Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  In practice, decision-making at every level remained firmly in Vietnamese hands. Truong Chinh noted the VWP’s ‘right of supervision’ over its Cambodian and Lao allies and that the Khmer communists faithfully ‘took instructions’ from the Party in Vietnam. No Khmer could become a Party member without the prior agreement of Nguyen Thanh Son’s All-Cambodia Work Committee, most of whose members were Vietnamese. All appointments, down to the level of village chiefs, required the Committee’s approval. Even the commander of the Viet Minh-backed Khmer Issarak forces was Vietnamese until, ‘to appease the Khmers’, Sieu Heng was given the post, closely supervised by his predecessor, now officially his deputy. No matter how much Hanoi might talk of the need to ‘Khmerise’ Cambodia’s revolution, the reality was that the leaders of Khmerland were little more than a polite fiction masking Vietnamese control.

  This was not simply a matter of Vietnam having hegemonic designs upon a weaker neighbour. Rather it reflected the mismatch between two incompatible peoples. To the Vietnamese it seemed that no matter how hard they tried to mobilise Khmer support, the overwhelming majority of Cambodians stubbornly refused to budge. Their frustration at perceived Khmer obtuseness was palpable. At a meeting in the summer of 1950, one of Nguyen Thanh Son’s colleagues exploded:

  The Cambodian revolution must be carried out by Cambodians. If the Cambodian people don’t wake up, if the Cambodian cadres don’t know how to work, then no matter how many millions of cadres we send — how many thousands of tons of arms or how much money we give them — it won’t help.

  A senior Viet Minh general complained that it was impossible to find Cambodian officer material because they ‘lack qualities of command’. In 1951 — despite a recruitment drive and a decision to lower membership criteria for Khmers ‘to take account of the insufficiency of their intellectual level’ — there were still only 150 Khmer Party members. The Vietnamese, like the French before them, had decided that the Cambodians were apathetic, primitive and incapable of doing anything without the tutelage of a more civilised and vigorous power.

  One colonialism was chasing out another. A French intelligence officer wrote: ‘[This] revolutionary war has an aspect that is truly paradoxical: it is being undertaken by the Vietnamese against the French for the independence of the Cambodian people. It is the deed of one foreign army against another foreign army — the one contesting with the other the right to bring Happiness to the country in question.’ The Vietnamese never asked themselves, any more than had the French, whether the Cambodians wanted the new system they were introducing. They acted in the unassailable certitude of a superior truth.

  The half-dozen or so young men who began meeting in the winter of 1950 in Keng Vannsak’s flat in Paris knew little of all this. Although French newspapers were devoting more and more space to the war in Indochina — la sale guerre,’the dirty war’, as the French Left called it — it was always in reference to Vietnam. Cambodia hardly got a mention. ‘The French press uses “Vietnam” and “Indochina” as though they are interchangeable,’ Khemara Nisut complained. Mey Mann recalled trying to explain to a group of French students at a holiday camp one summer that Cambodians formed a separate nation, with their own culture and traditions which were nothing to do with Vietnam’s. The members of the AEK voted by an overwhelming margin that celebrations to mark the Khmer New Year should never be held in the Maison d’Indochine because the setting was too Vietnamese.

  Affirming Khmer identity was a constant struggle, and not only in France: China’s Premier Zhou Enlai confessed later that when the Chinese communists began formulating policy in regard to ‘Indochina’, he and his colleagues initially assumed they were dealing with ‘a single country in which the Cambodians were a national minority’.

  None the less, by early 1951 it had become clear to the students in Paris that there were three distinct pro-independence movements at work in Cambodia: the original Khmer Issaraks, led by local warlords like Prince Chantarainsey, Puth Chhay, Ouch and Savangs Vong; the so-called ‘Khmer Viet Minh’, the term used by the French to describe Issarak leaders and others (notably Son Ngoc Minh, Sieu Heng and Tou Samouth) who had thrown in their lot with the Vietnamese; and last, but by no means least, the uneasy partnership between King Sihanouk and the Cambodian parliament, controlled by the Democratic Party, which was seeking to transform ‘independence within the French Union’ into full statehood through negotiations with Paris. The burning issue for Vannsak’s circle was which path to national liberation was most likely to succeed, and how a group like theirs — keenly aware of its responsibilities as Cambodia’s future intellectual elite — could best promote that goal. To all of them, independence, not ideology, was the key. The founding of ‘New China’, the expansion of the war against the French in Vietnam, the independence of India and Indonesia, about which Khemara Nisut wrote at length, and the anti-colonialism of the French Left, all combined to put national emancipation at the forefront of their thoughts.

