Leper-kings

Richard West

Cambodia Year Zero Francois Ponchaud (Allen Lane £6.50; Penguin 95p)

When I first went to Cambodia in 1963, it struck me as simply the pleasantest country in the world, a place of temples, incense and gongs; of smiling, serene peasants, and fishermen; and, of course, 'a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land'. Subsequent visits only increased the enchantment of Cambodia under the wise if eccentric rule of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, creator of that unique political movement, Royal Buddhist Socialism. He approved of what I wrote in praise of Cambodia: 'I have seen the past, and it works'. But! also added a warning, this was in 1968, that such a delightful pocket of civilisation could not long survive in a world under assault from Russian, Chinese and American barbarism.

Never, in my most pessimistic mood, did I imagine that Cambodia could be transformed from the most pleasant to the most hellish country on earth, as described by Francois Ponchaud in a deeply depressing book.

The author was a member of the Society of Foreign Missions of Paris and lived in Cambodia from 1965 until he was forced to leave Phnom Penh on 6 May 1975, some three weeks after the Communist takeover. He had been responsible for a Khmer student centre and a translation bureau; he has a profound knowledge of Khmer culture and history; indeed the inscription for his book comes from the stele of Jayavarman VII (1183-1201), known as the Leper-king: He suffered more from his subjects' diseases than from his own, for it is the people's pain that makes the pain of kings and not their own.

This account of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouges, or the Angkar as their organisation is called, is based in part on their publications and broadcasts but overwhelmingly on the accounts of more than a hundred refugees whom M Ponchaud has questioned at great length. Describing himself as an 'exegete by training and profession' M Ponchaud explains: 'I was instinctively suspicious of people who had 'revelations' to make, and came bearing sensational tidings. I also mistrusted those who spoke French, and those who came from the wealthier classes and who had too much to lose under the new regime. I was mainly interested in the ordinary people, the army privates, peasants and labourers who could neither read nor write nor analyse what they had seen but whose illiterate memories could supply exact details. 'He has also been able to cross-check these accounts to achieve still further accuracy. Finally it should be pointed out that M Ponchaud is a man of the Left who, until March 1975, had 'welcomed the revolutionaries' victory as the only possible means of bringing Cambodia out of its misery'.

In a preface to this English edition, M Ponchaud explains that his book has been criticised by Noam Chomsky and others who say there have been no massacres and lay the blame for the tragedy on the American bombings. Now it may be true that American bombing was largely responsible for the rise of the Khmer Rouges but not for the deeds of the Khmer Rouges when they took power. Denial from the evil Chomsky only adds weight to the judgement of M Ponchaud that the 'Khmer revolution is irrefutably the bloodiest of our century'.

The beginnings of that revolution in the first days after the fall of Phnom Penh have been described by other outsiders but M Ponchaud, who was used as an interpreter, probably saw more than anyone of the suffering caused by the mass expulsion into the countryside: 'I shall never forget one cripple who had neither hands nor feet, writhing along the ground like a severed worm, or a weeping father carrying his ten-year-old daughter wrapped in a sheet tied round his neck like a sling, or the man with his foot dangling at the end of a leg to which it was attached by nothing but the skin'. He disposes of the argument that the evacuation was ordered for fear of American bombing, or because of a shortage of food, and shows that it was part of a plan to eliminate an entire class of the population, even if that class was actually the majority. 'One or two million young people are enough to make the new Kampuchea', the Khmer Rouges boasted.

All over the country, the Khmer Rouges rounded up army officers, civil shopkeepers, teachers and students, sometimes under the pretext of going to greet Prince Sihanouk, then drove them into the forest where, in the words of one survivor; 'The servants of the Prince of Death, hiding along the road and in the forest, all armed, began to send a rain of fire down upon us'. Wives and small children were slaughtered along with the men.

Those who survived the initial massacres were put to toil on the land, building dikes, working the paddy fields, hoeing, pulling ploughs. Probably hundreds of thousands died of starvation, exhaustion, disease or execution. The Angkar decreed that: 'In Kampuchea there are no camps or prisons. Anyone who protests shows that he doesn't want to be part of their society. Anyone who doesn't want to be part of their society should be shot. There is no pardon.' However, to save bullets, the executions are usually carried out by a blow to the neck with a pick-handle.

The Khmer Rouges set out not only to kill the members of the former society but to destroy even its memory. Families have been systematically split up and their individual members given new names. The ancient songs and music have been abolished, temples destroyed (though not apparently those of Angkor Wat) and bonzes murdered. The Khmer Rouges have smashed statues of Buddha, used them as clothes racks or wheel-blocks, even urinated on them. These things have happened to a society based on Buddhism and the family.

The Khmer Rouges have even succeeded in changing the Khmer language into the kind of 'newspeak' that George Orwell predicted in 1984. The subtle and intricate forms of address to show respect for age, social position, family ties and religion, have been abolished. All adults are called 'mum' and 'dad' by young 'cadres' who call each other 'junior comrade' or 'senior comrade'. All foreign words have been abolished except for 'meeting' and 'fascist'. Those to be shot are sent to 'the higher organisation'.

About the only thing that anybody could find to admire in modern Cambodia is the encouragement of ox transport to save on fuel, and the invention of machinery powered by rice fuel. But the price to pay for such forms of conservation would horrify even the most fanatical western 'Friends of the Earth'.

Why, one keeps asking oneself, reading this book, should such an abomination have happened in what used to be such a peaceful country? Why did the revolution arrive so differently in neighbouring Vietnam? In his concluding chapters, M Ponchaud offers the best explanation that I have yet read, based on his great understanding of Cambodian Character and history. He points out that for all their apparent peacefulness, the Khmers had a high military reputation and were preferred by the French over the Vietnamese as soldiers; with this aptitude for fighting there went a strain of ferocity, and also of chauvinism, that dates to the loss of Cambodia's empire to the neighbouring Thais and Vietnamese.

The leaders of the Angkar — its very name IS mysterious — appear to be mostly school teachers who learned their marxism in France during the Stalin era, and have not been affected by later, more liberal trends in Communism. And just as the Russian masses accepted the Stalin tyranny, so are the Cambodians inclined to obey authority, Which may be an inheritance, so M Ponchaud suggests, of their former Hindu civilisation.

The city of temples, Angkor Wat, was built in the Hindu era, and, with its pro fusion of almost identical stone gods, danc ing girls and elephants, suggests that it was the creation of an authoritarian ruler. Some mad Cambodian Stalin' must have built it, I wrote after my first visit. And Ieng Sary, one of the Khmer Rouges leaders and an inveterate Stalinist, is quoted by M Ponchaud as saying: 'How many human lives it must have cost to build Angkor Wat!'

He does not regret the human lives but the purpose for which they were expended.

Hundreds of thousands, or even millions of lives have been lost in the last three years to create not temples but a wilderness, with commissars instead of priests, and slogans instead of prayers.

As M Ponchaud writes at the end of his devastating book: The smile of the Leper-King has frozen into a grimace of death.'