Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  The Congress was held not a moment too soon.

  Throughout the winter of 1962, student agitation had been growing. In February, a banal protest over the right of schoolchildren to cycle along footpaths in Siem Reap degenerated into rioting after it was learnt that one young demonstrator had died in police custody. Two officers were beaten to death in revenge. Faced with the fury of the mob, the police and provincial militia fled and took refuge in the forest. For three days, from February 24 to 26, Siem Reap was in the hands of the students. Police headquarters were ransacked, filing cabinets emptied and their contents burned. Next day the Minister of Education arrived to negotiate with student leaders. He and his officials were taken hostage and paraded through the streets before a jeering crowd.

  When Sihanouk returned from Beijing on March 1, he was beside himself with rage. Over the next forty-eight hours he publicly berated the Prime Minister, Prince Kantol, for incompetence, dismissed the government, announced the dissolution of the Sangkum and of parliament and ordered new elections. He then asked Keng Vannsak, at the time Dean of the Literature Faculty of Phnom Penh University — who had visited Siem Reap shortly before the rioting occurred and whom he suspected of fomenting the unrest there — to become Prime Minister. Vannsak politely declined. In a show of force, troops were sent to occupy the radio station and other key installations.

  Two days later, on March 4, with political tensions at their peak, Sihanouk published a list of thirty-four known and suspected leftists drawn up by the security police,* and after treating them as ‘cowards, hypocrites, saboteurs, subversive agents and traitors’, demanded that they form a new government (reserving for himself, however, the right to name the Police, Interior and Defence ministers), ‘in order to show the country what they are capable of. On March 7, he summoned the entire group to a meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office, where each of those present was asked to put in writing whether or not he agreed to form a government. To no one’s surprise, they all wrote that Sihanouk himself was the only man capable of guiding the country forward.

  Two of the thirty-four failed to appear. Chou Chet, who had been released from prison three weeks earlier, had already left for the maquis. Saloth Sâr went into hiding as soon as the list was published.

  By mid-March, the storm had passed and Sihanouk’s imprecations against parliament, the government and the Sangkum were quietly forgotten. It was, one Western Ambassador grumbled, ‘a crisis Cambodia could have done without’. Yet there was method in the Prince’s madness. After spending three weeks in China, singing the praises of a foreign communist state, he had given Cambodians a trenchant reminder that communism had no place in his own kingdom. From now on, each new opening to communism abroad would be matched by increased repression at home. The thirty-four named leftists found police guards posted outside their houses. The schools where many of them taught, Chamraon Vichea, Kampuj’bot and Sotoân Prychea In, were placed under surveillance, and several left-wing newspaper editors imprisoned for ‘causing trouble and disorder’.

  The clamp-down on the communists that spring was the signal for the withdrawal to the countryside that had been in the air since 1960. To Sâr, with the leadership election over, there was no longer any reason to delay. For the first time in his political career, the veil of anonymity that cloaked his activities had been rent, leaving him suddenly exposed. It was not an experience he enjoyed.

  Ieng Sary took a different view. He claimed later to have argued that the possibilities for legal and semi-legal activities were not yet exhausted and that to abandon Phnom Penh was premature, but Nuon Chea — whose name had not appeared among the thirty-four, and whose cover was apparently intact — had insisted that those in the Party leadership whose identities had become known should not continue clandestine work lest they inadvertently expose others. Moreover, he told Sary, a spell in the maquis would help to get rid of his ‘petty bourgeois Parisian attitudes’ and develop a ‘proletarian spirit’. Reluctantly, Sary acquiesced.

  Sâr set out first, on March 31, with a guide provided by Hay So’s successor, a South Vietnamese communist named Sau Kouy. Two weeks later, on April 13, Sary followed. He left Phnom Penh at ten o’clock at night, he recalled, hidden under sacks of charcoal in the back of an ancient lorry. ‘Every time we stopped at a checkpoint, the driver got out and gave the soldiers money to let us through without a search. For once I was glad Cambodia was corrupt.’ Next day they arrived at the commune of Snuol, on the border of Kratie and Kompong Cham. From there, he walked for a day through the jungle to an encampment of the South Vietnamese communists, the Viet Cong, concealed in thick forest just across the Cambodian border. Son Sen followed the same route a day later.

