield in the middle of the jungle surrounded by dead bodies. The way I figure it, pal, he is either sitting there bleeding to death or he is about to pop out with about 20 others and waste me. This is hardly the time to inquire about his travel plans. Perhaps I lost something in the translation.

I didn’t understand the response from the figure in the tree line, but our two scouts reacted positively, and they started making their way gingerly off the path towards the figure. There was no way to tell how many people were in the tree line, and whether or not they were friendly. The guides were obviously reluctant, not confident enough to incautiously proceed forward.

It was one of the traders, and he was wounded, the scouts called back to us. They scurried to help him. He was talking rapidly as the two scouts carried him the short distance back to us. The boy, only 19, had avoided any shrapnel wounds, but had been hit twice in the leg by the subsequent AK fire. He had run into the woods and been hiding since the attack, now about 19 hours before. Heng Samrin troops had come back twice since the initial attack, he said, each time killing any of the wounded they could find. The last time was less than an hour ago, he said, as he pleaded with us to take him to safety. I took the Cambodian scarf off my head and used it to cover his wounds. A hammock materialized, and they tied it to a long pole. This was a very lucky man, I thought, looking at him. The expression on his face was a queer mix of pain, joy, and fatigue. He looked like he was trying to laugh, but his injuries were sending other messages, resulting in an incongruous mix of facial expressions.

The boy said he had seen no one else alive other than those that the soldiers had killed on their return trip. The news that the Heng Samrin soldiers were in the immediate area made all of us very nervous and the scouts kept grabbing me, telling me to run. I had shot less than two rolls and was reluctant to go. We had been there less than ten minutes.

We left the massacre site in a considerably different manner than we arrived. We trotted along the same path that only minutes before we had inched along. I reminded myself that this was the same path our scouts had relieved of a dozen mines within the last few hours. As well, there were three occasions (or was it four?) where they chose to leave the mines intact, and guide us around them.  I briefly reminded myself of these remaining mines as we walked briskly back toward Thailand and hoped that Savuth, our mine detector, deserved his reputation for thoroughness.

It seemed to me that our return trip through the jungle was rather reckless, as we moved quickly and in a group. But I just followed the lead of those in charge and tried not to think. I had adopted an attitude in covering the war that a French photographer had impressed upon me a few years back. The two of us were on the front lines with the KPNLF, awaiting an expected Vietnamese assault to overrun a resistance camp. The Vietnamese had already captured half the village; all 17,000 civilians had been evacuated many weeks before. The opposing front lines were a series of trenches facing each other less than fifty meters apart.

When the expected assault came, it was clear the Vietnamese intended to own that piece of real estate by the end of the day. They laid a heavy artillery and mortar barrage on our position and were sending in assault teams to dislodge our front lines. Our platoon would have been more than happy to retreat immediately, but the shelling accompanied by dozens of AKs on full auto left us unable to move. There were three guerrillas in my particular trench. One had taken a round at about his sternum and was breathing heavily with a wet gurgling sound with every breath. The second was in tears, and the other was crouching with his AK held high over his head on full automatic pointed in the general direction of the Vietnamese. I had basically abandoned any serious thoughts of photography and was, in a prone position, reassessing my career objectives. The Frenchman, however, was standing outside of the trench, slightly in front of us, casually focusing his camera and taking our picture. There were numerous AK rounds hitting the dirt around his feet, not to mention the big guns which had bracketed our position. He was wearing bright yellow pants. I knew right away that this man was simply crazy. We, of course, survived the unpleasantness, and later over dinner safely back in Thailand, I inquired why he seemed to have divorced himself from sanity earlier that day.

“Look,” he said, “I travel all over the world trying to photograph combat situations. Maybe, if I am lucky, ten hours per year I will be in a hot situation such as today. I just empty my mind and take pictures. You can’t think about the danger too much or you won’t get any shots. And anyway it doesn’t do any good, since usually there is nothing you can do about it.”

He was, of course, right. He also had good pictures. Every one of mine that day turned out to be out of focus or the victim of camera shake. Most also were at a peculiar angle, with lots of rim shots of the trench taken from below. So not only did I risk my life, but I didn’t even have any saleable pictures to show for it. This job did not make a hell of a lot of sense to begin with, but it made absolutely none if I didn’t have any pictures. I did think, however, that thee Frenchman’s day glow yellow pants were entirely unnecessary.

It took us less than 45 minutes to make it back over the Thai border. Although we were safely past the mined path, it was another 45 minutes where we had left the truck. Our focus was on getting the wounded boy to a Red Cross team that was stationed back in Tapraya. I said some quick goodbyes to our Khmer Rouge scouts, for whom I had developed a fondness ever since they found the first Type 69 in the path in front of us. They were Cambodians and were not allowed to venture freely on Thai territory, so they headed south through the elephant grass to their Khmer Rouge base camp. Noi, myself, and a small contingent with our wounded friend moved west toward the pickup truck. I had spent the better part of two days around these folks and still had no idea who they were or exactly what their function in life was. Some of them we seemed to acquire in this no-man’s land, wandering about with no explicable purpose. With their huge knives and bags of cooked rice, groups of two or three seemed to appear out of nowhere at several points earlier in the day. Usually they would sit down, often with no one acknowledging each other, and silently roll a cigarette or eat plain rice with their hand out of a bag. This had been a strange day.

As we walked toward the truck, I saw three soldiers standing in the path waiting for us. Three Royal Thai Army soldiers armed with M-16s several klicks from the nearest road were clearly not just passing though. The Thai’s do not control this area and there was only one reason they were there.

“We have been ordered by our commander to confiscate your film,” said one of them in a perfectly friendly tone. The Thais are some of the friendliest people in the world, and they have the ability to make you like them, even if they have orders to ruin your day. How did they know so quickly I had gone in, I thought. I had tried to be as inconspicuous as possible. But it is hard for a six-foot-two-inch white guy with a camera to blend in on the Thai Cambodian border.

“Oh, man, you can’t do this to me,” I said. “I worked hard for these pictures.” They were friendly but firm. They were just grunts with orders, and I knew they could not return to their commander without film.

“Check his pockets,” said one to the other. “And the film in his camera as well.’

“All right,” I conceded. I rewound the film in my Nikon and popped it from the case. I handed it to them along with two rolls from my pocket. They had a job to do and they were pleasant enough. They let us go, mission accomplished as far as they were concerned. At least they didn’t arrest me, I thought. It had happened to me more than once coming over the border from someplace I wasn’t suppose to be.

What the three Thai soldiers didn’t k now was that I had taken all my exposed film and hidden it in my socks periodically throughout the day. I have had my film confiscated before, and vowed to be prepared in the future. A photographer without film isn’t worth much to anybody. They had gotten two unexposed rolls I keep for just such occasions, and the film in my camera, which had less than five exposed frames. My damage control strategy had been effective.

We made it to the truck and arrived at the Red Cross stand-by ambulance by mid-afternoon. The doctor who administered to the boy before he was transferred to the ICRC surgical hospital said that he would live, although a bullet was lodged in his knee and could permanently impair his ability to walk. If he had not received medical care today, said the doctor, he probably would have died from blood loss or dehydration.

I went back to Tapraya to assess the last 24 hours and try to sell the story and pictures.

