Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  The mixture of indoctrination and terror was fundamental. ‘Making propaganda means mobilising the population to hate the enemy’, a Viet Minh broadcast explained. ‘Once people have the right feelings in their hearts . . . they will act accordingly’ Winning the support of the masses was the key to everything else. ‘Otherwise,’ a French officer wrote, ‘the Viet Minh could have not existed. They have succeeded because they have been able to channel the confused aspirations of the people, to fire their enthusiasm and to bring them hope.’ If the population refused to cooperate, a scorched earth policy was enforced: the village was razed and the inhabitants scattered.

  Sâr never forgot those lessons.

  He did not see them carried out in practice because the students were not allowed to go out on operations. But after a while the Viet Minh cadres let him visit nearby villages to help out with the farm work, which opened his eyes to the poverty of the border region and enabled him to see for the first time how the peasants adapted to life under a revolutionary regime. Later he made friends with two officers from the Po Kombo Regiment, a nominally Khmer unit of about three hundred men based ten miles to the north-west. The commander, Phay, a former rifleman in the French colonial army, and his political commissar, Chan Samân, were both Khmer, but Sâr noted with disgust that more than 80 per cent of the other ranks were from Vietnam..

  It was during this time that he met a young man of his own age who had joined the maquis four years earlier. Keo Meas had hated the French ever since reading Nagaravatta as a precocious fifteen-year-old. He dropped out of a teacher training course to join a Khmer Viet Minh group in Svay Rieng province and, in March 1950, was among the twenty-one Khmer members of the ICP who approved the guidelines for the future Cambodian Party during the meeting at Hatien. The following year he was appointed Commissar of the Action Committee for Phnom Penh, and in 1952 travelled to Beijing, where he became the first Khmer to meet Chairman Mao and the Red Army commander, Zhu De, before going on to attend the World Peace Conference in Vienna.

  Keo Meas was keenly aware of his high status. He lived with Tou Samouth and the rest of the leadership in a different part of the forest, which was out of bounds to the students. Sâr learnt a lot from him, especially in the later months at the camp, when Meas was put in charge of the new ‘Voice of Free Cambodia’ radio station and Sâr helped to write the commentaries. How well they liked each other is another matter. Keo Meas already thought of himself as the future leader of the Cambodian Communist Party and Sâr would have been less than human had he not discerned a potential rival. But whatever he may have felt, he showed nothing. Years later, when Meas searched desperately in his memory for clues to the cause of their subsequent estrangement, the idea that it might have stemmed from their months in the maquis together never entered his head.

  As proof of his commitment to the cause, Sâr started to learn Vietnamese and eventually, by his own account, could speak and understand it after a fashion. That was more than most of the others could do and it brought him to the notice of Tou Samouth. The Eastern Zone Secretary was a traditionalist — one Vietnamese official likened him to ‘an old monk, sweet and good-natured’ — and Sâr’s Buddhist upbringing and calm, unruffled manner won his confidence. At Samouth s request, Sâr began to act as his assistant, helping him to prepare political seminars. Imperceptibly, he established himself as the older man’s secretary and principal aide, a position he would hold for the next five years.

  Sihanouk’s ‘Royal Crusade’ had forced the Viet Minh to change tactics. No longer could they claim that the King’s heart was with the people but he was a captive of the French. From the summer of 1953, they were caught up in a triangular struggle: the King tried to win over the insurgents; the French tried to deter him from making common cause with the Viet Minh; and the Viet Minh tried to prevent the Khmer rebels from making common cause with the King. For a time, Vietnamese propagandists attempted to fudge the issue, arguing that Sihanouk had been duped. But that was too subtle to be convincing and Hanoi and Beijing soon adopted a harder line. ‘This traitorous king has become a lackey of world imperialism,’ thundered the Vietnamese Workers’ Party daily, Nhan Dan. The French were offering ‘fake independence’ because they wanted to send Cambodians to fight for them in Laos and Vietnam. ‘Puppet King Sihanouk is not concerned about the independence of his country or the interests of the Khmer people. He simply wants [American aid] . . .’ True independence would be achieved ‘only by fighting to the last and . . . eliminating the puppet regime’.

