Khieu Seng Kim remembers the day welclass="underline" it was Monday, April 24, 1967. His mother served dinner at seven-thirty, and the two of them sat at the dining table and waited for Khieu Samphan to arrive; he always came home at about that time. They stayed there till eleven, without eating, listening to every footstep and every sound; then his mother broke down and began to cry. She cried all night, "like a child who has lost its mother."
At first they thought that Khieu Samphan had been arrested. They had good reason to, for Prince Sihanouk had made a speech two days before, denouncing Khieu Samphan and two close friends of his, the brothers Hu Nim and Hou Yuon. But no arrest was announced, and nor was there any other news the next day.
Khieu Seng Kim became a man possessed. He could not believe that the brother he worshipped would abandon his family; at that time he was their only means of support. He traveled all over the country, visiting friends and relatives, asking if they had any news of his brother. Nobody could tell him anything. It was only much later that he learned that Khieu Samphan had been smuggled out of the city in a farmer's cart the evening he failed to show up for dinner.
He never saw him again.
Eight years later, in 1975, when the first Khmer Rouge cadres marched into Phnom Penh, Khieu Seng Kim went rushing out into the streets and threw himself upon them, crying, "My brother is Khieu Samphan, my brother is your leader." They looked at him as though he were insane. "The revolution doesn't recognize families," they said, brushing him off. He was driven out of the city with his wife and children and made to march to a work site just like everybody else.
Like most other evacuees, Khieu Seng Kim drifted back toward Phnom Penh in 1979, after the Pol Pot regime had been overthrown by the Vietnamese invasion. He began working in a factory, but within a few months it came to be known that he knew French and had worked as a journalist before the revolution. The new government contacted him and invited him to take up a job as a journalist. He refused; he didn't want to be compromised or associate himself with the government in any way. Instead, he worked with the Department of Archaeology for a while as a restorer and then took a teaching job at the School of Fine Arts.
"For that they're still suspicious of me," he said with a wry smile. "Even now. That's why I live in a place like this, while everyone in the country is getting rich."
He smiled and lit a cigarette; he seemed obscurely pleased at the thought of being excluded and pushed onto the edges of the wilderness that had claimed his brother decades ago. It never seemed to have occurred to him to reflect that there was probably no other country on earth where the brother of a man who had headed a genocidal regime would actually be invited to accept a job by the government that followed.
I liked Khieu Seng Kim; I liked his quirky younger-brotherishness. For his sake I wished his mother were still alive — that indomitable old woman who had spread out her mat and started selling vegetables on the street when she realized that her eldest son would have no qualms about sacrificing his entire family on the altar of his idealism. She would have reminded Khieu Seng Kim of a few home truths.
11
According to his brother, Khieu Samphan talked very little about his student days upon his return from France. He did, however, tell one story that imprinted itself vividly on the fourteen-year-old boy's mind. It had to do with an old friend, Hou Yuon. Khieu Seng Kim remembers Hou Yuon well; he was always in and out of the house, a part of the family.
Hou Yuon and his brother Hu Nim played pivotal roles in the Communist movement in Cambodia: along with Khieu Samphan, they were the most popular figures on the left through the sixties and early seventies. Then as now, Pol Pot preferred to be a faceless puppeteer, pulling strings behind a screen of organizational anonymity.
The two brothers were initiated into radical politics at about the same time as Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot; they attended the same study groups in Paris; they did party work together in Phnom Penh in the sixties, and all through the desperate years of the early seventies they fought together, shoulder by shoulder, in conditions of the most extreme hardship, with thousands of tons of bombs crashing down around them. So closely linked were the fortunes of Khieu Samphan and the two brothers that they became a collective legend, known together as the Three Ghosts.
Khieu Samphan's acquaintance with Hou Yuon dated back to their schooldays at the Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh. Their friendship was sealed in Paris in the fifties and was the subject of the story Khieu Samphan told his brother on his return.
Once, at a Cambodian gathering in Paris, Hou Yuon made a speech in which he criticized the corruption and venality of Prince Sihanouk's regime. He was overheard by an official, and soon afterward his government scholarship was suspended for a year. Since Khieu Samphan was known to be a particular friend of his, his scholarship was suspended too.
To support themselves, the two men began to sell bread. They would study during the day, and at night they would walk around the city hawking long loaves of French bread. With the money they earned, they paid for their upkeep and bought books; the loaves they couldn't sell they ate. It was a hard way to earn money, Khieu Samphan told his brother, but at the same time it was also oddly exhilarating. Walking down those lamp-lit streets late at night, talking to each other, it was as though he and Hou Yuon somehow managed to leave behind the nighttime of the spirit that had befallen them in Paris. They would walk all night long, with the fragrant, crusty loaves over their shoulders, looking into the windows of cafés and restaurants, talking about their lives and about the future…
Hou Yuon was one of the first to die when the revolution began to devour itself: his moderate views were sharply at odds with the ultraradical, collectivist ideology of the ruling group. In August 1975, a few months after the Khmer Rouge took power, he addressed a crowd and vehemently criticized the policy of evacuating the cities. He is said to have been assassinated as he left the meeting, on the orders of the party's leadership. His brother Hu Nim served for a while as minister of information. Then, on April 10, 1977, he and his wife were taken into Interrogation Center S-21—the torture chambers at Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh. He was executed several months later, after confessing to being everything from a CIA agent to a Vietnamese spy.
Khieu Samphan was then head of state. He is believed to have played an important role in planning the mass purges of that period.
For Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot, the deaths of Hou Yuon, Hu Nim, and the thousands of others who were executed in torture chambers and execution grounds were not a contradiction but rather a proof of their own idealism and ideological purity. Terror was essential to their exercise of power. It was an integral part not merely of their coercive machinery but of the moral order on which they built their regime, a part whose best description still lies in the line that Brückner, most prescient of playwrights, gave to Robespierre (a particular hero of Pol Pot's): "Virtue is terror, and terror virtue" — words that might well serve as an epitaph for the twentieth century.
12
Those who were there then say there was a moment of epiphany in Phnom Penh in 1981. It occurred at a quiet, relatively obscure event: a festival at which classical Cambodian music and dance were performed for the first time since the revolution.
Dancers and musicians from all over the country traveled to Phnom Penh for the festival. Proeung Chhieng, one of the best-known dancers and choreographers in the country, was among those who made the journey; he came to Phnom Penh from Kompong Thom, where he had helped assemble a small troupe of dancers after the fall of Democratic Kampuchea. He himself had trained at the palace since his childhood, specializing in the role of Hanuman, the monkey god of the Ramayana epic, a part that is one of the glories of Khmer dance. This training proved instrumental in Proeung Chhieng's survivaclass="underline" his expertise in clowning and mime helped him persuade the interrogators at his labor camp that he was an illiterate lunatic.