Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  In wonderland, the worm was in the fruit.

  While Sihanouk tilted quixotically at the communists’ public emanations, the movement’s secret leadership went ahead with preparations for a Party Congress to transform the PRPK into an authentic Marxist-Leninist party. The original intention had been to meet in 1958, but the Vietnamese, whose approval had been sought, hurried slowly, rightly suspicious that the Khmers wanted to strike out on their own. Finally, however, Hanoi was persuaded that the existing structure, with separate rural and urban organisations, must be changed, and it was agreed that a Congress should take place in the second half of 1959. Then came Sieu Heng’s defection. Everything else was pushed into the background; the priority became damage control.

  Tou Samouth, Nuon Chea, Saloth Sâr and a fourth man, probably So Phim, formed a ‘General Affairs Committee’ to head the movement nationally, pending the election of a new leadership. In Phnom Penh, Nuon Chea remained Secretary of the City Committee, but delegated the running of it to Sâr, who brought in Ieng Sary and a younger man named Vorn Vet, whom he had known at Krâbao, to help him. In the countryside, repression intensified. The Vietnamese spoke of a campaign of terror; a Cambodian communist document charged that Sihanouk’s police were ‘slaughtering everyone’. The physical destruction of the rural bases was aggravated by a breakdown in communications. In some cases, contacts between the Party leaders in Phnom Penh and surviving rural networks remained severed for four years. In the summer of 1960, Sâr himself set out for Kompong Cham, to follow up, apparently successfully, a chance report that a group of former guerrillas were eking out a living as charcoal burners in a remote, forest area of Krauchhmar. Others, like Ke Pauk’s district committee in nearby Chamkar Loeu, would remain out of touch until 1963.

  The draft statutes and political programme which the leadership had prepared were circulated to Party cells in the spring of 1960, together with a set of ‘rules for Party members’. Sâr claimed later that he had done most of the drafting himself, but officially the documents were presented as a collective effort. The programme of the new Party, which was to be called the Kampuchean Labour Party, one step up from a ‘People’s Revolutionary Party’ but not quite on a par with the ‘Workers’ Party’ in Vietnam, was in most respects orthodox enough. It was defined as ‘a Party of the working class . . . [taking] Marxism-Leninism as its foundation, closely linked to the masses, organised on the basis of democratic centralism and [using] criticism and self-criticism as its guiding principle’. The issue of exactly who constituted this ‘working class’ was fudged, but that could hardly be otherwise in a backward, agricultural country with virtually no industrial proletariat. As Sâr knew from his reading in Paris, China had taken similar doctrinal liberties — as indeed had Vietnam. That apart, the programme’s analysis of the classes in Cambodian society was conventional (albeit rather woolly), and the Party’s declared aims — ‘to nationalise the main means of production . . . to realise the people’s democratic dictatorship . . . [and then] go on to construct a fully worked out socialist system on the basis of the slogan “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his work”, under the dictatorship of the proletariat, in order to advance towards communism’ — were textbook Leninism.

  Buried among the platitudes were two neuralgic issues: the relationship between the new Party and the Vietnamese communists; and policy towards Sihanouk’s regime.

  In practice, the two were inseparable. In a letter to the Cambodian leaders at the end of 1959, the Vietnamese Party had reiterated the policy of qualified support for Sihanouk’s government that they had first laid down four years earlier.

  The validity of this approach, at least in Vietnamese eyes, had been underscored by Khrushchev’s concept of a ‘parliamentary road to socialism’, proclaimed at the Soviet 20th Party Congress in February 1956 and subsequently enshrined as the doctrine of ‘peaceful transition’ at the World Communist Conference held in Moscow a year later. The idea was that, in the era of peaceful coexistence between the two world blocs, communist parties could achieve power through elections, rather than by class struggle and revolutionary violence. To Sâr, after the Cambodian Party’s experiences in 1955 and 1958, this rang very hollow. But for Hanoi it was a useful weapon to keep the Khmers in line (since they were in no position to argue that the entire world communist movement was wrong), and from 1956 onwards, Sieu Heng, with Vietnamese encouragement, had urged that parliamentary rather than class struggle be given priority.

  He was not alone. Keo Meas and the Pracheachon group also favoured ‘peaceful transition’. So did So Phim and Mey Mann. Ieng Sary, who had watched the PCF grappling with Moscow’s new line shortly before he left Paris, likewise spoke in favour of it during discussions at cell meetings. On the other hand, it was plain that it was not a concept the Vietnamese accepted for themselves. In January 1959, the VWP Central Committee authorised the resumption of armed struggle in South Vietnam on the grounds that Ngo Dinh Diem’s government was ‘a US tool for aggression and enslavement’. By 1960, widespread insurgency had broken out and, in mid-September, the VWP’s Third Congress approved the launching of a full-scale guerrilla war. At about the same time, armed struggle resumed in Laos. It was hard for the Khmers to understand why they alone should be bound by a doctrine which their communist allies breached.

  Two weeks after the VWP Congress ended, twenty-one delegates gathered at the home of Ok Sakun, a member of Vorn Vet’s North Phnom Penh Party branch (and a veteran of the Cercle Marxiste) who held a senior post at Cambodian Railways and occupied a government villa not far from the Phnom Penh station. To avoid attracting attention they arrived singly or in small groups, and Sakun posted watchers to give the alarm if strangers approached. They met for three days, from September 30 to October 2. ‘During that time, none of us was allowed to leave,’ Ieng Sary recalled. ‘We slept on the floor, piled together like logs. It was hot and we couldn’t wash properly — and the whole place started to smell.’ No record of the discussion has survived and it is probable that none was kept. But the programme approved by the meeting marked a crucial first step towards an independent political line.

  The ‘feudal ruling class led by S[ihanouk]’, they declared — far from playing a positive role, as the Vietnamese argued — was ‘the most important enemy of the Kampuchean Revolution’ and ‘a tool of the American imperialists’. The plight of the Cambodian people was ‘two or three times worse’ than before 1955 (when Hanoi had imposed the policy of co-operating with Sihanouk). Cambodians would therefore have to struggle to ‘annihilate the feudal regime’ — peacefully or otherwise:

  The Kampuchean Revolution must have [the option of] two forms of struggle: peaceful means; and means that are not peaceful. We will do our utmost to grasp firmly peaceful struggle, for that form of struggle does not cause heavy losses to the people. However, [we] must be ready at all times to adopt non-peaceful means of struggle if the imperialists and feudalists . . . stubbornly insist on forcing us to take that road . . . [If and] when the enemies of the revolution force us to arm ourselves, the countryside will provide us with favourable . . . conditions . . . For that reason, the revolution [should make use of] its potential to build, consolidate and develop its strength in the rural areas . . . The countryside is an important base for the revolution because in Kampuchea, like all undeveloped countries, the national revolution is a peasant revolution. The cities are . . . the nerve-centre of the ruling class and the imperialists, the places where the enemies of the revolution can concentrate great power to suppress [us].

  The arguments, and the conclusion, even down to the phrase ‘non-peaceful means of struggle’, echoed, word for word, those employed by the Vietnamese themselves eighteen months earlier to justify to the Russians the resumption of their own armed struggle. The only argument Hanoi could raise against it — that Sihanouk’s policy of neutrality made him fundamentally different from Ngo Dinh Diem, in South Vietnam, or Phoumi Nosavan, the right-wing leader of Laos —
the Cambodians implicitly rejected. The underlying message was that, regardless of Vietnam’s preferences, the possibility of armed struggle was once again firmly on the Cambodian Party’s agenda. But since the Khmers’ position was couched in such careful terms, there was little the Vietnamese could do except reply in the same veiled fashion. Three weeks after the Congress, Ho Chi Minh sent birthday greetings to Sihanouk, wishing him ‘good health and happiness in order that you may lead the Kingdom . . . to everlasting progress and stability’. Subsequent Vietnamese messages to the Cambodian Party leadership urged patience and promised that after South Vietnam and Laos had won their freedom, ‘the Cambodian revolution will also triumph.’

  There were other signs of a growing divergence of views. The Cambodian programme did not mention neutralism or the ICP or the PRPK, and it contained only one brief reference to Vietnam and Laos. Instead of Indochinese solidarity, the new Party’s stated goal was to ‘secure total independence . . . construct a national economy [and] build one Cambodian nation, independent, sovereign and prosperous’. Vietnam’s hopes of an Indochinese Federation were fast receding.

