Nate Thayer

The Night Pol Pot Died: From the Jungles of Northern Cambodia By Nate Thayer

The Night Pol Pot Died: From the Jungles of Northern Cambodia

By Nate Thayer

(Copyright Nate Thayer. All rights reserved. No publication or transmission in whole or part allowed without express written permission of the author. Excerpts from the unpublished manuscript “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalist’s Memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.”)

I was alone in a hotel the night Pol Pot died, in the small, remote Thai border town of Surin, abutting the Khmer Rouge controlled jungles of Cambodia.

I had been urgently summoned by the Khmer Rouge a few days earlier in a phone call which betrayed no specifics of why they wanted to see me, only that it was urgent. General Khem Nuon, the Khmer Rouge army-chief-of-staff and top field commander for Ta Mok had said only: “What you have been asking for we have agreed to.”

I took that to mean that I had been granted another interview with Pol Pot, but I was to learn it was even more significant. They had decided, as I had been pressing them for months, to turn Pol Pot over to the international community to face a trial.

I was summoned to discuss how to actually handle the logistics of handing over Pol Pot. It was an attempt to play their last card to garner international support and stem metastasizing mutinies and all out warfare raging in their jungles which threatened to finish their organization for the final time.

I had spent several days along the Thai-Cambodian rebel held border discussing their plight and interviewing their top cadre. Earlier that day I had filed a story with my magazine, the Far Eastern Economic Review, on the Khmer Rouge decision to hand over Pol Pot. The Review went to press at 6:00 pm Hong Kong time on Wednesdays—this one being that day--the 15^th of April, 1998.

“We have decided to turn Pol Pot over to the Americans. But we can’t get in touch with the Americans. We discussed it again this morning and Ta Mok agreed. So we want to give him to you,” said the guerrilla commander.

I was, to put it mildly, momentarily flummoxed. What the fuck was I supposed to do with Pol Pot? Put him in the back of the pickup truck and take him to the Far Eastern Economic Review office in Bangkok? It was not part of my job description. I suggested they should promptly get in touch with the International Committee of the Red Cross and gave him the appropriate contact details. “That is a very good idea!” Khem Nuon responded. There were other details, but I knew that the decision to turn over one of the century’s most egregious perpetrators of crimes against humanity to face justice was a very good story indeed.

The magazine released the highlights of the story in a press release that night at 5:00 pm Bangkok time—6:00 pm Hong Kong time. It was picked up immediately by the international wire services and broadcast by the VOA at 8:00 pm Thailand time on their Khmer language service, which Pol Pot listened to every evening.

17 minutes after Pol Pot died—at 10:32 pm on 15 April 1998—my mobile phone rang in my hotel room. Reaching past the half-empty bottle of fake Johnny Walker Black whiskey on the bedside table, I grabbed the remote, muted the volume of CNN blaring on the television, and answered the phone.

“My friend, Pol Pot is dead,” said Gen. Khem Nuon, the KR commander and for months my good friend, in an urgent whisper. “He died a few minutes ago.” He was calling on a Chinese military radio phone from the jungles across the Thai border.

While the Khmer Rouge always whispered, they were rarely breathless. Nuon was desperate and looking for guidance. “What should I do?” he pleaded. “You must tell the Americans and you must come here immediately.” It was an example the murky terrain of my role as a journalist and liaison with the rebels in their final days.

As I listened to the Khmer Rouge army commander, Monica Lewinsky splashed across the muted screen of CNN International Headline news, the world news dominated with the criminal punishment and removal from power of the US president for his indiscrete blow job with a young intern, which would continue to tower over the story of the demise of a man who had been one of the century’s most notorious despots.

General Nuon called, mainly, because he knew I would want to know. He was both a killer and my friend. Nuon always tried his best to be helpful. I had spent countless days and nights over the last months with Nuon explaining how the world worked outside the jungles he had called home for thirty years. His appetite for and curiosity for ideas and the new-fangled world was insatiable. It equaled my thirst for knowledge of his movement, its inner workings and history. He had commanded the troops that overthrew Pol Pot the year before, and therefore risen as the top field commander of all Khmer Rouge troops. With his formidable language skills and new role as chief field commander of rebel troops, he was for the first time able to clandestinely leave the jungles he called home and travel for covert meetings in Thailand, where he was escorted by a special unit of Thai military intelligence operatives who closely monitored the routines, movements, and intentions of the outlawed guerrilla faction. Nuon was also receiving medical treatment in Bangkok at a Thai military facility for a cancerous thyroid. He would always come to my house and, over copious amounts of hot tea with lots of sugar, spend hours talking about life and just to be free from the harsh deprivations of the jungle. He had come to rely on me and me on him as we spent countless days and nights sharing thoughts and information. “We will be friends forever!” he would often say to me with a broad, gentle grin, squeezing my hand and hugging me. He was bright, gentle, hard working, kind, and a natural leader of men. He was also the top armed commander of one of the world’s most brutal political movements. He personified the contradictions within the Khmer Rouge movement that allowed them to be such a formidable political force despite their atrocious human rights record. He represented to me the contradictions in my own mind that I had developed for the Khmer Rouge—on one hand respectable and impressive and on the other hand unspeakably brutal and offensive. I was very fond of Nuon and him of me, despite the fact, in truth, I had grown to collectively detest everything that Cambodia had become.

There was symbiosis in my relationship with the Khmer Rouge: They needed me and I needed them and neither of us trusted each other. While competent jungle fighters, these were peasants, mostly rice farmers turned guerrillas, but their ranks were also filled with the best and the brightest of Cambodia who had fled to the jungles as youth 30 years before to join the revolution. Nuon and most others had no exposure to how the world worked outside the jungle, where most had lived there entire adult lives. They had come to largely rely on me to both interpret it for them and take their message to the outside.

After Nuon called with the news of Pol Pot’s death, I knew I wouldn’t have to tell the Americans that Pol Pot was dead. Moments after I hung up, an American intelligence officer charged with following Khmer Rouge developments called from Bangkok. He wanted to know if I had heard “rumours" that Pol Pot was dead. Nuon’s phone was tapped as I assumed mine was and the American spy wasn’t fooling either of us. It was a game whose rules I had long before learned and understood. But he also knew that a monitored phone conversation between a guerrilla commander and a journalist was insufficient to confirm such an historic event. They, as I, needed proof. To be sure this wasn’t some kind of political trick, someone independent and credible needed to go back to the jungle and provide details and evidence of what had happened. The American wanted me to bring Pol Pot’s body back if possible, he said, or some forensic material. “If you can’t do that, maybe you could cut off one of his fingers,” he suggested seriously, in an only fleetingly embarrassed tone. I told him I would do what I could. He needed to get Washington hard evidence of what had happened in these jungles inaccessible to them, and his crude suggestion didn’t faze me at the time at all. He was a top notch military intelligence officer, very bright, spoke fluent Thai, and had excellent relations with the Thai military.

The Americans had political restraints and could not simply show up at Khmer Rouge field headquarters, but I didn’t. I requested he make a phone call to the Thai military to encourage them to let me cross their borders at dawn with direct permission from the highest command, into the Khmer Rouge zones. The American promised to put in an urgent good word to facilitate my crossing through the heavily guarded Thai military checkpoints, through which all unauthorized persons were forbidden to pass. The road to Anlong Veng was a well hidden dirt path set off a remote road that hugged the unpopulated, jungle-clad Thai Cambodian border marked by a steep mountain escarpment. These rutted narrow paths were bordered by a towering jungle canopy and weaved through eerily silent thick tropical forests void of any human presence. It was a no-man’s land for miles after the last Thai checkpoint and before populated areas of the Khmer Rouge controlled jungle bases in Cambodia. The areas between frontlines are always the most dangerous, fraught with vulnerability from roving bandits, landmines, and ambush from a wide potential cast of characters.

While the Khmer Rouge wanted me to come, and Gen. Nuon controlled the troops at his jungle checkpoints, crossing out of Thailand into Khmer Rouge territory required another set of permissions.

A few moments after I hung up with the American spook, the assistant of the Thai army commander-in-chief called. It was close to midnight now. He said I was granted permission personally from the Thai army commander-in-chief, who I had known personally for years since he was a mid level Special Forces commander, to go out of Thailand to find Pol Pot’s body. The general was highly respected for his professionalism and honesty and previously was in charge of Thailand’s important and complicated efforts during the Cambodian covert war. He then headed army intelligence before rising to overall army commander, one of Thailand’s most powerful positions. His aide gave me the name and mobile phone number of the commander of a highly secret Thai military unit who I knew only by reputation. Regiment 16 was based in a remote location along the border and charged with the extremely sensitive task of controlling all access to and liaison with the Khmer Rouge, escorting them on their forbidden trips to Thailand and entering the Khmer Rouge zones with relative free will. Regiment 16 officially didn’t exist and performed functions Thailand officially denied it didn’t engage in. He said the Colonel was already instructed to meet me at a specific gas station at dawn

Neither the Thais or the Americans wanted to be seen as involved in what surely would be an extremely high profile event that would soon, I knew, dominate world headlines and attract scores of journalists to the border area. The Thais had long denied they had direct dealings with the Khmer Rouge, loathed the periodic public fallout from revelations to the contrary, and were under intense international scrutiny and United Nations official directive to not assist them.

My trip across the border from Surin in Thailand to Khmer Rouge zones was not a new scenario. I had made these forays many times before. And both the Thai and American intelligence officers trusted me. I could have burned them all many times over the years, and I never did.

I never revealed how I accessed the guerrilla zones or who assisted me. I knew which secrets to keep and which ones to spill and they appreciated that. One thing I rarely reported was what means and methods of getting to the story I sought or used which might jeopardize a source. The process was usually full of intrigue and would make a good read, but all officials involved operated covertly and therefore were deeply suspicious of journalists. I never betrayed a promise or source from any faction, agency or government.

By the time of Pol Pot’s death in 1998, no governments, even China, who previously appeared unconcerned with international opinion, could be seen as having friendly—or any—relations with the Khmer Rouge.

But everyone knew I still maintained good contacts with the guerrillas, and as a journalist this was wholly legitimate. Beholden to no one, I could hold the mantle of an independent, neutral journalist around my neck, which I defended proudly and without compromise. I had no political problems with associating with international pariahs and murderers. It started as my job. And I rather enjoyed it. Rogue people and states fascinated me. And then it became my obsession.

But the night of Pol Pot’s death, in many ways, marked when that particular episode of my life’s long efforts were finally over. It was midnight now. Pol Pot was dead. I felt numb mainly, but also relieved. I drank straight whiskey from a glass, re-organized my gear to cross the border in a few hours at dawn. I watched Monica Lewinsky play over and over on CNN, flashbulbs sparking, as she fled into a courthouse, to face the full puissance of the American justice system. It did not elude me that it was a twisted reality that the Lewinsky affairs sordid details of superfluous justice was far more newsworthy than that which had been deemed appropriate for pursuit of Pol Pot, who stood accused of crimes against humanity. It was a fact that when he died, 20 years after his regime, which left 1.7 million people dead--1/4 of the population—in 3 years, 8 months, and 20 days in power, Pol Pot had never been charged by any court with any crime anywhere in the world. When he died he was not formally, in the eyes of international law, a wanted man. In fact, it would have been a violation of his rights, sufficient to have any charges dismissed under international law, if he was captured and held against his will anywhere outside of Cambodia.

I knew that soon Pol Pot would be featured, perhaps not eclipsing but along with Monica, in the world press. It would leak to be a world story within hours. Once leaked, scores of journalists would descend on this Thai border town. I wanted to get in and out of the jungle before the circus began…..

To be continued….

(Copyright Nate Thayer. All rights reserved. No publication or transmission in whole or part allowed without express written permission of the author. Excerpts from the unpublished manuscript “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalist’s Memoir From Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.”)

THE CAMBODIAN CONUNDRUM:U.S. drug policy and U.S. foreign policy interests collide By Nate Thayer

THE CAMBODIAN CONUNDRUM

Cambodia represents a case study of what can happen when U.S. drug policy and U.S. foreign policy interests collide

FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL

March 2002

By Nate Thayer

(This article details the way the U.S. war on drugs is actually played out in the real world, the hypocracy betwwen the rhetoric to hunt down and the reality of giving political protection to the powerful narcotics kingpins. U.S. policy is rarely implemented when the high level drug dealers have politcal protection from governments the U.S. has other wise good relations with. While billions are spent going after the small fish, making the U.S. have the highest percentage of people in prison than any other nation in the world--those in charge of narcotics trafficking are not just untouchable, but protected, and, too often,  given the red-carpet treatment by the American government)

On April 8, 1997, Theng Bunma, Cambodia’s most powerful tycoon, upset at “rude” treatment from airline personnel, marched out onto the tarmac of Cambodia’s Poechentong International Airport, pulled out a Russian K-59 automatic pistol and shot out the tires of the Royal Air Cambodge Boeing 737-400 he had just arrived in from Hong Kong.

Bunma complained that the national airline had lost his luggage and refused to adequately reimburse him: “So I said, ‘If you do not pay me that, I will shoot your airplane—for compensation.’” He added: “If they were my employees, I would have shot them in the head.”

Yet Theng Bunma is no bombastic, small-time thug: He is arguably the most powerful man in Cambodia. “In Khmer we say, ‘He makes the rain. He makes the thunder,” said a senior Cambodian official. “Everybody knows that Theng Bunma can do what he wants.”

Theng Bunma intimidates every Cambodian, from noodle vendors to the Prime Minister. As well as, the record shows, the government of the United States.

“We have reliable reporting that he (Theng Bunma) is closely and heavily involved in drug trafficking in Cambodia,” a state department spokesman, Nicholas burns, said in July 1997.

But that public admission by the United States government was years in coming, and came only after an overwhelming and embarrassing mountain of public evidence emerged through the press, forcing Washington to acknowledge the reality it had long tried to suppress: Cambodia has become a classic narco-state.

Theng Bunma is a poster child for the weakness of America’s so-called war on drugs in narco-states like Cambodia. The record shows that the United States government has gone through years of acrobatics to turn a blind eye to Theng Bunma and his benefactors in the Cambodian government.

The U.S. dilemma is simple: successive administrations have been reluctant to implement strict “zero tolerance” policy directives against governments that protect, abet, and benefit from narcotics traffickers. U.S. law requires that they “decertify” these nations as being cooperative in fighting the drug trade, thus cutting off bilateral aid and, potentially, multilateral aid to these governments. But decertification might, officials argue, derail concomitant attempts to develop otherwise good relations with governments they are trying to nurture as “emerging democracies.” So, in Cambodia, the United States has avoided the mandate on the war on drugs.

It’s not that the United States isn’t aware who Bunma is. “Theng Bunma is a well known figure widely reported to be involved in drug trafficking,” a State Department official said in December 2001. But he also noted that Cambodian “cooperation with the Drug Enforcement Administration remains excellent” and said the U.S. government was pleased with “the reorganization of anti-narcotics coordination” within the Cambodian government.

“Cambodia has taken a number of positive steps,” the official said, citing $460,000 that the U.S. government gave in 2001 to the United Nations Drug Control Program to help Cambodian authorities combat drug trafficking.

Still, the U.S. reluctance to recognize the impunity with which Bunma conducts his international criminal enterprises provides a colorful case study of how organized crime, narcotics trafficking and political corruption, when left unchallenged, undermine fundamental tenets of democracy.

By 1997, Bunma represented the height of political and economic legitimacy in Cambodia. He had twice been elected president of the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce. His Cambodian diplomatic passport described him as “economic advisor” to the head of the ruling Cambodian People’s party. And because of his beneficence to royal charities, he held the high honorific title of “Okna,” bestowed upon him by King Sihanouk.

He is also the country’s single biggest taxpayer and landholder and owns its biggest newspaper. His Thai Boon Roong holding company owns banks, airlines, tobacco concessions, logging concessions, shipping fleets, hotels, casinos, and credit card concessions—among many other legitimate businesses.

With offices in Phnom Penh, Bangkok, and Hong Kong, his company is the single biggest corporate entity in Cambodia. Financial records put his net worth in the billions of dollars.

But that is not the source of Theng Bunma’s power. He is a narcotics trafficker. He runs a multi-billion dollar international criminal syndicate that lavishes money and gifts on Cambodia’s leaders. In turn, he is given political protection by the Cambodian government to do just about anything he wants.

Booming Business

Before the 1990’s, Cambodia was not involved in any significant narcotics activity. It was neither a producing country nor a transshipment route. But in 1991, the DEA began noticing—though not yet intercepting—shipments that left Cambodia and headed into a maze of fishing boats. The first drug shipment abroad identified as having originated in Cambodia, according to international investigators, was in 1993.

“In the last two years, we have seen a dramatic increase in Cambodia being used as a heroin smuggling point,” a senior Bangkok-based DEA official said in 1993. “Our intelligence is now picking up four to six shipments a year” of high grade refined heroin with “a minimum of 300 kilograms. The largest we have detected so far is 800 kilos.” (An interception of 300 kilos—660 pounds—of heroin would rank in the top ten drug busts from the Golden Triangle.)

Regarding Cambodian government anti-drug efforts, the DEA official scoffed:” The only thing hampering them is the weather.”

The formula is simple: Criminal syndicates involved in narcotics trafficking seek out week governments that, through the exchange of corruption money for political protection, allow them to conduct their criminal activities. Cambodia in the early 1990’s was just such a case, and organized crime descended to set up shop.

Bunma came to prominence in Cambodia in the late 1980’s. Though born in Cambodia, he carried fake passports and identity cards that identified him as a citizen of Thailand. And he had plenty of money for Cambodia’s political leadership, including both Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh and Second Prime Minister Hun Sen, political enemies who shared power in an uneasy alliance as the result of United Nations-sponsored democratic elections held in 1993.

In February 1994, U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia Charles Twining invited Finance Minister Sam Rainsy and another senior government official to a private luncheon at his residence. In his living room, Twining turned up the music and lowered his voice. According to Rainsy, Twining offered this warning:”Please tell Ranariddh not to get involved with Theng Bunma because we Americans have evidence that Theng Bunma is involved in drug trafficking.”

Twining, when asked to confirm the conversation, said through an embassy spokesman: “We don’t comment about confidential conversations with a host government.”

