Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  Underpinning this vision of a new global revolution was the idea that the other Marxist-Leninist parties in the region were poised to follow Cambodia’s lead. This was not, at the time, far-fetched. In the mid-1970s, the West was being battered by the effects of the oil shock and world communism was at its apogee. Thirty-two nations, more than ever before or since, were ruled by Marxist or pro-Marxist regimes. Singapore’s tough-minded Prime Minister, Lee Kwan Yew, remembered: ‘The communists were on the ascendant, and the tide looked like flowing over the rest of South-East Asia’.

  Over the next two years, Pol and Ieng Sary courted communist leaders from Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, and officials of the East Timor Liberation Front. Several parties, including the Indonesians, sent groups for military training in Democratic Kampuchea. The Thais, in whom Pol placed particular hope, were permitted to build bases along the two countries’ common border. When, in October 1976, the Thai army seized power in a bloody, right-wing coup, sending hundreds of Thai students fleeing to join the communist insurgency, the Cambodians were not alone in thinking that another domino was about to fall. A leading American specialist wrote that the Thai revolutionaries had ‘growing capability . . . To a great extent the future of Thailand now rests in their hands.’ With hindsight, such a judgement seems absurd. But to many Thai intellectuals, as well as Western scholars, that was how it looked at the time.

  The idea that Democratic Kampuchea was a model for revolutionaries elsewhere had as its corollary the view that the Cambodian revolution was genetically original. Like the chiliastic movements of medieval Europe, each of which was seen as ‘an event of unique importance, different in kind from all other struggles known to history, a cataclysm from which the world [would] emerge totally transformed and redeemed’, Cambodia was undertaking ‘a revolution without precedent’. In Pol’s words:

  We do not have any preconceived model or pattern of any kind for [our] new society . . .

  The situation is completely different from other countries. We are not confused, as they are . . . Ours is a new experience and people are observing it. We do not follow any book.

  Ieng Sary went further, telling an interviewer in 1977: ‘We want to achieve something that has never occurred before in history.’ To do so, he said, the Khmers Rouges eschewed theories but ‘relied on [revolutionary] consciousness and carried out the struggle in a practical way’.

  That raised the question of whether Cambodian ‘communism’, in the fully developed form it assumed after mid-1976, could be considered Marxist-Leninist at all. ‘Certain [foreign] comrades,’ Pol acknowledged, ‘take the view that our Party . . . cannot operate well because it does not understand Marxism-Leninism and the comrades of our Central Committee have never learnt Marxist principles.’ His answer was that the CPK did ‘nurture a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint’, but in its own fashion. To some extent this was true. Party members studied texts on dialectical materialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat and other Marxist concepts. But the Cambodian Party had never been an integral part of the world communist movement — until 1975, its only foreign contacts were with China, Vietnam and Laos — and it took from Marxism only those things which were consonant with its own world-view. Socialism, to Pol, was a means to an end, a way of making Cambodia strong, ‘of defending the country and preserving the Kampuchean race forever’. His ideological soul mates were not Stalin or Mao, but the sixteenth-century Englishman Thomas More, the Hébertistes of the French Revolution and the Utopian socialists of nineteenth-century Russia, whom Lenin had castigated as ‘the carriers of a reactionary petty bourgeois ideology [promoting] stagnation and Asiatic backwardness’. The difference was that Pol had power and could put his ideas into effect.

  In the summer of 1976, the Khmers Rouges were at last in a position to strike out on their own.

  There was a change of style. Democratic Kampuchea had a new name, a new leader, a new government, a new self-image. The desire to win acceptance from the rest of the world yielded to a sentiment that others would have to accept the regime on its own terms.

