Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  Certainly the new system was more puritanical than Cambodians were used to. Extramarital affairs were frowned on, gambling was banned and alcohol discouraged. But, at the same time, theft was stamped out and corruption, the besetting sin of government in the past, even at village level, was virtually eliminated.

  For those who were prepared to co-operate, the regime was comparatively benign. Probably the most galling restriction was on individual movements: a peasant who wished to travel outside his commune had to obtain an official pass. But that was presented as a matter of wartime security.

  For those perceived to be hostile it was a different story. Opposing the revolution, whether in word or deed, usually meant death. In most cases, the offender was summoned to the district headquarters and never returned. Less commonly, exemplary punishment was meted out. In the autumn of 1970, a village whose inhabitants had rebelled and killed three district cadres was encircled by Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge soldiers, and the families of the three alleged ringleaders, twenty-four people in all, including children and infants, were publicly beaten to death. A year later, mass graves containing more than 180 bodies were found near Kompong Thom. But these were the exceptions. Until the end of 1971, Khmer Rouge jails held few prisoners, and in the villages arrests of suspected spies and ‘enemies’ were still a rarity. Even the US Defense Intelligence Agency acknowledged that ‘On the whole [Khmer communist cadres] have attempted to avoid acts which might alienate the population, and the behaviour of Vietnamese communist soldiers has generally been exemplary . . .’

  After the Central Committee meeting in May 1972, all that began to change.

  That spring, Cham Muslims in Vorn Vet’s Special Zone were ordered to stop wearing Islamic dress — colourful clothing for women and white tunics with baggy cotton trousers for men — and to adopt the same black peasant garb as the poorest Khmer villagers. Upswept hairstyles and the wearing of jewellery, characteristic of Cham women, were also forbidden. The Chams were singled out because they are culturally distinct: they live together in their own villages; they have their own mosques; they marry among themselves and they keep to their own ways. But the primary motivation was not racist. Soon afterwards similar prohibitions were extended to the population as a whole. The Chams were merely the earliest victims of a general policy aimed at the cultural, social and economic levelling of all Cambodians, regardless of race or creed.

  By the summer the same principle was applied to land ownership and certain private possessions. Richer peasants were divested of part of their land-holdings, which were given to poorer families, so that, by the end of the year, each family had exactly the same acreage. In some provinces, like Kampot, the quota was set at five hectares; in others, where population pressure was greater, it might be as little as one hectare. Unlike the land reform in China, which was based on the number of mouths to feed, in Cambodia the benchmark was uniformity. In any given village, each family was treated identically. At the same time the revolutionary administration requisitioned or taxed out of existence all private motor transport.

  The result, and the intention, was that no one had anything different from anyone else.

  The poorest and lower-middle peasants, whom the CPK regarded as the strongest supporters of the regime, did well out of these arrangements. They had no motor-cycles to lose and they were given extra land. But even for richer families, the reform was relatively mild. Everyone continued to farm individually, or at most in mutual-aid groups of four or five families; they grew enough to feed themselves; they retained ownership of livestock and poultry, and while restrictions were imposed on the slaughter of cattle, other animals could be killed and sold at market. Co-operative stores were set up to sell household necessities, including cloth, kerosene and medicines, imported from Vietnam, thereby eliminating the Sino-Khmer merchants who had kept a stranglehold on village commerce. In some areas, pressure was put on wealthy families to sell their household furniture, another mark of difference, for poor peasants possessed no furniture and slept on a mat on the floor. Ostentatious weddings, traditionally an occasion for finery, expensive gifts and extravagance even in the poorest communities, were at first discouraged and then stopped altogether, on the grounds that all energies should be devoted to the war and young people who wished to marry should wait until it ended. The sale of bottled beer and cigarettes, previously smuggled into the countryside from Phnom Penh, was likewise halted because only the richer peasants could afford them. After 1972 only locally made palm wine and roll-your-own tobacco were available.

  None the less, a schoolteacher who left the Special Zone in January 1973 and defected to the government — therefore in principle not a sympathetic witness — felt able to write that ‘the local people [see] they have a fairly easy life and no one is oppressing them . . . They are grateful, they are happy, they are enjoying themselves.’ That may have been a partial view, based on experience in a single area. However, it is clear that in much of the countryside, the new regime won acceptance with little difficulty, for the good and simple reason that, for the poorer peasants, who made up half the rural population, the first years of Khmer Rouge rule were better than what had gone before and for most of the other half not markedly worse.

  What would have been, and later was, a hell on earth for town-dwellers was not a huge change for those who had always lived that way In the 1970s, large parts of the Cambodian countryside remained mired in autarchic poverty beyond the imagining of the educated elite. The American historian Michael Vickery recalled visiting an area in the north-west near the Angkorian site of Banteay Chhmar, where, along the roadside, ‘wild-looking boys [were] carrying [home for supper] dead lizards strung on sticks like freshly caught fish . . . The people seemed strangely hostile [and] . . . we heard mutterings that they did not like city people, because their arrival usually meant trouble.’ The villagers ate forest tubers; there was no rice because of a three-year drought. They made their own silk, but refused to sell or exchange it because ‘there was nothing they wanted to buy.’ That was in 1962. Forty years later, long after the Khmer Rouge regime had come and gone, another American visited a village in the hinterland of Kompong Thom. ‘They live completely apart,’ he reported. ‘No one has a radio or a motorbike. Everything they need they make for themselves; nothing comes in from outside.’ Some time afterwards, two of the villagers came to Phnom Penh to visit him. ‘To try to put them at ease,’ he said, ‘I took them to eat at a stall in the market, the simplest place I could think of. They had no idea how to behave. They weren’t comfortable. They didn’t know how to sit on a chair. Everything in Phnom Penh was strange and they hated it.’

  The overriding, if unstated, objective of Khmer Rouge policy from 1972 on was to refashion the whole of Cambodian society in the image of this authentic, autochthonous peasantry, unsullied by the outside world.

  But there was another purpose, too, both Khmer and communist, underlying the Party’s emphasis on social and economic levelling to force everyone into the same poor-peasant mould: the eternal Buddhist goal of demolishing the individual, but this time in new garb — not as a path to nirvana (‘nothingness’), but to remove what was seen as the biggest obstacle to the establishment of a collectivised state: the innate and essential egoism which characterises Khmer behaviour. Whatever shortcomings attach to such cultural generalisations, that was the way Cambodians saw themselves. Sihanouk called individualism ‘a national failing’. Ith Sarin came back from nine months in the Special Zone convinced that it was ‘the fundament of the Khmer personality’ and therefore communist policies could not succeed. Years later, a prominent Khmer businessman argued that the reason there are few Cambodian restaurants in Paris but innumerable Khmer taxi-drivers and pharmacists is that the latter occupations are suitable for a single man or a couple; to start a restaurant, several Khmer families have to pool their resources and the venture inevitably founders amid recriminations and jealousy.

  The organisation of life in Khmer villages reinforces
that perception. Where Vietnamese and Chinese villagers live cheek by jowl, animating a communal existence by means of countless associations and benevolent institutions, each Khmer family is an island, living on its own land, united only by membership of the wat and a shared belief in Buddhism. If Khmer Rouge attempts to set up village associations failed, it was precisely because of the absence of a co-operative tradition in Cambodia.

  Pol and Nuon Chea preferred to close their eyes to all that, emphasising instead the rare occasions when Khmer villagers did work together — at harvest time, for instance, or to help a neighbour build a new house. But they were also aware that Angkor, the timeless symbol of Cambodia’s glory and the inspiration of their own future regime, had been built not by free Khmers but by slaves. A Western diplomat, reflecting on Sihanouk’s political difficulties, had written in the 1960s: ‘Khmers, born individualists, predisposed to egocentrism, require a unifying bond to bring them together and the use of effective force to maintain their unity.’ In his mind, the Throne was the bond and the ‘effective force’, the Sangkum. Ten years later, Pol and his colleagues reached the same conclusion. But now the bond was revolutionary consciousness and the ‘effective force’, Party coercion, which, as time went on, emulating Vietnam’s experience, relied increasingly on terror.

  If, among the population at large, levelling was imposed from above, among the Khmers Rouges themselves* the methods of choice were ‘criticism and self-criticism’, manual labour, and the study — riensouth,’learning by heart and reciting’ — of Communist Party texts.

  Criticism and self-criticism took place at so-called ‘lifestyle meetings’, held in small groups, usually twice a week but in some units every evening. Members of each section met together — kitchen staff, for instance; or guards; or cadres who worked together in the same bureau — under the leadership of an older member, and each in turn would publicly confess his errors in thought and deed since the previous session. Khieu Samphân called them ‘a daily accounting of revolutionary activities’. At the jungle prison where he was held in 1971, the French archaeologist François Bizot watched his warders go through the nightly ritual:

  ‘Comrades’, began the older man who was leading the séance, ‘let us all give account of the day that has passed, to correct our faults [and] purge ourselves of the sins that are holding back our beloved Revolution.’

  Then the first one spoke: ‘For myself’, he said, ‘I was supposed today to replace the rod where we hang the washing to dry, behind the northern hut, but I didn’t. I was lazy . . .’ The older man said nothing, and pointed to the next one. ‘I fell asleep after the meal’, this man said, ‘and I forgot to check whether the prisoners’ urine pots had been emptied properly . . .’

  When they had all spoken, they went on to the next stage . . . One of the youngest ones raised his hand . . . ‘This afternoon,’ he began, ‘I happened to go into the dormitory, and I saw Comrade Miet hiding something in his bedding . . .’ With a gesture of his head, the older man sent someone to search the hammock. He ran back, holding a notebook. Young Miet burst into tears.

  Bizot never did learn what the notebook contained. It was probably nothing culpable. But that was not the point. The aim of these ‘introspection meetings’, as they were also called, was to make the participants look into their own souls and strip away everything that was personal and private until their individuality was leached out, their innermost thoughts exposed before their peers and existence outside the group made meaningless. Mutual surveillance and denunciation were a key part of the process, which required a climate of perpetual vigilance and suspicion. Like monks at confession, opening their hearts to God, the young Khmers Rouges ‘gave themselves to the Party’, becoming one with a revolution which, in theory at least, replaced all other relationships.

  Bizot, who was in Cambodia to study Khmer Buddhism, was struck by the paradox. ‘The Party theoreticians,’ he wrote later, ‘had substituted Angkar (“the Organisation”) for the Dhamma, the primordial Being who [in Buddhism] personifies the notion of “Instruction”.’ In place of the monk’s ten vows of abstinence (sila), the Khmers Rouges had ‘Twelve commandments’ (also called sila). Like the ‘Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention’, which Mao issued to the Chinese Red Army after 1927, and the ‘Twelve Points’ used by the Vietnamese communists, these enjoined the cadres ‘not to touch even a single pepper or can of rice belonging to the people’, to ‘act properly towards women’, and ‘to be modest and simple’. But there were also significant differences. Mao’s injunction to his troops ‘not to ill-treat captives’ was absent from the Cambodian list. Instead the Khmers Rouges were urged to ‘have burning rage towards the enemy’, ‘not to depend on foreigners’, ‘not to be individualistic’ and to ‘follow the traditions of the people’. Angkar was absolute and impersonal, as Buddhism was, Bizot wrote, and it demanded the same unconditional determination, refusing ‘to take into account the human aspect of things, as though it were dealing solely with matters of the spirit’.

  These were not parallels that the CPK leaders willingly acknowledged, but unconsciously they resonated in the minds of their followers. To youthful Khmer Rouge devotees, echoes of the novitiate placed the new communist teaching in a familiar setting.

  Criticism, self-criticism and ‘introspection’ were not only for the young and malleable. All Khmer Rouge cadres, at whatever level, were required to take part. At Pol’s headquarters on the Chinit river, Central Committee meetings always started with a week-long session of ‘criticism and self-criticism’, led by Pol himself or Nuon Chea. Only afterwards would they get down to the real business at hand. ‘We all had to go through it,’ Khieu Samphçn remembered. ‘You had to examine your own thinking, and analyse your failings and your strongpoints.’ Only members of the Standing Committee — which in practice meant Pol and Nuon — were exempt.

