Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  3

  Initiation to the Maquis

  WHEN SR HAD set out for France, three years earlier, one of his companions had remarked that, in contrast to Vietnam, there was ‘no fighting in Cambodia’. That was not completely true but it was what most of them believed. When he returned in January 1953, he found a country at war.

  The bloodshed was not on remotely the same scale as in neighbouring Vietnam. Nevertheless, that month in Cambodia, according to the French, 115 Issaraks and Viet Minh were killed in clashes with government troops and 220 were taken prisoner. Internal Viet Minh reports spoke of a comparable level of government casualties. Far from being a comic-opera conflict, matching the kingdom’s Ruritanian image, it was ugly and brutal. In a typical action in Kompong Cham, a government patrol of fifty men, led by a Khmer sub-lieutenant, was lured into a Viet Minh ambush. The regimental despatch recounted impassively:

  In the first burst of machine-gun fire, Sgt Roeung received a bullet in the head and was killed outright. Cpl Rhek, mortally wounded, crawled back towards our main force. Sub-lieutenant Chhim Yan ran forward to recover Sgt Roeung’s rifle and took cover behind an ant-hill . . . when he, too, was hit by a bullet in the head . . . Seeing that the situation was critical . . . our men counter-attacked. Four Viet Minh fell under our fire . . . Our men then formed a square . . . Towards 17.30 hours, the Viets approached . . . from the south-east. They called out to our men: ‘Don’t shoot. We are friends.’ Then they charged. Most of their fighters did not have firearms. They just ran towards us in a compact mass, yelling. We cut them down with machine-gun fire and grenades. Their shouts suddenly stopped as though their throats had been cut . . . The battle ended at nightfall . . . and our men marched back, reaching the HQ at 2 a.m.

  In that engagement, the French admitted losing five dead and four injured for thirty-seven Vietnamese put out of action, allegedly including a Viet Minh lieutenant. Both sides habitually inflated casualty figures. None the less, the carnage — especially among the Viet Minh auxiliaries, unarmed villagers from the Khmer districts of Cochin-China who fought with staves and axes — was grim, and French military reports spoke of sorties to ‘kill us some Viet’ in the same way as Americans would later talk of’killing gooks’.

  To Saloth Sâr, the change was clear the moment he disembarked in Saigon. No longer could one simply go to the bus station and board a coach to Phnom Penh. Now there was a daily convoy, protected by a military escort. Troops patrolled the Cambodian capital. Puth Chhays men held large areas to the north, west and south of Phnom Penh and the population lived in constant fear of terrorist attacks.

  But it was the journey back to Sâr’s village at Prek Sbauv that really brought home to him how much Cambodia had altered while he had been away:

  Before I went away to study, my relatives were . . . mostly middle class farmers. When I returned, I took a bus home. [At the terminus], someone — one of the cyclo-pousses — called out to me: ‘Oh, you’re back!’ I looked, and it was one of my uncles. He asked me: ‘Do you want a ride home?’ I was so shocked! That man used to have land, buffaloes, everything. I wept to see him like that. I rode home with him, and over the next month or so I talked with [other] relatives who had also lost everything . . . The Cambodian countryside was being pauperized. Having lived in Europe, seeing these things hurt my heart.

  To Sâr, the cause was colonialism, the remedy, independence, so that Cambodians could run their own affairs under a system that was socially just. The French might retort that the cause was the war and the insecurity it engendered — villagers were unable to harvest their crops; transport was disrupted; the rubber plantations were being sabotaged; and areas producing pepper, the second most important cash crop, had fallen under Viet Minh control. Defence was taking so much of the budget, one official complained, that ‘there is nothing left for anything else’. But young nationalists like Sâr were unimpressed. Without colonialism, they argued, there would be no war and therefore no insecurity. The fundamental contradiction was between the continuing French presence and Cambodians’ desire for freedom.

  The previous winter, Sâr’s elder brother Chhay had been appointed Son Ngoc Thanh’s representative for much of northern and eastern Cambodia, including their home province of Kompong Thorn and neighbouring Kompong Cham. Chhay had little difficulty convincing Sâr that the former Premier was a force to be reckoned with. It was the Thanhists, not the Viet Minh, who controlled Cambodia’s secondary schools, and in the urban areas they boasted a sophisticated intelligence network which usually kept them a step ahead of the police.

