Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  Through these stories, Sâr and his brothers were introduced to the moral tenets of Theravada Buddhism, which teaches that retribution or merit, in the endless cycle of self-perfection, will be apportioned not in this life but in a future existence, just as man’s present fate is the fruit of actions in previous lives.

  Prek Sbauv was too small to have a Buddhist temple of its own. But on Buddhist holy days, four times a month, Loth and his wife travelled by oxcart to the great wat, or monastery, of Kompong Thom, where their two eldest sons, Suong and Seng, had learnt to read and write. Loth himself had been taught his letters there, and though the boys’ mother, Nem, was illiterate, there was enough Chinese ancestry in Loth’s make-up for him to understand that education was important. In the early 1930s, rice prices rose. The family prospered and he decided that the time had come to send the younger children to school in Phnom Penh, where Suong, now well-established in his job at the palace, had recently married a young woman from the Royal Ballet corps.

  Chhay went first, followed, in 1934, by Sâr. They travelled, not by oxcart, but in one of the new-fangled steam buses the French had just introduced, powered by an engine burning charcoal. Cambodians were being dragged willy-nilly into the modern age. But they went reluctantly, full of backward glances.

  Although the reason for sending Sâr to Phnom Penh was to allow him to attend one of the new Western-style primary schools, he did not do so at once. Instead his parents decided he should first spend a year at the Wat Botum Vaddei, a large Buddhist monastery a couple of hundred yards south of the palace.

  It was a compromise which reflected, perhaps unconsciously, the anxieties of the time. Tensions were developing between the emancipated, Westernised values transmitted by the French and the immovable, inward-looking conservatism of Cambodian tradition. The anguish this generated was captured in a play by Sâr’s future mentor, Keng Vannsak, which took the plight of a gauche young man from a traditional household, torn between the demands of his elderly grandfather and his fashion plate of a lady-love, a thoroughly modern miss infatuated with foreign ways, as a metaphor for that of the Cambodian people, groping their way through a transition they did not understand towards a goal they could not see. A group of intellectuals, led by a young lawyer named Son Ngoc Thanh, began planning the first Khmer-language newspaper, the title of which, Nagaravatta, the Pali spelling of Nokor Wat (‘Land of the Temple’), evoked the glories of Angkor. Cambodian nationalism was stirring, and the issue of Cambodian identity became its prime concern.

  Wat Botum Vaddei, which belongs to the Thommayut order, a small, elitist Buddhist school favoured by the royal court, is a walled village. A warren of narrow lanes and dwellings, sleeping quarters and refectories encircles the temple proper, which stands, hidden in a grove of banyan and palm trees, beside two immense grey-blue stupas. Novices, in indian red robes, squat between the houses, doing washing, preparing rice for the monks’ lunch, shouting, fighting, ribbing lay friends who have come to visit. One day, the roles will be reversed: the young acolytes will rejoin the workaday world outside, and their friends will become novices in their place. The wat is a revolving door, a place of constant interchange between the hustle and bustle of the city and Cambodians’ inner yearning for spiritual release through ritual and meditation.

  Each year about a hundred children, between seven and twelve years old, were sent there to be initiated into the mysteries of the Triple Jewel and the Eightfold Path and, scarcely less important, to learn to read and write in Khmer.

  The majority, like Sâr, were from the countryside, but there were also boys from aristocratic households, brought by their parents for a few months to fulfil a religious obligation. Many were desperately homesick. Nhep remembered feeling wretched after being packed off to Phnom Penh. But if Sâr missed his mother and father he never spoke of it. On the contrary, in later years he reminisced fondly about the time he had spent at the wat, even on various occasions falsifying his biography to make it seem that he had stayed there longer than was actually the case.

  It was a crucially important formative period. Monastic discipline was strict. As a novice, Sâr was part of a rigidly ordered community in which, as in all traditional Cambodian institutions, including the court and the Royal Ballet, originality and initiative were discouraged, the least deviation was punished and the greatest merit lay in unquestioning obedience to prevailing orthodoxy. Nhun Nhget, later abbot of Botum Vaddei, was among Sâr’s contemporaries:

  In those days, if you came to the wat as a novice, you had to study for three months before you were allowed to wear the robe. You were taught the etiquette of a monk: how to put on the robe; how to speak; how to walk; how to put your palms together to show respect . . . And you were given a thrashing if you didn’t do as they said. If you didn’t walk correctly, you were beaten. You had to walk quietly and slowly, without making any sound with your feet, and you weren’t allowed to swing your arms. You had to move serenely. You had to learn by heart in pali the rules of conduct and the [Buddhist] precepts so that you could recite them without hesitation; if you hesitated, you were beaten.

  The boys had dormitories of their own, separate from those of the older monks. They rose at 4 a.m., lit sticks of incense and made obeisance to the Buddha, the Law and the Clergy. Then for two hours they recited sutras, led by a senior monk, before doing their assigned chores — sweeping the temple courtyard, and cooking the rice for breakfast. After two more hours spent memorising the scriptures, they accompanied the monks to beg alms, repeating silently to themselves an impetration in pali to subdue the self. On their return, they prepared the second, and last, meal of the day, consisting of rice and vegetables, which had to be finished by noon — for under monastic rules no food could be consumed between midday and the following sunrise. In the afternoon, they attended classes where, in addition to basic literacy, they were taught from the cpap, traditional collections of moral maxims which first appeared in the sixteenth century — the Treatise on the Morality of Men; the Treatise of Ancient Sâyings; the Treatise on the Glorious Tradition, and others of the same kind — chanting them aloud until they had them by rote.

  The content of these edifying texts was not intrinsically very different from that in China or most other Asian countries, being rooted in respect for parents, for elders and for hierarchy — and, in the case of women, for men. But it was notably more rigid, more intransigent. Where the Confucian primers treat children as individuals, with personalities of their own and talents to be encouraged and drawn out, the cpap view them as objects — as ‘aggregates of cause and effect’, in Buddhist terms — whose behaviour must be moulded to ensure the faithful transmission of immutable values. The cpap for boys were stern enough — ‘Do not destroy the tradition that your parents pass on to you! Do not oppose their advice!’ Those for girls — inevitably, in the feudal scheme of things — were still more stiff-necked and dehumanised:

  Never turn your back to your husband when he sleeps and never touch his head without first bowing in his honour . . . Respect and fear [his] wishes and take his advice to heart . . . If [he] gives an order, don’t hesitate a moment in responding . . . Avoid posing as an equal to your husband — and never above he who is your master. If he insults you, go to your quarters and reflect, never insult or talk back to him . . .

  The cpap, at least in the form in which Sâr would have learnt them, had another particularity. They portrayed the Khmers as honest and sincere but ‘foolish and ignorant’, constantly being duped by their smarter Chinese and Vietnamese neighbours:

  Your eyes are open and can see,

  But see only the surface of things . . .

  Learn arithmetic . . . with all your energy

  Lest the Chinese and Vietnamese cheat you . . .

  The Khmers are lacking in judgement

  They eat without giving thought for what is proper and right, Each season they borrow from the Chinese,

  And the Chinese gain control of the inheritance their parents
have bequeathed.

  If the cpap were a practical code of conduct to regulate life in the world beyond the monastery walls, the monks also sought to inculcate in their young charges a spirit of detachment. Nhun Nhget remembered that as the hardest thing to accept. ‘They taught us to renounce worldly desires, not to covet material things. If you are an ordinary person, you can [behave normally], you can have nice meals, you can marry . . . When you become a monk, you have to forgo all that.’

  One wonders whether Sâr, as a child, was also struck by this emphasis on detachment. There is no way of knowing. But subconsciously it must have registered, for in later life the abandonment of personal ties and the suppression of individuality — in both thought and behaviour — would become key elements of his political credo.

  In the summer of 1935, at the age of ten, Sâr left Wat Botum Vaddei and went to live with his brother Suong, his wife and their baby son, in a large, rambling wooden house, built on wooden pillars, with a spacious front veranda overlooking a small courtyard planted with trees and tubs of flowers. His older brother Chhay was already staying with them, and soon afterwards Nhep, the youngest, arrived too.

  That September, Sâr joined Chhay at the Ecole Miche, named after a nineteenth-century missionary bishop. The lessons were in French, dispensed by Vietnamese and French Catholic fathers, and each day’s classes began with an hour spent learning the catechism, followed by a collective recitation of the Lord’s Prayer or one of the Psalms. At first sight it might seem an odd choice. Sâr’s family had no connection with the Catholic Church. But the school had a good reputation and, catechism apart, the curriculum was the same as at the other main primary school in Phnom Penh, which was run by the protectorate authorities and catered exclusively for Europeans and a handful of assimilated Khmers from aristocratic families, like Thiounn Thioeunn and his brothers. Even primary schooling was hard to come by in the Cambodia of the 1930s, and the fees at the Ecole Miche, modest though they were, were far beyond the reach of all but a tiny fraction of the population. In the country as a whole, no more than a few thousand children, among half a million of school-going age, had access to even the rudiments of a ‘modern’ education.

  Phnom Penh, at that time, was an unusual capital city. It was strangely un-Khmer.

  Visitors found ‘tables of chattering Frenchmen . . . Chinese in white suits and helmets, Annamites with bare torsos and full black trousers — and, among them, surprisingly few Cambodians.’ Khmers accounted for little more than a third of the population of 100,000. Most of the others were Chinese-speaking merchants, who controlled the country’s commercial life, and Vietnamese, who worked as junior civil servants, fishermen or coolies. There was also a scattering of Thais, Malays and Indians from Pondicherry. The few hundred French families formed a tiny, if highly visible, microcosm, who put their stamp on what passed for the cultural and intellectual life of the city, its pavement cafés, tree-lined boulevards and colonial, Mediterranean-style buildings. The result was a cosmopolitan, contradictory place — languid yet bustling — a hodge-podge of conflicting styles:

  The street traffic is a mêlée of rickety native-built gharris [known locally as matchboxes], glittering motorcars, rickshaws, top-heavy omnibuses drawn by tiny ponies . . . and bullock carts exactly like those illustrated on the walls of Angkor . . . all moving against a background of avenues and suburbs full of typically French villas . . . The street-markets of Phnom Penh are peculiarly its own, yet have much in common with those of France . . . The goods are set neatly out on the pavements instead of on raised stalls . . . Flowering plants in home-made basket-pots [stand] in ranks of scarlet and orange, white and mauve, pink and green . . . As the sun moves across the heavens, the goods are [transferred to the other pavement] and laid out patiently and methodically all over again.

  Even the King’s palace, a gilt-and-gingerbread confection with crenellated yellow-plaster walls, ornately curlicued sentry-boxes and imposing wrought-iron gates — not to mention a belle époque summerhouse, used by the Empress Eugénie for the opening of the Suez Canal before being dismantled and shipped to Indochina — seemed to have been created by its French architects with an oriental Monaco in mind.

  The foreignness of Phnom Penh, and the leading role played by other Asians at the expense of Khmers, appear to have had little impact on Sâr. ‘It didn’t surprise us,’ Nhep explained later, ‘because . . . there were Chinese everywhere in Cambodia.’ Even in a place as small as Prek Sbauv, there was a Chinese shop — the only one in the area — where the merchants from Kompong Thom congregated each year to purchase the rice harvest.

  The Vietnamese were viewed differently. Every Khmer child knew the story of the three Cambodian prisoners, whom the Vietnamese buried up to their necks so that their heads formed a tripod on which a kettle could be placed, lighting a fire in the middle and enjoining them not to move lest they ‘spill the master’s tea’ — just as every child knew that sugar palms, or thnot, emblematic of Cambodia, stopped growing a few miles before the border ‘because they don’t want to grow in Vietnam’. That such tales were patently untrue was irrelevant; they summed up a perception of a country which Cambodians viewed as an hereditary enemy. Despite the atrocities committed by the nineteenth-century Siamese, there were no comparable stories about the Thais.

  Vietnam was the Cambodian bogeyman. When Khmer children squabbled, one of Sâr’s friends recalled, an older child would intervene, reminding them that Cambodians had enemies enough without fighting among themselves. Yet it was above all the idea of the Vietnamese that was hated. They seemed to be everything the Khmers were not: a disciplined, vigorous, virile people, whose relentless, centuries-long southward migration had swallowed up Kampuchea Krom, or Lower Cambodia, in the area of what would become South Vietnam, and now threatened a creeping takeover of Cambodia itself, aided and abetted by the French authorities, who encouraged large-scale Vietnamese immigration to staff the lower echelons of the colonial civil service and furnish the skilled manual labour which Cambodians were judged incapable of providing. The result was more than mere racial antipathy. It was a massive national inferiority complex, which took refuge in dreams of ancient grandeur. At a personal level, Khmers and Vietnamese might befriend each other; Khmer pupils often remembered their Annamite teachers with affection. But the cultural fracture between the two peoples — between Confucianism and Theravada Buddhism, between the Chinese world and the Indian — was one of mutual incomprehension and distrust, which periodically exploded into racial massacres and pogroms.

  The different quarters of Phnom Penh were strung out along the riverside: the Vietnamese ‘Catholic village’ in the north; the French district around Wat Phnom, the ancient grave mound from which the city takes its name; the Chinese in the commercial area in the centre; and the Khmers in the ‘Cambodian village’ in the south.

  It was there that Saloth Suong had built his house, on a newly-laid-out street, across fields and marshland, half a mile west of the palace. The city is situated on a flood plain, at the point where the Mekong is joined by two other rivers, the Tonle Sap and the Bassac. In the early 1930s, the French had undertaken a drainage programme and large areas of swamp and lakeland had been reclaimed. Suong’s house was in one of these new districts, inhabited mainly by minor officials and palace functionaries. A mile or so to the north, near Wat Phnom, stood the railway station, also built on reclaimed land, where the first train service was inaugurated in 1935. Between the two, on the route which Sâr and Chhay took each morning as they walked to school, a new Central Market was being erected on what previously had been yet another swamp. It was an imaginative, cruciform structure in art deco style with an immense concrete dome (taller than the basilica of St Peter’s in Rome, the French architects boasted). In September 1937, Sâr and his brothers watched the grand opening, performed by the French governor, the Ré sident Supérieur, in the presence of the city mandarins and notables.

  For the young, Phnom Penh in the 1930s was a place of wonde
rment. Each November during the Water Festival, the floodwaters that gorge the Great Lake, backed up by the monsoon rains, cause the Tonle Sap to reverse course and flow out towards the sea. The King, escorted by white-robed baku, the spiritual descendants of the brahmins of Angkor, their long hair in chignons, bearing trumpets made of conch-shells, boarded the royal barge to watch dragon-boat races, signalling the start of three days of bacchanalian excess when the taboos proscribing flirtation between young men and unmarried girls of good family were temporarily eased. Apart from the Khmer New Year, in April — when Sâr returned to Prek Sbauv to be with his parents — the major ceremonies all revolved around the Throne and the Buddhist faith. Each spring crowds gathered to watch the Royal Oxen plough the Sacred Furrow, from which the King’s astrologer would divine whether there would be plenty or famine in the year ahead; and at Tang Toc, the King’s birthday, the provincial governors came to pay homage. Royal protocol was draconian. In his palace, if no longer in the colonised state over which he reigned, the King was still an absolute ruler, the ‘Master of Life.’, venerated by the populace as a sacred, quasi-divine figure:

  At royal audiences [one participant wrote], the princes, mandarins and other dignitaries crouch on all fours, with their knees and elbows on the floor, and their hands raised together before their heads. The King sits above them, enthroned on a dais, sitting cross-legged like an Indian idol. When he enters or leaves, all present prostrate themselves three times. No one has the right to speak unless the King addresses him . . . and no one may publicly disagree with anything the King says.

  The symbolism was explicit: the heads of the courtiers, in Khmer culture the most sacred part of the body, were beneath the King’s feet. A special vocabulary had to be used when addressing him, and all those not of royal blood, even the grandest ministers, were, in the consecrated formula, ‘we who carry the King’s excrement on our heads’.