(TAPRAYA, THAILAND) ‘Vietnamese backed Heng Samrin troops ambushed a group of more than 100 Cambodian cattle traders today in an apparent dispute over control of this lucrative cross-border black market. At least 37 people were killed, all Cambodians and mostly civilians. Forty-five wounded managed to cross the border into Thailand, and were taken to the International Committee of the Red Cross hospital at Khao I Dang refugee camp, 20 kilometers south of this Thai border town of Tapraya. Thai military sources said seven of the killed were Khmer Rouge soldiers who were escorting the traders back into Cambodia after selling their cattle. Red Cross officials confirmed reports that as many as 30 wounded were unaccounted for and their fate appeared grim. Attempts to organize a rescue effort were complicated by continued fighting in the area. Thai military and relief officials said it was one of the bloodiest clashes of the year in the ten-year-old civil war in Cambodia. The Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge are the strongest of the tripartite resistance coalition fighting the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia since December 1978.”

I called a wire service I had worked for in the past to try and sell the story. “Sounds interesting," said the editor, “How does fifty bucks sound?”

The fact is that a firefight in Cambodia doesn’t raise many eyebrows in 1989, 19 years since Sihanouk was overthrown and the United States sent ground troops across the Vietnamese border to dislodge NVA sanctuaries. The same music with different words had been playing on Radio Cambodia for a long time, and the world was getting bored. I accepted the wire service offer. Knowing that soon the ambush would be yesterday’s news. I understood it received a full paragraph in the New York Times next to a department store ad the following day. I was surprised they even printed it.

I would send the pictures to Bangkok to make the rounds and see if anyone was interested. Freelance photojournalism is an unpredictable business. You never know what will sell or for how much. Or if at all. If I made a couple hundred bucks from the last couple days product, I thought, I would be lucky.

It was getting dark and I was sitting alone in a small restaurant in Tapraya, having my first food since yesterday. I had spent the day walking through a minefield with some very suspicious characters in order to take pictures of dead people. Now I was eating dinner in a restaurant on the Thai-Cambodian border. Four months ago I was working as a bureaucrat for a state government in the northeastern United States. Steady desk job, good money. I was engaged to be married. Shit, the wedding had been scheduled for next Saturday, I thought over my fried rice with chicken. But I decided to make some changes. My mother is not happy.

 

 

Mr. X, The Cop, and the Heng Samrin--By Nate Thayer Soldier of Fortune

"Mr. X, the Cop, and the Heng Samrin"

(Note: Nate Thayer was South East Asian correspondent for Soldier of Fortune Magazine from July 1989 to the mid 1990's. He was listed under the Masthead name George Jones (in homage to perhaps the world greatest make vocalist--country music singer George Jones) He also wrote under the pseudonym Ed Norton covering Burma (in respect for the character playing Jackie Gleason's sidekick his next door neighbor and sewer worker Ed Norton in the TV comedy sitcom "The Honeymooners"). Often the story of how when gets the story in reporting is as interesting as the straight reporting that makes it to press. SOF focused on this genre of reporting.

Soldier of Fortune Magazine

"Mr. X, the Cop, and the Heng Samrin"

March 1990

By Ed Norton (Nate Thayer)

It was not unusual, given the type of story that SOF prefers, for a correspondent, during the course of researching his article, to run into some very unusual people, travel under unusual circumstances, or to find himself in an unusual pickle. My trip to the Karen-held areas is a case in point.

One day I had lunch with SOF publisher Bob Brown at a hotel in Bangkok and, as had become routine since he arrived in town, an unusual person joined us. “Mr. X, " whose employer(s) I never adequately determined, was a Thai military type who appeared to have extraordinary access to the ethnic resistance movements in Burma, as well as detailed knowledge of the methods of opium production and transport used by the opium armies of the Golden Triangle

Mr. X produced pictures of himself and Khun Sa--perhaps the biggest primary source of heroin in the world--and said he could arrange for me to travel to the Golden Triangle to interview him.

He also had good contacts with Karens, had information of a major Burmese assault at their base of Palu and detailed Burmese troop movements, including the battalion identity, location, and strength (by memory). He said he could arrange my immediate transport to the resistance base.

Mr. X carried a military-issue, multi-programmable hand radio and repeatedly used the phrase “I cannot disclose that information." Brown kicked me under the table more than once, his arched eyebrows analyzing this caricature.

Mr. X was a solid fellow, whose information was good, but I have no idea why he was being so generous with his assistance. Being the crack investigative reporter that I am, I doubted Mr. X's contention that it stemmed from a moral obligation to promote the just cause of the opium armies.

Mr. X clearly is some shade of spook, but I have decided that half of my contacts out here are, and that fact in itself doesn't concern me. I can count at least 14 armies at war on one or another of the Thai borders, and wars, particularly guerrilla wars, mean spooks. It is only logical that if one is to run around asking lots of questions, one can assume that others will run around asking why, and just what you plan to do with the answers. As far as I can tell, these are the same folks that have others running behind them for God knows what reason.

Mr. X agreed to call me later that afternoon to make arrangements for my immediate transportation to Palu. The call woke me from my nap. “Go to the Pata department store at 0800 sharp and wait out front. A black Volvo will meet you to take you to Mae Sot." Mr. X identified himself as "your friend from lunch." I reiterated my interest in interviewing Khun Sa. “Please, we don't know who is listening. Do not refer to him by name. Call him Commander-in-Chief." Whatever you say X baby.

I received another call that night. “There has been a change," said Mr. X, " The car will meet you at the same place and time but will not be a black Volvo. It will be a white Mercedes with the following plate number."

Look, Mr. X, the deal was a Volvo. There was no mention of a Mercedes. I am an important correspondent for a very important international publication. The type of folks who read SOF would not be happy if they knew you were responsible for such a precipitous decline in the quality of my transport. But being the flexible sort of guy I am I said nothing.

Mr. X took the opportunity to broach another subject. “Uh, Ed, do you have any contacts in the American embassy?" asked the man whose acquaintance I had made only a few hours earlier. “Well," I replied cautiously. I am a journalist. I try to have contacts everywhere. What is it you would exactly like to know?" “Perhaps you could introduce me to some DEA agents when you return from Burma," said the fellow whose picture I had seen with his arm around the biggest primary producer of heroin in the world hours before. “Right, Mr. X. We will talk when I return."

I was met on schedule by the Mercedes and its owner. Thong was an affable young man, with a big smile, a crew cut, and a brand new Mercedes. We got in the car. Thong slipped Grand Funk railroad into the cassette deck, and we were off for the 400 klick drive towards the mountain borders of Northwest Thailand. Thong's military-issue, multi-programmable radio crackled between the seats.

“So, Thong, what exactly is your interest in arranging my illegal transport across the Thai border into rebel-held Burma?” I inquired in significantly more diplomatic terms. I soon learned the 30-year-old Thong was a policemen, which seemed for some reason to make perfect sense. “I don't like being a policeman, but I am my mother's only son and that is what she wanted. You cannot make any money as a policeman in Thailand." That is true, with senior officers making less than US 50 dollars a week. I wondered, however, how Thong managed to purchase a brand new $35,000 Mercedes. He must really save his pennies. “What would you prefer to do for a living?” I ventured. “I want to be a rock-and-roll guitar player. I like heavy metal," he commented over Deep Purple's "Smoke on the water" blasting from the cassette.

