Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  In Hanoi the Vietnamese Politburo was compelled to make a painful reassessment. The Khmers Rouges now controlled more than two-thirds of Cambodia’s territory and almost half its population. With US bombers grounded, it was clear that they would win whatever Vietnam did. Hanoi’s original strategy — to establish a unified communist Vietnam, which would then ‘liberate’ its younger siblings, Laos and Cambodia, earning their undying gratitude — was dead in the water. By continuing to push Pol to start peace talks which he did not want or need, the Vietnamese communists risked losing what little goodwill from the Khmers Rouges remained.

  The arms flow along the Ho Chi Minh Trail was quietly restored.

  Other gestures followed. Vietnamese heavy artillery was despatched to help in the siege of Kompong Cham. A South Vietnamese NLF delegation toured the Eastern Zone and was given a red-carpet welcome from Pol himself, Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphân, Hou Yuon and other CPK luminaries. But the damage had been done. In July 1973, the CPK Central Committee held its annual plenum at K-30, Pol’s new headquarters a few miles north of S-71, which had been abandoned the previous winter. The delegates agreed that in future Vietnam should be treated ‘as a friend, but a friend with a conflict’.

  That autumn, Pol travelled again to the Special Zone, where a new forward base had been established near the village of Chrok Sdêch, ‘The Gate of the King’, in the eastern foothills of the Cardamom Mountains, on the old royal road from Oudong to Pursat. The area was thickly forested, crisscrossed by tracks no wider than an ox-cart, which were hidden from the air by a dense canopy of foliage of immense tropical hardwoods. As the crow flies, it lies about thirty miles north-west of Phnom Penh.

  Pol and his entourage lived in thatched huts, built beside a stream amid a cluster of century-old mango trees. Mok’s South-Western Zone troops had set up their main camp, equipped with bunkers and trenches for protection against bombing, in rough, broken country, studded with rocky outcrops, a few miles further into the hills. Thiounn Thioeunn ran a military hospital, with six long barrack-like wards, in the nearby village of Boeng Var. Down the cart-track leading southward towards Phnom Penh was Vorn Vet’s Special Zone headquarters, concealed in a grove of sugar palms that towered over the surrounding plain.

  In theory, operational control of the Khmer Rouge army lay with Son Sen, whom Pol had summoned from the North-East to resume his role as Chief of Staff. His command post was ten miles to the south-east, near the railway halt of Ra Smach on the now abandoned main line from Phnom Penh to Battambang. It was in an area dotted with giant anthills up to twenty feet high, with trees and clumps of bamboo growing out of their sides. Sen’s brother, Nikân, recounted:

  We built the command offices half-underground, with trenches and bolt-holes inside the anthills, and a system of tunnels to communicate from one anthill to the next. When there were bombing raids, we hid inside — as though we were ants ourselves. Then, when the danger was past, we would emerge and resume our work. Usually when we built trenches, we lined them with wood and a layer of rice-husks to absorb the Shockwaves from the bombs. But earth that has been worked by ants resists the blast even better. And the bamboos provided camouflage.

  Messages were carried to the front by courier. Pol distrusted radio traffic for fear of enemy monitoring. Although the resistance had captured US-made transceivers from Lon Nol’s forces, they were used mainly to listen in to enemy communications and occasionally to mislead enemy commanders, as on one notable occasion when a quick-witted Khmer Rouge operator tricked the navigator of an air-force transport plane into parachuting a precious cargo of 105-mm artillery shells, destined for government forces, into a resistance-held area, by providing false map co-ordinates. At battalion level and below, Khmer Rouge forces had no radio equipment. Where the Chinese communists, at a similar stage in their civil war, had used bugles to communicate, the Cambodians employed wooden flutes, whose banshee-like wails, echoing through the night air, instilled terror into their opponents.

  Pol took two major decisions during his stay at Chrok Sdêch.