  The communist leaders were rational men. The decision to re-base in the countryside marked the same kind of tactical retreat that the Chinese Politburo had made in abandoning Shanghai in 1933 and the Vietnamese when they left Hanoi in 1946.

  But Sâr and his companions were not Chinese or Vietnamese, they were Khmer. Just as Sihanouk always consulted an oracle before taking any grave decision, and Cambodia’s agricultural plan was determined, with all the seriousness in the world, on the basis of such astrological portents as the royal oxen’s choice of grains after the ploughing of the sacred furrow, so too the Cambodian communists inhabited a mental realm in which the irrational had an accepted place. Outwardly the Cambodian revolution was returning to its roots, to the maquis where the Issarak had fought. Psychologically the transition was more complex. In Khmer thought, the fundamental dichotomy is not between good and evil, as it is in Judaeo-Christian societies, but between srok and brai, village and forest. Subconsciously the centre of gravity of the revolution had shifted from the civilised regions, the towns and settlements, where man dominated nature, to the jungles, the wild places, where dark, unknown forces roamed and, throughout the centuries, sages — the Khmer Daeum of Cambodian antiquity — had repaired to seek spiritual power.

  5

  Germinal

  LIFE AT THE Vietnamese base was dire. Ieng Sary said later that Sâr had sent him a message a few days after arriving to tell him not to come, but the letter never reached him. The camp itself was spartan: a few peasant huts scattered in the forest, backed up by a system of tunnels and bunkers. It was close to the headquarters of the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) in the village of Ta Not, though Sâr and his colleagues were probably at first unaware of the NLF base’s presence. Sunlight could not penetrate the jungle canopy, and Sary remembered that their faces took on a waxy pallor, ‘a jaundiced, sickly look’. Truong Nhu Tang, afterwards Justice Minister in the South Vietnamese Provisional Revolutionary Government, spent several years working in the area:

  We lived like hunted animals . . . [Each of us had] two pairs of black trousers and shirts, a couple of pairs of underpants, a mosquito net and a few square yards of light nylon (handy as a raincoat or roof) . . . The rice ration for both leaders and fighters was 20 kilos a month . . . a nutritional intake which left us all in a state of semi-starvation . . . Food was a continual pre-occupation; the lack of protein especially drove us to frenzied efforts at farming or hunting whenever it was feasible . . . I will always remember one chicken feast, where we shared out a single bird among almost 30 of us . . . I think I have never eaten anything quite so delicious . . . Elephants, tigers, wild dogs, monkeys — none of these were strangers to our cookpots . . . Another dietary supplement which I eventually learned to eat was . . . jungle moth . . . With the wings off and barbecued quickly over a flame it wasn’t exactly a tasty morsel, but it wasn’t that bad either . . . But [nothing] alleviated the chronic malnutrition or the tropical diseases that battened on the weakened men.

  For the Khmers, these discomforts, which Sâr had already experienced, albeit in milder form, at the old Khmer Viet Minh base at Krâbao, just across the border three or four miles away, were compounded by physical and mental isolation.

  For the first few weeks there were only three of th
em — Sâr, Ieng Sary and Son Sen. As at Krâbao, nine years earlier, they were advised not to leave the camp or to have any contact with nearby Khmer villages. The South Vietnamese air force was already carrying out bombing raids along the border, and if the base’s location had become known, not only the Khmer encampment but the much more important NLF headquarters would have risked attack. None the less, it was galling. Sâr and his colleagues were no longer naïve young students but the leaders of a national communist party which, in theory, at least, was the equal of Vietnam’s. At Ta Not, they felt treated as outcasts. They could listen to the radio and once a week they had a meeting with their Viet Cong ‘hosts’, who briefed them on current events. That was it.