  Apart from the Khmer Serei and the Viet Minh, the only other serious opposition to French rule came from older-generation Khmer Issarak leaders like Prince Chantarainsey and Puth Chhay. But by the spring of 1953, these men were being approached by the palace or its provincial representatives and invited to lay down their arms and join Sihanouk’s ‘Royal Crusade’. Most succumbed to the royal blandishments. By May only Chantarainsey remained as an independent force. To the French he was useful because he prevented Viet Minh units entering his territory. The French commander, General de Langlade, described him as ‘a true feudal lord’, but regarded the thousand or so troops that he led as a rabble of bandits and mercenaries. Sâr, who spent two or three months at Chantarainsey’s headquarters at Trapeang Kroloeung, in south-west Kompong Speu, in the first half of 1953, reached a similar conclusion. The Prince’s camp, of thatched huts, was situated in a poor, arid region of brush and sparse forest. Sâr’s report on his stay has been lost, but another student recruit remembered it as ‘not well structured or commanded. The men were organised in battalions, and lived with their wives and children . . . When [eventually] they were amnestied, they organised themselves into gangs and went straight back to being highwaymen again, robbing travellers at night.’

  Banditry is usually associated with poverty. In many countries, it gives rise to horrific cruelty. Cambodia was no exception. Thiounn Mumm’s uncle, Bunchan Mol, one of the founders of the Issarak movement in the 1940s, recounted in his memoirs:

  If we thought a Cambodian was spying for the French, we tortured him and then [killed] him . . . If the executioner clubbed him to death cleanly with a blow on the back of the neck . . . it was not so hard to look at. But sometimes they used other means . . . They had a method called sra-nge pen. First they beat up the suspect. Then they made him kneel beside an open grave, with his hands tied behind his back, and formed a circle around him. The executioner took a sharp sword and started dancing round the man and making horrible grimaces. He gradually got closer and very slowly started cutting the man’s throat — sucking the blood as it came out and spewing it onto the blade of the sword. It was terrible to see. The victim shook with pain . . . until finally the killer slashed his throat and pushed him into the grave . . . I was against that way of doing things . . . but the other Issarak leaders didn’t agree with me. They said the suspect had to be killed like that as a warning to people not to work for the French.

  Others had their bellies ripped open while still alive and their livers torn out to be fried and eaten by their accusers, who believed that in this way they would absorb the dead men’s strength.

  Chhang Song, later a Cambodian senator, remembered how, in his village in Takeo province, the Issaraks would decapitate their victims and stuff their stomachs with grass. ‘When as children we went fishing in the ponds,’ he recounted, ‘we would find severed heads in the water. It didn’t bother us; we were used to it. We’d yank them out by the hair, and throw them aside. That was around 1949 . . . I was 10 or 11 years old.’

  Many of those killed as spies were framed for reasons of personal vengeance, as Bunchan Mol acknowledged. But while he claimed to be sickened by the violence and said he often thought of quitting the movement, he did not. Nor did he speak out when men he believed to be innocent were being beaten to death in front of him. One reason was that anyone who protested against such punishments automatically fell under suspicion himsel
f. But Mol’s silence — the complicity of an educated man confronted with barbarism — also reflected a state of mind in which the mere fact of being accused was regarded as proof of guilt and it was thought better to err on the side of caution, to kill all who might be culpable, than to allow an enemy to go free.

  Violence walked hand in hand with sorcery and superstition. Issarak leaders like Puth Chhay and Dap Chhuon carried kun krak— the ‘smoke-children’ or mummified foetuses of which Sâr had heard stories as a child — as amulets against enemy bullets. Among the peasants, they were known as aggi netr,’those whose eyes shoot flame’, and were rumoured to have occult powers that enabled them to burn a man simply by looking at him. The reality was more prosaic but no less dreadful. ‘What it meant,’ one veteran recalled, ‘was that whenever they saw something they liked — coconuts, chickens, cattle, young women — the people had to offer it to them, otherwise the village would be burned to the ground.’ Issarak fighters tattooed their bodies with Buddhist charms; rubbed earth on their heads to symbolise unity with the earth goddess, me; and offered libations at the shrines of the neak ta, the tutelary spirits of the forest.