  The previous spring Pol had insisted that the parliamentary elections be ’carefully prepared . . . so that our enemies cannot criticise us’. He had instructed Hu Nim to organise radio broadcasts of campaign meetings with peasants, workers and soldiers, and interviews with candidates, to prevent the foreign press claiming the procedures were undemocratic. It was a charade. As Pol himself acknowledged, ‘This isn’t a capitalist election; we apply proletarian class dictatorship.’ The only area in the country to have multiple candidates was Phnom Penh, where Sihanouk and Khieu Samphân cast well-publicised votes. Everywhere else there was only one name on the list, and in many, though not all, areas, ‘new people’, having no political rights, were not allowed to take part. When the new parliament convened some weeks later, the fiction continued. Radio Phnom Penh announced that the deputies had met for three days to discuss the composition of the government before solemnly voting it into office. In fact, they met for three hours; there was no discussion and no vote. But the public façade was there to show the outside world the trappings of a proper state. The same was true of most of the public meetings which the Khmers Rouges claimed to have held over the previous two years. The Second FUNK Congress in February 1975; the Special Congress in April, which supposedly created a commission of 1,200 members to elaborate the new constitution; the Third Congress in December which approved that constitution — all existed only on paper. They never met, at least not in the form that was claimed. They were simply press releases, dreamed up to give a semblance of normalcy to a minimalist regime.

  From mid-1976 onwards, that changed. For all practical purposes the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, to the extent that they had ever existed, fell into disuse. Parliament, which was supposed to hold two sessions a year, never met again. Cabinet meetings ceased. Ministerial portfolios were left vacant. Two years later, only half of the sixteen government posts were still filled. The pretence was over. Power resided where it had always been: in the hands of the CPK Standing Committee and its Secretary, Pol Pot.

  There was also a change of substance.

  The first stage of the socialist revolution, which had begun in April 1975, had seen the establishment of village-level co-operatives throughout the country In October the Standing Committee agreed to take the process a step further. Several villages were now to be linked in a single cooperative of 500 or 1,000 families, with the eventual goal of forming commune-sized units with twice that many people. At the same time, communal kitchens were organised. In practice, this ‘unity of feeding’, as the Khmers Rouges called it, meant that each family had to surrender its cooking pots and dishes, keeping only a kettle to boil water and a spoon for each family member. In parts of the Northern Zone and the North-West, the new system took effect from December 1975. Elsewhere, notably in parts of the Eastern Zone, family meals continued until mid-1977. Sometimes neighbouring districts applied the new rules months apart. Villagers forced to eat communally on one side of a highway enviously watched their neighbours on the other side of the road cooking supper outside their huts. Like much in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, it all seemed to depend on the whim of the local cadres.

  Communal eating quickly became one of the most detested aspects of life under the Khmers Rouges.

  In theory it made things easier for all concerned. ‘They have no need to cook,’ Ieng Sary’s wife, Thirith, enthused. ‘They just do the work and then they come back and eat.’ And some did see it that way. Laurence Picq, at B-1, felt that however disagreeable it might be at a personal level, communal cooking had great practical advantages. Some Sino-Khmer families, at a loss to fend for themselves in the countryside, found it less trouble. But everyone else hated it. The food supply sharply diminished, as the cooks pilfered provisions for their own use or for the village chiefs. The cohesion of the family, already under pressure, was weakened further. Women, in particular, felt it undermined their traditional role.
The ‘base people’ lost their privileges: no longer could they get by with the produce of their fruit trees and the vegetable plots beside their houses because now, like everything else, these were communally owned. Their carts and oxen were seized. So were private grain stocks, fish-nets, bicycles and anything else which might set the individual apart from the mass. In many villages, the larger houses — which also often belonged to ‘base people’ — were dismantled to provide wood for the new communal dining halls, and uniform, smaller huts, barely big enough to sleep in, built in their place.

  Communal eating, while intended to be the most egalitarian of policies, in practice deepened the divide between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ of the new society. Pol might inveigh against ‘authoritarianism, mandarinism, show-off-ism, high-rank-ism’ and ‘lording it over the people’, but as the radicalisation drive accelerated, all these phenomena increased.

