Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  Shortly before leaving for France, he had acquired a girlfriend, Soeung Son Maly. Her mother was a royal princess, her father a schoolmaster and compulsive gambler who quickly squandered his wife’s fortune. Unlike Sâr’s adolescent liaisons with the young women of the palace, the relationship with Maly was serious and chaste. She was extremely pretty and was nicknamed ‘the Beauty Queen’. It was a standing joke among the students in Paris that, whenever Sâr looked morose, he was pining for his lady-love. Whether or not that was so, there was a solitude about him which others sometimes interpreted as loneliness.

  That first year in Paris, he applied himself to his studies and, by his own account, got ‘quite good marks’. He narrowly failed the year-end exam but, along with other borderline cases, was allowed to sit it again and passed, which meant he could go on to the second year.

  But then, in the summer of 1950, a series of events occurred which would change the direction of Sâr’s life. Towards the end of June, the magazine Khemara Nisut announced that the Khmer Student Association was offering its members a choice of two trips abroad during the summer holidays. One was a month-long camping tour in Switzerland; the other, participation in an ‘international labour brigade’ to help with post-war reconstruction in Yugoslavia. The Swiss tour would cost 22,000 francs (about 70 US dollars); the trip to Yugoslavia was free. For Sâr, there was no contest: ‘I didn’t have money, so I couldn’t do as the others and go to Geneva, or to the sea or the mountains, and have a holiday there . . . A group of us poorer students went instead to . . . . Zagreb, [where] we worked building a motorway’

  The train journey took forty-eight hours, with lengthy stops and no food to be had — a foretaste of the penury ahead. Nghet Chhopininto, who went with a brigade to Sarajevo a year later, remembered being hungry all the time they were there. The midday meal at the work-site was never enough. Sometimes they went to local restaurants and showed the cooks drawings of the food they wanted. But there was little to be had there either. On the other hand, it was exhilarating to be part of such a massive effort of national reconstruction. ‘Everywhere . . . resembles an enormous building site,’ one of Sâr’s companions wrote later. ‘This effort is even more estimable because the force and the faith of the people, united around their leaders . . . allow them to win successive victories, aware that this is a question of national independence.’ Foreign volunteers were expected to do manual labour three days a week, from 6 a.m. until noon, and could spend the rest of their time in cultural activities and sports. Chhopininto and a colleague ‘got lucky with the local girls’, as he put it, which also helped; and he left with happy memories of the camaraderie that came from working together with young people from many different countries.

  Not everyone reacted in the same way. Huot Sambath, who had arrived in France a month after Sâr to study international relations and later served as Sihanouk’s Foreign Minister, decided that ‘the western countries’ [postwar] difficulties were being resolved very fast, [whereas] in eastern Europe, the people lacked everything and their lives were not happy at all.’ Like other Cambodian intellectuals, he wrote, he was concerned for Cambodia’s future: ‘There were only two ways to walk: communist or liberal. I had already seen all the facts . . . so I chose the liberal way’

  Sâr was still a year or more away from making that kind of judgement. But Yugoslavia evidently made a favourable impression on him, for he went back there the following summer for a camping holiday.

  Back in Paris for the start of the new academic year, he faced other, more pressing concerns. Somonopong had returned home after completing his studies, which left him with nowhere to live. It was then, he recalled, that ‘I came into contact with some progressive students . . . I often stayed with them, and little by little they influenced me.’ One of these ‘progressive students’ was Ieng Sary, who arrived at the beginning of November 1950. Sary had obtained the first part of his baccalauréat (albeit at the second attempt) in Phnom Penh a year earlier, but had failed the second part, normally a prerequisite for further study abroad. Because the government was in the hands of the Democratic Party, for whom he and his friend Rath Samoeun had campaigned tirelessly, he eventually got his bursary, but not until all the others had left. Samoeun, who had passed his bac with flying colours, had reached Paris earlier, and it is possible that Sâr’s initial contact was with him. In any event, soon after arriving, Ieng Sary went to pay his respects to Keng Vannsak, who had been four years his senior at the Lycée Sisowath and was now, at the age of twenty-five, among the leading figures of the little Cambodian colony in Paris. He had a friend, he told Vannsak, a young man named Saloth Sâr, who was having great difficulty finding a place to stay. Was he in a position to help?