  Bunchan Mol remembered a monk once telling them that if they wore his magic krama, the bullets would not hit them. One of the men picked up a rifle and shot the monk dead. ‘I tried to explain to them,’ Mol wrote, ‘that we must try to learn combat techniques and not rely on things like that. But they wouldn’t listen.’

  If the Issarak violated the rules of war, so did everyone else. Colonial troops raped women, burned down villages and destroyed rice stores. A former Cambodian government soldier described how, in Battambang province, he and his comrades ‘would move into villages, kill the men and women who had not already fled and then engage in individual tests of strength which consisted of grasping infants by the legs and then pulling them apart’. The Khmer Viet Minh were not much better. Son Ngoc Minh routinely informed his Vietnamese superiors that an enemy agent had been detained ‘but despite the tortures we have inflicted on [him], he refuses to talk’. French officials complained that when government troops moved out of a village they had been protecting, the communists immediately moved in and burned it down in reprisal. In disputed areas, Viet Minh assassination squads were sent to murder local dignitaries and political opponents.

  Sâr had been the first emissary of the Cercle to return to Cambodia. Others followed. His former classmate, Ping Sây, who arrived two months later, went to the forest of Krâlanh, in Siem Reap province, to meet Ea Sichau. He proposed that the returned students act as a bridge between Thanh’s group and the Khmer Viet Minh. ‘We talked,’ Sây remembered, ‘but we couldn’t agree . . . Sichau said we were pro-communist which meant we were under the thumb of the Vietnamese, whereas they were pro-American and therefore more independent. If we were to join up with them, we’d have to submit to their rules.’ It was exactly the same problem that had prevented Thanh reaching agreement with the other groups a year before: he favoured unity, but only with himself in charge.

  When Sây returned to Phnom Penh, he sought out Sâr, now back in the capital after his stay with Chantarainsey, to give him his impressions. The Khmer Serei seemed ‘less serious than the communists’, he reported, ‘and they aren’t properly organised.’ Moreover, Thanh relied on Issarak forces which had ‘been in the forests for years without doing anything spectacular’, whereas at least the Khmer Viet Minh had fought against the French. Sây’s findings conflicted with the enthusiastic accounts Sâr had heard from his brother, Chhay, and other Thanhists, but they had the ring of truth. One final attempt was made to reach an understanding when, during the summer, Ea Sichau returned incognito to Phnom Penh and had a meeting with Rath Samoeun, who had also now arrived from Paris and was staying with Keng Vannsak at the Lycée Sisowath. But that, too, came to nothing.

  In his report to the Cercle, Sâr dismissed Chantarainsey and his band as simple brigands, whom the French were exploiting as a counterweight to the Viet Minh. Son Ngoc Thanh, he wrote, should be taken more seriously, but while ‘his forces claim to be resisting the French colonialists, in fact they do nothing; they just stay in an isolated mountain area [in the Dangreks]’. The most promising resistance group, he concluded, was the Khmer Viet Minh or Moutakeaha of Son Ngoc Minh, which, through its alliance with the Vietnamese, enjoyed the support of the world communist movement, making it the only rebel organisation to have ‘international’ connections.

  Back in France, Sâr’s report was discussed at length in cell meetings. As Mey Mann remembered it, ‘We all agreed that Cambodia had to be free of the Vietnamese, but the question was whether we should try to wrest control [from the Viet Minh] by working from within, or externally. If we’d done it from outside [by joining forces with Son Ngoc Thanh] . . . it would have meant fighting them and sacrificing a lot of Cambodian lives. Working within [the Viet Minh movement], we could do it gradually — fewer people would die. So we decided to support the Viet Minh while at the same time trying, little by little, to free the Khmers [in that movement] from Vietnamese tutelage. That was the decision we took in Paris.’

  In Cambodia, the Thanhists and the Moutakeaha, despite their refusal to join forces, were in regular communication. Saloth Chhay, as Thanh’s representative in the North-East, was able to put Sâr in touch with the Khmer Viet Minh Eastern Zone Headquarters in Prey Veng. In August 1953, saying nothing to friends or family, he and Rath Samoeun slipped away from Phnom Penh, bound for the liberated zone.