Airplanes and Limousines

The United States had reason to worry about penetration of the highest levels of the Cambodian government. Bunma’s many gifts to officials were legendary. In 1993, he paid $1.8 million for Ranariddh’s personal King Air-200 plane and gave Hun Sen the Mercedes limousines that ferried him to official functions. When the government was low on funds in 1994, Bunma underwrote the state budget with several million dollars interest-free “loans.” He paid the entire salary of the Cambodian army during their 1994 dry-season offensive against the Khmer Rouge.

According to one American narcotics official, Cambodia in 1994 was a place where criminal syndicates were “using government planes, helicopters, military trucks, navy boats and soldiers to transport heroin.”

It was also in February 1994—the same month that Twining warned the Cambodian government o distance themselves from Bunma—that the U.S. embassy did the opposite: Bunma was issued a U.S. visa so he could attend the Congressional Prayer Breakfast, with president Clinton the keynote speaker.

Bunma was accompanied by Interior Minister Sin Song, a former Khmer Rouge officer who eight months earlier has led a coup attempt. The two Cambodians were given the red-carpet treatment in Washington. They asked for and were granted a meeting with U.S. officials.

Attending the meeting at the Pentagon, were officials from the CIA, the State Department, the Department of Defense and other agencies. Sin Song, to the shock of the Americans, asked formally for U.S. support for another coup d’état. Bunma identified himself as the “financier” of the effort, according to three officials at the meeting.

In July 1994, a coup was indeed launched, but it too failed.  Sin Song was arrested. So were 33 Thai officials, connected to powerful figures within Thai military circles, who had flown in from Bangkok. Their airline tickets on Cambodian International Airlines were all booked under the credit card of Bunma’s Thai Boon Roong holding company, according to the head of the airline. While dozens were jailed, no action was taken against Bunma.

In August 1994, the opposition newspaper Voice of Khmer Youth published a front-page profile of Bunma, accusing him, among other things, of having been arrested for drug smuggling in 1972. The report said he bribed his way out of jail and fled to Thailand. Less than a week after the article appeared, men in military uniforms gunned down its editor in broad daylight on a busy Phnom Penh street. No one has ever been arrested.

A Fine Line

In March 1995, the U.S. government issued its Narcotics Control Strategy Report, in which the State Department walked a fine line regarding Bunma and Cambodia: “Involvement (in the drug trade) of some leading businessmen with access to the highest levels of government is a known concern. There are indications that some high-level businessmen who give financial support to politicians are involved in heroin smuggling.” No names were given, however.

The report, ironically, outlined the effectiveness of “public diplomacy” in the U.S. war on drugs: “It is in the drug trade’s interest to remain behind the scenes working through corrupt government officials who can maintain a façade of probity and respectability. One of the best ways of routing out drug corruption is to expose it to public scrutiny. Corruption is a threat to any nation’s security, for it allows criminal elements to undermine the legitimacy of the state from within.”

Despite these concerns, the U.S. embassy issued Bunma another visa the following month, this time to accompany the Cambodian head of state, Chea Sim, and his official delegation to Washington. Chea Sim dined with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord, held talks with National Security Council officials and met—at the personal request of Ambassador. Twining—Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., among others.

The entire Cambodian government delegation’s rooms at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington during this visit were reserved for and paid in the name of Theng Bunma, according to the hotel.

Just prior to the U.S. visit, the State Department formally, but secretly, put Bunma on the visa ban list, according to department documents, but decided to issue a de facto waiver so that Bunma, described in his diplomatic passport as an “economic advisor,” could accompany Chea Sim. “We did not want to create problems at the start of what was an important bilateral visit,” said one embassy official.

Grounds for Exclusion

Placing Bunma on the visa blacklist, according to the U.S. government document, was based on State Department provision P2C, which cites section 212 of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Act: “ Controlled substance traffickers…who the consular or immigration officer knows or has reason to believe (are) or (have) been illicit traffickers…(are) excludable.” Bunma was also banned from entering the United States under another State Department provision (code “00”) covering other unspecified “derogatory information.”

“According to our records he (Bunma) does not hold a U.S. visa,” a State Department official said in December. “No determination regarding his eligibility to enter the U.S. can be made prior to his application, but we would obviously take all relevant facts into account.”

In June 1995, after Bunma and Chea Sim had left the United States, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns reiterated longstanding official U.S. policy toward nations who fail to move against drug traffickers: “Governments that reward corruption and that allow trafficker influence to penetrate the highest levels of authority will have difficult relations with the United States.” But he was referring to events in Columbia, not Cambodia, and U.S. officials continued to avoid confronting the Cambodian authorities.

In November 1995, the Far Eastern Economic Review published a cover package entitled “Cambodia: Asia’s New Narco-State?” It detailed Bunma’s involvement in drug trafficking and criminal syndicates. A few days later, Hun Sen, a primary beneficiary of Bunma’s largesse, threatened that “a million demonstrators” might take to the streets to protest foreign interference in Cambodian affairs.

“Diplomats should stay indoors,” he warned. “I cannot guarantee their safety.” The United States sent a special envoy, Kent Wiederman, to try to calm the situation. Wiederman, then deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, emerged from a private meeting with Hun Sen commending his “commitment to human rights and democracy.” The French ambassador, who had just ordered the destruction of sensitive documents because of Hun Sen’s threat, reacted to Wiederman’s praising of Hun Sen by commenting: “What planet did he arrive from?”

On January 7, 1996—at the dedication of the new “Hun Sen park” on the Mekong River, paid for by Bunma—Hun Sen announced his government would “never abandon “ Bunma, “who has helped our party.” On the VIP dais were both Bunma and U.S. charge d’affaires Robert Porter.

Our Intelligence Was Clear

Several months later, a U.S. government regional drug conference was held in Bangkok, with attendees from State, the CIA, the DEA and other agencies. The Phnom Penh embassy official who supervised narcotics issues argued with representatives from other U.S. embassies and agencies who questioned why the U.S. embassy in Cambodia was refusing to acknowledge—let alone confront—Bunma as a drug trafficker.

“Our intelligence was clear and overwhelming that Bunma was a major player,” said a U.S. government official from another embassy who attended the conference. “We couldn’t understand what the Phnom Penh embassy was doing.”

The Phnom Penh embassy cited “suspicions but no proof.” Other American officials involved in narcotics policy were outraged.

On March 1, 1997, in its required annual report to Congress on narcotics, the State Department noted that “Cambodia made significant efforts towards taking control of the drug trafficking and transit problems” in 1996.

But according to Cambodian and Interpol records, the seizure by foreign law-enforcement authorities of drugs originating in Cambodia increased by more than 1,000 percent in 1996 over 1995.

The State Department report added that promises by the Cambodian government to crack down on officials involved in narcotic trafficking or corruption: have thus far yielded no concrete indictments or results.”

Yet they again officially “waived” Cambodia from being decertified as a nation that failed to move against drug trafficking.

The FBI Investigates

Later that month, a terrorist grenade attack targeting Cambodia’s main opposition leader, Sam Rainsy, killed 19 and wounded more than 120 on a bright Sunday morning in a peaceful gathering outside the parliament building. Rainsy was long a vocal critic of Bunma and Hun Sen, publicly linking them to the narcotics trade.

Because an American citizen, and employee of the congressionally-funded International republican Institute, was wounded in the attack, the FBI sent a team to Cambodia to assist the investigation.

A state Department spokesman told me on April 14, 1997, that with regard to drug money supporting the Cambodian government, “we are actively looking into reports that corrupt elements of the military and government may be facilitating drug trafficking, but we are not in a position to comment on those reports.”

By May, the FBI’s preliminary findings had concluded that the terrorists were linked not only to Bunma but to Hun Sen himself. They informed U.S. ambassador Kenneth Quinn that their investigation pointed to some of the prime minister’s top aides, including the head of his personal bodyguards.

Further, the FBI told Quinn, the grenade throwers appeared to be part of a paramilitary unit of assassins who were on the payroll of both the government and Bunma and operated out of one of Bunma’s hotels.

The next step, the FBI said, was to interview Hun Sen and give him a polygraph test. Quinn was not pleased at the potential diplomatic ramifications. Within days, he ordered the FBI team to leave Cambodia, citing “threats” to their safety from the Khmer Rouge. The source of the threats? Hun Sen.

“There is no question our investigation was halted by the highest levels because it was leading to Hun Sen,” said one American law enforcement official directly involved.

Quinn and others in the U.S. government privately argued that Cambodia’s stability was already teetering on the brink of civil war. To continue the FBI investigation to its logical conclusion would push the country over the edge, they contended. (Quinn did not respond to my request for comment).

The departure of the FBI team from Phnom Penh, didn’t, of course, help calm things down. It further bolstered those in the Cambodian government who felt, correctly, that they were capable of intimidating the United States and could act with impunity without harmful diplomatic consequences.

Between the growing fractious deterioration within the Cambodian coalition government, the rising international scrutiny focused directly on Hun Sen from the high-profile grenade attack on Sam Rainsy, and the very public international calls for increased pressure to stem the influence of organized-crime syndicates and drug traffickers over the corrupt Cambodian government, the pressure mounted—and the government imploded.

A bloody coup d’état occurred in early July 1997. The 2.8 billion dollar U.N peacekeeping effort, which began with the signing of the 1991 Paris Peace Accords and culminated in the 1993 elections, was now formally a failure. Civil war had returned. The winners of the election—Ranariddh and his supporters—were ousted from power and in exile; the losers—backers of Hun Sen—had full control. The Khmer Rouge, now allied with the ousted government leaders, was fighting from the jungle. And parliament, the press, opposition politics, a coalition government, and other tenets of the “emerging fragile democracy” had collapsed.

Perhaps no one was happier than Theng Bunma. In an interview shortly after the coup, he boasted of having given millions of dollars in cash and gold to Hun Sen to finance it. “For the clash of 6 July 1997, I called Mr. Hun Sen and I talked to him. I gave him one million dollars to do whatever the control the situation,” said Bunma. “He asked me whether I had the money in Cambodia….I said I would send one hundred kilograms of gold in a plane to Cambodia.”

“I say what Hun Sen did was correct,” Bunma said. “Why? One reason. Take the example of my hotel.” Hun Sen “put three tanks and soldiers around to protect it.”

No Formal Linkage

A few days after this interview appeared in the Washington Post, the U.S. government publicly stated, for the first time, that Theng Bunma was a drug trafficker. But State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns hastened to add that the United States “does not have evidence that links Hun Sen himself, personally, to these accusations of drug trafficking.”

“We think the Cambodian government can do a lot more to purge itself of obvious corruption in the government, of obvious linkages between…members of the government and narco-traffickers,” Burns said.

Burns careful separation of Bunma from Hun Sen was no coincidence. It allowed the State Department to avoid the conclusion that the Cambodian government itself was involved in drug trafficking. Such a conclusion would require the United States to decertify Cambodia, with all its implications—including cutting off bilateral aid and voting against loans from the IMF, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and other multilateral aid. That would have been the death knell for a government that derived almost half its budget in 1996 from such sources.

It was the same reason the U.S. government refused to label the “events” of July a coup d’état. That also would require a cessation of aid to Hun Sen’s government.

In June 1998, the Thais issued an arrest warrant for Bunma, who was charged with fraud for allegedly providing false information to obtain a Thai identity card and passport under two different names. In 1999, criminal charges were brought against Bunma in Hong Kong for falsifying immigration documents. Later the prosecution dropped all charges after the Cambodian Foreign Minister, Hor Nam Hong, presented a diplomatic note citing Bunma’s “top honors and ranks” to the Hong Kong court. “Mr. Theng Bunma has claimed diplomatic immunity through his lawyers. The Royal Government of Cambodia has claimed diplomatic immunity on his behalf,” the court said, “The administration has carefully considered the claims and has concluded that Mr. Theng is entitled to immunity from criminal jurisdiction. In those circumstances, the prosecution has decided to drop the charges,” said the Hong Kong government spokesman

And while the Thai arrest warrants remain open, Bunma’s connections in powerful circles in Thailand have prevented any movement to touch him.

On June 18, 2000, Bunma’s daughter was married to a Thai army officer in a lavish ceremony in Phnom Penh. It was hardly a quiet affair.

The Thai military’s Supreme Commander, Gen. Mongol Ampornpisit, chartered a military plane from Bangkok full of top army officers. Hun Sen’s wife was guest of honor and a witness to the engagement ceremony. Cambodia’s defense Minister Gen. Tea Banh, served as the bride-to-be’s sponsor. The Interior Minister, Sar Kheng, also attended. The Bangkok Post reported that “diamond jewelry and stacks of cash” were presented to the bride and groom.

A “Transit Route”

After the coup of 1997, under pressure from Congress, the United States suspended most of its bilateral aid to Cambodia. According to the State Department’s Narcotics Control Strategy Report released in March 2001, “U.S.-Cambodia bilateral narcotics cooperation is hampered by restrictions on official assistance to the central government that have remained in place since the political disturbances of 1997” and “remained suspended in 2000.”

“Cambodia’s principal involvement in the international narcotics trade is as a transit route for Southeast Asian heroin to overseas markets, including…the United States,” the report says.

The report cites Cambodia’s National Authority for Combating Drugs (NACD) as “playing a central role, provid(ing) more effective measures” and said the NACD had the potential “to become an effective policy and coordination tool for the government.”

The same report also noted that in 2000 the deputy police commissioner had alleged that four senior Cambodian government officials—including the former and current heads of the NACD and a deputy commander-in-chief of the Cambodian military—had accepted bribed from narcotics traffickers.

Nevertheless, a few months later, President Bush removed Cambodia from the list of “major Drug-Producing or Transit Countries.” According to the White House,” The only change in the list from the previous year is the removal of Cambodia.”

“I have removed Cambodia from the major’s list,” said President Bush in a prepared statement dated November 1, 2001. “Cambodia was added to the Majors List in 1996 as a transit country for heroin destined for the United States. In recent years, there has been no evidence of any heroin transiting Cambodia coming to the United States.”

Could it be that no one really wants to look for evidence?

 

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."

Thai Border: A Wild West of Anarchy By Nate Thayer

Thai Border: A Wild West of Anarchy

By Nate Thayer

Phnom Penh Post

Friday, 20 November 1992

BANGKOK, Thailand-Thai officials, black market traders, and U.N. workers who have operated on the Thai-Cambodian border for years say U.N. efforts to impose economic sanctions against the Khmer Rouge will be virtually impossible to enforce.

The U.N. hopes to pressure the Khmer Rouge into rejoining the deadlocked peace process, in part by sealing the 830-kilometer border, where Khmer Rouge timber and gem concessions add millions of dollars a year to the coffers of the powerful guerrilla faction.

Except for a strip of only a few kilometers near the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet, the central government is not in control of most of the border, from the Gulf of Thailand to Laos.

Aside from the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian-Thai frontier is home to a powerful plethora of shady businessmen, rebel groups, warlords, fortune seekers, gangsters, and assorted bad guys who have operated without serious hindrance for generations.

Since the days of the anti-French resistance in the 1940s, Khmer rebels and outlaws have used the sanctuary of the mountain and jungle escarpment to fight whoever was in power in Phnom Penh. Scores of other warlords have maintained small armies that control trading routes.

Since 1979 the border has been home to the three Khmer resistance factions. The signing of peace accords in October 1991 resulted in the factions' foreign backers cutting off all supplies, forcing the groups to seek revenue elsewhere.

Now that there is "peace" in Cambodia, some of the rebel armies have embarked on an orgy of lucrative trading. No longer under the control of their nominal commanders, dozens of separate military units are carving out control of their own plots of Cambodia, selling everything from toothpaste to surface-to-air missiles. While some of the trading ends up in the central coffers of these groups, most is controlled by loosely-monitored bands of independent operators.

With the peace plan mandating that the Cambodian armies disarm and turn their weapons over to the United Nations, many of the soldiers have opted for a more profitable alternative. The frontier has turned into one of the biggest arms bazaars in Asia, with thousands of weapons being sold in recent months.

Arms traders recently offered the Phnom Penh Post a selection of SAM-7 surface-to-air missiles at 280,000 Baht (U.S. $11,200) each. Tanks, helicopters, artillery, and assorted light weaponry and ammunition are also available.

Intelligence officials and black market arms dealers say that the border has attracted representatives of a number of groups from around Asia looking for weapons. They say that the notorious Burmese drug warlord Khun Sa recently purchased two surface-to-air missiles, as did anti-Burmese Karen rebels. Anti-government guerrillas from the Philippines and Sri Lanka have also made inquiries, as have representatives from Sikh separatist organizations in India and Muslim separatists from the Burmese-Bangladeshi border.

"I think you should buy them," said the arms dealer with a look of alarm. "Some of the people I am dealing with seem to be very dangerous people. It is better that you have them all.''

Black market traders on the Thai border, who operate easily with Cambodian guerrillas as well as Thai officials, say that processed heroin is available for sale, as are ancient Khmer artifacts looted from temples, and even uranium.

The border has also turned into a freeway for cars stolen in Thailand and slipped over the border, where hundreds of vehicles have showed up in Phnom Penh to be openly sold in the markets. Some are seen with military license plates of the Phnom Penh regime attached to make transport across western Cambodia less difficult at checkpoints.

Across from southeast Thailand, more than a 100,000 Thais and Burmese have crossed the border to seek their fortune in Khmer Rouge-controlled ruby mines, a major source of income for the faction. The miners say that they can carry out handfuls of gems worth millions of baht in their pocket, and they laugh at the thought that the blue-bereted UN peacekeepers will be able to stop them.

Thai Minister of Parliament Thanit Traivut, who represents the border province of Trat adjoining the Khmer Rouge-controlled gem mines, told the Post that 57 Thai companies now operate in the ruby area, with nearly 1,000 earth-moving vehicles. He said that U.N. sanctions could cause the companies, which have invested more than 3 billion Thai baht on equipment, to lose their shirts.

One rai (1,600 square meters) of earth is leased to the mostly small companies at a cost of 2 million baht (U.S. $40,000). Whole divisions of Khmer Rouge fighters have turned into "economic cadre" to provide security, build roads, and check permission papers of the Thai miners. The miners say that no Cambodians are allowed to work in the area.