Although I had been to resistance-held Burma before, it was not an area where I concentrated my efforts. I preferred the Thai-Cambodian border and reporting on the resistance to the Vietnamese-occupation in Cambodia. I had been scheduled to return to the Cambo border that morning, until Mr. X appeared with an offer I couldn't refuse. Anyways, I could use a couple more days to analyze my approach to returning there, as it seemed there were a couple groups of folks there upset with me. Brown had returned from a brief trip to the Cambodian non-communist resistance. , and, sleuth that he is, informed me that he was told that someone had plans to shoot me upon my return to that area. As I recall, the conversation went something like this. “Ah, Ed, I don't want to pry into your personal life, but this is for altruistic reasons."

"Well, what is it you want to know, Bob?'

"Do you carry an Australian passport?"

"Ahhh, no."

"Well", he said, spitting tobacco into the hotel bone china coffee cup. “My contact said that he talked to someone who said when you came back to the border you were going to be,"--Brown pointed a finger at me simulating a pistol--"X'd."

The info, as I was to find out, was pretty accurate. They were angry at a westerner who drove a motorcycle and had recently been arrested in the area. "They' were the Khmer Rouge--i.e. Pol Pot et al., the group who decreased the Cambodian population by over a million in 3 and 1/2 years. As far as I knew, I was the only westerner with a motorcycle on the border, and certainly the only one who had been arrested by these people a few weeks before this relayed threat. I had gone in east of one of their military bases to take pictures of soldiers, and they were quite upset, took my film, put a guy with an AK behind me and one in front and marched me to their leader, where I was accused of being a spy and eventually turned over to Thai military intelligence. “I think you do secret work," said the interrogator

"Oh no, you are quite mistaken, my friend. I just work for a magazine called Soldier of Fortune," I could have told him. As I pictured a humorless young KR intel agent--who had lived in the jungle his entire adult life--leafing through his English phrase book for the definition of "Soldier of Fortune," I had decided this would be inadvisable.

Apparently, this incident continued to irk them, and I wasn't quite satisfied with the efficacy of any of my strategies for defusing the unpleasantness, so a couple of days on the Burmese border was fine with me. Besides, two nights before, I received a message at 0300 from my apartment security guard in Bangkok: “Noi called from Tapraya," he said, referring to a small town on the Thai-cambodian border. “The Heng Samrin army is angry with you. Return immediately--I will negotiate with them for you."

Noi is a Thai intelligence contact of mine. I presumed it had something to do with the time Noi had arranged a trip into Heng Samrin-controlled territory a few weeks ago so I could meet them. What Noi had not told me until we were tromping through the jungle was that in fact I was a doctor today, not a journalist, and I was here to diagnose what apparently was a VD epidemic in this Heng Samrin recon unit, and supply appropriate medication which Noi would deliver at a later date. And so I played Doctor in between taking several rolls of film. Perhaps they had caught on when the pictures were published in the second largest news weekly in Asia, and were perturbed. Regardless, I had two of the three-largest Communist armies in Southeast Asia apparently very angry with me, and I was just as happy to be driving 140 kilometers an hour in the opposite direction towards Burma, with my rock and roll cop and his Mercedes.

 

 

"Cambodia needs to move on"-Malaysian Star

From The Malaysian Star
17th February 2000

Cambodia needs to move on

TO hear Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy tell it, every
Cambodian is either a drug addict, prostitute or corrupt. To hear
foreign correspondent Nate Thayer tell it, there's no hope for the
country either. Chief News Editor CHUA YEW KAY heard all kinds of
stories--there were stories of optimism and hope as well--during a
recent trip to a country once notorious for its "killing fields."
Here, he tries to clear the confusing and conflicting accounts he
heard about the country.

NATE Thayer, Far Eastern Economic Review correspondent and self-made
expert on Cambodia, made no bones about what he thought of the country
he has been reporting on for 15 years.

"It's a virtual dictatorship by any definition," he declared.

Thayer, who made a name for himself with his scoops on the Khmer Rouge
and the first interview with Pol Pot in 20 years since the end of the
genocidal regime, could not find anything positive to say about the
country.

"I am negative because everything about this place is negative.

"I thought I would know this country better but the more I learn the
less I know."

He wasn't the only one confused. Even more so were his
audience--senior journalists and editors from Asian and German
publications. Among them were also Cambodian media people.

The occasion was the third Asian-German Editors Forum organised by the
Konrad Adenauer Foundation to promote a free and responsible press in
South-East Asia.

And while the Cambodian media representatives called the Cambodian
media among the freest, if not the freest, in Asia, Thayer wasn't so
sure.

"There are stories that ought to see print but aren't published
because the journalists fear for their lives, the lives of their
families, or their livelihood," he said.

There is a great likelihood of having a hand grenade lobbed into your
home or your office ransacked for running a story someone does not
like.

It may take some stretch of the imagination, but it is also a form of
freedom of expression, according to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen,
although he didn't say it in so many words.

The Government is all for freedom of expression, he said.

The media can carry anything it wants as long as it's fair and
balanced, but the politicians also have the right to reply.

Nevertheless, while the Cambodian media feels that it is moving
towards even greater freedom, it rated itself quite lowly when asked
how influential it has been in shaping the national agenda.

After Hun Sen had given a rosy picture of Cambodia to the journalists
at the Hotel Le Royal in Phnom Penh, oppositionist Sam Rainsy painted
a dark and gloomy scene.

"Don't let the grand surroundings of this hotel fool you into thinking
the rest of Cambodia is like this," the gentle-looking Rainsy said.

Then he proceeded to check a list of what was wrong with his country.
Everything was wrong, it seemed--from the political structure and
social fabric to the environment.

He reeled off grim statistics--80% of Cambodians were poor farmers;
95% of exports came from overdependence on the textile/garment
industry; international assistance accounted for 40% of the national
Budget; the country was 10 times poorer than next-door neighbour
Thailand in terms of Gross Domestic Product per capita but spent 30
times less on education and health than Thailand.

For someone who aspires to the premiership, Rainsy offered no firm
solutions to his long list of problems, to the disappointment of his
listeners.

Even Thayer, who considers Rainsy the person most suitable to replace
Hun Sen, sees no hope of the opposition leader ever making it to the
top post given the current political circumstances.

He is disgusted, and rightly so, by what the Khmer Rouge did during
their bloody reign from 1975 to 1979, when up to two million
Cambodians were massacred.

His writings about certain Cambodian personalities and what he claims
are proof of the corrupt system--from airport immigration to the
highest political office--have earned him threats and lawsuits.

While he grapples with the present Cambodia and what he sees as its
bleak future, Thayer has difficulty burying the past.

He remains frustrated with that final interview he had with Pol Pot in
October 1997, the first international journalist to do so since the
man was driven from power 18 years earlier.

Pol Pot reportedly committed suicide in April 1998 to avoid trial.

Thayer is also irked by the fact that five of the Khmer Rouge central
committee members are today in the government, something he finds hard
to accept.

No one doubts his sense of justice and fair play. But, as he said, the
more he finds out about Cambodia the less he knows.

To many people, the Killing Fields may seem like yesterday. Yet, more
than 20 years have gone by. One new generation has grown up.

