Pol Pot

by Philip Short

In Khmer, the word for ‘study’ — riensouth— is made up of rien, which means literally to ‘learn by heart’, and south,’the sutras’. So ‘to study’ means ‘to learn by heart and recite’. Where is the spirit of criticism? Where is there any analysis, any synthesis? . . . Cambodia’s art is extraordinary, its literature is rich and abundant. So the absence of critical faculties does not mean that [Khmers] are incapable or inadequate. But in certain areas, it holds them back.

  In Khmer tradition, asking questions was discouraged: young people — and subordinates in general — were expected to listen and obey. Samphân remarked that when foreign teachers tried to force the students to think for themselves, many were unable to follow and lost interest in their studies.

  With Siphan’s encouragement, Sâr’s work improved. The following year he began preparing for the dipiôme, the examination which, in those days, marked the completion of junior middle school.’*

  Meanwhile the defeat of Japan and Germany had opened the way for the return of the French. In October 1945, British troops entered Phnom Penh, ostensibly to disarm the Japanese garrison. A few days later the Prime Minister Son Ngoc Thanh was arrested and packed off to exile in France, where he was sentenced to life imprisonment, later commuted to house arrest. The following January, the Cambodian and French governments signed a Modus Vivendi, which provided for the resumption of French rule but also acknowledged Cambodian autonomy, leaving the door ajar for further discussion of the country’s political status.

  For the French this was a holding operation, designed to stabilise relations while Paris gradually regained full control. Cambodians saw it very differently. The Japanese occupation had undermined French legitimacy. Independence might have been disallowed, but it was now on the agenda. Not for tomorrow, perhaps, but surely for the day, or the week, or the year after. The principle was not in doubt. All that was uncertain was the timing.

  Another factor was at work too. Throughout Cambodian history, politics had been the preserve of the palace. Now, for the first time since the 1860s, a commoner had thrown down the gauntlet to the King. Son Ngoc Thanh’s few months in power had given him a claim to leadership which Sihanouk found hard to counter. Even Sâr, whose interest in politics at that time was virtually non-existent, saw Thanh as an heroic figure, for whom arrest and trial by the French had been a consecration. After his arrest, his close followers fled to Vietnam and Thailand where they linked up with clandestine anti-French movements. The most important of these were the Khmer Issarak (literally, Khmer Freedom Fighters, or Khmer Masters), a group founded in Bangkok in 1940 by Bunchan Mol’s uncle, Pok Khun. The Issarak were manipulated and partly financed by the Thai government, which encouraged them to harass French outposts as a means of pressing Thai claims to Cambodia’s western provinces. During the Vichy period, they were quiescent. But with the war now over and the French demanding the return of Battambang and other Thai-held areas, the Issarak exploded back into life.

  In the early morning of April 7 1946, a Sunday, a group of about fifty men, armed with old-fashioned muskets and a couple of machine-guns, attacked the Grand Hotel in Siem Reap, where most of the French officer corps was staying. According to Bunchan Mol, who took part, other, smaller groups tried unsuccessfully to liberate prisoners from the town jail and to attack the houses of government officials. After six hours they were driven off, leaving behind seven French dead and taking with them a quantity of arms. The survivors held out for a week in the ruins of Angkor Wat before retreating to the Dangrek Mountains, a traditional refuge of bandits along the Thai border to the north.

  Smaller-scale attacks continued, but they were an irritant rather than a threat to French power. In November of that year, Thailand agreed to return the disputed provinces, and eighteen months later a change of government in Bangkok ended direct Thai support for the rebels. Conditions remained unsettled and many groups turned to brigandage. Agricultural production was disrupted — the economy, in the words of one French observer, was at death’s door — and tax revenues fell sharply. But Cambodian politics would have to evolve further before the Issarak could become a major force again.

  In the summer of 1947, Sâr passed the end-of-year examinations and, with a few other children from Kompong Cham, was admitted to the Lycée Sisowath, which was still recovering from the disruption caused by the war and had vacant places in 3 èrne. For the decidedly average student that he was, it was no small achievement, for the lycée’s normal intake was only 120 pupils a year. One of his closest friends at Kompong Cham, Lon Non, whose elder brother, Nol, would become Cambodia’s Head of State in the early 1970s, made the move at the same time. With Ping Sây, an extrovert, mischievous youth, a year younger than Sâr, they formed an intimate trio, visiting each other’s homes and spending the holidays together. Sâr was once more living with his eldest brother, Suong, who had recently divorced and remarried. His new wife, Chea Samy, had also been a dancer at the palace. She was a cultivated young woman, and Ping Sây was impressed by her. But the house was sparsely furnished, with chairs made of woven bamboo, and Sây remembered thinking that they could not have much money.