On the northern borders, controlled by the notorious one-legged Khmer Rouge commander Ta Mok, Thai logging companies said to be linked with senior members of the Thai military have paid millions of dollars for the right to cut logs in Cambodia.

The Thai government has sold the rights to 17 entry points to Thai companies who in turn are given the right to tax logs coming into Thailand. Senior Thai officials are reportedly on the receiving end of some of the profit.

According to traders, the highly-secret Thai intelligence unit known as 838, which was responsible for covert liaison and weapons supplies to the Khmer Rouge during the 13-year war against the Vietnamese, receives 40 baht (U.S. $1.60) for each cubic meter of wood that crosses into Thailand.

Through a complicated procedure of payoffs, Thai loggers pay fees of around 5,000 baht (U.S. $197) per cubic meter for soft wood, and considerably higher for hardwoods. Several Thai companies, known to be controlled by Thai organized-crime groups, are involved in the logging concessions, with the sanction of several well-known Thai political figures.

Thanit Traivut, in an interview with the Post, said that UNTAC officials have asked Thailand to be prepared to close the border by the end of the year. He said that Thailand "will request to postpone [implementation of sanctions] until next year in order to allow Thai companies to recoup their losses.''

Furthermore, the Phnom Penh regime is involved in buying logs from their enemies-the Khmer Rouge-paying fees to the Khmer Rouge in many areas in order to transport logs through Cambodia, often to the port at Kompong Som. This adds further complications to the effectiveness of U.N. sanctions, which are not directed at the Phnom Penh regime.

In case U.N. officials are looking for reference points to study in their effort to impose the sanctions, they need look no further than the Thai border to the west with Burma.

There Khun Sa, reputed to be the world's number one opium trader and with a U.S. arrest warrant à la Manuel Noriega on his head, controls a section of Burma from which he exports the drug through Thailand.

Despite the efforts of hundreds of U.S. drug and intelligence agents, and with the stated support of both the Thai government and military, the flow of opium and its derivative heroin continues virtually unabated.

One Thai weapons trader, reflecting on the reaction of the Khmer Rouge if the United Nations attempts to cut its purse strings, said: "Right now the Khmer Rouge do not hurt the U.N. But if the U.N. does that, they will have to kill them. You know, they don't like foreigners anyway."

Another Thai arms dealer, with long experience running weapons through Thai borders with several neighboring countries, said: "It will be easy to order sanctions, but impossible to enforce. The order just comes from air-conditioned rooms. But in the field, too many people are making money."

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.

Cambodia: Asia’s New Narco-State? Medellin on the Mekong By Nate Thayer

Cambodia: Asia’s New Narco-State?

Far Eastern Economic Review

COVER STORY (Three story package below)

 23 Nov 1995

Has Cambodia become a mafia state? Nate Thayer reports that in the two years since UN-run elections, criminal syndicates protected by high-ranking have turned the country into a major centre for heroin trafficking and money laundering. Doubly disturbing, some of the same military units accused of killing government opponents are implicated in drug smuggling and other crimes. Western aid donor countries are alarmed. Also: A profile of Theng Bunma, a businessman who has bestowed millions of dollars on the Cambodian regime.

(Authors note: The Review and I were sued by Theng Bunma for this story and I was forced to leave Cambodia for a short while because of serious threats to my life as a consequence of its publication. The U.S, government refused to go on the record that they had identified Bunma as an organized crime figure and drug trafficker, despite innumerable U.S. sources privately, in detail, saying he was. Thailand and Hong Kong, after publication of the below stories, both banned him from entry to their countries and issues criminal warrants for his arrest. Over drinks one night, in what will remain an unnamed remote Asian country, I was expressing frustration to a resident American diplomat at the U.S. refusal to acknowledge publicly Bunma’s status as banned from entry to the U.S. having been formally designated a drug trafficker. I was being sued by Bunma at the time causing considerable distraction. The diplomat responded: “Fuck that. Come to the embassy tomorrow morning. I’ll give you the documents.” I told him I wanted them to give to the Hong Kong court and he—the diplomat-- would be technically committing treason by giving me the classified documents. “Fuck it. You are a U.S. citizen. It is my job to protect American citizens.” I carried with me at the time a copy of Bunma’s Cambodian diplomat and civilian passport as well as his Thai passport under an alias. The next morning, I arrived at the embassy and the very accommodating American diplomat took the passport numbers, punched them into a computer, and up came Bunma’s classified designation as banned from entry to the U.S. based on his designation under two U.S. Immigration criminal classifications: (1) drug trafficker, and (2) “Undesirable person”—which often refers to an organized crime figure. “Which documents would you like?” asked the diplomat. “All of them,” I answered. He pushed print and out spit a U.S. government document, on embassy letterhead, stating Bunma was banned from entry to the U.S. that would appear on any immigration computer on entry to the United States. I turned it over to my lawyers, who turned it over to the Hong Kong court, who turned it over to Bunma’s lawyers. They dropped the lawsuit. I then wrote a follow up story based on the document and the Review printed a graphic photocopy of the official U.S. government document to emphasize the point.  End of story)

CAMBODIA: Medellin on the Mekong:

 

The UN spent $3 billion to lay the foundation for peace and democracy in Cambodia. Now the country's fragile democratic institutions are being subverted by the wealth of drug lords. The REVIEW's Phnom Penh correspondent, Nate Thayer, researched these stories over a four-month period in Cambodia, Thailand, Hong Kong, France and the United States.

It wasn't your typical diplomatic luncheon. In February 1994, U.S. Ambassador Charles Twining invited Cambodian Finance Minister Sam Rainsy and another senior official to dine at his residence in Phnom Penh. Leading them into the living room, Twining turned up the music and lowered his voice.

Then, according to Rainsy, Twining asked him to convey a message to Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh: "Please tell Ranariddh not to get involved with Theng Bunma because we Americans have evidence that Theng Bunma is involved in drug trafficking." The other Cambodian official confirms the account.

The United States ambassador had just named Cambodia's wealthiest businessman, but the allegation didn't shock his listeners. Western governments, international law-enforcement officials and Cambodian sources say businessmen engaged in criminal activities have amassed immense power in Cambodia in the two-and-a-half years since United Nations-run elections. Protected by senior government officials, they've turned Cambodia into a major centre for drug trafficking, money laundering and smuggling.

Although Theng Bunma denies any wrongdoing (see story on page 27), his company has been fined at least twice since 1993 for attempting to smuggle gold and other goods into Cambodia. Yet Bunma holds a Cambodian diplomatic passport issued in January that identifies him as special adviser to National Assembly President Chea Sim. He's a benefactor of both prime ministers: He paid $1.8 million in August 1993 for Ranariddh's Kingair-200 plane and gave Second Prime Minister Hun Sen the Mercedes limousine that ferries him to official functions. He even helped underwrite the 1994 state budget with interest-free loans of several million
dollars--effectively funding the dry-season offensive against the Khmer Rouge, the REVIEW has learned.

Cambodia is a place where, one American official charges, criminal syndicates "are using government planes, helicopters, military trucks, navy boats, and soldiers to transport heroin." Doubly disturbing, some of the same military units involved in drug trafficking have been implicated in political violence, pointing to dangerously close links between crime syndicates and political figures.

The allegations have far-reaching implications for Cambodia, which receives 44% of its $410 million annual budget in aid from Western donor countries. U.S. officials told the REVIEW that Cambodia will join 29 other countries on the Major Narcotics Country list in coming weeks, which could lead to a cut-off of aid.

France has already put Phnom Penh on notice that unless top officers it believes are involved in crime syndicates are removed from the national military police it will stop aiding the force. Australia, meanwhile, is worried by evidence that the navy--which it is assisting--is directly
involved in shipping heroin.

The revelations could cause additional embarrassment to U.S. diplomats, whose government has officially made the fight against drug trafficking a top foreign-policy priority. In late April, Twining's embassy issued a visa to Theng Bunma--the same businessman the ambassador had alleged to be a drug smuggler. Bunma visited the U.S. as part of a delegation headed by Chea Sim, who was acting head of state.

Asked whether he had informed Rainsy of U.S. suspicions about Theng Bunma, Twining said: "We don't comment about confidential conversations with a host government." But his employer, the U.S. State Department, has publicly voiced its worries about Cambodia. In a report on narcotics and Cambodia issued in March, it said "involvement of some leading businessmen with access to the highest levels of government is a known concern. We are not aware of any prosecutions for narcotics-related corruption. There are indications that some high-level military officials and powerful businessmen who give financial support to politicians are
involved in heroin smuggling."

Cambodian sources, international law-enforcement officials and diplomats say numerous senior military and police officers are involved in transporting heroin through Cambodia or protecting the traffic. The drug, originating in the Burmese segment of the Golden Triangle, arrives by
land from Thailand and Laos, or aboard small boats from Thailand. Then most of it is shipped out of Cambodia through ports in the southwestern province of Koh Kong, destined mainly for the U.S. About a third departs through Phnom Penh's Pochentong airport, often destined for Europe.

"It is clear that Cambodia is a new and rapidly increasing trafficking route," says Bengt Juhlin, deputy head of the UN International Drug Control Project regional office in Bangkok. He points to the absence of an effective legal system, lack of resources to combat drug smuggling, and
official corruption. "The presence of the three makes Cambodia very vulnerable."

An added attraction for international criminals is the ease of laundering money in Cambodia. A confidential report prepared this year for the Interior Ministry says that 19 of Phnom Penh's 29 banks are suspected of being fronts for cleaning tainted cash. As the BCCI scandal showed a
few years ago, crooked banks pose a special risk to the international financial system. But it doesn't take a bank to launder--in Cambodia's cash economy, it's easy to unload dirty dollars at restaurants, nightclubs, luxury-goods dealerships and the casino.

"Cambodia is now a mafia state because there are a group of businessmen who consider themselves above the law, who have infiltrated all spheres, all aspects of government, the judiciary, the parliament," says Rainsy, who was sacked from his government post in September 1994 and has just formed an opposition political party. "These people--these politicians--are at least protecting and at worst working for the mafia."

It's a sinister symbiosis. When the influence of crime bosses permeates the apparatus of state, then elements of the security forces can become their tools. Critics say that's happening in Cambodia, compounding the climate of fear created by the government's increasingly heavy-handed treatment of its political opponents. In fact, the two units most frequently cited in connection with political violence and other human-rights abuses--the Defence Ministry's intelligence force and the national military police--are also deeply implicated in smuggling and other crimes, according to international law-enforcement officials and diplomats (see
story on page 30).

That means those who highlight the links between crime bosses and government officials are doubly at risk. In August, after Phnom Penh's popular Morning News published reports about military complicity in heroin smuggling, a hand grenade was thrown in the house of the paper's publisher.

A year earlier, the editor of The Voice of Khmer Youth was shot dead at midday at a busy Phnom Penh intersection. The attack came just days after the newspaper published a detailed biography of Theng Bunma, accusing him of heading a large criminal syndicate whose activities included drug trafficking.

"Cambodia is now like Noriega in Panama. Nobody dares to speak out because they will be killed," says a senior officer in one of Cambodia's security services.

Police Gen. Nouen Souer, the former head of the national police anti-drug unit, is one of the few Cambodian officials to have spoken out publicly about government corruption and the drug trade. After his remarks were published in an August newspaper interview, he received death threats. He has been silent since then.

In the August interview, though, Souer claimed that 600 kilograms of heroin a week were coming through Phnom Penh. "I knew about this, but I couldn't do anything," he said. "The smugglers are rich and have high-ranking officials behind them." Asked who the high-ranking officials were, he replied: "I can't tell you or I will die."

Cambodian sources, international law-enforcement officials and diplomats name several wealthy and well-connected Cambodian businessmen as suspected heads of criminal syndicates. But none is better connected than Theng Bunma, a master at playing both sides of the fence.

In addition to bestowing gifts on the prime ministers, the magnate was linked to a failed July 1994 coup that attempted to shore up the power of some former communist officials who were being marginalized under the new regime. Cambodian and Thai officials say the 33 Thai nationals implicated in the coup plot arrived in Phnom Penh on air tickets booked by Bunma's holding company, the Thai Boon Roong Group. The invoice remains unpaid, however, and Bunma contends the order was unauthorized.

Until this year, Bunma seemed to be content to operate from behind a veil of enforced silence. But on October 15, he was elected president of the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce by a vote of 21-1. That shocked Western donor countries, who were well aware of Bunma's unsavory reputation. "This time they went too far," one Western ambassador in Phnom Penh quoted his U.S. colleague, Twining, as saying.

Twining's discomfort was understandable. His embassy had issued Bunma a visa so he could visit the U.S. in May as part of Chea Sim's delegation. That was 15 months after Twining's warning to Rainsy.

Twining and other U.S. officials refused to comment publicly on why suspected drug traffickers were issued visas, but one U.S. embassy source defends the decision: "We had no firm proof, only suspicions," he says.

But other U.S. government sources close to the issue reject that defence. "The decision was mainly political. We did not want to force a confrontation with a government that we have good relations with," says one official.

When several Thai MPs were put on the U.S. immigration "watch list" last year, barring them from entering the country because of suspected links to drug trafficking, the diplomatic and political fallout was heavy. Yet this time, the effort by diplomats to avoid controversy may have backfired.

To start with, letting suspected Cambodian drug traffickers into the U.S. appears to directly contradict post-Cold War U.S. foreign policy, which calls for "public diplomacy" to expose foreign officials who participate in or protect international crimes such as drug trafficking.

"It is in the drug trade's interest to remain behind the scenes working through corrupt government officials who can maintain a facade of probity and respectability. One of the best ways to routing out drug corruption is to expose it to public scrutiny," says the U.S. Government Narcotics Control Strategy report released by the State Department in March. "Corruption is a threat to any nation's security, for it allows criminal elements to undermine the legitimacy of the State from within."

When Chea Sim came to the U.S., his delegation's rooms at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington on May 8-10 were reserved and paid for in the name of Theng Bunma.

Chea Sim dined with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord, had talks with National Security Council officials, and met Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, according to his official schedule prepared by the State Department. Teng Bunma didn't accompany Chea Sim on his official rounds in Washington, but Rohrabacher was incensed when he learned afterwards that U.S. officials suspected a member of the Cambodian delegation of involvement in the drug trade.

"If Chea Sim was accompanied to the United States by major drug dealers, I would be very upset. Not only upset with the drug dealers, but upset with my own government for not tipping me off," says the congressman, who met Chea Sim on May 10. "The Cold War is over. We have no more excuse to turn a blind eye to this kind of behavior by governments."

President Bill Clinton seems to agree. In a speech marking the 50th anniversary of the UN, he announced that the U.S. was identifying and putting on notice countries that tolerate laundering of drug money, and threatened economic sanctions against governments that failed to crack down.

"President Clinton's speech . . . represents a significant new conception of U.S. foreign policy," Zoe Baird, a member of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, wrote on October 25. "The U.S. may stop supporting a leader who is tolerant of a drug cartel though it
previously supported him because he was a staunch anti-communist. The U.S. may risk embarrassing or destabilizing a government that is weak in rooting out--or protects--terrorists or organized crime."

The Cambodian government protests that it is doing what it can to fight crime. On September 15, it set up a special committee chaired by the prime ministers to combat drug-related crimes. Already, it says it's "closely cooperating with international organizations--such as the UN and  Interpol and with countries such as the U.S. and France--in implementing measure aimed at ferreting out and apprehending criminals, seizing drugs and sending them to the court."

But unless concrete results are visible soon, it may be too late to protect U.S. aid to Cambodia. American officials say it's only a matter of weeks before Cambodia is placed on the Major Narcotics Country list. Once that happens, U.S. law will require that Phnom Penh demonstrate that it has "taken legal and law-enforcement measures to prevent and punish public corruption--especially by senior government officials--that facilitates the production, processing or shipment of narcotic drugs, or that discourages investigation or prosecution of such acts."

If Cambodia cannot satisfy these terms, the U.S. is obliged to consider halting most forms of bilateral assistance, and voting against multilateral assistance programmes such as those of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank--the financial lifeblood of the Cambodian government.

In several cases, countries that failed to meet the criteria were issued U.S. "national-interest waivers" by the White House, sparing them from the full force of sanctions. But Cambodia, which lacks the strategic importance of a country like Pakistan, could conceivably end up on a short list of the countries that have been "decertified" by the U.S: Afghanistan, Burma, Iran, Syria and Nigeria. That would give it virtual outlaw status.

"You don't want to be on that list," says one U.S. official. "Its significance is the loss of assistance, but it's also political. It's like being on the terrorist list."

 

 (Story two)

Sugar Daddy

Businessman emerges as pillar of the regime

 

His name is a household word to Cambodians, from noodle vendors to civil servants. It is synonymous with wealth and power on the streets of Phnom Penh. “In Khmer, we say ‘He makes the rain, he makes the thunder’,” says a senior Cambodian official. “Everybody knows that Theng Bun Ma can do what he wants.”

Theng Bun Ma, a 54-year-old ethnic Chinese, is Cambodia’s richest businessman. But his aura of power doesn’t come from his October 15 election as president of the Cambodian Chamber of Commerce—it comes from his close connection to the country’s political and military elite.

With interests ranging from cigarette distributorship to a casino, Bunma’s company, the Thai Boon Roong Group, is Cambodia’s biggest taxpayer. But he has also showered the leadership with gifts and even helped underwrite the military budget.

Clearly, Bunma has come a long way from the eastern province of Kampong Cham, where he started out as a driver’s assistant on a rural bus line and moved into small trading. “I was young, then I traded rice and ran buses,” he said in a rare interview with a Phnom Penh journalist, “I had contact with Thai’s selling beans, sugar, cement.”

That wasn’t all he traded, according to a detailed biography published in a Phnom Penh newspaper in August 1994. The Voice of Khmer Youth alleges that in 1972, Bunma was arrested in the western city of Battambang, when he tried to smuggle 20 kilos of opium in from Thailand under the hood of his car.

Sentenced to twenty years in prison, Bunma bribed a guard and escaped, it charged. “Using a bamboo stalk as a ladder, he crawled out a prison window (and)…hid in a rice loft. The court issued an arrest warrant for Bunma. From this point on, Bunma took refuge at the Khmer-Thai border,” the newspaper said.