  ‘Introspection’ and ‘study’ were two sides of the same coin, and much of Pol’s time during the first years at the Chinit river base was taken up with writing training documents on such topics as ‘Class Struggle’, ‘How to Fight Individualism [and] Liberalism’ and ‘Building Proletarian Principles’.

  To ‘build’, in Khmer Rouge parlance, meant to refashion a person’s consciousness. Mental training was one means to that end. The other was manual labour. As with many Khmer Rouge practices, this had been copied from China and Vietnam. Manual labour had been made compulsory for Chinese Communist Party cadres at Yan’an in the 1930s. The goal then was essentially practical: self-sufficiency in food in a drought-ridden border region. Even Mao had his vegetable plot. In the early 1950s, the Viet Minh used it to temper new arrivals — as Pol and the others had cause to remember from their days at Krâbao — much as army sergeants in the West put raw recruits to cleaning out latrines. Later Mao made it part of a campaign to bridge the gap between manual and mental labour and, through the Great Leap Forward, to harness the nation’s energies for development. It was in that form that Sihanouk introduced it to Cambodia in the mid-1960s.

  All these elements — self-reliance; showing humility; being close to the masses; combining mental and manual labour; mobilising the nation for development — were incorporated into the Khmer Rouge approach.

  But to Pol, manual labour had another, more important purpose. It was a means of forging ‘proletarian consciousness’, that immaterial, indefinable quality that, contrary to all Marxist principles, Pol had viewed since the late 1960s as the touchstone of revolutionary virtue. This ‘theory of proletarianisation’, as it was called, held that through manual labour, anyone, whatever his class origin, could acquire ‘the materialist discipline of the factory worker . . . the idea of respecting the rhythm of discipline, the tempo of work, the rhythm of life’ that characterised the working class. Those considered most apt for this transformation were the poor peasants, the backbone and model of CPK support. Others, including intellectuals, could in theory reforge themselves, but it was inherently more diffi
cult.

  Manual labour under the Khmer Rouge had another purpose, too, more far-reaching than in China or Vietnam.

  The cadres’ goal was not to become merely ‘close to the people’ but indistinguishable from them — not merely to work but ‘to speak, sleep, walk, stand, sit, eat, smoke, play, laugh . . . like the people’. Eating in a revolutionary manner meant eating meagrely, out of respect for the peasants’ poverty, even if plenty of food were available. Dressing in a revolutionary manner meant that everyone without exception, including Pol himself, should wear black peasant clothes, with a red-and-white checkered krama around the neck and sandals cut from car tyres. Men wore Chinese-style peaked caps, and women had their hair severely bobbed. Thiounn Thioeunn’s wife, Mala, remembered that when she and her husband left for the Special Zone in January 1971, the first thing she did, after depositing the family jewellery with her sister in Phnom Penh, was to equip herself with the regulation black trousers and jacket. ‘They told us it was safer like that, because you couldn’t be seen from the air. If you lay on the ground, the spotter planes thought you were a burnt log,’ she recalled. ‘So we all became crow-people.’

  By the beginning of 1972, relations with the Vietnamese were going downhill again. Hou Yuon dated the change to the end of the previous year.

  The key factor was the increase in the military strength of the Khmers Rouges. With 35,000 men under arms, clashes with Vietnamese units were inevitably more frequent than when there were only a tenth of that number. As the CPK forces grew more confident of their ability to handle the war on their own, pressure increased for the disbandment of the remaining Khmer-Vietnamese mixed units and for the Khmers Rumdoh (Liberated Khmers) — the ‘Sihanoukist’ troops trained by the Vietnamese in the early months of the war — to be brought under Khmer Rouge command. Officially, relations were still close, but with an undertone of mistrust. In the summer of 1971, the Vietnamese had proposed a second Indochinese summit as a follow-up to the Canton meeting a year earlier. Pol had refused, seeing it as another attempt by Hanoi to dominate the Lao and Khmer junior partners’. ‘There was no [open] conflict with Vietnam’, an Eastern Zone official recalled, ‘but [we] were watching each other very closely.’ Non Suon quoted Vorn Vet as saying in the autumn of 1971 that when problems arose with Vietnamese units, ‘avoid using arms if possible . . . Try to use political methods.’