Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  In practice, the new tripartite division was introduced unevenly — in some areas it was already in force in 1975, elsewhere not until 1977 or later — and the basic dichotomy remained between ‘base’ and ‘new’ people. The difference in status between these two groups was immense, especially in the first year of Khmer Rouge rule. The ‘base people’ could grow their own food to supplement communal rations and, if they offended against revolutionary discipline, were often let off lightly or given the benefit of the doubt. ‘New people’, by contrast, were always suspected of the worst. Pol himself urged local cadres to tread a careful line between, on the one hand, ‘treating everyone indiscriminately, without reference to the positions, principles and viewpoint of the Party’, and on the other, ‘treating all new people as enemies’. But that was asking too much of the poorly educated peasants who made up the village administrations. In many areas ‘new people’ continued to be viewed, as they had been during the exodus, as ‘prisoners of war’. Unsurprisingly, most concluded that the system was deliberately designed to exterminate them, leaving the ‘base people’ as the country’s sole class. In fact that was never the intention. What occurred was rather a dysfunction of the Khmer Rouge polity, one of many that prevented Pol’s vision of the future ever being carried out and which were intrinsic to it, for they stemmed from a fundamental incompatibility between the vision and Cambodian reality.

  If the institution of a system of slavery was not motivated by class revenge, it cannot be explained either by what one writer has called a narcissistic turning back’ to the grandeur of the Angkorean kingdom.

  Certainly Angkor was the benchmark, the point of reference, for the Khmers Rouges, no less than for every previous regime. ‘If our people can make Angkor,’ Pol said in 1977, ‘they can make anything.’ It is also true that there were numerous parallels between the Angkorean kingdom and the system Pol sought to install. Both aspired to total independence. Both sought an unattainable perfection — one in temples of stone glorifying the Hindu deities, the other as a model of communism. Both executed enemy officers and sent their followers to do forced labour; both stressed irrigation and rice-growing as the mainstay of the economy; and both employed slaves. Moreover in the 1970s the Cambodian peasantry, who formed the basis of the Khmer Rouge revolution, did not live much differently from their forebears six centuries earlier, using less farm equipment than French peasants in the Middle Ages.

  But none of this meant that Pol wished to recreate the past. The goal was not to imitate Angkor but to surpass it.

  The first step, the destruction of the feudal elite which for centuries, in the revolutionaries’ view, had exploited the country for its own ends, had been accomplished by the communist victory and the evacuation of the towns. The second and third steps — ‘to build and defend’, in Pol’s phrase — meant mobilising the entire nation to develop at breakneck speed, in order to prevent Cambodia’s sempiternal enemies, Thailand and Vietnam, from taking advantage of its enfeebled state. This last consideration was crucial.

  For centuries, Cambodia had been mauled by its two powerful neighbours. Colonisation by the French, followed by the US war in Vietnam, had brought a hundred-year-long respite. But now that the Great Powers had departed, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam were left to their own devices. To Pol, in 1975, this did not mean that a new regional conflict was imminent. But the constant sparring for influence between the Cambodian and Vietnamese communists during the civil war, the frequent clashes between supposedly allied Khmer and Vietnamese troops and the troubled history of border skirmishes during the Sihanouk years, convinced him that Cambodia needed to gird itself against future challenges from Hanoi. As he told the Standing Committee, ‘If we run really fast, Vietnam won’t be able to catch us.’

  Even without that spur, Pol would undoubtedly have driven the country to the limits of endurance and beyond. ‘If we wish to defend the fruits of the revolution, there must be no let-up,’ he told his colleagues. ‘We must strike while the iron is hot.’ The economy was just another battlefield to be conquered by brute force:

  How must we organise [our] action? It is the same as in war. There we raised the principle of attacking . . . wherever the enemy was weak. The same goes for the economy. We attack wherever the opportunities are greatest . . . We must prepare offensives for the whole country . . . We learned from the war. If the command was strong, we would win. If the command was not strong, we would not win. The same goes for building up the economy.

