Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  It was not that he was unhinged. But the nature of the system he had inherited and built was such that none of his closest advisers dared reason with him. ‘There is a malaise developing,’ one diplomat wrote before the election. ‘The Prince’s behaviour is plunging even his most faithful supporters into perplexity and dismay.’ Earlier that year Indonesia’s President Sukarno had been eased out of power in an army coup. Lon Nol — an imperturbable, heavily-built man, who professed a mystic loyalty to the monarchy — might have no thought of emulating the Indonesian military. But it was better not to tempt fate. For the next six months, Sihanouk worked assiduously, and not without difficulty, to circumscribe the new Premier’s powers. Assailed by self-doubt, he took refuge in amateur filmmaking. In the 1950s one canny observer had compared Cambodia to a stage-show in which the Prince had the starring role. Now theatre and reality were one. He wrote, directed and starred in a series of maudlin romances with his wife, Monique, as the leading lady, and sundry members of the government, including the Chief of Staff, Nhek Tioulong, in supporting roles. Sihanouk monopolised the screen as he did his country. Neither his films nor, from then on, his policies, would have any lasting success.

  To Sihanouk, Lon Nol’s emergence as Prime Minister at the head of a right-wing government more independent than any that had gone before was a challenge that needed to be blunted. To the Cambodian communists, it was a godsend. As Defence Minister for more than a decade, Nol had been in charge of anti-communist repression. As Prime Minister, he was the ideal target against which to mobilise opposition to Sihanouk’s regime. A week after his appointment, the CPK Central Committee denounced his government as ‘lackeys of the United States’ and attacked Sihanouk by name ‘not just as a King who reigns but worse, a reactionary . . . who should be overthrown’. Lon Nol’s nomination justified ‘the use of political violence at a high level’, it declared. The revolutionary movement had arrived at the stage of the ‘direct seizure of power . . . and if [Lon Nol] oppresses and terrorises [the population] strongly, we will have to resort to armed struggle’.

  The fate of the Indonesian Communist Party, which had supported Sukarno, gave legitimacy to this new strategy. After his overthrow, some 300,000 Indonesian Party members had been slain in anti-communist massacres. The lesson for Sâr was that the bourgeoisie could not be relied on. The Vietnamese strategy was wrong. It was not possible for the communists to ‘live together with Sihanouk’ because the contradictions between them were too deep. Policy towards non-Party sympathisers was therefore modified. In theory, the guideline remained ‘to unite with all those who can be united with’, but in practice the movement behaved more and more as though ‘all those who are not with us are against us’. Khieu Samphân, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim, who had kept their seats in the September elections, began to distance themselves from the Prince. It marked the start of the politics of exclusion that would become one of the hallmarks of the Cambodian Party’s style. From now on, the CPK required its supporters ‘to draw a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves’.

  The new line on armed struggle was first applied in the North-West, where Ruos Nhim had strong support in the villages south of Battambang.

  Nhim’s career as an Issarak commander stretched back to the 1940s. When the idea of relaunching guerrilla activity was broached at the Central Committee meetings of late 1964 and early 1965, he had immediately started preparing his followers. One of their first actions had been to mine a railway bridge over the Dam river, between Battambang and Poipet, damaging a passenger train. After that, Lon Nol and Nhek Tioulong began installing guard posts in the villages and new roads were driven through the jungle to make troop movements easier. The soldiers’ presence, in turn, brought petty exactions and harassment, fanning local discontents. In December 1966, after the CPK’s Third Plenum had endorsed the principle of ‘armed violence’, Nhim stepped up his campaign. ‘We decided to arm the people . . . [to] attack Lon Nol’s secret police and soldiers,’ one of his aides wrote later. ‘The government then sent in reinforcements.’ The spiral of violence and counter-violence was beginning to bear fruit.

  The following month, Sihanouk, still preoccupied with what he saw as the political challenge from the Right, departed for his annual dietary cure in France. His absence, he thought, would be salutary, making it possible for him to install after his return a cabinet more responsive to his wishes.

