CAMBODIA: The Khmer Rouge: Rampant Terror

“When they no longer need me, they will spit me out like a cherry pit,” Prince Norodom Sihanouk once said about Cambodia’s new Khmer Rouge rulers. Last week the prince’s pithy prediction came true. In a radio broadcast, Vice Premier Khieu Samphan, the iron-fisted guerrilla who has ruled the country since the Communist takeover a year ago, announced that Sihanouk had resigned as chief of state, even though he had been reconfirmed in that post by the National Assembly on March 20. Samphan said that the prince, heir to a long line of Khmer royalty and virtually a demigod to Cambodians during his 30-year reign, would receive a pension of $8,000 a year, and that a statue would be erected in his honor—presumably to placate those Cambodians with lingering loyalties toward the former monarch.

Whether or not the resignation was voluntary—and there were widespread doubts that it was—Sihanouk seemed to accept his fate. Shortly after Samphan’s broadcast, the prince declared: “I request the representatives of the people to allow me to retire, while remaining to the end of my life an ardent supporter of the Khmer revolution, the democratic people and the government.” There were subsequent but unverified reports that Sihanouk had left the country for China.

Frequently Wept. Forced into exile in Peking by the U.S.-backed Lon Nol regime that ousted him in 1970, Sihanouk had backed the Communist Khmer rebels. But since their capture of Phnom-Penh, the prince has reportedly been unhappy about the new regime’s ruthless campaign of intimidation and reprisals against everyone with any connection to Cambodia’s past. On a world tour last year, friends say, Sihanouk frequently wept over the course of events.

There is now little doubt that the Cambodian government is one of the most brutal, backward and xenophobic regimes in the world. Cambodians themselves refer to the Khmer Rouge simply as “the Organization.” Refugees who have managed to flee to Thailand —often after days and weeks of walking through thick forests and jungles along the border—describe the revolution as a chilling form of mindless terror. In sharp contrast to Laos and Viet Nam, where party cadres have subtly tried to win popular support for social change, there are no revolutionary songs, slogans, poetry, party newspapers or “reeducation” centers to explain the purpose and ideology of the revolution. Instead, refugees told TIME Correspondents William McWhirter and David Aikman there has been a grim, silent round of purges, mass evacuations, forced labor and willful assassinations that have swept up the innocent along with the guilty.

Since the Communist victory last year, an estimated 500,000 to 600,000 people—one-tenth of Cambodia’s population—have died from political reprisals, disease or starvation. After the Khmer Rouge takeover, the authorities ordered a shocking forced march of 25,000 patients from their Phnom-Penh hospital beds to work in the countryside. This set the pattern. The populations of every city have been evacuated—young, old, sick, well—and forced, at rifle point, to work in the rice fields. All shops, schools and hospitals have been closed. Phnom-Penh has shrunk from a war-swollen population of 2.5 million to an empty and lifeless shell of 45,000.

Buried Alive. Cambodia’s new rulers have systematically killed former civil servants and soldiers in the Lon Nol army. In a typical incident in the provincial capital of Battambong last year, hundreds of former officers were assembled in a school building on the pretext that they were to greet Prince Sihanouk. There, they were bound hand and foot, loaded onto trucks, and machine-gunned on the outskirts of the city. In recent months the pogrom has been extended to include anyone with an education, such as schoolteachers and students. Whole families—and sometimes entire villages—have been massacred.

To escape the bloodbath, at least 20,000 Cambodians have fled across the border into Thailand. They tell tales of people being clubbed to death “to save ammunition.” Others have been bound together and buried alive by bulldozers, or suffocated by having plastic bags tied over their heads. Says one former military policeman who escaped to Thailand: “If some worker made a mistake or criticized a project, he was taken away and we never saw him again. They were sometimes flogged to death, other times shot at night. The bodies were left un-buried.” Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the Khmer Rouge regime is that, as one refugee describes it, “we never knew their intentions. They didn’t know how to read or write. All they had learned was revolutionary philosophy. Between Cambodians we once thought we could talk and understand each other well. It was just a dream.”

The savagery of the Cambodian revolution, in contrast to neighboring Laos and Viet Nam, caught political analysts by surprise. They note, however, that there has always been an element of brutality beneath the placid Khmer personality; for that reason the French army in Indochina preferred Cambodian troops to Laotian or Vietnamese soldiers. Another explanation of the brutality is that the Khmer Rouge feared they could not control Cambodia’s swollen cities or its educated and political elite.

After a visit to Phnom-Penh last month, Swedish Ambassador to Peking Kaj Bjork—the only Western diplomat permitted inside Cambodia—characterized its revolution as more radical than China’s. “The new leaders,” he said “speak neither of socialism nor of Communism but of new collectivist ideas. They are taking pains to wipe out everything that reminds them of the old society.” A Cambodian specialist was more blunt: “There have always been retributions, but I can only call this genocide.” Adds a refugee: “In Cambodia today, death is preferable to life.”