Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  But the purge did not end there.

  In March 1978, the Western Zone Secretary, Chou Chet, was arrested. He had been the last survivor of the old Pracheachon group. Then the remaining Hanoi returnees were killed, along with several dozen of their children, who had been held since 1975 at a special camp near Rovieng, in Preah Vihear.

  From there, the wave of suspicion rolled over the North-West. In a carbon copy of what had happened a year earlier, local cadres were accused of starving the people in order to turn them against the regime. But this time the North-Westerners were ready. When Mok’s South-Western cadres moved in, the old village leaders resisted. In many areas, the newcomers were unable to impose their authority. The former system, which had relied on a monopoly of terror, was compromised. Each commune, each district, was now divided against itself.

  But the worst of the self-inflicted blows the regime suffered that spring occurred in the East, where Pol’s attempts to galvanise So Phim’s forces had failed to produce the results he had hoped for. By the end of March, he had reached the conclusion that the root of the problem was the Eastern Zone Secretary himself. Phim was in poor health, and spent April and the beginning of May in hospital in Phnom Penh. During his absence, the Central Zone military commander, Ke Pauk, who was his deputy in the Highway 7 Front Command, was ordered to undertake a sweeping purge of the Eastern Zone military and civil administration. By April 20, more than four hundred Eastern Zone cadres were being held in Tuol Sleng.

  Pol and Nuon Chea then called Pauk to the capital where they showed him ‘documents’ purporting to prove Phim’s treason. Among them were the confessions Chou Chet had made under torture, accusing him of conspiring with Vietnam and plotting a coup d’é tat. On Pol’s instructions, Pauk returned to the Highway 7 Front HQ in Kompong Cham and began summoning the commanders and political commissars of the Eastern Zone divisions and regional brigades to ‘meetings’, where they were disarmed and detained. The more important among them were sent to Tuol Sleng, the others killed on the spot. Around the middle of May, when So Phim returned, Pauk summoned him to a ‘meeting’ also. Phim angrily refused. ‘I am the President of the Highway 7 Front,’ he replied. ‘What right does the Deputy President have to call me to a meeting? It should be the reverse. What does this mean?’ Instead, he sent a bodyguard to find out what was going on. The man did not return. Two other emissaries, including Phim’s nephew Chhoeun, also disappeared without trace. Finally, on May 23, Phim despatched Pol’s old protégé Sok Knaol, now Director of the Eastern Zone Office, to confront Pauk directly. He, too, failed to return.

  At that point, Phim concluded that Pauk was out to destroy him.

  But he still refused to believe that Pol was responsible. Even two days later, when Pauk’s forces crossed the Mekong and began closing in on his headquarters, Phim thought that his deputy was plotting to usurp the authority of the Standing Committee.

  On the 28th, he set out for Phnom Penh, accompanied only by his family and bodyguards, to seek a meeting with Pol to try to set matters straight. When they reached the east bank of the Mekong, opposite the capital, they were attacked by Son Sen’s forces and So Phim was wounded in the stomach. He managed to escape, taking refuge in the forest of Srei Santhor, north of Phnom Penh. But six days later, his hideout was surrounded. That night Phim shot himself. His wife and children were captured as they were preparing his body for burial in accordance with the Buddhist rites. They, too, were killed.

  For the next two months, surviving Eastern Zone units staged hit-and-run attacks against the combined forces of Pauk, Son Sen and Mok. So many thousands of Eastern Zone soldiers were sent to Tuol Sleng that it was unable to cope with the influx. The S-21 chief, Deuch, remembered Nuon Chea issuing instructions that ‘there was no need to interrogate them, just smash them’. Deuch was displeased. ‘No such order had ever been received before,’ he noted. ‘Nor were we used to working in that way.’ But the killings at Tuol Sleng were as nothing compared to the massacres that took place among the civilian population. A short time before, Radio Phnom Penh had spoken of the need to ‘purify . . . the masses of the people’, a significant addition to Pol’s original formula which had called merely for a purge of the Party and the army. If an Eastern Zone village was suspected of aiding the rebels, the inhabitants were slaughtered. For years afterwards, survivors returning to their former homes would find areas of jungle carpeted with bones.

  Hundreds of thousands more were deported to the Central Zone, the North and the North-West, where many were also killed. The death-toll will never be known: certainly more than 100,000, perhaps as many as a quarter of a million. Whatever the figure, it was the bloodiest single episode under Pol Pot’s rule.