  The first was systematically to tighten the noose around the capital by cutting, as far as possible, road and river communications with the rest of the country, in preparation for an all-out offensive either the following spring or, if that proved impossible, during the dry season a year later. The second was to tighten security in the Special Zone to prevent infiltration by government spies. This had become a real problem. Serge Thion, a French sympathiser who had visited the Special Zone a year earlier, had been astonished by the ease with which people could cross between government and communist-controlled areas. As a result, Lon Nol’s intelligence service was remarkably well informed.*

  Now all that changed. Kong Duong, then a sixteen-year-old student at the Lycée Yukanthor in Phnom Penh, recalled what happened when he tried to visit relatives near Oudong the following spring:

  I had a guide from the liberated zone, a peasant who had come to take me across. But we were both arrested by the chhlorp, the village militia. They said we were spies . . . My arms were bound behind me and they used a length of rope to pull me along. They sat me down under a tree . . . Then they announced that they’d caught a spy — and all the villagers came to look. When my sister and brother-in-law saw it was me, they came up and vouched for me. That was my good luck — because I was arrested at 4 p.m. If there’d been no one around who could recognise me and say who I was, I’d have been killed. They asked me questions. ‘Where are you from? What do you do? How long have you been a spy? You are here to find out where are the places to bomb!’ It was the militia chief of the commune who decided I should be spared. But if later I had turned out to be a spy after all, my brother-in-law and his whole family would have been executed. The guide who had brought me over wasn’t so lucky. When we were arrested we were separated. He was taken to another village. No one knew him there and he was killed.

  Purges also began among the local population. Duong, who afterwards spent fifteen years as a Khmer Rouge cadre, remembered how in his village ‘they killed anyone who had an education’. It was not that they had been ordered to do so. But that was how the peasants interpreted the call for heightened vigilance. ‘To them, rich people and educated people were the same: they both looked down on the poor.’

  New prisons were built — one near Vorn Vet’s headquarters; two others further up in the mountains, beyond Chrok Sdêch — where alleged infiltrators, if they survived the militia, were sent for interrogation. Long afterwards local people still shivered at the names of these places — Sdok Srat, Phnom Prateat and K’mab — ‘to which men were taken, but none came back’. Monks arriving from the capital were also viewed as potential spies and confined to a holding centre in the village of Dom Kveth. Ethnic Chinese and Sino-Khmers, who had at first been among the strongest supporters of the resistance, were now denounced as ‘capitalists who suck the Cambodian people’s blood’. There was growing concern, too, about the attitude of the Chams, who were numerous in the Special Zone. In November 1973, a Cham revolt had broken out in the East, in protest against the communists’ attempts to force them to abandon their customs and live in co-operatives like everyone else. At the end of the year, most of the leaders of the movement were still in hiding in the jungle. The Zone Secretary, So Phim, acting on Pol’s instructions, gave orders that those captured be treated with exemplary severity:

  The leaders must be tortured fiercely in order that we may obtain a complete understanding of their organisation. Then we should wait for a time before deciding what to do with them. Lower-level leaders should also be tortured harshly, but they need not be killed . . . Their followers should be re-educated . . . Then they can be released to act as political bait and kept under surveillance . . . All methods, and all political and military measures, must be employed . . . to prevent them hiding and regrouping their forces.

  This idea that all who diverged from the revolution were human vermin and should be treated accordingly, analogous to the medieval C
hristian notion that sinners merit the torments of Hell, also coloured the Party’s attitude to the inhabitants of Phnom Penh, including the peasant refugees who had streamed into the city. They had chosen their side, sitting out the US bombing in safety while the revolutionaries were blown to smithereens. They therefore merited whatever punishment rained down on them. From late December 1973, Chinese-made 107– and 122–mm rockets were fired into the city, often falling on the poorest quarters and causing hundreds of casualties. The following spring, these were supplemented by captured 105-mm artillery, firing at maximum range from positions south of the capital. Already in 1971 and 1972, the Viet Cong had launched occasional rocket attacks as a means of psychological warfare, to demonstrate that the Lon Nol government was incapable of protecting the population. Now it became a daily blitz of indiscriminate terror.

