When the War Was Over Read Free

restructuring that would lead to the deaths of as many as two million of their people immediately after a war that had devastated the country. The victims of this revolution understood least of all.

    Mey Komphot was thirty-seven years old when the war in his country ended. The fighting began in 1970 and ended in the spring of 1975––it lasted only five years. It had not been a quagmire or a war of attrition such as the French and Americans considered their long, disastrous battle to deny the Vietnamese communists the independence they believed they had won in 1945. Cambodia’s descent into misery had been precipitate and brutal, catching all Cambodians by surprise, especially men like Komphot.
    He had watched his country’s collapse from an extremely privileged position, as an executive in one of Phnom Penh’s largest private banks. Sophisticated and intelligent, a bachelor with entree into the capital’s elite circles, Komphot epitomized all that the Khmer Republic and its American sponsors claimed to be fighting to protect. But Komphot had grown so weary of war and so disgusted with the leadership in Phnom Penh that he wanted nothing more than that the war should end and the Khmer Rouge win as he knew they would.
    Komphot knew very little about the Khmer Rouge, or Red Khmer. The Cambodian communists had not mounted sophisticated, successful political propaganda campaigns such as those of the Vietnamese communists. By design they had obscured their history and their ultimate aims while they fought the war.
    Yet Komphot felt compelled to judge these communists and decide if he wanted the Khmer Rouge to win the war. His answer, finally, was a qualified yes. The Khmer Rouge could not be as awful as the leaders in Phnom Penh. In such a fashion, Komphot became a distant follower.
    He reached this conclusion because he had faith in the few acknowledged Khmer Rouge leaders and because, he believed, most Cambodians shared a particular set of values. The leaders promoted by the Khmer Rouge during the war were men and women Komphot and his generation had long admired. In the early sixties they had made their mark in Phnom Penh as skilled intellectuals, writers, journalists, and politicians who resisted corruption—the disease that had kept Cambodian politics at medieval-court standards.
    Komphot had known only one Khmer Rouge figure personally, and that was Khieu Ponnary. She was one of the country’s first independent-minded women and a widely respected professor. She had taught Komphot during his first year at lycée, or high school, and he remembered her intelligence and vivid sense of Khmer nationalism. She had never betrayed her communist
sympathies in the classroom, nor those of her husband, who became infamous under the nom de guerre Pol Pot.
    Khieu Ponnary and the other Khmer Rouge leaders were presumed communists, but in Phnom Penh most of the intelligentsia assumed the Khmer Rouge were more nationalist than communist, hence less dangerous. However, it had been more than a decade since Komphot and the rest of Phnom Penh had seen the Khmer Rouge leaders. They began disappearing from the capital during a witch hunt begun in 1963 by Prince Norodom Sihanouk. By 1967 all the prominent figures had abandoned the city for the jungle and a war of resistance. They left behind romantic reputations that haunted the Phnom Penh of Komphot’s generation and colored expectations of what would happen once the war ended.
    Komphot had created an unshakable fantasy about the Khmer Rouge and their plans after the war. He ignored wartime propaganda that cast them as ogres and held the view common in his circles that these nationalist Cambodians represented something resembling the Yugoslav variant of communism. If they won and established a communist government, Komphot reasoned, they would welcome the talents and support of professionals like Komphot. He knew little about communism or about the Khmer