  The leading rebels — the Zone deputy chiefs of staff, Heng Samrin and Pol Saroeun, and half a dozen district secretaries — eventually made their way to Vietnam to join the nucleus of exiles being groomed for leadership by Le Duc Tho. By the autumn, in most parts of the Zone, a semblance of order had been restored. But the population remained profoundly hostile.

  And still the killings continued.

  A week after So Phim’s suicide, the North-Western Zone Secretary, Ruos Nhim, was detained and sent to Tuol Sleng. He and Phim had been close. Their children had married each other. Chou Chet had claimed in his confession that they had been working together to overthrow the regime. At a time when the regime was bent on cleansing itself no matter what the cost, that was enough. Nhim, So Phim and Chou Chet were ‘thatched houses’, not ‘brick houses’, Issaraks not intellectuals. That made them potential traitors. That there were no serious grounds for believing that any of them had plotted against Pol’s regime,* any more than had all the others who ended up in Tuol Sleng, was beside the point. In the Stalinist scheme of things, considerations of innocence are irrelevant.

  In totalitarian despotisms, a purge can strengthen a regime or fatally weaken it. Pol Pot’s purges in 1978 bled Cambodia white. By August, only Mok’s forces in the South-West and Pauk’s in the Central Zone were still considered reliable. The Standing Committee was told that month that the armed forces were spending 60 per cent of their energy defending the regime against internal enemies.

  In public, the CPK leaders whipped up a frenzy of patriotic fervour. Pol himself declared, in a commentary written for Radio Phnom Penh:

  In terms of numbers, [each] one of us must kill 30 Vietnamese . . . That is to say, we lose one against 30. We will therefore need two million troops for 60 million Vietnamese. In fact, [that] will be more than enough . . . because Vietnam has only 50 million inhabitants . . . We need only two million troops to crush the 50 million Vietnamese and we will still have six million Cambodians left. We must formulate our combat line in this manner in order to win victory . . . We absolutely must implement the slogan of one against 30.

  The regime was getting back to basics. It was the same type of crude appeal to anti-Vietnamese racism that Lon Nol had used. Such language resonated in the Khmer psyche. The Black Paper, an indictment of Vietnamese treachery written by Pol that autumn, had a similar effect. Its vituperations against Hanoi were, in the words of one Western historian, ‘beyond falsehood’. Yet to Khmers, they touched a chord of national pride which was among the regime’s few remaining assets.

  If Pol used such emotional props to the hilt, it was because he had little else to fall back on.

  In private, at a Standing Committee meeting in August, he was uncharacteristically gloomy. ‘We can hold on for a certain time,’ he warned, ‘but if the present situation continues, it will become impossible. We can now afford to sustain only partial losses. If things go on as they are, we will face the risk of collapse.’

  In these bleak circumstances, Pol did what Stalin had done when the Germans attacked Russia in 1941. He sought strength in the ancient, immutable values of his people’s culture, the bedrock of their national identity, formed long before the advent of communism and destined to endure long after it had passed.

  Stalin
turned to the Russian Orthodox Church to instil in the Soviet people a sacred mission to defend their homeland. Pol turned to the monarchy. On September 28, Khieu Samphân gave a banquet for Prince Sihanouk, who had not been seen in public for more than two years. The photographs taken on that occasion, transmitted around the world, showed the Prince and his wife, in good health, accompanied by Penn Nouth and other former members of his suite, apparently on the best of terms with Pol Pot’s government.

  To reach that point had taken two and a half years. Having cut his ties with the regime in the spring of 1976, Sihanouk had sat on his dignity and sulked. For the next eighteen months, he had received occasional visits from Khieu Samphân, but little else. Change came with the conflict with Vietnam. In September 1977, on Pol’s instructions, the Prince was presented with a basket of lychees. He responded with a series of letters, praising the CPK Secretary’s ‘wise leadership’ and condemning Vietnam’s aggression. In January, Zhou Enlai’s widow, Deng Yingchao, was permitted to see him being driven past in a limousine but not allowed to meet him. At the end of the summer, he was moved from the palace to a new, more secure residence in the area where Penn Nouth lived, ostensibly as a precaution against a Vietnamese kidnap attempt. Pol was keeping him in reserve, to be produced like a rabbit from a hat at a moment of his own choosing.

