Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  ’Angkar needs that motorbike,’ the soldier repeated . . . Then, as polite as ever . . . he said: ‘Angkar proposes to borrow it from you. Do you accept, yes or no?’ [She replied:] ‘I’m sorry . . . I need it. How else can I carry my baggage?’ The soldier’s eyes widened. He unslung his rifle [and] said: ‘You dare say “no” to Angkar?’ . . . Then suddenly he fired into the air right in front of her face . . . She burst into tears [and] ran to my mother, who took her in her arms. The soldier glared round at us all, as if daring us to move. I was frozen with fear . . . [Then he] settled the rifle back on his shoulder, slowly untied [my sister’s] baggage, handed it carefully to my father, mounted, kicked the engine into life and rode off.

  For the better-off, who owned cars or trucks, there was a second stage in this creeping pauperisation. Many had left Phnom Penh and other towns with vehicles ‘overflowing with bundles of clothing, curtains, and incongruous but treasured items — cookers, sofas, cupboards . . . symbols of former wealth [like] televisions and tape-decks.’ Haing Ngor, later to achieve fame in the film The Killing Fields, contemplated the efflux of consumer durables and thought how strange were the things people valued and that they should fail to realise that electric fans and televisions would be of no use in villages without electricity. In the event, these cherished icons of the consumer society never got that far. When the order came for private cars and trucks to be abandoned, their contents were left scattered by the roadside: refrigerators, suitcases, sewing machines, armchairs — even a grand piano, which was sighted three years later, the lacquer peeling from its frame, marooned in the middle of a rice-field. For some it was all too much. Several deportees remembered seeing ‘a shiny new Peugeot, driving down the riverbank’:

  It was one of those events that happened faster than its meaning can be absorbed . . . The car drove into the water with a splash and floated forward, until the river current spun it round and took it slowly downstream. There were people inside. A man in the driver’s seat, a woman beside him and children looking out the back with their hands pressed against the windows. All the doors and windows stayed closed. Nobody got out . . . We just stared as the car settled lower and the waters closed over the roof. A rich family committing suicide.

  As well as cars and consumer goods, money itself lost its value. For some days, traders continued to set up stalls, offering cakes, cigarettes, barbecued chicken and eggs, fruit and vegetables, laid out on tarpaulins by the roadside, for ever-increasing quantities of the old Lon Nol riels. The Khmer Rouge might warn that the old currency had been abolished, but market instincts died hard. Only when it became clear that riels were useless, and the roads passing through the suburbs were, in the words of one deportee, ‘covered in a thick carpet of banknotes’ whose usefulness was now limited to lighting fires, did the traders finally resort to barter.

  By this stage, rich and poor alike were reduced to taking only what they could carry on their backs. And the levelling-down continued. On every road leading out of Phnom Penh or Battambang or smaller provincial towns, checkpoints were set up where each deportee’s baggage was searched. Cameras, radios, tape recorders, wristwatches, books in any language, documents, foreign currency — in short, all those things which, in former times, set the elite apart from the peasantry as defined by the condition of the very poorest among them — were confiscated. There were no body searches, partly because it was assumed (often correctly) that, at the mere mention of Angkar, people would obey to the letter, and partly, it seems, because to have soldiers body-searching deportees, especially women, would have violated the communists’ moral code. As a result, many families managed to hide jewellery, gold and medicines, and even in some cases dollars, which would later serve as a medium of exchange for favours from village cadres and for extra food, until that resource, too, was exhausted.

  For those who survived the march and the spot checks to which former army officers and civil servants were subjected, there remained one further test. When they reached their home villages, or in some cases even before, adult deportees were required to write a short autobiography This was a technique devised by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1930s to test applicants for Party membership and as a vehicle for self-criticism during rectification campaigns. In the 1940s and ‘50s the Viet Minh went a step further, making the repeated writing of life-stories the central plank of a sophisticated process of indoctrination aimed at non-communist intellectuals. The Cambodian communists took the process to its logical extreme, eventually requiring virtually everyone in the country to write out a personal history describing their family background, their activities since childhood, and above all how they had spent the years when Lon Nol was in power. Educated people were judged by the style and language they employed as well as the content of what they wrote. Scribes assisted the illiterate. As ever, Khmer Rouge cadres promised clemency, assuring all who had held posts in the republican administration that, if they were honest about their past, the new regime would make use of their talents.