  In the countryside, those with power — the chhlorp, the soldiers, commune and district officials — ate separately and well. Some had four meals a day and personal cooks to prepare their favourite dishes. Railway workers and certain other privileged groups were given special rations of meat and rice. At the Foreign Ministry, senior officials also benefited from a separate regime. Still more pampered were the ‘elders’, the regional leaders who came to B-1, accompanied by servants and bodyguards, before being sent abroad as Democratic Kampuchea’s first ambassadors. Laurence Picq, with all the naive innocence of her May 1968 Parisian radicalism, was scandalised by their behaviour:

  They all had quantities of suitcases, boxes and trunks . . . [in contrast to] the rest of us, who had had to give up everything we possessed . . . In the kitchen, despite the penury of supplies, the cooks prepared special dishes for them. [Sometimes] they deigned to put in an appearance. But in general . . . they preferred to eat among themselves. They had real feasts, with chicken, sucking pig, wine and sticky rice . . . and each morning, one of their bodyguards would go to collect freshly baked bread, that was made for the foreign diplomats, to bring for their breakfast . . . During the day, [the wives] went rummaging in abandoned houses and came back with fine clothes, silk underwear and bric-à-brac which they said were for the co-operatives. One day I overheard them discussing what they could get for some jewels they had found. It was a strange world . . . These people lived a life apart, in a style beyond anything one could imagine in a country so puritan and poor. Dinners, excursions, parties, liquor — and first choice in whatever plunder was going. Like the conquerors they were, they never went without.

  At the highest level, everything was available. Thiounn Mumm recalled how at Vorn Vet’s headquarters ‘there was always a basket of fresh fruit on the table. I never ate better in my life.’ When an aide’s wife was pregnant, Son Sen’s wife Yun Yat sent round a gift of pears. Sihanouk remembered the Central Committee commissariat providing ‘Japanese biscuits, Australian butter, French-style baguettes, ducks’ eggs . . . and succulent Khmer crabs’, together with locally-grown tropical fruits, Oranges from Pursat, durians from Kampot, rambutans and pineapples’. When Ieng Sary returned from a trip to the UN, he brought with him a hamper of foie gras and Swiss cheeses. All the leaders grew fat. Contemporary photographs show Pol and Nuon Chea looking bloated. Khieu Samphàn put on weight and acquired an unhealthy, reddish complexion.

  In the countryside, meanwhile, the ideological thumbscrews were being tightened still further.

  Foraging, which had helped many villagers avoid starvation in the first year of Khmer Rouge rule, was now denounced as a manifestation of individualism and banned on the grounds that it would result in some having more than others. For the same reason, local officials refused to allow villagers to fish, or to kill the monkeys and wild boar that raided their plantations.

  Picking a coconut without authorisation was an anti-revolutionary act. Ieng Sary had a Foreign Ministry official dismissed for doing so. Fruit that fell to the ground should be allowed to rot, rather than be gathered for individual use. ‘That belongs to Angkar,’ the soldiers would say as they forbade anyone to touch it.

  From the summer of 1976 onward, children above the age of seven were separated from their parents to live communally with Khmer Rouge instructors who taught them revolutionary songs and assigned them light tasks in the fields — much as earlier generations of Cambodian children had gone to live as Buddhist novices at a wat. Parents were not allowed to discipline their children. That right, too, belonged to Angkar on behalf of the collectivity, not to the individual.

  Yet among the revolutionary elite, ‘familyism’ and ‘siblingism’, as Pol called them, grew apace. Ieng Sary was one of the worst offenders, systematically placing his children and nephews in high posts for which they were unsuited. Son Sen, on the other hand, behaved with a rigour matching the severity of his image. As highly placed a man as Nuon Chea, the number two in the regime, authorised his mother, a devout old lady who lived near Battambang, to keep a Buddhist monk, almost certainly the only practising bonze in the country, to recite the sutras for her. Even more striking was an experience that befell Sihanouk one day when Khieu Samphân was accompanying him on a provincial tour.

  Suddenly our driver pulled over to the side of the road and stopped to let past another vehicle . . . We were in the company of the Khmer Rouge Head of State, which should have meant we had an absolute right of way Who, then, was this other person, in a car flying not just a pennant but a large red flag of Democratic Kampuchea, to whom even a president had to give way? . . . To my astonishment, I saw a woman in her 60s, with greying hair, and a small boy, perhaps a grandchild, beside her . . .

  The Prince never did work out the passenger’s identity. She was Pol’s (and Ieng Sary’s) mother-in-law.

