Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  Hunger was a weapon in the countryside no less than in the re-education camps. Lenin’s dictum, ‘He who does not work, does not eat’, was applied in the Cambodian co-operatives with a literalness the Russians had never dreamed of. In a bad area, a day’s work earned one bowl of watery rice soup; those too ill to work got nothing. Illness itself was often equated with opposition to the regime, or at least a lack of ‘revolutionary consciousness’ which was considered almost as bad, and the rural clinics, where untrained nurses doled out traditional medicines, were no more than charnel-houses.

  But hunger, compounded by non-existent health care, was a double-edged sword.

  For the local cadres, food was an essential means of control, calibrated by the differing treatment of ‘new’ and ‘base’ people. For the ‘base’ people, life was bearable. The plight of the ‘new people’ was a constant reminder to them of their own relative good fortune, which in turn was designed to incite the former to work harder to reforge themselves, in order to progress from being depositees to candidate or full-rights status with a corresponding improvement in rations. That, at least, was the theory. In practice, it rarely worked that way. The Khmer Rouge system was essentially coercive. Yet at the same time there was a genuine shortage. Even with relief rice from China, grain stockpiles after the war were dangerously low. When ’new people’ starved to death that winter, it was not a matter of policy but because the system had failed.

  Pol wanted more, not fewer people. He called for a doubling or tripling of the population, to ‘15 or 20 million people within 10 years’, to implement his plans to make Cambodia prosperous and strong. But how was that to be achieved if women were unable to menstruate because of malnutrition? How could the existing population work effectively if it were half-starved? The leadership recognised the problem. Standing Committee resolutions at that time, and Pol’s speeches at closed Party meetings, are full of references to the need to ensure an adequate diet, defined as an average of 500 grams of paddy per person per day. ‘The [most] important medicine is food,’ he told a conference in the Western Zone. ‘Resolving the food problem is the key.’ Two months later he made the same point again: ‘We must solve the problem of the people’s livelihood and we must solve it rapidly . . . [Otherwise] contradictions [will] spring up among us.’

  But the contradictions were already embedded in the policy. In a period of generalised penury, cadres were expected to ensure a healthy minimum diet for all, while maintaining a hierarchy of rations between ‘new’ and ‘base’ people. This meant guaranteeing that those in responsible positions, who lived apart from the masses — co-operative and district leaders, soldiers, militia and certain other privileged groups, such as railway workers, whose loyalty was crucial to the regime — were fed not merely adequately but well, with meat or fish in addition to rice; yet at the same time retaining the use of hunger as a means of discipline, since there was no obvious alternative.

  It added up to so many conflicting imperatives that in practice most cadres opted for the simplest solution: they and the ‘base’ people ate well; the ‘new’ people ate badly; hunger remained a punitive weapon; the death toll from malnutrition and related diseases stayed high; and the health and strength of the ‘new’ people continued to decline.

  There was a similar dilemma over how hard people should work, and how much ‘cutting-edge violence’ should be used to make them do so.

  The Standing Committee had decreed one free day in each ten-day week — a system copied from the French Revolution — and up to fifteen days’ holiday a year. ‘There’s not enough food for people to work all the time,’ Pol explained. ‘If a person doesn’t rest, he gets ill. It is a strategic objective to increase the strength of the people. Therefore, leisure should be considered fundamental.’ But in practice the weekly day off, when granted, was devoted to political meetings, and the proposed annual holiday was never implemented.

  That left the question of daily work quotas.

  If they were set too high, those who failed to meet them were punished, either by being given extra tasks, or less food, or both, frequently leading to illness and death. But if they were lowered, the targets set by the region and the Zone would not be fulfilled. Grass-roots leaders met this challenge in different ways. Some tried to strike a balance — especially in the Eastern and South-Western Zones; in Kratie; and in the more fertile districts of the North-West. Others resorted to terror. The indiscriminate killing of former republican army officers and senior civil servants which had marked the first months of the regime had stopped during the summer. But in the co-operatives, executions of supposed ‘bad elements’ and others who allegedly violated collective discipline continued. A young village militiaman explained:

  Those we surprised at night in the act of saying bad things, we educated, which means that they worked harder than the others. If they repeated the offence, they were killed with a cudgel or a pickaxe. Then they were buried and that was that . . . Children were also killed if they made a lot of mistakes . . . I agreed with the executions . . . Those who made mistakes had to take responsibility for their errors.

