Pol Pot
Page 43
You have a lot of experience. It’s better than ours. We don’t have the right to criticise you . . . Basically you are right. Have you made mistakes or not? I don’t know. Certainly you have. So rectify yourselves; do rectification! . . . The road is tortuous . . . Now our situation [in China] is exactly as Lenin predicted — a capitalist country with no capitalists . . . Salaries are not equal. We have a slogan of equality — but we don’t carry it out. How many years will it take to change that? Until we become communist? Even under communism, there will still be a struggle between what is advanced and what is backward. So this matter is not clear. [Emphasis in original]
On close reading, it was strangely ambivalent. Mao’s repeated references to criticism and mistakes, at a meeting with a friendly delegation, were unusual. Moreover, the last sentence seemed to throw doubt on whether the perfect egalitarianism Pol advocated, however desirable, could ever in practice be realised: ‘this matter is not clear’.
The Chairman’s mind was harking back to the infancy of his own revolution when the Chinese communists in Jiangxi in the 1930s — just like the Khmers Rouges, forty years later — had burned down villages, displaced populations, terrorised rich peasants and executed Party dissidents under the slogan, ‘Better to kill a hundred innocent people than let one truly guilty person go free’. That period had ended with the Long March, when Mao developed the doctrine of rectification to provide a subtler means of dealing with intra-Party disputes. Now he was urging the Cambodians likewise to ‘do rectification!’, implying that the time had come for them, too, to abandon their early extremism. This message was woven between the lines of everything Mao said that day. By using snatches of English, by referring to Pol’s Cambodia as ‘a socialist wat’, by citing Huxley, Kant, and the fourth-century Buddhist missionary Kumârajîva,* and finally by offering to give Pol ‘30 books written by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin’ to study, Mao sought to convey the idea that the Cambodian leaders should open their minds and place their revolution in the context of the wider world.
How much of this any of them understood — indeed, how much survived the translation — is another matter. The one idea that clearly did resonate, because afterwards Pol frequently repeated it, was Mao’s injunction to his visitors not to copy indiscriminately the experience of China or any other country, but ‘to create your own experience yourselves’.
Notwithstanding Mao’s reservations about the system Pol wished to build — reservations shared by Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping — China had already decided to give his regime all-out support. For China, as for Cambodia, the key factor was Vietnam. There was a near-perfect symmetry to the three countries’ relations. China was to Vietnam as Vietnam was to Cambodia — a vast and powerful neighbour, which threatened hegemony. Both had made huge sacrifices, in men and money, to help their allies’ revolutions, only to have them bridle against their suzerainty. Relations between Hanoi and Beijing had begun to cool in the late 1960s. By 1975, the Chinese leaders saw Vietnam as a Soviet bridgehead in Asia, which Moscow would try to use to spread its influence throughout the region. The Laotian communists were too weak, and historically too close to Hanoi, to act independently. That left Cambodia as the one country on Vietnam’s western flank which might be expected to resist the expansion of Vietnamese, and hence of Soviet, power.
In the end it was realpolitik, far more than ideological affinity, which brought China and Cambodia together.
That is not to downplay the importance of the beliefs they shared: the primacy of men over machines; the exaltation of the human will (in China) and ‘revolutionary consciousness’ (in Cambodia); the pre-eminence of ideology over learning (being ‘red’ rather than ‘expert’); the strategy of using the countryside to surround the city and the need to eliminate the differences between them; the concern to bridge the gulf between mental and manual labour; and the view that revisionism, in the shape of bourgeois thought, grew spontaneously within the communist movement itself.
Mao was entranced by Pol’s boldness in emptying the cities. That autumn he asked Le Duan whether Vietnam could do the same. When the Vietnamese leader shook his head, Mao paused for a moment and then agreed: ‘No. We couldn’t do it either.’
At the end of his long life, the Chairman was lucid enough to realise that the new world the Cambodians dreamed of would prove to be a mirage. China had tried that route already. It too had considered doing without money, but rejected the idea as impractical. The temporary closing of schools and universities during the Cultural Revolution had brought as many problems as it had solved. Even Mao himself now accepted that the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s — a Utopian mass movement which was intended to allow China to overtake Britain and America in economic output and proceed directly to communism, but instead resulted in 20 million deaths from starvation — had been a disaster. Yet when later a frail Zhou Enlai, in hospital suffering from cancer, tried to caution Khieu Samphân that the road to socialism was long and Cambodia should not repeat China’s errors, he drew only a non-committal smile.
From then on, the two Parties rarely discussed ideological matters, and when they did they failed to agree.
The relationship was pragmatic. China offered Cambodia large-scale economic aid, technical training, military supplies and a market for its meagre exports; Cambodia provided a secure forward base for China’s strategy to contain Vietnam. The quid pro quo had been established within days of Phnom Penh’s fall when, on April 19, Ieng Sary had flown from Hanoi to Beijing to ask that military supplies henceforth be channelled through the port of Kompong Som, rather than through Vietnam. Four days later, on April 23, the Deputy Director of the Chinese Communist Party’s International Liaison Department, Shen Chien, at the head of a small fact-finding team, had accompanied Sary to Phnom Penh on the first flight to Cambodia since the end of the civil war. To underline the importance of the mission, Pol himself had gone to the airport to greet them. In June, following his encounter with Mao, Pol had a series of meetings with Deng Xiaoping in Beijing and Shanghai to discuss Cambodia’s aid requirements. Deng told him that military assistance would be provided free, and that — in the words of the final accord, signed the following February — ‘it will be up to the Cambodian government to decide how the [Chinese] military equipment and supplies are allocated and used. China will not interfere, nor impose any condition, nor demand any privilege.’ The list was long, and included:
Complete equipment for three artillery regiments, including a total of 108 pieces of 85-mm, 122-mm and 130-mm ordnance and 13,000 shells.
Complete equipment for two anti-aircraft regiments and an anti-aircraft battalion, including 150 pieces of 100-mm, 57-mm and double-barrelled 37-mm cannon.
Complete equipment for a signals regiment.
Complete equipment for a pontoon battalion.
Equipment for a tank regiment, including 72 light tanks and 32 amphibious tanks.
Equipment for a radar battalion, including 20 sets of search-and-guide radar.
30 fighter aircraft and six trainers.
15 bombers and three trainers.
12 high-speed torpedo boats, 10 escort ships, 4 anti-submarine vessels, with corresponding armament; 4 landing craft, one 80-ton minesweeper and one 300-ton tanker.
It was to be delivered by sea over a three-year period ending in 1978. In addition, China undertook to repair and refurbish US equipment seized from Lon Nol’s army, including sixty more aircraft; to furnish 50,000 complete sets of infantrymen’s equipment; to build a new military airport at Kompong Chhnang, fifty miles north of Phnom Penh, a naval base at Ream, near Kompong Som, a munitions depot and a communications workshop; and to enlarge an existing weapons repair works. All this was on top of 10,000 tons of military equipment, including 100 120-mm artillery pieces and 1,300 military vehicles, the delivery of which had been held over from 1975 following Ieng Sary’s request that transport via Vietnam be discontinued.
The quantities of economic assistance pledged were equally i
mpressive. Pol asked that priority be given to restoring road and rail links, especially from Phnom Penh to Battambang and to Kompong Som, and that China provide barges for river transport. Next came the reconstruction of war-damaged factories processing export commodities: rubber, tropical hardwoods and fish products. By the end of the year agreement had also been reached on building, or more often, rebuilding, twenty-nine industrial enterprises, including the oil refinery destroyed by US bombers during the Mayaguez affair; textile mills; glass and tyre factories; a paper mill; fertiliser and pharmaceutical plants; a phosphate mine and a cement works.
In addition, more than three hundred Chinese army officers and technicians and a larger number of civilians were sent to Cambodia to conduct training programmes, while nearly six hundred Khmer trainees went to China.
The true financial cost of these measures is difficult to establish. In September, diplomatic sources in Beijing reported that the Chinese commitment exceeded a billion US dollars (equivalent to 3.4 billion dollars in today’s money). If anything, that is probably on the low side. The Chinese government later revealed that economic assistance alone to Cambodia in 1975 totalled more than 300 million dollars, and that, like the military aid, it was provided in the form of grants. The one-billion-dollar figure had begun circulating a few days before Le Duan arrived in Beijing to seek Chinese help for the post-war reconstruction of Vietnam. It was almost certainly leaked to underscore China’s refusal to give further aid to Hanoi. Explaining that decision, Mao baldly told the Vietnamese leader: ‘Today you are not the poorest under heaven. We are. We have a population of 800 million.’ Deng Xiaoping then berated Le Duan for anti-Chinese statements in the Vietnamese media and treated him to a lengthy disquisition on Mao’s ‘Three Worlds’ theory, which held that the Soviet Union and the United States were both hegemonist powers, each as bad as the other.
Barely five months after the fall of Saigon, it marked the parting of the ways.
Le Duan returned home in a cold fury, having refused to issue a joint communiqué and, in what one Chinese official called ‘an extraordinary gesture for a fraternal Party leader’, cancelled the customary return banquet for his hosts. In October he travelled to Moscow, where the Russians promised three billion dollars for Vietnam’s five-year plan. Beijing and Hanoi were slowly moving towards a collision course in which Pol’s Cambodia would play the starring role.
It did not seem like that at the time. To Pol and his colleagues, their first year in power had begun rather well. The alliance with China was solidly in place. After his stay in Beijing, Pol had paid a secret five-day visit to North Korea, where President Kim Il Sung had promised to send aid experts to help with agricultural and hydroelectric projects. Through China’s good offices, relations with Thailand had stabilised. Talks between provincial officials on the border during the summer were followed by a visit by Ieng Sary to Bangkok, which led to the setting up of a permanent liaison office near Poipet. Such incidents as did occur were the result of fishing disputes or the work of the Khmer Serei and other exile groups, and after the Cambodians had mined the land border, even that irritant diminished. Overtures were made to Laos, which sent its Foreign Minister, Phoune Sipraseuth, to Phnom Penh to discuss the possibility of using the Cambodian port of Kompong Som. Even with Vietnam, relations were correct. There were minor incidents in the North-East, where Vietnamese units which had been guarding the Ho Chi Minh Trail delayed their departure longer than the Cambodians would have wished. But by the following spring Pol felt able to report that the situation on all the country’s borders had ‘very greatly eased’.
Pol stayed on in China to have a medical check-up after the rest of the delegation had left. As well as malaria, he was plagued by gastric ailments. So it was not until mid-July that he flew back to Phnom Penh to begin work on the nuts and bolts of putting the new administration together.
The first task was to restructure the army.
On July 22, Pol addressed a unification rally, attended by 3,000 soldiers, followed by a military parade at a stadium near the former French Embassy Flanked by the seven Zone secretaries — Koy Thuon, Mok, Ney Sarann, Ruos Nhim, So Phim, Vorn Vet and Chou Chet (in charge of a new Western Zone) — he announced the formal incorporation of their forces into a national Revolutionary Army, headed by Son Sen, Chief of the General Staff. They had dared to wage ‘a struggle completely different from that of revolutions elsewhere in the world’, he declared. Now that they had won, their main task was to ensure security in the capital and to guard against espionage and internal saboteurs.
It was all just a little bit too late. If the CPK Military Committee, which Pol headed, had been able to impose its authority on the forces of the Zone commanders a year or two earlier, many of the problems which followed might have been avoided. But Pol, unlike Mao, had never led his men into battle. He was a political, not a military strategist. Even Mao had taken ten years to unite the People’s Liberation Army, which then fought for twelve more years before achieving victory In Cambodia, victory had come far faster. As a result, the CPK, in appearance, at least, seemed to be united, but the army, from which its power derived, was not. In Phnom Penh, the different sectors of the city were guarded by units which, while nominally under unified command, continued to answer to divisional commanders from different Zones. Pol never succeeded in creating a military force which was loyal to him personally and, in the end, that would prove his undoing.
The matter of forming a new government was also troublesome.
In theory the GRUNC, headed by Penn Nouth, continued to govern Cambodia. But Nouth himself and his Foreign Minister, Sarin Chhak, were still in Beijing. Two other ministers — Hou Yuon (Interior) and Norodom Phurissara (Justice) — had been rusticated just before the fall of Phnom Penh. Phurissara had been sent to reform himself through manual labour in a remote village in Preah Vihear, near the border with Thailand. Hou Yuon, who was now seen as excessively liberal, sat out the first weeks of ‘liberation’ in a deserted camp near Oudong. After being allowed to spend a day visiting Phnom Penh at the end of May, he was put aboard a river steamer for Stung Trang, on the Mekong. There he was held with two other Party miscreants — Ping Sây and another former Cercle Marxiste member, Chhorn Hay — under a loose form of house arrest.* Of the eight remaining cabinet posts, half existed only on paper. Khieu Samphân was no more responsible for Defence than the Western Zone Secretary, Chou Chet, was for Religious Affairs. They were ghost portfolios, announced in January 1975, four months before victory, to make it appear that the Khmers Rouges had a viable government-in-waiting.
The first step towards installing a new order was taken in August, when three additional vice-premiers were appointed: Vorn Vet (Transport and Industry); Ieng Sary (Foreign Affairs) and Son Sen (Defence). But then the process stalled. There was too much uncertainty over the future role of Prince Sihanouk, whiling away his days at the palatial home Kim Il Sung had built for him in Pyongyang, awaiting the call to return; over the choice of Prime Minister; and over domestic policy, which had been left in abeyance during the summer while the Standing Committee concentrated on relations with China and Vietnam.
Pol spent August travelling in the South-West and the Eastern Zone to see for himself how the rural areas were coping with the flood of urban deportees. Then, in mid-September, he convened a Central Committee plenum in Phnom Penh, at which he laid out in detail his vision of Cambodia’s future:
We must fix quotas for [agricultural] production and for the distribution of the resultant capital at all levels — the villages, the districts, the regions and the zones . . . Part should go . . . to the people for their food and to exchange with the State for medicines and other articles of prime necessity. Part should go to the State, to be used to improve the people’s living standards, for defence and for national construction . . . Later, [when] cooperatives have been established everywhere . . . they will take on the task of building schools, dispensaries and workshops . . . The districts can keep a little ca
pital, but not much, just enough to coordinate the labour force. The regions can have a bit more, to build hospitals of some size, to buy medicines, and to undertake agricultural research and maintain a corps of technicians . . .
[To] develop public health [we should] both use traditional medicine [and] buy modern medicines abroad in exchange for [exports of] rice and rubber . . . [We must] eradicate malaria . . . There are other illnesses, too, to fight, like leprosy, tuberculosis and goitre. For each illness, we must work out a strategy.
We must set up creches and kindergartens to free the energies of our women . . . We must think of the development of education and culture. The State must provide schools, exercise books and pencils. Don’t forget that later on we will need more advanced technology. But scientific and technical education must obey the general principle that technicians and scientists must temper themselves first in the movement of the masses.
The basic production quota, Pol announced, to be applied throughout the country, was three tons of paddy, or unmilled rice, per hectare.* On paper this was not totally unreasonable, at least as a long-term goal. Sihanouk himself had proposed a target of two tons per hectare, and experimental farms had had no difficulty in reaching 3 or 4 tons. But in a country where historically yields had averaged just over one ton of paddy per hectare, among the lowest in Asia, it was still a tall order. Moreover, to achieve it would require massive use of chemical fertiliser, which was exactly what Cambodia did not have: instead, Pol proposed using ‘animal manure, alluvial soils, earth from anthills, bat guano and so on’, which while ecologically sound was incapable of producing the yields he demanded. In that contradiction lay one of the major causes of the vicious circle of repression, famine and more repression that would eventually bring the regime down.