  The Congress elected a new leadership. Tou Samouth became Secretary with Nuon Chea as his deputy and Saloth Sâr in the third-ranking position. All three were full members of the CC Standing Committee. Ieng Sary, whose only real qualification was to have headed the Cercle Marxiste in Paris, was promoted over the heads of the former resistance leaders to become fourth in the hierarchy — a striking demonstration of the growing power of the returned students. He and So Phim, who ranked fifth, were alternate Standing Committee members with the right to participate in the Committee’s deliberations but not to vote. Then came two other veterans of the Indochina War — Mang, the Zone Secretary of Son Ngoc Minh’s former base area in the South-West, and Prasith, an ethnic Thai from Koh Kong province. Minh himself, who did not attend, was in tenth position, while Keo Meas was placed eleventh and last in the rank order.* According to Ping Sây, the question of appointing Rath Samoeun and other Hanoi regroupees to the Central Committee was not raised because ‘they were regarded as having excluded themselves’.

  The 1960 Congress was the first at which the Khmer communists had chosen their own leaders and defined their own political strategy free of Vietnamese tutelage. Previously such decisions had been taken for them by Nguyen Thanh Son’s All-Cambodia Work Committee. This time, not only was no Vietnamese Party delegate present, but the Party programme — while clearly drafted with Hanoi’s reactions in mind — was not submitted to the Vietnamese in advance. As Keo Meas put it, ‘From now on we were responsible for our own fate. We dealt with them as equals.’

  To underline the fresh start, all members of the movement were required to reapply for Party membership.

  At the same time, a major effort began to rebuild the rural bases, which would be the key to the Party’s future if, as the Standing Committee plainly expected, ‘peaceful struggle’ led nowhere. Mang and Prasith returned immediately to the South-West; Ruos Nhim left his farm in southern Battambang to restore the old Issarak networks in the hill districts around Samlaut; So Phim went back to the Eastern Zone. Even the citified Ieng Sary was reported to have travelled through the provinces trying to revive dormant cells. As things turned out, it was a wise precaution.

  Throughout 1961, Sihanouk was obsessed by the deteriorating relationship with Thailand and South Vietnam and the threat from Son Ngoc Thanh’s Khmer Serei movement. For the communists, the pressure was off. The government announced that it was dropping legal proceedings against the Pracheachon, l’Observateur and two other left-wing newspapers suspended the previous autumn, and that their printing presses and equipment would be returned ‘because gagging or imprisoning convinced militants has never served any purpose . . . except to turn them into martyrs’.

  But the communist challenge was not forgotten. During a tour of the provinces that summer, the Prince delivered a series of harsh — and prophetic — warnings about the Khmer communists’ ultimate aims. A communist regime in Cambodia, he said, might achieve more than the Sangkum had done, but at the price of ‘depriving the individual of all that is dear to him — basic freedoms and the joys of family life — and turning him into a producing machine which over time has all human values sucked out of it’. Such a system ‘reduced men to the level of brute beasts’. Cambodians would gain nothing and had everything to lose by adopting it. His statements reflected the bitterness and frustration of a man who saw disaster approaching but felt he could do nothing to avert it. ‘Sooner or later the communists will win,’ he warned glumly. ‘Laos is lost already So is South Vietnam. Cambodia’s turn will follow’ American policy was so inept and so out of touch with Asian realities, he concluded, that the precarious power balance that enabled Cambodia to live at peace would inevitably collapse — and not to the West’s advantage.

  The months of tergiversation that these bleak forebodings engendered came to an abrupt end on January 10 1962.

  That day twelve members of the Pracheachon were arrested in the province of Kompong Cham for allegedly collecting military intelligence on behalf of the Vietnamese communists, trying to suborn the monkhood and to infiltrate the Sangkum. The so-called ‘plot’ was a government fabrication timed, like the 1958 campaign against the Pracheachon, to unite the country behind Sihanouk ahead of the parliamentary elections which were due in June. But this time the stakes were higher. ‘I will not pardon these traitors, I’ll have them shot . . . because that’s what they were planning for me,’ Sihanouk raged. On January 12, Non Suon was detained, followed by the Pracheachon’s editor, Chou Chet. Keo Meas went into hiding: But the newspaper refused to be silenced. ‘Our country is [supposed to] have a constitution . . . and to have proclaimed its attachment to the Declaration of Human Rights,’ it protested. ‘Yet our staff are under day-and-night surveillance by armed police with binoculars and cameras.’ Shortly afterwards it accused the government of ‘harsh oppression, contrary to democratic principles’, and appealed to Britain and Russia, the co-Presidents of the 1954 Geneva Conference, for the release of Non Suon and Chou Chet. More arrests followed and on February 10 the newspaper’s offices were sealed. A month later, the only other surviving ‘progressive’ mouthpiece, a weekly called Pancasila, was also closed. The pretext was that it had reprinted an eighteenth-century Khmer poem which urged court functionaries not to mistreat people.