  In the event that was what happened, though not for the reasons Sihanouk anticipated.

  Lon Nol spent much of January and February in Battambang supervising state purchases of the rice harvest. The previous year 60 per cent of the crop had been sold to Chinese middlemen acting for the Viet Cong and smuggled out to liberated zones in South Vietnam and Laos, creating a huge shortfall in state revenues. The problem, as a US National Security Council study noted, was that the Vietnamese communists paid far higher prices than the Cambodian government. To make the peasants sell to the state, compulsion was necessary. In southern Battambang, where centrifugal tendencies were strong because of the province’s links with Thailand, where Phnom Penh had always had difficulty in making its writ run and where Ruos Nhim’s communist agitators had been hard at work for two years, this was a recipe for disaster.

  It is impossible to tell which of the various factors involved was most responsible for the events that followed. Kong Sophal, who had become North-West Zone Deputy Secretary, remembered ‘pushing the peasants more and more strongly until early 1967, at which point the conflict became ripe for the internal war to explode’. The villagers were angry over the forced rice sales and the corruption of local officials. There was resentment at the authorities’ demands for free labour and ‘voluntary financial contributions’ to carry out government projects, and over the seizure of peasant land-holdings, which were given to army officers for development as large, private estates or redesignated as youth settlements to provide work for the urban unemployed. There was friction, too, caused by the resettlement in the area of Khmer Krom refugees who had fled from South Vietnam, a group notably recalcitrant to authority and — understandably, after two hundred years of persecution by the Vietnamese — obsessed with its own survival.

  Whatever the precise mix, the pot soon boiled over. In mid-February clashes occurred between soldiers and local people in the gem-mining town of Pailin on the border with Thailand. Anti-government demonstrations broke out in Battambang, where three city officials were hacked to death. In the thickly wooded hill-country around Samlaut — which had been an Issarak stronghold twenty years before — village armouries were raided and the population fled into the jungle. On March 11, protesters demanded that the Pailin garrison be withdrawn, a call which Sihanouk, just back from France, angrily rejected.

  Thereafter the situation degenerated rapidly. On the morning of April 2, villagers in Samlaut attacked a group of soldiers overseeing rice purchases, killing two of them and stealing several rifles. Two hundred peasants then marched to the nearby village of Kranhoung, the site of a large youth settlement, a fitting symbol for all the aggravations the authorities had made them endure, which they proceeded to burn to the ground. By nightfall, army posts in two other villages had been attacked and a commune chief killed. Over the next four days more attacks followed, two road bridges were destroyed and another local official was executed. Then the first units of paratroops arrived to begin what Sihanouk euphemistically called ‘repression and pacification’.

  By late April, two hundred rebels had been captured and nineteen killed, against four dead on the government side. The Prince himself visited Samlaut, offering an amnesty and making liberal distributions of food and clothing. However, attacks on army posts continued, and the inhabitants of three more villages fled their homes to join the rebels. Communist cadres, accompanying a force of five hundred peasants, some of them armed, retreated to Mount Veay Chap, a highland area covered by dense jungle some twenty-five miles north-east of Samlaut. But the army poisoned wells and seized and burned
their rice stocks, and by mid-May their position was critical. At that point Nuon Chea conveyed to Nhim and Kong Sophal a directive from the CPK Standing Committee ‘to stop the war and negotiate with the enemy’. Shortly afterwards talks began with the newly appointed Battambang governor, In Tam, through the intermediary of the Abbot of Wat Thvak, a large Buddhist monastery near the mountain. The government undertook not to carry out reprisals — a promise which it did not keep — and a month later, on June 20, Sihanouk was able to announce that the rebellion was over.

  The ‘Samlaut events’, as they became known, posed problems both for the Communist Party and for Sihanouk.

