Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  Militarily it meant hurrying slowly, consolidating advantages on the ground before attempting further advance. As a result, throughout 1971, the battlefield situation remained unchanged: communist forces continued to hold more than half Cambodia’s territory; Lon Nol’s rare offensives were repulsed or, where they succeeded, the terrain was reoccupied after government units withdrew; but there were no major gains.

  The second imperative was to clarify the Khmers Rouges’ relationship with the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. In late November 1970, Pol and Nuon Chea had a week-long meeting with the two top leaders of the COSVN, Nguyen Van Linh (still known to them as Hay So) and General Tran Nam Trung, at a camp midway between K-I and the COSVN headquarters in Kratie, forty miles to the east. Three decisions were taken. The Vietnamese agreed to withdraw their civilian cadres from the administration of the ‘liberated areas’ as soon as they could be replaced by Khmers; they undertook to step up their military training programme, so that Khmer Rouge units could bear a larger share of the fighting; and they promised that in areas where mixed Khmer Rouge—Viet Cong battalions had been formed, notably in the East and the South-West, they would gradually be dismantled and replaced by all-Khmer units. After this meeting, friction between the two sides, which had led to armed clashes in the autumn of 1970, markedly declined.

  The third aspect was political. At a time when overall strategic considerations required an improvement in relations with the Vietnamese as well as the rapid growth of Khmer Rouge military strength, an intensive political education campaign was needed to ensure that the resistance remained loyal to Cambodian, not Vietnamese, goals, and that the CPK itself was welded into a still more tightly disciplined force, capable of enforcing ‘independence-mastery’ throughout the communist-held areas. Accordingly, from December 1970 onwards, recruits for the army and for FUNK were accepted regardless of their background with no questions asked; but entry qualifications to the Party were made even stricter. Students and ‘middle peasants’, defined as those with enough to eat all year round, who in the 1960s had been readily admitted as candidates for Party membership, were now turned down flat or, at best, allowed to join the Youth League. Only ‘poor peasants’ were deemed to have the right class origin for admission to the Party ranks.

  At the end of 1970, Pol and Nuon Chea moved to a new base about five miles away on the northern side of the Chinit river. It was bigger than the old one, with twenty or thirty straw-thatched houses, guardrooms, a messenger office and a printing shop. K-1 became a support facility. The whole Central Committee area now bore the code name S-71. At the same time, the Northern Zone HQ was transferred to Dângkda and by the spring of 1971 accommodated some two hundred people, including a troupe of sixty musicians and dancers, who toured the Zone giving ‘revolutionary performances’ to inspire the masses.

  Indoctrination, by whatever means, was crucial because communications difficulties made referral to a centralised hierarchy impossible — and the Party’s enforcement mechanism, the Santebal or political police, did not operate nationally until 1975. Unity had to be achieved, not through a vertical command system but through the inculcation of shared beliefs, both within the Party and among the population at large. One of Pol’s first moves after reaching Kompong Thom had been to set up an information section, headed first by Tiv Ol, the former teacher who had accompanied him from Ratanakiri, and later by Hu Nim, to provide articles for the FUNK radio in Hanoi. The office, known as S-31, housed many of the ‘progressive figures’ who had flocked to the CPK standard — Sihanouk’s cousin, Prince Norodom Phurissara, the GRUNC Justice Minister; Hou Yuon, the Interior Minister, who had accompanied Hu Nim from the South-West; Toch Phoeun from the Cercle Marxiste, now Public Works Minister; and Pok Deuskomar, the ribald Vice-Foreign Minister who, in a pre-Khmer Rouge incarnation, had once remarked to a friend that his girth was ‘very good for the fucking, keeps the stomach against the woman!’ Khieu Samphân also spent time at S-31 but, because of his role in liaising with Sihanouk, was soon moved to a compound nearer Pol’s headquarters.

  Another, more secret office, known as L-7, headed by Son Sen’s wife, Yun Yat, produced the Party’s internal monthly journal, Tung Padevat (Revolutionary Flags), which appeared in two versions — one with five flags on the cover, destined for senior cadres; the other with a single flag, for the Party rank and file.

  Ping Sây worked at both S-31 and S-71, where he served as Pol’s confidential secretary. His most abiding memory was of the draconian security restrictions under which everyone lived. Pol himself set the tone. In Ratanakiri, he had suffered from chronic gastric ailments which became associated in his mind with the risk of poisoning. Whenever he was given medicine, he would demand proof that it was what it claimed before agreeing to take it. At S-71, even Zone Secretaries had to leave their bodyguards outside the perimeter before being escorted in, alone and unarmed:

  The base was in a part of the jungle that was reserved exclusively for the leaders. No one was permitted to go there. It was a forbidden zone . . . You had to be accompanied at all times by a messenger, normally a montagnard . . . Once you were inside, you did not have the right to leave the sector to which you had been assigned . . . Even within the Information Section, you couldn’t move about freely. If you had tried, someone would have seen you and you would have been told: ‘Stop it! Why are you going from place to place?’

  The huts where we lived had thatched roofs and walls, a hard bed of woven bamboo and a desk and chair, also bamboo, all very simple and rustic . . . They were 20 or 30 yards apart — sometimes as much as 50 yards — and separated by thick hedges, so you couldn’t see from one to another. They were built in the same way as at the Issarak camp I’d visited in 1951, but under Pol Pot they were better made and the camp was better organised . . . The Issaraks threw their rubbish everywhere, the place was a mess. [Here] there were strict rules of hygiene . . . We ate rice [and] sometimes meat or fish, but usually just rice with prahoc[fish sauce] and wild vegetables we found in the forest.

  At that time, I didn’t even know where [Pol’s] Office was. Everything was kept rigorously separate . . . The offices were only a mile or two apart, but each in its own area. In Pol’s Office, the living conditions were much the same as everywhere else . . . But let me tell you a story. When I arrived, I said to the others, without thinking — ‘I see you always build your camp by a water-course’ — because Pol’s Office, like S-31, was on the bank of a stream. That was reported back, and two or three days later Yun Yat summoned me. She said I must not speak like that, I must show ‘revolutionary vigilance’ . . . In one way, she was right; if it had come to the notice of the enemy, it would have been a clue about where the HQ was located. But when she said that, it made me realise that these people had a sense of ‘revolutionary vigilance’ that was really quite disturbing. They were very, very secretive. Even inside their own headquarters.

  It was a shared neurosis. Pol’s deputy, Nuon Chea, was equally wary. The primary cause was the leadership’s conviction that, in Khieu Samphân’s words, ‘Khmers cannot keep secrets’, and therefore exceptional means had to be used to compel them to do so. Almost all the later excesses of the Khmer Rouge regime can be traced back, at least in part, to this perception that the innate failings of the Cambodian people could be overcome only by a totalitarian absolutism so severe and all-embracing that no evasion was possible and everyone would be forced to engage, for the good of all, in selfless and unremitting collective endeavour.

  In mid-January 1971, the Central Committee met for the first time since October 1966. The three-day meeting took place at S-71 and was attended by twenty-seven delegates.* Hu Nim, Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphân — then being presented to the outside world as the chiefs of the Cambodian resistance — did not take part. All three were Party members, having been inducted by Mok in 1969, but even Khieu Samphân, the most trusted of them, was not yet judged sufficiently sure to be admitted to the CPK’s inner councils.

  Pol’s mes
sage to the assembled leaders was pragmatic. The CPK must maintain good relations with the Vietnamese ‘because we are fighting a common enemy’. The Party line was, as Ieng Sary put it later, ‘United we win; divided we lose’:

  Our Party holds that there are three battlefields [in Indochina] which cannot be separated from each other . . . If we break up into two or three strategic lines in terms of dealing with the enemy, it will be difficult for us. At the same time, however, within the three battlefields there are three different peoples. Thus an important point for our Party is that every country must be self-reliant and must struggle.

  In this scheme of things, the Cambodians’ role was to launch guerrilla activities — ‘a people’s war which must be the affair of the whole people’-cutting communications links and harassing isolated government units in support of the Vietnamese main force. The Khmer resistance, Pol told the delegates, was still at the stage of a ‘national-democratic revolution’. Talk of socialism could come later. The immediate priorities were to seize weapons from the enemy and to build the broadest possible united front, in order to create a self-sufficient force which would permit the implementation of ‘independence-mastery’.

  Much of the meeting was taken up with ‘housekeeping’. New boundaries were agreed for the Zones, together with a new set of code numbers: the North-East became 108; the East, 203; the North, 304; the South-West, 405; and the North-West, 506. Subsequently a new zone was created around Phnom Penh, designated, as in Issarak times, ‘the Special Zone’, under the control of Vorn Vet. The Zones were in turn divided into regions, each also with its code number.

  Shortly afterwards the former Pracheachon spokesman Non Suon, who had been released from prison as part of a post-coup amnesty, was appointed head of Region 25 in the Special Zone. But none of the Hanoi returnees was given responsibilities at this level. Pol held that they had been away too long and were out of touch with the CPK’s thinking.

  The meeting also approved the setting-up of three distinct sets of military forces on the Viet Minh model: the chhlorp, or village patrols, which combined security and militia functions; regional troops, operating at district level as a territorial defence; and main-force units, organised in the Zones, which were destined to take over the conduct of the war from the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese when the latter eventually went home.

  The task was immense. At the end of 1970, the biggest Khmer Rouge units were of battalion strength, usually comprising three or four hundred men. The first regiments would not be established until 1973. The Vietnamese had been fighting under divisional commands since the 1950s. None the less, the decisions taken in January 1971 gave the CPK for the first time a blueprint for a civil and military organisation covering the whole of Cambodia. Most of the next eighteen months would be spent on the wearisome nuts and bolts of turning it into reality. CPK directives spoke of the need to ‘exercise mastery over the revolutionary movement in every way . . . [to] get a tight grasp [and] filter into every corner’, a message which was repeated, mantra-like, at political education seminars all over the country. Pang remembered conducting five training sessions for local officials in Preah Vihear, each lasting ten days and attended by eighty people, over a period of two months. In July and August, Pol himself presided over a month-long ‘nationwide training’ for some two hundred district, region and zone cadres at Koy Thuon’s Northern Zone HQ. Afterwards selected participants were escorted by montagnard guides to a specially prepared camp in another part of the jungle, about fifteen miles away, to attend the CPK’s Third Congress. It turned out to be a wise precaution, for, whether by accident or design, shortly after they moved, the whole of the Northern Zone HQ area was heavily bombed.

  Some sixty delegates attended the Congress, including all the Regional and Zone Secretaries, military commanders such as Ke Pauk and Kong Sophal, representatives of the ‘intellectuals’ like Hou Yuon, Hu Nim and Khieu Samphân, and a token group of Hanoi returnees. By the time it ended in mid-September, they had approved new Party statutes, ratifying the name, ‘Communist Party of Kampuchea’, adopted five years earlier; confirmed Pol as Secretary of the Central Committee and Chairman of its Military Commission (rather than merely Standing Committee Secretary, which he had been until then); and elected a new CC of thirty members, including Chou Chet from the South-West, Koy Thuon and Pauk from the North, Vy from the North-East, and Khieu Samphân and Khieu Ponnary as alternates. Hou Yuon and Hu Nim were not included. Neither was Non Suon or any of the Hanoi group.

  By the beginning of 1972, Pol felt sufficiently confident to make his first extended journey through the ‘liberated zones’ to see how the new political and military structures were taking shape. Apart from his travels to and from Ratanakiri and to Vietnam and China, he had remained confined to his own headquarters for almost nine years. Escorted, as always, by montagnard bodyguards, he went first to Vorn Vet’s HQ in Peam commune, fifteen miles west of the old royal capital of Oudong, and then to Mok’s base in the hill-country near Amleang, where Ponnary had spent much of the previous spring. From there he travelled on elephant-back across the Cardamom Mountains to Koh Kong, on the Thai border in the far south-west. Everywhere he went his message was the same: ‘independence-mastery’; self-sufficiency; and ‘the need to take our own forces as the main factor, even though we co-operate with others’.

  The three months Pol was away were a time of rapid change. Phi Phuon, his Jarai aide-de-camp, remembered how, week by week, the local cadres in the areas they traversed seemed more self-assured. On the outward journey, Pol’s guards took him across Kompong Thom province, avoiding the more densely populated areas further south. When they reached the Great Lake, they lost their way for three days in the water-marshes which form when the floods recede at the end of the rainy season. The whole journey was made on foot and took six weeks. For the return trip they travelled the forty miles from Amleang to Taches by Land-Rover and crossed the River Sap in motorised canoes at a point only thirty miles north of Phnom Penh. Another jeep took them to the Northern Zone HQ at Dângkda.

  There, in May 1972, Pol summoned another meeting of the Central Committee, at which he spoke of his impressions during his journey and the conclusions he had drawn. The burden of his message was that the revolution was going too slowly. The decision adopted at the Third Congress, nine months before, to ‘start sweeping away the socio-cultural traits of the old regime . . . the traits of feudalism, reaction and imperialism’, had remained a dead letter, he said. At his urging, the Committee issued an ‘urgent directive’ calling on the Party to strengthen its ‘proletarian stance’ and to intensify the struggle against ‘the various oppressive classes . . . [who] want to conserve their rights under our new regime’. The participants also approved plans for the collectivisation of agriculture and the suppression of private trade as soon as the situation permitted.

  It was a turning point.

  The Khmer Rouge army by then numbered 35,000 men, backed by an estimated 100,000 guerrillas, more than enough to hold their own against Lon Nol’s increasingly demoralised troops even if the Vietnamese did one day withdraw. They had sufficient weaponry. The five million dollars in cash which China provided each year for buying arms from government forces was supplemented by income from sales of rubber produced at the former French-owned plantations in the Eastern Zone, now under communist control — which was exported with the connivance of corrupt officials in Phnom Penh. At the same time, Chinese weaponry flowed down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, enlarged a year earlier by Chinese engineering teams and equipped with a flexible petroleum pipeline which reached as far south as the Laotian border. Throughout the ‘liberated zones’, a stable administration was in place. A third of the population, more than two million people, was living under communist control.

  The time had come to move on to the next stage. The social revolution was about to begin.

  For the first two years after Sihanouk’s overthrow, Khmer Rouge policy in the countryside had been remarkable mainly for
its moderation. Within weeks of the coup, district-level CPK cadres, presenting themselves not as communists but as representatives of the FUNK, and often, in the Eastern Zone, accompanied by Vietnamese, began organising commune and village-level elections throughout the ‘liberated areas’. All the candidates were local peasants, most supported the FUNK because they wanted Sihanouk to return, and, with rare exceptions, none had any connection with the Communist Party.

  In one sense this was making a virtue out of necessity. The CPK barely had enough cadres to head the district administrations, let alone appoint them to commune — and village-level posts. Accordingly, the wats continued to function normally; religious festivals and holy days were observed as before; families continued to farm individually and to buy and sell at local markets. In some areas, the peasants were encouraged to form small-scale credit co-operatives and mutual aid teams at harvest time. One or two evenings a month, a village assembly was held, with much singing of revolutionary songs and exhortations to support the resistance.

  But if expediency played a part — the Khmers Rouges went easy on the villagers because the only way to win support was to improve their lives — there was also a powerful streak of idealism, a desire to ‘be together with the people and serve the people’, comparable to the early days of the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions. ‘The [Khmers Rouges] would sometimes pick fruit,’ a government official in Siem Reap recalled, ‘then they would leave payment at the foot of the tree. The local [people] would think they were very fair.’ Ith Sarin, a Khmer Rouge defector with every reason to show his former comrades in an unflattering light, reported that in the Special Zone:

  If a peasant is sick, the Khmer Rouge will often go to the house to give an injection or leave medicine, even at night or during a storm. In ploughing, transplanting, harvesting or threshing seasons, each office will send out its cadres to help . . . These kinds of psychological activities were really successful and deeply affected the people . . . The farming people of the base areas who knew nothing of socialist revolution quickly began to support Angkar because of its sentiments of openness and friendliness.