Less than a week after the newspaper printed the biography, its editor was gunned down by men in military uniform in broad daylight on a busy Phnom Penh street. No one has been arrested for the murder.

Bunma said he moved to Thailand in 1972 simply because Khmer Rouge guerrillas were disrupting trade. Whatever the reason for the move, Bunma received a Thai citizenship card on July 8, 1975. The next month he registered Thai Boon Roong as an import-export company with capital of $100,000. “I did business through waterways using ships to transport goods to sell in Vietnam,” Bunma said in the interview.

It was a tumultuous time to be trading with Vietnam, where the south had just fallen to the communists. The Voice of Khmer Youth report said that Bunma used boats to smuggle everything from palm oil to tobacco into the country, returning with Vietnamese girls and well-off Sino-Vietnamese refugees.

Smuggling made Bunma a rich man, the newspaper said. That charge incenses the tycoon, who prepared for the October interview by having an aide tape a patch of traditional Chinese medicine to his chest. “You’ll be asking questions so I am putting this patch on for fear that my energy is not strong enough,” he said. “My heart is not strong.”

Then he lashed out at public accusation that “I am mafia, that I deal in drugs.” Bunma said he made his fortune during the Thai property boon of the 1980’s. “Can the people who do dirty business be equal to me? I sold a piece of land on Sukhumvit (in Bangkok), which I’d bought for $400 million, and I sold it for than $800 million. I bought another piece of land, also in Thailand, for $100 million and I sold it for $470 million. Do people dealing in drugs make that much money?”

Bunma didn’t explain, however, where the initial capital came from. Nor did Thai Boon Roong’s move into real-estate mean an end to smuggling: Cambodian customs officers have fined the company at least twice in recent years for illegally importing goods: One incident in 1993 involved 104 kilograms of gold.

Bunma, who is managing director of the Thai Boon Roong group, said it was a desire to “reconstruct the Khmer nation” that made him one of the first major investors in Cambodia after the country started opening up in 1992. Actually, Bunma was already trading with Cambodia on a massive scale by the late 1980’s, and he helped the army meet its payroll when Soviet and Vietnamese aid ended.

In the early 1990’s, he snapped up hundreds of hectares of property in Phnom Penh and the deep-water port of Sihanoukville. When the government began privatizing its assets, He became a major contributor to the formerly communist ruling party, the Cambodian People’s Party, in the run-up to the 1993 UN-run elections.

Bunma now has major stakes in a wide range of legitimate businesses in Cambodia, including the Mekong bank, the Holiday International casino, the Regency Park hotel-office complex, a daily newspaper and a plywood factory. Thai Boon Roong is partnered with Intercontinental Hotels in building Phnom Penh” first five-star hotel. It also has exclusive distribution rights for Jet brand Indonesian cigarettes in Indochina; business associates say the monopoly nets at least $4 million a month on sales of 100,000 cases.

In the interview, Bunma also talked about owning three Boeing 737 aircraft and “49 pieces of land in Thailand, but I have not had time to construct.”

Bunma’s business skills have earned him his share of admirers. Says one Overseas Chinese Businessman in Phnom Penh: “he keeps his word. There is not a lot of paperwork in the traditional Chinese way of doing business, and he always pays his bills.”

Says another associate: “He is a very shy person, quiet, dignified. There is a physical presence, but he doesn’t swagger. For what it is worth, he is a very doting grandfather.”

One Asian intelligence agency, which has an extensive file on Bunma, mentions that he suffers from diabetes. He speaks Khmer, Thai, and Chinese, but no European languages.

“He is very demanding—he only eats dishes prepared by his wife,” said the newspaper biography. He has been married twice and has ten children—eight sons and two daughters. One son is the director of the Mekong bank; the other runs Sharaton Hotel in Phnom Penh, which houses the casino.

The casino business is perhaps most emblematic of the man, who used to spend his free time gambling on card games even as a small-time trader in sleepy Battambang. Now, according to an Asian intelligence official, “every time he gambles it’s not less than $1 million.”

 

(Story three)

The Storm Troopers

Abuses prompt donor countries to reconsider aid

It wasn’t exactly a clean getaway. When confronted by Phnom Penh’s anti-drug squad early this year, a gang of suspected heroin traffickers opened fire on police and to sanctuary inside a compound belonging to military intelligence on the western edge of the capital.

Was that a sign that the Cambodian Defence Ministry’s feared intelligence force was abandoning its security role for more lucrative pursuits? No, apparently it was just diversifying: On July 13, dissident politician Sam Rainsy’s bodyguards were dragged to the same compound, where they were beaten and threatened.

Diplomats, international law-enforcement officials and human-rights advocates who monitor Cambodia say a disturbing pattern has emerged: The same military and police units responsible for violence against opponents of the government are also the most deeply implicated in criminal activities. These include military intelligence and the national military police, or gendarmerie.

The way crime permeates the apparatus of state is problematic for Western aid donors. It is particularly awkward for France, which is aiding the military police. French officials say they notified the Phnom Penh government in October that unless the commander of the military police—Gen. Kien Savuth—is purged, France will halt its multimillion- dollar programme to train and equipt the force.

Formed during the 1979-1989 Vietnamese occupation and still essentially controlled by the same men, military intelligence and the military police both adapted quickly to life after communism after the signing of the 1991 Cambodian peace agreement. “From the very beginning, these people, in addition to arresting, held people for ransom,” says a former top official of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (Untac), which organized the 1993 elections. “They have been involved in both extortion arrests and political arrests.”

Untac documents implicate the current head of military intelligence, Maj-Gen. Chhum Socheat, in a number of incidents of political intimidation and violence during the run-up to the 1993 election, including the abduction and execution of four opposition-party activists in Battambang, in western Cambodia.

Military intelligence troops have been enforcing a reign of terror in western Cambodia since at least 1991, according to a 1994 report from the UN Centre for Human Rights. The confidential UN report said intelligence units were “making use of wide and uncontrolled powers they enjoy in the province to arrest, detain, interrogate, torture, and execute to carry out, concurrently to their military intelligence work, more lucrative activities.”

Socheat was responsible for the 5^th military region, which covers western Cambodia, at the time.

One UN official assigned to investigate a murder committed by senior military intelligence officers, vented his frustration with their impunity in a March 13, 1993 memo to his superiors: “Is someone going to escape going to trial for cold-blooded murder merely because he is a high-level military figure?” he said. “If so, this Human Rights Officer would prefer someone else tell the sister of the victim.”

The record of the military police, which answers directly to the two prime Ministers, isn’t much better. From 1985 through 1993, Gen. Kien Savuth’s 820-man unit was responsible for Phnom Penh’s security. It was called in by the Prime Minister to put down anti-corruption demonstrations in December 1991. According to the former top Untac official, the unit was directly “implicated in the killings of unarmed demonstrators during the unrest” and “was responsible for numerous cases of ill-treatment of peasants” during other operations.

“because of its record, recommendations were made during the Untac period that it be made among the first units to be demobilized because its very existence was antithetical to the creation of a neutral political environment,” the former official says.

Instead, the unit survived the Untac period and was transformed into a military police force after the election. In October, the gendarmes were used to break up an opposition-party meeting that had been banned by Hun Sen. Earlier, grenades were thrown and more than 30 opposition officials and supporters were hurt.

The nationwide networks of military intelligence and military police give them the means to traffic contraband, Nguon Pen, deputy governor of Stung Treng province, charged in September that planes controlled by the military were flying heroin from the province, which borders Laos, to Phnom Penh. “Who can fight them if some of the crimes are committed by those in the army themselves,” he said.

Military intelligence’s Gen. Socheat and the gendarmerie’s Gen. Savuth have something else in common: links to powerful businessmen. Uniformed and plainclothes gendarmes guard Theng Bunma’s residence in Phnom Penh, and also handle security at the Holiday International casino, which Bunma controls.

In February 1994, gendarmes forcibly evicted hundreds of families from a property owned by Bunma near Phnom Penh and slated for development. Gen. Savuth personally directed the operation, during which scores of villagers were beaten, one child shot to death, and one man taken into custody and executed, according to foreign human-rights investigators.

A record like that has made France balk. “We have officially told the Cambodian government already that if Gen. Kien Savuth is not dismissed, removed as head of the military police, we will not support them anymore. We will be forced to halt our gendarme programme,” a senior French official in Phnom Penh told the REVIEW. “We know very well the truth about this man. We cannot continue to support him.”

Australia, another key donor country in Cambodia, is faced with a similar dilemma. Much of Australia’s military assistance programme is focused on helping Cambodia rebuild its navy. But law enforcement officials say some elements at the navy are deeply involved in criminal syndicates, using naval vessels to transport or protect shipments of heroin and marijuana. “We are very disturbed by some of what we know,” says an Australian official in Phnom Penh.

Cambodia’s main drug export route is the southwestern coastal province of Koh Kong, where former navy chief Adm. Tea Vinh, the younger brother of Defence Minister Tea Banh, wields immense influence. A foreign narcotics official says that since 1991 “our intelligence began picking up four to six shipments a year” of high-grade refined heroin through Koh Kong, with each shipment weighing at least 300 kilograms. That is probably just the tip of the iceberg, he adds. “The only thing hampering them is the weather.”

Not that there isn’t the occasional raid. A combined force of police and customs officials swooped down on a speedboat off Koh Kong on August 11, seizing 71 kilograms of heroin. But two of the arrested smugglers were cops, who quickly fingered their superior officer. “The province of Koh Kong is completely under the control of the mafia,” charges a senior Cambodian government official. “Virtually the entire political structure is involved in illegal activities.’

 

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."

Dying Breath: The inside story of Pol Pot's last days and the disintegration of the movement he created-By Nate Thayer

Dying Breath: The inside story of Pol Pot's last days and the disintegration of the movement he created

------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Nate Thayer in Preah Vihear province

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Far Eastern Economic Review
April 30, 1998

As Pol Pot's body lies bloating 100 metres away in a spartan shack, exhausted Khmer Rouge leaders gather in a jungle-shrouded ammunition depot filled with home-made mines and crude communications equipment. Explosions of heavy artillery and exchanges of automatic-weapons fire echo in the mountains as the Khmer Rouge's remaining guerrillas hold off government troops.

Ta Mok, the movement's strongman, vows to fight on, and blames his longtime comrade-in-arms for the Khmer Rouge's desperate plight. "It is good that Pol Pot is dead. I feel no sorrow," he says. Then he levels a bizarre accusation against the rabidly nationalistic mass murderer: "Pol Pot was a Vietnamese agent. I have the documents."

A young Khmer Rouge fighter, his leaders only metres away, leans close to a visiting reporter and whispers in Khmer: "This movement is finished. Can you get me to America?"

Besieged in dense jungles along the Thai border, the remnants of the Khmer
Rouge are battling for survival in the wake of three weeks of chaotic
defections and the loss of their northern stronghold of Anlong Veng. Having
lost faith in the harsh leadership of Ta Mok, several commanders are
negotiating to defect to the guerrilla forces loyal to deposed Prime Minister
Norodom Ranariddh.

Ta Mok's growing paranoia and isolation were only some of the revelations to
come out of an exclusive tour of shrinking Khmer Rouge-held territory north of
Anlong Veng the day after Pol Pot's death. Khmer Rouge cadres and Pol Pot's
wife recounted the last, ignominious days of his life, as he was moved through
the jungle to escape advancing troops.

There was no visible evidence that the former Cambodian dictator was murdered.
Cadres say he died of a heart attack on the night of April 15. In the days
after his death, Khmer Rouge envoys held secret peace talks in Bangkok with
Cambodian Defence Minister Tea Banh, and had their first direct contact with
U.S. officials in more than two decades. Yet at the same time, Khmer Rouge
holdouts were joining up with Ranariddh's rebel forces, making it likely that
the insurgency will continue as Cambodia prepares for crucial elections in
July.

The Khmer Rouge weren't trying to expose their shaky future when they allowed a REVIEW reporter to enter their territory, but to prove to the world that the architect of Cambodia's killing fields was indeed dead. Leading the way to Pol Pot's house to display the ultimate proof, a cadre warns against stepping off the path. "Be careful, there are mines everywhere."

The sickly-sweet stench of death fills the wooden hut. Fourteen hours have
passed since Pol Pot's demise, and his body is decomposing in the tropical
heat. His face and fingers are covered with purple blotches.

Khmer Rouge leaders insist that Pol Pot, aged 73, died of natural causes.
Already visibly ill and professing to be near death when interviewed by the
REVIEW in October, he had been weakened by a shortage of food and the strain of
being moved around to escape the government offensive. "Pol Pot died of heart
failure," Ta Mok says. "I did not kill him."

That night, Ta Mok had wanted to move Pol Pot to another house for security
reasons. "He was sitting in his chair waiting for the car to come. But he felt
tired. Pol Pot's wife asked him to take a rest. He lay down in his bed. His
wife heard a gasp of air. It was the sound of dying. When she touched him he
had passed away already. It was at 10:15 last night."

There are no signs of foul play, but Pol Pot has a pained expression on his
face, as if he did not die peacefully. One eye is shut and the other half open.
Cotton balls are stuffed up his nostrils to prevent leakage of body fluids. By
his body lie his rattan fan, blue-and-red peasant scarf, bamboo cane and white
plastic sandals. His books and other possessions have been confiscated since he
was ousted by his comrades in an internal power struggle 10 months earlier. Two vases of purple bougainvillea stand at the head of the bed. Otherwise, the room is empty, save for a small short-wave radio.

Pol Pot listened religiously to Voice of America broadcasts on that radio, but
the April 15 news on the Khmer-language service may have been too much to bear. The lead story was the REVIEW's report that Khmer Rouge leaders--desperate for food, medicine and international support--had decided to turn him over to an international tribunal to face trial for crimes against humanity. "He listened to VOA every night, and VOA on Wednesday reported your story at 8 p.m. that he would be turned over to an international court," says Gen. Khem Nuon, the Khmer Rouge army chief-of-staff. "We thought the shock of him hearing this on VOA might have killed him."

A week earlier, Nuon had said that Pol Pot knew of the decision, but now he
says the ageing leader had not been fully informed. "We decided clearly to send
him" to an international court, says Nuon, "but we only told him that we were
in a very difficult situation and perhaps it was better that he go abroad.
Tears came to his eyes when I told him that."

Perched nervously by the deathbed is Pol Pot's wife, a 40-year-old former
ammunition porter for the Khmer Rouge named Muon. Clutching her hand is their 12-year-old daughter, Mul. A peasant woman, Muon says she has never laid eyes on a Westerner before. She corroborates Ta Mok's account of Pol Pot's death. "Last night, he said he felt dizzy. I asked him to lie down. I heard him make a noise. When I went to touch him, he had died."

Pol Pot married her after his first wife went insane in the 1980s as the Khmer
Rouge tried to survive in the jungle after their reign of terror was ended by
invading Vietnamese troops. Muon seems oblivious to her husband's bloodstained past, caught only in the anguish of the present.

"He told me a few weeks ago: 'My father died at 73. I am 73 now. My time is not far away,'" she says. "It was a way of telling me that he was preparing to
die." Reaching down to caress his face, she bursts into tears. "He was always a
good husband. He tried his best to educate the children not to be traitors.
Since I married him in 1985, I never saw him do a bad thing."

Asked about his reputation as a mass-murderer, her lips quiver and she casts a
terrified glance at senior Khmer Rouge cadres hovering nearby. "I know nothing about politics," she says. "It is up to history to judge. That is all I want to say."

She has reason to be terrified. "As to what I will do with his family, I
haven't decided," says Ta Mok. "If I let them go, will they say anything bad
about me? Maybe they might be used by Hun Sen," he says, referring to his
nemesis, the Cambodian premier.

Outside the front door is a small vegetable garden tended by Pol Pot's wife and
daughter; next to it, a freshly dug trench where Pol Pot and his family were
forced to cower as artillery bombarded the jungle redoubt in recent weeks.

Pol Pot's last days were spent in flight and fear of capture--a humiliating end
for the man who ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. According to his wife and
Khmer Rouge leaders, he dyed his hair black on April 10 in a desperate attempt
to avoid capture by mutinying Khmer Rouge troops as he fled to the Dongrek
mountains north of Anlong Veng. "Pol Pot feared that he could be caught. By
dying his hair he was trying to disguise himself. For such a person to do that,
it showed real fear in his mind," says Gen. Nuon.

The guerrillas had been unable to provide their ousted leader with sufficient
food since being forced from their headquarters in late March. "For the last
few weeks he had diarrhoea and we haven't had much food because of the fighting with the traitors," recounts Ta Mok.

As Pol Pot fled, the remnants of the movement he created 38 years ago crumbled before his eyes. A few days before his death, he was being driven with his wife and daughter to a new hideout by Gen. Non Nou, his personal guard. From his blue Toyota Land Cruiser, Pol Pot saw Khmer Rouge civilians--cadres say around 30,000--who had been forced from their fields and villages by government troops and Khmer Rouge defectors.

"When he saw the peasants and our cadres lying by the side of the road with no
food or shelter, he broke down into tears," says Non Nou. His wife echoes the
account, and quotes Pol Pot as saying: "My only wish is that Cambodians stay
united so that Vietnam will not swallow our country." Pol Pot never expressed
any regrets, she says. "What I would like the world to know was that he was a
good man, a patriot, a good father."

Asked how she wanted her father remembered, Pol Pot's only child stands with
her head bowed, eyes downcast and filled with tears. "Now my daughter is not
able to say anything," interjects Muon. "I think she will let history judge her
father."

History will have to, because death has deprived the world of the chance to
judge the man responsible for the deaths of more than 1 million people.

Although Pol Pot has cheated justice, other leaders of that regime remain at
large, including Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, who are sheltering with Ta Mok. Others, such as Keo Pok, Mam Nay and Pol Pot's former brother-in-law, Ieng Sary, have defected with their troops to the government side since 1996.

Although Pol Pot's life will stand as the darkest chapter in Cambodian history,
his death is likely to be just a historical footnote. What's more likely to
affect Cambodia's future is the continuing disintegration of the Khmer Rouge.
This is prompting desperate attempts by what's left of the movement to find
security.