  It was the same approach that had thrown tens of thousands of men into repeated offensives against Phnom Penh, undeterred by casualty figures that would have stopped any other army dead in its tracks. In ‘building socialism’, as in waging war, Pol declared,

  the Party leadership must exercise its leading role by the use of cutting-edge violence . . . This is the most important factor, the decisive factor, which is the power that drives things forward.

  Ieng Sary commented years afterwards — somewhat belatedly, it might be thought — that his brother-in-law had ‘a very simplistic vision of things’.

  In terms of development policy, this brought a militarisation of thought and language. People ‘struggled’ to catch fish or to collect fertiliser; they ‘waged continuous offensives’ to grow ‘strategic crops’; they attacked ‘on the front lines’ (at dam and canal sites) and ‘at the rear’ (in the village rice-fields); they formed sections, companies, battalions, mobile brigades and regiments; they showed ‘fighting solidarity’ to win ‘victory over nature’.

  It was the doctrine of the bludgeon. By 1975, it was written into the Party’s genes. No other way was imaginable. Yet it was also true that Pol and the rest of the CPK leadership faced a genuine and all but insurmountable problem, which had defeated the French, defeated Sihanouk, and has defeated every Cambodian government since.

  The problem was: how to make Khmers work.

  Putting it in those terms will raise hackles. But the issue is too important to be brushed aside with comforting platitudes. The witticism of an anonymous civil servant in colonial Indochina — ‘The Vietnamese grow the rice; the Khmers watch it grow; the Laotians listen to it grow’ — has a sufficient core of truth to put out of countenance the most convinced Cambodian nationalist. The perception of indolence has become part of the country’s self-image, an explanation for its failure to keep up with its neighbours economically.

  Khieu Samphân and Hou Yuon, in their doctoral theses, argued that the low output of the peasants was not the result of laziness, but of an ‘eco nomic and social structure which prohibited [them] from developing their full potential’. Many French experts in the early part of the century shared those views. Why should Khmer peasants exert themselves, they asked, when all but subsistence earnings were seized for taxes or went to line the pockets of Chinese moneylenders? Instead the farmer ‘makes himself as poor as possible as a defence against the rapacity of the mandarin . . . Why do more when, whatever happens, he will be left with less? . . . [His] inertia, his passivity, is in the final analysis nothing more than a form of resistance against a system that is weighted against him.’

  But that was only part of the truth. Even Khieu Samphân estimated that on average Khmer peasants worked only six months of the year, and sometimes much less. Theravada Buddhism has never placed much value on the acquisition and consumption of wealth. Sihanouk has recounted the experience of an American aid expert in the 1950s who convinced a group of villagers to use chemical fertiliser, promising that it would enable them to double rice production: ‘Sure enough, at harvest time, the yield was doubled. Everyone was delighted . . . [But] when the official came back [the following year] he was horrified to find that each peasant had cultivated only half his land. “Why,” said the peasants, “cultivate the entire area when you can get just as much by cultivating half?”’ Fifty years later, a Khmer businessman, seeking a regular supply of palm sugar for sweetmeat manufacture, encountered exactly the same problem. Once the peasant farmers he e
mployed had earned enough for the year, they stopped work, and neither blandishments nor the promise of more money could make them start again. ‘From their point of view it was logical,’ he acknowledged. ‘Once they had paid their family’s expenses — seed for the next planting; fertiliser; clothes; offerings to the monks; school fees for the children — what would they spend it on? There was nothing more they wanted.’

  To some, that may be indolence; to others, it is wisdom. But in either case it flies in the face of the way the modern world runs. To Pol, it was a roadblock obstructing his ambition to make Cambodia prosperous and strong, and it had to be demolished. He explained his views to a sympathetic fellow communist, the Thai Party Chairman, Khamtan: ‘The characteristics of peasants,’ he said, ‘are often negligence, lack of zeal and lack of self-confidence. They know only how to work by following orders.’ Already, before the communist victory, a perceptive American journalist, Donald Kirk, had noted that the Khmers Rouges had deliberately adopted policies of extremism to move ‘the inert peasant mass’. After 1975, that approach was applied throughout the country.

