Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  In 1972, liaison offices were set up at district and regional level, answering to a special bureau at Pol’s headquarters, codenamed D-3, to provide a mechanism to resolve disputes and reduce friction. Then, after a series of allegedly ‘spontaneous’ anti-Vietnamese demonstrations, new regulations were introduced requiring Viet Cong and North Vietnamese units to be billeted well away from Khmer population centres, to give advance notice of troop movements, and to produce passes, signed by both the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge commands, whenever they travelled through Khmer Rouge territory. An internal Eastern Zone directive justified the new restrictions but acknowledged that the fault was not all on one side:

  Some Vietnamese [soldiers] have no papers, and don’t want to submit to our checkpoints for fear they will be arrested or have their guns confiscated. So they threaten our sentries . . . They behave aggressively because they are frightened [and] they think our sentries are interfering with their freedom of movement . . . [But] the real problem is that there is too much coming and going [which] gives . . . the enemy an opportunity to infiltrate the liberated zones. . .

  If two or more Vietnamese soldiers wish to pass [a checkpoint], so long as one has a Khmer laissez-passer all should be allowed to go through. They should not be obstructed or arrested . . . The Khmer pass must be printed in bold characters; handwritten or typewritten passes are not valid . . . Glued to the back of the Cambodian paper, there should be a pass from the Vietnamese Command which must specify the exact number of weapons the unit is carrying.

  NB: It must be noted that one reason for the continuous, successive, and more and more numerous incidents which are chipping away at Khmer-Vietnamese solidarity in a number of localities is that our side keeps making mischief by stealing the Vietnamese troops’ rifles and ammunition.

  By the beginning of 1972, Vietnamese main-force divisions had started pulling out of Cambodia. It was later claimed that they had been forced to withdraw and that their expulsion had been decided by the CPK at the highest level. This was untrue. They left of their own accord — indeed, according to Vietnamese documents, over the Cambodian leadership’s objections — because they were needed for the offensive against Saigon and because, in Hanoi’s judgement, the Khmers Rouges could now cope on their own.

  Their departure should have eased the strains. It did not.

  Over the next two years, the CPK imposed ever tighter controls on Vietnamese troops who sought sanctuary in Cambodian territory; on the amount of food the ‘Vietnamese friends’ could purchase from Khmer villages; and, eventually, on Vietnamese civilian refugees living in the border areas who, ‘to protect the Cambodian revolution’ — in other words, to deprive the Viet Cong of a support base among sympathetic compatriots living on Cambodian soil — were ordered to return to their homes in South Vietnam. The directives were worded with care. ‘We must not resolve these problems by violence, but by lawful means’, one typical CPK document declared. ‘We must be calm, just and patient.’ Vietnamese settlers were to be allowed to harvest the rice they had planted (but not to use this as an excuse for delaying their departure unreasonably) and attempts to confiscate their belongings or to force them to sell their livestock were forbidden. None the less the sense was clear: the Khmers Rouges, now the dominant military force in the ‘liberated zones’, were reasserting sovereignty over their own territory.

  In the same vein, the Khmer Viet Minh ‘regroupees’ who had returned via the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1970 and 1971 were increasingly viewed as a potential Vietnamese fifth column. ‘[They] have lost their national character,’ Pol wrote. ‘They’ve been spoiled, and some have political problems.’ Khmer Rouge cadres were scandalised by the returnees’ enthusiasm for taking new Cambodian wives when they already had families in Vietnam and began speaking of them disparagingly as ‘Khmers in conical hats’, an allusion to the headgear worn by Vietnamese peasants. From early 1972 some of the Hanoi Khmers were discreetly removed from sensitive positions, especially in the Special Zone and the South-West, to be given lower-ranking posts or sent to ‘reforge themselves’ through manual labour. Although there was no general purge — transfers were made on a case-by-case basis — it prompted a number of defections by former Khmer Viet Minh, who either crossed the lines to join the government side or made their way back to Hanoi, thereby reinforcing the CPK leaders’ doubts about the group’s reliability.