  Many fell into the trap. But what happened to them next varied enormously, depending on who they were and, above all, to which part of the country the exodus had brought them.

  Technicians and skilled workers were sent away in lorries after being promised that their families would be allowed to join them later. When nothing further was heard from them, many deportees concluded that they had been killed. In fact, most were taken to Phnom Penh to help restore production in the factories where they had worked previously. In provincial towns, where the evacuation was on a smaller scale and consequently better managed, factory employees were told at the outset to remain at their places of work.

  Former military men, civil servants, architects, doctors, engineers, lawyers, schoolteachers and university students were sent for ‘re-education’. For the first two categories, this was often a euphemism for death. But not always. At Sramar Leav, in Takeo province, in the heart of Mok’s Southwestern Zone, reputedly a tough area, those who had served in the army and the civil service under the Lon Nol regime were assigned separate living quarters but otherwise treated identically to other deportees. In a commune in the supposedly liberal East, sixty former civil servants and professional people underwent a three-month ‘re-education course’ consisting of intense physical labour, a starvation diet and repeated interrogations. All but three died. In the North-West and the North, where the evacuation itself had been conducted with especial harshness, all those with university training underwent re-education involving extremely hard physical labour for between three months and a year. Yet in both Zones large numbers of intellectuals survived.

  The evacuation of Cambodia’s towns and its immediate consequences — the relocation of the entire population to the countryside; the killing of former opponents; the reform or elimination of all regarded as potentially hostile — were an almost perfect paradigm for the three years, eight months and twenty days of Khmer Rouge rule that followed.

  That most city-dwellers were taken completely by surprise merely showed how little attention they, and the outside world, had paid to the Khmers Rouges and their methods during their long years in the wilderness. What happened in mid-April 1975 was the fruit of policies that had been in gestation since the 1960s and had their origins in a still earlier time. It was not fortuitous that six of the principal Zone leaders — Ruos Nhim and Kong Sophal in the North-West; Pauk in the North; Ney Sarann in the North-East; So Phim in the East; and Mok in the South-West — had started their revolutionary careers as Issaraks during the war against the French.

  They showed the same extreme single-mindedness, the same excessive simplification, the same ruthlessness and contempt for human life, as the rebels of thirty years earlier. They also showed the same fractiousness and diversity. Unlike orthodox communist states, where decision-making is highly centralised and implementation is in theory monolithic, Khmer Rouge Cambodia was unruly. That combination of attributes would prove one of the most enduring features of Pol’s regime and
eventually a prime cause of its downfall. Directives from the CPK Standing Committee were obeyed, but each Zone interpreted them in its own fashion. Hence the welter of conflicting signals during the evacuation of Phnom Penh. What was true of the Zones was also true at lower levels. A battalion commander from the South-West maintained that ‘whether different units were soft or strict depended on the individual commanders — not on the Zone they came from’. Deportees might be treated harshly in the supposedly moderate East, or with moderation in the supposedly harsh North.

  The prevailing image of the Khmers Rouges as uniformly mindless automatons, bent on destruction, was fundamentally wrong. What the deportees themselves experienced was a mosaic of idealism and butchery, exaltation and horror, compassion and brutality, that defies easy generalisation. That, too, would continue throughout the Khmer Rouge years.

