Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  For students from colonised nations, this was an exhilarating prospect. It meant there was a path to socialism which could elide western-style capitalism. And Mao added, as a further encouragement, that ‘the only yardstick of truth is the revolutionary practice of millions of people’, which seemed to mean that a revolution could be whatever the masses, or their leaders, wished. ‘The universal truth of Marxism,’ he explained, ‘must be combined with specific national characteristics and acquire a definite national form if it is to be useful, and in no circumstances can it be applied subjectively as a mere formula. Marxists who make a fetish of formulas are simply playing the fool . . .’

  Only on one point was Mao, like Stalin, totally inflexible:

  Either you co-operate with the Communist Party or you oppose it . . . The moment you oppose the Communist Party, you become a traitor . . . Whoever wants to oppose the Communist Party must be prepared to be ground into dust. If you are not keen on being ground into dust, you had certainly better drop your opposition.

  With Stalin’s grim prescriptions for maintaining purity in a revolutionary party and Mao’s guide to revolutionary practice, the young Khmer communists-in-the-making seemed to have most of what they needed. None of them, not even Ieng Sary with his much-vaunted ‘diploma’ from the PCF Cadre School, took much interest in Marxist theory. No one indulged in philosophical speculation about metaphysics or the unity of opposites, as Mao and his companions did at a comparable stage of their careers. Nor, it seems, did they seek out Western accounts of the Chinese and Russian revolutions. Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, Jack Belden’s China Shakes the World and Agnes Smedley’s China’s Red Army Marches were all available in French translations. But there is no evidence that any Cambodian ever read them. Even a star student like Keng Vannsak was unaware of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s influential work Humanism and Terror, an apologium for the Stalinist show trials, despite having the author as his thesis director at the Sorbonne. Still less did any of them study Hegel or Feuerbach or Nietzsche, as their Chinese counterparts had, half a century before.

  The Cambodians embraced Marxism not for theoretical insights, but to learn how to get rid of the French and to transform a feudal society which colonialism had left largely intact.

  From this standpoint, Stalinism and Maoism both had one great flaw. They dealt with a world in which pride of place belonged to the industrial proletariat. The Bolshevik Revolution had been launched by the workers of Petrograd in a country which was already the world’s fourth-ranking industrial power. In 1917, Russia had more than seven million workers. Stalin’s vision of socialism reflected conditions in an industrialised state contending for world supremacy with the major capitalist powers. Even Mao, leading what he described as ‘essentially a peasant revolution’, insisted in the next breath that ‘the revolution cannot succeed without the modern industrial working class.’

  In Cambodia there was no ‘industrial working class’, modern or otherwise.

  Even the Vietnamese, fired up by their missionary endeavour to create a Khmer revolutionary movement, were compelled to admit that conditions did not exist for ‘a socialist revolution, or even a new-democratic revolution, but only [for] a revolution that is national in nature’. For that, a different model was needed — which Sâr discovered one weekend, browsing among the second-hand bookstalls that line the banks of the Seine near the Pont St Michel. Fifty years later, it was the only book from his Paris days whose title he could remember: The Great Revolution, by the Russian anarchist Prince Pëtr Kropotkin.

  It is a massive volume, running to 749 pages, and Sâr admitted later that he ‘did not understand all of it’—unsurprisingly, given that there are long sections on eighteenth-century French feudal land rights, emphyteutic leases, acapts, arriere-acapts, censives, sur-cens, champarts, lods, quints, requints, sokes, tasques, treizains, venterolles and other untranslatable fiscal terms — but it held his interest well enough for him to persevere to the end. For the ‘national revolution’which corresponded most closely to conditions in Cambodia was not that of China or Russia, but the revolution of 1789, launched by an alliance of bourgeois intellectuals and peasants against the rule of Louis XVI.

  Kropotkin set out the aim of his book in the opening paragraph:

  The Revolution was prepared and made by two great movements. One was the current of ideas — the tide of new ideas on the political reorganisation of the State — which came from the bourgeoisie. The other, the current of action, came from the popular masses — the peasants and labourers . . . When these two movements joined together for what at first was a common goal — when for a time they lent each other mutual support — the Revolution occurred . . . The [eighteenth-century] philosophers prepared the way for the downfall of the anden ré gime. . . But that was not enough by itself to make the Revolution break out. It was necessary to pass from theory to action, from an ideal conceived by the imagination to its practical implementation by deeds. What [we] must study today, above everything else, are the circumstances which permitted the French nation, at a particular moment in history, to make that leap — to begin to make that ideal a reality.

  For a young man dreaming of revolution in another feudal kingdom, these were inspirational thoughts.

  The story itself was not new to Sâr. All Cambodian children, from primary school on, were taught how the French King was overthrown and the revolutionaries declared a republic of’Liberty, Fraternity, Equality’, whose guiding principles were enshrined in a Declaration of Human Rights. These were recounted as heroic events. ‘The King thought he was God’s representative on earth . . . The nation . . . was in servitude to royal despotism,’ wrote Alphonse Aulard in his History of France, one of the most widely read schoolbooks in the 1930s and ‘40s. Aulard insisted that the monarchy was weak, the republic strong, and the Revolution itself the expression of the noblest, most generous instincts of mankind. Another primary school textbook writer, Ernest Lavisse, declared: ‘The soldiers of the Revolution . . . fought not just for France but for the whole of humanity . . . They wanted to deliver people everywhere from their kings so that all men might be free.’ The Terror was explained as ‘an exceptional measure in exceptional times’ which took many innocent lives but saved the French Republic.