  As the government crackdown in Phnom Penh intensified, the size of the Khmer contingent gradually increased. Keo Meas and his family, who had been in hiding in the Eastern Zone, arrived during the summer. A courier office was established in a Cambodian village about four hours’ walk from the base, enabling Sâr to send out messengers independent of the Vietnamese. But by the end of the year, there were still only six or seven of them. It was a strange, artificial existence, like being inside a pressure cooker. There were explosions over trivial incidents. Keo Meas, in particular, felt excluded by the others, who had been together in Paris. In reality all of them were in limbo.

  Early in 1964, Sâr persuaded the Viet Cong to allow the Khmers to set up their own camp ‘to avoid political complications and build the revolution step by step by ourselves’. The new base, known as Office 100, was also on the Vietnamese side of the border and, like its predecessor, under tight Viet Cong control. Ney Sarann, who arrived from Phnom Penh in August to become the base administrator, found that they had to ‘rely on the Vietnamese for everything, food, materials, security, the lot . . . To go from one bureau to another, we had to have a Vietnamese guard to escort us . . . They were the hosts and we had to obey.’ But Sarann also noted that, in terms of policy and ideology, ‘little by little . . . we were developing an independent stance.’

  The first concrete sign of that came in the autumn, when an enlarged plenum of the Central Committee — the first such meeting the Cambodians had ever held* — took place in a forest on the Cambodian side of the border. It lasted several weeks and ended by producing a draft resolution which endorsed ‘all forms of struggle’, including ‘armed violence’ against Sihanouk’s government, and emphasised ‘self-reliance’, the Khmers’ codeword for freedom from Vietnamese control.

  Copies were run off using a glass bottle as a roller, stencils of waxed paper on which a text was scratched by hand with a stylus, and ink made by burning rubber, and despatched throughout the country Son Sen’s younger brother, Nikân, remembered that the messengers hid them in cakes or bottles of prahoc, the pungent fish relish which is the Khmers’ national dish, or rolled them inside tubes of bamboo, to avoid discovery by Sihanouk’s police.

  In January 1965, the Central Committee met again to put the resolution into its final form. The version approved by this Second Plenum attacked ‘modern revisionism’ — meaning Khrushchev’s ideas about the ‘peaceful transition’ to socialism — and affirmed the role of ‘revolutionary violence’ in the struggle against ‘imperialism and its lackeys’. To the Khmers, Sihanouk was just such a ‘lackey’ — ‘a chieftain of the feudalists and imperialists [wreaking] terror on the Cambodian people’, as one of their pamphlets put it — and therefore a legitimate target. To the Vietnamese, he was a patriot. But this and other issues which risked creating discord — such as the Central Committee’s decision not to accept Vietnamese advisers — were either finessed or omitted from the written text altogether.

  Alongside these incremental, snail’s-pace steps towards an independent Khmer communist identity, Sâr began to reflect on the kind of system he wanted to create in Cambodia.

  ‘After 1963,’ he explained, ‘when I withdrew to the countryside, my opinions and my thinking and views changed a lot, because I was in a very isolated, remote, rural area, far from the city . . . I lived among the masses [and] I realised I could trust them.’ Towards the end of his life, he spoke again of this period on the border. In Paris, he said, he had understood little, because he had been surrounded by intellectual high-fliers; in Cambodia, he was in contact with ‘the lower levels, the monks, the ordinary people, so I understood the problems.’ In the villages his modest educational level was not only no hindrance but in many ways a help, for he was closer to peasant realities than his university-trained colleagues. Nevertheless, it was a journey in the dark. ‘We applied ourselves to [define a direction] and then to put it into practice without knowing whether it was right or wrong.’ There was no model, no blueprint, but rather ‘a mixture [of influences], a little of this, a little of that . . . I copied no one. It was what I saw in the country that made an impression on me . . .’

  Those remembered fragments are revealing. Not for Sâr and his colleagues the certainties of ‘scientific socialism’, in which the writings of Marx and Lenin, of Mao and Stalin, would provide ready-made answers for every problem that might arise. The Cambodians sought their path to communism intuitively. ‘Marxism-Leninism,’ Sâr said later, ‘resides within the movements forged by the people, and the people’s movement in each country puts together [its own] Marxism-Leninism. Cambodia is also [able to] contribute to the building of Marxism-Leninism.’ The inference was that there was no need for Party members to study the Marxist classics and therefore no need to translate them into Khmer. Sâr acknowledged that foreign experience could provide useful lessons. But the goal was an authentically Khmer doctrine, rooted in Cambodian identity.

  Such an unschooled, almost mystical approach to communism had no precedent either in Chinese or in European Marxism.

  There were superficial parallels in Mao’s writings. Sâr believed, like him, that revolutionary truth came ‘from the masses, to the masses’. Both romanticised the peasantry. To Mao, in his more megalomaniac moments, the peasants were pure and unsullied, ‘poor and blank . . . Poor people want change, want revolution. A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the purest and most beautiful words can be written on it.’ To Sâr, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, they epitomised the noblest, most profound yearnings of their race. But Mao’s revolutionary romanticism was tempered, in theory at least, by an awareness of reality. As he had explained in On New Democracy, which Sâr had read in Paris: ‘We are not Utopians and cannot divorce ourselves from the actual conditions confronting us.’ It was necessary to ‘seek truth from facts’ and ‘test the correctness of ideas in action’.

  To Sâr and his colleagues, such considerations simply did not apply. What mattered was the vision, the inspiration. Whereas Mao was the product of an intensely rational, literate society, with highly developed traditions of philosophical debate, Sâr’s cultural heritage was irrational, oral, guided by Theravada transcendentalism and by k’ruu, spirit-masters, whose truths sprang not from analysis but from illumination. As the Cambodian communist leaders groped towards a model for their future revolution, they never once, either at Office 100 or later, carried out any form of investigation of the social conditions in which that revolution was to occur. The contrast with Maoist China could hardly be greater.

  What the two countries did have in common, as did Vietnam, was that the bulk of the population were peasants. Accordingly, the Cambodian Party identified lower-middle peasants as the ‘semi-proletariat’ of the countryside and poor and landless peasants as a ‘core element of the working class . . . the lifeblood of the revolution’ — a heresy in Marxist terms, which it tried to gloss over by insisting on the leading role of the country’s minuscule industrial workforce, at the time only 10,000 strong. But efforts to create clandestine pro-communist workers’ associations were unsuccessful, partly because no senior Khmer communist had a working-class background. Whereas Mao had started his communist career as a trades union organiser and Ho Chi Minh had been a deckhand and a washer-up in a London restaurant, neither Sâr n
or Nuon Chea nor Ieng Sary nor So Phim nor any other Cambodian leader had experience of working-class life. They were peasants, students of peasant origin, or both: to all of them, industry was a closed book.

  The Cambodian Party’s inability to penetrate the country’s nascent proletariat was to have far-reaching consequences. Sâr and his colleagues did not ask themselves what they were doing wrong. Instead, in a pattern of behaviour that would be repeated whenever they were faced with failure, by 1965 they decided that the factories had been ‘infiltrated’ and ‘the workers transformed into enemy agents’. From then on, factory workers were systematically refused admission to the Party.

  For a communist party, whose raison d’ê tre is to represent the working class, this was an astounding decision. Khieu Samphân would argue later that the Party had no choice:

  [It is true that] the Cambodian communist party was based on the poor peasantry rather than the working class . . . But you can’t use that as an argument for saying it wasn’t a Marxist party, or that there was no economic basis for a communist party in Cambodia. In fact, we applied the criterion of ‘material conditions’ quite correctly, because the poor peasants were the most impoverished, the most oppressed class in Cambodian society, and it was this class that was the foundation of the Cambodian Party.