Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Horrible as the killing fields were, this museum of atrocities distracted attention from the corruption of the present regime. Far from being an aberration, they were an example of Khmer culture run riot. A French missionary had called the terror "an explosion of the Khmer identity."

But Pol Pot had lit the fuse. All his life he had the Khmer smile. No one ever knew what he was thinking or feeling. Few people knew his real name. He was born Saloth Sar, and over the years he changed his name at least a dozen times. "The more often you change your name, the better it confuses the enemy," he said. What Pol Pot did not say was that the name changes reflected his multiple identities. He'd had a privileged upbringing, some of his childhood spent at the royal palace. His colonial education allowed him to travel to France in 1949, where he was known as a bon viveur, if a bit secretive, and eventually as an anticolonial ideologue. He discovered Stalinism. He became a utopian socialist, a leveler, unsentimental, but in the Khmer way, capable of preaching extreme violence.

On his return to Cambodia in the 1950s he allied himself with the anti-French forces and rejoiced in the French retreat. The Vietnam War emboldened him, as the American bombing had, by winning more converts to his cause. Because of his Chinese support, he had powerful reasons to be anti-Vietnamese. He kept to the rural areas, strengthening his army, at a time when the United States was currying favor with China. In his five-year civil war, he fought a weakened, unpopular, and crooked government. Half a million people died in this war of attrition. Seeing that the end was near, America's man, Lon Nol, left for Hawaii with a million dollars from Cambodia's central bank. Cambodians were relieved, believing they might at last have a stable and independent government. No triumphant processional by the new leadership entered the fallen capital. Pol Pot waited for days and then slipped into the city in darkness.

As an expression of his weird idealism, Pol Pot declared Year Zero—a clean slate—and abolished money. That alone was the cause of much of the chaos that ensued, because food took the place of currency and was hoarded and fought over. Food became scarcer, and soon starvation and malnutrition were universal. Books were burned and ministerial files dumped in the streets. Phnom Penh was emptied of its population. City dwellers, sent into the countryside, were unprepared for this rustication; most left their homes with as many of their belongings as they could carry; a great number died on the way to remote areas. The whole nation reverted to chaos, a kind of madness and primitivism characterized by machine-smashing and virtual slavery. Hardly anyone laid eyes on Pol Pot, since he was obsessively secretive, an enigma even to his followers.

No personality cult attached to Pol Pot. No pictures of him appeared anywhere. There were no songs, no poems, no sayings, no anecdotes about his life. Turkmenbashi in Turkmenistan was inescapable; Pol Pot in Cambodia was unfindable. No one knew where he lived. He gave no speeches and published very little under his own name. He owned no property. He had no personal wealth. His austerity extended to government events. At one celebration to mark the party's anniversary, only orange juice was served, and the entertainment was Albanian films.

Outsiders demonized and denounced Pol Pot, by this time known as Brother Number One, but no one really knew who he was or what he stood for. In a way he was a classic geek, and like many geeks, a paranoiac.

His ideas remained obscure or oversimplified, but his paranoia percolated into the leadership—to soldiers, the police, prison guards, torturers, to everyone who had power. His reclusiveness and indecision helped create a tyranny that became random and improvisational; no one, neither the frightened populace nor the empowered soldiers, knew what they were supposed to do. Having a weapon helped, for if you had a weapon, you had power. A weapon might be something as simple as an ax or a hoe or a pitchfork. Kampuchea, as the country was known then, became a slave state where, in less than four years, a million and a half people were killed as enemies of the state.

Pol Pot was undone by the invading Vietnamese, who deposed him and installed their own man, Heng Samrin, in 1979. In the same year, wishing to see Vietnam weakened in the so-called proxy war (the Soviet Union was still Vietnam's best ally), the United States supported the right to a seat for the exiled Pol Pot's blood-soaked delegation to the United Nations.

***

IT GAVE ME THE CREEPS to read all this while I was staying in Phnom Penh. Some of the worst of the killing had occurred while I was taking my Railway Bazaar trip, and then writing it, complaining that it had been impossible for me to visit Cambodia. Little did I know what was happening here—but not many people on the outside knew much, or cared.