Pol Pot's Lifeless Zombies

Brainwashed refugees from a brutal regime

Fleeing from famine and war, an estimated 560,000 homeless Cambodians are massed along their country's ill-defined western border with Thailand. Last week the Thai military command announced that the country would move most of the refugees from insecure frontier areas and establish huge camps to hold them. Thai officials contend that many of the Cambodians are actually inside their country already; even so, the 560,000 may be only part of an exodus even larger than the tragic flight of more than 700,000 refugees from Viet Nam.

At Khao I Dang in Thailand, seven miles from the frontier, international aid officials last week were hastily constructing a transit camp to hold 200,000 people; the camp will be able to provide rudimentary care for the sick and starving. While Thai workers with bulldozers and excavators were preparing 1.6 square miles of rolling grassland for the campsite and building latrines, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees was trucking in food, medical supplies and relief personnel from Bangkok. As soon as the camp is fully staffed, the plan calls for bringing 10,000 refugees each day from the frontier, walking in groups of 200 at 15-min. intervals. At week's end, however, the plan had to be scrapped, when it was discovered that the first 5,000 refugees were too exhausted or too ill to walk the seven miles to the camp. Thai soldiers escorted the Cambodians half a mile to a red-clay highway, where buses and trucks, equipped with mattresses for the sick, were waiting to take them to Khao I Dang.

The most traumatized of all the refugees in Thailand are the Khmer Rouge soldiers, and the civilians who were forced to follow them into hideouts in border areas under pressure by the Vietnamese army that occupied Cambodia last January. These refugees, about 30,000 in all, are dramatic evidence of the human damage wrought by the murderous regime of ousted Premier Pol Pot.

Aid officials and physicians have been astounded by the apathetic behavior of the Khmer Rouge refugees. Though no trained psychiatrists have examined them, they appear to be suffering the effects of drastic brainwashing, combined with extreme physical hardship and unrelieved fear. In an effort to create a radically new kind of human being, Pol Pot's Communist fanatics turned their subjects into zombie-like creatures whose will and capacity for human feeling seem all but extinguished.

TIME Hong Kong Bureau Chief Marsh Clark last week visited the Sakaew refugee camp in Thailand, 40 miles from the Cambodian border, where many of the Khmer Rouge soldiers and civilians are concentrated. Cambodians are normally a voluble people; Clark was struck by the fact that the Khmer Rouge refugees said almost nothing. Terror, as much as exhaustion or illness, appeared to be the principal cause of their muteness. The ferocious and deeply feared Angka (literally, organization), represented by top-ranking Khmer Rouge cadres, had followed the civilians into exile. Under Pol Pot civilians were constantly warned not to make idle conversation; small children were trained to eavesdrop on their elders and report all conversations to Angka cadres. In a camp near Sakaew, refugees are being watched by Khmer officers who try to make sure they give ideologically correct answers to foreigners' queries. One refugee who talked freely with her brother, a longtime emigre in Thailand, was shot in the hand as punishment by Angka representatives in the camp.

At Sakaew there are dozens of orphans, testifying to how brutally family ties were shattered under the Pol Pot regime. Most are children who were assigned to mobile work teams after their parents' murder by the Khmer Rouge. When questioned by refugee caseworkers, many said they did not miss their parents. Similarly, parents in the camp showed little or no interest in the children they brought with them to Thailand. In a makeshift maternity ward at Sakaew, a Red Cross volunteer, Midwife Judith Greenberg of Oakland, Calif, told Clark that the mothers appeared not to care whether their babies were born dead or alive. "Many of the exhausted and sick mothers don't hold their babies or even look at them. Yet they continue to procreate even under the difficult conditions they've been through."

Even more striking than the Khmer indifference toward life was their seeming indifference toward death. "When a family member dies, they take little notice," said a nurse. "They see death every day. They're very tough." One young man made no move to inform camp authorities when his wife died of cerebral malaria. As her body lay beside him beneath a blanket, he stared tearlessly into space. A Khmer Rouge soldier explained that the Angka never allowed them to cry. "We were not even allowed to say we would miss the people who died."

Working in a medical ward at Sakaew is the wife of a Phnom-Penh doctor who had watched helplessly while her husband and two of their children were beaten to death shortly after the capital fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975. The crime of the doctor and his children: they belonged to the intellectual class. Said the widow: "I didn't cry, for to have done so would have meant death for me and, more important, for my only surviving child. To cry would have meant that I disapproved of the Angka 's decision to kill my husband and two children."

Perhaps the most shocking method that the Khmer Rouge used to enforce discipline was cannibalism. One refugee told a group of assembled Cambodians at Sakaew of an incident he had observed when adultery was considered a crime punishable by death. A married man and a pregnant woman wed to another man had been caught making love. The man was beaten to death. Then members of the local work team were forced to watch the woman's execution. Recalled the witness:

"She was killed by a blow to the back of her neck. Then her stomach was cut open and the baby was taken out. It was alive and crying. The Khmer Rouge held the baby up by the heels and asked who among us would raise the child. None of us volunteered, for to do so would mean we approved of the adultery. The child was dashed to the ground, and the Khmer Rouge cut it open, removed its liver and fried it to eat."

When this story was told to the refugees, they began to laugh. One result of the brutalization of the Khmer Rouge is their sometimes perverse response to death and disease in the camp.

Jossif Sack, one of six volunteer Israeli doctors at Sakaew, told Clark: "We can't figure it out. When I am treating a patient here and causing pain, everyone starts to laugh. Is there something in their personality that makes them laugh when they see people dying or in pain?"

It remains to be seen whether the new refugees headed for Thai camps are suffering from the profound psychological damage evidenced by the Khmer Rouge and their civilian followers. But for almost all the refugees the future is unrelievedly bleak. The majority have no relatives or other ties abroad, and thus they will find it difficult to emigrate. Many have no skills and no training of any kind.

Few of the children can read and write.

Living in a universe that is totally circumscribed by the agonies they have endured, they know nothing whatever of the outside world. During Rosalynn Carter's visit to Sakaew three weeks ago, a journalist asked a group of Cambodian refugees: "What do you think of Mrs. Carter?" The reply: "Who is Mrs. Carter?"

"President Carter's wife," the newsman said. The rejoinder: "Who is President Carter?"

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