  Even those who acted most harshly oscillated between thuggery and nerveless calm. The young soldier who furiously loosed off a volley in the face of Pin Yathay’s sister as he stole her motor-bike, afterwards ‘slowly untied [her] baggage and handed it carefully to [her] father’. At one level it was the eternal Khmer dichotomy between serenity and uncontrollable violence, with no middle ground between. ‘We try to stay polite,’ Haing Ngor explained, ‘because it is easier that way. To be in conflict forces us to treat each other as enemies, and then we lose control.’ In a revolutionary context, where violence was the norm, the politeness of the Khmers Rouges was all the more telling. Often it had a sinister coloration: a woman overheard a soldier telling a group of prisoners who had just been savagely beaten: ‘“So you don’t feel too well? Just wait, you’ll feel better in a little while . . .” Those sugary words, that irony, I recognised all that, it was the way the soldiers talked.’ Yet there were also cadres who were genuinely ‘not oppressive or threatening [but] quiet and polite’. The two were not necessarily in conflict. Pin Yathay noted that the soldiers went about their work, ‘preparing death with unfailing courtesy’.

  Alongside terror and cruelty, virtually every deportee had a story to tell of at least one ‘decent’ Khmer Rouge, who offered help when it was least expected. A young woman recalled a black-garbed cadre who noticed her sick niece and ‘in an inexplicable humane gesture, used his influence to secure the streptomycin that saved [her]’. Another deportee remembered a soldier helping a small boy and his elderly grandmother at a Phnom Penh hospital. ‘He left them alone for five minutes, then came back with a hospital cart loaded with ten big loaves of bread, some grilled fish and some pork.’ Haing Ngor recognised a regional Secretary in the North-West as one of his former teachers, a man who had lived ‘a simple, spartan life . . . He was very pure and intellectual . . . typical of the idealists who joined the communists in the 1960s and then vanished into the forests.’

  There were many reasons for the disparities in Khmer Rouge behaviour.

  One was the entrenched individualism of Khmer society. Despite constant indoctrination and ferocious discipline, the communist troops remained Khmers, heirs to a culture which holds — in contrast to that of China and Vietnam — that each family, each individual, is an island, and its primary task is to defend its own. To such a people uniformity does not come easily, especially not to those among them who hold a particle of power. It produced, in the case of the Khmers Rouges, a system which was not so much ‘communist’ as inherently unpredictable. The replacement of a cadre, the vagary of fate that led a deportee to settle in one village rather than another, could mean literally the difference between life and death. Capriciousness and uncertainty were as characteristic of the Khmer Rouge regime as violence and barbarism.

  Differences were exacerbated by the high level of illiteracy and the paucity of qualified cadres. No matter how detailed the guidelines prepared by the CPK Standing Committee, the fact that they had to be transmitted orally to low-level officials meant that only the most simplistic, broad-brush principles were retained. All the rest was improvisation. The way in which policies were carried out depended on the whim of the individual and the attitude of the higher-ups in his k’sae, a word which means literally ‘string’ but has the sense of a vertical patronage network through which a mandarin distributes largesse and receives support from subordinates. Under the pre-colonial monarchy and under Sihanouk, such networks were the principal channels for the exercise of power in Cambodia. Revolutions, even as they destroy, build on the model of what has gone before. Power relations among the Khmers Rouges continued to be channelled through k’sae, with the Zone Secretaries, latter-day mandarins, in the role of provincial warlords, loyal to the CPK Centre yet with considerable latitude of their own.

  The other defining features of the evacuation — the systematic stripping away of the possessions of the rich and not-so-rich; the writing and rewriting of autobiographies to identify potential opponents; the summary executions; the near-total absence of resistance by millions of people, uprooted from their homes and going like sheep to the slaughter — were equally a foretaste of the regime to come.

  The united front that had linked the Khmers Rouges with Sihanouk and other ‘bourgeois progressives’ had expired in fact, if not in name, the day Phnom Penh fell. Far from trying to broaden the communists’ support base, the CPK had reverted to its pre-1969 strategy of ‘quality rather than quantity’, promoting a narrow, puritanical regime, fit for carrying out an ultra-radical revolution and guided by the principle that it is always better to go too far than not far enough.

  That doctrine lay at the root of many of the abuses both of the evacuation itself and of the years that followed.