  This growing mistrust of Vietnamese intentions, felt by Pol and the rest of the Standing Committee no less than by lower-level cadres, was not simply the product of atavistic fears.

  Even the Soviet Ambassador in Hanoi, Ivan Shcherbakov, a pro-Vietnamese source if ever there were one, told Moscow that the Vietnamese leaders still spoke of their old dream of a ‘socialist Indochinese Federation’. Hanoi’s ‘narrowly nationalistic approach’ and its attempts ‘to subordinate the problems of Cambodia and Laos to the interests of Vietnam’, he warned, risked alienating the communist movements in both those countries — exactly the same problem that had soured relations with the Khmers in the early 1950s. To Pol, the experience of the alliance with the Vietnamese during the resistance war in 1971 and ‘72 showed, even more clearly than Vietnam’s refusal to help him against Sihanouk in the late 1960s, that only force majeure would ever bring Hanoi to accept the reality of an independent Cambodian revolution and that, for the CPK to be in a position to resist Vietnamese control, it would have to build up its forces militarily and politically until they had sufficient strength to make attempts at interference unprofitable.

  At this juncture, another factor intervened. The peace talks with the Americans, which had been under way in Paris for the previous four years, suddenly picked up speed. In mid-1972, for the first time, a real possibility emerged of a negotiated settlement.

  For Pol this presented both problems and opportunities. Until then, the Vietnamese and Cambodian communists, whatever their political differences, had been bound together by the war against the United States. If Hanoi now signed a separate peace, the biggest factor uniting them would disappear. If, on the other hand, Vietnam’s forces left Cambodia after a negotiated accord, the Khmers Rouges would at last have carte blanche to follow whatever policies they wished without having constantly to look over their shoulders to gauge Vietnamese reactions. However they would also come under pressure to negotiate with the US themselves, a course which Pol regarded as diametrically opposed to the CPK’s long-term interests, even without the precedent of Geneva in 1954.

  It was this last prospect that he found most worrying. That spring President Nixon had met Mao to lay the foundations of a strategic partnership with China against the Russians. Would the Americans try to use this new relationship to reach a separate deal with Prince Sihanouk, who for the past two and a half years had been acting as the public face of the resistance from his gilded exile in Beijing? If they did, how would the Chinese react? And the mercurial Prince himself — which side would he come down on?

  For the first year Sihanouk spent in Beijing, he had been both physically and politically in an orbit entirely his own. In the city beyond, the harsh values of the Cultural Revolution prevailed. But behind the walls of his princely mansion, the Cambodian leader lived like the King he still was, with a phalanx of chefs to turn out gourmet dishes of Chinese, Khmer and French cuisine, a private swimming pool, a tennis court, a cinema and the best wine cellar in Red China. He entertained diplomats and sympathetic journalists like the French writer Jean Lacouture, at a table groaning with foie gras and guinea-fowl — ‘from my good friend, [the North Korean leader] Kim Il Sung’ — and made broadcasts to the Cambodian people over the FUNK radio in Hanoi, extolling the feats of arms of the resistance and denouncing the treachery of Lon Nol and his ‘pro-American clique’.

  But he had no direct contact with the Khmer Rouge leadership.

  It was as though the GRUNC, in Beijing, under Prime Minister Penn Nouth, with its attendant apparatus of ministries and ambassadors, existed in total isolation from the reality of t
he war being fought on the ground. The rare messages from ‘the interior faction’, as the CPK was euphemistically called, were sent in the name of Khieu Samphân, now officially presented as ‘Commander-in-Chief of the People’s Armed Forces for the National Liberation of Kampuchea’, and transmitted via the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

  The propaganda display in Beijing was useful. The Chinese understood that the resistance stood a far better chance of international recognition with Sihanouk at its head than if it were led by a group of anonymous revolutionaries in the jungles of Kompong Thom. Sihanouk was no dupe either: he said privately from the outset that the FUNK would exist only for as long as the Khmers Rouges needed him, and later told the New York Times:’They will spit me out like a cherry pit the moment they have won.’ But it was in the Prince’s interest, too, to portray himself as resistance chief. He maintained close contact with the Vietnamese, who delighted him when he visited Hanoi by letting him stay in the apartments formerly occupied by Ho Chi Minh. Nominally he headed the Khmers Rumdoh, who were distinguished from Cambodian communist units by a badge bearing the Prince’s effigy which they wore on their uniforms. In reality, however, these troops were a Vietnamese creation. As Sihanouk noted bitterly, there was no chain of command stretching back to the GRUNC in Beijing. The ‘Sihanoukist army’ took its orders from Hanoi.

  It was a role Sihanouk understood well: as King, under the French, he had also served as a national symbol, with no overt executive role. But in those days he had been able to transmute the aura of kingship into political power.

  Now, confined to faraway Beijing, that became much harder — and from mid-1971 onward, when Ieng Sary came to China as ‘Special Representative of the Interior’, his margin of manoeuvre was restricted still more. Sary had reached Hanoi from Ratanakiri in December 1970. He spent the next three months reorganising the ‘Voice of FUNK’ Radio (which he placed under the control of his wife, Khieu Thirith) and trying to impose the new Party line, emanating from the maquis, on Son Ngoc Minh and the rest of the fractious Khmer community in North Vietnam. In April 1971, he travelled secretly to Beijing, where he spent the summer incognito in talks with the Chinese Communist Party’s International Liaison Department, his presence unknown even to his fellow Khmers. Finally, in August, the Chinese announced his arrival with much fanfare and he was officially installed in a villa in central Beijing about half a mile from Sihanouk’s residence. There a teletype circuit was installed, giving him a direct link to Pol’s headquarters at S-71, and he began to build the core of the future Khmer Rouge Foreign Ministry. Thiounn Mumm, his brother Prasith, and the asthmatic Keat Chhon were inducted into the CPK, followed shortly afterwards by several other young radicals from the Cercle Marxiste.

  Sary had a triple mission. He was to liaise with the Chinese and Vietnamese leadership on behalf of the CPK; to keep an eye on the GRUNC’s foreign policy, which until then had been the exclusive preserve of Sihanouk and Penn Nouth; and to ensure that the Prince hewed to the Party line at a time when CPK and Vietnamese policies were diverging.

  This last task was not made easier by the fact that Sihanouk took an instant dislike to him. Sary was a slippery, duplicitous introvert, contemptuous of the Prince in private and intimidated in his presence, ‘falling over himself, not knowing where to put his hands when he tries to make a reverence’, as one observer put it. Sihanouk in turn tormented him, telephoning him in the small hours of the morning to check that he was not meeting Zhou Enlai (who, like Mao, kept impossible hours) and inviting him to watch risqué films borrowed from the French Embassy, an experience Sary loathed. For a time, the Prince managed to maintain the outward appearance of concord. But occasionally the mask would drop. ‘That abominable Ieng Sary is always spying on me,’ he told the Swedish Ambassador, Jean-Christophe Oberg, who visited him at the state guesthouse in Hanoi. ‘Mr Ambassador, if you look at the bottom of the curtain as you go out of the room you will see his feet. He is always standing there listening in.’ Eventually, during a visit to Algiers, the Prince could contain himself no longer, telling journalists that his Khmer Rouge minder was ‘my worst enemy . . . What is more, I find him antipathetic. But what does that matter? . . . What sort of patriot would I be if I made everything revolve around . . . my personal likes and dislikes?’

  The looming peace accord on Vietnam exacerbated the differences between Sihanouk and his communist allies.

