Sihanouk and Pol Pot spent four hours together. They began with small talk. While sipping orange juice, they recalled their previous encounter in 1973. Pol Pot, using submissive royal pronouns—to Sihanouk’s delight—apologized for not calling on the prince since the liberation of Phnom Penh. He pleaded too much work; Sihanouk agreed politely. Pol Pot then suggested that the prince travel to the United Nations, via Beijing, to plead the cause of the regime. A Chinese jet would leave Phnom Penh with Sihanouk and his entourage on January 6. Sihanouk accepted the assignment. Pol Pot then gave the prince a long, optimistic briefing about the military situation using an enormous map. He promised to “liquidate” Vietnamese forces within two months. At that point, he added, he would be happy to welcome Sihanouk back to Phnom Penh. The rendezvous and the two performances were over. Sihanouk was taken home in the Mercedes. His wife and motherin-law were delighted to see him. They had assumed he had been killed.

The prince’s flight departed on time the following afternoon, less than twenty-four hours before Vietnamese forces reached the outskirts of Phnom Penh. It was the last plane to leave the city. Along with Sihanouk, it carried most of what remained of the diplomatic corps. Chinese aid personnel had been evacuated by train several days earlier. On January 6 it was the turn of several government ministries; others were given orders to leave the next day. At 8:00 A.M. on January 7, hundreds of minor officials were loaded onto a train. They included some of the returnees, one of whom, Y Phandara, later recorded his memories of the scene. Wounded troops brought in from the hospitals and anyone who could climb onto the carriages crowded around him. Soon after the train departed, around 9:00 A.M., Phandara “saw two helicopters coming from Phnom Penh and heading in the same direction as we were. I watched them disappear over the horizon.” The helicopters were carrying Pol Pot and his close associates to exile in Thailand and an uncertain future. It was an ignominious departure, reminiscent of American ambassador John Gunther Dean’s in April 1975, barely a week before the first “liberation” of Phnom Penh.41

CHAPTER NINE - “Grandfather 87,” 1979—1998

CHAPTER NINE

“Grandfather 87,” 1979—1998

The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia caused hundreds of thousands of Cambodians to run, but very few could escape as neatly as Pol Pot managed to do. DK troops numbering over 30,000 men and women, accompanied by perhaps 100,000 villagers and conscripts, retreated through the forests into northwestern Cambodia as Vietnamese armies swept up the major roads and occupied the towns. Thousands of Cambodians died in combat and from malaria and malnutrition in the exodus. By the end of 1979 most of what was left of Democratic Kampuchea’s army was encamped in malarial forests close to the Thai-Cambodian border. Pol Pot’s whereabouts for most of that year are unknown.