  In the villages, it was put in simpler terms, Sieu Heng’s deputy, Ruos Nhim, the Khmer Viet Minh military commander in the North-West, told one group of peasants: ‘Why doesn’t the King ask us to help him [in the struggle for independence]? . . . It is because he is mobilising the Cambodian people to help the French. You will all be sent far from your homes to die. From now on, I forbid you to leave your villages to respond to the King’s appeal.’

  After the transfer of power from the colonial authorities to Sihanouk in November 1953, the conflict intensified, as the King, backed by the French, on one side, and the Viet Minh and their Khmer allies on the other, manoeuvred for advantage ahead of the Indochina Peace Talks which everyone now realised were only a matter of time.

  The Cambodian Army, which had retreated into inactivity throughout Sihanouk’s ‘Crusade’, launched a series of attacks on rebel bases in the southern provinces of Kompong Speu, Svay Rieng and Kampot, followed in December by an operation in Battambang led by the King himself. It was pure public relations: the French ensured that any rebels were kept miles away from the royal person. But it made for lavish photo-spreads in government publications, showing the King marching intrepidly through areas ‘infested with booby-traps and mines’, braving the Viet Minh’s ‘craving to kill’ in order to free his subjects from ‘the whip and lash of communist slavery’. More substantively, in February 1954, the Issarak leaders Chantarainsey and Savangs Vong formally pledged allegiance to the Throne. That left Son Ngoc Thanh as the only non-communist hold-out.

  The Viet Minh response was not long in coming.

  For the past nine months, Hanoi’s master-strategist, Vo Nguyen Giap, had been toying with the idea of a massive assault against eastern Cambodia, comparable to the invasion of Upper Laos in March 1953, when Vietnamese regular divisions had occupied two provinces which became the Pathet Lao ‘liberated zone’. That autumn, a mixed force of more than 11,000 Vietnamese, Khmer and Lao troops was assembled (at least, on paper), and by the beginning of 1954 French military intelligence reported that Giap had the material reserves to launch a co-ordinated strike against all of Cambodia east of the Mekong.

  In the event, the attack never came. There were logistical problems, and by January, Giap’s attention, and that of his Chinese advisers, was directed elsewhere: to the remote mountain base of Dien Bien Phu, two hundred miles west of Hanoi on Vietnam’s border with Laos, where the trap was being set which, a few months later, would bring the war with the French to an inconclusive close. Instead of a general offensive, the Vietnamese High Command ordered diversionary actions, first in Lower Laos in January and February and then in north-east Cambodia in March 1954, to distract attention from the Vietnamese battlefield where the end-game was to be played out.

  Even that was more than Sihanouk’s forces could cope with. For weeks French intelligence had been reporting ‘a very serious crisis of morale’ in the Cambodian Army. Now it started falling apart. The district centre of Voeunsai was occupied by Viet Minh forces on April 2. Siempang and Bokeo were surrounded a few days later. Sihanouk, showing more courage than his cabinet, which resolved to take no action, set up a temporary headquarters in Kratie to direct the counter-attack. But, as one military observer noted drily, ‘the King’s army does not seem to follow’. Meanwhile another body-blow was in the making. A Viet Minh column of five hundred men, accompanied by ten elephants carrying heavy equipment and forty ox-carts, had marched across the Cardamom Mountains from t
he west, terrorising the population into secrecy. At dawn on April 12, the eve of the Khmer New Year, they laid mines along the main railway line to Battambang about fifty miles north-west of Phnom Penh. According to the official report:

  The engine was derailed and 40 carriages overturned. Immediately, [the] Vietminh, armed with sickles, rifles, grenades and automatic weapons poured out of the woods nearby and threw themselves on the defenceless passengers. A regular massacre followed . . . The injured were . . . doused with petrol and burned alive . . . Those who tried to escape were caught and killed slowly with knives . . . In this way, more than a hundred people perished, including 30 monks.

