Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  In this, Sihanouk was not wrong. During the five years they had been in power, the Democrats had shown themselves to be corrupt, feudalistic, incompetent and addicted to Byzantine factional squabbling which paralysed political life. A prominent member of their own party acknowledged: ‘They were unworthy. They thought only of themselves . . . All they were interested in was their ministerial career.’ Yet it could scarcely have been otherwise. The only indigenous political models were the palace and the mandarinate, which had waxed fat over the centuries by squeezing the population. Parliamentary democracy was a colonial import utterly alien to Cambodian tradition. Sihanouk’s reaction, which was to conclude that the institutions of the French Fourth Republic had no place in his oriental kingdom, was short-sighted and did nothing to help Cambodia become a modern democratic state. But the US administration, by instinctively preferring an ‘elected government’, whatever its defects, to an unelected monarch, was equally simple-minded. It marked the beginning of a process of mutual incomprehension which would not end until America’s defeat in the Vietnam War, a quarter of a century later, if indeed it ended then.

  For some days after Sihanouk’s ‘coup’, Moroccan infantrymen guarded the parliament building and French armoured cars patrolled the streets. All political meetings were banned. In Siem Reap province the Royal Army launched fresh attacks against the Khmer Serei (or Free Khmers), as Son Ngoc Thanh’s forces now called themselves, and burned down more villages. That triggered fresh protests by secondary-school students and a boycott of year-end exams. The National Assembly was sullenly hostile. But the sharpest criticisms of all came from Paris, where the leaders of the Students’ Association rushed out a special issue of Khemara Nisut, the centrepiece of which was a vitriolic attack on Sihanouk, penned by Keng Vannsak, bluntly accusing the King of treason and lauding Son Ngoc Thanh and his followers as Cambodia’s ‘true heroes’:

  We, Khmer students of the AEK, consider that Your Majesty has acted illegally . . . and that the policy of the Throne . . . will inevitably lead our Khmer Motherland into an abyss of perpetual slavery . . .

  In your message to the nation, [you said that] Cambodia faces ever greater dangers. It seems Your Majesty has only just noticed. The people have known this for a long time, and they know too that their sufferings are the doing of the French imperialists and of the absolute monarchy and its courtiers . . . What should the people think when Your Majesty’s Palace has become a lobby for dishonest dealings which place within your hands the riches of the country and the people? . . . Corruption in our country stems from the Throne and spreads down to the humblest officials. The French oppress the whole country, the King trades on his Crown, the Palace and its parasites suck the people’s blood . . . These are the main causes of our country’s critical situation today. . .

  Your Majesty has sought to divide the nation in two: the royalists, and those who struggle for independence. [Your] policy is to set Khmers against Khmers . . . as happened under Sisowath and Norodom, who [also] collaborated with the French . . . Your Majesty is merely following in the footsteps of your ancestors, that is to say, you are selling the blood of your people as the price of your crown. . .

  The King considers Cambodia as his chattel . . . His policy . . . is one of destruction — of the people and the life of the Khmer country . . . [But] let Your Majesty be advised that we Khmer students . . . have no intention of judging or condemning you. It will be up to History — the history wrought by Your Majesty and your ancestors — to judge your faults in due time.

  Vannsak’s attack was all the more wounding because it contained a number of home truths about the personal corruption of Sihanouks parents. Copies were signed by Hou Yuon, the AEK president; Mey Mann, who had been elected Secretary-General; and by Vannsak and other student luminaries, including Ieng Sary. They were sent to the palace, the National Assembly, the Cabinet Office, the two main Buddhist orders and the newspapers. The King sank into a ‘black rage’, Vannsak was told later, but was sufficiently lucid to recognise that punishing the culprits would only alienate opinion further. Instead, he sent the most senior of the Counsellors to the Throne, Penn Nouth, to Paris, with instructions first to obtain an apology and then try to smooth things over.

  This was easier said than done. Hou Yuon addressed him pointedly as Monsieur Penn Nouth, rather than by the royal title, Monseigneur, an insult Nouth never forgot. Vannsak refused to see him at all. No apology was forthcoming. Sihanouk was forced to swallow his pride and recall his emissary, leaving behind a warning that the bursaries of those involved were now at risk.