The day after Pol Pot died, senior Khmer Rouge officials travelled to Bangkok,
where they held secret negotiations with Cambodian Defence Minister Tea Banh.
There, they offered for the first time to cooperate with elements of the
Cambodian government. "Yes, we are prepared to negotiate. We are in the
process," says Ta Mok. "But I am not going to be a running dog of Vietnam like
Ieng Sary. In a nutshell, we want to dissolve the Hun Sen government and
establish a national government that includes all national forces."

Interviewed on April 18, one of the chief Khmer Rouge negotiators, Cor Bun
Heng, said of the unprecedented meeting: "It was a good beginning and cordial.
But these things take time." Added the other senior negotiator, Gen. Nuon: "We
believe that the only way out is national reconciliation between all the
parties. We know that the entire Cambodian population wants peace."

What's more, Nuon and Cor Bun Heng said they met secretly on April 17 with
American officials in Bangkok, and laid out their demands for a political
settlement. It was the first official, direct contact between the United States
and the Khmer Rouge for at least two decades. U.S. officials wouldn't comment.

In the jungles, Ta Mok knows that his capture and trial is sought by the
international community. He wants to use Pol Pot's death to wipe the slate
clean. "The world community should stop talking about this now that Pol Pot is dead. It was all Pol Pot. He annihilated many good cadres and destroyed our movement. I hope he suffers after death," he says. He then asks a visiting
reporter to get hold of a satellite telephone for him, sketching a collapsible
phone he has seen. "I want a good telephone. One that I can call anywhere in
the world."

But working the phone will not prevent Ta Mok from rapidly losing the loyalty
of his own commanders. Privately, many of his top officers and cadres hold him responsible for the collapse of the movement since he seized control from Pol Pot last July. "He is very tired," says a senior Khmer Rouge official. "No man can shoulder all the political, diplomatic and military burdens by himself." Others are less kind. "He has no more support from many of his own people," whispers one cadre. "But we don't know where to go. Cambodia has no good leaders."

Fear was in the faces of many leaders and cadres still holed up near the Thai
border--and for good reason. "There may be more traitors, it is normal. But in
the end they will all die," Ta Mok says. He's a man of his word: Three top
commanders arrested with Pol Pot last year were executed in late March because some of the fighters who mutinied were loyal to them. "It was a decision made by the people," Ta Mok shrugs.

He gives the impression of being increasingly out of touch with reality, seeing
enemies everywhere and unwilling to compromise. His brutal tactics are also a
source of unease among his remaining loyalists. "Our movement will only get
stronger. We have sent our forces close to Phnom Penh and they have carried out
their tasks successfully," he says. The "task" he boasts of was the recent
massacre of 22 ethnic Vietnamese, including women and children, in a fishing
village in Kompong Chhnang province.

The REVIEW has learned that many of the estimated 1,600 guerrillas still
nominally under Ta Mok's command have pledged allegiance to the forces loyal to
Ranariddh's Funcinpec party, who occupy nearby jungles. Cadres say that in
negotiations with Funcinpec's Gen. Nyek Bun Chhay, they have pledged loyalty to
Ranariddh's party and agreed to force Ta Mok into "retirement."

Scores of uniformed Funcinpec troops, including senior commanders, are fighting
alongside Ta Mok loyalists north of Anlong Veng. Gen. Meas Sarin, a Funcinpec
commander and governor of Preah Vihear province before Hun Sen's coup in July,
is present at Khmer Rouge headquarters. He says 600 Funcinpec troops are
fighting government forces alongside Ta Mok's commanders. The heavy fighting
nearby is audible during the interview.

This presents a political dilemma for Ranariddh. He has pledged to abide by a
Japanese peace plan that aims to create conditions for Funcinpec to campaign
freely ahead of the July elections--something Hun Sen has resisted. The
Japanese plan specifically calls for the severing of links between Funcinpec
troops and Ta Mok's guerrillas. For the moment, Ranariddh is choosing denial.
"I do not have any cooperative relations with the Khmer Rouge," he said on
April 17. "Rumours currently circulating to the effect that forces loyal to me
are supporting the Khmer Rouge forces in Anlong Veng are not true."

That's not the only obstacle facing Japan and Asean as they try to find a
formula that would allow Ranariddh to return home to campaign for the polls.
The job was already hard enough for the Thai, Philippine and Indonesian foreign
ministers who met King Norodom Sihanouk in Siem Riep in mid-April. But then
Sihanouk made it harder by telling them Ranariddh should pull out of the
elections--and Cambodian politics altogether--and instead prepare to be king,
according to furious Funcinpec members.

Meanwhile, Cambodia's neighbours are becoming increasingly exasperated by the
seemingly endless war. Interviewed in Bangkok, Thai Foreign Minister Surin
Pitsuwan expresses optimism that elections could be held in Cambodia, but also
voices a warning. "Without a resolution to the Cambodian conflict, the region
is being perceived as insecure, unstable. That prevents further cooperation and
development for Asia," he says, pointing to plans to develop the Mekong basin
that are now delicately poised.

China, previously hesitant about taking part in the Mekong's development, is
now willing to participate, Surin says. That means that Cambodia, at the heart
of the Mekong Basin, is now the major remaining obstacle. "The region is being
denied this development by the existing Cambodian conflict," says Surin.
"Certainly, there is a sense of Cambodia fatigue in the international
community. Cambodians should realize that."

KR HARDLINERS- DOWN BUT NOT OUT-By Nate Thayer

KR HARDLINERS- DOWN BUT NOT OUT

Phnom Penh Post

By Nate Thayer

Friday, 04 October 1996

The Khmer Rouge split has brought much attention to the mysterious rebel group's inner workings. Nate Thayer analyses the break-up and assesses where the Pol Pot faction now stands.

AFTER the raw drama and spell-binding intrigue of the unprecedented Khmer Rouge break-away, one thing remains sure: thousands of hardcore troops and commanders remain loyal to Pol Pot. These hardliners, who have long warned against dealing with the enemy, have likely been hardened by recent events.

The schism has pitted Ieng Sary - former Khmer Rouge foreign minister, brother-in-law of Pol Pot, and former No. 4 in the all powerful Standing Committee of the Party - and a group of powerful younger military field commanders, against the old guard leaders and their loyalists. Not since the purges and open warfare of 1978, that led to the Vietnamese invasion and the fall of the KR regime, has the movement's inner-circle been so rocked.

Remaining intact, however, is virtually all of the important KR political leadership and most of its military command structure. These include party supremo Pol Pot, his second in command Nuon Chea, chief of the general staff Ta Mok, and Defense Minister Son Sen.

Mok, who opposed the Paris peace agreements and advocates an aggressive military posture, has seen his power significantly rise as a result of the internal strife. He now directly commands at least 80 percent of the KR troops, though the rank and file remains split, with final alliances not expected to clarify themselves for months.

Though Sary has taken as much as 20 percent of the KR's fighting force, he has not gone over to the Royal Government. Sary's faction has effectively set up an autonomous command with a tenuous agreement of a truce with government forces.

But the rebel faction has removed a major stronghold and leadership base, as well as control of rich gem and timber territory that provided desperately needed cash to the movement's central coffers - a major economic and political blow to the leadership.

In addition, for the first time in 30 years the KR loyalists find themselves without foreign or domestic allies that have been critical to it's survival.

The United Nations, the United States and ASEAN, who all backed the KR-led guerrilla movement prior to the 1991 peace accords, are all now firmly behind the Cambodian government. China halted all support in 1991, and Thailand has gone to lengths to stop cross border traffic and covert assistance to the guerrillas. In addition, their former battlefield allies - the two non-communist factions - are now part of a coalition government and formally at war with the KR.

Pol Pot, known as a brilliant military strategist, saw the writing on the wall in 1992, and warned his comrades of impending danger: "While Democratic Kampuchea has indeed now become strong, without others to be with it, Democratic Kampuchea cannot be strong all on it's own. When these guys...leave Democratic Kampuchea on it's own, it is possible for us to be weakened. Once that happens, they will attack the DK and drag the other forces into joining with Phnom Penh. It would become an alliance between the West, the Youn [Vietnamese], the contemptible puppets and two of the three parties. If this were to be the situation, then the Chinese, the Thai, and ASEAN would all accept it whether they liked it or not...the forces sustaining us would be enfeebled, which would lead to our being isolated and attacked." He termed it "a life and death struggle".

The scenario that Pol Pot described as his faction's worst nightmare is precisely the situation they face now, many analysts say, and is key to the pressures which contributed to his movement's implosion.

Since 1992, when the KR pulled out of the UN-sponsored election they have attempted to become self sufficient, relying on timber and gem trading for new resources. The breakaway faction has taken with them control of the most lucrative area. In 1993, at least 57 Thai companies were operating over 1,000 earth moving vehicles in KR-controlled ruby regions of Pailin, with more than three billion baht invested, according to then Thai MP Thanit Traivut. Western intelligence and Thai businessmen put the guerrillas' monthly gem profits at $10 million from Pailin alone, until the early 1990's.

In a speech to senior cadre before the peace agreement, Pol Pot explained the importance of Pailin: "Our state does not currently have sufficient capital either to expand its strength or enlarge the army. We are spending many tens of millions of baht to augment the assistance of our foreign friends, but that is still not enough and there are many shortages. It is thus imperative that we find ways to develop the natural resources that exist in our liberated and semi-liberated zones as assets to be utilized in the fight the aggressor enemy."

ORIGINS OF THE CURRENT CONFLICT

It was a centrally-ordered directive by the senior leadership in recent months to re-seize control over resources in Pailin that sparked the crisis.

Importantly, KR radio - still in the hands of the loyalists - and the rebel radio provided important and accurate details of the origins of the split.

While often used for propaganda, KR radio also serves as a vital communication link to the rank and file. References to its importance are often cited in internal KR documents.

Between radio broadcasts, intelligence reports, and guerrilla and loyalist sources, the origins of the split are relatively clear. There are several important factors.

Firstly, there are long personality disputes among the leadership that have simmered for years. Particularly, Ieng Sary was in fact purged from all positions of political importance within the organization more than six years ago. While he continued to live in DK zones, he was in many ways a minor figure. It was the younger field commanders, Y Chhien in particular, who held the real power.

Secondly, the KR, in the aftermath of the failed Paris Agreements, the cut off of foreign assistance, and the loss of their former Cambodian allies to a government coalition, are suffering from an increase in "regional fiefdoms". In areas like Pailin the large amount of trading in valuable resources has made many ordinary KR cadre, soldiers and civilians relatively wealthy - and reluctant to go back to the times of warfare and central control by the DK leadership.

Thirdly, because of the cut-off of foreign assistance and pressure on cross border trade with Thailand, the KR leadership increasingly is in need of cash and was trying to consolidate central control of resources and political loyalty.

Furthermore, the massive trading with Cambodians from government territory and Thais has left sectors such as Pailin vulnerable to infiltration by enemy operatives. Senior KR sources say they have been suspicious of locating important bases at Pailin since at least 1990, when they began detecting radio emissions not under their authorization. The brief government military capture at Pailin in 1994 was blamed by senior KR officials on government special forces units and other "spies" posing as businesspeople.

The split erupted publicly on 6 August when KR radio called for the arrest and "destruction of the traitors", naming Ieng Sary, 450 Division commander Sok Pheap and 415 commander Y Chhien.

Ieng Sary, in a rebuttal broadcast over government radio, called Pol Pot "the cruelest and most savage murderer", and also condemned Ta Mok and Son Sen.

On 7 August, the DK radio again denounced Sary as a traitor, accusing him of embezzling millions of baht from the movement to lavish on himself and his family.

On Aug 8, the loyalist radio called for the arrest of Chhien for spying and stealing party coffers.

Importantly, the radio also said "this Chhien and a couple of his thugs, such as the named Nhoek, Lanh, and Khieu, threatened to arrest, in a pseudo coup, the NADK supreme command representatives... This open offense and threat to arrest the supreme command representatives took place on the morning of 6 August."

The rebel faction shot back, announcing loyalty "to support our leader" Ieng Sary and "deny[ing] our support to Son Sen who is not our leader who confiscated possessions, such as ox-carts".

The rebel broadcast also referred to Son Sen accusing "patriotic fighters...such as the late comrade in arms Hoem and Mich, of being traitors.."

Many aspects of the radio reports were confirmed by Khmer Rouge loyalist and rebel sources, and the radio was used, during this crisis, as a means to communicate with the rank and file to attempt to explain the events and halt the erosion of unity within the ranks.

The spoils of rubies and timber sparked an internal party conflict that has escalated to what we have today. In essence, the Khmer Rouge military leadership, including Ta Mok, Son Sen and Nuon Chea, attempted in recent months to re-assert central control over elements in the army in control of the Pailin sector. These forces, particularly Chhien and his allies, balked, and the confrontation escalated.

Furthermore, the rebels' reference to the "late comrade in arms" Mich of being a traitor suggest a purge was under way prior to the open split. Mich served as a senior military chief of Front 250, elements of which joined the rebels.

The government reference to Chhien and a "couple of his thugs" attempting to arrest the leadership is a direct reference to younger field commanders seeking to arrest Ta Mok, Nuon Chea, Son Sen, and Nikon after the attempt to seize control over the area in early August.

What is clear is that the rift had virtually nothing to do with politics, and even less to do with factions of the KR defecting to the royal government, which was decidedly a spectator - although beneficiary - to the events.

IENG SARY AND LEADERSHIP CONFLICTS

Ieng Sary - a long-standing member of the Communist Party standing committee, foreign minister and deputy prime minister during the DK years in power, and the key liaison for all Chinese military and financial aid throughout the guerrilla war of the 1980s - was stripped of power in a bitter break with the organization many years ago.

His fall came after years of friction, much of it based on personality conflicts.

As foreign minister during the KR rule, most of the intellectuals who came back to Cambodia after the KR victory in 1975 were under his charge. Hundreds perished, and many more were kept in reeducation camps or were forced to do menial work in state ministries.

When the KR retreated to the jungle in 1979 after its overthrow by the Vietnamese, Sary caused a major rift within the leadership by acknowledging to a reporter the existence of the Toul Sleng torture center in which at least 16,000 people were interrogated and executed - mostly party cadre and their families. Sary was denounced in internal party meetings for violating a key tenet of the KR - to never make public statements not sanctioned by the leadership.

But Sary had the support of the Chinese, who insisted that all their assistance be passed through him. As a result, he was effectively in charge of distributing weapons and money throughout the 1980s, a role which gave him concrete power. But he is known to have had several disputes with Pol Pot, and to have angered field commanders and political cadre with his autocratic style and abrasive personality. When the signing of the Paris agreements ended all Chinese covert aid in 1991, his influence effectively ceased.

Ousted from the Standing Committee of the Communist Party around 1989, Sary was no longer invited to high level meetings, according to KR officials. In a late 1992 meeting between Pol Pot and another senior official, Pol Pot agreed with criticism of Sary, saying "I have known for a long time that Ieng Sary was a bad leader", according to sources close to the faction.

KR sources say that serious rifts between Sary and the leadership began in 1986, "when one guy who was in charge of security for Ieng Sary organized a bandit attack with some Thais at Pailin and stole millions of dollars," according to one source.

Many Khmer Rouge intellectuals complained bitterly about Ieng Sary's abrasive personality. "We have a saying in Cambodian that people had to 'walk like a duck' around Ieng Sary and his wife. If they dropped something, someone else picked it up. They complained about the quality of the food. Their servants were nervous and obsequious, like around a king. It was very feudalistic," says one source close to the KR leaders.

"In 1993, Ieng Say still lived in Thailand in a very nice home built with DK money. That was denounced by the leadership. While others suffered in the jungle, he lived in a nice home in Thailand."

During the 1980's, most of the KR intellectuals were based at Phnom Malai, in areas under Sary's influence. But in the early 1990's, almost all of the political leadership, including the foreign affairs staff, young intellectuals, and Khieu Samphan and the office of the president of Democratic Kampuchea, moved north to the base of Phnom Chhat. Under the control of So Hong, commander of sector 102 and the nephew of Pol Pot, it served as a major base for the leadership until it was overrun by government forces in a surprise attack in August 1993.

While Sary is held responsible for the deaths of many intellectuals during his tenure as DK foreign minister, Cambodian scholar Steve Heder points out that some of the only ones who survived were those directly under his charge. Department heads in the Foreign Ministry during the Khmer Rouge rule included Suong Sikoeun (who joined Sary's breakaway in August), Kiet Chhon (who defected in 1993 and is the current Finance Minister), Thionn Prasith (former KR ambassador to the UN through the 1980s until his retirement), Long Norin (who is with Sary's breakaway), Ok Sokhun (KR ambassador in Paris until the embassy was turned over to the government after the Paris agreements), Pech Bun Ret (who remains with the loyalists), and Chan Youran (the current DK "foreign minister"). Such survival rates among these intellectuals, who had all been named to the security services at Toul Sleng as traitors, suggests that Ieng Sary was able to protect them from the purges that claimed many of their colleagues.

THE REAL POWER

Many KR sources say that by far the most important defector, rather than Sary, was military commander Lt. Gen. Y Chhien, who, as officer in charge of Pailin, controlled crack troops and the lucrative gem and logging trade with nearby Thailand.

"Officially Chhien should be under Ieng Sary, but many believe that Chhien now controls Ieng Sary," said one source close to the KR. "He controls concrete forces - troops and money."

Chhien "was said to be a protégé of Pol Pot", says scholar Heder. "He was responsible for the personal security of both Pol Pot and Nuon Chea," according to the confession of senior Khmer Rouge official executed at Toul Sleng prison in 1977. In 1977, he accompanied then Foreign Minister Ieng Sary on an officials visit to Rangoon, in the capacity of "bodyguard".

By 1981, he was identified as Division 415 commander, and in 1991 promoted to overall Pailin sector commander - equivalent of a governor, civilian administrator, military commander and economic czar.

It was a role that gave him great influence, and one that would be bestowed on someone with the total confidence of the leadership, including Pol Pot. Chhien was viewed as one of a rising group of six or seven younger commanders being groomed for taking over the movement.

Sary's daughter, a graduate of the State University of New York at Stony Brook in the late 1980s, is married to a top lieutenant of Chhien.