People like taxi driver So Pheap and human rights activist Phuong Sith
do not remember much of what it was like then.

Pheap, 26, said he was told his father was killed by the Khmer Rouge.
He never knew what happened to his mother. He grew up with relatives.

Sith, executive director of Human Rights Vigilance of Cambodia, said
Cambodians wanted to put that episode behind them and get on with
their lives.

What would it take then to lay the past to rest? Bringing the
perpetrators of the genocide to justice is one obvious answer.

While it may be important for the Cambodian psyche to have the Khmer
Rouge ghost exorcised once and for all, this is easier said than done.

Attempts to set up a tribunal are bogged down by a debate between the
Cambodian leadership and the United Nations.

The two sides have been negotiating for months to create the tribunal
to try the remaining leaders of the Khmer Rouge.

The government plan calls for UN involvement--vital to gaining
international legitimacy for the court--but ensures that the trials
would be controlled by Cambodia's politicised and nascent judiciary.

The UN has balked at approving the plan, which is in the form of a
draft national law. UN legal experts have demanded an international
co-prosecutor be able to make indictments independently of a Cambodian
counterpart.

Critics accuse Hun Sen of seeking to protect senior former Khmer Rouge
rebels living freely under defection deals while the UN has said it
would only back a trial that ensured minimum international standards.

It would seem that the tribunal is one vital component in the scheme
of thing in restoring confidence not only among Cambodians but also
outsiders.

Still, the tribunal issue has apparently divided the Cambodians. Some
analysts say while every Cambodian family lost a relative, every
family also had the suspicion that someone in the family was
implicated in the Khmer Rouge movement.

But, meanwhile, it is business as usual for the country--the business
of ensuring the country's economic growth.

Hun Sen, who became a grandfather for the first time just before the
media gathering, ought to pay attention.

During the question and answer session with the media, he was asked
about an incident in which the wife of a junior minister allegedly
threw acid into the face of her husband's mistress and whether he
should use it to restore confidence in the justice system, but Hun Sen
dismissed it as an isolated incident.

"Looking at one tree is dangerous. You must look at the whole jungle,"
he said.

That may be so, but as long as the law of the jungle does not take
hold again, Cambodia has every opportunity to break free from its
terrible past and move on with the rest of the world.

Last remnants of Khmer Rouge surrender, without their leaders-AP Robert Horn

Last remnants of Khmer Rouge surrender, without their leaders

By Robert Horn

December 5, 1998

Associated Press

BANGKOK, Thailand — The last main fighting force of the Khmer Rouge, the radical Marxist guerrillas who killed nearly two million Cambodians, has surrendered, a journalist close to the rebels said early today. Negotiators for the last band of guerrillas holed up near the Thai border met Friday with representatives of the government in Phnom Penh at Preah Vihear temple and agreed to lay down their arms, according to Nate Thayer of the Far Eastern Economic Review.

In 1997, Thayer became the first journalist allowed to interview Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, who had not been seen in public in nearly two decades and died in April. Thayer is one of few outsiders trusted by the guerrillas.

The surrender of the Khmer Rouge would bring to an end more than 30 years of'civil war in Cambodia that began with the Marxist guerrilla's insurgency against the government in Phnom Penh in the late 1960s.

Although the fighters' top surviving leaders, Tak Mok, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea were not included in the deal, they no longer command any troops. Their former followers apparently did not want to give them up. Khem Nuon, Ta Mok's chief of staff who negotiated the surrender with government officials, said simply that they are "retired" and he refused to go into details about them, Thayer said.

The Cambodian government and the United States have expressed a desire to capture all three and try them for genocide and crimes against humanity. Khem Nuon claimed he was negotiating on behalf of 5,000 remaining ragtag troops and 15,000 civilians living under Khmer  Rouge control. Thayer said, however, that he believed the estimate of fighting men was inflated, and that many of the civilians are living in the Phu Noi refugee camp in Thailand."There must be unity. There is no other way. There is no way for a military solution. No weapons. Only political struggle," Thayer said Khem Nuon told him in a telephone interview.  The government was represented at the negotiations by Meas Sopheas, deputy chief of staff of the Cambodian military, Thayer said.

Under the agreement, Thayer said the remaining guerrillas will join the government army and the civilians will return to Anlong Veng. the guerrillas' former stronghold in the north. While it is possible some tiny bands of guerrillas are still wandering the jungles, Thayer said he knew of no sizable Khmer Rouge fighting force that could pose a viable threat to the government.

The Khmer Rouge came to power in April 1975 by overthrowing the U.S:-backed Lon Nol government.

Under the leadership of Pol Pot, they emptied the cities and attempted to turn the country  into an agrarian utopia by herding the population on to collective farms. The experiment was a disaster economically and in human terms. Nearly two million people died of execution, overwork, starvation or disease under the Khmer Rouge until they were ousted from power by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979. They have fought a guerrilla war against successive governments ever since, but wings of their movement began defecting to the government in 1996.

Khmer Rouge push for Hun Sen trial-AP

Khmer Rouge push for Hun Sen trial

(Author's note: The Khmer Rouge would routinely announce spurious and fictional accounts of my visits to their control zones over their radio, often before I had managed to exit their jungle hideouts and file a report. Note this radio broadcast was days after I interviewed Pol Pot and before I had released or published any story regarding my visit or the Pol Pot interview. They, in fact, gave me no documents whatsoever. At this point, they were reduced to using manual typewriters as their headquarters was without even electricity)

Associated Press

October 21, 1997

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) —Khmer Rouge guerrillas said on a radio broadcast Sunday that if they hand over longtime leader Pol Pot for trial before an international tribunal, Cambodia's current leader, Hun Sen, should be tried as well. The guerrillas said they had given American journalist Nate Thayer documents that implicate the Cambodian coup leader in "great crimes."

"Hun Sen has committed crimes, treason and mass killings of Cambodian people," they said. "If the international court arrests Hun Sen, try him along with Pol Pot."

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia 1975-79, killing as many as 2 million people in their ruthless drive to quickly transform the country into a Marxist agrarian society. Hun Sen held power after a Vietnamese invasion overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1979. He controls the country again after deposing his co-prime minister, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, in a July coup.

Khmer Rouge smell victory Cambodian rebels enjoy strong backing by China-By Nate Thayer

Khmer Rouge smell victory

Cambodian rebels enjoy strong backing by China

By Nate Thayer

July 21, 1990

The Associated Press

SIEM REAP PROVINCE, Cambodia — Khmer Rouge guerrillas have seized large areas deep inside Cambodia in recent months and say they will fight as long as needed if they are shut out of a political settlement.

A recent five-week, 450-mile trip through the country's north by this reporter found the Khmer Rouge have strong Chinese support and have stockpiled caches of weapons, ammunition and funds in case foreign aid is cut. The United States announced Wednesday it was withdrawing recognition of the guerrilla coalition dominated by the Communist Khmer Rouge. The coalition also includes the non-Communist forces of Prince Norodom Sihanouk and Son Sann.

The U.S. move was prompted by fears of a return to power of the Khmer Rouge. The Communist group killed hundreds of thousands of people in forced agrarian reform in the 1970s until Vietnam invaded and installed a new government in early 1979.

