Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  Next morning troops burst into the room where Mok, Sophal and Vorn Vet were meeting. ‘Mok was shitting in his pants,’ Ieng Sary recounted gleefully ‘He thought it was all over.’ In the event, Vorn Vet and Kong Sophal were arrested and taken to Tuol Sleng. The reasons remain a mystery. It requires a peculiarly devious mentality to promote a man to the summit of power one day in order to arrest him the next, above all at a moment when the country was about to embark on a life-and-death struggle for survival. Kong Sophal may have fallen under suspicion because of his association with Ruos Nhim when he was military commander in the North-West. Vorn Vet’s arrest is inexplicable. Like Pang and Siet Chhê, he had been one of Pol’s favourites.

  The ‘sickness in the Party’ of which Pol had spoken two years earlier had become a sickly suspiciousness, a paranoid mistrust, infecting leadership at every level. The more desperate Cambodia’s plight, the more the poison spread.

  The regime’s days were numbered, not only because of the war with Vietnam, but because the body politic had rotted from within. The microbes, ‘the ugly microbes’, as Pol had called them, were not, as he believed, the result of some political gangrene, blighting a healthy organism. They were the very essence of the system he had built.

  For the next few weeks, the regime existed in a state of limbo.

  At the end of November, the Chinese Party Central Committee confirmed Deng’s decision not to send troops to Cambodia, but decided instead to entrust the Chinese People’s Liberation Army with a punitive operation across Vietnam’s northern border. The Russians, Deng argued, would not risk a world war to defend their Vietnamese ally, regardless of the security clause in their new Friendship Treaty. But there was a possibility they might launch a tit-for-tat attack into Xinjiang. Three hundred thousand people were accordingly evacuated from Kashgar and other sensitive areas on the Soviet border with Chinese Central Asia.

  On December 2, several hundred Khmer exiles gathered near Snuol, in a clearing in a rubber plantation about two miles inside the Cambodian border, to inaugurate the new Vietnamese-backed National Salvation Front, headed by Heng Samrin. Le Duc Tho was on hand for the occasion, as he had been in April 1950 when, in very similar circumstances, Vietnam had created the Khmer National Liberation Committee, led by Son Ngoc Minh.

  A week later, two American journalists, Elizabeth Becker of the Washington Post and Richard Dudman of the St Louis Post Despatch, and a British academic, Malcolm Caldwell, who was sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge cause, became the first non-communist Westerners, other than diplomats, permitted to visit Democratic Kampuchea. Dudman reported that officials were speaking openly of the possibility of having to abandon Phnom Penh.

  Yet as each side prepared for war, on the battlefields there was an eerie silence. Radio Phnom Penh continued to broadcast its usual reports on the improvement of life in the co-operatives. At the Foreign Ministry, Laurence Picq recalled, ‘We weren’t worried . . . We thought everything would work out painlessly; there’d be no gunfire, no fighting, no bloodshed.’ Even in the army, only units directly involved in the fighting knew what was going on. The head of the air-force radar repair unit, Kân, on a visit to the border area in late November, was shocked to find defeated Cambodian troops in retreat. ‘Soon afterwards I heard that the Vietnamese had broken through, that our defences weren’t holding,’ he said. ‘But all that was unofficial. Officially we were told nothing.’

  On December 22, Pol received Becker and Dudman and gave them his version of the confrontation that was now looming. Vietnam, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were on one side, he declared. On the other were ‘NATO [and] . . . Kampuchea, South-East Asia and the world’. He also saw Caldwell for what must have been, in the circumstances, an altogether surreal discussion of Khmer Rouge economic policy.

  That night, after they had packed their bags for the following morning’s flight to Beijing, an event occurred which provided the perfect metaphor for the disintegration of the regime.