  Their discussions were often rather muddled. At one early meeting, Ea Sichau developed a proposal — ‘enough to make you fall asleep standing up,’ Keng Vannsak grumbled — that Sihanouk should marry an Indian princess so that Nehru would take up the cudgels for Cambodian independence. The anecdote is revealing not just for the lingering influence of the statecraft of the Angkorian kingdom, six centuries before, but for the insight it provides into the mentality of the students in Paris. Even university-educated Cambodians often found the gulf between Western and Asian ways of thinking unbridgeable. As a result, they absorbed European ideas piecemeal rather than as a coherent system of thought. The lack of critical faculties, which Pierre Lamant noted among his pupils at the Lycée Sisowath, was to be an enduring characteristic of many of Sâr’s generation: they dreamed dreams, and showed a total disregard for reality.

  Another of Sichau’s contemporaries, a young man of pronounced right-wing views, wrote a long essay extolling the Soviet collective farm system as a model for Cambodian agriculture without once asking himself what collectivisation would do to Cambodia’s social system. A left-wing medical student warned his comrades that ‘the sweet, young [French] working girl presents the greatest danger [of venereal disease] because of her inexperience and ignorance of the most elementary rules of hygiene’, a comment which, if prophylactically true, was politically indefensible. Even Vannsak, endowed with an alert, questioning mind that far outstripped those of most of his colleagues, embraced an obscure quasi-Buddhist doctrine called ascetology, founded by a paralysed French academic, Dr Gorelle, in the belief that it would help him control his sexual desires at a time when the struggle for independence was paramount.

  Vannsak’s study circle eschewed political labels. Its members did not claim to be either Left or Right, and the group itself had no name. As he put it, ‘It was simply a gathering of friends who liked being with each other, all of whom, in one way or another, regarded themselves as progressive.’

  From the outset, however, there were two opposing tendencies. Ea Sichau, Hang Thun Hak and Saloth Sêr believed Cambodia’s salvation lay with Son Ngoc Thanh, then still living in exile in Poitiers, and several times in the course of that year travelled there to see the great man and hear his views on the situation at home. Rath Samoeun and Ieng Sary, still under the spell of the Communist Manifesto which they had read in Phnom Penh, were more interested in the Viet Minh. Soon after arriving in France they had contacted Jacques Verges, then a member of the Bureau of the International Students’ Union (ISU), a communist front organisation with its headquarters in Prague. He had put them in touch with left-wing Vietnamese student groups.

  At this stage, even for Sary, ‘independence’, not ‘communism’, remained the overriding goal. But by 1951, the two were becoming intertwined. Since Stalin’s recognition of Ho Chi Minh’s government a year earlier, the French Communist Party (PCF) had vociferously championed the Viet Minh cause. Many in the Khmer student community began to look on the Party in a new light. Mey Mann remembered t
hinking that spring that ‘the communists were our best friends. They were the ones who supported us. They opposed colonialism . . . Everyone else was against us.’ Thiounn Mumm, who spent the first half of the year at a sanatorium at Combloux, near Megéve, in the Alps, convalescing from a lung disease, reached the same conclusion. Many of his fellow patients were communists who had been in the French resistance, and from time to time they organised meetings against the Indochina War. ‘If you wanted to fight against colonialism,’ Mumm decided, ‘the communists were the only ones who would help you.’

  Within the circle, Vannsak saw himself as a rallying point, bringing the two sides together. But even he recognised that, as the months passed, the gap between the rival tendencies was growing and it was sometimes better that they met separately.