  Carried out at night and in secret, they inspired a morbid jingle: ‘Angkar kills but does not explain’. But this method too had a drawback: every person who died was one person less to work.

  By the winter of 1975, if not sooner, the mass of the Cambodian population had become, in the eyes of the leadership, digits on a national balance sheet. It was implicit in the menacing couplet which the cadres used when a person was about to be killed: ‘To keep you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss’. A villager remembered it as a time when ‘a person’s worth was measured in how many cubic yards of earth he could move’. Like the oxen they were supposed to emulate, people were a commodity to be fed, watered, housed and worked. When they were executed, their clothes were removed by the soldiers and handed on to others to wear; their corpses were often buried beside fields, in the belief that the rotting flesh would fertilise the soil. Those who died in village clinics were cremated and the bone ash used for phosphate. As in death, so also in birth: when women still menstruated, cadres noted the dates of their periods so that their husbands might be brought to sleep with them at the time they were most likely to be fecund, to swell the population.

  While life for those in the co-operatives was physically extremely harsh, the indoctrination to which they were subjected was correspondingly mild.

  In part this was a conscious decision. At the end of 1975, the CPK’s existence was still secret. Another year would pass before it would be hinted publicly that the mysterious Angkar might in fact be a communist organisation. Only a third of the co-operatives then had Party branches — total Party membership for the whole country was probably less than 10,000 — and, as Khieu Samphân had noted, the time was not yet ripe for communist ideas to be disseminated openly among the masses.

  There were also practical reasons. In the rural areas the aim was not to demolish personality — that treatment was reserved for intellectuals — but to make the deportees shed their bourgeois outlook and think and act as peasants. The nightly lifestyle meetings concentrated on planting schedules, increasing fertiliser production, the digging of irrigation channels and disciplinary violations. ‘The bourgeoisie . . . have been subordinated to worker-peasant power. They have been forced to carry out manual labour,’ the Party journal, Tung Padevat, explained, ‘but their views and their aspirations remain.’ Once they had reforged themselves, the differences between ‘new’ and ‘base’ people would disappear and the next stage could begin, which would be to instil in them the ‘proletarian consciousness’ that alone would permit the modernisation of agriculture and industry which was the regime’s ultimate goal. In Samphân’s words:

  The workers are the most revolutionary class, because they do not possess property and they work in an organised manner at regular hours. The peasant possesses land on which to grow his crops; he is disorganised and negligent; he works when he feels li
ke it. The worker owns nothing; he earns his living with the strength of his arms. That is how we, too, should be . . . So in this first stage we have a peasant revolution; but later, to advance to communism, we must make a proletarian revolution.

  That should not be seen as an affirmation of Marxist orthodoxy: the real flesh-and-blood workers in the factories of Phnom Penh and Battambang were distrusted as much as ever. ‘Proletarian consciousness’ was an ideal, to be achieved through ‘illumination’,* not, as Marx had held, the reflection in the social superstructure of a particular pattern of economic organisation — and in any case it was for the future.

  For now, the nightly message was ‘to work hard, produce more and love Angkar’, to ‘build and defend the nation’ and to reject the selfish, individualistic values of Western-style capitalism.

  It was government by incantation. The village leaders knew their lines so well, one man noticed, that ‘every time they spoke they put the punctuation marks exactly where they had been the day before.’ The repetition was deliberate, the cadres emphasised. It was designed, like a Buddhist sermon, to ‘impregnate’ people’s minds so deeply with a single idea that there would be no room for any other.