  That was eighteenth-century France. This was twentieth-century Cambodia. Sihanouk himself was well aware of the precedent, but none of his subjects, nor even the French colonial administrators, seems to have made the connection between his methods of rule and those which brought Louis to the scaffold. With hindsight the parallels cry out. But it was only when the young Cambodians came to France that they allowed themselves to think the unthinkable and the similarities began to register.

  Thiounn Mumm found the history of the French Revolution ‘exalting’. Ieng Sary held long discussions with other members of the Cercle on the lessons the Revolution might have to offer. Thirty years later, a correspondent of Le Monde reported a surrealistic encounter in the jungles of north-western Cambodia with Khieu Samphân, who assured him that ‘Prime Minister Pol Pot and I were profoundly influenced by the spirit of French thought — by the Age of Enlightenment, of Rousseau and Montesquieu.’ In Sokhan’s youngest brother, Sopheap — later Khmer Rouge Ambassador to Egypt — pondered the resemblance between ‘the clergy, the nobility and the tiers état[commoners]’ of royalist France and ‘the monks, the mandarinate and the commoners’ at home. His contemporary, Suong Sikoeun, afterwards one of Ieng Sary’s closest aides, discovered the French Revolution even earlier, sneaking off to the lavatories at his boarding school in Kompong Cham, after ‘candles out’ at 10 p.m., to read about the Montagnards and their implacable leader:

  Robespierre’s personality impressed me. His radicalism influenced me a lot. He was incorruptible and intransigent. [Perhaps] it was the intransigence of youth [that made me feel that way]. If you do something, you must do it right through to the end. You can’t make compromises. That was my personal philosophy, my personal ideolo
gy. You must always be on the side of the absolute — no middle way, no compromise. You must never do things by halves . . .

  That was also one of the lessons of Kropotkin’s book, though he put it in somewhat different terms. To the Russian prince, Robespierre was an upright man of great moral purity whose revolutionary faith never faltered. But he was also a moderate, an administrator, not a visionary — ‘careful not to go beyond the opinions of those who were the dominant force at any given time’ — whose power stemmed precisely from occupying the centre ground. The whole problem of the French Revolution, in Kropotkin’s view, was that it never, went far enough. He warned of the ambivalence of the bourgeoisie, which tried to damp down the revolutionary elan of the masses whenever it sensed that its own interests were threatened. A revolution, he explained, occurred when those in power resisted change until blood ran in the streets. ‘[It] must never stop halfway, for then it will surely fail . . . Rather, once a revolution has broken out, it must develop to its furthest limits. [Inevitably] at its highest point, countervailing forces will combine against it . . . and it will be forced to yield . . . Reaction will set in . . . But the end result will be better than what went before.’

  Another of Kropotkin’s themes was that the touchstone of revolution was property. Those who owned property were, by definition, against the revolution; those who had nothing were for it. He quoted Robespierre approvingly: ‘Only goods in excess may be traded. Necessities belong to all.’ The egalitarian principles of the French Revolution, he argued, were in fact the principles of communism. ‘Modern [Marxist] socialism has added nothing, absolutely nothing, to the ideas that the French people sought to put into practice in [1793-4] • • • More than that, the people’s communism of [those] two years was more clear-sighted, and pushed the logic of its analysis deeper, than today’s socialism does . . . The Great Revolution . . . was the source of all the communist, anarchist and socialist concepts of the present age.’

  There is much else in The Great Revolution. But these three core notions — that revolution requires an alliance between the intellectuals and the peasantry; that it must be carried through to the end, without compromise or hesitation; and that egalitarianism is the basis of communism — would stay with Saloth Sâr for the rest of his âife. One may wonder whether he noted another premonitory sentence: ‘The powerful currents of thought and action that collided and clashed in the French Revolution . . . are so intimately linked to the very essence of human nature that they will inevitably [do so] again in the future.’

  While the members of the Cercle in Paris pondered the tenets of Marxism, at home in Cambodia King Sihanouk was facing more down-to-earth problems. Son Ngoc Thanh, whose old friend Pach Chhoeun was now Minister of Information in the Democratic Party government, had lost no time gathering together the surviving members of the Nagaravatta group and in January 1952, helped by Ea Sichau and monks from the Buddhist Institute, launched a successor paper, Khmer Krauk (Khmers Awake!), which poured forth a stream of articles advocating independence along with ‘sibylline poems, preaching nothing less than armed revolt’. During a visit to Siem Reap province where, by agreement with France, the Royal Khmer Army had been given responsibility for security, Thanh dropped hints of an accommodation with the Viet Minh. Should they commit ‘acts of piracy’, he said, they must be opposed; but their ‘advance to independence’ was a different matter. At some of Thanh’s meetings, an American cultural attaché was present, ostensibly to ensure that the public address system, provided with US aid, was functioning properly.

