Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  For the next nineteen years, the Cercle operated as a secret core group, manipulating from behind the scenes the AEK and its successor organisations. The French police Special Branch, the Renseignements Généraux, estimated that in 1953, by which time the Cercle had about thirty members, it exerted a direct influence on approximately half the Cambodian students in Paris. That did not mean they were all Marxists. But all had ‘progressive’ views and saw the communists as allies in the independence struggle.

  The cells met once a week, usually for a couple of hours in the evening, to discuss the week’s events and to study Marxist texts. They started with Lenin’s ABC of Communism, followed by the Communist Manifesto and Mao Zedong’s On New Democracy. There were also evenings of ‘criticism and self-criticism’, when cell members analysed their shortcomings and those of their comrades. Such sessions were relatively benign, one participant recalled, with none of the systematic demolition of personality that would characterise self-criticism in Cambodia when the communists were in power. None the less, there was an undertone of severity, which everyone knew came from Ieng Sary. As Ping Sây put it: ‘Sary worked a lot and he was quite broad-minded. But he wasn’t amusing like Sâr [or Rath Samoeun] . . . He was tough — and he had a strong character.’ Thiounn Mumm charged that some students quit the Cercle altogether because of Sary’s excessive demands. Mumm himself and his girlfriend moved to a different hotel after Sary took to banging on their door at six o’clock in the morning to tell him that there was ‘political work to be done’. Another Cercle member remembered Sary advising him to masturbate instead of wasting his time with young women. Yet Sary did not always live up to his own exacting standards. A year later, when his fiancee, nineteen-year-old Khieu Thirith, the daughter of a judge, came to join him in Paris, he promptly made her pregnant. Mumm and a couple of friends lent them money to go to Switzerland for an abortion, it being unthinkable for a Cambodian girl of good family — Marxist sympathiser or not — to bear a child out of wedlock. In one sense the incident was banal, proof that Sary was, at heart, no different from other young men of his age. But it reflected a double standard — one set of rules for himself; another for those around him — that would characterise his behaviour all his life.

  Thiounn Mumm was a very different character and in later years he and Sary came to loathe each other. Mumm’s intellectual brilliance and aristocratic ways gave him a sense of detachment which made him insensitive to the concerns of lesser beings. He was an amoral Utopian, consumed by a voracious curiosity for whatever touched on the realm of ideas but seemingly armour-plated against sentimentality and human weakness.

  Of the three leaders of the Co-ordinating Committee, only Rath Samoeun commanded real affection. Khieu Samphân recalled his modesty and kindness; Ping Sây found him ‘a gentle man’. To Keng Vannsak he was ’honest and pure’. But Samoeun died before the Khmers Rouges took power. Otherwise he might have been remembered differently.

  If Saloth Sâr remained inconspicuously in the background for his first two years in Paris, it was partly his character — as he put it many years later, ‘I did not wish to show myself — and partly because he had yet to find his role. He breathed the ‘air of the times’, as the French expression has it, and was carried along, with little effort on his own part, by more assured, dynamic colleagues.

  Keng Vannsak thought he was ‘out of his depth’ in France, unable to cope with Parisian ways. To him, Sâr was ‘a poor fellow who hardly knew anybody and found it difficult to manage’. That judgement sits ill with the image of the ‘bon vivant’ that Ping Sây and Mey Mann remembered, and it may say more about Vannsak — whose high opinion of himself was reflected in a certain contempt for those he viewed as less gifted — than it does about Sâr. Yet it held a grain of truth. By the autumn of 1951, Sâr was beginning to worry about what he was going to do with his life. The Radio-Electricity School was leading nowhere: he had lost interest in his studies and that summer failed his second-year exams. His hero Son Ngoc Thanh had returned home. Vannsak’s circle he found fascinating, but the discussions were often above his head. The same disdain that the boys at the Lycée Sisowath had shown for the ‘apprentices’ during Sâr’s last year in Phnom Penh had followed him to Paris. ‘I only had a middle school certificate,’ he recalled. Men like Vannsak and Phuong Ton, preparing doctorates — no matter how sympathetic they might be — did not have a great deal of time for a former carpentry student now training to become a radio technician. Even in the Cercle Marxiste, he admitted ruefully, ‘the leaders were appointed on the basis of the diplomas they held —so I was not among them.’

