VERSE
Irwin, Mark
ever, the killings stopped, and the transformation of Cambodian rural society, in the northwest, began in earnest. By this time, the people o[ Battambang and Plmom Penh--perhaps two and a half...
...In the Cambodian case, in 1976, autarky makes sense, both in terms of recent experience --American intervention, and what is seen as the Western-induced corruption of previous regimes---and in terms of Cambodia's long history of conflict with Vietnam...
...Where did they build it...
...At the same time, I might feel less cautious and more optimistic if I were able to hear the voices of people I knew in the Cambodian countryside fourteen years ago, telling me about the revolution in their own words...
...She watches and listens...
...Can the regime recapture the grandeur of Angkor without duplicating the slavery (and by implication, the elite) that made Angkor what it was...
...Timidly she approaches and lowers one bare foot to the water's glassy surface...
...Is the price for liberation, in human terms, too high...
...The speech went something like this: In the old days, the big people told us we had independence...
...No, they didn't...
...1 April 1977:210...
...To make up for this they are now told that they own the land and factories where they work, and even the revolution itself...
...The phrase is sometimes known as autarky, and Khieu Samphan used this word in his address to the Conference of Non-Aligned Nations held in Colombo last year...
...they saw only photos...
...By this time, the people o[ Battambang and Plmom Penh--perhaps two and a half million of them--had been moved into the countryside by the revolutionary army, organized into work-teams and ordered to produce their own food...
...Instead, everyone is at work, "happily" building dams, canals and embankments to provide water for two or even three rice crops a year--an achievement unequaled since the days of Angkor...
...We don't build monuments like that...
...French words are no longer used in Cambodian conversation...
...the dialogue of young girls and princes...
...What was revolutionary about the process, in Cambodian terms, was the value placed on manual labor almost as an end in itself...
...The work-teams were made up of groups of 10, 30, 100, 300 and 900 people, led at each level, except the lowest, by three workers placed in charge of "work" (the tasks at hand), "politics" (culture and morale) and "economics" (food and tools...
...What was wrong with the "old society," these broadcasts suggest, was exploitation (literally, in Cambodian, "riding and stomping") and outsiders...
...Ricocheting, their song stitches the nether light of stars in a delicate fiction...
...Surely, as a friend of mine has written, we Americans with our squalid record in Cambodia should be "cautiously optimistic" about the new regime, "or else shut up...
...Collective self-reliance or autarky, as preached by the regime, contrasts sharply with what might be called the slave mentaiity that suffused pre-revolutionary Cambodia and made it so "peaceful" and "charming" to the elite and to most outsiders--for perhaps two thousand years...
...What do we do, now, in contrast to all this...
...Words that suggest foreign influence--such as "Communist," "socialist" or "Marxist," to name only three--do not appear in the constitution...
...What kind of independence was that...
...Well, they built an independence monument...
...In cultural and economic terms, the word has been attacked by T. S. Eliot, used by Stalin, and defended by Mussolini...
...In the "old society" peasants placed a premium on individual freedom, and on leisure of an unsupervised kind...
...Did country people see it...
...Self-reliance also explains turning away from Cambodia's past to make a society where there are "no rich and no poor, no exploiters and no exploited," and where, in the words of the constitution, people are free to "have no religious beliefs...
...A refugee from Battambang recalls a Khmer Rouge making this point at a miting in dramatic terms...
...a. medley of bow strung rapture...
...In the capital...
...Who saw the thing...
...Hours were long and food was scarce, although the "organization" made a point of feeding work-teams better than they fed "unproductive" people...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 MARK IRWIN FROG'S ADVICE TO A YOUNG GIRL IN LOVE Dressed in July's thick night air, she walks toward the pond's opera, mouth...
...The big people's children...
...What had we built...
...The big people's children went in and out of Cambodia, going here and there, and then they came back, to control our kind of people...
...Autarky is the keynote of Cambodia's ideology today, and certainly explains changing "Cambodia," in English ("Cambodge" in French) to "Kampuchea," reflecting local pronunciation, as if Argentina had changed the "g" in its name to an "h...
...This structure, modeled on a military one, proved to be an effective instrument of Khmer Rouge control...
...Instead, by raising embankments and digging irrigation canals, the children of Cambodia build their own independence monuments, ones that they can see, and their children, t o o . . . The theme of self-reliance is stressed in Cambodia's constitution, promulgated in January of last year, and derives in part from the dissertation that one of Cambodia's leaders, Khieu Samphan, wrote in France in 1959...
...and the constitution condemns "so-called humanitarian" aid...
...Cambodians are urged daily by their radio, and four times in the constitution, to "build and defend" their country against unspecified enemies...
Vol. 104 • April 1977 • No. 7