"Both Sok Pheap and Chhien had a high degree of interaction with the international community. They had extensive contact with Thais and other foreigners," said Heder. "Elements of both Divisions voted in the UNTAC elections, against the directive of the leadership."

On the other side of the KR, perhaps the most key military man is Ta Mok

The number three on the standing committee and Chief of the General Staff of the army, has seen his influence considerably enlarged since the UN peace agreements. He increased his control from 6 to 12 divisions in 1992, and is responsible for troops from the northwestern Thai border throughout the north and the entire east of the country on the Vietnam border.

This gave him control of perhaps 70 percent of the Khmer Rouge army. But one of the consequences of the recent split is the marked rise in influence of Ta Mok in the wake of the loss of Pailin. Now more than 80 percent - and perhaps as much as 90 percent - of the remaining troops are under his direct command.

Ta Mok, otherwise known as Chhit Choeun, studied Buddhism when young, and reached the status of "Lok Kru Achhar". He took over his father's lumber business and was described as "bright".

According to a senior KR official in 1977, Ta Mok "made vital contributions...by building up a solidly reliable base. He was able to build up military strength in every sector", "throngs of people supported him" and "he was able to build up massive armed forces rapidly" and "went down personally to lead the military". But, continued Non Suon, who was later executed at S-21, Ta Mok had "shortcomings"; "he thinks only his zone is important" and "is quick to become angry, even furious...his attitude is displayed in loud rages and cursing. A lot of other cadre have been cursed out by him". Non Suon continued to say Mok has a "boastful personality and clings stubbornly to his understanding of things. Whatever he says has to be done, is to be done. If this is not curbed in time he could be transformed into an authoritarian strongman."

THE NUMBERS GAME

While Prime Minister Hun Sen said in August that the two commanders Chhien and Sok Pheap would bring 3,000 troops to defect to the government, analysts urged caution, and the intelligence figures suggest otherwise.

In August 1991, the NADK formally submitted military organization charts to the UN, in accordance with the agreements reached in Paris. They said that 415 division had a strength including combatants, guerrillas (militia), and porters of 1,200 men and women. In 1992, UN military intelligence put the real number under arms at about 400. In internal documents of the RCAF's 2nd bureau responsible for military intelligence dated June 1995 put the troop strength at 350.

For division 450, the August 1991 NADK official figure was 1,635 (of which the DK said about 65 percent were under arms). UNTAC estimates in 1993 put the figure at 400, and the later RCAF internal intelligence documents reported about 300 under arms.

Whichever way one analyses it, the figures bandied about by the government of late can be dismissed as propaganda.

For overall figures of DK armed strength, their formal submissions to UNTAC in August 1991 was 25,175 combatants and porters plus 2,510 guerrillas, of which 65 percent - or about 18,874 - under arms. These figures are consistent with the upper ranges of State of Cambodia and Vietnamese intelligence estimates at the time. In the mid-1992 UNTAC's "guestimate" was about 10,000 KR under arms. But after the DK's withdrawal from the peace process, they began a central directive of remobilization of troops. By December 1992, UNTAC had increased their estimates to 15,000 under arms. In June 1995, RCAF intelligence put the KR strength at 4,750 regular forces, with militia bringing the total to 8,500.

Using the government own intelligence figures, the two divisions comprise approximately 800 soldiers, or between 10 and 20 percent of the entire KR fighting force.

But the KR leadership is not only short of friends and money, but also ammunition. The group has ordered all soldiers and civilians to meet a quota of homemade bamboo stakes and other crude weapons since last year. In an internal strategy document from the leadership to cadre earlier this year, the leadership spoke of "The strategic weapons that we call our main forces, sharp pointed soldiers, which are punji sticks, poison punji sticks, and booby traps...machetes, axes, and knives are locally abundant."

THE FUTURE

While the internal split within the movement has caused concrete damage and is a major propaganda victory for the government, it is much too early to count the KR out.

Virtually the entire KR political leadership, and much of its military command, is intact. The entire northern command structure - which has successfully defeated all government attempts to destroy it in recent years - is largely unaffected. It is this area that the leadership moved its political operations several years ago.

It is cogent to remember that the Sary's forces have given no sincere indication that they are willing to join the government, or indeed that peace and national reconciliation was ever their aim in breaking away.

In scores of interviews with defectors by this reporter in recent years, few cited political disagreements with the KR as a motive for leaving. Most said that they were treated well by the commanders and were proud of their role in defending the country against the Vietnamese threat. That is the case with those loyal to the Pailin commanders.

It is likely that, for the time being, the Pailin rebels will remain a "third force" - with a shaky tactical alliance with the government - unless a confrontation between the new "allies" is forced.

For the rest of the KR, many government officials acknowledge that they have little to offer in the eyes of the average guerrilla, and that life in the "liberated zones" is often better than that of his counterpart across government front lines.

Hardline KR elements - who have long advocated no contacts with the enemy and who support an increase in guerrilla warfare and terrorism - are now in greater control of their faction.

In a 1994 KR document issued to northern forces, Ta Mok warned: "We have continued to exist with them, eat with them, peacefully allied with them to the point that some of our cadres and ranks have been repeatedly put in danger... in some of our units, enemy elements comprise 50-60 percent."

Ta Mok warned that "pacifism has entered our cadres" and that "there is a confusion, a blending our essence and our enemies."

He reminded cadre of "our absolute duty to smash and sweep away the enemy."

An October 1995 internal KR military strategy document outlined their emphasis on avoiding "tricks of the enemies", especially the "peaceful relationship scheme".

The document also urged the KR to target foreigners, particularly Americans.

"The resistance forces are everywhere. We can attack the two heads and their American boss everywhere. We can cut highway four anywhere, any bridge, any culvert on the road. We are going to cut it over and over until the two-headed government will not be able to use it and until the Americans and their construction on highway four turn their tails and run back to Phnom Penh...the short reminder of historical events is nothing more than a desire to caution that the strategic supply lines are the life and death key to winning or losing a war...cut the enemy' throat! Cut the enemy's throat! Cut the enemy's blood arteries! Tragic fit, tragic death to all enemies near and far!"

The US Army has detachments of military engineering units involved in road construction on Route 4 and special forces units training Cambodian deminers elsewhere in Cambodia. Western intelligence sources say they have information that the KR are targeting Westerners in Cambodia, and have issued at least three confidential "threat alerts" in recent months.

Similarly, other internal documents and references on radio push the same line: that the KR must guard against all enemies, and remain at a distance from corrupting influences.

One document said: "Our first responsibility is we must be clean. Our major responsibility is to clean up our act. We must be clean. Our ranks, especially our cadre, must be clean, our skin clear, free of all smell, no peaceful relationship scheme, no spying activity, no internal undermining, nothing to be compromised at all..."

With the recent events, those elements of the KR who have been warning of the "peaceful relationship scheme" are likely to be saying "I told you so" - and be that much more intent to strengthen their hands with the remaining ranks.

 

(Nate Thayer, correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, is currently a Visiting Scholar and Fellow at the School of Advanced International Studies, Foreign Policy Institute, Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC.)

Help Wanted:Forces loyal to the deposed Premier Prince Norodom Ranariddh are regrouping-By Nate Thayer

Help Wanted:Forces loyal to the deposed Premier Prince Norodom Ranariddh are regrouping. But to hold out against Co-Premier Hun Sen's army, they will need foreign assistance-which doesn't seem forthcoming.

              After the July 5 coup, the REVIEW's Nate Thayer
              crossed the frontline in Cambodia's emerging
              civil war. Over the next nine days, he travelled
              through both government and resistance
              strongholds, covering 110 kilometres in a
              military jeep escorted by armoured personnel
              carriers. Thayer got a ring-side view of the
              fighting across the northern and northwestern
              regions of the country. He interviewed dozens of
              commanders and soldiers representing both sides,
              including Gen. Khan Savoeun, now commanding the
              resistance fighters, and Gen. Serei Kosal, one
              of the two men most wanted by Second Prime
              Minister Hun Sen.
              -------------------------------------------------
                  By Nate Thayer in Phnom Penh and Samrong,
                            northwestern Cambodia

              Far Eastern Economic Review
              -------------------------------------------------
                                July 24, 1997

              My name is Number Sixteen." The coded message,
              delivered to a mobile-phone number on July 11,
              brought this reporter in contact with Gen. Serei
              Kosal, one of the two most-wanted men in
              Cambodia. Loyal to ousted First Prime Minister
              Prince Norodom Ranariddh, Serei Kosal had
              escaped from Phnom Penh hours after the July 5
              coup by Second Prime Minister Hun Sen.

              Now he was in a secret base in northwestern
              Cambodia, not far from Poipet, on the Thai
              border. Tired, frightened and cut off from other
              commanders of forces loyal to Ranariddh's
              royalist Funcinpec party, the general is
              nonetheless determined to keep fighting. If Hun
              Sen's Cambodian People's Party doesn't agree to
              a negotiated settlement, he says, "we will fight
              them to the end."

              As Hun Sen consolidated his grip over Phnom Penh
              in the second week of July, thousands of
              resistance fighters were regrouping in the
              country's northern and northwestern provinces,
              where they still control some territory. From
              here, they hope to mount a political and
              military counterattack against Hun Sen's
              Cambodian People's Party.

              It won't be easy. For any kind of fightback, the
              Ranariddh loyalists will need ammunition and
              food-and the support of the international
              community. Serei Kosal ticks off a wish-list:
              "We need mosquito nets, Icom [radios], canned
              fish and rice." All that, plus ammunition. "It
              is necessary for us to take out bridges and send
              out small units to practise guerrilla warfare,"
              he explains.

              The general's position appears hopeless to some
              observers. CPP commanders in Phnom Penh and Siem
              Reap are confident it is only a matter of time
              before Funcinpec forces surrender. There is a
              palpable sense of fear in the
              resistance-controlled areas, as thousands of
              refugees arrive daily from other parts of the
              country, with stories of arrests and executions
              conducted by CPP forces. Many refugees carry
              their passports, hoping to find a way out of the
              country.

              But Serei Kosal insists the end is nowhere near
              nigh. "Now the situation is much easier than
              when we fought the Vietnamese," he says.

              Certainly, the Funcinpec forces are better
              manned and armed than they were during the 1980s
              when, along with the Khmer Rouge, they waged a
              guerrilla war against the Vietnam-backed regime.
              Funcinpec commanders claim to have at least
              10,000 armed men-and CPP commanders agree that
              figure is realistic. In addition, travelling in
              Funcinpec-held territory, this reporter saw at
              least 12 tanks, 30 heavy artillery pieces and
              several armoured personnel carriers.

              But the Funcinpec commanders concede that their
              forces are perilously short on ammunition. And
              support from the Khmer Rouge-who have 3,000
              fighters each in the north and west-may not be
              enough to fight the larger, better-equipped CPP
              forces. "We need help from our foreign friends,"
              says Serei Kosal.

              On that front, he's had little cheer. To be
              sure, the international community has rebuked
              Hun Sen for his violent putsch. The United
              States, Germany and Japan have suspended
              financial aid to Phnom Penh, while the
              Association of Southeast Asian Nations has
              postponed Cambodia's induction to the regional
              grouping (see stories on pages 18 and 19).

              But the expression of displeasure over Hun Sen's
              power grab does not automatically translate into
              support for Ranariddh's forces. There is little
              likelihood that Asean, the United Nations or
              Western donor countries will encourage a return
              to civil war. Thailand, central to the success
              of any resistance movement along its border with
              Cambodia, is reluctant to take sides.

              Nor does it help the resistance fighters that
              some senior Funcinpec leaders are ready to sleep
              with the enemy. On July 16, Foreign Minister Ung
              Huot was picked by remaining members of the
              Funcinpec steering committee to succeed
              Ranariddh as first prime minister. Away from the
              country when the coup took place, Ung Huot
              returned to Phnom Penh on July 14.

              Toan Chay, governor of the northwestern Siem
              Reap province and former Ranariddh ally, has
              said many Fincinpec members of parliament are
              prepared to cooperate with Hun Sen. However, at
              least 24 MPs have arrived in Bangkok seeking
              political asylum.

              Still, some Funcinpec members say it would be
              politically expeditious to remain within the
              power loop in Phnom Penh, even if they privately
              support the resistance fighters in the
              northwest. "Many will give their bodies, but not
              their hearts," says Serei Kosal.

              For his part, Hun Sen has invited Funcinpec
              ministers to stay on in their posts-only
              Ranariddh and a few senior leaders would be
              punished as "traitors," the second prime
              minister has said. This would allow Hun Sen to
              claim that he is staying within the framework of
              the Paris Peace Agreement, the Cambodian
              constitution and the coalition government
              approved by the international community after
              the UN-sponsored 1993 elections.

              But few doubt that any authority that emerges in
              Phnom Penh will be subservient to Hun Sen. "If
              we do not support Hun Sen, we will be killed,"
              Serei Kosal says. He himself came very close to
              death on July 5. When the coup began, Serei
              Kosal was in Phnom Penh with another Funcinpec
              general, Ho Sok. When their compound came under
              artillery shelling, he escaped by foot to the
              military airfield; he commandeered an aircraft
              and flew to Battambang in the northwest. From
              there, he trekked for three days, without food
              or rest, to reach his current position.

              Ho Sok, meanwhile, was captured and executed,
              "as a warning to all of us," Serei Kosal says.
              So too was another general, Chau Sambath. Of the
              four Funcinpec commanders on the CPP army's
              most-wanted list, only Serei Kosal and top
              commander Nyek Bun Chhay-rumoured to be wounded
              and fleeing-survive.

              But Serei Kosal is not alone in holding out
              against the CPP forces. In the northern
              provincial capital of Samrong, Gen. Long
              Sareirath says he will be ready for the CPP
              attack when it comes. "We will blow up key
              bridges to keep them from coming north with
              artillery," he says. Already, some bridges on
              the strategic Highway Six and Highway 68 have
              been blown up. This reporter saw at least 100
              anti-tank mines unloaded from a truck 12
              kilometres north of Kralanh, on Highway 68.

              Some 70 kilometres away, in his frontline
              command post, Gen. Khan Savoeun claims to have
              most of seven armed divisions-more than 10,000
              men-under his command. "We will fight even if we
              don't get foreign assistance," he says,
              defiantly, surrounded by Russian T-54 tanks,
              armoured personnel carriers, heavy artillery and
              anti-aircraft guns.

              In Banteay Meanchey province, the one-armed Gen.
              Ta Sou, a former Khmer Rouge commander who
              defected to the Funcinpec cause, claims to have
              2,000 men-and says he can call on his old
              comrades for help. Referring to the Khmer Rouge
              military overlord, he vows: "If the world
              doesn't help us, we will ask Ta Mok."

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.

 

 

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

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”

Miners risk all for Cambodia rubies

Miners risk all for Cambodia rubies

Chicago Sun-Times

January 27, 1991 | Nate Thayer

BORAI, Thailand Thousands of fortune hunters risk land mines and malaria digging for rubies in the war zones of guerrilla-controlled western Cambodia.

Ruby fever has gripped this border town. Miners tell their adventures in bustling poolrooms and bars.

Lucky miners make fortunes, as in the gold rushes of the American West in the 19th century. They emerge from the jungle with pockets full of rubies.

Wutipong Sophapong, owner of a gas station in Borai, sat on his back porch fondling several hundred gems - dug from his yard in a single day, he said.

The Khmer Rouge captured the area east of Borai in 1989 and opened the border to Thai miners to help finance its war with Cambodia's Vietnam-sponsored government.

About 50,000 miners a month trek over the Ban Thad Mountains into the Cambodian jungles, according to Thai authorities. They say hundreds have died there, about one-third return with deadly cerebral malaria and others lose limbs to land mines.

Despite the risks, newcomers arrive every day.

"Over this mountain a few days' walk, you just stick your hand in the ground and the dirt is filled with red jewels," a miner said, his eyes sparkling while he waited to be checked for malaria.

The Khmer Rouge, who abolished money and all forms of private enterprise during their brutal 3 1/2 years in power, now oversee a sophisticated mining operation that miners and provincial officials say brings them millions of dollars a month.

Each miner pays the equivalent of $60 for access to the region and can keep whatever he finds. Officials say the windfall may allow the Khmer Rouge to buy weapons on the black market if supplies dry up from China, which is among the world powers searching for a peace formula in Cambodia.

Borai District officials estimate that more than 100 million baht ($4 million) change hands every day in deals over rubies.

"There are a lot of 3 or 4 million baht stones," the district chief of Borai said. "The most valuable one so far went for 24 million baht," about $1 million.

Less than a yard from where Wutipong sat on his back porch, the yard disappeared into a 100-foot-deep hole the size of a football field. The hole was filled with pumps, workers and two cranes worth $280,000 each, which the gas station owner bought after striking it rich a few months ago.

"There is an old canal under my house and we found rubies on both sides, so we are going to tear down the house in a few weeks," he said.

Rebel Group Outlawed by Cambodia; Thais Implicated In Coup Attempt -Nate Thayer

Rebel Group Outlawed by Cambodia; Thais Implicated In Coup Attempt

The Washington Post

July 8, 1994 | Nate Thayer

Cambodia today passed controversial legislation to outlaw the Khmer Rouge rebel group, raising tensions in a government still jittery from a weekend coup attempt.

After the 98 to 1 vote in the National Assembly, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, who holds the title of first prime minister in a shaky coalition government, called on all countries to bar Khmer Rouge members from their territory and "arrest those outlaws" who he said will be named on government lists of Khmer Rouge officials. His remarks were aimed primarily at neighboring Thailand, where military officers and businessmen have long maintained ties with the notorious communist guerrilla group.

At the same time, however, Ranariddh publicly accused Thai citizens of involvement in the coup plot, which was apparently directed against him and his royalist Funcinpec party by hard-line supporters of the Cambodian People's Party, his main coalition partner.

So far, authorities have arrested 14 Thais connected to a Cambodian general who confessed to involvement in the plot, and a number of others are being sought. Ranariddh said they included a Thai police official and nine Thai specialists in radio communications, weapons and explosives.

