Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  The problem was that neither Sâr nor Pham Van Dong nor Zhou was yet sure that Sihanouk could be relied on. ‘We should support [him] for the time being and see how he will act,’ the Chinese Premier said. ‘We will see whether he really wants to establish a united front against the US . . . Because of the circumstances he may change his position.’ All three, therefore, kept their options open. China and Vietnam maintained contact with the new authorities in Phnom Penh in the faint hope of preserving the Viet Cong supply line through Kompong Som. And Pham Van Dong gave the Prince a formal assurance, ‘on oath’, as he put it, in Zhou Enlai’s presence, that Vietnam would respect the ‘independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity’ of Cambodia ‘within its present borders’.

  Two days later, on March 23, Sihanouk announced that he was forming a political movement to be called the National United Front of Kampuchea, known by its French acronym, FUNK, and appealed to his compatriots to launch a campaign of guerrilla attacks and civil disobedience against the Lon Nol government. Those with ‘the necessary courage and patriotic spirit’ would receive arms and military training — the former (although he did not say so) to be provided by China, the latter by North Vietnam — and as soon as practicable a National Liberation Army would be formed, which would fight under the orders of a Cambodian Royal Government of National Union (GRUNC).* The political complexion of the new movement was not explicitly spelt out, but the statement stressed the role of ‘the progressive, industrious and pure working people’; promised ‘social justice, equality and fraternity among Khmers’; underlined the solidarity of ‘our three peoples, the Khmers, Vietnamese and Laotians’, and claimed the ‘complete support’ of ‘anti-imperialist countries and peoples, near and far’.

  As the language indicated, the ‘Appeal of March 23’, which Sihanouk liked to compare with De Gaulle’s appeal to the French in 1940 to resist Nazi Germany, was not all his own work. A draft had been given to Zhou Enlai, who in turn had shown it to Sâr. He had proposed certain changes, the main one being to excise all references to socialism. During the meeting the Chinese Premier told him: ‘The Cambodian communists should think about the overall situation of the country, and not dwell on past quarrels. Prince Sihanouk is a patriot and his international reputation is high . . . [You] should co-operate to form a joint government against the common enemy.’ Sâr needed no persuading. But instead of agreeing to meet the Prince, as Zhou had expected, he drafted a message of support for the Front over the signatures of the men the Americans called the ‘three Ghosts’, Khieu Samphân, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim, who most Cambodians believed had been killed on Sihanouk’s orders three years earlier. It was delivered on March 26 and purported to have been sent from a resistance base inside Cambodia. Sihanouk was never told of Sâr’s presence in Beijing, and when it was publicly confirmed eight years later he refused to believe it.

  The supposed ‘message from the maquis’ was an astute move. By presenting Khieu Samphân and his colleagues as the principal Khmer Rouge figures (as Sihanouk himself had always believed) the secrecy surrounding the CPK leadership and the Party’s existence was preserved. All three men were widely respected for their probity and courage. In terms of image, Sâr could hardly have done better.

  The resistance was Cambodian, patriotic and led by a Khmer king. Lon Nol’s claims that it was ‘communist’ and ‘controlled by the Vietnamese’ faced an uphill task.

  Sihanouk’s appeal amounted to a declaration of war. Every Khmer was now forced to choose sides. In China, the Prince was joined by the few Cambodian ambassadors who had remained loyal to him, including Sarin Chhak from Cairo, Huot Sambath from the United Nations and Chan Yourann from Dakar; by Chau Seng, his former minister and gifted bad boy of Phnom Penh’s ‘drawing-room Left’; and by Thiounn Mumm and a group of colleagues from the Parisian Cercle Marxiste. For the next year, they and another former cabinet member, Keat Chhon, formed the administrative backbone of Sihanouk’s government-in-exile.