  The report claimed, untruthfully, that the train had no military escort. In fact, the forty-five men assigned to guard duty had left their posts and were in the restaurant car or with other passengers, drinking. Another fifty soldiers, with full equipment, were also on board, travelling to Pursat, in the west. They, too, made no attempt to resist. By May the situation had deteriorated further. The government garrison at Pailin, on the Thai border, was under siege, and there were fresh incursions in the South-East as well as in the North. The weekly military intelligence summary warned:

  The regular [Cambodian] forces are disintegrating so fast that any general attack by the V.M. could have the most serious consequences . . . Whole units have mutinied, refusing to take part in operations. The brief incursion of V.M. Battalion 302 towards Prey Veng triggered scenes of indescribable panic. If this unit launches a concerted action with another V.M. battalion against the main highway to Phnom Penh, it will have every chance of succeeding because [the government] will probably be unable to find any viable force to send there.

  The French were puzzled that the Viet Minh did not pursue their advantage. Had they underestimated their own superiority? Were they short of supplies? Or did North Vietnam — or, more likely, its Chinese and Soviet backers — judge that a dramatic extension of the conflict in Cambodia might torpedo the peace talks in Geneva, which had opened on April 28?

  Whatever the reason, Hanoi’s failure to carve out a communist-administered region to serve as a base for Khmerland on the model of the Pathet Lao dealt the Cambodian communists a fatal blow. Keo Moni and Mey Pho, who travelled to Switzerland to represent the Khmer resistance, could argue as much as they wished that Cambodia was an integral part of the Indochinese battlefield; that stable resistance bases existed in thirty-six out of Cambodia’s ninety-eight districts; that Son Ngoc Minh’s government had 800,000 people and 40 per cent of the country’s territory (more or less) under its control; and that therefore Khmerland should enjoy the same rights as the Pathet Lao and North Vietnam. The fact that they held no clearly defined ‘liberated zone’ meant that their claims, and their presence, were ignored.

  On May 3, the demand of the Khmer ‘ghost government’, as the Americans called it, to be seated at the head of a separate Khmerland delegation was rejected. Over the next few weeks, Sihanouk’s representatives won back at the conference table everything his army’s incompetence had lost on the ground. The North Vietnamese Vice-Premier, Pham Van Dong, with support from the Soviet Union, which was far enough away from Indochina to be able to hang tough, but not from Zhou Enlai — who was acutely aware, after China’s experience in Korea, of the risk of being dragged into yet another war if the conference should fail — forcefully pressed the Khmer communists’ case for two regroupment zones, east and south-west of the Mekong, like those at Sam Neua and Phong Saly in Laos. But Sihanouk refused to budge. In the end, the Khmer resistance was sacrificed to the greater good of communism in Vietnam and Laos. Unlike those two countries, which were divided into communist and non-communist areas, Cambodia emerged from Geneva with its political and territorial integrity intact. Sihanouk’s sole concession was to agree that in Cambodia, as in government-controlled areas of Laos and in southern Vietnam, insurgents who did not wish to surrender could accompany the Viet Minh forces being repatriated to North Vietnam.

  The ceasefire took effect at dawn on August 7. After technical discussions in New Delhi, the International Control Commission, composed of Canadians, Indians and Poles, began work on the 12th in Svay Rieng. Lon Nol led the government side, Nguyen Thanh Son the joint Viet Minh/Khmer resistance delegation. Almost at once the talks hit procedural problems, which dragged on into September. The deadline for the reintegration of the Khmer rebels came and went. France thought Thanh Son’s men were dragging their feet ‘to gain time to set up a clandestine propaganda network ahead of the forthcoming elections’.

  In fact the explanation was simpler. Time was needed to hide weapons against the day when the struggle would resume. At the Eastern Zone HQ at Krâbao, Mey Mann remembered spending most of August greasing rifles and other weapons with beef fat before putting them in waterproof wrappers for the Vietnamese to bury in the forest.

  Time was needed, too, for the Khmer leaders to decide who was to be sent to Vietnam and who would stay behind. In the East, Tou Samouth and one of his district chiefs, Tuk Nhung, made the final selection. Rath Samoeun, Yun Soeun and several other students were among those who left, walking overland to Chau Doc, on the Vietnamese border, where they boarded sampans for the 200-mile river journey across the Mekong delta to Cape Camau. There a Polish cargo ship, the Jan Kilinski, was waiting to take them north.