The 30,000-man Khmer Rouge army already controls hundreds of villages in the country's south, west and north, and it operates in virtually all parts of the country.

In their jungle command posts, senior Khmer Rouge commanders said recently they were stepping up the fight to force the Vietnamese-backed government into political concessions. "The Khmer Rouge have everything they want from China. They don't need any more guns or money," said Col. Khan Savoeun, a commander of Sihanouk's army. "U.S. support for the non-Communists is very important psychologically for the non-Communist resistance. But it means nothing to the Khmer Rouge."

Ta Pok, a Khmer Rouge brigade commander in this northwestern province, said he listened to the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia for news on peace and hoped for progress. But he said the guerrillas cannot wait around for documents to be signed. "The Vietnamese will only listen to strength, and if they don't listen they will lose everything," he said.

The guerrillas have seized large quantities of weapons in recent fighting. Dozens of hidden jungle bases are full of ammunition, and captured heavy weapons were seen in the north.

The Chinese aid is channeled through the Thai border. But as the guerrillas push deeper into the country, they rely on the hidden caches and food from recently seized villages. Thousands of soldiers and civilian supporters were seen moving freely through newly seized areas. Heavy fighting between Khmer Rouge and government troops holed up at several key forward outposts defending Siem Riep city was heard every day. The guerrillas mined roads, attacked supply convoys and overran government artillery bases.  “ We are winning more easily than we expected. There is nothing that can stop us," said Khmer Rouge division commander Mit Lot, in charge of areas around the ancient temples of Angkor Wat in Siem Reap province. "If (Cambodian Prime Minister) Hun Sen is not flexible, we will fight and for sure we will win," he said.

The guerrillas appear to have substantial popular support. Many villagers say the Khmer Rouge are not forcing them to fight, and that they pay those who help carry ammunition and supplies. The guerrillas also pay a high price for rice. However, some villagers said they were afraid to refuse guerrilla requests for help.

As part of preparations in case foreign aid is cut, the Khmer Rouge have seized large gem-mining areas in the south and collect more than $500,000 monthly in taxes from miners, said Western intelligence analysts in Bangkok. In the north, they have created a sophisticated logging operation, trucking teakwood to Thailand. The guerrillas now have a network of thousands of miles of roads snaking from areas under their control to new front lines deep in the interior.

A young rebel relaxes near Ankor Wat: Photo: Nate Thayer

Refugees con Americans with MIA information: AP by Nate Thayer

Refugees con Americans with MIA information

Editor's note: The writer has lived for more than two years along the Thai-Cambodian border, and has been offered numerous artifacts and data about alleged American MlAs in Indochina.

By Nate Thayer

July 21, 1991

Associated Press Writer

BANGKOK, Thailand -"I have bones from dead American pilots," the Cambodian refugee whispered to this reporter, handing over a small packet of teeth, bone chips and a serviceman's identification number. "Is it true I can get $1 million from the Americans?" he asked.

The episode took place recently at a refugee camp along Thailand's eastern border with Cambodia, and the identification turned out not to belong to any of the 2,274 U.S. serviceman missing in action, or MIA, from the Vietnam War. But the offer illustrates the rumors —some based in fact — that have spread for years through rebel-held camps bordering Communist Laos and Cambodia, of huge rewards awaiting those who can show that U.S. servicemen are imprisoned in Indochina or those who can lead to their bodies.

The release of a photo this week purporting to show three U.S. prisoners of war has renewed debate over whether Americans are still held 16 years after the Vietnam War. Families of the three missing men say the men are in the photo. The three countries strongly deny they are holding prisoners. Numerous refugees and guerrillas have emerged from the jungles carrying bones, maps, letters purported to be from U.S. prisoners, and "dogtags" — military identification neckchains. They also talk of foreign captives in jungle hideouts. Refugees are often keen to provide stories about Americans in hopes of enhancing their chances of being resettled in the United States. Guerrillas are eager for cash.

The information is usually passed through relief officials or other foreigners to the U.S. Joint Casualty Resolution Center office at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok. Most is immediately dismissed as fraudulent or irrelevant. The packet which the reporter received at Site 2 was sent to the center, but the identification number did not belong to anyone on the Pentagon's list of Americans missing in action.

Most of the "evidence" turns out to be scams engineered by hucksters and conmen, although some is credible. But none has been proven. No prisoners have been brought out.

Still, many remain convinced that Americans remain captive. Teams of privately funded Americans have offered huge rewards, set up safe houses along the Thai border, and sent agents into remote jungles in efforts to obtain remains or bring back Americans alive.

Billionaire H. Ross Perot in 1986 offered $4.2 million to obtain a videotape purportedly showing POWs in Laos. Many of the private American teams' investigating reports accuse their government of dragging its feet, ignoring. evidence and conspiring to stifle efforts to bring back prisoners.

“American Journalist praised by Khmer Rouge for ‘support’ ”

“American Journalist praised by Khmer Rouge for ‘support’ ”

(Author's note: This was from a KR radio broadcast the day after my interviewing Pol Pot and 4 days before publication of that first inteview in two decades in the Far Eastern Economic Review. Not only did it piss me off, it underscored their cluelessness on any remotelessly effective PR strategy)

The Associated Press

October 20, 1997

Phnom Penh, Cambodia (AP)-The Khmer Rouge yesterday praised an American journalist Saturday who in June was the first outsider to see the group’s notorious leader Pol Pot in 18 years, and said he is back in guerrilla territory interviewing them again.

In a radio broadcast, the radical Marxist guerrillas said their leader Khieu Samphan met with Nate Thayer, a journalist with the Far eastern Economic Review on October 15.

A few of Thayer’s colleagues also were present at the Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng, 190 miles Northwest of Phnom Penh, the announcer said.

Thayer captured international attention in June when he witnessed a show trial  of Pol Pot by the guerrillas he had led for three decades.

Doubts persist, however, as to whether the Khmer Rouge has truly repudiated Pol Pot, or whether Pol Pot staged the trial himself as a propaganda ploy.

“Khieu Samphan thanked Nate Thayer and the international neutral press for taking note of the truth about the struggle of the Cambodian nation and people to reach real real national reconciliation, peace, and democracy,” Saturday’s radio broadcast said.

"The Cambodian nation and people strongly need the support and assistance from the international community in order to realize this very sacred objective."

The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia 1975-79, transforming the country into a vast labor camp, and killed as many as 2 million of the country’s 7 million people through starvation, exhaustion, and execution.

The Khmer Rouge waged a guerrilla war in the countryside after they were ousted by a Vietnamese invasion. The movement began to crumble last year, however, as thousands of war-weary guerrillas began defecting to the government.

Khieu Samphan remains holed up near Anlong Veng with the group’s last hard-liners, who in an attempt to make themselves more palatable to the international community, said they cut their ties with Pol Pot.

In the trial witnessed by Thayer and cameraman David Mckaige, Pol Pot was denounced by his comrades as a murderous traitor and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Khmer Rouge on the move in Cambodia: AP's Nate Thayer spent five weeks with rebels deep in Cambodia

Khmer Rouge on the move in Cambodia

Guerrillas control large chunks of country, target provincial capitals

EDITOR'S NOTE — Associated Press correspondent

Nate Thayer spent five weeks with Cambodian guerrillas deep inside Cambodia, the first Western journalist to make such a trip during the 11-year-old war. This is his report.

