Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  Another equally fateful decision was taken by the delegates that month: not to use money.

  A year earlier, at Meakk, the Central Committee had agreed that the new currency, printed in China, should be issued as soon as possible after the fall of Phnom Penh. In January 1975, Ping Sây had travelled with a delegation bringing wooden crates full of the new banknotes down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Shortly afterwards he and Hou Yuon attended a meeting of the National Bank Preparatory Committee, chaired by Khieu Samphân, at B-20, a camp near Pol’s old headquarters on the Chinit river. In May, the work conference at the Silver Pagoda which approved the new strategic line of advancing directly to communism, decided that the riel should be put progressively into circulation, with appropriate measures to guarantee its value, in order, as Pol put it, ‘to demonstrate to the people the reality of our state power’. Non Suon, the former Pracheachon leader, was appointed National Bank Chairman with a brief to get the new system up and running. That summer, posters showing the new bills were sent to the provinces along with supplies of notes pending final approval from Phnom Penh. In August, Suon was succeeded by a young regional commander from the Northern Zone, Pich Chheang, who had married Pol’s former cook, Moeun. Chheang started a training programme for sixty peasant youths, who were to run the bank’s branches in the regions and, as a trial run, at the beginning of September, allowed the new currency to circulate in his home area, Region 41 of the Northern Zone, north-west of Kompong Cham.

  By then, however, a number of influential CPK leaders were questioning the wisdom of these moves. Pol’s aide, Phi Phuon, remembered informal meetings of the Standing Committee at the Silver Pagoda in late August where Mok, in particular, spoke out against the use of money:

  Mok favoured a barter system. He said some regions were rich in rice, others had different products: the answer was a system of exchange. He also said if there were no money, it would remove the problem of corruption and curtail the activities of enemy agents. ‘When a wound is not yet healed,’ he said, ‘you shouldn’t push a stick into it. You must leave it alone, otherwise it will get worse.’ So Phim and Koy Thuon supported him. They agreed with his views.

  Pol, too, found Mok’s arguments convincing. Beyond practical considerations — the regime’s ‘lack of experience’, as he put it, a reference to the difficulty of turning semi-literate young men with politically correct, poor peasant origins into capable bank tellers — there were more important ideological reasons. The question of whether or not to use money, he told the Central Committee, concerned the essence of the Khmer Rouge state:

  The State is an organism whose purpose is to maintain the power of one class by exercising dictatorship over others in all domains . . . But the State is also an instrument that creates a privileged social stratum which, as it develops, becomes cut off from the proletariat and from labour. This has happened, for example, in the Soviet Union . . . and [to some extent] in [North] Korea and in China. In conformity with Marxist-Leninist principles, it is necessary to . . . reduce progressively this defect which is the State until it is extinguished completely, giving place to [a system of] self-management of factories by the proletariat and of agriculture by the peasants. The privileged upper stratum will then disappear altogether.

  Up to now, the fact we do not use money has greatly reduced private property and thus has promoted the overall trend towards the collective. If we start using money again, it will bring back sentiments of private property and drive the individual away from the collective. Money is an instrument which creates privilege and power. Those who possess it can use it to bribe cadres . . . [and] to undermine our system. If we allow sentiments of private property to develop, little by little people’s thoughts will turn only to ways of amassing private property . . . If we take that route, then in one year, or 10 or 20 years, what will become of our Cambodian society which up to now is so clean?

  Money constitutes a danger, both now and in the future. We must not be in a hurry to use it . . . We need to think more deeply about this matter.

  On September 19, the conference resolved not to issue the new currency, a decision confirmed at the CPK’s Fourth Congress four months later. The supplies of currency which had already been distributed were gathered up and put in storage in Phnom Penh.

  The other major theme of the September plenum was the need to improve rural living standards. Manufacturing industry was to concentrate on turning out light industrial goods for daily use — bicycles, clothing, mosquito nets, fishing lines, cigarettes and lighter flints — and simple agricultural machinery. Commerce, in the absence of money, would be limited to barter between co-operatives and the state. Koy Thuon, who had championed this system, was given responsibility for making it work and he and Khieu Samphân drew up a notional price-scale to be used in barter transactions. How well it functioned is another matter. Thiounn Mumm, who had just arrived in Phnom Penh from Beijing, was horrified:

  I found myself in the Ministry of Industry, working under Vorn Vet. What did I see? First of all, there was no administration. The cadres sat outside under a tree. When someone arrived, they’d ask him: ‘What d’you need? You need oil? Go and get it from such-and-such a factory.’ And they’d give him a voucher. They didn’t even keep a copy. Sometimes the man would get to the factory only to be told there wasn’t any oil. No one knew. No accounts were kept!