  That gave them pause. Vannsak remembered Ieng Sary telling him: ‘This is your fault, brother. You’ve got your degree — you don’t need to study any more. We think you should go back to Phnom Penh and try to raise some money, so that we can stay in France.’ Whether from guilt — Vannsak loathed Sihanouk and had pressured the others into putting their names to his letter — or from simple lassitude after six years in Europe, he agreed. Ieng Sary and his fiancee, Thirith, took over the apartment in the rue de Commerce, and in October 1952 the Vannsaks set off on the three-day plane journey to Phnom Penh, which included an afternoon stopover in Cairo, to see the Pyramids, and another in Rangoon. Vannsak had warned his wife that they might be arrested on arrival, but in the event the worst that befell him was a dressing-down from an elderly aunt, Princess Peangpas, then Minister of Education. ‘Imbecile !’she yelled at him. ‘What did you think you were doing, daring to oppose the King?’ When he denied responsibility, she demanded to see a specimen of his handwriting. He sat up all night trying to perfect a different script. But next morning the old lady had forgotten about it and instructed her Chef de Cabinet to find him a teaching post.

  Vannsak had not been alone among the students in Paris in protesting against Sihanouk’s actions. Others, with his encouragement, also published articles attacking the King. One, who called himself Khmer Daeum (Old Khmer), entitled his contribution ‘Monarchy or Democracy?’ Compared with Vannsak’s diatribe, it was a rather juvenile effort, but as Saloth Sâr’s earliest known piece of writing it provides an insight into his thinking at that time. Plainly influenced by his mentor, Sâr argued that the Khmer monarchy reduced the people ‘to the condition of animals which are [treated] like a herd of slaves and forced to work day and night without stopping’, whereas democracy was ‘priceless as a diamond . . . like a torrent cascading down the mountainside which no person can stop’. Monarchy, Sâr wrote, was ‘as foul as a putrefying sore’; ‘the King’s words are good, but his heart remains evil’. Such imagery, which would become the cachet of Pol Pot’s oratorical style, enlivened otherwise pedestrian prose.

  Most intriguing was his emphasis on Buddhism. Enlightened monks, he claimed, had ‘always understood very well the nature of monarchy’ and had written folk-tales like the Thmenh Chey (whose hero, one of the best-loved rogues in Khmer literature, famously outwitted the king), in order to show the people that they should not believe in royalty. The Buddha — ‘our Great Master’ — had abandoned princely life, he went on, in order to become ‘a friend of the people’; he had been the first to preach the virtues of democracy and it was the democratic system alone that could defend Buddhism’s ‘profound values’. As a member of the Cercle Marxiste, Sâr would not have been expected to write in such terms. Ieng Sary or Thiounn Mumm certainly would not have done so. Like his choice of the pseudonym Khmer Daeum, it suggested a conscious desire to identify himself with an authentically Cambodian viewpoint rather than imported, Western ideas.

  Sâr’s other main historical reference was, unsurprisingly, the French Revolution, which ‘dissolved the monarchy and executed the King’. The Russian and Chinese revolutions received passing mention, but for ending monarchical rule, not for their ideological content. There were other allusions which, in the light of later events, assume a significance that was not apparent at the time. Sihanouk, Sâr wrote, had undermined the Buddhist faith by introducing ranks into the monkhood; an
d he had mortgaged the country’s independence. ‘History has shown,’ he explained, ‘that the King who seeks aid from Siam has to pay tribute to Siam; the King who seeks aid from France will have to pay tribute to France.’*

  To Sâr and his companions, the King’s action was ‘a royal coup d’état’. A page had been turned. The French felt it too. ‘Democracy had no hope [here],’wrote the French military commander, General Pierre de Langlade. ‘The parliamentary experiment has failed . . . The Sovereign remains the only person capable of giving Cambodia political direction . . . [He is] heir to the . . . mystique of the God-Kings, who for thousands of years have guided the destinies of the land . . . Everything in this country has to be done by the King.’