  Radio Phnom Penh did the same, repeating stereotyped phrases with mantra-like regularity. Pol told the Information Minister, Hu Nim, that the announcers should have clear, strong voices ‘like the monks who lead the prayers at a wat’. In more prosperous communes, the daily homily was broadcast over loudspeakers. Invariably it was accompanied by a song illustrating the chosen topic — the need for greater efforts in pig-breeding or the digging of irrigation canals — set to a lilting traditional air. Despite the dreariness of the subject matter, the music, one deportee remembered, made it a ‘most effective tool — you started to believe in it’. Like the cpap of Pol’s childhood, it was an aid to memorisation and an ideological guide, depicting the world as it should be, a place of joy and exaltation, where everyone struggled constantly to build a better life, seethed with class hatred against the exploiters of old and showed absolute faith in Angkar, the ‘correct and clear-sighted revolutionary organisation’. ‘The implication,’ one woman wrote, ‘was that if we did not share the general joy, the fault lay with us. We must work harder . . . to weed out selfishness, laziness and desire.’

  From the winter of 1975, the radio started urging people to ‘fight non-revolutionary moral and material concepts, including those of private property, personality [and] vanity, and . . . [to] adopt the stand of collective ownership and austerity’. It called for ‘renunciation’ — another Buddhist notion — which the cadres explained meant devoting oneself body and soul to the collective without being swayed by personal interests:

  ’Renunciation of feelings of ownership’ meant that one must concentrate completely on the task at hand without thinking of oneself, as in Buddhist meditation. ‘Renunciation of material goods’ implied detachment from one’s wife, one’s children and one’s home, just as Buddha once renounced those things. ‘Renunciation of control over one’s own life’ meant digging out from oneself the roots of pride, contempt for others and complicated thoughts, as the monks used to preach before. The ‘renunciation of the self’ is particularly necessary as it concerns the emotional ties within the family — between husband and wife, parents and children, and children and parents. [They used to tell us:] ‘You should purify yourselves, free yourself from emotional bonds’; ‘You still have feelings of friendship and goodwill. You must eliminate from your mind all [such] individualistic notions.’

  However, indoctrination was carried out principally through the practice of daily life.

  Language was stripped bare of incorrect allusions. Instead of ‘I’, people had to say ‘we’. A child called its parents ‘uncle and aunt’ and other grown ups, ‘mother’ or ‘father’. Every relationship became collective; words distinguishing the individual were suppressed or given new meanings. Terms denoting hierarchy, like the dozen or so verbs meaning ‘to eat’, whose use depended on the rank and social relationship of those involved, were replaced by a single verb previously used only by peasants. Nuon Chea, who masterminded these changes, devised neologisms, often based on scholarly Pali terms, to convey political concepts for which no equivalent existed in Khmer. Other new coinages were taken from peasant slang: bokk rukk,’to launch an offensive’, meant literally ‘to ram a stake into a hole’, with the sense of violent buggery. The sexual connotation was odd in such a puritanical regime, but it conveyed well enough the idea of an elemental, brutish struggle to overcome material obstacles and bend nature to man’s will. Nuon, as the final authority, other than Pol himself, in all matters concerning propaganda, also supervised Radio Phnom Penh. At his insistence, words conveying lyrical or ‘bourgeois’ sentiments, like ‘beauty’, ‘colourful’ and ‘comfort’ were banned from the airwaves. The goal was that described in Orwell’s 1984, a book which neither Pol nor Nuon had read but whose principles they grasped intuitively:

  The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought . . . In the end we will make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that will ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten . . . Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller . . . In fact there will be no thought as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking . . . Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

  Reality mirrored the notions this new language conveyed. The family continued to exist but, as Orwell had imagined, its primary purpose became ‘to beget children for the service of the Party’. Ties between individual family members were diluted within the larger community. ‘Mothers should not get too entangled with their offspring,’ Pol told the Central Committee. Similarly, if a man felt a sentimental attachment developing with a woman, he should ‘take a collectivist stand, and resolve it . . . To do otherwise is to have a strong private stance.’ Marriage — not merely between Party members, as Orwell had envisaged, but between any two people — was a Party, not an individual affair. Khieu Samphân married in December 1972 because Pol told him he should and personally served as his go-between. Traditionally, in Khmer society, marriages had been arranged between families. Now Angkar played that role. ‘Free choice of spouses’ was explicitly condemned. To underline the social aspect, weddings were celebrated collectively for a minimum of ten couples. After a marriage had been consummated the couple often lived apart.