  At less exalted levels, cadres’ positions in the hierarchy were reflected in the quality of the kramas they wore, silk or checkered cotton; or the number of pens in their breast pocket. Commune secretaries had bicycles; district secretaries, motor-bikes; regional secretaries and above, cars.

  Other human longings also tarnished the immaculate, selfless existence to which Khmer Rouge ideology aspired. At a time when husbands and wives were supposed to show no public sign of affection and even to stand several yards apart, local cadres seduced attractive young women and then executed them for moral turpitude. One girl turned the tables on her accuser, claiming that she had also had intercourse with two other village tyrants. She was killed, but so were they. Her fellow deportees regarded her as a heroine. As in China and North Korea, the revolutionary art troupes which put on propaganda performances were a source of nubile young women.

  They enjoyed special rations, and in a country deprived of any other form of entertainment, were the equivalent of film stars. Tiv Ol, the handsome young Deputy Information Minister, fell from grace after his superior, Hu Nim, learnt that he had been ‘caressing the breasts and vulvas’ of the Ministry’s performing artists. Nuon Chea, who was consulted, recommended taking no action. But Nim insisted, saying the incidents were too widely known simply to be brushed aside. Thiounn Thioeunn remembered a woman hospital director being executed for procuring nurses to work at a clandestine brothel for Khmer Rouge cadres.

  Such abuses occur in all countries with dictatorial systems where privilege depends on power and no checks and balances exist to ensure a minimum of social justice. It is a characteristic not of communism but of tyranny, whatever its political colour.

  But in Democratic Kampuchea the contrast was so flagrant that it became a caricature. Not only did a tiny, cosseted elite preside over the destinies of a nation of slaves. But the regime which that elite imposed made ideological purity, abstinence and renunciation, material detachment and the repression of the ego, the foundations of national policy, outweighing all other considerations.

  The ban on foraging was not an oversimplification by uneducated local officials. It was approved by the national leadership in Phnom Penh. When the choice was between allowing starving people to feed themselves, and
observing absolute egalitarianism (in the process letting food go to waste), the regime chose egalitarianism. It may be argued that this was an aberration, that the leadership never envisaged the ban being enforced in districts where there was hunger. And it is true that Pol spoke often of the need to raise living standards. In August 1976, he exhorted regional leaders to recruit good cooks, ‘so that no one can criticise the notion of collectivism, saying that the food . . . made collectively tastes bad . . . If they make tasty food, people’s stomachs will be full.’ Revealingly, however, his concern was not that, if collectivism failed, people would be discontented, but that individualism would re-emerge. He certainly knew that, in some areas, there was acute privation — detailed reports from the Zone leaders arrived on his desk each week — but either he did not wish to think about it or he regarded it as unimportant.

  This was not an exception: it was the rule. Whenever ideological principle and practical benefit came into conflict, principle won out, regardless of the material cost.

  The emptying of the towns had resulted in the abandonment of a capital stock of housing, commercial buildings and factories that represented a substantial part of the national wealth of one of the world’s poorest countries. Pol had initially given instructions that ‘the beauty of the towns must not be spoiled’, but by late 1976, any thought that they would ever be repopulated had been definitively abandoned. Visitors to a saltworks at Kampot found ‘5,000 young girls and women . . . living in makeshift barracks, [while] in the town only half a mile away hundreds of well-preserved houses stood empty’. The past had been repudiated and was never to rise again. The leadership spoke of rebuilding every rural village in the country within ten years, so that the peasants’ individualistic, wooden homes, each slightly different from the other, would be replaced by a uniform, small, model, family dwelling, identical from one end of Cambodia to the other. Similarly the traditional rice-paddies, small plots which followed the topography of the terrain, were to be levelled and amalgamated into square one-hectare fields, grouped in units of a hundred, in perhaps unconscious imitation of the checkerboard pattern utilised at the time of the Angkorian kingdom, five hundred years before. Like many Khmer Rouge innovations, the giant fields had mixed results: they were easier to irrigate and plough, but harder to make level, which is essential for rice cultivation.