The curtain of silence that has concealed Cambodia from Western eyes ever since the Khmer Rouge capture of Phnom-Penh on April 17 opened briefly last week, revealing a shocking portrait of a nation in torturous upheaval. Eyewitness reports by the few Western journalists who stayed on in the Cambodian capital after the closing down of the American embassy indicated that the country's new Communist masters have proved to be far more ruthless, if not more cruel and sadistic in their exercise of power than most Western experts had expected.
Phnom-Penh has become a ghost city, forcibly and quickly emptied of most of its 2 million inhabitants. Perhaps as many as half of Cambodia's 7.6 million people have become victims of a massive dislocation, a forced march of city dwellers who have been ordered by the Khmer Rouge government to take to the roads and paths and become rice growers in the countryside. Even hospitals have been evacuated, and doctors stopped in mid-surgery, so that the patients, some limping, some crawling, could take their part in the newly proclaimed "peasant revolution."
Naive Glee. Eyewitness accounts contained scenes of savage contrast. Many of the Khmer Rouge soldiers who first entered Phnom-Penh were country boys who joyfully climbed aboard abandoned automobiles and rammed them, more by accident than design, against walls or telegraph poles; with naive glee, they looted stores for wristwatches but threw jewelry away because they had no use for it. Yet their leaders appeared to be tough disciplinarians who were more concerned about ideology than about the plight of the country's war-weary people. There were also reports of public executions, but these were not confirmed by eyewitnesses.
Cambodia's new leaders were apparently driven by a xenophobic determination to rid the country of foreign influence, not just the taint of "Americans and other imperialist lackeys" but also the influence of even the Chinese and North Vietnamese. Moscow, which had maintained diplomatic relations with the former Lon Nol government almost to the end, was rejected utterly: the second floor of the Soviet embassy was strafed with machine-gunfire, and the seven Russian diplomats there ordered to go to the French embassy compound to be evacuated with the other foreigners. From that precarious vantage point, they saw hundreds of thousands of Cambodians moved out of the capital, as Sydney H. Schanberg of the New York Times (see THE PRESS) put it, "in stunned silence—walking, bicycling, pushing cars that had run out of fuel, covering the roads like a human carpet."
The enforced mass exodus from the capital was carried out, it seemed, in desperate, mindless haste. The rice harvest will not be in until November. What will the millions of refugees in the countryside eat between now and then? If the new government refuses foreign aid, as it has said it will do, who will provide the seed for next year's crop? "Was this just cold brutality," wrote Schanberg, who stayed behind when Phnom-Penh fell last month, "a cruel and sadistic imposition of the law of the jungle? ... Or is it possible that, seen through the eyes of the peasant soldiers and revolutionaries, the forced evacuation of the cities is a harsh necessity? Or was the policy both cruel and ideological?"