Read Online Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing Ngor - Free Book Online

invade
Cambodia again!’
    The riot had less to do with contemporary politics than with an old, old racial grudge against the Vietnamese. Cambodia and Vietnam had fought many wars over the centuries. We Cambodians
remembered our defeats and waited for revenge – even those of us who were not ‘pure’ Khmer but a mixture of Chinese and Khmer. We all knew the legend of the cooking stones.
According to the legend, Vietnamese soldiers took three Cambodians captive long ago and buried them alive up to their necks with just their heads sticking out of the ground. Then the Vietnamese
made a fire between the heads and set a kettle on top of the heads as cookstones. Whether this had actually happened or not, most Cambodians believed it as fact. And in this riot, the resentment
against Vietnamese of all kinds, communist and noncommunist, from the North and from the South, and even against Cambodians of Vietnamese descent, got rolled into one.
    The riot put Phnom Penh in an uproar. Here was the capital of a supposedly neutral country attacking the embassies of its neighbours. Sihanouk cabled from Paris to try to stop it. He knew what
people like me didn’t – that the rioters, for all their deep feelings, had been manipulated by hidden organizers like puppets on strings. But in his absence officials of his government
continued to push the North Vietnamese. The two highest-ranking officials were Sihanouk’s royal rival, Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak, and General Lon Nol, who was prime minister and also
minister of defence and minister of information. Lon Nol was a dark-skinned man who liked his troops to call him ‘Black Papa’. He was proud of being Khmer, and he hated the Vietnamese
as much as the rioters themselves. He gave the Vietnamese communists three days to leave their sanctuaries along the border.
    Of course, the North Vietnamese didn’t leave. If they could fight successfully against a superpower like the United States, why should they obey a government with a tiny military like
Cambodia’s? In Phnom Penh the excitement and uncertainty rose. The airport closed. Armoured cars and tanks took up positions on the streets. On March 17 there was a big rally and parade. I
was in it, carrying a sign, shouting for the Vietnamese to go home. Everybody on the street was anti-Vietnamese and pro-Sihanouk. We all felt the same – students, journalists, police, army.
What we had forgotten was that Sihanouk himself had carefully balanced the Vietnamese communists and the Western powers to keep Cambodia neutral. He had also protected ethnic Vietnamese-Cambodians
from persecution.
    At lunch the following day I was having my usual bowl of sour-and-spicy noodle soup. My friend Sam Kwil, a journalist for one of the newspapers, and I were chatting when there was an
announcement on the radio: The National Assembly had passed a vote of no confidence against Sihanouk.
    Suddenly the food wasn’t tasty anymore.
    I looked around the restaurant. Everybody was staring with disbelief at the radio. Overthrow Sihanouk? Impossible! I took the radio from its stand and brought it to my table and turned up the
volume. We waited. Then the announcement was repeated, and the hope that we had heard wrong disappeared.
    Sirik Matak and Lon Nol were behind the coup. They had the support of only a tiny minority, the Phnom Penh elite, which couldn’t become as rich as it wanted because Sihanouk and his family
controlled all the top jobs. My journalist friend Sam Kwil, who was very well informed, told me that Sirik Matak and Lon Nol probably had help from the CIA. He said that Lon Nol wasn’t smart
enough to use racism against the Vietnamese as a way to destabilize the country, and then use the instability as the excuse for a coup. I agreed. But nobody has ever proved that the CIA was
involved.
    In a short time a new government emerged, with Lon Nol as its chief of state. Soon the government-owned television and radio station and the newspapers