By Nate Thayer

The Associated Press

July 18, 1990

NATIONAL HIGHWAY 6, Cambodia — Guerrillas have seized hundreds of villages and military positions in northern Cambodia, forcing the army to fall back and defend besieged provincial capitals.

Evidence of the most significant guerrilla gains in more than 11 years of fighting was clear during a five-week trip with the insurgents that covered 450 miles.

 

The three-party guerrilla coalition, which includes the Communist Khmer Rouge, controls large areas of the north and northwest. The insurgents are shelling and launching commando raids on key provincial capitals.

Senior guerrilla commanders say the attacks are in preparation for full-scale assaults on the cities of Kompong Thorn and Siem Reap, and the ancient temples of Angkor near Siem Reap.

During the trip, hundreds of government artillery shells and rockets landed daily, shaking the paddies of a beautiful rice-growing region engulfed by war. Debris from bridges blown up by guerrillas littered highways. The jungle fighters set up ambushes to attack convoys trying to resupply forward government outposts defending the major urban areas. Guerrilla medics trained in China ran field hospitals, dressing wounds and amputating limbs.

As the guerrillas advance, the world seeks a political solution and worries that the Khmer Rouge, whose bloody regime was overthrown by a Vietnamese invasion in December 1978, may regain power. More than a million Cambodians were killed or died of starvation during 3 1/2 years of Khmer Rouge rule. Khmer Rouge commanders expressed confidence they would capture Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. They used maps to illustrate encirclement from the north, south and west —similar to the strategy in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge defeated the U.S.-backed government of President Lon Nol.

The trip, with an escort of guerrillas loyal to Prince Norodom Sihanouk, leader of the coalition, began on the Thai border and covered three northern provinces. Included was a 30-mile stretch of National Highway 6, a government lifeline to outlying provinces, now in guerrilla hands.

It provided the first independent confirmation of the guerrillas' claims that they have advanced deep inside the country. Thousands of Sihanouk's guerrillas were seen lounging in villages, shopping in bustling markets and manning lines around Kompong Thom, which they said was their next target. Kompong Thom, a strategic crossroads city, is 90 miles north of Phnom Penh.

Sihanoukist rebels advance toward the besieged provincial capital of Kompong Thom. (AP)Photo: Nate Thayer

 In separate attacks, the Khmer Rouge was advancing toward Siem Reap, 200 miles northwest of Phnom Penh, and was within reach of the Angkor temples. "We have taken all the positions around Siem Reap, isolating the town," said Ta Pok, a Khmer Rouge brigade commander interviewed at his jungle base north of the city. "We are winning everywhere we are fighting," said Col. Khan Savoeun, a commander of forces loyal to Sihanouk, Cambodia's former ruler, at headquarters in Stoeung, the de facto capital of what the Sihanoukists call their liberated zone.

In the war's early stages, most guerrillas were in bases along the Thai border and obtaining weapons from China was easy, given Thailand's support for the insurgents. Now the lines have shifted far from the frontier.

The Sihanouk forces and the Khmer Rouge have forged a network of thousands of miles of secret roads and trails into the interior. Convoys of trucks, oxcarts and thousands of civilian supporters were seen daily moving supplies from jungle caches to forward areas. Convoys of Chinese-supplied trucks and captured government vehicles moved freely along sections of provincial highways that were under government control less than a year ago.

More than 50,000 insurgents are fighting an army that has superior firepower, but is mostly conscripts reported to be poorly trained. The guerrilla groups led by Sihanouk and Son Sann are non-Communist, but the Khmer Rouge is by far the strongest. The war took a favorable turn for the guerrillas last fall, when Vietnam withdrew most of its soldiers, leaving the forces of Premier Hun Sen to face the battle-tested guerrillas alone. "Sometimes I think Hun Sen is stupid; you know we don't need to negotiate with him now," said Mit Lot, Khmer Rouge deputy division commander at a base 12 miles from the Angkor Wat ruins. “If they don’t compromise, they will lose everything. At this rate the war will be over by the end of the year," he said.

Although the Khmer Rouge is the most powerful force in the coalition, it seemed clear during the trip that the non-Communists had gained considerable support and scored significant military victories. The Khmer Rouge has little public support because of its history, and that hampers its effectiveness in more heavily populated areas.

Sihanouk's commanders described a raid by 400 commandos who briefly seized Kompong Thom in late June. They destroyed military positions and tested the waters for what guerrilla field commanders said would be a full-scale attack on th provincial capital. Heavy weapons could be seen in place less than five miles from the city and rockets were being fired at Kompong Thom.

The Sihanouk forces claim to control more than 700 towns and villages. A major source of their strength appears to be wide public support for Sihanouk, revered by many as a god-king during his reign. Around Stoeng, on Highway 6 less than a 30- minute drive from Kompong Thom, non-Communists control the largest area of Indochina since the Americans left 15 years ago.

Followers of Sihanouk  have trained hundreds of civilian administrators, teachers and medical personnel and begun an aggressive effort to re-establish Buddhism. Thousands of children were seen attending primary schools. Dozens of Buddhist temples were being refurbished and others built.

While the Sihanoukists and Khmer Rouge are in a loose coalition, tension between the groups was evident. "For the time being, we share common military goals with the Khmer Rouge, but we are in full control here," said Col. Khan Savouen, commander of the Kompong Thom area. "The Khmer Rouge understand strength, and we are very strong in Kompong Thom”

“Cambodian guerrillas advance attack” – Associated Press reporter Nate Thayer

“Cambodian guerrillas advance attack”

EDITOR'S NOTE – Associated Press reporter Nate Thayer was the first to travel in an area of Cambodia where guerrillas have claimed recent victories. Returning, he was wounded by shrapnel from a land mine that destroyed the truck in which he was riding and killed the driver.

By NATE THAYER

Associated Press Writer

October 16, 1989

ROUTE 69, Cambodia (AP) —Following their capture of three towns, Cambodian guerrillas have begun a coordinated attack on the only big town blocking their advance to the strategic city of Sisophon, which is controlled by the Vietnam-installed government. The guerrillas claim they already have taken frontline positions at Svey Chek. The offensive began Saturday, and all day the area reverberated with hundreds of artillery blasts.

More than 1,000 guerrillas were seen Saturday trekking on the roads to Svey Chek from the recently captured towns of Thmar Puok, Banteay Chmar and Kandoul. Following them were convoys of people carrying ammunition and more than 50 ox carts full of ammunition, mortars, rockets and anti-tank weapons.

The Khmer People's National Liberation Front claimed it seized Thmar Puok and Banteay Chmar, along Highway 69 leading to Sisophon, and Kandoul, just west of the highway, days after launching a "general offensive" on Sept. 30. A 16-hour, 94-mile tour Saturday of the towns and several captured artillery bases showed they were firmly under the Liberation Front's control. Field commanders said the Liberation Front was attacking Svey Chek in uncommon coordination with its two partners in the resistance coalition, the Khmer Rouge and the forces of Prince Norodom Sihanouk.

The guerrillas are trying to topple the government Vietnam installed after it invaded Cambodia in late 1978. Their attacks intensified after Vietnam made what it called the pullout of its last troops from Cambodia on Sept. 26. Capturing Sisophon, a major military base for operations in northwestern Cambodia, would be a major victory for the guerrillas, who have not seized any areas of such significance.

