Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  Another important figure had also been in Phnom Penh that day: Sâr’s wife, Khieu Ponnary, was staying in another safe house in the city, on her way from Ratanakiri to Mok’s headquarters at Mount Aural, when the raids occurred. She, too, evaded capture.

  The crackdown that autumn did not wipe out the city network. Vorn Vet patiently rebuilt his smashed ‘strings’. Nuon Chea, the opaque master of the underground, undetected by the authorities, continued to devote himself to what was now his main task — using his cover as a commercial traveller to send rifles, grenades and ammunition to the rebels in the bush.

  None the less, it showed how far the rebellion had extended its tentacles into the capital itself and offered fresh proof, if proof were needed, of how indispensable Lon Nol had become. In December 1968 he was named acting Prime Minister, standing in for the ailing Penn Nouth. Seven months later he was still serving in that post while concurrently Defence Minister and Chief of the General Staff. It was the first time the Prince had allowed anyone to combine the top military and civil offices. He had no choice.

  Sihanouk was also forced to retreat over economic policy. That same December he announced that the programme of nationalisations and state control of foreign trade, launched five years earlier, would be modified to give more scope to private enterprise and that the government would accept foreign aid ‘no matter where it comes from’. The rationale was the same as had led him to restore diplomatic relations with the US. To arm itself against a potentially unified, communist-ruled Vietnam, Cambodia needed to strengthen its ties with the West. That meant reorientating its economy along capitalist lines and joining the International Monetary Fund and other Western-run aid institutions.

  To Cambodian right-wingers, here was yet another case of the Prince reversing himself after belatedly discovering that his earlier policies had been wrong.

  Once more, Sihanouk was disarmed.

  With no left wing to fall back on, he had to confront his critics himself. The following spring, for the first time, parliament defied his authority by refusing to bury a corruption inquiry involving one of his cronies. The resulting row lasted three months and ended only after the Prince had been forced into an unprecedented public climb-down, an episode which left him smarting. By then another crisis was brewing. To try to balance the budget, Sihanouk had granted, for an annual fee of 80 million francs — a huge sum at that time, equivalent to a third of all Cambodia’s foreign aid — licences for two casinos. Financially they were an immense success. Socially they were a disaster. Phnom Penh was soon alive with stories of people committing suicide after losing their life-savings. Business activity slumped as factory owners, government officials, shopkeepers and labourers spent their days and nights courting ruin at the betting tables. To right wing MPs like Sim Var and Douc Rasy, it was the perfect symbol of the bankruptcy of Sihanouk’s regime.

  In July 1969, the Prince decided that Lon Nol’s confirmation as Premier could no longer be delayed. The US chargé d’affaires, Mike Rives, was due to arrive the following month. If Cambodia wanted the Americans to take it seriously, it could not continue indefinitely under a caretaker government. Lon Nol, Sihanouk believed, was personally loyal to him — which men like Sim Var were not — and he commanded the support of the Right. In any case, there was no alternative. The Khmer Rouge threat showed no sign of receding, and the Vietnamese were finally beginning to give their Khmer allies small quantities of arms. Moreover, their own forces in Cambodia had undergone a massive expansion, growing from 6,000 in mid-1968 to an estimated 30,000 a year later.* Nor were they now confined to the sanctuaries. The secret ‘Menu’ bombings had not only failed in their primary mission — neither COSVN headquarters nor the Viet Cong bases had been destroyed — but had driven the Vietnamese communists further and further into the Cambodian interior.

  One may legitimately wonder whether, behind the rhetoric, Nixon’s objective all along was not to spread the war to Cambodia in order to divert attention from the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam. Certainly it worked out that way. One senior American general said later that the US aim in Cambodia was to mount ‘a holding action. You know . . . the troika’s going down the road and the wolves are closing in, and so you throw them something off and let them chew it.’ By mid-1969 Cambodia was being sucked into a conflict it had done everything to avoid, and which, until Nixon’s election, Sihanouk’s see-saw diplomacy had managed to keep at arm’s length.

  Nowhere were these developments watched more closely than in Beijing and at Sâr’s headquarters at K-5.

  That spring Zhou Enlai told the North Vietnamese Premier, Pham Van Dong, that China was ‘not [too] optimistic’ about the situation in Cambodia. The parallel with Sukarno had not escaped the Chinese leaders, any more than it had Sihanouk himself. They did not rule out the possibility of an American-backed military coup.

  By the middle of 1969, the latent conflict between Sihanouk and the Sangkum right wing was also exercising Sâr. But where the Chinese leaders saw a threat to the flow of arms to the Viet Cong, Sâr saw an opportunity the Khmer communists could exploit. In July, Nuon Chea travelled secretly to Ratanakiri for an enlarged meeting of the CPK Standing Committee, which approved a major change of political line. For the previous three years, the CPK had targeted Sihanouk as the chief symbol of the ‘reactionary, monarchical system’ it wanted to overthrow. Henceforth, the Standing Committee resolved, the Party’s main line of attack should be directed against Lon Nol and the pro-American right. This did not necessarily mean, as Sâr and other communist leaders later claimed, that they had ‘foreseen’ that a coup was imminent. But certainly they understood sooner than most that a new and fundamental fault-line had developed in Khmer politics. The Party’s prime task, Sâr now argued, was to isolate the rightists and mobilise ‘all forces capable of being mobilised’ into a united front against them. Consequently, anti-Sihanouk propaganda was to cease.

  To underline the importance of the change, the Standing Committee censured Khieu Samphân, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim, who had recently written a tract denouncing the Prince, for acting ‘counter to the Party’s line on the National United Front’. Theoretically this was justified because the 1960 Party Programme mentioned the need for front work ‘to win over intermediate forces’. But until then the stress had been on ‘quality not quantity’, on revolutionary purity rather than gaining dubious allies. After mid-1969, the Party itself remained as secretive and puritan as ever, but its tactics changed.

  The resolution called for renewed stress on political struggle in areas such as the North-East, the Cardamoms and Mount Aural, where the movement enjoyed the protection of a substantial Vietnamese presence and had the possibility of establishing ‘revolutionary bases’. The prime task of the guerrilla forces in those regions, it said, was to protect the bases and the civilian population which lived there. They were to serve as a springboard for resistance in the event of a coup, and as prototypal liberated zones, a pole of attraction for urban sympathisers repelled by the rise of the Right.

  Efforts were also made to win over the former Khmer Viet Minh who had settled in North Vietnam after the Geneva accords. In August, Sâr despatched Keo Meas, who had spent the spring in Beijing undergoing medical treatment, to act as the CPK’s unofficial representative in Hanoi. His brief was to work with Son Ngoc Minh, and ‘to try, step by step, to take over the political education of the regroupees . . . [but] to do so secretly, not openly’. It was an all but impossible task. Minh was out of touch with events at home and deeply suspicious of the younger men who had supplanted him. With Vietnamese support, he used his rank as a Central Committee member and Secretary of the Hanoi branch of the Party to ensure that Meas’s contacts with the exiles were kept to a minimum.

  That same month, as Nuon Chea was making his way back from K-5 to inform the Zone committees of the new strategy, Lon Nol was sworn in as Prime Minister of a ‘Government of Rescue and National Salvation’, more openly pro-American and more right-wing than any admi
nistration Cambodia had known before. Sihanouk announced that the new Prime Minister had carte blanche to take whatever measures he thought necessary to revive the flagging economy and end the Khmer Rouge rebellion, the only proviso being that the policies of neutralism and non-alignment must remain intact. In fact, their relations were marked from the start by a climate of mistrust, which Lon Nol did nothing to diminish by appointing the Prince’s arch-enemy, Sirik Matak, as his deputy.

  Nol might be loyal to the Throne, but he had been burned by Sihanouk’s duplicity during his previous stint as Prime Minister in 1966. Sirik Matak, a man of sterner stuff than his Prime Minister, was determined to prevent a repetition. This time the government insisted on governing. Within weeks, diplomats were reporting open conflict between the two sides. The Prince was increasingly restricted to his constitutional role. He found it intolerable.