  Conditions were grim. On each voyage, 3,000-4,000 troops, most of them Vietnamese, were crammed into the holds with no medical treatment for the wounded, along with arms and munitions and, on one journey, a dozen elephants used by the Viet Minh transport corps.

  Altogether 1,900 Khmer men and thirty-six women made that journey. They landed at a fishing port a hundred miles south of Hanoi, and from there were taken in lorries to a camp newly built for them in the high plateaux near the Laotian border, where Son Ngoc Minh, in his speech of welcome, warned them against the rigours of the North Vietnamese winter. They could expect to spend two years in Vietnam, he told them, studying the land reform and undergoing political training.

  The last Khmer Viet Minh units left Cambodia on October 18 1954. Sâr, Mey Mann and Chan Samân, the commissar of the now defunct Po Kombo Regiment, were not among them. After leaving the camp at Krâbao, they walked southward by a roundabout route across Svay Rieng as if making for Chau Doc, then crossed into southern Vietnam and headed west for several days before traversing the Cambodian border again and entering Kompong Trabek district in Prey Veng. The journey took a month. Mey Mann remembered that they made frequent stops to disguise their eventual destination. Nguyen Thanh Son’s special representative, Pham Van Ba, and his wife travelled with them. After waiting another week in Kompong Trabek, they separated. Sâr took a bus to Phnom Penh, followed, a few days later, by the two Vietnamese. Mann and Samân set out last.

  During the political training classes at Krâbao, Pham Van Ba used to tell his Khmer listeners that Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam were ‘like lips, teeth and tongue; each needs the other two’. Now, he said, the Cambodians’ role had changed. They had to make the transition ‘from armed struggle to political struggle’. The three young Khmers discussed this among themselves during the journey. As a proposition, it seemed logical enough. But none of them had any clear idea of what it might involve.

  4

  Cambodian Realities

  AS THE YEAR 1954 drew to a close, Sihanouk found himself confronted with the perils of his own success. The Viet Minh had gone. The French protectorate was finished. Now that he had the plenitude of power, there were no excuses left.

  Already, a year earlier, half-jubilant, half apprehensive, he had told the French commander, General de Langlade: ‘Getting independence all at once makes it so indigestible I may choke. It was never my intention to go this fast.’ His cousin, the Defence Minister, Sirik Matak, predicted gloomily that the withdrawal of the French army would lead ‘to the overturning of the Throne and power passing into the hands of Son Ngoc Thanh, which will mean the end of Cambodia.’

  In the event, French tr
oops stayed on until after the Geneva talks, which gave the government a breathing space. But under the terms of the peace agreement, elections had to be held in 1955. Most observers, Cambodian and foreign, predicted a Democratic Party landslide. That would open the way for Thanh’s return to office and, eventually perhaps, the proclamation of a republic, which the Americans — ever ready to cock a snook at the French — regarded as greatly preferable to the corrupt and decadent Cambodian monarchy and its unreliable King.

  Son Ngoc Thanh came down from his mountain lair in the Dangreks, with an escort of two hundred armed men, to pledge allegiance to the government at a ceremony at Siem Reap on September 30. Sihanouk refused to see him. ‘Son Ngoc Thanh is not a communist,’ Penn Nouth told a French reporter; ‘however he is certainly a republican, and that makes him a danger to the regime.’ But ostracising the former rebel leader did not make the problem disappear. The Indian Prime Minister, Pandit Nehru, who met Thanh during a visit in October, came away convinced that he would play a key role in Cambodia’s future. Washington instructed its Ambassador in Phnom Penh to re-establish contact with him. French intelligence was convinced that Britain was giving Thanh’s forces covert aid through its mission in Bangkok. By Sihanouk’s own estimate, half the Democratic Party was firmly committed to Thanh’s cause, and theirs was the only party in the country capable of organising a credible election campaign. The King was worried, and showed it; but the only remedy he could think of was to put off for as long as possible the day when Cambodians would be called on to vote.

  This was the political situation to which Sâr and the others returned.