The tour began at a Liberation Front base along the Thai border south of the Dong Ruk mountains, where the guerrillas showed off captured equipment — more than 1,000 automatic rifles, heavy machine guns, mortars, many cases of anti-personnel mines and teletype machines with Soviet lettering. The journey into Cambodia was on motorcycles, with about 20 Liberation Front guerrillas. It was slow and grueling, covering roads drenched by monsoon rains. Everywhere were captured artillery positions, virtually all capable of hitting Site 2, the Liberation Front's major civilian base just inside Thailand. Three destroyed tanks, four destroyed heavy trucks and heavy artillery guns were abandoned on the roads. Everywhere were former government soldiers who had defected to the guerrilla side. The three captured towns appeared only lightly defended and there were no signs the guerrillas expected a counteroffensive.

PHOTOGRAPHIES POL POT

PHOTOGRAPHIES POL POT

Excerpts from video of Pol Pot trial. Jungles of Northern Cambodia near Anlong Veng, July 25 1997. In French. Video copyright: Nate Thayer

"Ink':The New Yorker: "Nate Thayer, a thirty-seven-year-old Boston Brahmin with a shaved head and teeth blackened by chewing tobacco, emerged from the Cambodian jungle..."

Ink

The New Yorker

The Talk of the Town

By Philip Gourevitch

August 18, 1997

On Friday, July 25th, Nate Thayer, a thirty-seven-year-old Boston Brahmin with a shaved head and teeth blackened by chewing tobacco, emerged from the Cambodian jungle, having witnessed and recorded on film the Khmer Rouge trial of Pol Pot. Being the first Western journalist to see Pol Pot in nearly two decades was, he said over the telephone from Bangkok last week, the fulfillment of a "life objective." A few years ago, in Phnom Penh, The Cambodian capital, he had given me some indication of what he had endured along the way. By Thayer’s reckoning, over the last ten years he has been the object of several assassination attempts and countless death threats; been taken hostage twice by the Khmer Rouge; seen eight of his personal security guards killed; been hospitalized sixteen times for cerebral malaria; been detained more than ten times by Thai intelligence and Cambodian government troops; and lost hearing in one ear when his vehicle was blown up by a land mine.

Thayer's appetite for the extreme, his gift for shucks-it-ain't nothin' self-dramatization, his readiness to meet armed adversaries with what he calls "superior firepower," and his anti-hair style have won him the nickname Kurtz among the increasingly pampered ranks of contemporary foreign correspondents. Thayer, who speaks Khmer, has said that he feels more attuned to life in Cambodia than in America. Of New York, where he lived, and was mugged, as a teen ager, he says, "Man, I can't control my perimeter there. It's the crazies that I can't deal with." Thayer rarely talks about his family - moneyed New England; Harvard's Thayer Hall; his father, Harry Thayer, a former Ambassador to Singapore - except to ...recall Judge Webster Thayer, who sentenced Sacco and Vanzetti: "Whenever they call me the black sheep of the family, I say, 'What about this fucking guy?

 Whether Thayer’s gnarly macho bluster is more of a gag or pathology, it has served as a useful foil for his intense seriousness as an investigative reporter and political analyst. Since he first turned up, with no journalistic experience, in the refugee camps along the Thai border in 1988, Thayer's muckraking exposed of Cambodia's Jacobean politics have made him not just a chronicler of events but a significant factor in their development. (In a typical story, he found himself alone in a hotel room with a coup plotter, ringed by troops with orders to kill). His principal employer is the Far Eastern Economic Review, but he also contributes to Soldier of Fortune, a magazine which he calls "by far the finest publication of its genre."

 

In 1992, Thayer trekked up the old Ho Chi Minh trail near the border of Vietnam, where he discovered a lost army of anti-communist Montagnards, still loyal to their Saigon and American commanders; he convinced them that the war had been over for seventeen years, and many of them later settled in America. A more recent ‘scientific’ expedition, in search of the Kouprey—a nearly extinct Indochinese bovine species—ended in fiasco, after Thayer and his cohort rode into the jungle on elephants, heavily armed and wearing Donald Duck and Ronald Reagan masks on the backs of their heads to scare off Tigers (the cats tend to attack from the rear).

 

 

In June, when Khmer Rouge radio announced that Pol Pot had been imprisoned, Thayer saw an opportunity to get "the last great interview in Asia." He was broke, so he borrowed the plane fare and set about convincing his Khmer Rouge contacts that they needed to bring a credible witness to Anlong Veng, the jungle redoubt where Pol Pot was being held. With his old friend the cameraman David McKaige, Thayer proceeded through an elaborate underground railroad—“meetings at gas stations, coded phone messages, hotel rooms, waiting”--...into the bush. "I wasn't the first to get into Anlong Veng," he said. "I was the first to get out." Three Westerners had disappeared after venturing into the Khmer Rouge headquarters in the past year or so.

 Thayer never got his interview. Pol Pot, seventy-two years old, and visibly weakened by disease, could not stand on his own, much less speak, when the two-hour trial was over. "Every ounce of his being was struggling to maintain some last vestige of dignity," Thayer said. “You could see his cheeks shaking.” And Thayer, who choked up himself during an interview with Ted Koppel afterward, told me, "It was a tragic thing to watch any human being have to go through that, regardless of what he did to others. I felt great sympathy—and not just for him. My mind raced with the millions of people whose lives were destroyed."

Still, Thayer seems almost to regard the accomplishment of this life goal as old news. The leaders of this summer's coup in Phnom Penh are themselves old Khmer Rouge cadres. "Pol Pot is in jail; the rest of them are in leadership," he said. "They're executing people, and the American government doesn't have the balls to call it a coup, because that would mean cutting off aid, and that's a scandal." To hear him talk, Pol Pot's demise was not the end of the story but the starting point of a new one.—PHILP GOUREVITCH

 

DEPT OF SCOOPS: Where’s the Committee to Protect Journalists from each other?-"Talk of the Town"-The New Yorker

DEPT OF SCOOPS

Where’s the Committee to Protect Journalists from each other?

The New Yorker

May 25, 1998

Talk of the Town

By Philip Gourevitch

A George Foster Peabody Award is the broadcasting world’s version of the Pulitzer, and until last Monday, when the fifty-seventh annual awards ceremony was held, at the Waldorf-Astoria, nobody who was honored with a Peabody had ever spurned the distinction. Then Nate Thayer came to town. Thayer is the thirty-eight-year-old Bangkok-based journalist-adventurer who, last July, obtained one of the great scoops of our time by trekking into the Cambodian jungle, attending the show trial of Pol Pot, and trekking out into Thailand with the whole bizarre spectacle on high-quality videotape. Much of that footage was promptly aired by ABC’s “Nightline” in a three-part series, which went on to win one of this year’s Peabody’s for “distinguished achievement and meritorious public service.” And Thayer went from being the first journalist to meet up with Pol Pot in nearly twenty years to being the first to turn down a Peabody.