  ‘Formerly everything came down from Sihanouk,’ commented the French chargé d’affaires, Robert Mazeyrac. ‘Today, Cambodia’s domestic policy is almost entirely out of his hands.’ In October the Prince branded the National Assembly ‘a gang of evildoers, traitors and criminals’, refused to attend the state opening of parliament and issued a decree banning MPs from attending all official ceremonies he presided over ‘from now until the end of my life’. The bluster had no effect. Nor did his jibes, a few days later, at ‘the headless government’ of Lon Nol (who had left for medical treatment in Switzerland), which was not ‘a government of rescue’ but ‘a government of drowning’. By the end of the year, there was a perfect stalemate. Government and parliament stood together. Sihanouk’s relations with both were execrable. No one, neither Lon Nol, nor Sirik Matak, nor even the Prince himself, could see how it would end.

  For Sâr, too, the last months of 1969 had been frustrating, if less dramatic. The rebellion was slowly gathering strength and the new ‘united front’ strategy was beginning to bear fruit. CPK ‘armed propaganda teams’, closely modelled on those the Viet Minh had brought to Cambodia in the early 1950s, were gradually building support in the villages. But the insurgents were still extremely short of weapons, and without external support, it looked as though the current stand-off — in which neither side had the strength to inflict decisive damage on the other — would continue indefinitely.

  In November, Sâr, accompanied by Khieu Ponnary, his assistant, Pâng, and two bodyguards, set out once again on foot up the Ho Chi Minh Trail to Hanoi, to try to persuade Le Duan and Pham Van Dong that the time had finally come for the Vietnamese communists to aid the rebellion directly.

  The moment was ill-chosen. Sihanouk himself had travelled to Hanoi two months before to attend the funeral of Ho Chi Minh and had made clear to the Vietnamese leaders that if they wanted to keep Cambodia neutral’ and open to the transit of supplies to the Viet Cong, they would have to show support for him. Sâr’s importunities got nowhere. Le Duan urged him to call off the rebellion altogether and revert to political struggle. ‘The talks took place in a very tense atmosphere,’ Sâr wrote later. ‘The contradiction between [us] was unbridgeable.’ There were differences on other issues, too. When the Vietnamese suggested that he travel on to Moscow, he said he did not wish to become involved in the Sino-Soviet dispute. When, in turn, he proposed visiting Pyongyang, the Vietnamese replied, mendaciously, as he learnt later, that the Korean Party leaders were ‘not ready to receive him’. His request to visit the Pathet Lao was likewise deflected. By the time he flew to Beijing in January, nothing had been resolved and no progress made on any of the issues he had discussed.

  Sihanouk was equally unsuccessful in extricating himself from his dispute with Lon Nol. At one point, according to his cousin, Prince Sisowath Entaravong, he considered having himself crowned King again, but was dissuaded by his mother, Queen Kossamak, who told him he would look ridiculous after his repeated promises never again to wear the crown. Then, at the end of December, he ordered four government ministers, all long-time Sihanouk loyalists, to submit their resignations in the hope of triggering a cabinet crisis. The four complied. But no crisis ensued. A few days later, in a black depression, Sihanouk retired to the French hospital in Phnom Penh, suffering from nervous exhaustion. On January 6 1970, with only a few hours’ warning to his wife and family and none at all to the government or the diplomatic corps, the Head of State flew out to France for a much-delayed rest-cure at a clinic in the Mediterranean town of Grasse.

  It was three years, almost to the day, since he had left, in similar circumstances, during Lon Nol’s first premiership. On that occasion, his absence had helped to unblock another difficult situation. This time, with Sirik Matak in charge and Lon Nol convalescing in Europe, the Prince felt that by ‘standing back at a distance’, he would give his troublesome cousin enough rope to hang himself. As the new decade began, for Sihanouk, as for Sâr, everything was still to play for.

  6

  The Sudden Death of Reason

  UNTIL THE SPRING of 1970, nothing that Saloth Sâr had done or permitted to be done by the Party he led gave any intimation of the abominations that would follow.

  To all appearances, he was still the same soft-spoken, smiling, amiable man who, as a student in Paris, was remembered for his sense of fun and good companionship; who later, as a teacher in Phnom Penh, had been adored by his pupils; and who finally, as a communist, was valued for his ability to bring together different tendencies and groups. His revolutionary alias in the 1960s reflected his reputation. He called himself Pouk, meaning ‘mattress’, because his role was to soften conflicts.

