Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  The third attempt to destroy Sihanouk, by parcel bomb, may have been mounted without American knowledge. But it certainly would not have occurred had South Vietnam believed the US would disapprove, any more than Thailand would have provided hospitality to Sihanouk’s enemies, Sam Sary and Son Ngoc Thanh, without US acquiescence.

  American policy in the 1950s was founded on a Manichean vision in which — decades before President Reagan coined the phrase — the US led the forces of good in an apocalyptic struggle against the empire of evil. In this polarised mental universe, there was no place for a middle road. ‘All those who are not with us are against us’ became the intellectual underpinning that led America to its calvary in Vietnam. In fairness to policy-makers in Washington, it must be added that, in the 1950s and ‘60s, not to speak of half a century later, such attitudes were consistent with the beliefs of the majority of Americans. Korea had barely dented America’s confidence in its self-ordained role as leader of the Free World. It would take the Vietnam War to make Americans question established certitudes, and then not for very long. In the meantime, Washington insisted on viewing the world through a deforming prism that blinded it to the realities of the countries with which it had to deal. In Cambodia’s case, as in many others, this produced results exactly opposite to those America desired. Sihanouk sought closer ties with China, and eventually with North Vietnam. The US dream of an anti-communist alliance stretching ‘from the 17th parallel to the border of Burma’ was definitively shattered, largely by its own maladress.

  The same instinctive wariness that had caused Sihanouk in 1957 to distance himself from right-wing leaders like Sam Sary and Dap Chhuon — the ‘Bleus’, as he took to calling them, in contradistinction to the ‘Rouges’ — led him to restructure his own political power base. In one sense he had no choice. The Sangkum members of the National Assembly elected in 1955 had shown themselves to be corrupt, fractious, undisciplined and, worst of all, incompetent. Having gone through ten different governments in less than two and a half years, destroyed the Democrats and intimidated the Pracheachon, the Prince decided that the time had come to broaden his political base. That meant bringing the Left, or what remained of it, back into Cambodian politics, not as opponents but as part of the national union the Sangkum was supposed to represent.

  Already, two years earlier, he had made tentative moves in this direction. Keng Vannsak was given a senior post in the Education Ministry. Ea Sichau returned to work at the Treasury. Thiounn Thioeunn, Mumm’s eldest brother, was invited to join the government but declined.

  In the 1958 elections, the opening to the Left became a priority. While Keo Meas and his Pracheachon colleagues were being flayed by Sihanouk’s propaganda machine, the victorious Sangkum candidates, selected by the Prince in person and allowed to stand unopposed, included two former members of the Cercle Marxiste, Hou Yuon and Uch Ven, and three other young leftists, all but one in their late twenties and all far better educated than the outgoing members they replaced. Hou Yuon was the most controversial of the new intake. Before joining the Sangkum, he, too, had been a Pracheachon member. Shortly after his election, it was discovered, to the government’s embarrassment, that there was a court case pending against him for fomenting an illegal strike. The charges were hurriedly dropped. Uch Ven, who had travelled to France with Sâr aboard the SS Jamaique, was a teacher, as was the third of the new recruits, So Nem. The last two — Hu Nim, a brilliant student from a poor peasant background, who had become, at the age of twenty-six, Director of the Treasury; and Chau Seng, the most ambitious of the group, who had married the daughter of a PCF mayor in the South of France — were not Party members but espoused radical ideas. On his return to Cambodia, Chau Seng had become Sihanouk’s private secretary. After the elections, he and Hou Yuon were appointed junior ministers. The other three would hold ministerial posts intermittently over the next few years in accordance with the Prince’s pleasure and the political vagaries of the moment.

  Sihanouk’s motives were mixed. The leftists were never more than a token force in the Sangkum. But they were young, dynamic and intelligent — qualities Cambodian politics sorely lacked — and their presence served as a safety valve for frustrations which might otherwise have sought more dangerous outlets. He also hoped that the temptations of power would erode the young men’s idealism. Above all they provided a counterweight to the Right, which enabled him to assume the political role he liked best — that of supreme arbiter, playing off one side against the other.