  Illicit love affairs were punished by death. Women wore their hair short in a regimented Maoist bob with shirts buttoned to the neck. At work the sexes were segregated, regardless of age. Sport was banned as ‘bourgeois’. So were children’s toys. There was no free time. The only reading materials were two Party journals, which were exclusively for cadres, and a fortnightly newspaper, Padevat (Revolution), which circulated within the ministries in Phnom Penh. The Buddhist wats, formerly the centre of village life, were closed. Some were demolished, as the Catholic cathedral had been, to recover the iron struts that reinforced their concrete frames. Others were turned into prisons or warehouses, much as Cromwell’s New Model Army in seventeenth-century Britain had turned the churches into stables. Because they lived on charity, the monks were regarded as parasites: in Khmer Rouge terminology, they ‘breathed through other people’s noses’. Along with expatriate intellectuals and officials of the republican regime, they were designated a ‘special class’ — a singularly un-Marxist category — and within a year had been defrocked and put to work in co-operatives or on irrigation sites.

  In short, everything that had given colour and meaning to Cambodian life was comprehensively suppressed.

  Certain groups had special difficulty in accommodating to the new regime. As in Lon Nol’s time, Christians were suspected of being Vietnamese. Sino-Khmers were forbidden to speak Chinese, on the grounds that Khmer, or Kampuchean as it was now termed, was the sing
le national language. The Chams, already under suspicion during the civil war, had the worst of all worlds, since their history, religion and culture made them a people apart. The Khmers looked down on them because their kingdom, Champa, had been overrun by the Vietnamese in the fifteenth century, an event constantly cited as a warning of Cambodia’s fate if its resolve weakened. Moreover, the fact that they lived and intermarried in self-contained communities, often having little contact with other Cambodians, was a security concern. In 1974, the CPK had begun speaking of the need to ‘break up this group to some extent; do not allow too many of them to concentrate in one area.’ A year later, the dispersal of the 150,000 Chams in the Eastern Zone to villages in the North and NorthWest became established policy.

  This was not racism in the normal sense of the term. The aim was uniformity — a country where, as Mey Mann put it, ‘everyone was exactly Im. 60 tall’ — not the suppression of a particular group.

  In practice, local cadres sometimes simplified their own lives by singling out such people for punishment, not because of anything they had done but because they were seen as more likely than others to deviate from Khmer Rouge norms, in the same way as anyone wearing spectacles was regarded as bourgeois or an intellectual or both and hence untrustworthy. The Issarak, twenty-five years earlier, had acted in much the same way. They, too, had killed people who wore glasses. It was the right to difference that was at stake. The Chinese suffered disproportionately because they found it harder than others to adjust to peasant life. The Chams, having lost their own country, were more reluctant than other groups to abandon the cultural and religious specificity that constituted the only identity they had left. The result was a vicious circle: the more the Chams were perceived as anti-revolutionary and anti-national, the more they were repressed. But there is no convincing evidence that Chams died in vastly greater numbers during the Khmer Rouge period than did other racial groups. The criterion was not ethnicity; it was whether people behaved like Khmers or, as they were now called, Kampucheans, a term that had been adopted for the nation as well as the language precisely in order to avoid the impression of racial exclusiveness. That may have been disingenuous, but it was in line with the traditional thinking which had always defined the ‘Cambodian race’ as those who lived like Khmers. Until recent times, the Khmer language employed the same word for race and religion: to be Khmer was to be Buddhist. Cambodia has never seen itself as a multicultural state. ‘This is not America!’ Khieu Samphân exclaimed when asked why the Vietnamese had been repatriated in 1975.