According to Cambodian officials and diplomats, the heavy emphasis on Thai involvement appears partly intended to deflect attention from the role in the plot of senior officials of the coalition government. The sources said the coup attempt, which had been in the works for months, stemmed from a broad-based plot by hard-liners in the People's Party to stifle growing dissent among their partners in Funcinpec. The royalist party won last year's U.N.-sponsored elections but has been unable to wrest real power from the formerly communist People's Party, which had ruled Cambodia since 1979 but finished second in last year's voting.

Strains within the coalition intensified after the People's Party rejected a suggestion by King Norodom Sihanouk in mid-June that a national unity government be formed that would include the Khmer Rouge. Today's legislation to outlaw the radical guerrilla group, accused of killing 1 million people while it held power in the late 1970s, has exacerbated splits within the government. Some Funcinpec leaders described it as a move to further sideline Sihanouk and consolidate the People's Party's grip on power.

On Wednesday, security forces arrested Gen. Sin Sen, the number-two official in the powerful Interior Ministry, on charges of involvement in the conspiracy.

The coup attempt started when a dozen armored personnel carriers and 300 rebel troops left the eastern province of Prey Veng for the capital late Saturday afternoon. It ended Sunday when supporting elements failed to materialize and a distraught Prince Norodom Chakrapong, Ranariddh's estranged half-brother and one of the alleged coup leaders, was allowed to fly into exile in Malaysia after pleading for his life in frantic negotiations by mobile phone from a Phnom Penh hotel room.

Chakrapong, 49, a son of King Sihanouk, initially eluded arrest and went into hiding in Phnom Penh's Regent Hotel. From there, he contacted this reporter at 6:30 a.m. Sunday, begging me to come quickly to the hotel in apparent hopes that the presence of a foreign journalist would prevent security forces from killing him.

What followed was a bizarre 4 1/2-hour drama in which the terrified prince engaged in desperate phone negotiations with Cambodian intermediaries, the American ambassador and, in calls from Beijing, King Sihanouk and Queen Monique.

After making my way past government troops and security forces posted outside the hotel with machine guns and rocket launchers, I found Chakrapong, disheveled, barefoot and wide-eyed with fear, emerging from a crawlspace above the ceiling of his room.

"Please, they are trying to arrest me," he pleaded. "They will kill me. I am innocent. Please tell the American ambassador to come right away. I need protection."

Agitated and near tears, he repeatedly denied any involvement in the coup attempt, cursed government leaders and begged me not to leave him in case troops invaded the hotel. He fielded calls constantly on two mobile phones, speaking in English, French and Khmer.

At one point he had Sihanouk on the phone in one hand and U.S. Ambassador Charles Twining on the line in the other. But it was his stepmother, Queen Monique, who appeared to take a leading role in negotiating with government leaders on Chakrapong's behalf to let him leave the country.

"I am all right, Papa, but the situation is bad," he told Sihanouk at one point. "They have surrounded me."

He pleaded with Twining for political asylum but was told the embassy could not help him. Twining eventually showed up at the hotel and joined Interior Minister You Hokry in discussions with Chakrapong on his departure from the country.

"I am a military man," Chakrapong told me in protesting his innocence before being whisked to the airport in a heavily armed convoy. "I know how to make a coup. Now I have no power and no forces. How can I make a coup?"

Ousted Cambodian Prince Seeks Foreign Supporters; Ranariddh Criticizes U.S. Response to Coup - The Washington Post

Ousted Cambodian Prince Seeks Foreign Supporters; Ranariddh Criticizes U.S. Response to Coup

The Washington Post

August 15, 1997 | Nate Thayer

As Cambodian leader Hun Sen consolidates his power in Phnom Penh following a successful coup there last month, the rival he ousted is stepping up efforts to rally international opposition to the takeover and is openly criticizing the Clinton administration's response.

Prince Norodom Ranariddh, whom Hun Sen deposed as first prime minister in the coup on July 5 and 6, called on the United States to take a tougher stand on Cambodia and reveal what it knows about possible terrorism, drug trafficking and human rights violations by Hun Sen's supporters.

In an interview here on Monday, Ranariddh said Hun Sen's takeover of the shaky coalition government will not lead to greater stability in Cambodia, as some U.S. officials have theorized, but to a renewal of that nation's long-running civil war and a new lease on life for the notorious Khmer Rouge guerrillas. "I have clearly warned the U.S. if you do not help me put pressure on Hun Sen, you will have civil war -- a bloody civil war -- and you cannot help but have the participation of the Khmer Rouge," Ranariddh said at the house of Cambodia's ambassador to Thailand, a member of the prince's royalist party, known as Funcinpec. "The Khmer Rouge are coming back, but they are coming back as nationalists, as patriots, not as killers." While Hun Sen's coup was aimed at scuttling a political alliance between Funcinpec and remnants of the Khmer Rouge, it has driven the royalists and the rebels together militarily as they try to defend territory in northwestern Cambodia from attack by Hun Sen's forces. In response to the coup, the Khmer Rouge has stepped up its condemnation of Hun Sen as a "puppet" of neighboring Vietnam, which installed him in power after the Vietnamese invaded in 1979, ending nearly four years of bloody Khmer Rouge rule under Pol Pot. Because of Cambodians' widespread fear and resentment of Vietnam, a historical adversary, the Khmer Rouge propaganda appears likely to strike a more responsive chord in the wake of the coup, particularly since the group formally broke with Pol Pot in a show trial on July 25. In the interview, an emotional Ranariddh accused Washington of ignoring human rights violations by Hun Sen, notably a March 30 grenade attack that killed at least 17 people and wounded more than 100 at an opposition political rally in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. Because the injured included an American, Ron Abney of the Washington-based International Republican Institute, an FBI team was sent to investigate. It has produced an internal report that implicates a bodyguard unit loyal to Hun Sen, government sources have said. However, according to other sources close to the investigation, the report is not being released because of U.S. concerns that it would upset internal political stability in Cambodia. "We have to talk about the grenade attack," Ranariddh said. "President Clinton must release the FBI investigation. They know Hun Sen is a terrorist, but why are the Americans hiding the information, protecting Hun Sen?" Ranariddh also accused Washington of concealing connections between Hun Sen and suspected drug traffickers who have bankrolled his projects and helped fund last month's coup. "We should bring Hun Sen to an international trial," Ranariddh said. "They are terrorists, they are drug traffickers, and they have committed crimes against humanity." At least 41 of Ranariddh's supporters were tortured and executed following the coup, and hundreds more are missing, according to international human rights groups. Soldiers have taken scores of bodies to Buddhist temples and incinerated them, the groups say. "My priority is a political struggle, but the people will not let such a regime last," Ranariddh said. "With or without Ranariddh, Cambodia will have a resistance. It is not a problem between Hun Sen and Ranariddh. It is a problem between dictatorship and democracy." He added, "It will be a big mistake if the world community thinks strengthening Hun Sen will mean stability." Ranariddh's Funcinpec party "is now in the process of reorganizing militarily and politically," he said. Facing an arrest order by Hun Sen if he returns to Cambodia, Ranariddh vowed to go to Funcinpec-held territory in the country's northern jungles if the fighting continues. When his military commanders call him, he said, "I will not hesitate for one second to go back to lead the resistance."

Cambodian Peace Was Just a Day Away; Hun Sen's Coup Derailed Ceremony to Announce Truce With Khmer Rouge

Cambodian Peace Was Just a Day Away; Hun Sen's Coup Derailed Ceremony to Announce Truce With Khmer Rouge

The Washington Post

August 17, 1997

By Nate Thayer 

After six weeks of secret meetings and a violent power struggle here in the jungles of northern Cambodia, a watershed moment in this country's tortured history was at hand.

The last holdouts of the Khmer Rouge, the radical Communist guerrillas who had killed more than 1 million people when they ruled Cambodia in the late 1970s and thousands more after their ouster, were giving up. They had deposed their notorious leader Pol Pot, effectively abandoned their war against Cambodia's government and had agreed to a formal "surrender" ceremony in which their forces would join the Cambodian army.

As a result of negotiations that Pol Pot violently opposed, but ultimately failed to prevent, it seemed that the end of the 35-year-old guerrilla movement was near -- and with it a termination of the civil war that has gripped the country for most of that time. Plans were made to announce the deal in a ceremony scheduled for July 6. The ceremony never took place. On that day, Second Prime Minister Hun Sen declared himself in full control of the government and announced the overthrow of his rival, First Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh. Apparently fearing that the peace agreement was a ploy to weaken him politically and militarily, Hun Sen had launched a coup July 5 to scuttle it. Now, Hun Sen's political opponents are waging armed resistance to his authoritarian rule, and there are signs that the Khmer Rouge remnants -- minus Pol Pot -- are reuniting to help them. In the tragic logic of Cambodian politics, an initiative that seemed only a day away from bringing long-awaited peace has instead brought more war. The story of the ill-fated peace initiative, played out in this Khmer Rouge jungle stronghold surrounded by land mines, emerges from documents and interviews with the government and Khmer Rouge negotiators involved in the talks. The Khmer Rouge officials were interviewed at the time of an extraordinary July 25 show trial in which an ailing Pol Pot was sentenced to "life imprisonment" by a tribunal made up of younger guerrilla leaders, who had revolted against him in June. Frail, white-haired and visibly traumatized, the former dictator hobbled on a bamboo cane as he was escorted away to house arrest. Government documents obtained by The Washington Post, signed by both the government and Khmer Rouge negotiators, show that on July 4 the guerrillas finally had agreed to integrate their troops into the army and recognize the government. The agreement, principally between Ranariddh and the Khmer Rouge's nominal leader Khieu Samphan, was the culmination of a score of secret meetings between Khmer Rouge leaders and government military negotiators. The talks proceeded against a backdrop of bitter divisions within both the government and the Khmer Rouge. Ranariddh and Hun Sen, steadfast political opponents, coexisted uneasily as co-prime ministers. The Khmer Rouge, meanwhile, had split a year ago when about half its fighters, followers of former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary in the western gem-mining center of Pailin, agreed to join the government army in a deal brokered by Hun Sen. Pol Pot, in firm control of the rest of the organization in its northern redoubt of Anlong Veng, bitterly opposed any peace negotiations. But many of his top commanders, seeing continued warfare as futile if they played no political role, wanted to strike a deal like the one agreed to in Pailin. Pol Pot's notoriety made him a major obstacle to such an accord. Between April 1975 and January 1979, when he ruled the country as head of a Khmer Rouge government, Pol Pot orchestrated a campaign of terror and mass murder that left more than 1 million Cambodians dead and the country in ruins. Formal negotiations with the Khmer Rouge were attempted last February, but Pol Pot loyalists ambushed a government team of 15 emissaries when its helicopter landed in Khmer Rouge territory. Ten of the government officials were executed and the rest were taken prisoner. Negotiations resumed on May 16, when a government military delegation met with Khmer Rouge officials led by Tep Kunnal, a senior political figure. A government negotiator who was at the meeting quoted Tep Kunnal as saying "he was in favor of national reconciliation and wanted a permanent cease-fire . . . to study whether we could work together to allow their territory and army to join the government." Tep Kunnal, a French-educated engineer and longtime Khmer Rouge diplomat and political strategist who joined the group in the early 1970s, has emerged as a top new leader. He served more than a decade in New York in the U.N. mission of the former Khmer Rouge government-in-exile and is knowledgeable about U.S. politics. A series of talks continued through the end of May and into early June, with government army negotiators repeatedly traveling by helicopter to Anlong Veng. "Pol Pot was informed of the negotiations," said a government negotiator. "At first Pol Pot said he was in favor of negotiations. But our side insisted strongly that Pol Pot must be completely out. So we discussed secretly with the new {Khmer Rouge} military leaders. So that was why Pol Pot was getting mad. We asked to exclude him." The guerrillas agreed in principle to integrate their army into the government armed forces, recognize the Cambodian constitution and formally disband their "provisional government," according to Khmer Rouge and government sources. On June 1, Ranariddh met Khieu Samphan, the nominal leader, secretly near the Thai border, according to Ranariddh. On June 5, the two sides met at the historic temples at Preah Vihear, where the guerrillas were preparing a site to announce the agreement. But that evening, Im Nguon, chief military representative on the negotiating team and chief of staff of the new Khmer Rouge army, called a senior government negotiator by mobile telephone "and asked me to work carefully on the issue secretly, because the negotiations were very sensitive," the government negotiator said. "I realized that this was a signal that there was a split within the Khmer Rouge. I realized that within the Khmer Rouge there was a split on negotiations. I didn't know who it was between, but {Im} Nguon was warning me." The next meeting was scheduled on June 10, "but there was a big problem," one of the government negotiators said. Khmer Rouge defense minister Son Sen and 12 members of his family and inner circle had been found murdered. It was the beginning of Pol Pot's attempt to scuttle the political negotiations through a violent purge of Khmer Rouge ranks. On June 12, top government military commander Gen. Nhek Bun Chhay and one other government colonel arrived by helicopter in Anlong Veng to find a Khmer Rouge at war with itself. Most of the Khmer Rouge negotiating team, including Tep Kunnal and Khieu Samphan, had been taken hostage by Pol Pot and his loyalists. Heavy fighting, involving mortars, artillery and small arms, could be heard just a couple of miles away, as the Khmer Rouge factions battled for control. Pol Pot's Hostages The Khmer Rouge negotiator, Im Nguon, reported that Pol Pot was holding hostage "all those who were in favor of national reconciliation." The Khmer Rouge said the situation was critical, and asked for immediate military support "to help liberate the hostages," according to one of the government negotiators. "After that we immediately took the helicopter to {the nearby government military base at} Samrong to bring ammunition -- mainly AK-47 ammunition but also heavier ammunition," including helicopters loaded with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and other heavy munitions, the government negotiator said. With Pol Pot and his loyalists on the run and the entire political leadership held hostage in nearby jungles, government negotiators moved fast. Nhek Bun Chhay flew in from Phnom Penh on June 12 and shuttled back and forth delivering ammunition before returning to the capital. It was that day, while fighting raged in the surrounding jungle, that Nhek Bun Chhay first met Khmer Rouge strongman Ta Mok, the 72-year-old, one-legged overall commander of the new Khmer Rouge who had joined the revolution in 1963 with Pol Pot -- and now had turned against him. "I place all my hope on you," he reportedly told Nhek Bun Chhay. "Please continue the negotiations for national reconciliation in order to bring trust between our two groups. I want to see peace in Cambodia and to not see any more killing," he was quoted as saying. The next day, June 13, the government team returned by helicopter. "It was a very tense meeting because the fighting was still going on, and they asked us to postpone the meeting because they had to solve their internal problems first," one of the negotiators said. The team left after four hours. When they returned four days later, they were told that "the situation had calmed down" and that some of the hostages had been rescued. "They said that Tep Kunnal and the others had been liberated and they would arrive back the next day, but political leader Khieu Samphan was still held and Pol Pot had not yet been captured," one of the negotiators said. On the next day, they returned and met with Tep Kunnal, who "expressed fear for his group because Khieu Samphan, their leader, was missing with Pol Pot," according to the government negotiator. Tep Kunnal said that Pol Pot's battle slogan was, "Fight! Fight! Fight! Struggle! Struggle! Struggle!" Meanwhile, back in Phnom Penh, there was another developing issue: the attitude of Cambodia's other prime minister, Hun Sen. Nhek Bun Chhay and other government military officials say Hun Sen was kept informed of daily developments by a committee of senior military and political officials, formed earlier this year to ease tensions between the two government camps headed by Ranariddh and Hun Sen. "Tep Kunnal . . . asked about Hun Sen's stance. What did Hun Sen say about the groups returning back to join the society?" recalled a government negotiator. The team replied that there "was no problem provided that he abandon Pol Pot, accept the constitution, and integrate their army." Strongman's Downfall As the days went on, Pol Pot's remaining loyalists, who had numbered only about 300, began to abandon him one by one. He had fled northeast toward the Thai border, and by June 19 was surrounded. When the man who had once wielded absolute power over 7 million people was finally captured, two of his soldiers were carrying him through the jungle in a green Chinese military hammock strung on a bamboo pole. With him were his wife, a woman in her 30s, their 12-year-old daughter, a niece, three other loyalists and Khieu Samphan as hostage. A witness to his capture said he was given oxygen immediately and seemed near death from exhaustion and trauma, which were exacerbating his serious heart disease and high blood pressure. A white Toyota Land Cruiser that the Khmer Rouge had seized from U.N. peacekeepers years earlier was sent to bring him back to Anlong Veng. On June 21, government negotiators returned to Anlong Veng, where they met a tired and drained Khieu Samphan. Nearby was a very sick 72-year-old man hooked to an intravenous drip with an oxygen mask over his face. When asked by government negotiators if they could take a picture of Pol Pot to prove to the world that he was alive and captured, Ta Mok erupted: "Let me throw the contemptible Pol Pot in a cage first, and then you can take his photograph!" "He was very angry," said a witness. Ta Mok reportedly told negotiators they could take Pol Pot away if they could find a suitable place in exile for him, but no specific country was mentioned. From that point, the peace negotiations moved more quickly. On June 20, during an official visit by Thai Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh to Phnom Penh, Ranariddh announced that Pol Pot was under arrest and Khieu Samphan would agree to surrender. The comments were met with widespread skepticism by diplomats and others, coming on the heels of similar claims over recent months that had proved unfounded. A military subcommittee was formed to hammer out the details of integrating the guerrillas into the government army. Nhek Bun Chhay demanded that the Khmer Rouge announce its support of the Cambodian constitution over their clandestine radio broadcasts. The Khmer Rouge prepared a draft statement agreeing to support the constitution, turn over their army and territory to formal central government command and recognize the role of King Norodom Sihanouk as sovereign of the nation. But the government negotiators spent days hammering out wording and demanding the deletion of vitriolic language condemning Hun Sen -- particularly frequent references to the second prime minister as "contemptible" and a "puppet" of Vietnam. Hun Sen defected from the Khmer Rouge in 1977. Vietnam installed him as Cambodia's foreign minister after its invasion toppled Pol Pot in 1979 and later elevated him to prime minister. "We said to them to you must stop using these words. . . . We asked specifically to stop using `puppet' . . . in their language on the draft announcement to surrender to the government," said one of the chief government negotiators. On June 22, the Khmer Rouge reiterated a request for assurances that they be allowed to keep the same military arrangement in Anlong Veng that was given to earlier defectors. In those cases, the military units changed into government uniforms and pledged allegiance to the king, government and constitution, but were not forced to disperse from their territory. Nhek Bun Chhay agreed. And it was agreed that the former Khmer Rouge, who now called themselves the National Unity Party, could join the National United Front coalition of anti-Hun Sen political opposition parties, which had been formed earlier this year in preparation for elections scheduled for 1998. Request for Amnesty On June 29, Khmer Rouge leader Ta Mok met the government negotiators over lunch at Anlong Veng. Ta Mok complained about attempts to bring him to an international court on charges of crimes against humanity, citing the royal amnesty granted to former Khmer Rouge official Ieng Sary after his defection last year. "Now Ieng Sary has already been given amnesty by the king, and Ieng Sary was number three in the command structure of the Khmer Rouge. But I was number five. So if the number three is amnestied, why not me who was less powerful?" complained the commander who has been accused of leading major purges of political enemies during the Khmer Rouge's years in power. "From the very beginning of the struggle to now I have never issued an order to kill anyone," Ta Mok contended, according to sources who were present. "All orders were decided by Pol Pot alone. Pol Pot made all decisions with absolute dictatorship!" The question of Ta Mok's fate was left unresolved. A formal surrender ceremony was tentatively set for June 30, "but the problem was lack of helicopter transportation for all the journalists and diplomats" to the remote jungle base, which is surrounded by thousands of land mines and is unreachable by road. In any event, a few small issues remained. By July 3 both sides had hammered out all details of the agreements, "and we flew back to Phnom Penh to report to the prime minister that everything was finished," one of the government negotiators said. A statement that was to be announced on the radio and read by Khieu Samphan at a press conference on July 6 was signed by both sides, including Ranariddh on behalf of the government. "On 4 July we flew back to Anlong Veng and we informed the Khmer Rouge to proceed because we got the final agreement from Prime Minister Ranariddh," said one of the chief government negotiators. The surrender ceremony was to be held at the Preah Vihear temple site, with diplomats and journalists flown in to witness the historic occasion. It never happened. Early on the morning of July 5, Hun Sen launched his coup d'etat in Phnom Penh, targeting Nhek Bun Chhay and inflicting a total military and political defeat on Ranariddh's forces in the capital within 48 hours. The chance for a negotiated peace, only 24 hours away, was gone. Back to Square One Ranariddh's forces are now holed up in jungle sanctuaries, and Hun Sen, in control of the government, is sending thousands of troops and heavy weapons to the areas in an attempt to subdue them. The forces loyal to Ranariddh have begun to form a military coalition with former Khmer Rouge fighters, both from Anlong Veng and from the other faction that surrendered last year. "I hope that ASEAN {the Association of Southeast Asian Nations} and the international community will be aware that our government was not able to take Anlong Veng militarily, in a series of major offensives since 1993," Ranariddh said in an interview in Bangkok last week. "Now it is Hun Sen alone. My priority is diplomatic and political struggle, but I have clearly warned the U.S. if you do not help me put pressure on Hun Sen, you will have civil war, a bloody civil war, and you cannot avoid having the participation of the Khmer Rouge." He added, "The Khmer Rouge are coming back, but they are coming back as nationalists, patriots, not as killers. It is not fair that they accuse Ranariddh. It is Hun Sen who has brought back the war."