  The 1958 elections set a pattern that lasted for the next eight years. Within the Sangkum, the radicals were afforded certain freedoms provided they accepted the rules that Sihanouk laid down. Beyond that limit they were ruthlessly repressed.

  The new climate of political violence that followed the parcel-bomb attack at the palace in August 1959 quickly made itself felt. On the evening of October 9, the editor of the Pracheachon’s weekly paper, Nop Bophann, was shot as he left his office. He died two days later. Unsurprisingly his killers were never caught: they were members of the security police. His death was probably intended as a gesture of reassurance to the Right that, notwithstanding Cambodia’s difficulties with America, the communists would be held in check. But, deep down, Sihanouk’s feelings were much more ambivalent. In an article suffused with despair, published the same week, he wrote for the first time of communism’s ‘irresistible global advance’ and the West’s seeming inability to counter it:

  The constant progression of communism throughout the world is undeniable, and I cannot see what will stop it and make it retreat . . . The Western conception of Democracy seems to me the only one that is worthwhile from the viewpoint of the human condition, of human rights and freedoms. Its superiority resides in the fact that it places Man at the summit, while Communism reduces him to the state of a slave to an all-powerful State . . . But the great weakness of Western Democracy is its failure to deliver social justice . . . In most of the countries where they build up military forces as a rampart against totalitarian, freedom-hating communism, our American friends close their eyes to the violations of Democracy perpetrated by the governments concerned — violations which lead to a system no less totalitarian than the one they are fighting against, and without the latter’s advantages . . . The West must try to understand that . . . its aid will never cure the Red fever if it is used to prop up regimes which lack the support of their own people.

  Within this unpromising global context, Cambodia’s fate, Sihanouk concluded, depended largely on factors over which it had no control. The realisation marked the beginning of a long and perilous tightrope walk, balancing between East and West — leaning first one way, then the other — that Sihanouk would execute in bravura fashion throughout the next decade, keeping Cambodia insulated from the firestorm in neighbouring Vietnam until, finally, the forces that the war had unleashed overwhelmed him, dragging him and his country into the inferno.

  At home, repression spread in all directions. ‘Arrests and searches are taking place everywhere,’ wrote one diplomat, shortly after Nop Bop-hann’s murder. ‘People in Phnom Penh are frightened, and this is exacerbated by rumours of the brutal treatment the security police are said to be inflicting on those they interrogate.’ By the spring of 1960, some two thousand people, Vietnamese, Chinese and Khmer, were being detained in a holding camp on the outskirts of the city.

  The Vietnamese, prime targets of suspicion, were the object of a full scale witch-hunt. While Sihanouk maintained publicly that his ‘constant aim’ was ‘sincere reconciliation with [Vietnam]’, he sent a secret memorandum to his cabinet stating that security measures must be based on the explicit premise that ‘all Vietnamese, no matter what group or political party they belong to, constitute an eternal and mortal danger for the Khmer nation’. The government acted accordingly. Vietnamese communist cells — re-implanted in eastern Cambodia to prepare for the resumption that summer of communist insurgency in South Vietnam — were smashed and their members arreste
d. Khmer Krom saboteurs sent in by Son Ngoc Thanh’s Khmer Serei movement from CIA training camps across the border in South Vietnam were hunted down and killed. In one celebrated incident, probably imagined by the Prince himself, the two targets were combined: the security services detained and ‘turned’ a naïve young member of a Viet Minh cell in Svay Rieng, who was then sent to the US Embassy to ask for help with a plan to assassinate Sihanouk. The Americans, as might have been expected, handed him over to the police. But the result was an embarrassing scandal in which all the Prince’s adversaries — the US, the communists and the Vietnamese — were dragged through the mud. The unfortunate youth at the centre of the affair, who had apparently been told he would be released as the price of his co-operation, was sentenced to death.

  A Military Tribunal, whose judgements were not subject to appeal, dealt with state security offences. In its first two months of operation it handed out twenty-two death sentences to associates of Sam Sary and Dap Chhuon, generating what one observer termed ‘a psychosis of fear’. Another nine death sentences followed that spring. The verdicts, the French Embassy noted, were decided by Sihanouk in person, ‘without the least concern to maintain even the appearance of judicial independence’ and in flagrant disregard of the evidence, or rather the lack of it, against the individual accused:

  Over the last eighty years . . . Cambodia has grown unused to such outbursts of [royal] hatred which do not spare even women and children. Many Cambodians are talking privately among themselves of the odious nature of the sentences. Unfortunately, in this country . . . few dare speak out openly . . . [for] it is true that opposition is neither possible nor feasible in the presence of a Prince who will not tolerate even the slightest infringement of his authority

  After the death of his father, King Suramarit, in April 1960, Sihanouk’s ‘façade of liberal democracy, concealing the reality of personal dictatorship’, became a little more threadbare. The Prince’s mother, Queen Kossamak, a strong-willed, highly political woman, whom Zhou Enlai once compared to a scheming Chinese empress, made clear that she wanted the throne for herself After weeks of Byzantine palace intrigue, Sihanouk forced her to accept a powerless, ceremonial position as Guardian of the Throne, while a constitutional amendment was pushed through making him Head of State for life. It was a coup d’état in disguise.

  Meanwhile the left-wing press became a special target for attack.

  The most dramatic incident involved a French-language newspaper called l’ Observateur. It had been founded the previous autumn by Khieu Samphân, Ieng Sary’s successor at the head of the Cercle Marxiste, who had returned to Cambodia from Paris after completing his doctorate (and, along the way, becoming a committed member of the French Communist Party). With Sary’s encouragement, he had followed Hou Yuon’s example and joined the Sangkum. But then, to the dismay of his elderly mother, who expected him to begin a lucrative career as a high official, he invested his savings in a stock of lead type and began producing a twice-weekly broadsheet. His assignment from the underground Phnom Penh City Committee was to rally intellectual support and reach out to potential communist sympathisers in mainstream political life. It was a role to which Samphân was well-suited. He was an idealist, in whom personal morality and social conscience were indissolubly linked. To help make ends meet, he taught maths at a private school at weekends. One of his students remembered:

  He was always punctual and there were no jokes in his lessons, but he was a good teacher who won our respect. He would insist on our homework being done on time and we obeyed him even though he never punished us . . . He used to say, ‘I can’t understand why the trees are planted in the countryside but they fruit in the capital,’ by which he meant that the hard work of the farmers turned into wealth for the city people . . . His clothes were simple and he drove a rusty old sky-blue Mobylette. We used to laugh about the noise it made, like a tubercular cough . . . He dressed like a peasant, with sandals instead of shoes. His house was simple and small. In all these things he was setting an example. Above all, he disliked the corruption of the capital.

  Samphân had a nimble, even mischievous mind, a ready pen and a dry sense of humour; but there was also something blinkered about him, an austere side to his character which treated life as though it should be lived along geometrical lines of discipline and self-denial. His younger brother, Khieu Sengkim, remembered how one day Samphân had invited him out to dinner:

  He told me to order anything I liked. I ordered duck. When I had finished, he asked me: ‘Was it good?’ I said, ‘Yes, very good.’ His face darkened and he levelled a finger at me. ‘You ought to be ashamed of sitting here eating such good food when most people who work ten times harder than you have nothing at all!’

  In Paris, friends recalled how he had fallen in love with a French girl but had broken off the affair after deciding that his personal happiness should take second place to the quest for social justice at home.

  L’Observateur infuriated Sihanouk because, while plainly subversive, it was so carefully written that it was hard to establish seditious intent. It was anti-American and anti-colonial; it campaigned against the use of French in the lower classes at primary school on the ground that children from poor backgrounds were disadvantaged by not being taught in Khmer; and it carried a regular column, of which Samphân was particularly proud, which chronicled the wretchedness of the city’s poor — the water-carriers; the coolies who worked in the market, ‘so used to being beaten by police truncheons that they don’t even cry out, their skins hardened to the blows’; bicycle repairers; slum-dwellers; rickshaw men. Official spokesmen charged that it ‘never [contains] any constructive suggestion — and [there is] always complete silence about the social measures the government has taken.’ In short, the newspaper unctuously flattered the Prince’s person while perfidiously deploring the social ills that resulted from his policies.

  That spring Khieu Samphân was summoned by the Security Minister, Kou Roun, ‘a thuggish individual’, as one diplomat described him, and crudely put on notice that the government would not answer for the consequences if he did not fall into line. In the next issue of l’Observateur, Samphân printed a record of the conversation, ‘omitting neither threats nor blows . . . something which,’ the French Ambassador noted, ‘very few Khmers would have dared to do’.

  At lunchtime on Wednesday, July 13, Kou Roun put his threat into effect. As Khieu Samphân was leaving his office on his motor-scooter, a dozen or so cyclo drivers suddenly blocked his path. When he enquired what they wanted, they pinned his arms behind his back, beat him up and stripped off all his clothes. One of his assailants took a photograph of him standing naked in the street, after which they made off. A passer-by gave him a krama to cover himself He then walked to the Central Police Station, a few hundred yards from where the attack occurred, lodged a complaint, and next day wrote a detailed account of what had happened, in which he accused the security police of responsibility for the outrage.

  When parliament summoned the Minister to explain himself, Kou Roun baldly declared that it was not the job of the police to protect opponents of the regime. The National Assembly, he added menacingly, itself contained people of that ilk, and he proceeded to name Hou Yuon, Hu Nim, So Nem, Uch Ven and Chau Seng (who happened at the time to be a fellow member of the cabinet). Uch Ven, on behalf of his colleagues, then tabled a censure motion. But before it could be debated, Sihanouk issued a statement sharply reprimanding the deputies for their ‘hostile attitude’ towards his security chief and denouncing the Left in general and Khieu Samphân in particular as irredeemable troublemakers. Shortly afterwards, Hu Nim, the political director of the Prince’s newspaper, Réaltié s Cambodgiennes, who had used its pages to express his indignation against what he termed this ‘cowardly [and] brutal intimidation’, was sacked. Two days later, fifty more leftists were taken in for questioning and l’ Observateur and three other pro-communist papers were closed. Fifteen of those detained, including Khieu Samphân and a g
roup of Pracheachon leaders, headed by Non Suon, were placed in preventive detention in police cells. The Prince told a cabinet meeting that they were guilty of treason and ‘sowing hatred of the monarchy’, and that the Pracheachon’s ‘moral and political swindle’ could not be allowed to continue. But no charges were brought and a month later they were all freed.

  In one sense the targeting of the Left was almost a compliment. The contrast between ‘this small group of resolute men . . . [who] put their beliefs before their own safety’ and the ‘spinelessness’ of the mass of the Sangkum, in Ambassador Gorce’s words, cried out for all to see. Sihanouk himself had written earlier that year that though there were ‘probably only a few dozen true communists in Cambodia, they are militants of real worth, deeply convinced in their beliefs, doctrinally rigid but flexible in their tactics, capable of any sacrifice — even of their own self-respect — in order to attain their goals.’ But at another level the systematic resort to illegality, justified, when not instigated, by Sihanouk himself, augured ill for the future.

  To most Westerners, the early 1960s were a golden age for Cambodia. One American resident recalled: ‘[There was] complete peace and internal security, something which the country has not known within living memory . . . By 1960 . . . one could travel anywhere without danger from outlaws or hindrance from the authorities.’ The same week that Khieu Samphân was imprisoned, Sihanouk presented the prizes for ‘the most glamorous motor-car and owner’ at a Concours d’Elé gance at Kep, won by Miss Kenthao de Monteiro and her Ford Thunderbird, with a Dutch businessman’s wife the runner-up. To the affluent, Cambodia was an oriental paradise ruled by an entrancing playboy prince. The other side of the coin was better not thought about. ‘He is so thirsty for power that he can admit no opposition,’ Gorce had written that spring. ‘The system [he has created] accepts no contradiction. [To maintain it] the police impose a sort of reign of terror.’