Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  The couple were welcomed at K-12, the transit station on the Laotian border, by Hu Nim, Khieu Samphân, Son Sen and Ney Sarann, the NorthEastern Zone Secretary. After donning black Khmer Rouge peasant garb and checkered red kramas, they spent the next six days being driven some three hundred miles along bumpy dirt roads through the northern provinces of Stung Treng and Preah Vihear, to Mount Kulen, north-east of Siem Reap. To avoid spotter planes, much of the journey was made at night. No Vietnamese was permitted to accompany them, but a Chinese film unit recorded their progress.

  Like a latter-day Marie-Antoinette vaunting the rustic joys of the Petit Trianon at Versailles, Monique went into raptures over the traditional Khmer stilt-house that the Northern Zone Secretary, Koy Thuon, had prepared for them at their destination. ‘It’s our White House in the liberated zone!’ she wrote excitedly in her diary. ‘There’s a study, a little salon and a curtain separating these from the “bedroom” — there’s even a carpet on the floor and curtains in the windows.’ Almost every Khmer Rouge luminary of note was there to honour them, although some, like Pol, concealed their identities. The Prince was feted with theatrical performances, a meeting to mark the third anniversary of his ‘Appeal of March 23’ which had launched the FUNK, and visits to the temples of Bantei Srey and Angkor Wat, where he and Monique were photographed beneath thirteenth-century friezes of Angkorian overseers and slaves under the watchful gaze of their modern cohorts.

  For all its aura of guerrilla chic, the trip was not without danger. The US had stopped bombing Vietnam and Laos but not Cambodia, and the day after the Prince’s party started back, the road they had taken was obliterated by B-52S. In propaganda terms, it was a coup, and when the first photographs appeared in April, flabbergasted American diplomats insisted they must be fakes. Two months later, to press home his advantage, Sihanouk set out on an extended tour of sympathetic states in Africa, Asia and Europe, his second since his overthrow, and afterwards announced that the resistance government was being transferred from Beijing to the ‘liberated zones’. The goal was to convince a majority of United Nations member states that the GRUNC, rather than Lon Nol’s regime, should hold Cambodia’s UN seat. The effort failed by a handful of votes, mainly because of US pressure but also in part because of the ambiguities of Sihanouk’s own position. Despite his enthusiasm over his homecoming, he had been lucid enough to realise that his hosts had systematically prevented him from having any contact with the population, and in a series of interviews that summer he reflected bleakly on his future under a Khmer Rouge administration. His relationship with Ieng Sary deteriorated further and at one point he informed his entourage that he intended to resign. Zhou Enlai dissuaded him, as he had during an earlier tantrum in 1971.

  Meanwhile pressure for a negotiated settlement continued. Pol declined Le Duan’s invitation to talks in Hanoi, pleading ill-health. But over the next two years he had to combat peace initiatives not only from Vietnam but also from other ‘friendly powers’, including Algeria, Romania, Yugoslavia and, more subtly, from China itself, which wanted an early end to the war so as to be able to concentrate Asian minds not on US imperialism, now, in its view, in decline, but on Soviet ‘social-imperialism’, which it saw as the main threat to the region.

  In fact, the idea of a ‘third force’ solution was doomed before it began. Lon Nol showed little interest in a negotiated peace in Cambodia — which, whatever else it might do, would certainly remove him from power — and Nixon and Kissinger none at all. Nevertheless, the impression grew abroad that the Khmer Rouge leadership was fanatical, obdurate, intransigent if not actually irrational, while at home the campaign against ‘third force’ elements and the tendencies to pacifism and compromise which they were held to represent made all forms of moderation suspect.

  This was not an isolated trend. In 1973 every indicator of policy pointed to the same conclusion: the Cambodian revolution was entering a phase of comprehensive radicalisation.