  This was a problem of Pol’s own making. If there were few qualified cadres, it was because he refused to employ those with non-revolutionary backgrounds. But it also reflected his ignorance of economics. He once told the Central Committee that ‘if we have a million riels, we use it all for national construction and defence . . . [Other socialist countries] spend half of it on wages and only half on building and defending their country. That puts them half a million riels behind us.’ Those like Mumm and Khieu Samphân, who did have an economic training, kept their mouths well shut.

  Pol’s approach to the welfare of the population was equally simplistic. His visit to the South-West in August had finally made him understand what the rural cadres had known for months — that ‘shortages of food and medicine are affecting the labour force . . . Those who are suffering most are the urban deportees from Phnom Penh.’ It was not the suffering that bothered Pol; it was the fact that lack of food might reduce their ability to work. Rather than bringing in rice from other areas, the best solution, he decided, was ‘to redistribute the labour force in a balanced manner in accordance with the production needs of the different regions’. That became the signal for another wholesale movement of the population. In April the priority had been to empty the towns as quickly as possible. No one had paid much attention to where the deportees ended up. As a result, most settled in the East, the South-West and the North. Now, just as the crops were ripening and they were looking forward to the fruits of their labour, they were uprooted to go to other areas where their muscle-power was needed more.

  As always, the regime cloaked its intentions in a lie.

  This time the story was not that the Americans were about to launch bombing raids, but that Angkar was calling for volunteers to return to their home villages, or to Phnom Penh or Battambang. In the event, most of the ‘volunteers’ went to the North-West, traditionally the rice-bowl of Cambodia. By year’s end, more than a million people had left their adopted villages to be resettled in sparsely populated areas where manpower was lacking. In the context of a despotic state, it was not an illogical policy. But the timing was terrible. There was no way the North-West could cope with hundreds of thousands of extra mouths which arrived too late for their owners to grow new crops but in time to require feeding from the wholly inadequate harvest planted for a much smaller population several months before. Moreover, it underlined the principal lesson of the April evacuation. To Pol and his colleagues, the Cambodian people were no longer individual human beings, each with hopes and fears, desires and aspirations. They had become soulless instruments in the working out of a grand national design.

/>   During a period of singular megalomania, in the late 1950s, Mao had likened the peasantry to a blank sheet of paper on which ‘the newest and most beautiful words can be written, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted’. The Khmers Rouges, more prosaically, adopted the ox as their model. ‘You see the ox, comrades. Admire him! He eats where we [tell] him to eat . . . When we tell him to pull the plough, he pulls it. He never thinks of his wife or his children.’ A young deportee confided to her journal the oxen’s response: ‘Slaves we are,’ she wrote, ‘and as slaves are we treated.’

  In October 1975, a month after these decisions had been taken, the first large group of Cambodians abroad was authorised to return to Phnom Penh. Among them was Suong Sikoeun’s wife, Laurence Picq, and the couple’s two small daughters. Like the others, she had been working for the FUNK in Beijing. Unlike them, she was French.

  Laurence Picq would become one of only two non-Asians to spend the Khmer Rouge years in Cambodia. This was due to the intervention of Ieng Sary. In Beijing, Sikoeun, emulating other Khmer Rouge cadres married to foreigners, had asked to be allowed to divorce her to prove that his devotion to the revolution outweighed family ties. Normally this was CPK policy: a foreign spouse was a security risk. But in Sikoeun’s case, Ieng Sary refused. Their Chinese comrades, he explained, liked and respected Picq, a lively, bright woman of strong left-wing convictions, then in her late twenties. It ‘might not be understood’ if they were to split up. She herself suspected, probably correctly, that she was an alibi, there to prove that the new Cambodia, or at least its Foreign Minister, was not only not xenophobic but broad-minded enough to accept non-Khmer sympathisers.

  Unlike the ‘new people’, the urban deportees who had been swept up by the revolution and forced to live terrifying new lives wholly against their will, Laurence Picq and the thirty or so Cambodians who flew back with her were ardent supporters of the Khmer communist cause. All were intellectuals. All had voluntarily given up comfortable lives in the West or, in some cases, in Cambodia itself, to join the resistance in Beijing. Now they were brought face to face with the reality of the regime they had championed through five years of civil war:

  Along the roadside, cars lay abandoned and stripped, dozens and dozens of them, with their doors and windows open . . . The houses, too, had gaping black openings, like haunted buildings. In the courtyards and on the pavements, crockery, cooking stoves, fridges, lay scattered . . . What were they doing there? . . . On both sides of the road, an apocalyptic landscape rolled past us, as though a powerful shock-wave had wiped out any human presence . . . An unspeakable weariness overcame us. No one spoke. People averted their eyes . . .

  To those, like Sikoeun, who had spent time in the rural bases before coming to Phnom Penh, the desolation could be rationalised away as an inevitable consequence of war. To those returning directly from abroad, it was traumatic. The image that sprang to Laurence Picq’s mind was of Guernica: ‘That silence. A terrible silence . . . It resonated with the pain of a people that had been torn apart, their cries of despair, their distress, a suffering beyond measure.’

  Yet by the time the Beijing group arrived, Phnom Penh was actually in better shape than it had been when the communists had taken over six months earlier.

  The indiscriminate looting which had been a feature of the city’s ‘liberation’ had stopped almost at once. ‘War booty,’ the Party had decreed, ‘is what is seized during wartime. Now the war is over so booty belongs to the State.’ The ‘State’, initially, meant the Zones. For weeks, the deportees saw convoys of trucks and requisitioned cars, loaded with bicycles, furniture, electrical appliances, motor-bikes, pharmaceutical goods and radio sets, heading towards the Eastern Zone, the South-West and the North. The Zone Secretaries, true warlords that they were, feuded among themselves over how the plunder should be divided. By summer, removal teams were going from house to house in Phnom Penh with instructions to leave the ‘revolutionary minimum’ — defined as a bed without a mattress, a chair without a cushion, and a table; to remove whatever they thought might be useful for storage in state warehouses; and to burn the rest. In the central districts of the capital, which in April, when Lon Nol’s regime fell, had been piled high with filth, uncollected rubbish and the debris of buildings destroyed in Khmer Rouge rocket attacks, soldiers swept the pavements each morning. The shanty towns on the outskirts, where millions of peasant refugees had lived out the last year of the war in misery and squalor, were razed.

  The Foreign Ministry, codenamed B-I, headed by Ieng Sary, took over a complex of buildings, occupying an entire city block, which in Lon Nol’s day had housed the Prime Minister’s Office. Situated just south of the railway station on the main road to the airport, it adjoined the General Staff Headquarters, which Son Sen had established in the former republican Defence Ministry next door. Each was a self-contained community, a munthi, as it is called in Khmer, where the cadres and their wives lived — often in separate dormitories — worked, tended collective vegetable plots in what had once been the Ministry gardens, participated in political study and sent their children to the Ministry crèche. In three years, Laurence Picq was allowed outside the B-I compound fewer than half a dozen times, usually to see theatrical performances, and never on her own.

  That first year, when Cambodia was still almost totally cut off from the outside world — with no international telephone, telegraph or postal links, all land and sea borders closed, and no scheduled flights to anywhere — there was little work for diplomats.

  In Sopheap remembered making by hand the first passports for the new regime: ‘We typed the pages, put them between two sheets of cardboard and stapled them together . . . Later we had passports printed in China, but that was how we began.’ Sikoeun found some teletype machines to monitor foreign news agencies and compiled a daily digest which was circulated to the Standing Committee. But most of the Ministry personnel were sent to the countryside to reforge themselves through manual labour.

  The few who remained spent their days sweeping offices, cleaning graffiti off the walls and scrubbing lavatories. ‘It was a chance to show their revolutionary mettle,’ Picq recalled. ‘Normally Khmers are extremely squeamish about faecal matter . . . But now it was too good an occasion to miss. Some used rags, some buckets of water, but the boldest used their hands, scraping off the dried excrement with their finger-nails.’ Another Ministry team set about cleaning the former Governor-General’s Residence and the Hotel Phnom, nearby, which were rechristened ‘House No. 1’ and ‘House No. 2’ and were to be used for government receptions and to accommodate distinguished guests. ‘Pol himself came to inspect our work,’ a member of the team remembered. ‘At one point someone opened a cupboard door and a little dog jumped out. We all froze, we were terrified. It could have been taken as a serious breach of security. Fortunately he smiled.’

  By then Pol had moved from the Silver Pagoda to a new permanent headquarters in what were known as the Bank Buildings. A seven-storeyed L-shaped apartment complex — at the time the tallest in Phnom Penh — built in the 1960s to a design by a Cambodian architect, it had formerly housed senior civil servants and officials from the National Bank. Ieng Sary chose it as the Party leaders’ residence because it stood on its own in a park at the ‘Four Arms’, the point where the River Bassac, the two streams of the Mekong and the Tonle Sap meet, which meant that it was easy to protect and had access to the three main highways leading north, south and west. Pâng, who had been appointed Pol’s Chief of Staff, had bamboo palisades erected around it, with troops manning machine-guns on all four sides and multiple checkpoints along the single approach road. K-1, as it was called, was home not only to Pol, but to the other three Phnom Penh-based members of the Standing Committee — Nuon Chea, Sary himself and Vorn Vet — as well as Khieu Samphân, whose relationship with the Party Secretary, despite his junior status, was becoming increasingly close. Like the Foreign Ministry cadres, they lived apart from their wives, whom they saw once a week �
�� ‘as though you were going to visit your mistress’, Vorn Vet used to complain — and at Pol’s insistence, in order to ‘proletarianise themselves’, they had to clean their own rooms and help with other domestic chores. To Pol, that was no hardship: as Party leader, he was exempt and he lived as a bachelor anyway. Khieu Ponnary’s schizophrenia had worsened and she had been assigned a house in Boeung Keng Kâng, in the southern part of the city, where relatives of other leading figures, including Khieu Samphân’s elderly mother, also lived.

  Later in the year, Pol began using Ponnary’s old family home on rue Docteur Hahn as an additional residence. The whole block, which was known as K-3, was barricaded with corrugated-iron sheeting and barbed wire, and patrolled by guards. The other buildings were used for meetings and to accommodate Central Committee members when they came to the capital for the annual plenum. Subsequently Pol acquired a third home, a villa near Sihanouk’s former palace at Chamkar Mon, also in the southern part of Phnom Penh.

  The Central Committee Secretariat, codenamed 870, was housed in a shabby, two-storey office building behind the National Assembly. Doeun, a protege of Koy Thuon and a member of the Northern Zone CPK Committee, was appointed Political Director, with Khieu Samphân as special assistant responsible for united front matters, the economy, commerce, industry and tariffs. Samphân was also entrusted with missions which Pol judged too sensitive for others to handle.

  But if the basic framework of the future Khmer Rouge administration was being put in place, and the worst eyesores of the war removed, normalcy, in Phnom Penh, remained a very relative term.

  The Roman Catholic Cathedral was demolished, not so much as an anti-Christian or even anti-foreign gesture, but because its French missionary founders, with typical nineteenth-century arrogance, had built it directly opposite Wat Phnom, which in Khmer tradition is sacred ground.* The National Bank was left in ruins. The rest of the city’s building stock, unoccupied and unmaintained, slowly rotted in the tropical heat and damp. The city’s parks and gardens were given over to ‘useful’ trees and plants: frangipane, for traditional medicine; guavas; bananas; and, along the pavements, coconut palms. Pigs and cattle, belonging to the various ministries, roamed the streets — until Son Sen’s office issued a circular, warning that unless livestock were controlled, it would adversely affect the country’s image in the eyes of visiting delegations. But the principle that each munthi should be self-sufficient was not called into doubt. If Phnom Penh itself could not be physically uprooted and transferred to the countryside, as its population had been, nature would be allowed, wherever possible, to reassert its rights, eliding the difference between worker and peasant, mental and manual labour, and exerting a pristine, regenerative influence on the new revolutionary elite.