  To the Prince, it opened the prospect of a negotiated settlement for Cambodia whereby, with American and Chinese backing, he could return to Phnom Penh as head of a ‘third force’ government, made up of moderates from the Lon Nol regime and men like Khieu Samphân, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim (whom he mistakenly believed were key figures in the communist resistance). The Vietnamese favoured this solution and Zhou Enlai gave him to understand that China was not opposed either. The Khmers Rouges were adamantly against it. In July, Pol called a ten-day meeting of Zone and military leaders at which he insisted that there would be ‘absolutely no negotiation’. Whatever the Vietnamese might do, the Cambodians would go on fighting. Three months later, he repeated this to the new COSVN head, Pham Hung, during an acrimonious four-day meeting near his headquarters on the Chinit river. Soon afterwards, the chief Vietnamese negotiator at the Paris Peace Talks, Le Duc Tho, warned Kissinger that while Vietnam could ensure that the Pathet Lao would acquiesce in a peace accord, it could not deliver the Khmers Rouges. Kissinger refused to believe him. Only when it became clear that the Vietnamese would not budge did the Americans reluctantly agree that, in Cambodia’s case, the accords should contain a non-binding commitment, which Kissinger later explained at a press conference as an American ‘expectation that a de facto ceasefire will come into being’ there as well as in Laos.

  Pol’s view was that while ‘up to now, Sihanouk’s position is one of unity with us, some elements of his approach are unstable . . . We must therefore continue to draw him over to our side.’ Accordingly, he decided that the Prince and his wife, Monique, should be invited for the first time to tour the ‘liberated zones’.

  This was something that Sihanouk had been requesting ever since 1970 but the Khmer Rouge leadership had always refused, claiming that it was too dangerous. In fact they were afraid that, in the words of one Khmer Rouge cadre, ‘if Sihanouk comes back, all the people will unite behind him and we will be left bare-arsed’. Khmer Rouge wariness over the Prince’s popularity meant that their troops wore no Sihanouk badges; the CPK did not display his portrait; and he was rarely mentioned at meetings. Within the Party, behind closed doors, he was condemned as a feudalist, but a Central Committee directive laid down that such views ‘must absolutely not be made known to the masses . . . [and] can be disseminated only within our own ranks’.

  By late 1972, such concerns seemed less pressing. The communists were solidly in power in the areas they controlled. To Pol, the key consideration became to stiffen Sihanouk’s resolve and to equip him to serve as the voice of an independent Cambodian nationalism, not simply as a spokesman for the Khmer resistance in an Indochina-wide war.

  It proved a very necessary precaution.

  Three days before the signing of the Paris accords on January 27 1973, Pham Hung returned to the Chinit river to present Pol with the text of the peace agreement. That same week Ieng Sary began extended talks in Hanoi with Le Duan and other members of the Vietnamese Politburo. Extracts from the minutes circulated internally in Hanoi show the Vietnamese leaders walking on eggshells. Le Duan suggested to Sary that the CPK ‘consolidate the victories already achieved, and then move forward’. The Premier, Pham Van Dong, urged him to ‘take the initiative. Maybe they will meet your demands, maybe not . . . Why does your country still hesitate?’ But when, at the end of the month, Sihanouk offered publicly to meet Kissinger, promising ‘a rapid reconciliation with Washington’ if the US would agree to recognise an independent and non-aligned Kampuchea, Hanoi was compelled to row back. On February 7, a joint statement issued by the GRUNC and North Vietnam said the war
in Cambodia would continue. Four days later, Le Duc Tho proposed to Sary that Pol should visit Hanoi to discuss ‘the diplomatic struggle’. He went on: ‘Among Cambodia, Vietnam and China, we should be of the same mind about how both to fight and to negotiate . . . in order to bring America down . . . Otherwise [Cambodia] will meet difficulties like Thailand, Malaysia and Burma [with] endless guerrilla warfare, no assistance [from outside] and the situation will not progress.’ Sary was noncommittal but promised to transmit Vietnam’s views.

  Soon afterwards he accompanied Sihanouk and Monique down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It was a very different journey from the one he had made two years earlier, when he had walked the entire way. This time they travelled in a cavalcade of Russian-made jeeps and lorries with an escort of more than a hundred Vietnamese guards, drivers, cooks, servants and a full medical team. Thanks to the peace accord there was no bombing. Each night they stayed in a wooden guest cottage, specially built for the purpose and equipped with running water and plumbing, where they were served French meals with freshly-baked baguettes. It was a fitting start for an altogether surreal homecoming.