  On February 9, two days after Sihanouk and the Vietnamese leaders had proclaimed that the Cambodian resistance would fight on, the United States resumed bombing. Over the next six months, until Congress imposed a halt, B-52S and other aircraft dropped 257,000 tons of high explosive on Khmer villages, nearly half the total in five years of war. In part this was because Cambodia, in the words of the CIA Director, William Colby, was now ‘the only game in town’. As a result of the Paris accords, the US was hamstrung in Laos and Vietnam. Cambodia was the one place in Indochina where it could flex its military muscle and show that, even in retreat, it was still capable of something. Bombing became a virility symbol. ‘The President wanted to send a hundred more B-52S,’ the Air Force Secretary, Robert Seamans, recalled. ‘This was appalling. You couldn’t even figure out where you were going to put them all.’ In the event, B-52 sortie rates peaked at eighty-one a day, a third higher than in Vietnam, and air traffic congestion became so acute that bomb-loads sometimes fell dozens of miles off target.

  The deluge of fire from the sky saved the Lon Nol government, which most observers, including Americans, had expected to fall that year. It also sent tens of thousands of new recruits to join the ranks of the resistance or to become refugees in Phnom Penh and other government-held towns, as peasants fled devastated villages in far greater numbers than ever before. More importantly, it provided the conditions for a mutation of Khmer Rouge policy, which would have come about anyway over time but now occurred much more quickly.* The outcome was a harsher, more repressive regime under which the suffering of individuals became unimportant because there was so much of it.

  Ostensibly to avoid the bombing, whole villages were uprooted and moved to new locations. Smaller-scale population movements had already occurred in 1972 — and even, in Ratanakiri, as early as 1968 — but then it had been a matter of removing people from government control by transferring them deeper inside the ‘liberated zones’, where they lived in conditions not too different from those they had known before. Now they were sent to remote mountain and jungle areas. Their original homes, if not already destroyed, were burned down to stop them returning. Instead of working individually or in small mutual aid teams, they were dragooned into cooperatives of thirty or forty families who farmed the land in common. Here, too, there were precedents: in the South-West and the Special Zone, attempts had been made to introduce co-operatives after the May 1972 Central Committee meeting. But they had been unpopular and the authorities had not insisted. Now collectivisation was imposed by force throughout the ‘liberated zones’. Even in the Eastern Zone, where the cadres were reputed to be more easy-going than in other parts of the country, in half a year some 30,000 people were moved away from areas adjoining Vietnam. Kenneth Quinn, then a US consular officer just across the border at Can Tho, pieced together what had been happening from interviews with refugees:

  Families were forced to abandon [everything] except for basic necessities. Others reportedly committed suicide rather than face the loss of all their worldly possessions. Stories carried back by those who had survived earlier relocations told of people dying en route and forced labour after arrival . . . Village officials fled rather than carry out the directives from higher headquarters. Anyone protesting these policies was arrested, taken away and never seen again. Despite this, people . . . still fled . . . By November [1973] . . . a depopulated buffer zone had been established . . . [Intelligence] officers who flew along the border were able to observe deserted villages, empty roads, abandoned rice-fields and abandoned towns. . .

  Conditions in the new locations are reportedly not good. [Those] who have escaped say they are crowded, dirty places where people suffer from lack of food and [there is] a great deal of sickness . . . All land is organised and worked in common . . . and even though production has increased through the use of fertilisers and other scientific methods, people are [said to be] unhappy because they are forced to work constantly and do not have land of their own.

  Internal Khmer Rouge reports bore out his account.
A senior Eastern Zone leader acknowledged that many villagers killed their livestock for meat, rather than see the animals become collective property. ‘When everything was communally owned,’ he said, ‘the cattle and poultry became sick and died. Farm implements were damaged because no one maintained them any more, and no one took care of the fields.’

  The new policy was officially launched on May 20 1973. Pol justified it partly on practical grounds. Co-operatives were necessary to prevent the peasants selling their produce to the Vietnamese or to traders from government-held areas, who offered higher prices than the Khmer Rouge administration. They were a means of ensuring sufficient food supplies for the constantly expanding army and, in areas where most of the able-bodied men had left to fight in the war, of guaranteeing subsistence rations for the women, children and old people who had remained behind. But there was also an ideological rationale. The CPK’s goal was to ‘build a clean, honest society’. Private trade, like private ownership, implied the pursuit of gain and attachment to individual possessions. It was by definition dishonest.