  Its implementation became the prime task of the faceless, clandestine, collective leadership still known to the population only as Angkar. It was a word with multiple uses. Angkar was the regime at all levels, from Pol and the Standing Committee to the lowest village militiaman. It was omnipotent and baleful, impersonal and remote, the incarnation of revolutionary purity, demanding and receiving quasi-religious reverence from all with whom it dealt. Pol’s old mentor, Keng Vannsak, called it

  an immense apparatus of repression and terror as an amalgam of Party, Government and State, not in the usual sense of these institutions but with particular stress on its mysterious, terrible and pitiless character. It was, in a way, political-metaphysical power, anonymous, omnipresent, omniscient, occult, sowing death and terror in its name.

  Pol, of course, did not see it that way, any more than he thought of the population as slaves. On the contrary, he assured his colleagues, ‘with time the masses will draw closer and closer to the Party.’ Nor should that be dismissed as propaganda: Pol did believe that he was acting for the common good and that sooner or later everyone would recognise that. The fascination exerted by power — of wielding absolute control over every detail of the lives of a whole people in the service of a grand design to which he alone held the key — certainly played its part. But the aim was not to ‘compel’; rather it was to make them ‘see the necessity for work’. It was a nuance that escaped his fellow citizens.

  In late April 1975, even before the fall of Saigon, Pol decided that the entire Standing Committee should travel to Hanoi in a spectacular gesture of goodwill. The calculation was simple. If, as Pol believed, Vietnam was the main, potential long-term enemy, prudence required the maintenance of good relations at least until Cambodia was strong enough to meet an eventual Vietnamese challenge.

  The need for a conciliatory approach towards the ‘hereditary enemy’ soon received striking confirmation. On May 4, Cambodian and Vietnamese naval units fired on each other near the island of Phu Quoc, which lies about ten miles off the Cambodian coast near Kampot. It had been administered as part of South Vietnam ever since the colonial period, but the issue of sovereignty had never been resolved. Other incidents quickly followed and on May 10 another small Vietnamese-held island was occupied by Cambodian troops based on Wai Island, eighty miles southwest of Kompong Som. Two days later, into the midst of this offshore skirmishing blundered an elderly American container ship, the SS Mayaguez, which was promptly intercepted and boarded by Cambodian coastguards. What followed was pure farce, or would have been but for the loss of life it entailed. President Ford, smarting from the US withdrawal from Saigon less than two weeks before, decided to hang tough and ordered an aerial bombardment to interdict access to the ship. In Phnom Penh, Pol summoned the Standing Committee, who agreed that the crew should be released and the vessel sent on its way, as had happened a week earlier in the case of a Panamanian ship. Instructions to that effect were radioed to the local commander and an announcement prepared for the following day. But by then the President had already decided to send in the marines for a heliborne rescue attempt. Over the next few hours, fifteen marines and twenty-three American airmen were killed, US bombers destroyed the oil refinery at Kompong Som and the nearby airfield at Ream, and an undetermined number of Cambodians died. In the meantime, unknown to the rescuers, the crew of the Mayaguez had all been released unharmed. Mr Ford said later the raid gave ‘a whole new sense of confidence’ to the American people and helped put the Vietnam War behind them.

  For Vietnam and Cambodia, the Mayaguez affair was peripheral to the main business at hand: the fight for possession of the offshore islands. None the less it was a salutary reminder of Cambodian weakness. At this juncture, Pol was laid low by a severe attack of malaria, a legacy of his years in the maquis. Fearing that the US might next launch air attacks against Phnom Penh, he moved his headquarters to the Silver Pagoda, inside the Royal Palace, while Ieng Sary asked the Chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement, President Boumedienne of Algeria, to reassure Vietnam of Cambodia’s peaceful intentions. Two weeks later, on June 2, the new COSVN Chairman, Nguyen Van Linh, drove up from Saigon to see Pol on behalf of the Vietnamese Politburo and was assured by the Khmer Rouge leader that what he called these ‘painful, bloody clashes’ were not the result of central policy, but rather of local troops’ ‘ignorance of geography’.

