The appeal of Khmer Rouge's 'pure killers'

By Claude Casteran

PARIS (AFP): Cambodia's leaders, still to set a date for the trial of the several Khmer Rouge leaders in their custody, are given a sharp reminder of the charge-sheet in a harrowing account of the "killing fields" by a French ethnologist who witnessed them from the beginning.

Francois Bizot's Le Portail (The Gate) will provide further ammunition for those pressing the authorities in Phnom Penh to act faster and more vigorously in meting out justice to the surviving leaders of the 1975-1979 regime blamed for the deaths of up to two million people.

Soon to appear in an English translation after its publication in Paris, Le Portail (the gate in question is that of the French embassy in Phnom Penh) is prefaced by novelist John Le Carre, the master of Cold War intrigue, who describes the book, with its austere, rigourous prose, as a "contemporary classic".

Bizet, then aged 25, first arrived in Cambodia in the mid- 1960s and found a country "where the land was rich and beautiful, full of rice-fields and dotted with temples."

Employed at the historic site of Angkor Wat, he observed at close hand the rise of the Khmer Rouge, then still hiding out in the countryside. His informal reports to the capital were greeted by his friends and superiors with incomprehension and scepticism.

In October 1971 he was captured by the Khmer Rouge who suspected him of working for U.S. intelligence services. Chained up and guarded by children who were already hardened warriors, he spent three months in a detention center where the conditions were never less than wretched.

It was there that he met the guerrilla leader known as Douch who, as one of Pol Pot's faithful lieutenants, was to become one of the greatest killers of the 20th century, with the blood of tens of thousands of people on his hands.

Douch, with whom he had several long conversations, is the central figure in "Le Portail", and it was a report that the Khmer Rouge leader had been captured and would be placed on trial that decided Bizot to write his book.

"I was appalled and fascinated by the strength of the Khmer Rouge," he writes. "They knew how to say exactly what the West wanted to hear. (Douch) was one of the pure, one of those fervent idealists for whom truth was an absolute value."

Thanks to Douch, Bizot was released, the only one of around 30 Westerners to be set free by the Khmer Rouge prior to their seizure of power in 1975.

Bizot returned to Angkor, but his respite lasted just three years. Fleeing to Phnom Penh, he was one of the hundreds of civilians trapped in the French embassy as the guerrillas overran the Cambodian capital and prepared to carry out their murderous policies.

As a Cambodian-speaker he was one of the negotiators who persuaded the country's new rulers to allow the embassy's involuntary guests to be evacuated to neighboring Thailand.

While Bizot is unsparing in his treatment of the Khmer Rouge, he has harsh words to say too about their western apologists, ranging from sympathetic French teachers (described as "those guilty dreamers") to newsmen concerned only with their professional rivalries or with Cold War squabbles. He devotes several pages to these "stubborn sheep who complicate every issue."

The failings of his compatriots in the heat of the action are also spotlighted.

Among those who will squirm on reading Le Portail is a well- known television reporter who handed over his Cambodian mistress to the Khmer Rouge despite a promise to bring her with him to Europe, on the grounds that his wife would be upset.

Meanwhile Douch is among those currently awaiting trial in Phnom Penh for crimes against humanity. His former prisoner, now an authority on Buddhism in Southeast Asia, visited him in jail last year. He has said he is willing to travel to Cambodia to testify -- when a date for the trial can be found.