  The point of no return came that summer. The World Federation of Democratic Youth, a Budapest-based front organisation from the same stable as the ISU, announced that it was organising a fifteen-day ‘World Youth Festival for Peace’, to be held in Berlin in August. Sary, alerted by Jacques Verges, went to see Thiounn Mumm to suggest that the AEK should participate and that Mumm, as one of the most senior and highly qualified of the Khmer community in Paris, should lead the delegation. He agreed. Vannsak, standing in for the Association’s president, approved the decision and asked the other two to make sure that everyone had their travel papers. What happened next still made Vannsak fume half a century later:

  They screwed me! They didn’t get my papers. The day we were supposed to leave I couldn’t go because I had no passport and no visa. Why? Because they wanted to get rid of me, to push me aside. They saw that I wasn’t a hardliner, like they were. I thought too much . . . I didn’t act pig-headedly, in a fanatical, extremist way. And I had friends among the Thanhists, like Ea Sichau and Hang Thun Hak . . . Ieng Sary himself told me later: You’re too sensitive. You’ll never be a politician. To do politics you have to be tough . . . You can’t do it, brother. You’re too sentimental.’

  Thiounn Mumm, Rath Samoeun, Ieng Sary, Mey Mann and five or six others — all of them sympathetic to Sary’s ideas — travelled to Berlin by train through Switzerland. Saloth Sâr was not among them. He was a Thanhist and in any case he had already planned his camping holiday in Yugoslavia.

  In theory the Berlin Festival was non-political. In fact it was strongly pro-Soviet, as was made clear by a tract distributed by the CGT, the French communist trade union federation:

  Young working men and women of Paris! Every day you are suffering from the preparations for a new world war [being undertaken] by the [French] government on the orders of its American masters . . . The threat of Gaullist fascism is growing . . . You do not wish to be capitalist cannon fodder [but to] live in peace and win a better life. [In] Berlin, representatives of the young people of the whole world will shake hands and say a resounding ‘No!’ to all the MacArthurs and Eisenhowers, to the imperialist cannibals thirsting for blood.

  The Festival drew 25,000 young people, including 5,000 from France alone. Much of their time was spent watching displays of folk-dancing, and taking part in parades and emotional mass meetings to support the latest Soviet peace campaign. But they also visited the Nazi concentration camp at Ravensbriick and held meetings with delegations from North Vietnam and China. The Chinese, Mey Mann recalled, received the Khmers separately, whereas the Vietnamese insisted on seeing all the Indochinese students together. But it was the officials from Hanoi who made the strongest impression, for they were able to provide the Cambodians with the first reliable news of the Khmer Viet Minh struggle against the French, about which, until then, they had heard only confused rumours. They also gave them a photograph of Son Ngoc Minh, a set of propaganda texts and the flag of Nokor Khmer bearing the five-towered image of Angkor.

  From then on, the divergence between the Thanhists and the new de facto alliance of Ieng Sary, Rath Samoeun and Thiounn Mumm, became more pronounced. Vannsak swallowed his rage over the Berlin episode and continued to try to mediate between them, joining Mumm in Warsaw in late August for a congress of the International Students’ Union. But the fundamental issue in dispute — whether or not to endorse armed struggle against the French — was not one that could be papered over. Mumm said later that he had first realised the importance of a military struggle when his fellow officer cadets at the Ecole Polytechnique (run by the French Defence Ministry) had shown polite interest in Cambodia’s campaign for independence and a very different sort of respect for the fight the Vietnamese were waging. ‘I understood then that without armed struggle, we could not obtain independence. Ieng Sary felt the same way. And since we didn’t want the Vietnamese to have the monopoly of military power, it meant we had to have our own army and fight for our own cause.’ After the meeting with the Viet Minh in Berlin, this belief became a certainty. In Vannsak’s words, ‘[they] came back convinced that . . . the Viet Minh were right, that the French had to be forced to yield and armed struggle was the only way’

  Ea Sichau and the Thanhists saw things differently. They argued that to take up arms would be to court Vietnamese domination. Burma and India had both won independence by non-violent means: why could not Cambodia do the same?

  Son Ngoc Thanh himself equivocated. Mumm and Sary went to see him at Poitiers, where they noted, disapprovingly, that the Collected Works of Marx, prominently displayed in Thanh’s library, had never been opened. Thanh’s reluctance to commit himself was understandable: he had been trying for years to persuade Sihanouk to grant an amnesty allowing him to return and at long last there were signs that the King might soon do so. Laying himself open to accusations of endorsing armed revolt was the last thing he needed. To Ea Sichau and his supporters, moreover, Thanh’s return was the best, last hope of gaining independence without Viet Minh involvement. Sihanouk appeared more than ever a French puppet, a weak, capricious man whom none of the Paris students believed was capable of ending colonial rule. Vannsak, who was deeply mistrustful of Vietnamese motives, also urged Thanh to return and take control of the independence movement so as to forge the disparate Issarak groups into an authentic Khmer force, capable of ousting the French without foreign aid.

  In the middle of October, Sihanouk announced that Thanh’s exile was to end. Ten days later, accompanied by Ea Sichau, he set out for Phnom Penh, where he was given a hero’s welcome by a crowd estimated at 100,000 people, who lined the route from the airport as he drove in an open limousine the five miles into the city, slowing the cortege to walking pace in their efforts to see and touch him. It was the kind of welcome that hitherto had been reserved for Sihanouk alone and it gave the young King much pause for thought. Thanh declined the offer of a government post, and after consultations with Democratic Party leaders, set out on a tour of the provinces, hoping to build his popularity further before making a bid for power. Sihanouk watched uneasily, but could only let events take their course.

  The effect of the Berlin Festival and the departure of Son Ngoc Thanh was to move the political centre of gravity of the Khmer student movement in Paris sharply to the left. In October 1951, the AEK chose Hou Yuon as its new president. Nghet Chhopininto remembered him as ‘an independent spirit. Once he had traced his path, he followed it.’ Of humble origins, Hou was appreciated for the care with which he managed the association’s meagre funds and for his frankness and loyalty.

  Under Hou Yuon, the AEK established close links with the left-wing French National Students’ Union (UNEF) and, through Jacques Verges, with the ISU and another group he headed, the Liaison Committee of Colonial Students’ Associations, which had its headquarters in the rue St Sulpice. From then on, the AEK adopted an openly political stance, approving the ‘struggle for national independence in all its forms’, a phrase which covered armed struggle as well as negotiation.

  But this was merely the outward face of a deeper change. A few weeks earlier, Thiounn Mumm had invited some thirty Khmer students, chosen for their progressive ideas, to a meeting at the home of his French
girlfriend’s mother in Sceaux, a few miles south of Paris. They heard a report on the Festival in Berlin, followed by a discussion of the best way to promote independence. ‘No one used the word, “communism”,’ Nghet Chhopininto recalled. ‘[Mumm and Ieng Sary] were very cautious in what they said — and I think if they’d spoken in too ideological a fashion to begin with, people wouldn’t have gone along with them. Those who attended were patriots, whose aim was to get rid of the French.’ Mey Mann, who was also present that night, agreed. ‘The main question was always to get the communists to help us to free ourselves from the colonialists. But the appetite grows with eating. Once you study it, you start to like Marxism because it is so rational and scientific’

  The meeting at Sceaux was designed to test the waters. Soon afterwards, selected participants were approached individually and asked if they would like to participate in a new, secret organisation: the Cercle Marxiste.

  The Cercle was built up of individual cells, each comprising between three and six people. It was rigidly compartmentalised: one member of each cell was in contact with a single member of the leadership, and no cell member knew who belonged to the other cells or how many cells existed. Years later Ping Sây and Chhopininto were still unsure who had really been in charge.

  In fact the three-man Co-ordinating Committee which ran the Cercle was headed by Ieng Sary, assisted by Thiounn Mumm and Rath Samoeun. Initially there were about a dozen members. One group met at the Hotel Anglo-Latin on the rue St André-des-Arts, where Ieng Sary and Thiounn Mumm were then living. Keng Vannsak attended the initial meetings but then lost interest, finding the discussions too doctrinaire. Another cell, to which Chhopininto belonged, was based in the suburb of Antony. A third was led by a mathematics student named Ok Sakun and included Ping Sây and Mey Mann. Quite when Saloth Sâr joined is unclear. He may have been at the meeting at Sceaux but, if so, took little part in the discussion, for no one remembers his presence there. Indeed, Thiounn Mumm had no recollection of meeting him at any time in Paris. Nevertheless, some time in the autumn or winter of 1951, Sâr was admitted to a group which met in the rue Lacepède, near the Radio-Electricity Institute. Hou Yuon was in the same cell. So was Sary’s friend Sien An, and a boy named Sok Knaol whom Sâr had befriended. Knaol was several years younger than the others and was studying fashion design.