  The French were furious, and in February a pro-independence demonstration organised by Thanh’s supporters in Phnom Penh was banned. Shortly afterwards he made contact with an Issarak leader named Kao Tak and on March 9, the anniversary of the Japanese coup de force which had first brought him to power, he and a few close followers — including Ea Sichau and the young actor Hang Thun Hak — slipped away to a rebel camp in the Dangrek Mountains. From there Thanh broadcast incendiary appeals to government soldiers and police to desert their units and join the rebellion. When these began to bear fruit — in April a Khmer commander sent twelve crates of weaponry to Thanh’s Issarak allies — the French army attacked the rebels’ bases along the Thai border.

  That provoked a series of student demonstrations in Phnom Penh, Battambang and other towns. At Sâr’s old college in Kompong Cham, the French headmaster, Monsieur Bourotte, was stoned. Banners in French and Khmer charged French troops with burning down villages suspected of Thanhist sympathies and of’raping the wives and daughters of our peasants’.

  To Sihanouk, it was a replay of 1945. Thanh had seized the initiative and was once more denigrating the monarchy as a passive tool of the French. But now the stakes were higher: if Thanh could forge an alliance with the Democratic Party, the Throne itself might be imperilled. This was not entirely far-fetched. When Thanh had returned in October, the Democratic Party Premier, Huy Kanthoul, had gone to the airport to greet him. The Democrats were widely suspected of having been behind the latest demonstrations. Thanh’s radio broadcasts were drawing large audiences and a steady stream of secondary-school students was making its way to join him in the maquis.

  Wiser heads might have noted that Thanh’s support was limited to the towns and that basing himself in a remote and desperately poor rural area on the Thai border was a serious tactical error. But by this stage neither Sihanouk nor the French were behaving rationally — and rumours that the Americans were eyeing Thanh as a potential republican alternative to Sihanouk’s regime were not calculated to improve matters. On June 4, the King broke his silence with a long and vehement speech to the Council of the Throne, in which he warned melodramatically that ‘if the current unprecedented crisis is not resolved rapidly and in a radical manner, [it] will precipitate the Kingdom of My ancestors into anarchy and death’. The government, he complained, was equivocating before Son Ngoc Thanh’s challenge and the people no longer knew what was right. Most serious of all, the royal family was being discredited:

  There are two injustices which revolt Me! First, that which makes the People believe that those responsible for the [Franco-Khmer] treaty and who continue to have dealings with the French are traitors. Secondly, that which holds that . . . all who do not openly insult and struggle against the French are traitors . . . For Myself, I refuse [this logic] . . . If I am a traitor, let the Crown Council permit Me to abdicate! . . .

  I can no longer stand by and watch My country drown and My people die . . . Over these last few months we have no longer dared look each other in the face. In our offices and schools, everywhere people are discussing politics — suspecting each other; hatching plots; promoting this person, bringing down that one, pushing the third aside; doing no constructive work — while, in the country at large, killing, banditry and murder hold sway. Chaos reigns, the established order has ceased to exist . . . The military and the police . . . no longer know where their duty lies. The Issaraks are told that they are dying for Cambodia, and so are our soldiers dying in the battle against them . . . Each day threatens [to engulf us in] a veritable civil war . . .

  This is how things now stand, gentlemen. The time has come for the Nation to make clear whether it desires to follow [the way of the rebels], or to continue in the path that I have traced.

  It was the first time that the young King, then aged thirty, had deliberately gone beyond his constitutional role and entered the political arena. His performance was not yet vintage Sihanouk — that improbable mixture of rage and self-pity, acid and honey, brutality and sarcasm, passion and wit, which would become his trademark — but the demagogic talents he had discovered as a schoolboy studying rhetoric were already evident. For the next half-century, they would be the weapons of choice in his political armoury.

  The speech provoked an open crisis. The Democrats’ right-wing adversaries scattered tracts, demanding that the National Assembly be dissolved, the government be dismissed and the King institute direct rule. Dap Ch
huon, now commander of the Royal Army in Siem Reap, was rumoured to be marching on Phnom Penh to drive the Democrats from power. Public meetings were banned and on June 8 police searched the houses of four right-wing party leaders, including Lon Nol, who were accused of plotting against the state. On the King’s orders, three of them were released after a few hours, but the fourth, Yem Sambaur, a former Prime Minister widely believed to have been behind the assassination of leu Koeuss two years earlier, was held overnight. A case of grenades had been found at his home.

  The following day, June 9, Sihanouk received the French Commissioner, Jean Risterucci, who called up troop reinforcements from Saigon. They arrived on the 14th. That evening, the King, in the presence of his parents and palace advisers, signed a series of decrees, and Cambodians awoke the following morning, a Sunday, to learn that during the night the government had been dismissed; that Sihanouk had assumed emergency powers and appointed himself Prime Minister; and that he had launched a ‘Royal Crusade’, pledging to obtain full independence for Cambodia within the next three years. The Democratic Party leaders, the King informed the nation, had confused the interests of the state with their own, grabbing the benefits of high office and excluding others from the spoils.