For the Sake of All Living Things

Major Characters-1

MAJOR CHARACTERSThe Cahuom family of Phum Sath Din, Stung Treng Province:

CHHUON, b. 1923, an agronomist

NEANG THI SOK, b. 1930, Chhuon’s wife VATHANA, b. 1950, eldest daughter of

Chhuon and Sok

Her children are SAMNANG, son b. 1969; SAMOL, daughter b. 1971; and SU LIVANH, daughter b. 1973

SAMAY, b. 1952, eldest son

SAMNANG, b. 1956, second son

MAYANA, b. 1959, daughter

SAKHON, b. 1965, son (nicknamed Peou, which means last child)

SITA, Chhuon’s mother

CHEAM, b. 1919, Chhuon’s older brother MOEUN, b. 1921, Chhuon’s older sister VOEN, b. 1925, Chhuon’s younger sister SAM, b. 1924, Chhuon’s cousin

RY, Sam’s wife

MOEN, Ry’s mother

Other Villagers in Phum Sath Din:

NY NON CHAN, a village elder

NIMOL, Chan’s wife

MAHA NYANANANDA, monk and spiritual leader of village

MAHA VANATANDA, second monk

KPA, a mountaineer boy

HENG and KHIENG, schoolmates of Cahuom Samnang

The Mountaineer village of Plei Srepok:

Y KSAR, b. 1907, elder of the Jaang clan JAANG, wife of Y Ksar

CHUNG, son of Y Ksar and Jaang

DRAAM MUL, wife of Chung

SRAANG, daughter of Chung and Draam Mul Y BHUR, son of Chung and Draam Mul

BOK ROH, NVA/KVM soldier/agent, nicknamed after the Giant of Mountaineer legends

In Stung Treng City and Neak Luong:

PECH LIM SONG, a wealthy merchant SISOWATH THICH SOEN, Song’s wife, a/k/a

Madame Pech, a distant cousin of Sisowath Sirik Matak, Prime Minister of the Republic of Cambodia

PECH CHIEU TECK, son of Song and Madame Pech who marries Vathana, daughter of Chhuon

KIM, LOUIS, SAKUN, THIOUNN, Teck’s friends from the university

SOPHAN, Vathana’s wet nurse/servant SAMBATH, Pech Lim Song’s servant

KEO KOSAL, a poet

SARIN SAM OL, a doctor

Americans:

LT. JOHN L. SULLIVAN, b. 1948, two tours with Special Forces in Viet Nam, assigned to Military Equipment Delivery Team, Cambodia

SGT. RON HUNTLEY, Sullivan’s sidekick

SGT. IAN CONKLIN, team member of

Sullivan and Huntley

RITA DONALDSON, a reporter for The Washington News-Times

Khmer Krahom leaders (The Center)

(All characters are fictional. “Met” = “comrade.”)

MET SAR, a high general, covert chief of the Kampuchean Communist Party

MET PON, Sar’s wife

MET RETH, Sar’s bodyguard

METNIM, Sar’s aide

MET MEAS, scribe and historian

MET DY, head of School of the Cruel, KK chief of personnel

METPHAN, tactician and strategic planner MET YON, theoretician and economic planner

MET SEN, security chief

North Viet Namese Army / Khmer Viet Minh agents, leaders, advisors:

HANG TUNG, chief KVM agent in Phum Sath

DIN LTC NUI, commander of NVA unit in Ratanakiri Province

CADREMAN TRINH, NVA political officer in Nui’s headquarters

TRINH LE, Cadreman Trinh’s assistant

LTC HANS MITTERSCHMIDT, an East German military and political advisor to Nui South Viet Namese

TRAN VAN LE, an intelligence officer/agent with the ARVN

CAMBODIA: Factions, Influences and Military DispositionHISTORICAL SUMMATION Part 1

(to mid-1968)

Prepared for

The Washington News-Times

J. L. Sullivan

April 1985

THE CAMBODIAN h*******t HAS not ended and we remain skeptical and uncertain if or how the “problem” will ever be resolved.