  While Sâr had been staying with Sihanouk’s wayward cousin, Chantarainsey, the King himself had flown to France, ostensibly for a rest-cure but in fact to launch his ‘Crusade’ for Cambodian independence. The French were at first nonplussed, then frankly disbelieving. General de Langlade, their commander in Phnom Penh, on being informed of Sihanouk’s demand for complete control of military affairs and an end to extra-territorial privileges for foreigners — who were tried by French, not Cambodian, judges — cabled his superiors that the King’s arguments showed ‘childish bad faith’ and reflected ‘a court atmosphere of clans and intrigue worthy of the Middle Ages’. He quoted Prince Monireth, the King’s censorious, strait-laced uncle, as having confided to him privately some weeks earlier:

  The terrible thing about my nephew is that when he sleeps, he dreams. He takes these dreams as an inspiration from the Buddha, he gets up in a state of excitement, seizes some paper and starts to write . . . What is even more terrible is that he has a lively pen and a certain literary talent, and, like all illuminati, he is imbued with the reality of his dreams . . . And most terrible of all, perhaps, is that when he presents his dreams to you Frenchmen, you are so moved by them . . . that you try to turn them into reality.

  That is certainly how the French liked to think of Sihanouk — as a petulant child, to be humoured and then sent off with a hug. When he presented his demands to Vincent Auriol, the elderly French President gave him lunch at the Elysée Palace but made clear that talks on his proposals would be ‘inopportune’.

  However Sihanouk’s sense of theatre, the target of Monireth’s jibe, was only one aspect of his volatile personality, as the French would learn to their cost. Once he had determined his course, he was a relentless adversary whose very unpredictability made him all the harder to deal with. Over the next eight months, he played a weak hand with a skill that his great-grandfather, Norodom, would have admired. He, too, in the nineteenth century, had kept his court and his French minders off-balance by mercurial shifts and erratic, arbitrary conduct. It was a character trait that was in Sihanouk’s genes and he would use it more and more as his power and confidence increased.

  After leaving France in disgust, the King flew home by way of the United States, where his encounters with John Foster Dulles did nothing to improve his mood.

  The US Secretary of State had no time for a tinpot monarch who could not seem to understand that the only game in town was the war against communism and that colonialism was a side issue. ‘Your difference
with France is simply playing into the hands of our common enemy,’Dulles told him. ‘Without the French army [to help you], your country would very soon be conquered by the Reds and your independence would be gone.’ President Eisenhower apparently felt the same way, for he failed to invite Sihanouk to the customary White House banquet. To add insult to injury, the hapless desk officer in charge of his stay suggested that the King might like to visit a circus — which he took as reflecting the State Department’s view of his intellectual level.

  Even such gaffes aside, it was a dialogue of the deaf. To Sihanouk, only a genuinely independent Cambodia would be motivated to resist communism. To Dulles, only after communism had been defeated could Cambodia safely become independent. ‘Each of us,’ Sihanouk wrote later, ‘felt the other was trying to put the cart before the horse.’

  The visit did have one positive outcome. In an interview with the New York Times, Sihanouk warned that if independence were withheld his people might lose patience, overthrow the monarchy and join forces with the Viet Minh, which concentrated minds in Paris sufficiently for the government there to begin talks on speeding up the transfer of powers. But that was the only glimmer of light. Overall the visit was deeply unhelpful to Cambodia’s future relationship with the US. Sihanouk’s suspicions of American motives, already aroused by maladroit gestures of sympathy for the Democrats and Son Ngoc Thanh, were redoubled. He was appalled by America’s brashness and hubris, so different from the old-world duplicity and elegance of his own country and of France. Dulles s Cold War sermonising, which followed him in instalments telegraphically as he travelled back across the Pacific, he found exasperating. The US, he concluded, was a power to be reckoned with, but its values and goals were inimical to Cambodia’s desire for freedom on its own terms.

  The talks with the French soon bogged down over Sihanouk’s insistence on a complete transfer of military powers — including those in the eastern border areas, where Viet Minh penetration was strongest — and the decoupling of Cambodia’s economy from that of South Vietnam. For some weeks, there were inconclusive exchanges between the palace and the French High Commission. Then the King’s patience ran out.