  So ended the communists’ first and last attempt to operate legally in Sihanouk’s Cambodia. On the Prince’s instructions, the Military Tribunal condemned Non Suon and his companions to death. No Pracheachon candidate stood in the 1962 elections and to all intents and purposes the group ceased to exist. But there was still a left-wing presence in parliament. Bluff, outspoken Hou Yuon and Hu Nim, the former Treasury Director, both won re-election and Khieu Samphân became an MP for the first time and soon afterwards a cabinet minister.

  In July 1962 the Left suffered another body-blow when the Communist Party Secretary, Tou Samouth, was arrested and killed. He had been living, disguised as a labourer, in the southern part of Phnom Penh. One day he left home to buy medicine at the market for his sick child. The security police were waiting. They allegedly took him to a house belonging to the Defence Minister, Lon Nol, where he was tortured but refused to talk; then he was killed and buried on a piece of wasteland in the Stung Meancheay district of the city.

  It was never convincingly established who betrayed Samouth. But it was a setback to the Party’s urban networks scarcely less damaging than Sieu Heng’s defection had been to its rural organisations.

  It also opened the way for Saloth Sâr to become Party leader.

  Here, too, fate played its part. Normally Nuon Chea, as Tou Samouth’s deputy, should have become acting Secretary. But a year earlier Nuon had fallen under a cloud. The Vietnamese communists’ Work Committee in Phnom Penh, headed by Hay So, had given him a substantial sum of money — 10,000 Vietnamese dong — to purchase a house. The transaction, which was supposed
to be secret, had been approved by Hay So’s deputy. But word leaked out and rumours started circulating that Nuon had obtained the money improperly. There was muttering about his loyalty, and the fact that he was related by marriage to the defector Sieu Heng. According to the Vietnamese, who worked with him closely at this time, he became depressed and for much of the next year, withdrew from Party work. Sâr, as the third-ranking member of the leadership, became Samouth’s de facto deputy. As a result, when Samouth disappeared, Sâr, rather than Nuon, became acting leader in his place.

  Samouth’s murder raised the question of whether the leadership should leave the capital for the safety of the countryside. Sâr argued against it. An election would have to be held to elect a new Party leader, and he was well aware that his chances of success in Phnom Penh were far better than in an unfamiliar rural area, where the influence of resistance veterans like So Phim was preponderant.

  Over the next six months, the situation appeared to stabilise, and in February 1963, while Sihanouk was on a visit to China, it was announced that the sentences on Non Suon and his companions had been commuted to life imprisonment. At the end of that month, the Party convened its Second Congress.

  The meeting was held in the apartment of a Sino-Khmer sympathiser, in the centre of Phnom Penh just west of the Central Market, and lasted a single day.* According to Ieng Sary, only seventeen or eighteen people attended, fewer than in 1960. Sâr was elected Secretary of a new four-man Standing Committee; Nuon Chea remained Deputy Secretary; and Sary and So Phim became full members. Four new Central Committee members were also appointed: Mok, a former monk from Takeo, who had become Mang’s deputy in the South-West; Ruos Nhim from the North-West; Vorn Vet from Phnom Penh; and Son Sen. Keo Meas and the mysterious ‘Ray Thorn’ (almost certainly Non Suon) were dropped. The Party’s name was changed — it now became the Kampuchean Workers’ Party, which put it on the same level as the Workers’ Party in Vietnam — and its programme was modified to pay lip-service (in Cambodian conditions it could hardly have been more than that) to the November 1960 Moscow Declaration, which reaffirmed the validity of the parliamentary road to socialism.