  At around I a.m. Becker was awakened by what she thought was the noise of dustbins being knocked over, followed by a gunshot and the sound of moaning. When she opened her door, she found herself face to face with a young man wearing ‘clothes [that] seemed different [and] . . . a hat like a baseball cap’. He was armed to the teeth. She fled. Dudman, who was also now awake, saw from his window ‘several shadowy figures running back and forth . . . in the dim glow of the streetlights’. At least one was carrying a pistol. The man in the baseball cap then reappeared, fired at Dudman as he stood outside his room, but missed. Afterwards several more shots were heard. Nothing further happened until an hour and a half later, when Pol’s former aide, Phi Phuon, now Head of Security at the Foreign Ministry, arrived with a group of guards and broke down the door. They found Becker and Dudwell unharmed. Caldwell was sprawled on the floor, dead, with bullet wounds in the chest and head. Beside him was the body of a young Khmer — possibly, but not certainly, the man in the baseball cap.

  At 4 a.m., Ieng Sary was informed. He awoke Pol, who said little, as was his wont, other than to express regret and to give instructions that Thiounn Thioeunn conduct an autopsy and preserve the body to be flown to Beijing.

  Later the most outlandish theories were concocted to try to explain what had happened. British intelligence believed that Pol had ordered Caldwell’s death. An internal Khmer Rouge inquiry found that one of the guards had been having an unhappy love affair. It suggested he had gone on a shooting spree and then committed suicide. Another guard, under torture at Tuol Sleng, implicated the Defence Minister, Son Sen. Pol himself later told aides he believed that Dudman was the killer. The American was a CIA agent, he said, and had murdered Caldwell to discredit the regime. None of these ‘explanations’ made much sense. But Phi Phuon noticed one troubling detail. Although the dead Cambodian was found with a pistol by his hand, making it look as though he had shot himself in the head, the position of the body was not right. Phi Phuon thought that he had been murdered and someone had tried to mask his death as a suicide.

  The likeliest explanation, which, perversely, the regime refused to credit because of its obsession with traitors, was that the attack was the work of a Vietnamese commando unit. No one else had a comparable interest in showing up Khmer Rouge incompetence and no one else was as well-placed to do so.

  Yet the overriding lesson of Malcolm Caldwell’s death, however it occurred, was that by December 1978 security in Phnom Penh had broken down. The troops which had formerly guarded the capital had all been sent to the East, to the Highway I and Highway 7 Fronts, where they were dug into defensive positions, in an extended arc stretching from the Parrot’s Beak to the Fishhook, awaiting the Vietnamese attack. To defend the city after their departure, a former Special Zone officer named Ponlâk had been appointed military governor, with Pol’s nephew, So Hong, as his deputy. But the only troops at his disposal to man checkpoints and carry out patrols were youths barely into their teens. ‘They used to fall asleep on guard duty,’ Long Nârin remembered. ‘They’d put down their rifles and you could take them away — and then watch them panic when they woke up and found they weren’t there.’

  A creeping neurosis set in. Even inside the Foreign Ministry compound, one Khmer Rouge official was so frightened of a Vietnamese attack that when he left his office each evening to go home, he made his wife, who was expecting a child, walk in front of him. ‘They won’t attack a pregnant woman,’ he told her.

  On Christmas Day of 1978, the invasion began. Vietnamese advance columns set out from Ban Me Thuot, in the Central Highlands, and from southern Laos, making for Kratie and Stung Treng. It was a replay of the Viet Cong offensive after Lon Nol’s coup in the spring of 1970, only this time it was a lot quicker. Kratie fell on December 30 and Stung Treng four days later, putting the whole of the North-East in Vietnamese hands. But that was just a feint. After an intensive air and artillery bombardment, the Vietnamese main force, consisting of more than 60,000 men, commanded by General Le Duc Anh, smashed t
hrough the Khmer Rouge defence lines on January 1, heading up Highway I and Highway 7 to Phnom Penh.

  They did not have things entirely their own way. On Highway 7, in Kompong Cham, Son Sen’s forces blocked the advance for forty-eight hours. Then his headquarters were overrun and Sen himself narrowly escaped capture, taking refuge in the jungle before making his way back to Phnom Penh. Mok’s forces also put up stiff resistance at the ferry crossing of Neak Luong, and along Highway 3, from Kompong Som to Phnom Penh.