  Vannsak was then living in the rue de Commerce, in the 15th arron-dissement, a stone’s throw from the market at La Motte-Picquet. He was not long back from London where he had married, at the Hampstead Registry Office, a gifted young Frenchwoman who shared his passion for oriental languages. The couple were, indeed, in a position to help. Just across the road, on the corner of the rue de Commerce and the rue Letellier, was a wine shop which doubled as a café. The vintner let out the rooms above. They were spartan in the extreme — bare, dingy bedsits, in which the bed was the only item of furniture provided — but it was a place to live and Sâr moved in at once. Vannsak lent him a chair and some saucepans, and when the young man went down with flu that winter, his wife, Suzanne, ministered to him with daily injections.

  The same month that Sary arrived in France, the AEK elected a new six-man executive committee whose members included Keng Vannsak and Thiounn Mumm. One of its first actions was to set up informal student discussion groups, known as Cercles d’Etudes (Study Circles). There was a Law Circle, headed by Mumm’s brother, Chum; an Arts Circle, under the actor Hang Thun Hak; and others concerned with farming, literature and women’s issues. The inaugural meeting took place on December 21 1950, when Hak’s group — which included Sary, Rath Samoeun and Hou Yuon, then studying for a law degree — debated the relationship between art and society.

  A few weeks later Vannsak invited a few friends to a more select, unpublicised gathering in his apartment. This group, which had no name, met two or three times a month to discuss political issues — and specifically the future of Cambodia, now, for the first time, being directly affected by the war in neighbouring Vietnam. Ieng Sary and Rath Samoeun were regular participants. So was Sien An, a former classmate at the Lycée Sisowath, later to become Cambodian Ambassador to Hanoi. Ea Sichau, the president of the Khmer Student Association, and Hang Thun Hak also attended. So did Sâr. The meetings of Vannsak’s circle marked the beginning of his political apprenticeship.

  In retrospect, October 1 1949, the day when Mao Zedong stood at the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing and proclaimed the founding of the Chinese People’s Republic and, coincidentally, the day that Sâr and his companions arrived in Paris, was the beginning of the end of the French presence in Indochina.

  All through the 1940s, Ho Chi Minh had been at pains to obscure the reality that the Viet Minh was controlled by the Indochinese Communist Party, even claiming, falsely, that the Party had been dissolved. He presented himself as a nationalist, fighting an anti-colonial war in an area of the world where decolonisation was in full spate. Burma, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines were all struggling to free themselves from their respective overlords.

  The young Cambodians in Paris saw themselves in the same light. They were first and foremost patriots, engaged, albeit at one remove, in a shared fight for liberty. Mey Mann envisaged Cambodia as ‘a little Oriental Switzerland’. Ping Sây’s twin ambitions, as a trainee engineer, were to see independence and to build a bridge across the Tonle Sap. Sâr remembered simply being ‘patriotic and against French colonialism’. None of them regarded the war in Vietnam as anything other than a colonial struggle. Communism scarcely figured on their horizon. Even Keng Vannsak, more attuned to political realities than most, ha
d unwittingly offended an upper-class French girl a year earlier by suggesting that they spend an afternoon at the ‘Fête de l’Humanité’, the annual festival organised by the French Communist Party. ‘I had no idea it was communist,’ he protested. ‘I thought it was just a festival of humanity. She was outraged.’

  After the Chinese victory, this age of innocence was left behind. Mao’s triumph brought to what had been essentially a little, local conflict, the logic of the Cold War, transforming Indochina from a colonial backwater into a theatre for the Great Powers, whose rivalry would plague the region for the next half-century. The global political shift which had begun three years before, with Winston Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri, had finally reached Asia. In a world divided into two rival camps, Stalin’s spokesman, Andrei Zhdanov, proclaimed, Hanoi was associated with ‘the camp . . . based on the USSR and the new democracies . . . [It] is backed by the labor and democratic movement and by the fraternal Communist parties in all countries, by the fighters for national liberation in the colonies and dependencies, by all progressive and democratic forces.’

  On January 18 1950, China became the first foreign power to recognise Ho Chi Minh’s regime in North Vietnam. Moscow and its allies quickly followed suit. Soon afterwards, the US and Britain responded by recognising Cambodia and the other two ‘Associated States’ of the newly established French Union, Laos and what would become known as South Vietnam. Thailand, put on notice by America to choose between anti-communism and anti-colonialism, did the same, reaping US military aid as its reward. By June, when the Korean War broke out, the logic of containment, with its domino theories and defensive blocs, had become the foundation of American policy.

  Vietnamese policy underwent a sea change too.

  Communist Chinese occupation of the border areas gave Ho’s regime, in the words of the ICP Secretary-General, Truong Chinh, a ‘vast and powerful friendly country’ as a reliable rear area. The scale of the fighting increased dramatically. Over the following two years, the Chinese formed, equipped and trained six North Vietnamese divisions, capable of waging large-scale mobile warfare, where previously most engagements had been at battalion level or below. The pretence that the Viet Minh was a purely nationalist force was dropped, and the links between the Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian revolutionary movements were strongly underlined. General Giap, who in March 1950 was appointed head of an ICP CC Special Committee overseeing Laotian and Cambodian affairs, declared that Indochina was ‘a strategic unity’. Truong Chinh insisted that ‘the independence of Vietnam will not be assured as long as Cambodia and Laos are not liberated’, a statement subsequently repeated ad nauseam by every Vietnamese leader from Ho Chi Minh down. The final goal was a ‘Democratic Republic of Indochina’, incorporating all three countries, to serve as the vanguard of the communist revolution throughout South-East Asia.

  In this new geo-political context, the Vietnamese leaders, responding to the French creation of the ‘Associated States’, decided to establish ‘revolutionary counter-states’, the Pathet Lao (or Lao Country) and Nokor Khmer (Khmerland), and to endow them with full-fledged political parties which would lay the groundwork for socialist systems modelled on that of North Vietnam.

  On March 12 1950, the leaders of the ICP in southern Vietnam, including Le Duan and Le Due Tho, began a ten-day meeting with the future chiefs of the Cambodian revolution near Hatien, a few miles south of the border. Forty-five Cambodians attended, led by Son Ngoc Minh who the previous autumn had become the first ethnic (or part-ethnic) Khmer to be accepted as a Party member.

  The keynote speech was given by Nguyen Thanh Son, whom Giap had placed in charge of Cambodian affairs. He made four main points: firstly, in the absence of a Cambodian proletariat, the Khmer revolution would have to be based on the peasantry; secondly, the overriding priority was to train Cambodian cadres to carry out political work among the Khmer masses and generate popular support for military action — the Vietnamese could help, but Cambodians must take the lead; thirdly, the best way to win Khmer hearts and minds was through the Buddhist monks, for they wielded the greatest influence in the villages; and finally, Vietnamese ideas of communism must be modified to bring them into line with Cambodian reality — it was pointless, for instance, to attack the monarchy because Cambodians would not follow: the correct slogan was ‘Liberate the King from the French colonial yoke!’

  These were the lessons the Viet Minh had learnt painfully over the previous four years. Now they became official policy. In April 1950, two hundred Khmer delegates, half of them monks, met at Hongdan, just across the border from Cambodia’s Peam Chor district, where they approved a new national anthem and flag — a five-towered outline of Angkor Wat in yellow on a red ground — and appointed Son Ngoc Minh head of the provisional revolutionary government. His ‘cabinet’ included Tou Samouth, who headed the new Khmer National United Front, a broad-based organisation modelled on the Viet Minh, and Sieu Heng, a former aide to Dap Chhuon who had switched sides and was now the principal Issarak leader in the North-West. Samouth and Minh also joined the All-Cambodia Work Committee, a Vietnamese organisation, headed by Nguyen Thanh Son, which had ultimate authority over the Cambodian revolution.

  In May, the new leadership issued a Proclamation of Independence, stating: ‘We put our confidence in the people’s democracies, under the leadership of the USSR . . .’June 19 1950 was designated Independence Day, to be celebrated annually, and thereafter Son Ngoc Minh was venerated as the founding father of revolutionary Khmerland.

  The establishment of a Cambodian Party took a further year. In February 1951, the ICP held its last Congress, which approved the formation of a new Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP), that term being judged more appropriate than ‘communist’ at a time when it was necessary to rally the whole Vietnamese people against the French. A month later, Truong Chinh informed Stalin that ‘people’s revolutionary parties’ — a name conveying a much lower level of political development — would be established in Cambodia and Laos. During the summer Nguyen Thanh Son’s All-Cambodia Work Committee began drafting the statutes and political programme of what was to be known as the People’s Revolutionary Party of Khmerland (PRPK). They were promulgated on August 5, and soon afterwards Son Ngoc Minh, Tou Samouth, Sieu Heng, another veteran, Tuk Nhung, and a young man named So Phim were inducted as its founding members. A similarly constituted Laotian Party followed.

  Although the issue was fudged, the new Cambodian Party was not, strictly speaking, Marxist-Leninist. The statutes of the PRPK did not even mention the term, nor did they speak of socialism. Rather it was a proto-communist party — not the ‘vanguard of the working class’ but ‘the vanguard of the nation’. Vietnamese officials explained:

  Although Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have a common enemy — French colonialism — their degrees of evolution differ . . . The mission of the Vietnamese revolution is to liberate the nation, develop people’s democracy and establish socialism . . . The mission of the Laotian and Cambodian revolutions is to liberate the nation and establish an anti-imperialist government. For distinct principles and characteristics, distinct parties are needed.

  The delays in setting up the PRPK were due partly to the lack of qualified Cambodian cadres. Over the previous three years, various attempts had been made to start cadre training schools in the base areas, but the military situation was unstable and they were difficult to sustain. The courses generally focused on military tactics and on the ‘revolutionary situation’. The best students went on to the Truong Chinh Institute, the highest Party school in southern Vietnam, where they spent six months learning Marxist-Leninist theory, Mao Zedong Thought, dialectical materialism, guerrilla strategy and the theory of people’s war from lecturers who included Le Duan and Giap. Son Ngoc Minh and other senior Cambodian leaders attended courses there, while lower-ranking Khmer cadres went to a Vietnamese training school at Hon Chong, near the coast a few miles south of Hatien. According to French intelligence, it
comprised ‘three straw-thatched dormitories, each holding about 60 trainees. Every three months there is a new intake of 150 Vietnamese and 50 Cambodians. At political meetings a red flag with the hammer and sickle is displayed, together with a portrait of Stalin.’ Early in 1951, the school was bombed by French aircraft but ‘was rebuilt and resumed courses a few days later’.

  Gradually a system of local administration was put in place in the communist-controlled districts of Cambodia, starting at village level. It replicated in minute detail the practices developed in Vietnam. Khmerland, too, was to have its equivalent of the Viet Minh ‘People’s Committees’. In each khum, or canton, a guerrilla battalion and a militia unit were organised, and lotteries held to raise funds for the troops. Each Zone had its Women’s Front, its Peasants’ Front, its Workers’ Front, its Youth Front; and each district its Liberation Committee, its Military Committee and its Economic Committee. The Vietnamese even established a Highway Code Committee, to the bemusement of the Cambodians, for whom traffic regulations of any kind have always been a closed book. Khmer cadres were sent specimen forms, translated from Vietnamese, to show them how to file administrative reports. A radio station calling itself the ‘Voice of Khmer Issarak’ started broadcasting; a Cambodian Information Agency was set up; official telegrams were exchanged between the governments of Khmerland and North Vietnam.

  In short, the new polity was carefully endowed with all the trappings of modern statehood. But only the trappings. The ‘liberated areas’ were still tiny and the Khmerland People’s Government’s control over them so feeble that for the first two years President Son Ngoc Minh was compelled to live outside ‘his’ country, across the border at Hatien (just as the Lao revolutionary government was based, for even longer, in northern Vietnam).