  True, under his leadership the Cambodian Communist Party had started a guerrilla war against Sihanouk. But that was a decision which, to a great extent, had been forced on him. As the portly young banker Pok Deuskomar had explained two years earlier, shortly before setting out for the maquis: ‘there are no legal avenues of struggle left to us, so we have to take up arms.’ By the late 1960s, Sihanouk’s inability to tolerate criticism or even argument, his conviction that no one knew better than he on any conceivable subject, had killed political debate in Cambodia. Those who might have formed a constructive opposition had been silenced or forced to flee. In a deeply corrupt state, ruled by an autocrat and racked by social and economic injustice, armed rebellion had become not just the natural but the inevitable choice of any idealistic young man or woman committed to the country’s good. Moreover, the rebellion was not, in the early stages, markedly different from similar conflicts elsewhere. Village headmen and others who collaborated with the government were brought before mass meetings and publicly executed. But the same thing was happening in neighbouring Vietnam and on a far larger scale. There were acts of petty banditry which the government assimilated to terrorism — an attack on a bus in Koh Kong in which five people died; and random shootings near Phnom Penh during the New Year holiday — but nothing remotely comparable with terrorist incidents in South Vietnam or even with the train massacre perpetrated by the Khmer Viet Minh in 1954. Most rebel attacks were carefully targeted to serve political or military goals and the groups involved were so small that ‘excesses’ were rare. The atrocities, in these first years of the war, were the work of government troops.

  That is not to say that the forces which would give the Khmer Rouge revolution its peculiarly malignant form were not already at work. In retrospect it is clear that the ground had been prepared, the seeds of the future polity were already sown. But at the time no one foresaw — not the Vietnamese, not the intellectuals who flocked to the CPK cause, not even Sâr himself — the poisoned harvest that would follow. Questioned about the way the communist guerrillas treated their opponents, one of Sâr’s bodyguards, who had fought in Ratanakiri, responded thirty years later:

  You’re asking me if we took prisoners? No . . . and on our own side we had orders not to allow ourselves to be taken alive. If we captured a villager, and it was someone from the area, we sent him back home. But if we caught a government soldier, we killed him. There wasn’t any explicit guideline to that effect
, but everyone understood it was what we should do. It was a struggle without pity. We had to draw a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. That was the guiding principle.

  That was also how the government troops acted. They, too, took few prisoners. But the justification of the communists — ‘drawing a clear line of demarcation’ — raised different issues. Government forces killed their prisoners because Sihanouk had ordered exemplary repression. The Khmers Rouges did so because ‘enemies’ were defined as irredeemably hostile. This was not yet an article of faith: there were cases in the early 1970s of Khmers Rouges releasing their prisoners in the hope that they would mend their ways. But the Maoist approach, instrumental in achieving victory in the Chinese civil war, that enemy prisoners could and should be won over to fight for the communist cause, did not come naturally to Cambodians. In the Confucian cultures of China and Vietnam, men are, in theory, always capable of being reformed. In Khmer culture they are not. The ‘line of demarcation’ is absolute. Just as Cambodians are what they are because they are not Vietnamese or Thais, just as the village exists in opposition to the forest and what is civilised in opposition to what is wild — so those beyond the ‘line’ are irretrievably divided from those within. Their existence has no value.

  This attitude informs much Khmer thought and behaviour, but its application depends on circumstances. Eventually, it would come to dominate every aspect of CPK policy and practice. But not in the spring of 1970. The tragedy that was about to unfold did not have to happen.

  The same was true of other facets of the emergent Khmer Rouge movement.

  Sâr’s insistence that the revolution be led by an alliance of peasants and intellectuals was, in orthodox Marxist terms, a recipe for extremism. Both classes, according to Marx — and to Mao — had the characteristics of the petty bourgeoisie: individualism, volatility, indiscipline and a tendency to metaphysics and anarchism. They would behave as revolutionaries only if led by the proletariat. But extremism was a risk, not a certainty. It was not set in concrete that a revolution led by intellectuals and peasants had to be a blood bath.