  But the Cambodian strategy was fatally flawed. By putting half of Democratic Kampuchea’s best troops, more than 30,000 men, into stationary, forward positions, instead of adopting mobile, guerrilla tactics — as the Chinese had recommended and Pol had originally planned — the Khmer Rouge High Command had offered the Vietnamese a sitting target. In less than a week, Son Sen’s defensive shield was in shreds.

  As the country erupted in flames, Pol immersed himself in routine.

  On December 29, with the Vietnamese already in control of the upper reaches of the Mekong, he spent the evening hosting a banquet for the chairman of the Canadian Marxist-Leninist Communist League, a tiny pro-Chinese splinter group that had rallied to the Khmer Rouge cause. Next day he took time off to meet an obscure left-wing Peruvian newspaper editor.

  At that point, the fall of Kratie was announced. A bodyguard unit was despatched to prepare for an eventual withdrawal to Tasanh, in the Cardamom Mountains, south of Samlaut, where Son Sen had built a complex of underground bunkers as an emergency HQ if Phnom Penh were abandoned. They took with them the regime’s war treasury, several hundred kilograms of gold and silver confiscated after the 1975 victory.

  On the evening of January 1, when it became clear that Kompong Cham was also about to fall, Pol ordered the Foreign Ministry security chief, Phi Phuon, to escort Sihanouk, Penn Nouth and their families to Sisophon. They were to leave at once. At the least sign of danger, Pol said, Phi Phuon should take the Prince and his party across the border to safety in Thailand, whence they would make their way to Beijing. Sihanouk, Phi Phuon remembered, took the news calmly. Less than an hour later, the cavalcade of two Mercedes, one each for Sihanouk and Penn Nouth, a Lincoln Continental for the entourage and two escort jeeps, set out through the darkness along the potholed road to the North-West.

  The last days sped past in a blur.

  Twenty-four hours after Sihanouk’s departure, the entire diplomatic corps followed. So Hong, Pol’s nephew, looking flustered and sweating profusely, told the Chinese Ambassador: ‘The front line is critical . . . We think the Vietnamese intend to push forward and bombard Phnom Penh.’ They were then all driven to Siem Reap in a fleet of government cars.

  On the 4th, the Vietnamese offensive paused. The diplomats returned to their embassies, and Sihanouk and Penn Nouth were brought back from the Thai border. Then the advance resumed. The following evening, Pol met Sihanouk at the former French Governor-General’s Residence, now known as House No. 1, and asked him to go to the UN to plead Cambodia’s cause before the Security Council. The meeting, which was followed by a banquet, lasted four hours. It was the first time the Prince had been exposed at length to Pol’s magnetic personality and despite himself he was impressed. ‘He was waiting for me, smiling, outside the massive door of the residence,’ Sihanouk wrote later. ‘He placed his hands together and greeted me in the traditional manner, with a slight genuflexion, just like in the old society . . . Then immaculately dressed servants served us tea and petits fours with fresh orange juice.’ Sihanouk noted that the Khmer Rouge leader employed the special court vocabulary, speaking ‘easily and with flair . . . He had a certain charisma . . . and an eloquence that was “sweet and persuasive”.’ Pol assured him that the Vietnamese had walked into a trap. The Khmer Rouge army, he said, was deliberately luring them deep inside Cambodian territory. ‘It’s a stratagem to make them think that militarily we are very weak,’ he explained. ‘Once they are all within our borders, we will cut them up into little pieces . . . drowning them in a flood of popular resistance until they are leached out like salt in running water.’ He had spoken in similar vein in a radio broadcast earlier the same day, in which he accused the Vietnamese of ‘trying to exterminate our Cambodian race’, and predicted that they would perish ‘in a volcano of national indignation’.

  Sihanouk took this as just another of the deceits which underlay so many extraordinary Khmer Rouge statements. But it seems on this occasion he was wrong.

  Pol was certainly aware that Cambodia’s forward defences had failed. He was making a virtue out of necessity: mobile warfare was the only option left. But he evidently remained convinced that once Phnom Penh had been abandoned and the Vietnamese army tried to occupy the hinterland, it would bog down and become an easy target for Khmer Rouge guerrillas. The Vietnamese offensive, he declared, ‘will last for only a short period of time’. Other leaders shared this view. Khieu Samphân thought ‘we would just be leaving Phnom Penh temporarily, and then we’d be back’. At the Foreign Ministry, So Hong told colleagues that it would ‘all be over in a few weeks’. That may have been whistling in the dark. But it also reflected a widespread belief that, as In Sopheap put it, ‘the army had the situation in hand’.

  The Chinese knew differently. Their technicians at the rubber plantation in Chhup, in the Eastern Zone, had already reported by radio that ‘there was basically no more army.’ They headed for Kompong Som, where a Chinese merchant ship was waiting to evacuate them.

  None the less, on Saturday January 6, the Chinese Civil Air Administration maintained its scheduled weekly flight to Phnom Penh. It brought out Sihanouk, his entourage and about a hundred Chinese experts and other visitors, including a group of hapless Chinese acrobats who had been touring Cambodia when the invasion began. A plan to send two more planes to fly out Chinese technicians from Battambang was abandoned when it was realised that the runway there was too short.

  Khieu Samphân and Son Sen were at the airport to bid the Prince farewell. So were the Chinese and Yugoslav ambassadors. Not long afterwards, they too would depart.

  Son Sen left the city that evening, making his way through Vietnamese lines to Kompong Cham, where he tried to rally what remained of the Khmer Rouge divisions on the Eastern Front. Pol, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphân, accompanied by several jeep-loads of bodyguards, set out at dawn the following morning — Sunday January 7 — for Pursat, near the Great Lake, midway between Phnom Penh and Battambang. Pol travelled in a Chevrolet, which was higher off the ground and rode the potholes better than the Mercedes of his companions. Ieng Sary made for Battambang aboard a special train carrying several hundred Foreign Ministry personnel together with the Ministry archives, which had been hastily packed the previous day.

  Many of the other ministries, including one of the biggest, Social Affairs, which had 2,000 staff members and was headed by Sary’s wife, Khieu Thirith, were never informed that an evacuation was under way. Later trains were supposed to take out medical personnel from the city’s four main hospitals — but most of the patients, including large numbers of severely wounded soldiers, were left behind because there was no room in the wagons. ‘It was indescribable,’ one man wrote later, ‘a picture of human misery . . . The platforms were clogged with convoys of soldiers, with the injured, and with people desperately trying to flee.’ Soon after 7 a.m. the same morning, the forty or so diplomats in the city left by road for the second time, together with six hundred Chinese technicians and about fifty North Koreans who had been working on agricultural and hydroelectric projects. They were accompanied by the Chief of Protocol, Son Sen’s younger brother, Nikân, and a handful of other officials. They, too, headed for the Thai border, which they reached without incident the following day. After that, the only senior Khmer Rouge figure remaining in Phom Penh was Mok, whom Pol had belatedly ordered to help Ponlâk, the military governor, assure the city’s defence. Shortly after 8 a.m. Mok was seen near the Foreign Ministry driving a jeep. But a few hours later, he also decided that
nothing could be achieved by staying and set out for his old base on Mount Aural.

  Thus, by the middle of Sunday morning, the rulers of Democratic Kampuchea had stolen furtively away, abandoning the capital to its own devices. The population of 40,000 workers and soldiers, plus the military units based in the immediate vicinity, was left, leaderless, to fend for itself.

  The chaos and disorganisation of the final days — the sheer incompetence of Pol’s administration; the absence of any coherent plan for resistance; the refusal to confront the reality of Phnom Penh’s imminent fall; the failure to evacuate the wounded — showed the bankruptcy of the regime. It was doomed, whatever the circumstances, because it did not know how to rule.

  Khmer Rouge policy, right up to the last hours, remained wholly consistent with everything that had gone before. The priority accorded to getting Sihanouk to safety, to protecting Pol and the other leaders, was merely the practical application of the principle expounded by Nuon Chea months before: ‘If we lose members but retain the leadership, we can continue to win.’ The corollary — that ordinary people were expendable — had been Khmer Rouge practice ever since the evacuation of Phnom Penh in April 1975. The lack of concern over loss of life and over the squandering of material resources was exactly the same as three and a half years earlier.