Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  In the Eastern Zone, where Vietnamese influence had traditionally been strongest, the problems were of a different order. Men like Chan Chakrey, a flamboyant ex-monk who became commander of the Khmer Rouge 170th Division, made no secret of their preference for a less extreme communist system, one more tolerant of human failings. That was true, too, of the former Pracheachon leader Non Suon, who watched with dismay as members of his group were relegated to minor posts in the new CPK hierarchy. The conflict, dormant since the mid-1960s, between the ‘thatched huts’ and ‘brick houses’ — the former Issaraks with their roots in the ‘nine years’ war’ from 1945 to 1954, and the urban-educated radicals like Pol and Ieng Sary — came to the fore again. Adding to the tension, Hou Yuon, who never minced words, had begun openly to criticise certain CC decisions, often giving voice to what others felt but dared not say. In 1974, Yuon accused the Standing Committee of cheating the peasantry by refusing to honour IOUs issued for requisitioned rice. He told Pol and Nuon Chea that the co-operative system, of which he was nominally in charge, was being imposed too fast and allegedly warned: ‘If you go on like this, I give your regime three years. Then it will collapse.’* Yuon was a jovial, open man, ‘a good leader . . . popular among his comrades and the population at large’. His loyalty to the cause, and his friendship with Pol, dating from their Paris days, saved him from real trouble. None the less, he was sent to do penance planting vegetables at an isolated base called K-6 in the Chinit river headquarters area and thereafter remained under a political cloud.

  Matters came to a head in the South-Western Zone where there had been a long-standing feud between Mok, the Zone Secretary, and the Koh Kong leader, Prasith.

  Ostensibly it was over ‘revolutionary morality’: Prasith and another senior Zone official, Chou Chet, were both notorious skirt-chasers. Mok was a puritan. Chou Chet made his peace with the Zone Secretary. Prasith did not. But there were also deeper issues. Prasith, who had joined the Central Committee in 1960, had been passed over eight years later when Mok had been appointed Zone chief. Since that time Prasith, who had a strong following among the peasantry in the Thai border area, had manoeuvred against Mok to maintain his independence. To what was essentially a struggle for power were then added political differences. Prasith was a moderate in Khmer Rouge terms — ‘a gentle, simple, methodical man, a good organiser . . . who mixed easily with the people’, as Phi Phuon described him. He ran Koh Kong on more liberal lines than other South-Western Zone regions: private trade was permitted until the beginning of 1974 and villagers were allowed to travel back and forth across the border with Thailand. Mok, by contrast, like Ke Pauk in the North, enforced Standing Committee directives on collectivisation and the suppression of private property with the utmost vigour.

  Early in 1974, Mok went to Pol, claiming that Prasith had been in contact with In Tam, whom Lon Nol had put in charge of a programme to encourage Khmer Rouge cadres and their troops to defect. The allegation was almost certainly untrue, as were Mok’s other claims — that Prasith, an ethnic Thai, was working for the Bangkok government and the CIA.

  The latter charge was less outlandish than it might seem. From the late 1950s on, Sihanouk had claimed constantly in speeches and radio broadcasts, sometimes with good reason, that the CIA was working for his downfall, to the point where, to many Khmers, the Agency’s name had become just a synonym for ‘enemy’. Mok, in particular, saw CIA agents everywhere.* In 1971, he had been convinced that the French archaeologist François Bizot was working for the CIA and had tried to convince Pol and Vorn Vet of his guilt. When Pol had ordered Bizot’s release, Mok flew into a fury: ‘This fucking Frenchman is CIA,’ he yelled at Vorn and Bizot’s jailer, Deuch. ‘The upper brothers want him freed. But we, who work at the grass-roots, see things better. It’s out of the question to let him go.’ At Vorn’s insistence, Bizot was liberated. Prasith was not. Nor apparently was he given any opportunity to state his case. Instead, with Pol’s agreement, Mok’s troops took him into the forest and killed him. His death was followed in April by a purge of ethnic Thai cadres in Koh Kong who were suspected, by virtue of their nationality, of being in sympathy with him.

  Prasith was not the first CPK cadre to be liquidated. Mok had already eliminated a number of lower-ranking officials. Others in the East and the North-West had been killed in local power struggles. Some of the Hanoi returnees had also been executed, though most were still in detention camps, ostensibly undergoing ‘re-education’.