  Every rank-and-file soldier and village chief knew that insufficient vigilance against enemies would bring certain punishment, but excessive zeal in pursuing suspects would not. Thus, there was no central directive from the Party leadership ordering army clean-up squads in Phnom Penh and other towns to kill elderly and sick people who had stayed or been left behind during the evacuation — but the troops did so because they had been told to ensure that the area was emptied and that was the simplest way of doing it. There was no central directive, either, to loot libraries, scientific laboratories and research institutes, and to burn Buddhist and Western books. None the less, it happened. François Bizot saw the holdings of the Ecole Française de l’Extrême Orient, ‘precious works, laboriously collected by scholars, which we had deliberately kept in Phnom Penh to show our commitment to future generations of Khmers’, being thrown from the first-floor windows to be consumed in a ‘pathetic auto da fé ’. Another foreigner watched piles of books from the library of the Roman Catholic cathedral being burned on the lawn in front of the bishopric. Months later, Thiounn Mumm, then a senior adviser to the Khmer Rouge Industry Ministry, stumbled across a laboratory formerly used for agronomical research. ‘The soldiers had smashed everything . . . They didn’t do it for any clear reason — but if you leave a house full of ten-year-olds for three or four days without the presence of adults, you know what the result will be.’ The explanation is self-serving but not without truth. The destruction of Western things was not ordered from on high, nor was it universal.* It was the visceral reaction of men who had been force-fed with the idea that imperialism and all its works were absolute evil.

  Soldiers everywhere are trained to secure their objectives without paying too much attention to the damage they cause along the way. In the case of the Khmer Rouge, this was compounded by ignorance and extreme youth. None the less, the political context which allowed them to act as they did had been defined over the previous decade by Pol and the CPK Standing Committee.

  It need not have been so.

  In April 1975, popular disgust with Lon Nol’s republic was at its zenith and the majority of the urban population was ready and willing to support virtually any policy the new regime chose to introduce. Different leaders, with a different ideology, might have chosen a policy of national reconciliation. Pol decided otherwise. To him, the city-dwellers and the peasants who had fled to join them in th
e dying months of the war were ipso facto collaborators and had to be dealt with as such. Only when they had been subjected to the regenerative power of manual labour and the rude battering of peasant life would the survivors emerge from purgatory, just as the Khmers Rouges themselves had emerged, toughened and purified, from their own years in the maquis.

  Suffering and death were an essential part of this process. Mey Mak’s commanding officer told him: ‘If we worry about that sort of stuff, we are no longer revolutionaries.’ Soldiers were urged to ‘cut off their hearts’ towards potential enemies, a category which included all urban deportees. It might be argued that such behaviour comes more naturally to Cambodians than to other nations because their culture regards forgiveness as a form of weakness. Buddhist detachment, in the shape of indifference, is so widespread that a Khmer proverb asks: ‘The marrow has pips: why has man no heart?’ But the argument does not hold up. War and revolution are by definition heartless, no matter where they are made. The only distinction that can be drawn is quantitative. As Cambodians were discovering, some revolutions are crueller and more unforgiving than others.

  The urban deportees, the jetsam of the Cambodian revolution, tried in different ways to make sense of the sudden implosion of their lives. Many saw the evacuation, and the brutality with which it was carried out, as reflecting the Khmers Rouges’ numerical weakness, where ‘two or three brainwashed teenagers with rifles’ had charge of thousands of displaced town-dwellers.

  Others regarded it as an act of collective revenge by a neglected underclass against anyone who by birth, education, official position or wealth, had been privileged under the old regime. Revenge is the timid man’s weapon and, in Cambodia, where people flee open confrontation, it is a weapon of choice. Kum, that ‘particularly Cambodian mentality of revenge’, one deportee wrote, ‘is the infection that grows on our national soul . . . If I hit you with my fist and you wait five years and then shoot me in the back one dark night, that is kum. . . Cambodians know all about kum.’ To yet others it was a practical measure, designed to disorientate the town-dwellers and place them in a position of dependency vis-à-vis the country’s new rulers.