  For the former, the welling up of peasant anger had been too good an opportunity to miss. But it had happened too quickly for the Party to be able to exploit it to the full. ‘Non-peaceful means of struggle’ had been on the agenda as a principle ever since 1960. But the Central Committee’s Third Plenum, in October 1966, had fixed no date for it to begin and still less a co-ordinated programme for a nationwide uprising. That was to await the establishment of Sâr’s new headquarters in Ratanakiri and the organisation of a courier service capable of assuring communications with the rest of the country. In the meantime all that had been decided was to start ‘active preparations’ for rebellion. On the other hand, having ordered a vigorous campaign against the compulsory rice purchases, Sâr could hardly ask Nhim and Sophal to douse the anger they themselves had fanned. Yet the fact was that the Samlaut peasants were out on a limb. Only in one small area, covering about 300 square miles, where communist influence was strongest, did the countryside catch fire. By May it was obvious that unless a peaceful outcome could be found, the movement would be ruthlessly crushed.

  Sihanouk, too, was in a quandary.

  The idea that Cambodian peasants, his children, as he liked to call them, should rise up against him — Samdech Euv,’Monseigneur Papa’, the father of the nation — was politically intolerable, and he flew into a rage when Le Monde and other French newspapers interpreted the unrest in those terms.

  His explanation was that it was the work of Khmer Viet Minh cells which had been left behind in the former Issarak base areas in 1954 and lain dormant ever since, awaiting their opportunity. Their ‘backstage bosses’, he claimed, were none other than the three left-wing Sangkum MPs, Khieu Samphân, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim, who were deliberately stirring up trouble to destabilise Lon Nol’s right-wing government. How much of this the Prince actually believed is another matter, but it was his story and he stuck to it. He therefore followed a two-handed policy, showing royal indulgence to the majority of the four to five thousand rebel villagers who eventually returned to their homes, but giving the army a free hand to take vengeance on the rest as soon as the insurgency was over.

  The punitive raids which followed took hundreds of lives and left much of the population of Samlaut and the surrounding area irremediably hostile to the regime. The communists’ jungle bases were bombed, villages strafed and burned to the ground. ‘The pacification of the disturbed region,’ wrote Donald Lancaster, a Briton who was then working in Sihanouk’s office, ‘was undertaken with the rude vigour peculiar to soldiery who have been promised a monetary reward for each [rebel] head they might forward to military headquarters.’ Another foreigner, returning to Cambodia after a year’s absence, found Phnom Penh alive with ‘ghoulish details . . . of trucks filled with severed heads that were sent from Battambang . . . so that Lon Nol should be assured that his programme was being followed.’

  Whether or not this was actually true, it was what everyone, both senior Cambodian officials and foreign ambassadors, believed, creating an expectation of brutality that would increasingly affect the behaviour both of the regime itself and of its left — and right-wing opponents.

  A striking example of this concerned Khieu Samphân, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim. On April 22, Sihanouk announced on the radio that the three MPs might be brought before the Military Tribunal for a confrontation with their accusers, after which, if appropriate, the government would bring charges. This was not a threat to be taken lightly. Two days later, Samphân failed to return home. ‘My mother served dinner as usual at 7.30 p.m.,’ his younger brother, Khieu Sengkim, remembered. ‘The two of us sat at the dining table and waited for [him] to arrive . . . We stayed there till 11 without eating, listening for every footstep and every sound. Then my mother broke down and began to cry. She cried all night.’

  When it was learnt that Hou Yuon had also vanished, most people assumed that Lon Nol and, in the background, the Prince himself, were responsible. Grisly rumours began to circulate about the way their bodies had been disposed of, later confirmed by one of the Prince’s long-time French advisers. He told guests at a private dinner party hosted by a cabinet minister that he knew precisely how the two MPs had been killed. ‘He said one was burnt alive with sulphuric acid,’ one of them recalled. ‘The other was crushed by a bulldozer.’ There was a thoughtful silence, he remembered, as the Cambodians present looked at their plates. ‘Everyone knew that was exactly the way Sihanouk would have behaved.’

  In fact the rumours were false. On April 23, the day after Sihanouk’s threat, Khieu Samphân spoke to a contact in the Party’s clandestine network in Phnom Penh. Next day, police spies reported, he and Hou Yuon met twice. As instructed, Samphân said nothing to his family. Yuon, a less disciplined, more sentimental man, probably warned his wife. That evening at dusk, they were collected by a driver, who took them to an isolated spot in Ang Tasom district, 50 miles south of Phnom Penh on the road to Kampot. There they linked up with cadres from Mang’s South-Western Zone Party Committee, who guided them to a hamlet in the woods about a mile from the main road. The half-dozen families who lived there were all related, which, as Samphân said later, meant ‘there was no risk of betrayal because they were bound by the fidelity of blood’. None the less, the cadres, all veterans who had fought with the Viet Minh, took no chances. After three months in a village house, the two men were moved to a makeshift wooden cabin deeper in the forest. Samphân, a fastidious man, insisted on a daily bath, and each night after dark was accompanied by two village girls to a stream a couple of miles away to perform his ablutions. ‘I was on my guard,’ he said primly. ‘Having left Phnom Penh for reasons of principle, I wasn’t going to sully myself with a village woman.’ Apart from a radio set and occasional contacts with the villagers, they were completely cut off from the outside world. Hou Yuon railed at their enforced inactivity. Samphân, being of a very different temperament and never having lived in the countryside, followed the cadres’ instructions to the letter, dreamily contemplating, like his hero, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the mysteries of peasant life.

  The disappearance of Khieu Samphân and Hou Yuon embarrassed Sihanouk and helped trigger the resignation of Lon Nol, who was replaced as Prime Minister at the end of April. The new government, headed by the Prince himself, included several moderate left-wing ministers as well as elder statesmen like Son Sann and the former Democratic Party leader, Prince Norodom Phurissara, who became Foreign Minister. On the strength of these changes, Vorn Vet, the top Party leader in Phnom Penh, told Hu Nim, who had also been planning to flee, that he should stay on to see how the situation developed. A few days later, Nim issued an effusive statement of loyalty, declaring that he would ‘remain a loyal member of the Sangkum until the end of [my] life’. But Lon Nol’s departure changed little: the repression did not let up. In October, Nim, too, slipped away. His home was under round-the-clock police surveillance, but on the night of his disappearance there was a torrential downpour. An official inquiry found later that the surveillance team had taken refuge with a neighbour to get out of the rain. Soon afterwards Phouk Chhay, the head of the left-wing General Association of Khmer Students (AGEK), was arrested and sentenced to death, subsequently commuted to life imprisonment, and the Association banned. The same week, Nim’s brother-in-law died in unexplained circumstances while in police custody and a left-wing entrepreneur, Van Tip Sovann, who owne
d the Pracheachon’s printing press and other front businesses, was tortured to death at the Central Commissariat. A visiting Australian historian wrote that people spoke ‘with a mixture of repugnance, fear and gallows humour’ about the expeditive methods of Sihanouk’s security services. The trickle of intellectuals who had been making their way to the maquis since 1965 became a stream. They went, he noted, not just because they were afraid for their lives but out of a growing conviction that radical left-wing change was inevitable.

  The twelve months that had passed since the CPK’s Third Plenum had not been easy for Sâr either. The rebellion in the North-West and the subsequent flight of Khieu Samphân and the others had proved his strategy correct: legal, parliamentary struggle was impossible; the use of armed force against Sihanouk was now the only recourse. Nevertheless, Sâr had to acknowledge that he had failed to move quickly enough to take advantage of the peasant resentment that had built up in Battambang and as a result the rebellion had had to be called off because communist networks in the rest of the country were not yet ready to follow.

  Some time in the late spring of 1967, probably at the beginning of June, the four Standing Committee members, Sâr, Nuon Chea, So Phim and Ieng Sary, met at Office 100 and agreed that a fresh attempt should be made to launch a general uprising, this time on a nation-wide basis, the following winter. Sary was appointed North-Eastern Zone Secretary and despatched to Ratanakiri to organise the new Central Committee HQ. That autumn, after four years on the Vietnamese border, Office 100 was finally dissolved. Some of its staff were transferred to other zones, others to the new base in the north. Soon afterwards Sâr wrote to the Chinese Party Central Committee: