Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  When cannon fodder was found to be no defence against the hereditary enemy, Lon Nol’s government vented its fury on Vietnamese civilians. A curfew was declared — for Vietnamese only — and, ‘for their own safety’, families were herded into makeshift camps. Unlike the pre-coup demonstrations, in which Vietnamese had lost property but no one had been hurt or killed, this time there were full-scale pogroms. In the space of a single morning, four hundred bodies, with gunshot wounds and hands bound behind their backs, were counted floating down the Mekong river at the ferry point of Neak Luong, just below Phnom Penh. That same day, April 10, at Prasaut, in the Parrot’s Beak, camp inmates were told of an imminent Viet Cong attack and ordered to flee. As they ran, Cambodian guards opened fire with machine-guns. At least 3,000 people, all males over the age of fifteen, were rounded up in Vietnamese villages in the suburbs north of Phnom Penh, taken downriver and shot. The women left behind were raped. A few days later, Vietnamese ‘refugees’ being housed at a primary school in Takeo province met a similar fate. Mark Frankland of the London Observer witnessed the aftermath:

  It looked and smelt like a slaughterhouse . . . The cement floor was covered with pools of coagulated blood. Three corpses covered with bloody clothing were in one corner. About 40 Vietnamese men and boys lay or squatted on the far side of the classroom, as far as possible from the several hundred Cambodian soldiers milling around in the open . . . It was difficult to see exactly how many were wounded since everyone had been splattered with blood. One man . . . had stuffed clothes into an open stomach wound . . . The inside of the classroom’s single wall was peppered with bullet holes, but not the outside.

  The government denied point-blank that any massacres had taken place. Those who died, officials said, were the victims of cross-fire during attacks by the Viet Cong. It was an archetypal Khmer reaction. In a culture where people go to immense lengths to avoid causing others loss of face — where a man’s instinctive reaction in the face of the slightest conflict is to pull back, be it at the cost of sacrificing his own interests — embarrassing questions are simply not asked. If uncouth Westerners insist on doing so, they should not be surprised when they are told lies. In Khmer terms, they have put their interlocutor in a situation from which a lie provides the only possible way out.*

  The corollary of this visceral desire to avoid confrontation at all costs is that debate and argument do not function as a means of resolving differences. Between the extremes of acquiescence and violence there is no middle ground. The French archaeologist Bernard-Philippe Groslier, who spent his life studying Angkor, wrote of Cambodia that ‘beneath a carefree surface there slumber savage forces and disconcerting cruelties which may blaze up in outbreaks of passionate brutality’. Sihanouk himself acknowledged that ‘the Khmers can be violent, their gentleness and good fellowship can hide terrible explosions’. The one is the inescapable complement of the other. When the strains and pressures of existence reach a point where there is no longer the possibility of graceful withdrawal, when the smiling facade cracks, violence — ‘running amok’, as Sihanouk put it — becomes the only alternative. It is not an aberration. It is an intrinsic part of Khmer behaviour — the same reflex that leads a kindly middle-aged woman to pour nitric acid over the body of a teenage girl who has become a rival for her husband’s affections or a villager to tear out another man’s liver. In normal times, the line of fracture remains hidden. Once crossed, it is the signal for appalling acts of inhumanity undertaken without remorse.

  In 1970, all of Cambodia, city and countryside, prince and peasant, crossed that line.

  Eight weeks after the coup, Lon Nol made a radio broadcast announcing the start of a chiliastic religious war against the Vietnamese communists. They were ‘the enemies of Buddha’, he declared. All Vietnamese, communist or not, must leave the country and return ‘home’. The pogroms, which Lon Nol had halted after horrified protests abroad, not least from his South Vietnamese allies, were now followed by mass deportations. Over the next year, 250,000 Vietnamese residents of Cambodia were forced to abandon their homes and belongings — ‘to be taken care of by their neighbours’, as the government cynically put it — and placed in concentration camps pending their expulsion. And still the violence did not stop. In May, a Khmer general took about a hundred camp inmates, including women and children, to Khieu Samphân’ sold constituency of Saang. There he forced them to march, holding white flags, towards Viet Cong positions, using megaphones to urge the communists to surrender while acting as a human shield for the Cambodian soldiers behind. The Viet Cong were unimpressed. They opened up with machine-guns and the ‘new tactic of . . . psychological warfare’, as the general had explained it, collapsed in a bloody heap. Christian churches, frequented mainly by Vietnamese converts, were bombed by the Cambodian air force on the grounds that they might provide refuge for communist guerrillas.

  There was a price to be paid for this policy of hate. The South Vietnamese troops who had flooded across the border in April were ill-disciplined even in their own country. In Cambodia they had a massacre of their compatriots to avenge. American forces pulled back as planned by late June. The South Vietnamese stayed on to terrorise the countryside — raping Khmer women, stealing cattle, pillaging homes. The result was a recruiting opportunity made in heaven for the Khmers Rouges. The Viet Cong had been exemplary guests, leaving payment for anything they took and going to enormous lengths to avoid offending against Khmer customs. Lon Nol’s South Vietnamese allies were bandits. Before long, tens of thousands of villagers voted with their feet, swelling the population under communist control and sending their sons to join the resistance army.

  The pogroms were not the regime’s only self-inflicted wound.

  In April, Lon Nol had announced that the monarchy would be abolished. ‘An oracle has predicted,’ he said, ‘that everybody will enjoy equal rights . . . The bad king will flee, a comet will appear . . . and Cambodia will become a republic.’ To many peasants that meant nothing less than the end of the world as they knew it. ‘How shall we tend our rice-paddies, now that the King is not here to make it rain?’ Father Ponchaud, the Catholic missionary, was asked. Sihanouk, despite his abdication, was the ‘Master of Life’, the Brahmanic overlord whose symbolic power held the Khmer nation together. To a medieval people, his overthrow was a cosmic event. Had a new king been crowned, as Prince Sirik Matak wished, the outcome might have been different. But Lon Ncl, encouraged by his younger brother, Sâr’s old schoolmate Lon Non, and by a group of intellectuals led by the anti-monarchist Keng Vannsak, decided that the regeneration of Buddhism required a complete break wi:h the past. In this he was not wrong: many of the country’s ills stemmed from the feudal system which the monarchy perpetuated. But in practice Cambodia was no more ready for republican democracy than England under Henry the Eighth. The proclamation of the Khmer Republic was a monumental strategic error, definitively alienating the rural population.

  The slide over the edge of reason, into the abyss, was not confined to the regime in Phnom Penh. If, to Lon Nol’s government, all Vietnamese were communists, to the Khmers Rouges all foreigners were enemies. By the end of April, twenty-six Western journalists had ‘gone missing’ in Cambodia. Those fortunate enough to end up in the hands of the Viet Cong were usually freed, as was the practice in Vietnam, at a moment of maximum political advantage to their captors. With three exceptions, all those captured during the war by the Khmers Rouges — priests and aid personnel, as well as journalists — were killed. Once again it was a matter of ‘drawing a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves’.

  As the fateful year, 1970, lengthened, attitudes on both sides hardened.

  This was not inevitable. It was not just a response to the widening war. Each side was deliberately cutting loose from its traditional points of reference: the monarchy, in Lon Nol’s case; the legacy of Indochinese communism in the case of the Khmers Rouges. The normal restraints on thought and behaviour were eroding, Cambodia was movi
ng into unknown territory.

  Sâr bade farewell to his Vietnamese escort at K-12, at the southern end of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in June. He and Khieu Ponnary, accompanied by Pâng and their two Khmer bodyguards, had made the entire journey once again on foot, travelling across the Annamite cordillera and then through Attopeu in southern Laos.

  Ponnary had started behaving oddly while they were still in Beijing. A Chinese official who met her then remembered her being ‘so anti-Vietnamese it wasn’t possible even to mention the word “Vietnam” in her presence’. He wondered at the time what had happened to make her so unbalanced. By the time they set out from Hanoi she was seriously ill and for the last weeks of the journey she had to be carried on a stretcher. Only much later was her illness diagnosed as chronic paranoid schizophrenia. By then it was too late to attempt treatment. Sâr’s cook, Moeun, recalled an aide putting out a glass of water for him one day. ‘She screamed at him not to drink it because the Vietnamese had put poison in it,’ Moeun said. ‘Then she took the glass away, and brought him another one. I remember the look of pity on his face.’ After the initial acute spasm, Ponnary appeared to recover, but periodically afterwards suffered bouts of agitation and restlessness when ‘she would shout that Vietnamese troops were coming and they were going to kill us’. Eventually Sâr, who at the best of times suffered from insomnia, sent her to stay with Moeun whenever she had an attack to prevent her keeping him awake all night as she ranted in fear at imaginary enemies. For some years, she enjoyed long periods of normalcy, when she appeared completely lucid. But over time she developed the classic symptoms of the illness, withdrawing into herself, refusing to wash or to respond to those around her, and growing obsessed by nightmarish visions of Vietnamese atrocities.

  The root causes of paranoid schizophrenia are poorly understood. It is known, however, that stress often acts as a catalyst, rendering the condition acute. In Ponnary’s case, an early and basic cause of stress was undoubtedly her sterility. Friends remembered that in later life she loved to surround herself with children and that their presence seemed to make her behave more normally. She must have known that Sâr, too, had wanted children, but had buried his longing deep within himself.

  However, the trigger for the episode that began on the Ho Chi Minh Trail was obviously more recent. ‘Something must have happened to her in Vietnam or China,’ Moeun speculated later. Sâr himself provided a clue to what it may have been. During the talks in Hanoi in December 1969, he wrote, ‘The Vietnamese delegation . . . could neither bridle its violent hostility . . . nor control its fury . . . The [Cambodian] delegates [felt] they could easily resort to assassination . . . The atmosphere . . . was so tense that some members of the delegation, who were rot used to such tests, were greatly shaken.’ The description is overblown, but it may have reflected what Ponnary, who was present, had felt. Her schizophrenia was in a sense merely a clinical manifestation of a wider, national paranoia, whose focus was Vietnam but which would progressively invade every aspect of Cambodian life. Her madness had nothing 1:0 do with Sâr and still less with Khmer Rouge policies which had not even been formulated, let alone applied, at the time her mind began to crumble. Rather it was a metaphor — a tragic, personal metaphor — for the fate which was awaiting the country as a whole.

  Sâr spent the next two months at his old headquarters at K-5, three days’ march south of the border. He had brought with him radio transceivers powered by hand-cranked generators, which meant that, for the first time since the Ratanakiri base had been established, he could communicate by morse with Hanoi and with the Chinese Party’s International Liaison Department in Beijing. Three Khmer ‘regroupees’, who had been trained as radio technicians during their exile in Vietnam, served as operators. They were among the first of some 1,500 exiles who made the journey home that year. Kit Mân, one of the few women in the group, who had been trained as a doctor in Vietnam, left Hanoi in early April, a few days after Sâr’s own departure:

  Before leaving we were given two weeks’ training. They made us carry a heavy rucksack and climb a hill, then come back down, then climb it once more, over and over again. Then we set out, 60 or 100 of us, escorted by Vietnamese guides . . . The journey took three months. But there were resting places in the jungle along the trail, maintained by the Vietnamese, where they had hammocks for us to sleep in . . . In the regions the Americans were bombing, we marched at night with little pocket lights.

  Sâr’s aide, Pâng, set up a reception post at a village on the Lao border, from which the returnees were directed to destinations further south. Mân was sent to Kratie, which had been occupied by the Viet Cong in May. The Northern Zone Secretary, Koy Thuon, had established his headquarters in the forest of Speu on the banks of a tributary of the Chinit river, which rises in the hill-country of Preah Vihear and describes a long southwesterly arc before emptying itself into one of the affluents of the Great Lake. There, with two other Vietnamese-trained doctors and a group of nurses, Mân set up a primitive hospital for the use of the Party leadership.

  Other groups followed over the next twelve months. Most were assigned to the Eastern Zone, where they occupied middle-level posts in the emerging Khmer Rouge regional and district administrations.

  At the end of July, Sâr himself set out for the south, accompanied by Ponnary, Tiv Ol, the dandified young secondary-school teacher from Prey Veng who had joined them in Ratanakiri two years earlier, and by seventy montagnard bodyguards.

  On the eve of their departure, Sâr called the leaders of the group together. ‘Now we are going down to the plains,’ he told them. ‘Today, we will all change our names. I will no longer be Pouk. From now on I will call myself Pol.’ He then gave the others their new aliases, which he had chosen himself. His Jarai assistant, Phi Phuon, who was with him that day, received the name Cheam. It was a rite of passage, opening the way from one existence to another. Khmer men took new ‘names-in-religion’ when they became monks; Khmers Rouges did so when they took on new responsibilities. Son Sen had changed his name in 1969, when he was appointed Chief of Staff, responsible for the revolutionary guard units. Formerly he had been Kham, ‘the Biter’; now he was Khieu (‘Blue’).

  Pol — or Pol Pot, as he would later call himself, following the custom of adding an euphonic monosyllable, in the same way that Vorn made his name Vorn Vet and the eldest of the Thiounn brothers was called Thiounn Thioeunn — never explained why he had chosen his new name. However, the Pols were royal slaves, the remnants of an aboriginal people, ‘noble savages’ in Rousseau’s terms, and it is tempting to see in the soubriquet a sardonic reference to Sâr’s alliance with Sihanouk which made him, metaphorically, the ‘slave of the King’. It may also have harked back to his use of Khmer Daeum (Old Khmer) as a pseudonym while a student in Paris, for the Pols were Khmers Daeum; one of his fellow students at that time had used an even more explicit pen-name, Khmer Neak Ngear (Khmer hereditary slave) to sign an attack on the monarchy. Whatever the reason, for the next decade Sâr would be known as Pol.

  The journey south was slow and, apart from sporadic American bombing, uneventful. The transmogrified Pol Pot and his escort reached their initial destination, a temporary camp on the border of Kratie and Kompong Thom about thirty miles north-east of Koy Thuon’s headquarters, towards the end of September. There he convened an enlarged meeting of the CPK Standing Committee. No record of who took part has survived. Khieu Samphân had reached the area a few days earlier and was told that he was being given responsibility for liaison with Sihanouk, but he did not attend the leadership discussions. Although Pol himself claimed later that it was ‘a full meeting of the Central Committee’, evidently to underline its importance, it appears that the only senior Party figures present were himself, Nuon Chea and So Phim.

  The resolution they issued set out for the first time the principle of ‘independence-mastery’, which was to be the Party’s watchword for the next nine years. Like many Khmer Rouge terms, the word was a neologism derived from Pali, the
language of the Buddhist monks. It proclaimed the Cambodian communists’ right to determine their own strategy, free from outside interference — a message hammered home by reference to the ‘betrayal’ of the Khmer revolution by the Vietnamese at the Geneva Conference of 1954:

  The Cambodian Party has traced its own revolutionary path . . . We must not permit other powerful states to decide the destiny of our nation, our people and our revolution. At present [these states] still nurture this ancient longing . . . [In the past] we held our destiny firmly in our own hands, and then we allowed others to resolve it in our place. We must never allow this historical error to be repeated . . . Aid from abroad, even if healthy and unconditional . . . can never play a decisive role, either in the short term or the long term . . . We must always hold firmly to the stance of independence-mastery, rely on our own forces and endure difficulties and suffering. On that basis, whether we accept or do not accept aid will depend on whether or not we think it is necessary, on whether we find it useful or harmful, and also on the manner in which that aid is to be used.

  This was the theoretical text on which the independence of the Cambodian Communist Party was to be based. The time had not yet come to give it practical effect. For all their fine words, the Cambodians knew they still needed Vietnamese support. But Hanoi was not wrong in seeing it as a fundamental shift in the CPK’s position.

  The meeting also approved the sending of Ieng Sary to Hanoi and Beijing as ‘Special Representative of the Interior’ charged with foreign policy matters, a formulation which, to non-initiates like Sihanouk, continued to disguise the reality of communist power.