  By September 1978 he could wait no longer.

  For months the Chinese had been urging him to speed up preparations to counter what they now saw as an inevitable Vietnamese invasion.

  This was a major theme of Son Sen’s visit to Beijing in July, and was brought up again when Nuon Chea went there in August. But the most important discussions took place in the last ten days of September, when Pol himself flew secretly to China to meet Deng Xiaoping.* According to the Khmer Rouge Ambassador, Pich Chheang, who was present at some, though not all, of the talks, Deng pleased and surprised his guest by the ferocity with which he condemned Vietnam. Le Duan, he said, was an ingrate — a crocodile, in Cambodian terms — who had to be punished for his treachery. But he also suggested that, in China’s view, the Khmers Rouges were partly responsible for bringing these troubles on themselves by their excessive radicalism; the lack of discipline and ‘putschist, anarchic behaviour’ of their troops on the Vietnamese border; and their failure to unite the country behind them. When Deng made these remarks, Pich Chheang recalled, Pol smiled and said nothing. They did agree, however, on the importance of Sihanouk’s role, the need for united front tactics, and the necessity of preparing for a protracted guerrilla war when the Vietnamese attack finally came. Deng also made clear, as he had done earlier to Son Sen and Nuon Chea, that while China would give the Cambodians all the military help it could, the conduct of the war would ultimately be Cambodia’s responsibility. Whether Pol realised that this meant China would not send troops, and that the Cambodians would have to fight on their own, is uncertain. It appears that he did not.

  Sihanouk’s re-emergence was the most visible consequence of Pol’s visit to Beijing but not the only one. Since January 1978, Khmer Rouge frontier units had been under orders to adopt an aggressive, forward posture. ‘We must attack first, because otherwise they will attack us,’ Pol said. ‘Every Vietnamese attack must be met by a counter-attack.’ After his return from Beijing in October, the front-line commanders were told to switch to a defensive strategy, to use mines against Vietnamese armour and infantry formations and to avoid decisive confrontations which carried a risk of heavy losses. Pol explained the tactics they should use by means of traditional imagery which the peasant soldiers could easily grasp. He told them to fight like ‘a lake of floating water-hyacinths’, which meant entangling the enemy in a mesh of small guerrilla groups in the same way as aquatic plants entangle and pull down a swimmer; or as ‘multiplying snails’, whereby two — or three-man groups would creep up on an enemy section, each taking a single Vietnamese soldier as its target, and then melt back into the jungle. ‘If we carry out guerrilla warfare,’ he maintained, ‘we can never be defeated’:

  We must use the tactics of mobility and rapid attack, firing one or two shots and then disappearing before the enemy can locate us . . . We should attack from the flanks, avoiding engagement when their forces are strong. Occupying terrain is of no importance. What matters is preserving our strength . . . so that we can hit them at their weak spots.

  As if to offset the regime’s new-found caution, its propaganda became increasingly shrill. ‘The Vietnamese stink to high heaven,’ Tung Padevat told its readers. ‘They are so degraded that they are despised as nothing, for [they] think only of carrying around a begging bowl . . . beseeching charity from all and sundry.’ It was a poor argument against an enemy which was even then methodically preparing the Khmers Rouges’ downfall.

  While Pol was talking to Deng Xiaoping in Beijing, Le Duc Tho was meeting Heng Samrin, Pen Sovann and the other Khmer exiles at Thu Duc, a former US police camp in the suburbs of Ho Chi Minh City. He told them that Vietnam planned a full-scale invasion of Cambodia at the beginning of the coming dry season and that the newly formed Khmer resistance would fight alongside their Vietnamese ‘brothers-in-arms’. In the meantime the exiles were to set up an umbrella organisation, the Khmer National United Front for National Salvation (KNUFNS), capable of assuming power when the Pol Pot regime fell. History was repeating itself. For the third time in as many decades, the leaders in Hanoi were building a clandestine Cambodian resistance movement to further Vietnamese interests.

  In that same month of September 1978, the Vietnamese Premier, Pham Van Dong, set out on a hastily arranged regional tour to try to build diplomatic cover for the coming attack on Cambodia. He proposed a Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation with the non-communist South-East Asian states and solemnly assured each of his interlocutors that Hanoi had no expansionist ambitions. In Kuala Lumpur, he even laid a wreath to Malay soldiers who had died fighting the communist insurgency. But the treaty proposal was politely rejected. It was too much, too suddenly, too late.

  Vietnam’s efforts to woo the United States fared no better. In October President Carter decided that the China relationship took priority and normalisation with Vietnam would be put on hold.

  Three weeks later Le Duan, accompanied by Pham Van Dong and a phalanx of VWP Politburo members, flew to Moscow, where they were given an unusually cordial reception by the Soviet leadership. Duan and Leonid Brezhnev signed a Friendship Treaty which provided, among other things, for the two countries to take ‘appropriate and effective steps to safeguard [their] security’ if either were attacked. The immediate purpose was to deter China from escalating its conflict with Vietnam. The ‘international reactionaries’, gloated the Vietnamese Party journal, Tap Chi Cong San, would now face ‘heavy retaliation’ should they recklessly attack a Soviet ally.

  Cambodia was hardly discussed. The Vietnamese leaders told their Soviet counterparts merely that they expected the Khmer resistance to ‘use the forthcoming dry season to make powerful attacks on the Phnom Penh regime’ and that they did not believe China would be in a position to send troops to its aid.

  Two days after the treaty was signed in Moscow, Deng Xiaoping set out in Pham Van Dong’s footsteps to visit Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. He found his hosts already half-convinced that a Vietnam which was now part and parcel of the Soviet bloc was a potential danger to the whole region. The battle to contain Hanoi, Deng told them, would be fought out in Cambodia. ‘There is a possibility that Phnom Penh will fall,’ he added. ‘That would not be the end of the war, but the beginning.’ The Vietnamese would invade Cambodia in force, but they would be unable to consolidate their gains and a long resistance struggle would follow. When that happened, he went on, China ‘will not stand idly by. We will take appropriate measures.’

  To Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore and Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir, Deng’s analysis was persuasive. The Thai Premier, General Kriangsak, was warier. Thailand would be in the front line if conflict broke out in Cambodia. It would be a
ble to support the Khmers Rouges only if it were sure of having China’s backing. Deng assured him that that was the case and, by way of encouragement, indicated that China would reduce its support for the Thai Communist Party and persuade the Khmers Rouges to do the same.

  While Deng was in South-East Asia, another top Chinese leader, the regime’s security chief, Wang Dongxing, flew to Phnom Penh. Apart from demonstrating Chinese support, his mission was to appraise Pol’s plans for resistance and to give whatever advice seemed necessary.

  It was not the easiest of tasks. Hu Yaobang, the future Chinese Party Chairman, who accompanied Wang’s delegation, found the atmosphere unreal. Throughout the deserted city, beds were being taken from empty houses to equip extra hospital wards for the wounded. Factory workers were receiving military training. Officials were digging trenches. But neither Pol nor anyone else seemed to have any clear idea of what they would do when the Vietnamese came. In his speech at the welcoming banquet, the Cambodian leader had planned to say: ‘The government of Democratic Kampuchea and the CPK know that they can count on the help of the fraternal Chinese army if the need arises.’ But the Chinese objected and the offending paragraph was deleted. Instead, Wang warned sombrely that the Vietnamese aggressors ‘may run wild for a time’, meaning that the Cambodians would probably be unable to stem their advance. At that point there was a power cut in the hall and all the lights went out.

  In private Wang urged the CPK leaders to begin readying the population psychologically for the coming struggle, to distribute arms to the peasants and to prepare arms caches and stocks of rice. None of his recommendations was implemented.

  One reason for this was that a new round of purges had begun, targeting the very men who would normally have been responsible for planning the resistance to Vietnam.

  On November I and 2 1978, the CPK had held its Fifth Congress. The meeting was unusually brief — normally CPK congresses, including the preliminary meetings, lasted several weeks — and its main, if not its only function seems to have been to elect a new leadership. Mok, who now headed both the North-Western and the South-Western Zones, became the third-ranking leader, behind Pol and Nuon Chea, with the rank of Second Deputy Secretary, responsible for Agriculture and Rural Affairs. He was also appointed Vice-Chairman of the Party’s Military Commission. Ieng Sary ranked fourth, and Vorn Vet, who was in charge of military supplies to the Eastern Front, fifth. Son Sen, who now finally moved up from being a candidate to a full member of the Standing Committee, was in sixth place; and Kong Sophal, the new Chief of the Army Logistics Department, seventh.