  Political matters remained under the watchful eye of the Chinese. They alone, in that first year, were in contact with the CPK leaders inside Cambodia. It was they who, on April 24 and 25, organised an Indochinese summit between Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam — officially held in the jungle ‘on the border of China and Vietnam’ but actually at a luxurious hot springs resort in the suburbs of Canton — to demonstrate the newfound solidarity of the Indochinese peoples.* It was the Chinese, too, who told Sihanouk at the beginning of May that it was time to form a government; and Vice-Foreign Minister Han Nianlong who summoned Thiounn Mumm to draft its political programme. This was a moderate, nationalist document which, even more than Sihanouk’s appeal in March, eschewed communist goals, and was deliberately designed to win the widest possible support both inside and outside Cambodia. This time there was no input from ‘the interior’. Mumm remembered receiving only a single message, passed on by the Chinese, requesting that half the posts in the new government be given, notionally at least, to cadres inside Cambodia.†

  The GRUNC was formally proclaimed on May 5 and immediately recognised by China, North Korea and Vietnam, as well as by Cuba and a handful of other third-world states. It was housed in the Youyi binguan (Friendship Hostel), a residential and office complex in north-western Beijing originally built for Soviet aid personnel in the 1950s. Sihanouk lived in the former French Legation, a turn-of-the-century mansion set in formal gardens, surrounded by high walls, in the heart of the city’s government quarter. The Chinese paid all costs. Sihanouk and his suite were not used to penny-pinching. Zhou Enlai had asked Thiounn Mumm to work out a suitable budget. The figure he came up with was five million dollars a year. ‘Zhou said “No”,’ Mumm remembered. ‘He doubled it. We were to use half ourselves. The other half was to be sent to the interior.’

  There were practical reasons for this division of funds. The Khmers Rouges acquired part of their weaponry from corrupt officers in Lon Nol’s army who would sell to anyone prepared to pay them in hard currency. Each year, for that purpose, five million dollars in notes was wrapped in layers of waterproof paper, packed in rucksacks, and carried down the Ho Chi Minh Trail by Khmer porters, usually students or returnees, who were told they were transporting ‘secret documents’. But the equality of treatment between Sihanouk and the Khmers Rouges was also a reminder to both sides that China considered them to be playing equally valuable, but quite separate, roles. With hindsight, it was the separation that was most striking. Non-ruling communist parties always keep their distance from the public front organisations they manipulate behind the scenes. The relationship between the communist COSVN and the non-Party NLF was a typical example of the genre. But in the Cambodian case, there was not even manipulation. Once Sihanouk had accepted the principle of co-operating with the Khmers Rouges, he was free to lead the diplomatic battle for international recognition as he thought fit. Sâr had the same liberty to conduct policy at home. Each had a distinct agenda. Sihanouk wanted vengeance. The Khmers Rouges needed his name. It was not even a marriage of convenience. They shared different beds with different dreams.

  At the beginning of April 1970, Sâr flew back to Hanoi, where he and Khieu Ponnary were feted by Le Duan, Pham Van Dong, Vo Nguyen Giap and other VWP Politburo members. Before they left on the long trek back down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Le Duan proposed a meeting to discuss military co-operation.

  In Sâr’s absence, Nuon Chea — who, on the day the coup occurred, had been with So Phim at Krâbao attending a meeting of Eastern Zone CPK officials — had given instructions that, wherever possible, the Khmer Rouge ‘armed propaganda groups’ working in the countryside should seize control of village, commune and district administrations. A week later, after Sihanouk’s appeal, Vietnamese officials approached him with a proposal for joint military action. Nuon initially demurred, but when the Vietnamese made clear that, in their own interests, they intended to secure their sanctuaries in Cambodia regardless of Khmer views, he agreed in principle that the two forces should co-operate. How
ever, Nuon did not commit himself on details. Instead he sent a message to Hanoi, explaining what was being proposed, to await Sâr’s arrival. Now Le Duan wanted to know what were the CPK’s intentions.

  It was, by Sâr’s account, a rather awkward discussion. The Vietnamese began by offering 5,000 rifles to equip Khmer Rouge units, which the Cambodians accepted. But then Le Duan proposed setting up mixed commands. To Sâr, that brought back memories of the 1950s when Khmer ‘commanders’ had been assisted by Vietnamese ‘deputies’ who had taken all the decisions. The Cambodians would once again be under Vietnamese tutelage. Sâr took refuge in a syllogism, saying he had no mandate from the CPK Central Committee to discuss the issue. But his ‘personal view’, he added, was that it would be counter-productive: the ‘experience of past struggles’ had shown that mixed commands were a source of conflict; and politically it would give the impression that the Cambodian resistance was dependent on Vietnam, which neither Sihanouk nor the Khmer people would find acceptable. Le Duan took the point.

  Other, more fundamental, problems were less easily resolved.

  Even before Sihanouk’s appeal, the Vietnamese had drawn up plans for an offensive against Lon Nol’s forces if, as they expected, negotiations with the new government failed. On March 19, the day after the coup, without waiting to see what happened in Phnom Penh, COSVN moved to a pre-prepared base in the Prek Prâsâp district of Kratie. Soon after this, the Vietnamese leaders concluded that Lon Nol and Sirik Matak had accepted a Faustian pact to enter the war on the American side in return for US aid and that continued contacts would achieve nothing. On March 27, the last Vietnamese diplomats in Cambodia were flown out to Hanoi.

  Two days later the 40,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops in Cambodia, hastily reinforced by additional units from the communist 5 th, 7th and 9th divisions, launched co-ordinated attacks against government positions. On April 20, Viet Cong units came within fifteen miles of Phnom Penh before being beaten back. By the end of the month, they had occupied most of Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri, parts of Stung Treng and Kratie and a swathe of territory stretching through six other provinces, from Kompong Cham to Kampot.

  At that point President Nixon announced that the US and South Vietnam would launch what was officially termed ‘a limited incursion’. For the next two months, 30,000 Americans and more than 40,000 South Vietnamese swept through Svay Rieng and Kompong Cham ostensibly seeking the elusive, and long since departed, COSVN headquarters, but actually trying to keep Lon Nol’s flailing government afloat.

  There were short-term benefits. The US forces and their allies seized mountains of communist weaponry and equipment and killed large numbers of Viet Cong. But the long-term effects were disastrous. The invasion ratcheted up still further domestic US opposition to the Vietnam War and triggered the first of a long series of congressional amendments, restricting the US government’s freedom of military action. For Lon Nol, whom the White House had omitted to consult or even inform, it destroyed the government’s case against Sihanouk: there was no point telling Cambodians that the Prince was a lackey of the hated Vietnamese if Lon Nol’s own regime was being propped up by Saigon. But worst of all, the offensive was militarily counter-productive. To silence criticism at home, Nixon had had to promise that all US units would be pulled out by the end of June and that the invasion force would not penetrate more than twenty-one miles into Cambodian territory. The effect was to complete what the ‘Menu’ bombings had started: the Vietnamese communists were spread all over Cambodia.

  For Sâr and his colleagues, this posed a real dilemma. On the one hand, the more territory the Vietnamese seized, the more recruits there would be for the resistance army and the bigger the ‘liberated zones’ for the Khmers Rouges to administer. On the other hand, the CPK leaders were acutely aware of the danger of going too fast. ‘They told us, in effect,’ a Vietnamese historian wrote later: ‘If you, our brothers, help us to do everything too quickly, we won’t be able to keep up with you, and then, the moment you leave, we will have nothing.’

  When Sâr had met Le Duan in Hanoi, he had made clear that the Cambodians needed weapons, not troops: they had to build up their own armed forces, not rely on Vietnam’s. The implication, which he did not spell out, was that the Khmers Rouges sought a protracted war, not a speedy victory.

  Khieu Samphân argued later that the coup and its aftermath vindicated Sâr’s decision in the mid-1960s to initiate an armed struggle, because it meant that in 1970 a rudimentary Khmer Rouge guerrilla force was already in existence. But it was only two to three thousand strong, outnumbered twenty to one by its Vietnamese brothers-in-arms. The result was that, except in the North-East, where a local Khmer Rouge administration was already in place, the Vietnamese brought with them administrative offices, hospitals, military and political training schools, and all the paraphernalia of an occupying force. In Takeo province, a local cadre remembered:

  Some Vietnamese came up from Vietnam to organise the village administration . . . They [called it] a mixed Khmer—Viet Cong administration, but it was actually run by the Viet Cong. For instance, they appointed a Khmer commune chief. But in practice he answered to a Viet Cong official at the same level. It was like a colonial system. They appointed Khmer officials, but they were under Vietnamese supervision.

  This was not an isolated case, it was official COSVN policy. Sâr complained afterwards that the Viet Cong had set up a ‘parallel state power’ in the ‘liberated zones’ and established their own guerrilla detachments, independent of the Khmer Rouge command structure, ‘without the CPK Central Committee’s knowledge’. In fact, the Cambodian leaders knew very well what the Vietnamese were doing. They did not like it, but there was no choice. In most of Cambodia, the Khmers Rouges had neither cadres to administer the newly gained territories nor soldiers to defend them.

  Nevertheless it stuck in their gullets to see Angkor Wat, the very symbol of Khmer sovereignty, which fell to the resistance in May, occupied not by their own troops but by the Viet Cong.

  The Vietnamese communists understood that. Khmer susceptibility was not new. In terms almost identical to those Nguyen Thanh Son had used in the early 1950s, COSVN urged its cadres to ‘treat Cambodians as equals’ and ‘be patient in providing help for their movement . . . Eliminate the thought that we are “big country” and that [they] are poor and weak.’ But alongside the protestations of good faith, the same old condescension was in evidence: ‘Although the Cambodian revolutionaries are enthusiastic, they are incapable’, another document stated. ‘The Cambodian revolution is weak and its organisation loose. We have to strengthen it.’ It was all too true. But to Sâr, these were the honeyed words of Vietnamese duplicity.

  The Cambodians were torn between the fear that their Vietnamese allies would withdraw as soon as the war ended, leaving them high and dry, as had happened in 1954, and the even greater fear that they would stay. The ancestral dread of Vietnamese domination, shared by Sihanouk and Lon Nol, emerged in 1970 as one of the driving forces of CPK policy. But for the communists the threat came not from enemies but from friends, not from adversaries but from allies — which was far more insidious.

  From the outset, the civil war in Cambodia was marked by savagery. A week after the coup, peasant demonstrations broke out in Kompong Cham and a number of local officials were beaten to death. Troops opened fire to disperse rioting crowds. Next day, March 26, a mob sacked the governor’s mansion and the courthouse. Radio Phnom Penh described it as ‘a provocation by people with a Viet Cong mentality’, which raised the tension another notch. At dusk, two local MPs arrived from Phnom Penh to try to mediate. They were set upon and killed. Their livers were then cut out and borne in triumph to a local restaurateur who was ordered to cook them. Afterwards pieces were handed out to the crowd. The same evening Lon Nol’s half-brother, Nil, was slain in similar circumstances at a nearby rubber plantation. His liver, too, was cooked and eaten.

  That night about a thousand people from Kompong Cham set ou
t in lorries and buses for Phnom Penh, bearing portraits of Sihanouk. At the city outskirts they were joined by another column from Siem Reap. Again troops opened fire to drive them back. Some 10,000 peasants, following on foot, then sacked the government offices at Skoun. This time the army used heavy weaponry, killing and wounding about sixty people. At the weekend, another two hundred died when troops with tanks and armoured cars broke up protest marches in Takeo and Prey Veng.

  In the provinces, the repression had predictable results. ‘I ran away with my teachers and fellow-students,’ one young demonstrator recalled. ‘Fifty or sixty of us met up [in the jungle] . . . We hated the troops for what they had done and we wanted to fight back.’ Sihanouk’s appeal of March 23 prompted a wave of desertions from the army, most notably in Kratie, where the local commander sent all his men home and handed control of the region to the resistance. Viet Cong propagandists played recordings of the Prince’s broadcast in the villages. To the peasants, the coup was sacrilege.

  In Phnom Penh the reaction was quite different.

  The middle classes heaved a sigh of relief that at last they were rid of the playboy Prince with ‘his damn film shows’, as one young man put it, ‘and endless radio speeches in that singsong voice’.

  For them, too, the point of reference was the French Revolution, with Sihanouk in the role of Louis XVI. But their model was the revolution of Mirabeau in 1789, when the bourgeoisie seized power, not that of Robespierre and Saint-Just. At heart, in 1970, Cambodia remained a feudal country, and the coup was seen in feudal terms. In the first months, moreover, it was middle-class youths who provided the core of the regime’s support. After a couple of days’ military training at the city’s golf course, they were bussed down towards the border to face the Viet Cong. ‘Every day they could be seen setting out,’ one observer wrote, ‘hanging on the sides of Coca-Cola trucks or brightly painted buses, wearing shower clogs or sandals, shorts or blue jeans, parts of very old French uniforms or oversized American fatigues.’ They carried sticks and cardboard suitcases, and occasionally a rifle.