  This was the first time, however, that intra-Party conflict had reached into the ranks of the Central Committee. It was the first time, too, that the Party leadership had authorised the execution of one of its own number. Prasith’s case was discussed at length during the plenum at Meakk. ‘Pol explained’, his aide-de-camp Phi Phuon remembered, ‘that the class struggle had become extremely acute, and we had to take a resolute, decisive stance against our enemies. He said that anti-communists and counterrevolutionaries had to be dealt with categorically.’ But Phuon was not entirely convinced. ‘Prasith,’ he told himself, ‘was from a national minority, as I am. Is that how they think they can treat people like us?’

  By the time the meeting ended, Pol’s explanation of the purge had been accepted. But all present knew that a line had been crossed.

  The recapture of Oudong by Lon Nol’s forces in the late spring of 1974 was the last throe of a dying regime. Thereafter its position steadily deteriorated. For much of the previous two years, the dwindling energies of the half-paralysed, self-proclaimed ‘Marshal’ had been more occupied with political intrigues to shore up his personal position than with trying to save his government. Those he saw as potential rivals — Sirik Matak, Son Ngoc Thanh and In Tam — were successively sidelined. Nol himself was elected President in a fraudulent referendum where, but for massive vote-rigging by his younger brother, Non — Pol’s one-time classmate — he would have been soundly defeated.

  The US Embassy’s political counsellor, William Harben, before his acerbic despatches led to his transfer from Phnom Penh, noted in his diary that Washington was ‘supporting a regime which is almost a caricature of the ideal opponent for Marxist-Leninists’. His Ambassador, Emory Swank, told the State Department that Nol was mentally, as well as physically, ill.

  The government’s inability to protect even its own ministers was dramatically exposed by an incident in June 1974, when two members of Lon Nol’s cabinet, taken hostage by demonstrating students, were shot dead by a CPK hit man who vanished into the crowd. The same month, the new Prime Minister, Long Boret, had a narrow escape from a communist rocket attack.

  On the battlefield, communist forces continued to have the upper hand. Lon Nol’s troops, a US military historian wrote later, were hampered by ‘chronic deficiencies of poor leadership, corruption, inadequate training and poor morale’. Their main achievement that year was to prevent Khmer Rouge gunners from establishing secure positions closer than eight or nine miles from the capital, just beyond rocket and howitzer range of the central part of the city, which meant that incoming ordnance fell mainly on the suburban slums, teeming with malnourished refugees. But Phnom Penh was already rotting from within. It was not just a matter of the venality of officials at all levels, the opium parlours, the catamites, the brothels offering fillettes, the depravity of a regime where everything and everyone was for sale; more telling than any of that was the fact that most of those with a spark of integrity now supported the other side. The former Democratic Party Prime Minister, Chean Vâm, and Thiounn Thioeunn’s younger brother, Chum, worked secretly with urban radicals like Mey Mann to send to the resistance medicines and military maps, often bought from Lon Nol’s own officers. To circumvent government checkpoints, they were couriered out by a network of blind and maimed beggars. The banker Sâr Kim Lomouth served as the movement’s occult treasurer.

  In the diplomatic field, too, the resistance was gaining ground. By 1974, sixty-three countries had recognised the GRUNC. That year, Lon Nol’s government
retained its seat at the United Nations by a mere two votes. Khieu Samphân went to China to meet Mao, the first Cambodian communist to do so since Keo Meas in 1952, and then set out with Sihanouk on a two-month-long tour of GRUNC allies in Africa, Asia and eastern Europe. The aim was not merely to build support for the future Khmer Rouge regime, but, more importantly, to ensure that the Prince’s commitment did not waver. Though he strongly denied it, he had not completely abandoned the idea of a negotiated settlement that would enable him to return at the head of a coalition of moderate republicans, Khmers Rouges and monarchists.

  But Kissinger’s mind, in the autumn of 1974, was still on extricating America from Vietnam. The Khmers Rouges, who held the guns and therefore called the shots, adamantly opposed all talks. By the time Nixon’s successor, President Gerald Ford, authorised serious overtures to the Prince, it was already far too late.

  Pol made final dispositions for the dry-season offensive against Phnom Penh at a meeting in early December at B-5, a new forward base near Taing Poun village in Kompong Tralach, about five miles north of Oudong. Son Sen was named front commander, with the Northern Zone Secretary, Koy Thuon, as his deputy. The assault began at one o’clock in the morning of January 1975, with a massive artillery bombardment by captured 105-mm howitzers and Chinese-made rocket launchers, as 30,000 infantrymen advanced on the capital from the south, west and north.

  The first week went badly. The skies were clear and on New Year’s Eve there was a full moon. This time it was the Northern Zone troops who suffered most, as wave after wave of Khmer Rouge foot-soldiers, advancing across the brightly lit floodplain, were mown down in counter-attacks by government forces which had dug in on every patch of rising ground.

  The second stage of the plan was more successful. Vorn Vet and So Phim had been given the task of stopping the river convoys on the Mekong, if possible by the end of January. They achieved it with five days to spare: the last convoy reached Phnom Penh on January 26. By then, Chinese-made floating mines had been brought down the Ho Chi Minh Trail by a CPK delegation led by Ieng Sary.* Ney Sarann met the group at the Laotian border and the mines were taken by lorry to the front. Ten days later, on February 5, the river was blocked by sunken vessels south of the ferry crossing at Neak Luong. Until then, river convoys had provided 90 per cent of the government’s supplies. Now, American naval experts concluded, the waterway was definitively closed.

  Son Sen was charged with blocking the US airlift, which was the only other way of supplying Phnom Penh. In the first twelve days of January, more than a hundred 107-mm rockets hit the airport and nearby city suburbs. As the siege of the capital intensified and the howitzers were able to move closer, the frequency of shelling increased until the runways were being pounded more than a hundred times a day. In mid-March, after a 105-mm shell went through the cockpit of an aircraft coming in to land and several passengers were killed by shrapnel, the airlift was halted. But it resumed two days later as American officials realised they had no alternative. At its height, 600 tons of ammunition were being flown in each day from Thailand and more than 400 tons of rice.

  On February 25, Ke Pauk’s Northern Zone troops captured Oudong for the second time and began moving down Highway 5, closing in on Phnom Penh from the north-west. South-Western Zone troops under Mok advanced along Highway 4, from the direction of Kompong Som, while a Special Zone division moved up the salient between Highways 2 and 3, from Kampot and Takeo.

  At the beginning of March, Pol moved his headquarters to the hamlet of Sdok Toel, barely twenty miles from the city, and an observation post was set up on Mount Chitrous, the site of the Royal Tombs at Oudong, offering a panoramic view of the Khmer Rouge army, swarming like a black mirage across the gridiron-flat plains.

  By then, France and Japan had ordered the departure of all non-essential personnel from Cambodia and the Americans were dusting off evacuation plans, codenamed Operation Eagle Pull, drawn up two years earlier, when it had first seemed that the regime might collapse. Sihanouk announced in Beijing that when Phnom Penh fell, the ‘seven arch-traitors’ — Lon Nol, Sirik Matak, In Tam, Cheng Heng, the army commander, General Sosthène Fernandez, Lon Non and Long Boret — would be executed, but others would be spared. Over the next few weeks the list would be expanded to include a total of twenty-three names. But the implicit promise of an amnesty for everyone else was maintained. On April 1, Lon Nol allowed himself to be persuaded ‘temporarily’ to step down and, consoled by a draft for a million dollars from the Cambodian National Bank, flew off to exile in Hawaii. The same day, the ferry crossing at Neak Luong, which had held out since January, was overrun by Eastern Zone troops, who then advanced to a line just south of Takhmau.

  At this point, the Vietnamese, who had expected to wage a lengthy campaign to take Saigon, realised that strategic blunders by President Nguyen Van Thieu had opened the prospect of a quick victory. Their old plan to conquer the south before the Khmers Rouges took Phnom Penh suddenly seemed feasible after all. An undeclared race got under way. In practice it should not have mattered, but psychologically it was key. The last thing Hanoi wanted was for the Cambodians to win first. Far from helping, as the Americans claimed, they dragged their feet. Khmer Rouge officials complained about Hanoi’s miserliness in sharing munitions. Much later the Vietnamese themselves confirmed this: an internal military history, published in Hanoi, described how, in late March, Vietnamese officers refused to hand over a convoy of Chinese army trucks until the Khmers signed a document thanking Vietnam, not China, for providing them. In desperation the Cambodians complied.