  During the winter Pol travelled back to the Chinit river base to confer with Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary, who had arrived from Beijing. While he was there, twenty-five Khmer Rouge battalions stealthily took up position around Oudong, the former capital, north-west of Phnom Penh. The assault force included two all-women battalions, the only ones in the communist army. They had an unhappy record, for, as one cadre explained, ‘the moment it was known they were there, they attracted the enemy like magnets.’ By the time the war ended, they had each lost 60 per cent dead.

  Oudong was attacked at 3 a.m. on Sunday, March 3 1974. By morning, most of the defenders had been driven back to a narrow perimeter centred on a temple south-east of the town. After a three-week siege, the redoubt fell and several thousand government soldiers and civilian refugees were massacred. It was said afterwards that many ‘turned their [guns] on their own families’ — the eternal camp-followers of Cambodian military campaigns — ‘before killing themselves to avoid capture and torture’. The population of the town, some 20,000 people, was rounded up and marched to the forest of Palhel, an uninhabited area to the east of Chrok Sdêch, where Mok had a military base, before being resettled in co-operatives in the Special Zone and the South-West. Officials and uniformed soldiers were separated from the rest, led away and killed.

  The resistance did not have everything its own way. South-Western Zone troops laid siege to Kampot but were beaten back. Government forces eventually recaptured what was left of Oudong, now an empty wasteland of razed buildings and burnt earth. Some 40,000 villagers in the Northern Zone, driven to desperation by the harshness of the regime imposed by Ke Pauk and Koy Thuon, took advantage of a thrust by government troops to flee the ‘liberated areas’ en masse and take refuge in the town of Kompong Thom. Their accounts of the brutality of Khmer Rouge cadres, of forced labour, hunger and executions, foreshadowed the regime that would descend on the whole country little more than a year later. For a few weeks, republican forces fought with renewed vigour. But then the grim images of life on the other side were rationalised away as refugees’ exaggerations and quietly forgotten.

  At the end of March, Pol left Chrok Sdêch to visit the battlefield at Kampot before travelling on to Kep, which had been captured six months before. It is an area of pristine, white-sand beaches and limpid turquoise water, formerly the summer playground of the Cambodian elite. Now it was totally deserted. To mark the victory at Oudong, Pol knotted a krama around his waist and, like Mao signalling the start of the Cultural Revolution by swimming across the Yangtse, plunged into the sea. His montagnard bodyguards had never seen the ocean before and waded in uneasily after him, holding their AK-47S above their heads. It was the month of his forty-ninth birthday. The vice around Phnom Penh was slowly tightening.

  The war remained Pol’s chief concern in 1974, but it was not the only one. Although theoretically Cambodia was still in the midst of what Marxists termed a national democratic revolution’ — which required the broadest possible united front to overthrow the right-wing government and install a progressive regime — Pol’s mind was beginning to turn to the next stage, the ‘socialist revolution’, whose purpose was to transform root and branch the nature of Cambodian society. Collectivisation and the elimination of private commerce were already under way. Now, he decided, the time had come to start speaking openly of socialism as Angkar’s political goal, to launch a secret campaign to oppose the influence of Sihanouk and to sharpen the ‘consciousness and revolutionary stand’ of every Party member in preparation for the day when the new policies could be put into effect nationwide.

  In September, Pol summoned the Central Committee to the village of Meakk, in Prek Kok commune, eight miles south of the old Northern Zone base at Dângkda, for its annual plenum. There, at his urging, the assembled CPK leaders took three crucial decisions, which together helped to define the nature of the Khmer Rouge system over the next four years.

  The first concerned the population of the towns.

  As early as 1971, Pol and others had been struck by the speed with which the urban centres in the ‘liberated zones’, given half a chance, reverted to their bad old, capitalist ways. In March that year, Pol’s former companion at Krâbao, Yun Soeun, had been dismayed to discover during a visit to Kratie:

  The town market was even more crowded than before liberation . . . It was full of people at every hour of the day and night . . . There were Khmers, Chinese and Vietnamese merchants, buying and selling. People came on bicycles, on motorbikes and up the river by motor-boat. At the port, boats were coming and going all the time. There were drinking shops, brothels and gambling dens, and many cases of robbery . . .

