DK
Visit in Phnom Penh

In December 1978, the American reporter Elizabeth Becker was invited in Cambodia… In Democratic Kampuchea as the country is named since it had been seized in April 1975 by the Red Khmers (to be known as Communist Party of Kampuchea in 1977).
Between 1975 and 1979, the regime of Pol Pot made hundreds of thousands of victims, by killing, starvation, and slave labour. Behind the bamboo curtain (no international call, no mail, discontinued international flights, closed borders, no freedom of movement), Cambodia turned to the national wide void and “killing field”. As the relations with Vietnam became increasingly tense, On the advise of their powerful ally, China, Democratic Kampuchea leaders felt the need to secure the support of the international community against this aggressive neighbour. Therefore, non-Communist Western journalists were invited for the first time in the country. Elizabeth Becker and the other American journalist Richard Dudman were accompanied by the British scholar, Malcolm Caldwell, who was sympathetic to the Red Khmer Revolution. After a stay in Phnom Penh, the small delegation was taken throughout the country. One day, they toured a rubber plantation cooperative and an agricultural cooperative, in Phum Preah Meas.

Elizabeth Becker recounts: “Back into the car, we were off to the cooperatives, a true Potemkin village. (…) I was waiting for something of Cambodia to break through the shield around us, even if it was violent. The cooperative could have been a movie set. It bore no resemblance to the description of cooperatives refugees had fled. There was a cluster of handsome one-room Khmer wooden huts on stilt. Everyone, the cooperative leader told us, ate three meals a day, including dessert with the main meal. They had three holidays a month – on the 10th, 20th, and 30th. The cooperative leaders showed us women weaving cloth, men repairing implements, and a large canteen where all shared their meals. The leader said that he and the others running the cooperative were common people selected by the masses because they showed superior management skills. Later I discovered the leader and all those presented to us as common people were in fact top party officials”.

(Elizabeth Becker, “When the war was over, Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge revolution”, PublicAffairs, New York, 1998, p.414-415)