  But for Sâr, that winter, something clicked. He found his purpose in life. It was revolution.

  He was not alone in that. The discovery of Stalinism — the PCF’s official ideology and constant rallying cry — gave the Khmer students in the Cercle something they had all lacked: a sense of belonging and a goal. Suddenly they were part of a world-wide movement endowed with a transcendant mission. Like communists everywhere, they interpreted Marxism through the prism of national culture, in their case an intensely normative form of Buddhism. Unsurprisingly, they saw themselves not as the avatars of a proletarian society which would transform the economic basis of a new, industrialised world, but much more simply — as the incarnation of good that would triumph over the forces of evil.

  Most of them, moreover, had only the vaguest notions of Marxist theory. Thiounn Mumm, Khieu Samphân and, a generation later, radical students like Suong Sikoeun and In Sopheap waded through Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism and State and Revolution, Stalin’s Economic Problems of Socialism and other ponderous tomes, but they were the exceptions who proved the rule. Sâr confessed later that when he read ‘the big, thick works of Marx . . . I didn’t really understand them at all.’ Ping Sây, too, thought that ‘Marx was too deep for us’. Ieng Sary, as an old man, would still occasionally lapse into Marxist categories when speaking of his Khmer Rouge days, and colleagues recalled how proud he was to have been one of only two Cambodians who had studied at the PCF Cadre School. For the others, Marxism signified an ideal, not a comprehensive system of thought to be mastered and applied.

  A few months after the Cercle was established, Sâr joined the French Communist Party. Rath Samoeun, Ieng Sary, Mey Mann and half a dozen others did the same. They attended lectures on communist policy given by PCF leaders in a hall near the Opera, and meetings of the PCF’s Cambodian ‘language group’, which included both Party members and sympathisers.

  In the PCF’s scheme of things, Sâr’s lack of academic qualifications was not merely of no importance, it was actually an advantage. The French Party in the early 1950s was viscerally anti-intellectual. What mattered most was proletarian origin. Sâr, the former trainee carpenter, was better placed than the others to satisfy class criteria. He may also have been encouraged by Hou Yuon to play a more active role. The members of his cell, he recalled, ‘chose me to take charge of research on theoretical and ideological issues . . . My diploma was not as high as the others, and my French was not as good as theirs — none the less, they gave me [this] work to do.’ A French militant who met him at that time remembered him as a ‘discreet, courteous, polite young man . . . with firm convictions’. He began reading the PCF magazine, Les Cahiers Internationaux, and tried to analyse and compare the experience of different countries’ revolutionary movements.

  Like other members of the Cercle, Sâr also studied Stalin’s 1912 essay Marxism and the National Question and the History of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of the USSR — both of which, he said later, he found easier to understand than Lenin or Marx. The first sets out a materialist definition of the nation as a ‘stable, historically constituted community’ with a common culture, language and territory, and explicitly rejects the idea that a nation is a racial blood group — notions that accord closely with traditional Khmer ideas equating both ‘race’ and ‘nation’ with cultural behaviour. The second work, written by Stal
in in 1938 in the aftermath of the Great Terror, was used as a political primer by communist parties all over the world. The PCF, in its usual, humourless fashion, handed it out free to anyone who bought the first ten volumes of the Works of the PCF leader, Maurice Thorez. Mao had it translated into Chinese. Ho Chi Minh issued a Vietnamese version. It cannot therefore, of itself, be blamed for the singular barbarism of future Cambodian communist practice. But it was a crucial formative influence.

  The History of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) hammered home six basic lessons. Some of them — like the need to stay close to the masses’, and not to become ‘dizzy with success’ — were typically honoured in the breach. But Stalin’s four other precepts marked indelibly the thinking of the future Cambodian revolutionaries. He stressed the importance of correct leadership — ‘without which the cause of the proletarian revolution will be ruined’ — and of criticism and self-criticism; he taught that Marxism-Leninism was not a dogma, but a guide to action, constantly enriched by new revolutionary experience; and, above all, he urged eternal vigilance. ‘One of the watchwords of the Bolshevik Party’, Stalin wrote, is that ‘the Party grows ever stronger by cleansing itself of opportunist elements’:

  Without waging an intransigent struggle against the opportunists in its own ranks . . . the Party of the working class . . . cannot carry out its role . . . It might seem that the Bolsheviks have spent too much time [on this struggle] and accorded it too much importance . . . That is absolutely false. We can no more tolerate opportunism among us than we tolerate an ulcer in a healthy body . . . There is no way we can allow doubters, opportunists, capitulationists and traitors within the leading headquarters of the working class . . . A fortress is taken most easily from within. To be victorious, we must, before all else, purge the working class Party and its forward citadel, its leading headquarters, of capitulationists, deserters, criminals and traitors.

  The History offered other lessons, too: on the importance of revolutionaries using both legal and illegal forms of struggle in order to win power; and on the need for a ‘monolithic and combative’, intrinsically elitist Party, for which candidates must be vigorously screened, rather than a broad-based body to which all and sundry might aspire. But the burden of Stalin’s message was that communists must constantly be on guard against ‘political crooks’, ‘tricksters’ and ‘agents of foreign spy organisations’. Such people, he wrote, would go to any lengths to camouflage their ‘vile designs’ and worm their way into the Party, using membership as a mask for sabotage and betrayal. The only correct response to these ‘dregs of the human species’was ‘pitiless repression’.

  Stalinism, having been shaped by the legacy of Russian feudalism,resonated with the Khmers, whose culture likewise had little place for the subtle checks and balances that were applied, however imperfectly, in the Confucian world of China and Vietnam. Some members of the Cercle remained unconvinced: Phuong Ton had reservations, and Hou Yuon warned against ‘confusing the elimination of the bourgeoisie [as a class] with the elimination of bourgeois [individuals]’. But Sâr, Rath Samoeun and Ieng Sary had no doubts. When the PCF purged two Politburo members, Andre Marty and Charles Tillon, for breaking Party discipline, Samoeun enthusiastically told a French comrade: ‘I’ve just been waiting for this. I was beginning to think the PCF was too moderate, too legalistic and parliamentary’

  Sary, by this time, had a portrait of Stalin on his wall, as did Thiounn Thioeunn’s fellow medical student In Sokhan. That year he confided to Keng Vannsak: ‘I will direct the revolutionary organisation . . . I will hold the dossiers; I will supervise the ministers; I will watch that they do not deviate from the line laid down by the Central Committee in the interests of the people.’ The words, recalled decades later, may not be exact, but the sentiments ring true. By 1952, Ieng Sary, as head of the Cercle, saw himself as Cambodia’s future revolutionary leader.

  Saloth Sâr had more modest ambitions. He was slowly beginning to emerge as a ‘progressive student’ in his own right. He gave talks to the members of his cell. He helped to duplicate the Cercle’s clandestine journal, Reaksmei (‘the Spark’, named after Lenin’s revolutionary paper), in Ieng Sary’s hotel room. There he met for the first time Khieu Ponnary, the elder sister of Sary’s fiancee, who was about to return to Phnom Penh to teach at the Lycée Sisowath. Keng Vannsak would say later that Sâr and Sary ‘ate and slept revolution’. But Sary was in charge, Sâr followed behind.

  He started reading l’Humanite, which until then he had avoided, disliking its strident tone. Mey Mann, too, had been repelled by the ‘quasi-monarchical’ devotion the newspaper showed towards Maurice Thorez, which reminded him of Sihanouk’s court. In the early 1950s, VHumanite had no illusions about the kind of stories that would grab the attention of its working-class readership. Alongside articles by Politburo members about the minimum wage and the iniquities of Gaullism were gruesome crime reports with headlines like, ‘Amélie Rabilloud shows how she killed and cut up her husband’; ‘I baby devoured by the family dog before the eyes of its mother’; and ‘Suzanne Feret kept the corpse of her child in a suitcase for 38 days’.

  None the less, VHumanite faithfully reflected the PCF’s (and Stalin’s) priorities: the campaign to ban atomic weapons; the supposed menace of German rearmament; the Korean War; and the battle against French colonialism. Not only Indochina but French North Africa and Madagascar were seething with unrest. Anti-colonial rallies were held at the Salle de la Mutualité in the Latin Quarter, triggering fist-fights with right-wing students on the Boulevard St Michel which often ended with a night in the cells. Khieu Samphân remembered an insurrectional atmosphere in the city, where ‘one was almost led to believe that a great revolution was about to break out’ — less fanciful than it might seem at a time when communist doctrine proclaimed that the only way to power was through a general uprising.

  These were the years when 25 per cent of the French electorate voted for the PCF, more than for any other political party. To be a communist was a badge of honour, the legacy of the glory days when the communists formed the backbone of resistance against Nazi Germany. The PCF leader, Maurice Thorez, travelled in an armoured black limousine to guard against assassination attempts and lesser figures, including Politburo members, were constantly harassed by the police. Left-wing writers and painters like Paul Eluard, Picasso, Louis Aragon and Sartre issued ringing statements of support. The communist journalist André Stil was imprisoned for writing that the US had engaged in bacteriological warfare in Korea. L’Hurnanité urged its readers to draw inspiration from the Paris Commune of 1871, whose eightieth anniversary the PCF marked with grandiose celebrations and whose collapse under the assaults of the bourgeoisie was, in the words of one PCF leader, ‘an invitation to redouble our vigilance against the activities of enemy agents’. If that parallel seemed too remote, the East European show trials — of Rajk and Kostov in 1949 and the Czechoslovak leader, Rudolf Slansky, in 1952 — proved to the Party faithful that dangers lurked on every side. The fervour of those who believed was equalled only by the terror unleashed against those who did not.

  It was through l’Humanite that Sâr learnt for the first time of the heresy of Yugoslavia’s President Tito. The Belgrade—Zagreb motorway, on which he and his colleagues had laboured, was now, the newspaper noted smugly, the target of anti-Tito saboteurs. Sâr’s views are not recorded but he probably disapproved. According to Nghet Chhopininto, many Cambodian students secretly sympathised with the Yugoslav leader because ‘he stood up to Stalin. Apart from Yugoslavia, all the other east European countries were under Soviet tutelage. Tito was the only one who waved the flag of national independence . . . And that pleased us.’

  The parallel with Cambodia, likewise struggling to affirm its identity against powerful neighbours, Vietnam and Thailand, did not need to be spelt out.

  * * *

  Another seminal influence, not just for Sâr but for all the members of the Cercle, was Mao’s speech On New Democracy. Originally
delivered to cultural workers in Yan’an in January 1940, it provided a detailed blueprint for revolution in a colonial or semi-colonial state. Ho Chi Minh established the League for Vietnamese Independence (the Viet Minh) on the basis of the principles set out in this speech, and the term ‘new democracies’ soon became standard communist jargon for countries in transition, on the way to becoming socialist states. The ICP Secretary-General, Truong Chinh, looked forward to the day when ‘New Democracy [will] cover a continuous expanse reaching from Central Europe to [Vietnam’s] Cape Camau’. The word ‘democracy’ itself became a synonym for socialism. When Party workers referred to ‘democratic publications’, they meant the communist press. There were ‘people’s democracies’ in Eastern Europe; a ‘Democratic Front’ in Asia; and a ‘World Democratic Bloc’ under the leadership of the Soviet Union. Even Son Ngoc Minh and his Vietnamese mentors adopted the new fashion: Khmerland was referred to as ‘Democratic Cambodia’ which, with Pathet Lao and North Vietnam, formed the region’s three ‘democratic nations’.

  Mao argued that revolutions in colonies, or semi-colonial semi-feudal states, had to take place in two stages: first, a ‘democratic revolution’, carried out by an alliance of different classes — the peasants, who provided the main force, the workers and elements of the bourgeoisie; and only afterwards a ‘socialist revolution’. The two were fundamentally different and could not be collapsed into one. The first stage would create ‘a state under the joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes’; the second, a socialist state under ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’. In a world where socialism had become the dominant trend, it was no longer necessary, Mao said, to pass through the phase of bourgeois capitalism, as Marx had assumed. Instead the transition could be accomplished through the establishment of ‘a new-democratic republic’, which would nationalise banks and major industrial and commercial enterprises while permitting ‘such capitalist production as does not dominate the livelihood of the people’. It was true, Mao admitted, that the bourgeoisie were unreliable allies, who would turn tail at the first sign of trouble. None the less, the ‘new democracy’ phase of revolution was ‘necessary and cannot be dispensed with’, and since ‘we are [realists], not Utopians’, it would last for ‘quite a long time’.