  That was not quite the end of the matter. A year earlier, Vietnam had lost the Paracel Islands, which had been occupied by China. Hanoi wanted to make crystal clear that it was not about to yield sovereignty over islands in the Gulf of Thailand, least of all to a nominal ally which had come to power through a war in which 25,000 Vietnamese soldiers had died fighting on Cambodian soil. Once they had recovered the territory the Cambodians had initially seized, Vietnamese units attacked Wai Island, which they occupied on June 10.

  In these circumstances it was plainly unwise for the entire leadership to be out of the country at the same time, so the three Zone secretaries, Ruos Nhim. So Phim and Vorn Vet, stayed behind, while Pol, Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary left as planned for Hanoi, where they proposed that the two countries conclude a Friendship Treaty.

  It was an astute move. Pol’s old adversary, Le Duan, who led the talks on the Vietnamese side, could not openly rebuff such an overture. Yet it underlined that in the Cambodian view, future ties between Phnom Penh and Hanoi should be bilateral, between equal, sovereign nations, rather than part of a larger grouping of all three Indochinese states as the Vietnamese would have preferred. The visit, like all Pol’s activities in 1975, was secret. There was no announcement, no communiqué, no way for anyone outside the two Party leaderships to know what had transpired. But the talks were evidently successful in reducing political tensions. Pol offered ritual thanks for Vietnamese aid, ‘without [which] we could not have achieved victory’, and though he could not bring himself to utter the term ‘special relationship’, he did say, masking his feelings behind his eternal smile, that ‘the great friendly solidarity among the parties and peoples of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos . . . is the determining factor in all [our] victories to date as well as a decisive factor in [our] victories to come.’

  At the beginning of August Le Duan paid a return visit to Phnom Penh, which the Vietnamese Party newspaper, Nhan Dan, characterised as ‘cordial’, and a few days later Nguyen Van Linh informed Nuon Chea that Vietnamese units had evacuated Wai Island and were preparing to release six hundred Cambodian soldiers they had taken prisoner. Subsequent exchanges of messages included ringing declarations of ‘militant solidarity’ and ‘indestructible friendship’. Liaison offices were established in the border provinces and armed clashes all but ceased.

  True, the repatriation of Vietnamese families from Cambodia continued: from April to December 1975, an estimated 150,000 Vietnamese returned to Vietnam, while thousands of Cambodian refugees, who had fled the Khmer Rouge
advance, were sent back the other way. None the less, as the year ended, the Vietnamese Politburo concluded that relations were ‘slowly improving’ and that, despite strains, the alliance was intact.

  This was a fatal error. As the Vietnamese Foreign Minister, Nguyen Co Thach, subsequently acknowledged, ‘In 1975 Vietnam evaluated the situation in Cambodia incorrectly’. Khieu Samphân said later that Pol was simply playing for time.

  A week after the talks in Hanoi, Pol flew to Beijing. Again the visit was secret. This time he was accompanied by Ieng Sary, Ney Sarann and Siet Chhê. Symbolically the highpoint of his stay was a meeting with Mao, which took place beside the Chairman’s private swimming pool, at his home near the Forbidden City, on the afternoon of June 21. The Chinese leader was old and ill; he had to be helped to his feet, and on bad days even his secretary-companion, Zhang Yufeng, who had learnt to lip-read, had difficulty understanding what he said. But Mao’s mind was as nimble as ever. The Cambodian communists intrigued him. This, therefore, was a good day, or would have been had he not insisted on trying to convey some of his thoughts in English, a language he had been trying and failing to learn for the previous forty years. Whether Pol felt intimidated in Mao’s presence, or whether his interpreter was overwhelmed by the challenge of rendering into Khmer Mao’s elliptical reasoning, the Chinese transcript shows that he said nothing of substance. Mao, on the other hand, had a lot to say. He began by declaring his approval of the Cambodian revolution: