Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  The physical changes in Phnom Penh, disconcerting enough in themselves, were as nothing compared to the psychological shock of re-entering a familiar community to find that its members now inhabited a different mental plane.

  Laurence Picq found that old friends from her days in Paris and Beijing were now unrecognisable. ‘Their behaviour was studied, measured . . . When they spoke it was in the same official formulae that we had heard from countless other cadres . . . Every action, every word, was placed in a defined political and ideological context.’ Yet she was seduced by the monastic simplicity of the way of life she was offered in this new society which preached poverty, moral integrity and the renunciation of personal belongings. It was a society, she wrote, whose goal was to achieve harmony by surmounting the contradictions inherent in life or, in Buddhistic terms, where the reason for living was ‘not to have but to be’, a society ‘without desire, without vain competition, without fear for the future’.

  For Picq and her companions, the ‘renunciation of personal belongings’ was relatively civilised: shortly after they arrived, each was asked to unpack their bags and keep only the indispensable minimum, giving the rest to Angkar. For those who came later, from Europe and the United States, where, it was presumed, they had sat out the war in comfort, the regime was harsher. As had happened to the urban deportees, their bags were searched by soldiers, who threw out anything they considered superfluous, publicly stripping them of their dignity and their identity as individuals. Ong Thong Hoeung, who had given up a doctorate in French literature to return, remembered ‘blouses, trousers, skirts, underpants, bras, beauty products, medicine, books . . . all scattered on the ground . . . We felt humiliated . . . But no one dared say a word.’

  For everyone, regardless of when they returned, there came next a period of testing, which might last anything from six months to several years. All, virtually without exception,* had to undergo it — just as Pol, Rath Samoeun, Mey Mann and their comrades had had to prove themselves to the Viet Minh at Krâbao a quarter of a century before. In 1972 and 1973, the first groups of student volunteers who had returned from Beijing had been sent initially to a boot camp called B-15, in a clearing in the jungle a day’s ride by ox-cart from Pol’s headquarters on the Chinit river. One of them, Long Nârin, described how they built themselves wooden huts and spent a year growing their own food and living the lives of peasants:

  B-15 was new. When we arrived there was nothing. We had to do everything for ourselves in accordance with the principle of relying solely on our own strength. To start with, we were six or seven intellectuals. We had a group of teenagers to look after, mostly the children of leaders, aged between twelve and fifteen — the children of Hu Nim, Hou Yuon and Tiv Ol were there — it was tough for them because they were young and on their own. Altogether, including local peasants, there were about seventy of us. There was never enough to eat. For the whole group, we had 500 grams of rice a day: we mixed it with bananas, sweet potatoes and manioc, which we grew ourselves, just to give the impression that there was rice. It was enough to survive, but everyone was hungry all the time.

  At one level they were being tempered, in the same way as the urban deportees would be tempered, and for essentially the same reason: to prove their revolutionary devotion. Every evening there was a ‘lifestyle meeting’, like those which François Bizot had witnessed at his prison in the Special Zone, three years earlier, where each participant gave an account of his acts during the day and criticised himself and his colleagues. To Laurence Picq, at B-1, such meetings were ‘a ritual . . . which none of us could have done without . . . goading the group to new efforts, stronger, more united, more steeled . . . with ever greater intensity to do more and better’. There were also twice-weekly study meetings where, in Long Nârin’s words, ‘we had to wash away our intellectual mode of thinking’.

  Even these basic forms of thought control were undertaken with a severity ‘as tough’, as Picq put it, ‘as anything to be found in the harshest reeducation camps in China’. If, after six months, or a year, the postulant was assigned a responsible post, it meant he or she had passed the test. But not everyone did so. In her group, some were never able to convince Angkar that they should be allowed to return to Phnom Penh. Long Visalo, who had a doctorate in cartography from Budapest and returned six months after Laurence Picq, compared the experience to crossing a river: ‘There will always be people who don’t make it, who can’t get over and fall in the water. You can’t leave those people behind, so eventually you kill them.’

  Along with other returnees from Europe and America, Visalo stayed at the former Khmero-Soviet Technical Institute, which had been renamed K-15 and transformed into a holding camp for intellectuals. The work regime was tougher and the food more meagre than at B-1 or B-15. Ong Thong Hoeung found that friends who had left Paris only three months before were now ‘as thin as nails, skeletal, not just thin but dirty, covered in rashes and sores, with blackened and missing teeth . . . They looked as though they had come from a Buddhist hell or out of a concentration camp.’ He was struck even more by their expression, ‘a strange, enigmatic, disconcerting smile, expressing sadness but also something else, which I couldn’t fathom. I couldn’t bear to look at them. How had they got into this state?’ The answer, he discovered, lay not only in the physical conditions, but in the mental indoctrination to which they were subjected. The way Long Visalo remembered it:

  They told us to plant rice on a basketball court. On reinforced concrete! They didn’t want us to break the concrete, but to cover it with a layer of earth . . . I thought: ‘These people are mad’ . . . But then you start to realise, a basketball court is a place where the bourgeoisie play during their leisure. The peasants have to work to live . . . Take a city street. It’s where the bourgeoisie drive their cars. The peasants don’t have cars. So destroy the street! In [southern Phnom Penh] I planted tomatoes in the street. I dug holes a metre deep through the tarmac and filled them with straw and shit with my hands. You have to like that! You have to like shit, because it gives life! The street doesn’t give life. You can’t eat the street. But once you’ve grown tomatoes you can eat them . . . It’s not important how much you produce: you can grow tons of vegetables, but in itself that means nothing. What matters is to change your mentality.

  Exactly what was involved in ‘changing your mentality’ was made clear to the new arrivals at a month-long seminar conducted by Khieu Samphân:

  How do we make a communist revolution? [he asked us]. The first thing you have to do is to destroy private property. But private property exists on both the material and the mental plane . . . To destroy material private property, the appropriate method was the evacuation of the towns . . . But spiritual private property is more dangerous, it comprises everything that you think is ‘yours’, everything that you think exists in relation to yourself—your parents, your family, your wife. Everything of which you say, ‘It’s mine . . .’ is spiritual private property. Thinking in terms of ‘me’ and ‘my’ is forbidden. If you say, ‘my wife’, that’s wrong. You should say, ‘our family’. The Cambodian nation is our big family . . . That’s why you have been separated: the men with the men, the women with women, the children with children. All of you are under the protection of Angkar. Each of us, man, woman and child, is an element of the nation . . . We are the child of Angkar, the man of Angkar, the woman of Angkar.

  The knowledge you have in your head, your ideas, are mental private property, too. To become a true revolutionary, you must . . . wash your mind clean. That knowledge comes from the teaching of the colonialists and imperialists . . . and it has to be destroyed. You intellectuals who have come back from abroad bring with you the influence of Europe, what we may call the ‘sequels of colonialism’. So the first thing you must do to make yourselves fit to participate in the communist revolution, [to put yourself on a par with] the ordinary people of Cambodia, the peasants, is to wash your mind . . .

  If we can destroy all mater
ial and mental private property . . . people will be equal. The moment you allow private property, one person will have a little more, another a little less, and then they are no longer equal. But if you have nothing — zero for him and zero for you — that is true equality . . . If you permit even the smallest part of private property, you are no longer as one, and it isn’t communism.

  Samphân cautioned them that they should keep these ideas to themselves, because ‘if the masses knew what we had been discussing, they might become discouraged’. Yet more than twenty years later, Visalo, by that time a government minister, still felt that ‘in principle, all that he said was just. Whether it could be put into effect is another matter. It was idealistic . . . But when I listened to him, I felt it was right. His arguments were reasonable.’

  They resonated for several reasons. Cambodians are naturally attracted to extremes (which is no doubt why Kropotkin’s dictum, that the French Revolution should not have stopped halfway, influenced Pol so strongly in his student days in Paris). Even Mao had faltered, by Khmer Rouge standards, by allowing the need for wages, for knowledge and family life. The Cambodian communists would go where none had gone before. ‘Zero for him, zero for you — that is communism,’ Khieu Samphân had said. The idea that property is baneful is rooted in the Buddhist creation myth, which depicts a golden age, when rice grew in abundance and men ate as they wished, before greed for private possessions perverted the primeval commonwealth. When the French had introduced land rights, a century earlier, Prince Yukanthor commented: ‘You have established property, and you have created the poor.’ Men like Visalo, and the thousand or so Khmer expatriates who returned before and after him, came from a Europe fired up by the ferment of May 1968 and an America tearing itself apart over the war in Vietnam — a world where the old ways had been found lacking and a shining, new future beckoned to those with the courage to believe. The returnees did believe. In choosing to come home, they had consciously rejected what they called ‘the orchestrated calumnies, the campaigns of intoxication . . . the claims of massacres and forced labour’, spread by the US media, and proclaimed their faith in the ‘prodigious achievements [and] sublime ardour’ of the Cambodian people under their new leaders. Despite the appalling conditions they encountered after they arrived, many continued to believe until the regime fell.

  At B-1, where the Foreign Ministry staff, having already completed their period of testing, were held to be ideologically more advanced than the returnees, the séances of introspection, criticism and self-criticism were fiercer.

  The ultimate aim was to demolish the personality, ‘that hard, tenacious, aggressive shell which in its very essence is counter-revolutionary’, as one Khmer Rouge cadre put it; the preferred method, a ‘surgical strike’ to destroy ‘the individual’, who, in contradistinction to ‘the people’, defined as the embodiment of good, was seen as the root of every imaginable evil. Personality was a ‘property of the bourgeoisie, whereby they crush the masses . . . It is what enables them to throw out their chests and hold their heads high . . . It is the stuff of which imperialists and colonialists are made.’ The ultimate goal for a Khmer Rouge was ‘to have no personality at all’. To eradicate it, the ‘strike’ was directed at the individual’s most vulnerable point — his family relations, perhaps, or educational background or ties with a foreign country — in order to decondition him, liberating his behaviour from the acquired reflexes of his former life, before building a new persona on the basis of revolutionary values. The process was repeated with increasing refinement, through self-examination and public confession, until a new man emerged who embodied loyalty to Angkar, alacrity and non-reflection.

  Laurence Picq, reflecting on her life at B-1, compared it to membership of the Moonies. In all sects, indoctrination is accomplished by extreme mental and physical pressure. In Khmer Rouge Cambodia, that meant hunger, lack of sleep and long hours of labour. ‘All our thoughts were constantly on food,’ Picq wrote. ‘When political education drips into minds emptied by hunger and weariness and cut off from the outside world, the effects are prodigious.’ The same was true in reverse. During the twice-yearly seminars held by Ieng Sary at B-1, the diet of thin soup and mouldy bread suddenly improved: there was fruit and fresh-water crayfish, vegetables and rice. The combination of indoctrination and good treatment had ‘a psychological impact that was frightening . . . It acted on collective attitudes and behaviour with such power that the participants emerged feeling they were capable of anything.’ As the ideological fetters tightened, people no longer saw themselves as individuals, but as cogs in an occult machine whose workings, by definition, they could not fully understand.

  No other communist party — whether in China, Vietnam or North Korea — has gone so far in its attempts directly to remould the minds of its members. Under Pol’s leadership, the CPK was unique in its determination to create a ‘new communist man’ by pushing the logic of egalitarianism, co-operative self-management and the withering away of the state to its uttermost limits. The ideals of the French Revolution, the practices of Maoist China, the methods of Stalinism, all played their part. But the specificity of Pol’s revolution lay in its Khmer roots.

  The destruction of ‘material and spiritual private property’ was Buddhist detachment in revolutionary clothes; the demolition of the personality was the achievement of non-being. ‘The only true freedom,’ a study document proclaimed, ‘lies in following what Angkar says, what it writes and what it does.’ Like the Buddha, Angkar was always right; questioning its wisdom was always a mistake.

  To the former town-dwellers, adjusting to life in the countryside was even more traumatic than Phnom Penh was for the intellectuals. For both, it was a double blow Physically they were deprived of the creature comforts they had taken for granted throughout their lives. Psychologically they were enslaved, confined within a political and ideological strait-jacket that grew steadily tighter. The deportees were at one end of the Party’s scale of concerns, the intellectuals at the other. But its approach to both was the same.

  The physical change was so overwhelming for the ‘new people’ that at first it drowned out every other consideration. Many were terrified. ‘We had the impression,’ one wrote, ‘of having been abandoned in the middle of a hostile land.’ They arrived in villages ‘that seemed frozen in time’, where people still suffered from yaws, dropsy and other diseases which were supposed to have been eradicated from Cambodia decades before. Like the intellectuals, the deportees had to learn everything from the bottom up — to build primitive wooden huts; to plough; to plant vegetables and rice — usually in conditions far harsher than the returned students endured. Like the peasants, they used potash extracted from the cinders of wood fires as a substitute for soap. In the flooded rice-paddies, they wrapped cloths between their legs as protection against minuscule leeches which could enter the penis, the anus or the vagina, causing excruciating pain until, days later, they detached themselves and were flushed out.

  That first year, in most areas — except for parts of the North-West and western Kompong Chhnang, where the distribution system collapsed under the weight of the population increase — food supplies, while meagre, were enough to ward off starvation. Women stopped menstruating, as they did even in Phnom Penh where food was more plentiful; some suffered prolapsed uteruses, and nursing mothers had no milk. Malaria was rife. By the following spring, local cadres were reporting 40 per cent of the population incapacitated by fever. None the less, the deportees foraged for snails and lizards, crabs and spiders, and wild vegetables in the jungle, and bartered for food with the ‘base people’ what remained of the gold and jewellery they had managed to bring with them from the towns. Like the French, who survived the Second World War as well as they did in part because they were close to the soil, urban Khmers were at heart less removed from peasant life than they sometimes tried to pretend, and it stood them in good stead.

  In retrospect, one of the most astonishing aspects of the Khmer Rouge period
is that so many academics and professional people were able to ‘use the hoe as a long pen and the rice-field as their paper’, as the cadres liked to say, keeping themselves and their families precariously alive. The exceptions were the ‘Chinese’, the Sino-Cambodian businessmen who had no rural roots. They died in larger numbers.

  Within this overall context, local variations were extreme. Even in the North-West, where conditions were generally worst, there were villages where the ‘new people’ had as much rice as they could eat — ‘too much’, one man remembered. At the same moment, in Pursat, thirty miles to the south, others were so desperate for food that cannibalism was rife and a third of the deportees died before the year was out. Local leaders looked after their own: what happened in the next district, the next village, was not their concern. It made a mockery of central directives, as Pol was well aware. ‘It’s impossible to solve problems when walking on a narrow path,’ he complained to the Central Committee. But feudalistic, patron-client relationships were too deeply rooted in Cambodian culture for even the Khmers Rouges to change. ‘There was no established rule for the whole country,’ the former government engineer Pin Yathay concluded. ‘Discipline varied at the whim of each village chief There were ‘good’ villages in the worst regions, and ‘bad’ villages in the best.