  Ieng Sary and his best friend, Rath Samoeun, a bright boy from a poor rural family, whom Sâr now encountered for the first time, were in the class above him at Sisowath.

  Every Thursday afternoon, they and the other boarders, wearing the school uniform — a white shirt, blue trousers and a blancoed white pith helmet — walked in a crocodile up Boulevard Doudart de Lagrée (named after a nineteenth-century French explorer) as far as the French Quarter, where they were allowed to disperse and spend the afternoon as they wished. The more hard-working among them used to go to the National Library, a yellow-and-white stuccoed building with an imposing Grecian faÇade and an inscription in French and Khmer, on either side of the main entrance, declaiming prophetically: ‘Force binds for a time; ideas enchain forever.’ There the politically inclined Mey Mann read the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. The latter, he acknowledged, was too long for him to finish, but nearly sixty years later, he could still quote from it the words, ‘Life is struggle. Those who struggle, live!’ Ieng Sary devoured Montesquieu and Voltaire, who advocated constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament, an independent judiciary, equality of the citizenry and fundamental freedoms, all of which were conspicuously absent in Cambodia.

  Mey Mann and his friends were not alone in being influenced by the thinkers of eighteenth-century Europe. Sihanouk had also been through the French colonial school system with its — in Cambodian terms — wholly inappropriate emphasis on the French Revolution, and the uncomfortable parallel between the absolutism of the Khmer monarchy and the fate of Louis XVI had not escaped him. In the second half of the 1940s, the young King took the first tentative steps towards liberalising the political system. Under the Modus Vivendi Cambodia, no longer a protectorate, was destined to become a member of a still-to-be-established French Union and endowed with a constitution enshrining limited autonomy. To the annoyance of the French — who viewed the new arrangements as no more than a figleaf for the restoration of their pre-war rule — Sihanouk insisted that the text be approved by a consultative assembly elected by universal male suffrage, and that the same system be used in future elections. That made possible for the first time the formation of political parties.

  Sihanouk’s motives were mixed. As monarch, he had every intention of preserving the reality of undivided power. But he also saw himself as a moderniser and wished to appear to his people as such. Moreover, he had acute political antennae. The continuing popularity of Son Ngoc Thanh (in whose arrest he may secretly have connived) troubled him. So did the nationalists’ whispered criticisms over the renewal of his entente with the French following Japan’s defeat. By deciding to grant ‘his people’ the right to involve themselves in the political process, he hoped to refurbish an image that had become tarnished.

  Cambodia’s first national election, in September 1946, brought to
power the Democratic Party, led by Prince Yuthévong, who was named Prime Minister. Yuthévong had a French wife, a doctorate in mathematics and an ambition to install in Cambodia the democratic values and practices that he had come to admire in Paris.

  Students flocked to the Democrats’ cause. Mey Mann voted for them and helped as a volunteer — preparing the meeting rooms for sessions of the Executive Committee at Yuthévong’s headquarters, a villa overlooking the esplanade in front of the city’s railway station. In 1947, Rath Samoeun and two other young radicals, Hou Yuon and a boy named Keo Meas, who was studying at the Phnom Penh Teacher Training College, worked in the party campaign office. That April, after only six months in office, Yuthévong died at the age of thirty-four, apparently from lung complications caused by tuberculosis. Thiounn Mumm’s brother-in-law, Chean Vâm, who had returned from Europe two years earlier to become, at the age of thirty, the first Cambodian headmaster of the Lycée Sisowath, succeeded him. In 1948, Ping Sây joined the party; and in November of the following year — when Sihanouk, exasperated by the Democrats’ fractiousness, suspended the National Assembly — Samoeun and Ieng Sary helped to organise a protest demonstration which ended with numerous arrests. Sary was freed a few hours later, but more than a hundred others were held in prison for a week. A student strike was declared, which quickly spread to other cities, and a twelve-man delegation, of which Sary was a member, sought an audience with the King. ‘He was quite reasonable,’ Sary recalled. ‘He heard us out, and then ordered everyone released.’