 

In a letter “formally and unequivocally” rejecting his share in the award, Thayer wrote, “Ted Koppel and ‘Nightline’ literally stole my work, took credit for it, trivialized it, refused to pay me, and then attempted to bully and extort me when I complained. They should not be rewarded for this kind of behavior and I under no circumstances want my name associated with these egregious violations of basic journalistic ethics and integrity.” So last week’s gala luncheon became a split-level ceremony: upstairs, in the Waldorf’s Grand ballroom, Koppel accepted the trophy—the sixth Peabody of his career—while downstairs, in one of the Waldorf’s many saloons, Thayer pleaded his case to the barman, who set up his double scotches for free, explaining, “I like a man with principles.’

Thayer has no quarrel with the series Koppel anchored, or with the fee of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars that, a month ago, ‘Nightline” finally paid him for the use of his footage. But the deal—which he originally negotiated with Koppel over the phone—was for a one-week exclusive on North American television rights only. As Thayer understood it, that meant that he could sell the remaining world broadcast rights and the potentially lucrative still photographs from his encounter with Pol Pot, and that he retained the print-media exclusive to the story, which he had promised to his longtime employer, the far eastern Economic Review, a Hong Kong-based weekly. Thayer says that he chose to work with Koppel “because of his reputation for integrity” and yet “within twenty-four hours the pictures and the story were all over the place. ABC’s public-relations just took it over.”

 

Even before the first “Nightline program on Pol Pot aired, the network’s promotion teams were shipping out photographs made from Thayer’s footage, and video clips were available on the ABC web site, where anybody could simply download them. “Nightline” also allowed a writer from the Times to preview ten minutes of the footage, with the result that Thayer’s scoop—text and photographs appeared on the paper’s front page before his own article for the Review had gone to press. According to a spokeswoman for ABC, this sort of pre-broadcast publicity is normal, and the network did nothing to violate its agreement. If Thayer thinks otherwise, the spokeswoman says, “It might be that he had no idea that this is what happens when you deal with a large news organization.”

 

Thayer does think otherwise. “My main objection is that the industry has taken control of journalists, and part of our job is to fight for the integrity of our profession,” he said last week over more double scotches in a midtown bar. “I’ve just become incredibly disillusioned over the last year.” Sadly, Thayer’s sense of himself as something of a dinosaur is not inaccurate; in the dangerous pursuit of his stories that have made him famous, he has often needed to trust verbal agreements—even with Khmer Rouge cadres—as a matter of life or death. And nobody in the news business seems to recognize that fact better than Ted Koppel. Last October, at the same Waldorf podium where he would claim his latest Peabody award, Koppel addressed a banquet for the Committee to Protect Journalists, paying homage to reporters who risk “ death, or torture, or imprisonment” in violent places under repressive regimes, and he warned that American journalism was equally endangered.—but “more insidiously”—by “the trivialization of our industry.” He said, “We struggle to be first with the obvious…we’re afraid of the competition; afraid of earning less money; afraid of losing our audience.”

Last week, with the ghost of those words hanging in the hall, Koppel kept his Peabody acceptance speech brief. “Nate has chosen not to accept this award, because he has some profound differences with ABC news, with “Nightline”, with me. I’m sorry about that, genuinely sorry,” he said, adding, “While he rejects this award, I don’t want to reject the enormous contribution he made to bringing the world this story.”

 

It was odd hearing Thayer spoken of as having made a “contribution” to the story that he alone had brought out of the Cambodian Jungles. Finding Pol Pot was his biggest scoop, but for ten years, in one groundbreaking story after another, Thayer has not only chronicled Cambodia’s treacherous political history but also done a good deal to shape it. Early last month, for instance, he got word that the Khmer Rouge leaders who had purged Pol Pot, and were keeping him captive, wanted to turn the aging and sickly boss of the killing fields over to “the Americans” for trial; before an international tribunal. “But they didn’t know any Americans,” Thayer recalled. “Just me. I went back in, and spoke with them, and reported their wishes. The Voice of America’s Khmer-language service led the eight-o’clock news with the story on April 15^th. Pol Pot was listening, and a few hours later he was dead.” Thayer grinned, and ran a big hand over his shiny shaved scalp, his narrow eyes seemed to brighten. “ That’s my award,” he said, and laughed. “ I killed Pol Pot.”---Philip Gourevitch

Cambodia: Doing Its Best to Stop Drugs - Letter to the Editor:The Washington Post

Cambodia: Doing Its Best to Stop Drugs

The Washington Post

August 4, 1997

(What the Ambassador failed to mention was that the United States had banned Theng Bun Ma from entry to the U.S. based on evidence they had gathered he was a drug trafficker. And that in the same statement he reference U.S. State Department spokeseman Nicholas Burns said " We have credible evidence that Theng Bun Ma is heavily involved in drug trafficking.' And that in the days before the Ambassador's letter Bunma had publicly stated that he had been requested and paid Hun Sen $1 million dollars to finance his coup detat weeks earlier on July 5, 1997. And that Hun Sen's official limousines, airplanes, and salary of the Cambodian army was paid for by Theng Bun Ma. And that  Bunma held a diplomat passport as 'economic advisor' to the Ambassador's political Party the CPP, and had paid for the entire official Cambodian state delegation's trip to Washington where CPP party chief Chea Sim met with congressmen, senator's, the State department, and the Pentagon)

Letter to the Editor from Cambodian Ambassador to the United States: Washington Post

 

The Post's July 22 front-page article on Cambodia {"Drug Suspects Bankroll Cambodian Coup Leader"} was biased, defamatory and focuses on the weaknesses of Cambodia's drug enforcement program while ignoring the giant steps forward Cambodia has taken to eradicate drug trafficking. Tying Second Prime Minister Hun Sen to drug trafficking is nonsense.

Even U.S. State Department spokesman Nicolas Burns said recently, "We have no direct evidence that Hun Sen is involved in drug trafficking."

Cambodia is located in an area where drugs from other countries can pass through it by road, river, sea and air. Its border and police agencies are not equipped or fully trained to stop drug movement, but the government does its best to halt this activity with the limited resources it possesses.

Since Cambodia formed its government in late 1993, it has passed a tough, new drug law, reorganized its drug-enforcement unit pursuant to international recommendations, equipped a lab for testing substances for drug content and conducted extensive training for its police and port officials. Cambodia's drug law provides a minimum sentence of 10 years in prison for possession or use of any quantity of any illegal drug.

More than 100 drug traffickers have been arrested and convicted in Cambodia. Last year, roughly 450 acres of marijuana were found and destroyed, and 40 kilos of heroin were seized in transit. Further, 71 kilos of heroin were burned under international supervision.

America, with all its resources, has not wiped out its drug problem or stopped drug entry at its ports. On April 7, 1996, President Clinton said, "The United States government is deeply appreciative of the efforts of the Royal Government of Cambodia to combat illicit narcotics trafficking." After a review of drug transit, he certified that the Cambodian government was fully cooperating with the United States or had taken adequate steps to achieve full compliance with appropriate international laws and programs.

Nate Thayer, the author of The Post's piece on Cambodia, published a version of this article in the Far Eastern Economic Review in November of 1995. At that time an investigation was initiated, and no evidence of official corruption was found. H. E. VAR HUOTH Ambassador Embassy of Cambodia Washington

Holly Harris will spin her blues on 'BOS

Holly Harris will spin her blues on 'BOS

The Boston Globe (Boston, MA)

January 8, 1993 |