  By early April, life in Phnom Penh had become totally unreal.

  Those with money and connections scrambled for seats on the last planes out. The two and a half million others existed in suspended animation. Despite the airlift, the city was getting only half the rice it needed. There was no medicine, few hospital beds and, in a country drowning in blood, none left over for transfusions. Once one of the loveliest capitals of South-East Asia, Phnom Penh had become a bloated caricature of the plight of poor countries everywhere, in which the misery of the many is matched only by the shameless consumption of the few. While rice prices rose astronomically and, in the shanty towns, thousands of children and old people starved to death, restaurants like the Sirène and the Café de Paris still offered foie gras, venison and fine French wines. At the venerable Hotel Phnom, the oldest and most respected establishment in Cambodia, a French girl made love one evening in the swimming pool — once at the shallow end, once at the deep end, with two different men — to cheers from other guests sipping poolside drinks. It was as if the city were determined to prove itself the cesspit of decay and turpitude that the Khmers Rouges claimed it was — the ideal target, ready and waiting, like a diseased whore, for the purifying fires of an incandescent revolution.

  By April 10, some 800 US Embassy personnel and assorted ‘experts’ had been flown out to Thailand. Kissinger, having realised, months too late, that a deal with Sihanouk was the only possible way of avoiding total defeat, tried to keep Ambassador John Gunther Dean and a skeleton staff in Phnom Penh while feelers were put out to the Prince in Beijing. The effort was doomed before it began. Two days later, the Secretary of State had to bow to the inevitable. On Saturday, April 12, the Ambassador and his colleagues were helicoptered out to US naval ships standing by off the Cambodian coast. Cambodia’s acting President, a veteran army general named Saukham Khoy, went with them. After spending nine billion dollars, equivalent to nearly ten years of Cambodia’s national income, most of it on aerial bombardments, and leaving half a million inhabitants dead, America’s adventure in Cambodia had finally reached its term.

  Next day, New Year’s Day by the Khmer calendar, a Supreme National Council was formed. It was headed by the new army commander, Sak Sutsakhan, who had studied in France at the same time as Pol and, by one of those family ironies with which Cambodian politics abound, was cousin to the CPK Deputy Secretary, Nuon Chea. That did not help him. Sutsakhan�
�s name was promptly added to the list of traitors.

  The Year of the Tiger gave place to the Year of the Hare, an auspicious year in Cambodian legend. For a few hours, the daily rocket attacks tailed off. Ignoring the round-the-clock curfew, families met to celebrate and look ahead to happier times. At Pol’s forward base at Sdok Toel, the Khmer Rouge leaders celebrated too. Over lunch that day, the South-Western Zone leader Mok pooh-poohed the military talents of Son Sen and Vorn Vet. ‘Without me, you wouldn’t be anywhere near taking Phnom Penh,’ he crowed. ‘You’re a bunch of layabouts.’ Phi Phuon, who was present, remembered that a ‘heated discussion’ followed. Pol, he noticed, ‘tended to pay more attention to Mok’s views than those of the other two’. It was the harbinger of an improbable complicity between the two men, one the unruffled theorist of the Khmer Rouge revolution, the other a crude, peasant warlord, noted for his cruelty and for the devotion of his followers.

  The pause in the fighting was short-lived. On Monday morning the shelling resumed as fiercely as ever, triggering fires in various parts of the city which raged out of control for days. Hundreds of slum-dwellers perished in the flames. Takhmau, six miles south of the capital, was occupied by Mok’s troops. The airport was surrounded by Special Zone forces. Two days later, on April 16, the Supreme Council decided to leave the city and set up a temporary seat of government in the north-west, near the border with Thailand. But that night the helicopters which were to fly them out failed to appear. Years later, people had differing memories of the next few hours. Some spoke of an eerie calm. Others wrote of continuing bombardment which made the buildings shudder, and of gun and rocket fire drowning out conversation. All effective resistance ceased. By dawn, individual Khmer Rouge commanders were discussing with their republican counterparts arrangements for surrender.