  In the first six months after the collectivisation programme began, some 60,000 people fled the ‘liberated zones’ to cross into government-held areas or take refuge in South Vietnam.

  The 25 per cent of the rural population that had never owned anything, and therefore had nothing to lose, went along with the new system. The problem was the other three-quarters. They, too, were poor. Rural Cambodia, in the early 1970s, was less developed than many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. But most of the peasants who supported the Khmers Rouges in their fight against the Americans, sending their sons to join the resistance and rice to feed the army, were not seeking a fundamental change in their way of life. Pol would later twist the figures to claim that 75 per cent of the population was virtually destitute. It was a claim he must have known was absurd, an ideological figleaf to cover a political decision taken for other reasons. But once proclaimed, it became holy writ.* For the Khmers Rouges, from 1973 onwards, co-operative policy was framed on the premise that most Cambodians had lived in semi-starvation under the old society and therefore the co-operatives had to be an improvement. Since the majority were ‘content with and faithful to the new collective system’, as Pol put it, dissent was ipso facto the mark of a class enemy. Like many of the policies he imposed, it was a case of ‘cutting the feet to fit the shoes’.

  The new regime was applied with particular vigour in the Northern Zone, as Ping Sây discovered when he travelled to Pol’s HQ on the Chinit river in the summer of 1973:

  I met some relatives on the way [who] told me that in all that region there were no markets any more . . . Life was very harsh, very difficult. The revolution was not at all what they had expected. So when I arrived I met Khieu Samphân and Hu Nim, and I said to them: ‘We ought to set up a trade office to sell things to the people. They don’t even have any salt or relish for their rice.’ They didn’t answer. But they must have reported back what I had said, because afterwards Hu Nim told me: ‘Your views are unacceptable’ . . . I often wondered what happened to make them so hard and pitiless.

  The following year, Pol himself gave Sây part of the answer. ‘“If you could see how the revolutionary army fights to defeat the enemy,” he said, “I think perhaps you wouldn’t like it.” He said that to my face. And maybe he was right: because the destruction in those battles was incredible. For him I wasn’t tough enough.’ It was the same accusation that Ieng Sary had thrown at Keng Vannsak twenty years earlier, when they were students in Paris, and which others would make against Mey Mann. They were ‘excessively sentimental’.

  Sentiment has little place in any revolution. Robespierre’s France and Stalin’s Russia, the two revolutionary braziers which the young men of the Cercle Marxiste knew best, were prime examples. But in Cambodia in the mid-1970s, the glorification of violence went further. In Pol’s mind, bloodshed was cause for exultation. Humane feelings were a sign of weakness and should be ruthlessly suppressed. Nor was this one man’s aberration: the other Khmer Rouge leaders felt the same. CPK directives ritually enjoined Party members to embrace ‘suffering and hardship’ in exactly the same way as the early Christians were urged to embrace martyrdom. The Democratic Kampuchea National Anthem, which Pol sanctioned if not actually wrote, resembles nothing so much as the sanguinary paeans of nineteenth-century Catholicism:

  Bright red Blood covers the towns and plains

  of Kampuchea, our Motherland,

  Sublime Blood of the workers and peasants,

  Sublime Blood of the revolutionary men and women fighters!

  The Blood changes into unrelenting hatred

  And resolute struggle,

  [Which] . . . frees us from slavery.

  There is nothing comparable in Chinese or Vietnamese communist literature. Mao, who presided over slaughter on a far greater scale than Pol Pot, did not glory in the destruction caused by the Chinese revolution. To him it was a necessary evil, not an index of revolutionary virtue.

  The same deliberate extremism was translated into the conduct of the war at all levels. Until late 1972, atrocities were most often associated with government troops. Communist prisoners were routinely killed, to the despair of the Americans who found themselves deprived of potentially valuable intelligence because the men they hoped to question were dead by the time they arrived. Lon Nol’s soldiers massacred Vietnamese civilians and called in bombing strikes against Khmer villages, indifferent to civilian casualties, on the off chance that communist guerrillas might be hiding there. That is not to say the CPK forces were any better. They, too, killed and disembowelled prisoners and executed suspected collaborators. On the communist side, however, it was only after 1973 that such exactions became systematic.

  The Khmer Rouge soldiers in the field felt the change too. No longer were deserters treated with indulgence. Now they were killed. Discipline was ferocious for all ranks. That summer, the resistance launched its first major onslaught on Phnom Penh, in which 20-25,000 men, representing half of all Khmer Rouge main-force units, were mobilised to take part. By the time the offensive was beaten back in late July, thanks largely to US bombing, at least 30 per cent were dead. To meet the growing need for cannon fodder, conscription was introduced. The casualty rate on the government side was equally horrific: 1,000 men a week dead, injured or missing, according to the Commander-in-Chief, Sosthène Fernandez. But while government units sometimes turned and ran, there was no report of any Khmer Rouge unit breaking ranks or surrendering.

  US military intelligence claimed later that the forward commanders had ‘direct orders to take the city before August 1973’, when, at the behest of Congress, the American bombing runs were to end, ‘so they could prove to the world that they could humble the US.’

  Pol’s insistence on an all-out assault at the height of the rainy season, when the entire area surrounding the capital was flooded and conditions for the attackers were at their worst, was certainly, in military terms, futile, and showed total disregard for the lives of his own men. Had the Khmer Rouge commanders husbanded their forces and waited until the start of the dry season in December, the result might have been very different. As it was, the South-Western Zone troops who bore the brunt of the fighting had still not recovered from their ordeal a year later.

  But the Americans were wrong in concluding that Pol was bent on their humiliation. The real objective of the summer offensive was to force the hand of the Vietnamese.

  Since the Paris accords, the leadership in Hanoi had been in a quandary. Pol’s refusal to negotiate a ceasefire raised the spectre that they might lose control of their prickly Cambodian allies. Their first reaction was to make good the warning that Le Duc Tho had given Ieng Sary in February, when he had spoken of the danger of the Cambodians having to fight on with ‘no assistance from outside’. That spring the flow of arms down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from China was mysteriously interrupted. In April the Vietnamese Prime Minister, Pham Van Dong, told a Soviet diplomat that Viet
namese aid to the Cambodian communists was ‘decreasing, and its scale is now insignificant’. But squeezing the Khmer Rouge supply line did not produce the desired results. The Cambodians responded by raising the stakes. Pol gave orders that the Hanoi returnees, apart from a small minority who had proved their loyalty, should be rounded up and taken to a detention centre in Chhlong district, on the west bank of the Mekong, as suspected Vietnamese agents. At political training seminars, cadres began for the first time to speak of ‘those with Khmer bodies and Vietnamese minds’. Most of the returnees would eventually be executed.* Clashes between Khmer Rouge and remnant Vietnamese units escalated sharply: in July alone, there were two hundred Vietnamese casualties from incidents involving ‘friendly forces’. By late summer, only 2-3,000 Vietnamese combat troops and about 2,000 civilian cadres, plus the special units in the North-East guarding the Ho Chi Minh Trail, remained on Cambodian soil. All Vietnamese civilians, not merely refugees but also long-term residents, came under pressure to ‘return home’ on the grounds that the war in South Vietnam was now over. When the alternative was being herded into cooperatives, they needed little persuasion.

  At the same time the Khmers Rouges stepped up the military pressure. The river convoys supplying Phnom Penh came under sustained attack. Two cargo ships and several barges were sunk and eight other vessels damaged. The seaside town of Kep was captured. Takeo was surrounded.

  Rockets fell for the first time on Battambang. Finally, on August 12, government forces abandoned the strategic road junction at Skoun, 25 miles north of Phnom Penh. All the main land routes in and out of Phnom Penh were now insecure or cut and the capital relied increasingly on a US airlift for food, fuel and munitions.

  By the time the US bombing raids ended, refugees fleeing the countryside had swollen the population of the capital to nearly two million, three times the pre-war level. Around the city and along the banks of the Mekong as far as the Vietnamese border, the land was so pitted with craters that it looked, in the words of one diplomat, ‘like the valleys of the moon’. The Khmer Rouge attacks of that summer, undertaken in total disregard of the human and material cost, had created a momentum that was unstoppable. Kissinger later acknowledged that, after mid-1973, he had known Cambodia was lost.