One in ten Cambodians were killed in the multiforce fighting between 1967 and 1975—600,000 to 700,000 of 7.1 million—approximately half to the civil war and half to various invasions, pogroms and purges. From April 1975 to January 1979 more than two million people were killed, starved to death or died of epidemics caused by government policies. In the twelve months after the Viet Namese conquest of January 1979, an additional 600,000 to 700,000 Khmers were sacrificed to the policies of this new regime. And now, amid talk of new superpower détente and Viet Namese withdrawal from Cambodia, the cruelty, enslavement and murders continue.

How did it happen? What were the conditions and events that drove an unwitting people to the threshold of extinction? Was Cambodia a gentle land or the heart of darkness? A sideshow or an inextricable theater of the Southeast Asian war? A fertile lacustrine basin or an inevitable killing field?

By midsummer 1968 Cambodia was a nation set on a course of destruction, yet only a decade earlier Cambodia had been experiencing a period of unprecedented prosperity and optimism.

BROKEN PROMISES—BROKEN LEADERSHIP

In 1946, as Viet Namese nationalists were battling the reestablishment of French colonialism, France granted Cambodia internal autonomy. Three years later, as France foundered in Viet Nam and America sent its first anti-Communist aid to Southeast Asia, Cambodia gained de jure independence. Full independence was granted to the Royal Government of the Kingdom of Cambodia in November 1953—six months before the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, eight months before the Geneva Agreements divided Viet Nam into Communist and non-Communist halves.

The excitement of independence drove Cambodia but the new state never expunged the weaknesses of colonialism or the underlying feudal structure. King Norodom Sihanouk abdicated his throne to become prince and head of state. Using his early popular mandate, partially based on a belief in the divinity of the monarch, he reduced his critics to states of impotence. Sihanouk became a neomandarin, a leader unable or unwilling to understand or direct his people. Under his growing cult of personality, contrary views had no outlet. Elements of the political right and left faded into urban back alleys or into the forests and jungles that cover three quarters of the country. Hidden, the disenchanted joined or formed revolutionary parties.

In the decade and a half following independence, there was no development of democratic institutions or of an independent bureaucracy to run the daily business of the government. Sihanouk delegated almost no authority. No ministers of the cabinet, no representatives in the legislature, no officers in the army, and no intellectuals at the university were allowed to mature into leaders. From 1955 Sihanouk ruled as if he were the government, overriding all institutions at his personal whim, suffocating all those subordinate to him. By 1960, he had established near-total dominance over all means of mass communication.

He seemed blind to the dynamic changes surrounding him. From 1945 to 1968 the population doubled. Half of all Cambodians were under fifteen years of age. In the six years 1962 to 1968, the population of the core areas around the major cities increased by 30 to 50 percent. Phnom Penh grew from 394,000 in 1962 to nearly 550,000 in 1968. The move to urban centers was coupled with the establishment of a large secular block which began to shed its Buddhism and its belief in the divinity of the monarch.

Outside the capital, the underlying feudal structure of barons, warlords and powerful landowners severely hampered the development of a modern state, and Sihanouk’s monarchy did little to lessen the power of that traditionally corrupt class. His control of the national government and his influence over the regional barons was nearly absolute, but he was a man of contradictions. He pressed for universal primary education and encouraged secondary and university study. If the nation were to grow, he believed, it would need an educated class. Yet he was afraid that those with education would become prominent and powerful, potential enemies. Sihanouk and the ruling class undercut the institutions and blocked graduates from gaining employment, thus rendering them powerless. By 1968, protest and criticism were being dealt with by the jailing of teachers and students without charges being filed and without families being notified. These and other human rights violations were rampant.

Sihanouk also controlled the national “Buddhist-oriented system of voluntary contributions”—that is, taxes. To earn merit and achieve a better station in the next life, a Buddhist must be charitable. Sihanouk argued that because the rich were all devout Buddhists their contributions would support the poor and the state. In reality, the rich gave little to the poor and almost nothing to the state. The merchant or middle class, though taxed, was tiny, and state income from it amounted to little. This left only farmers to support the state, and they were heavily taxed, even though farmers as a percentage of the population had shrunk from nearly 80 percent to about 50 percent. p*****t from them was usually in rice, which the government sold on the export market. By 1966, two thirds of the peasants were burdened by indebtedness, loans which carried interest rates of 12 percent per month. The new population pressures, the tax-caused indebtedness and the feudal order combined to create unstable land tenure conditions. In 1950, only one in twenty-five Khmer farmers rented his land. By 1968, the figure was one in five.

Without broad-based taxes the government had no capital with which to modernize the state, to improve or maintain the transportation and telephone systems or to raise, equip and train a viable national army. Cambodia, from 1954, was an ever-increasing low-pressure area—a power vacuum—a nation unable to ensure domestic tranquility, much less the integrity of its borders.

ELEMENTS, ARMIES AND FACTIONS

By 1968 this power vacuum had attracted, nourished or allowed the imposition of seven nongovernmental forces with seven different political agendas, each, at times, set against Sihanouk’s poorly equipped Royal Cambodian Army.

Not yet on Khmer soil but of influence were two major forces: the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Viet Nam) and the Americans with assorted allies, including those from the Republic of Korea and Australia. In the northeast border region of the highlands and Srepok Forest (from the Mekong River east to the crest of the Annam Cordillera) was the Mountaineer organization FULRO (French acronym for the United Front of the Oppressed Races) struggling to maintain the autonomy of their region, the old Crown Dominion Lands, from Viet Namese and Khmers, from Communists and non-Communists.

There were four major Communist factions operating in Cambodia in the late 1960s—the Viet Cong (indigenous South Viet Namese rebels), the North Viet Namese, the Khmer Viet Minh, and the Khmer Krahom. The Viet Cong operated from bases along the border and concentrated their efforts on their war with the ARVN and the Americans in South Viet Nam. This was not so for the North Viet Namese Army (NVA). By 1968 the NVA, by far the strongest force in Cambodia, had transformed the Northeast—Ratanakiri, Mondolkiri and portions of Stung Treng and Kratie provinces—into their own uncontested base area. In a different manner, they also controlled large portions of the South and Southeast. There they were entrenched—through bribery, through corruption, through threat of force and through assassination—in every area along the Sihanouk Trail from Kompong Som (Sihanoukville) northward to Phnom Penh and eastward, along coastal Highway 3 through Bokor and Kampot, to the border regions. Indeed, in many of the villages in Svay Rieng, Prey Veng, Kandal, Kompong Speu, Takeo and Kampot provinces, the North Viet Namese maintained at least a parallel governing administration to that of Sihanouk’s government. In portions of the southeastern provinces, especially along the border, they controlled the economy so completely they printed their own currency and forced local inhabitants to use it instead of the Cambodian riel. In addition, the NVA had established a front headquarters just outside Angkor Wat in Siem Reap Province in the Northwest.

THE KHMER COMMUNISTS AND NORODOM SIHANOUK

The two Cambodian Communist factions, the Khmer Krahom (KK) and the Khmer Viet Minh (KVM), trace their lineage back to common cadre trained by Ho Chi Minh between 1925 and 1930 at the Hoang Pho Military Academy in Canton, China. In the early 1940s the forerunners of these movements were functionally operating as anti-Sihanouk, anti-French organizations. In 1943 these movements proclaimed an end to the monarchy and, fearing retaliation, disbanded. Some rebels remained in the wilds of Cambodia, others went into exile in China.

The term krahom was never picked up by the ethnocentric free-world press and seldom used by Allied military intelligence. But the distinction between the two factions is important. Without an understanding of the differences, one cannot understand what took place in Cambodia. Those rebels who stayed in the Cambodian wilderness established the Krahom. Krahom is Khmer for “red,” a designation used long before Sihanouk gave all insurgents the monolithic label “Khmer Rouge.” It was the Khmer Krahom, Pol Pot’s faction, which came to power in 1975.

In 1947, more than a year after France granted internal autonomy to Cambodia, Ho Chi Minh tapped the externally exiled cadre to establish a second front for his revolution.

This marked the birth and became the core of the KVM. In the 1960s and 1970s, the KVM, sometimes called the Khmer Hanoi, was commanded by Le Duc Anh, a North Viet Namese politburo member and head of Hanoi’s Central Office for Kampuchean Affairs (COKA).