Cambodians Describe Atrocities By Hun Sen's Forces, Vow to Resist; Supporters of Ranariddh Flee to Jungle Stronghold

Cambodians Describe Atrocities By Hun Sen's Forces, Vow to Resist; Supporters of Ranariddh Flee to Jungle Stronghold

The Washington Post

July 28, 1997 | Nate Thayer

After a two-week cross-country trek by motorcycle and on foot, Gen. Nhek Bun Chhay, the most hunted man in Cambodia, straggled into this jungle stronghold with tales of atrocities by government forces and vows to resist the recent coup by co-prime minister Hun Sen.

Wearing flip-flops on his badly swollen feet and Buddhist amulets around his neck, Nhek Bun Chhay held court in shorts last week as he and other royalist commanders laid plans to lead a resistance army against what they described as Cambodia's new dictatorship. Surrounding their conclave near Cambodia's northern border with Thailand were soldiers loyal to the royalist party, known by its acronym, Funcinpec, as well as tanks and artillery.

In the three weeks since Hun Sen deposed Cambodia's other co-prime minister, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, and effectively annulled the results of a 1993 U.N.-sponsored election won by Funcinpec, thousands of refugees have fled here, to Funcinpec-controlled areas near the Thai border, to seek sanctuary and join a political and military resistance. Many have come with horrific tales of massacres and torture. Some, including senior opposition officials, were denied refuge in the U.S. Embassy and other embassies, human rights workers said. In an interview here Friday, Nhek Bun Chhay, formerly the deputy armed forces chief of staff and a top Ranariddh aide, said Hun Sen's forces captured five of his bodyguards and gouged out their eyes under interrogation before killing them. Western human rights officials in Phnom Penh, the capital, confirmed the atrocity. At least 30 of Nhek Bun Chhay's soldiers were executed after surrendering and their bodies were burned with gasoline and tires, the general said. He said he believes about 500 of his troops have been killed. "There are people hiding in the jungle in just about every province," Nhek Bun Chhay said. "I have never seen in my life this kind of violence. The killing is still going on." He said that during his flight, he and his followers fought eight major battles with about 3,000 pursuing troops and that leaflets bearing his picture and offering a $50,000 reward were dropped on villages along the way. "Hun Sen is hunting down our people, killing them, arresting them," said another general, Serei Kosal, who arrived in borrowed shorts and shoeless a week before Nhek Bun Chhay. "Why hasn't the world condemned the coup-makers and acted in support of democracy?" Nhek Bun Chhay and Serei Kosal were among four top Funcinpec officials targeted by Hun Sen's forces during the coup. The two others were captured and summarily executed, one of them after being tortured in Hun Sen's residential compound, according to human rights officials and Cambodian intelligence officers. Serei Kosal said the scattered Funcinpec forces are "fighting for democracy" and desperately need supplies such as hammocks, mosquito nets, canned fish and walkie-talkies. But he vowed to battle on in any case. "If the international community abandons us," he said, "we will fight even if we all die, because we are fighting against dictatorship." During a trip of more than 120 miles through resistance-controlled zones abutting the border with Thailand, other Funcinpec commanders regrouping in the north and northwest expressed similar determination to rally their forces, which now include about 10,000 troops backed by tanks and artillery. Before the coup, Funcinpec was estimated to control about a third of the 87,000-member Royal Cambodian Armed Forces. "We won the elections, but the communists have gone against the will of the people," said Lt. Gen. Khan Savoeun, a Funcinpec loyalist who headed Cambodia's Fifth Military Region before the coup by Hun Sen and his formerly communist Cambodian People's Party. Khan Savoeun spoke surrounded by Russian-made T-54 tanks, armored personnel carriers, heavy artillery and antiaircraft guns -- an arsenal that was not enough to prevent his position from being overrun the next day. While the extent of the killing by government forces since the coup remains uncertain, refugees here and human rights officials in Phnom Penh painted a grim picture of torture and summary executions. They said some atrocities may have been ordered by the coup leaders, many of whom, like Hun Sen, are former members of the radical communist Khmer Rouge movement. Human rights officials said more than 40 senior Funcinpec officials have been executed and that hundreds of other people have been killed in fighting. "We have many cases of bodies found, hands tied behind their back, with bullets in the head," said a Western human rights investigator. "But sometimes we arrive too late for the bodies and only have the ashes. They are literally incinerating the evidence." In a statement from Beijing, where he is undergoing medical treatment, Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk, Ranariddh's father, denounced "unimaginable cruelty" by Hun Sen's forces. "A certain number of so-called `extremist' Ranariddh supporters had their eyes gouged out before they were put down like rabid dogs," he wrote. "Many others were tortured to death in especially diabolical ways." Gen. Chau Sambath, a top military adviser to Ranariddh, was captured while trying to flee the capital by motorcycle. According to human rights officials and Cambodian intelligence officers, he was taken to Hun Sen's personal compound on July 8 on the outskirts of the city and tortured before being executed. The sources say his fingernails were pulled out and his tongue yanked from his mouth with pliers before he was finally killed by Gen. Him Bun Heang, the chief of security for Hun Sen's personal bodyguard unit. Another senior Funcinpec official, Ho Sok, the secretary of state for the interior, reportedly was executed on the grounds of the Interior Ministry by the personal bodyguards of Gen. Hok Lundy, the national police chief and a top Hun Sen loyalist. According to Amnesty International, Ho Sok was captured "while attempting to find a country that would give him asylum." He had taken refuge at the Embassy of Singapore, but was expelled at the request of Hun Sen forces and arrested as he attempted to drive to the luxury Cambodiana Hotel, where many foreigners and Funcinpec officials had sought sanctuary in the days after the coup. An Interior Ministry spokesman confirmed the killing, saying it was committed by "people who were angry with him." "They {government forces} are arresting people everywhere," said Sok Nuon, a policeman from Kompong Chhnang Province. He had shed his uniform and said he had come from central Cambodia the day before and had not eaten in four days. Speaking at this mountain redoubt, where several thousand new refugees have massed, he added: "They are arresting people in their houses, in the jungles, along the road -- anybody they think works for Funcinpec." Several hundred Funcinpec officials, at least 24 members of parliament, journalists for independent newspapers and officials associated with other political parties have fled to Thailand by air, land and sea. Many journalists have received death threats and have left the country or escaped to newly created resistance areas. At least 19 newspapers have ceased publishing. "Soldiers came to my house with rocket launchers looking for my steering committee members," said Sam Rainsy, Cambodia's most prominent opposition politician and head of the Khmer Nation Party. "All my people are in hiding, have fled to the jungle or are out of the country. . . . The soldiers told people at my office, `We will not even let a baby asleep in a hammock stay alive.' " He said the warning reminded him of the language of the Khmer Rouge, whose brutal rule in the late 1970s left more than 1 million Cambodians dead. "We cannot operate any more," Sam Rainsy said of his party. "Democracy is finished." In the wake of the coup, human rights officials and Cambodians opposed to Hun Sen have criticized the response of Western governments, notably those of the United States and Australia, whose embassies in Phnom Penh reportedly refused requests for asylum from some government officials and members of parliament who feared for their lives. U.S. Embassy officials said they had no clearance from Washington to offer political asylum to anyone and claimed they were not approached directly by any Cambodians for sanctuary on embassy grounds. Officials said Ambassador Kenneth Quinn personally sought out senior Funcinpec officials during the height of street battles to offer assistance and that embassy cars were used to ferry some officials to the airport to board evacuation flights. But human rights workers asserted that the embassy rejected their pleas for emergency visas for legislators who were in danger. "It is an absolute disgrace the way Western embassies have reacted," said a Western human rights official in Phnom Penh. "We have begged them to open their gates for people who are clearly targeted for persecution, and the Americans, the Australians, flatly said no. These are the embassies that had pushed people to exercise their rights, have said they supported human rights and free expression and opposition politics. But when these very values were trampled upon and those who exercised their rights were targeted, they did nothing to help." According to human rights workers, among those refused sanctuary in a Cambodiana Hotel ballroom, which the U.S. Embassy rented as a haven for Americans, was Som Wattana, a Cambodian correspondent for the Voice of America, who received death threats in the aftermath of the coup. He has since fled the country. "Our primary concern was to protect the safety and welfare of American citizens," said an embassy spokeswoman. She added, "We were not open for visas during the fighting." Ranariddh, in an interview in Bankok, said, "Hun Sen has ordered the mass execution of members of our elected government. He is responsible for the killings of hundreds of innocent people. . . . Before recognizing this government in Phnom Penh, before shaking their bloody hands, the United States should . . . investigate the killings." Some Western embassies "think that Cambodia is not ready for democracy," said Stephen Heder, an American Cambodia specialist who teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and who was in Phnom Penh during the coup. "They don't seem to fathom how extraordinarily unpopular Hun Sen is."

Rebel Group Outlawed by Cambodia; Thais Implicated In Coup Attempt

Rebel Group Outlawed by Cambodia; Thais Implicated In Coup Attempt

The Washington Post

July 8, 1994 | Nate Thayer

Cambodia today passed controversial legislation to outlaw the Khmer Rouge rebel group, raising tensions in a government still jittery from a weekend coup attempt.

After the 98 to 1 vote in the National Assembly, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, who holds the title of first prime minister in a shaky coalition government, called on all countries to bar Khmer Rouge members from their territory and "arrest those outlaws" who he said will be named on government lists of Khmer Rouge officials. His remarks were aimed primarily at neighboring Thailand, where military officers and businessmen have long maintained ties with the notorious communist guerrilla group.

At the same time, however, Ranariddh publicly accused Thai citizens of involvement in the coup plot, which was apparently directed against him and his royalist Funcinpec party by hard-line supporters of the Cambodian People's Party, his main coalition partner.

So far, authorities have arrested 14 Thais connected to a Cambodian general who confessed to involvement in the plot, and a number of others are being sought. Ranariddh said they included a Thai police official and nine Thai specialists in radio communications, weapons and explosives.

According to Cambodian officials and diplomats, the heavy emphasis on Thai involvement appears partly intended to deflect attention from the role in the plot of senior officials of the coalition government. The sources said the coup attempt, which had been in the works for months, stemmed from a broad-based plot by hard-liners in the People's Party to stifle growing dissent among their partners in Funcinpec. The royalist party won last year's U.N.-sponsored elections but has been unable to wrest real power from the formerly communist People's Party, which had ruled Cambodia since 1979 but finished second in last year's voting.

Strains within the coalition intensified after the People's Party rejected a suggestion by King Norodom Sihanouk in mid-June that a national unity government be formed that would include the Khmer Rouge. Today's legislation to outlaw the radical guerrilla group, accused of killing 1 million people while it held power in the late 1970s, has exacerbated splits within the government. Some Funcinpec leaders described it as a move to further sideline Sihanouk and consolidate the People's Party's grip on power.

On Wednesday, security forces arrested Gen. Sin Sen, the number-two official in the powerful Interior Ministry, on charges of involvement in the conspiracy.

The coup attempt started when a dozen armored personnel carriers and 300 rebel troops left the eastern province of Prey Veng for the capital late Saturday afternoon. It ended Sunday when supporting elements failed to materialize and a distraught Prince Norodom Chakrapong, Ranariddh's estranged half-brother and one of the alleged coup leaders, was allowed to fly into exile in Malaysia after pleading for his life in frantic negotiations by mobile phone from a Phnom Penh hotel room.

Chakrapong, 49, a son of King Sihanouk, initially eluded arrest and went into hiding in Phnom Penh's Regent Hotel. From there, he contacted this reporter at 6:30 a.m. Sunday, begging me to come quickly to the hotel in apparent hopes that the presence of a foreign journalist would prevent security forces from killing him.

What followed was a bizarre 4 1/2-hour drama in which the terrified prince engaged in desperate phone negotiations with Cambodian intermediaries, the American ambassador and, in calls from Beijing, King Sihanouk and Queen Monique.

After making my way past government troops and security forces posted outside the hotel with machine guns and rocket launchers, I found Chakrapong, disheveled, barefoot and wide-eyed with fear, emerging from a crawlspace above the ceiling of his room.

"Please, they are trying to arrest me," he pleaded. "They will kill me. I am innocent. Please tell the American ambassador to come right away. I need protection."

Agitated and near tears, he repeatedly denied any involvement in the coup attempt, cursed government leaders and begged me not to leave him in case troops invaded the hotel. He fielded calls constantly on two mobile phones, speaking in English, French and Khmer.

At one point he had Sihanouk on the phone in one hand and U.S. Ambassador Charles Twining on the line in the other. But it was his stepmother, Queen Monique, who appeared to take a leading role in negotiating with government leaders on Chakrapong's behalf to let him leave the country.

"I am all right, Papa, but the situation is bad," he told Sihanouk at one point. "They have surrounded me."

He pleaded with Twining for political asylum but was told the embassy could not help him. Twining eventually showed up at the hotel and joined Interior Minister You Hokry in discussions with Chakrapong on his departure from the country.

"I am a military man," Chakrapong told me in protesting his innocence before being whisked to the airport in a heavily armed convoy. "I know how to make a coup. Now I have no power and no forces. How can I make a coup?"

Cambodians OK new step toward peace

Cambodians OK new step toward peace

Chicago Sun-Times

June 25, 1991

By Nate Thayer

Associated press

PATTAYA, Thailand Cambodia's warring factions moved another step toward peace Monday when they signed an agreement under which they would stop receiving foreign arms.

The accord also put in formal wording a truce declared Sunday between the Vietnam-installed government in Phnom Penh and the three guerrilla groups.

Despite the moves, the quest for a lasting end to the 12-year-old civil war faced major obstacles. Previous cease-fires have fallen apart, and the new pact left unresolved such issues as how to halt the combat and disarm the fighters.

"The declaration is one thing. The implementation is another," cautioned Prince Norodom Ranariddh, son of the resistance leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk.

The 12 members of the Supreme National Council, from the Cambodian government and guerrilla factions, signed the five-point pact on the first day of talks at this beach resort near Bangkok. The national council seeks to implement a United Nations Security Council peace plan drafted late last year. The talks have been mired by bickering over the role of the world body and other issues.

Under the peace plan as drafted, the UN would be extensively involved in Cambodia's administration and military affairs before elections.

The rebels have accepted the plan, but the Cambodian government has rejected demobilization before elections are held and is demanding measures to prevent any takeover attempt by Communist Khmer Rouge rebels.

Sihanouk denounced Prime Minister Hun Sen's reservations about the peace proposal. Sihanouk said a UN representative told him the UN Security Council would not monitor the truce or other agreements unless the entire plan was accepted.

"Sihanouk is putting the squeeze on Hun Sen," one diplomat said, on condition of anonymity. "He knows that Hun Sen knows you cannot have a cease-fire and cessation of arms without the UN plan."

The Supreme National Council said Monday it would "implement the unlimited cease-fire and undertake to stop receiving foreign military aid as from 24th June, 1991." Sihanouk is to direct future meetings of the council and lead a delegation to the UN.