Attacking Enemies

Despite the successful purges of 1977, which are referred to glowingly in many party texts, there were still “microbes” embedded in the army, the cooperatives, the ministries, and elsewhere that were spreading ideas of “privatism” among the population. Some of these ideas, it was asserted, were “systematically left”; others were “systematically right.” Vigilance would reward the party, which was said to have “as many eyes as a pineapple.” In early 1978 a policy of seeking new autobiographical statements was set in motion. By the end of the year, “April 17 people” came under scrutiny again. The regime’s repressive machinery had a life of its own and could not decelerate or change direction just because an “amnesty” had been proclaimed.

S-21, in fact, was probably the best-run office in the country. In the first half of 1978, the center welcomed 5,760 prisoners for interrogation, torture, and execution—roughly as many as in all of 1977. A similar number were arrested between June and December. Most of these were connected with purges of the east, which began in May 1978 and continued through October, sweeping up military personnel, “new people,” and those who lay in the expected path of a Vietnamese invasion. The party secretary of the zone, Sao Phim, committed suicide in June; his brother-in-law Muol Sambath (Nhim Ros), secretary of the northwestern zone, was then arrested and brought to Tuol Sleng. By the middle of 1978, the party replaced many of the troops who had failed to drive out the Vietnamese with units drawn from the center and southwest who were considered loyal. A former cadre described the process to Stephen Heder two years later: “Then we became traitors. We had done everything correctly and then they came and killed everybody. They said we were doing the opposite of what we were doing. We fought the Vietnamese and they killed us for not fighting the Vietnamese.” 22

Over the next few months, the military infrastructure of the eastern zone was torn apart in a purge reminiscent of those that swept through the Soviet army in the 1930s. Perhaps as many as 100,000 people—a large proportion of them cadre, soldiers, and their families—were gathered up and put to death. A similar operation, on a smaller scale, occurred in the northeast, an old base area where cadre from the southwest replaced local people in 1978. In both zones, hundreds of thousands of others were evacuated toward the north and northwest to keep them from being captured by the Vietnamese. Casualties in the course of the evacuations were horrendous.

The catastrophe in the east has been studied by Ben Kiernan and recalled by many survivors. It is significant because Pol Pot had finally alienated himself from his own revolutionary origins, which lay in the east; from his association with Sao Phim, which went back to the days of Office 100; and from his long-term relationship with Vietnam and the Vietnamese Communist party. In purging the east, Pol Pot was cleansing his own history. Perhaps he blamed the “east”—an amalgam of Vietnam and his own gullibility—for the troubles besetting his country. Certainly it was more severely punished as a region than any other—and more amply represented when the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) established itself with Vietnamese assistance in 1979.23