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executions to the period ending in January 1977, and for 1977–78 merely says that “living conditions most likely did not vary during these two years from the conditions during 1976,” although as was known when the CIA study was undertaken, these later years were the worst, by far, in the context of internal purges and the escalating conflict with Vietnam at a time when the United States was beginning its “tilt” toward China and Pol Pot. The CIA concludes that among the “old people,” the “rural population” who were “the foundation for the new Khmer Rouge revolutionary society,” there was a slight increase in population through the DK period. A still more muted assessment is provided by the close U.S. ally Deng Xiaoping, who emerged as “party strongman” in China in December 1978 and soon implemented his plan to “punish Vietnam,” and who remained the main supporter of Pol Pot. He bitterly opposed attempts to remove the Khmer Rouge from their leading role in the DK coalition in 1984, stating in a rage that “I do not understand why some people want to remove Pol Pot. It is true that he made some mistakes in the past but now he is leading the fight against the Vietnamese aggressors.”38 Deng has been backed in this stance by the Reagan administration (see “Phase III in Indochina,” p. 267).

In addition to such real examples of less harsh interpretations of the Pol Pot period, there are also mythical ones to which we return.

6.2.3. THE “NOT-SO-GENTLE” LAND: SOME RELEVANT HISTORY

Part of the illusory story constructed about Cambodia during the 1970s and since is that this “gentle land” with its “smiling people” had known little suffering before the country was drawn into the Indochina war and then subjected to Pol Pot “autogenocide.” The reality is different. Behind the famous “Khmer smile,” as Prince Sihanouk’s French adviser Charles Meyer observed, lies ample bitterness and violence.39 Vickery observes that earlier chronicles “are filled with references to public executions, ambushes, torture, village-burnings and forced emigration,” with the destruction of villages and landscapes, torture, and killing a matter of course, and few institutional restraints on terror. The peasantry of inner Cambodia, largely unknown to Western scholarship or to the urban population, appear to have lived under conditions of extreme violence and hatred for the oppressors from outside the village.

During the French war of reconquest in the late 1940s, up to “perhaps one million rural inhabitants . . . were forcibly ‘regrouped.’” The huge flow of refugees to Phnom Penh during phase I of the “decade of the genocide” was not the first massive dislocation in recent history, Vickery continues, adding that it is, furthermore, “a strange kind of history” that regards the displacement of people fleeing from U.S. bombs and savage fighting “as somehow less abhorrent or more ‘normal’ than the reverse movement of 1975,” the forcible evacuation when the peasant army of the Khmer Rouge conquered the city. Leaders of the anti-French resistance after World War II describe horrifying atrocities conducted with obvious pleasure as a “normal” part of “Khmer mores.” In the same years, government forces led by Lon Nol, who was to head the U.S.-backed client government in the early 1970s, carried out wholesale massacres in villages as the French withdrew, including such “individual tests of strength” as “grasping infants by the legs and pulling them apart,” actions that “had probably not been forgotten by the men of that area who survived to become the Khmer Rouge troops” whose later atrocities in this “gentle land” aroused such outrage in the West. “Thus for the rural 80–90 percent of the Cambodian people,” Vickery concludes, “arbitrary justice, sudden violent death, political oppression, exploitative use of religion and anti-religious reaction, both violent and quiescent, were common facts of life long before the war and revolution of the 1970s.” These conditions elicited no interest in the West. “The creations of Pol Pot-ism were all there in embryo,” Vickery continues,