  It was around this time that Sary came across a copy of the Communist Manifesto in the library of Yuthévong’s brother, Prince Entaravong. Marxism was a taboo subject under the colonial regime. Schoolteachers were forbidden to mention the Russian Revolution in class. But Yuthévong had brought back to Phnom Penh a suitcase-full of ‘progressive’ works, which Entaravong inherited after his death.

  Sary and Rath Samoeun puzzled over the Manifesto and argued about what it might mean.

  While the Democratic Party was challenging Sihanouk’s power, conflict of a different kind was brewing across the border in Vietnam. In the southern provinces of what was then known as Cochin-China, armed clashes had broken out within weeks of Japan’s capitulation as local communist and nationalist groups sought to resist the reimposition of French control. The movement, initially piecemeal and poorly organised, was gradually taken in hand by the Nambo Territorial Committee, the southern branch of Ho Chi Minh’s Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) which had seized power in Hanoi. It was headed by Le Duan, an intensely nationalistic young southerner who, twenty years later, would succeed Ho as the leader of the communist movement throughout Vietnam. Le Due Tho, the future Paris Peace Talks negotiator, was his chief assistant. Together they organised guerrilla attacks and sabotage. In Hanoi, Ho strung out the negotiations with France to gain time for the communist forces to consolidate. But by the end of the year his margin for manoeuvre was exhausted. In December 1946, his Viet Minh army, numbering 28,000 men, abandoned the capital to fight the French Expeditionary Corps from the jungle.

  The First Vietnam War had begun.

  Ever since the foundation of the ICP, in 1930, the Vietnamese communists, encouraged by the Comintern,* had taken the view that they had a responsibility to promote revolution not merely in their own country but throughout Indochina. In practice, this had remained a dead letter.

  The struggle for independence from France changed that. The Viet Minh, ostensibly an alliance of progressive forces in Vietnam, obtained most of its arms from Bangkok, then the hub of a South-East Asian black market in weaponry left over from the Pacific War. The only way to transport them to southern Vietnam was overland through Cambodia or by sea along the Cambodian coast. The need to secure these arms routes — without which Ho’s forces would have been unable to fight the French — gave Cambodia a whole new strategic importance. Defence planners under General Vo Nguyen Giap urged that the country be transformed into a ‘logistical support area’ for southern Vietnam. That implied the establishment of a Cambodian revolutionary movement, similar to that being created in Laos. The problem was that there was no indigenous Khmer communist structure to build on. Hanoi’s only options were to try to co-opt existing non-communist Thai-backed Khmer Issarak groups, or to recruit among the Overseas Vietnamese community, which accounted for almost one in twelve of Cambodia’s population, some 300,000 people in all.

  In practice, the Vietnamese tried to do both.

  First they recruited a former Buddhist lay preacher, calling himself Son Ngoc Minh, to serve as President of a newly-formed Cambodian People’s Liberation Committee (CPLC) in Battambang. Minh had been born in a Khmer district of southern Vietnam of mixed Khmer-Vietnamese parentage, which meant he was the nearest the Vietnamese had to an authentic Khmer revolutionary. According to French intelligence, his real name was Pham Van Hua. The nom de guerre was intended to capitalise on the popularity of Sihanouk’s banished rival, Son Ngoc Thanh, then still languishing in exile in France. Minh spent most of the first two years escorting arms convoys and groups of Overseas Vietnamese recruits through Cambodia to communist-controlled areas in southern Vietnam. But in 1948, the Vietnamese decided that the time had come to try to give the nascent Cambodian movement greater substance. The country was divided into four geographical zones. Minh was placed in charge of the South-West. Dap Chhuon, an army deserter who led an 800-man Issarak band in Battambang province, was assigned to the North-West. Keo Moni, an Issarak chief from Prey Veng province, assisted by another Buddhist preacher, Tou Samouth, had responsibility for the South-East. The North-East, a sparsely populated montagnard region where the French presence was tenuous, was for the time being spared Viet Minh attentions.

  Attempts were made throughout the areas of Cambodia under guerrilla control to set up an embryonic revolutionary administration — complete with a tax system, land survey, economic and judicial departments, revolutionary tribunals and even a public works service — and on May 15 1948, Son Ngoc Minh sent birthday greetings to Ho Chi Minh on behalf of a purported ‘revolutionary provisional government’. But in practice most of the new structures existed only on paper.

  The artificial nature of the Vietnamese communist implant in Cambodia, coupled with historical animosities, made it a virtual certainty that relations between the ICP and its Issarak protégés would be uneasy when not openly hostile.

  In the ‘liberated districts’, Khmer leaders, including Son Ngoc Minh himself, could do nothing without the approval of Vietnamese political commissars. A French intelligence officer wrote perceptively: ‘The initial Viet Minh plan seems to have been genuinely to transfer control to the [Cambodians] as they acquired the necessary political maturity . . . [However] as their authority steadily grows, [the Cambodian leaders] have more and more difficulty in tolerating Vietnamese [supervision] . . . One can expect that clashes [between them] will increase.’ They did. Already in 1945 and 1946, Khmers had slaughtered Vietnamese living in Khmer-speaking districts of Cochin-China. Now incidents began to occur within Cambodia itself. In 1948, Khmer villagers in districts of Takeo province, bordering Vietnam, attacked Viet Minh units, and a massacre of Vietnamese settlers occurred near Phnom Penh. Shortly afterwards a Khmer Issarak commander in south-eastern Cambodia, Puth Chhay, launched an anti-Vietnamese pogrom which so angered the Viet Minh leadership that they despatched a punitive expedition against him. It returned empty-handed.

  This resurgence of ancestral hatreds was partly triggered by what Khmers perceived as the condescension of their new revolutionary allies. But it also reflected the mixture of contemporary and historical motives at work on the Vietnamese side: at first internationalist rhetoric was used to justify policies devised for purely national military ends, and then, once the decision had been taken to treat Indochina as a single battlefield, the ICP’s long-standing desire to evangelise the Khmers, echoing the ‘civilising mission’ of the nineteenth-century Vietnamese emperor Minh Mang, had surreptitiously taken o
ver. Almost unconsciously, Hanoi’s programme in Cambodia mutated from a strategic initiative into an ideological crusade. Like the Vietnamese Catholic missionaries who had struggled for two hundred years to convert Cambodians to Christianity, ICP emissaries were determined to build a Cambodian revolutionary movement from nothing, regardless of cost or the suitability of the terrain. They would have little more success.

  Cambodians, in their immense majority, were simply not interested in the Vietnamese communists’ message — in part because they were Vietnamese. The history of conflict between the two peoples was merely the visible part of their antagonism. Cambodians assert their identity by means of dichotomies: they are in opposition to what they are not. Cambodia as a nation exists in opposition to Vietnam (and, to a lesser extent, Thailand). That does not prevent relationships at the level of individuals, but between Cambodians and Vietnamese such personal contacts must take place against the background of an overwhelming, pejorative, nationalist discourse.

  The other great problem confronting Vietnam’s communist missionaries — like their Catholic predecessors — was that they were trying to cross Asia’s deepest cultural divide. Marxism-Leninism, revised and sinified by Mao, flowed effortlessly across China’s southern border into Vietnamese minds, informed by the same Confucian culture. It was all but powerless to penetrate the Indianate world of Theravada Buddhism that moulds the mental universe of Cambodia and Laos.

  The Vietnamese leaders themselves were aware of these difficulties. ‘[It is] imperative that nothing be done which might lead our Laotian and Cambodian brothers to think mistakenly that the Vietnamese have come as invaders,’ the Defence Ministry cautioned. Hoang Van Hoan, a veteran ICP Central Committee member whom Ho Chi Minh had put in charge of North Vietnam’s foreign relations, complained that too many cadres ‘apply the revolutionary model used in Vietnam without taking into account the cultural and social differences of western Indochina . . . As a result of such blunders, many Lao and Khmers mistrust them.’ He added, in a telling comment, that it was ‘necessary to think of the Cambodian and Lao revolutions in terms of benefits for those two peoples, and not just [of advantages] for Vietnam’. Other leaders criticised the ‘arrogance’ of Vietnamese cadres. To make matters worse, Hanoi’s efforts to export its revolution were bedevilled by internal rivalries and conflicting chains of command. It is true that at the time the Vietnamese communists were fighting for their own survival. None the less, their programme for Cambodia was chaotic.