  Two years later, Pol wrote subsequently, nothing had changed. The merchants ‘did not want to work with us . . . At first, it wasn’t our intention to ban them. But . . . they cheated us all the time . . . In Kratie . . . we could not control the population because the traders . . . controlled the distribution of goods . . . They were arrogant, and did not want to subordinate themselves to us.’ The only answer, he concluded, was ‘to send them to work in the fields’. Otherwise, ‘if the result of so many sacrifices was that the capitalists remain in control, what was the point of the revolution?’ Kratie was evacuated in the second half of 1973. At about the same time, Khmer Rouge forces attacking Kompong Cham drove 15,000 town-dwellers from their homes and forced them to accompany them back into the ‘liberated zones’. Some died of hunger and from bombings along the way, but most were resettled in villages where, as one peasant put it, ‘they lived a normal life’. Finally, in March 1974, came the evacuation of Oudong. According to Pol’s aide, Phi Phuon:

  It worked well in the sense that there weren’t any big problems [for us] in resettling the evacuees from Oudong in the countryside and, on their side, the town-dwellers didn’t cause any special difficulties either. It was a radical solution designed to foil any attempt by the enemy to destabilise our forces — and at the same time it was an internal measure, because for our cadres, if they were living close together with the urban population, there was a risk that they would be politically and ideologically corrupted. They might be influenced by the new urban environment . . . If the town-dwellers were evacuated, that risk was avoided. You must understand that the final goal was the liberation of Phnom Penh, and to that end we had to sharpen our political and ideological stance. Was it so our cadres would avoid ‘the sugar-coated bullets of the bourgeoisie?’ Yes!

  There were other, less clearly defined reasons, too. All through history, peasant revolutions have been characterised by resentment of the cities. Not just in Asia but in early-twentieth-century Europe, men like the Bulgarian Agrarian Party leader, Aleksandr Stamboliski, ‘hated the town and both its categories of inhabitant, bourgeois and industrial workers alike’. Populists in Serbia, in Poland and Russia held similar views. The CPK did not put it in quite those terms. But the wellsprings of its action — the peasant resentments which, in a primitive agricultural society like that of Cambodia, provided the only possible motor for revolution — were exactly the same. The town-dwellers were to return to the land to reforge themselves, to reconnect with their Khmer roots. It was a t
rial, a rite of passage, from which they were expected to emerge strengthened, purified of the filth that came from city life.

  Whatever the precise mix of arguments, the outcome was a unanimous decision that Phnom Penh and all other Cambodian towns should be evacuated as soon as they were ‘liberated’ and the population sent off to start a new life in the villages.

  The second issue before the Committee concerned money.

  A year earlier, shortly after Sihanouk’s visit to the maquis, it had been agreed that a new currency should be printed for use in the ‘liberated zones’. The previous December, Ieng Sary had brought sample notes from Beijing for Pol’s approval. Thereafter, the use of government currency had been gradually phased out in the communist-controlled areas and replaced temporarily by a barter system with a view to introducing the new, revolutionary money by the end of 1974. The Central Committee did not call into question the principle of these decisions, but decided that the new currency should be put into circulation only after the whole country had been brought under communist control.

  The third and, in many ways, the most difficult problem had to do with Party unity.

  Since 1968, when the infant Cambodian communist movement had officially launched its armed struggle, the different groups and patronage networks that made up the CPK had made a real effort to come together. But it did not last. Five years later, cracks were appearing in the façade of Party brotherhood. In the Northern Zone, the military commander, Ke Pauk, a former Issarak, was constantly at odds with the Zone Secretary, Koy Thuon, who came from an intellectual background. There were similar, though more muted strains between Ruos Nhim in the North-West and his military commander, Kong Sophal. But Pauk and Sophal enjoyed Pol’s favour; their civilian counterparts did not.