  The political instability of the first half of 1952 had allowed the Viet Minh and their Khmer allies to strengthen their grip on the countryside. Son Ngoc Minh’s partisans claimed to hold a third of Cambodia with a population of one million. That was an exaggeration. But it was certainly true that large areas in almost every province were now officially declared insecure, and along the Vietnamese border upwards of 200,000 Cambodians were living under communist rule. The French army itself acknowledged that — in sharp contrast to the situation three years earlier — the Viet Minh ‘have acquired prestige in the eyes of the [Khmer] population’. The one bright spot for the authorities was that Son Ngoc Thanh’s efforts to unite the different rebel groups into a single force had fallen flat. In the weeks following his entry into rebellion, individual Issarak leaders, including Chantarainsey and Savangs Vong (an opium-addicted army deserter who led a band of four hundred men in Kompong Speu), had sent him congratulatory messages. But none was willing to give up his autonomy to form a national alliance. Exchanges with the Viet Minh came to nothing when Thanh insisted that any joint force must be under his command.

  After Sihanouk’s ‘coup’ in June, the French stepped up what they called their ‘pacification efforts’ and began to stabilise, then to reduce, the level of Viet Minh penetration. More than 100,000 villagers were gathered into fortified hamlets, protected by watchtowers manned by armed militia. Issaraks who rallied to the government were granted a royal pardon. None the less, it was a delicate game, in which neither side was duped. The French military command knew that if it were to win back the population from Viet Minh and Issarak control, it could only be in Sihanouk’s name. The King knew that to win independence, continued insurgency was necessary until the French accepted his ‘Royal Crusade’ as the only realistic outcome. De Langlade complained that Sihanouk was ‘playing into Son Ngoc Thanh’s hands’by his ‘extreme moderation’.

  That summer, there was an unnatural calm. It was plain to everyone that the Democrat-led National Assembly could not cohabit indefinitely with a government, led by the King, which was committed to the Democrats’ downfall. Cambodian schools closed for the holidays. Parliament went into recess. The AEK organised a holiday camp at Pornic in Brittany, opposite the island of Noirmoutier, where Thiounn Mumm, Rath Samoeun, Ieng Sary, Sâr and other members of the Cercle swam, went hiking and put on a show of traditional Cambodian dances for a group of French students camping nearby. They also held long discussions about Cambodia’s future. No decisions were taken. But when the new academic year began in October, Sary and Thiounn Mumm convened a meeting, attended by about fifteen members of the Cercle, at a farmhouse in the countryside an hour’s drive from Paris, owned by a member of the French Communist Party.

  There were three questions on the agenda: which rebel organisation they should support, now that Sihanouk had been discredited by his defacto alliance with the French; whether anything could still be done to bring the different resistance groups together, following Son Ngoc Thanh’s failure to achieve unity; and whether the time had come for members of the Cercle to return to Cambodia to take part in the struggle themselves.

  Some of those present argued that Thanh’s group, which included former colleagues like Hang Thun Hak and Ea Sichau and had impeccable Khmer nationalist credentials, offered the best hope of wresting power from the French. Others, including Ieng Sary, felt that Son Ngoc Minh’s ‘Khmer Viet Minh’ were more serious, although tainted by their association with the Vietnamese, whose motives the students mistrusted. But as the afternoon wore on, it became clear that they lacked the information on which to base a rational decision. No one in Paris had any idea how strong Son Ngoc Thanh’s Khmer Serei really were; of the extent to which the Vietnamese were manipulating Son Ngoc Minh and his followers; or the true stance of independent Issarak leaders like Chantarainsey in Kompong Speu. It was suggested, Sâr recalled, that someone go back ‘to carry out a reconnaissance . . . and make an assessment of the different resistance organisations. [Then we would] take a decision over which movement we should support — and which organisation we should join.’ The Cercle s Co-ordinating Committee agreed, but added a second task: whoever was sent should also report on the prospects of uniting the main resistance groups. Sâr volunteered to go. Mey Mann, who was present, remembered him being chosen because ‘he had a lot of contacts. He knew people at the Palace, and had met Chantarainsey there [as a child] . . . He had known Hang Thun Hak in Paris, and had also met Son Ngoc Thanh.’

  Vannsak claimed afterwards that Sâr had jumped at the chance because he was missing his girlfriend, the beautiful Soeung Son Maly. But that was mischievous. It was true that he had failed his exams at the Radio-Electricity School for the second year in a row, which meant his bursary was cut off. However, that had not stopped others staying on. In Sâr’s case, he seems to have reached the conclusion that his useful years in France were over and that whatever the future might hold for him, he now belonged at home. He passed on the grim little bedsit in the rue Letellier to a political science student named Son Sen, who came from the same Khmer-speaking district of South Vietnam as Ieng Sary and had arrived in Paris at the same time. In Marseilles, on December 15, Sâr boarded the SS Jamaique, the same ship that had brought him to France three years earlier, now making one of its last voyages before being sold for scrap. As before, he bunked in the hold with the soldiers. The atmosphere was no longer as carefree. The war in Indochina was not going well for France. Among each new shipload of conscripts, some would not return.

  Even before Sâr left Paris, there had been clear signs that the simmering confrontation between Sihanouk and the Democrats was coming to a head.

  In November, students in Phnom Penh and several provincial towns went on strike. When the King appealed to them to return to their classes, more than a hundred took refuge in the National Assembly, which, in a calculated display of defiance, announced that it was setting up a commission to study their grievances. Next came demonstrations by monks, who charged the government with complicity with the French. Then, in December, the Assembly refused to vote the budget on the grounds that it provided too much money for defence and not enough for economic and social purposes. Sihanouk fumed, but his mind was elsewhere: his youngest child, a four-year-old girl whom he adored, had suddenly fallen ill and lay dying.

  Sensing weakness, the Viet Minh intensified their attacks, setting ambushes in which a provincial governor and several district chiefs lost their lives. Agitation in the secondary schools, which had momentarily subsided, resumed more strongly than ever. On January 8 1953 a grenade went off in a classroom at the Lycée Sisowath, injuring two students; other devices were defused before they could explode. As usual in Cambodia, the perpetrators were never caught. It was probably a provocation, designed to force Sihanouk to act harshly or to give him justification for doing so. Two days later, the government sought emergency powers, asking the National Assembly to proclaim the nation in danger. It refused.

  On January 13, the day that Sâr’s ship docked at Saigon, troops surrounded the parliament building in Phnom Penh. In a radio address, Sihanouk announced that he intended to rule by decree. The Assembly was dissolved and civil liberties suspended. ‘From now on,’he warned, ‘any individual or any political party that oppos
es My policies will be declared a traitor to the Nation and . . . punished [accordingly].’ The King’s resolve was said to have been stiffened by a lecture from his mother, the redoubtable Princess Kossamak, who regarded parliamentary democracy as not only inimical to Cambodian tradition but a personal affront. In any event, the French were delighted. ‘If Norodom Sihanouk can hold to this new position of firmness,’ wrote the Minister for the Associated States, Jean Letourneau, ‘we may hope that Cambodia’s pacification will make continued progress.’

  Over the next few days, nine Democratic Party MPs, including Bunchan Mol and Khieu Ponnary’s cousin Im Phon, were imprisoned without trial on suspicion of ‘plotting against the state’. In Paris, the AEK, which had been fulminating for months against ‘the puppet, Sihanouk’ and his ‘government of traitors’, fired off a telegram of protest.

  But the climate had changed. Hou Yuon, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Mey Mann, Ping Sây, Thiounn Mumms youngest brother, Prasith, and a dozen others, were informed that their bursaries were terminated. The AEK itself was banned. In Phnom Penh the heads of the two Buddhist orders were treated to a humiliating public admonition against sympathising with the rebels. ‘For the first time in my life,’ Sihanouk raged, ‘I have to grab the monks by the throat. Me! The most religious man in the Kingdom! Because I’ve had enough — more than enough! My subjects and the elite among my subjects must obey!’

  An era had ended. The open expression of dissent would never be tolerated again. Cambodia had taken the first, critical step down the road to revolution.