CAMBODIA: Silence, Subterfuge and Surveillance

Phnom-Penh opens its doors ever so slightly: Pompeii without the ashes

The shroud of terror and darkness that has enveloped Cambodia ever since it fell to the Communist Khmer Rouge in April 1975 lifted slightly last week, but in a way that was at once tragic and bizarre. After a three-year refusal by Cambodia's new rulers to admit Western news correspondents to Democratic Kampuchea—as Cambodia now calls itself—two American reporters, Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Elizabeth Becker of the Washington Post, returned to the U.S. with detailed accounts of a two-week visit. A third member of their party, British Scholar Malcolm Caldwell, 47, did not leave Cambodia alive. He was shot to death by antigovernment guerrillas.

Dudman, 60, and Becker, 31, were experienced reporters who had covered the Indochina war in both Viet Nam and Cambodia for extended periods. Their 1,000-mile trip through eleven of Cambodia's 19 provinces was clearly an attempt by the Cambodian regime to counteract its worldwide image as a merciless, anonymous and genocidal regime. That image has been fed by the accounts of postrevolutionary life given by thousands of refugees in neighboring Thailand and Viet Nam. Caldwell, a lecturer in Southeast Asian economic history at the University of London, accompanied the reporters as a sympathetic student of Cambodia's agrarian revolution. An avowed Marxist, he supported the brutal, enforced depopulation of Cambodia's cities in 1975 as economically and politically essential.

Caldwell was murdered on the last night of the trip, when three armed intruders burst into the guest house where the visitors were quartered. Dudman and Becker luckily escaped the gunfire, but Caldwell was caught in his room and died there. Who the assailants were may never be known, but the Cambodians immediately offered their own theory. Said the Westerners' official guide in Phnom-Penh, Thiounn Prasith: "Our enemies know of the importance of your visit and wanted to show the world that Cambodia could not protect her friends."

In the days before the killing, the touring trio found themselves constantly surrounded by official silence, subterfuge and surveillance. On foot, even in Phnom-Penh, they were usually flanked by two young men in khaki shirts with pistols tucked into their belts. Often they were not even allowed out of their guest house. On the road, their government-supplied Mercedes 200 sedan was always both preceded and followed by at least a carload of armed guards. Government officials explained that there was a constant danger of assassination attempts on Cambodian officials by "the Vietnamese and their agents" even in Phnom-Penh itself.