Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  Yet if there were one, overriding reason for the collapse of Democratic Kampuchea in January 1979, it lay in the leadership’s mania for secrecy.

  Pol simply could not bring himself to tell the Cambodian people what was going on, even if it meant the destruction of the regime. The radio broadcast he made early on the morning of Friday January 5 was as revealing for its omissions as for anything he said. Apart from two brief references to ‘temporary difficulties’, he gave no hint that large parts of Cambodia were already under Vietnamese occupation. On the contrary, he implied that the ‘valiant and invincible Cambodian army’ was successfully resisting the aggressors. Still less was there any practical advice to the population about how to respond to the Vietnamese advance. Instead he intoned ritualistic formulae about ‘relying on the worker-peasant alliance’, developing production and strengthening national unity. It was a textbook example of how not to rally a nation to resist, and it followed months of similar mistakes. Pol had known since September that it was only a matter of time before the Vietnamese invaded. Yet apart from establishing a fallback base for the leadership at Tasanh, he had made no contingency plans. In a regime where mistrust had been institutionalised, trusting the population, or even the military, was unthinkable. Outside the inner circle formed by Pol, Nuon Chea, Mok, Ieng Sary and Son Sen, no one was adequately informed. Mey Mak, then head of civil aviation at Pochentong, remembered:

  Did we have any advance warning that the Vietnamese were so close? Well, two or three days before, on January 3 or 4, [the air-force commander] Mang Met told us to be prepared to deal with ‘disturbances’. . . But he didn’t say anything about Vietnamese soldiers. We knew that something was wrong, because, two weeks earlier, some of the pilots had told us that Vietnamese troops were in Memot . . . And then, Sihanouk left on January 6. But I thought that was [like the trips he had made] in 1975 . . . I still didn’t have any idea that the Vietnamese were about to attack Phnom Penh. I knew they were in Kompong Cham. But if you listened to the radio, it spoke every day about the Vietnamese being beaten back — it never talked about our forces retreating or anything like that. So even though there were rumours — people said the Vietnamese had reached this far, or had overrun that place — we still didn’t really believe it. They were simply rumours.

  Apart from Mang Met and his two deputies, Lvey and Phal, no one at Pochentong knew that the Vietnamese were approaching. No attempt was made to rebase the air force at Battambang, to move out the fuel reserves or even to fly out any of the planes. When the Vietnamese arrived, every aircraft the Cambodians possessed was lined up on the tarmac, theirs for the taking. Hundreds of armoured vehicles, quantities of munitions and strategic grain reserves fell into Vietnamese hands because, ‘to maintain secrecy’, no one had been ordered to move them. Confidential Party documents, which should have been destroyed, were left behind. Even the most secret of all the Khmer Rouge institutions — the S-21 interrogation centre at Tuol Sleng — continued its evil work, oblivious of the danger, until it was almost too late. Prisoners were still being interrogated on January 5 when Deuch received an urgent order from Nuon Chea to kill the remaining inmates. He complied. But there was no time to destroy the prison archives and most were recovered intact by the occupation forces.

  Ironically, had Pol been less secretive, the secrecy he sought would have been far better preserved.

  As it was, no sooner did word spread that Democratic Kampuchea’s top leaders had fled than most of the senior officers followed. At 8 a.m. on Sunday, Mang Met’s 502nd Air-force Division was ordered to block the Vietnamese advance from the south. Mey Mak went with them. Three hours later, when he radioed Divisional HQ for orders, there was no one there to answer. On the other side of the city, another battalion commander received a wireless signal from his regiment at 10 a.m., telling him: ‘From now on, you are on your own. Don’t wait for further orders. There won’t be any.’ Phi Phuon, who had been ordered by Ponlâk to defend the Foreign Ministry, assembled eight hundred factory workers and Ministry employees and issued them with rifles. By midday, Ponlâk, too, had fled. Phi Phuon’s men — none of whom had ever fired a shot in anger before — held out near the railway station until evening and then headed westwards. Twenty years later, he was still outraged by the way the leadership had behaved. ‘It was a complete shambles. They organised no defence at all. Even Ponlâk, who was supposed to be the City Governor, wasn’t told anything. They trusted no one at that moment . . . Mang Met was under orders to defend the city too. What did he do? He ran away.’ With no guidance from above, individual company commanders began leading their men away from the city as well. Even then, one officer recalled, ‘it was totally disorganised. No one followed orders. Some groups fell back, others went ahead, until by dawn they’d all scattered in different directions.’

  Mey Mak was shocked by the attitude of the villagers in the areas through which they passed. ‘They hated us,’ he said. ‘They just wanted us gone.’ There were cases of individual soldiers who became separated from their comrades being disarmed and beaten to death, and of revenge killings of local Khmer Rouge officials. But they were relatively few. After so much horror, people were sick of blood. The little energy they had left they needed for their own survival.

  Three years, eight months and twenty days after the Khmers Rouges won power, the slave state which Pol Pot had created had come to an ignominious end. Old Madame In — the mother of In Sopheap and In Sokhan — summed it up at the railway station that morning. ‘Didn’t they win a glorious victory?’ she said to her companions. ‘But they wouldn’t treat people properly, so now they’ve lost everything. Band of cretins!’

  12

  Utopia Disbound

  AFTER TWO DAYS in Pursat, Pol and Nuon Chea travelled on to Battambang. There they met Ieng Sary, whom they decided to send at once to Beijing to discuss a plan of resistance with the Chinese. The problem was how to get him there. Foreign diplomats and aid workers had been permitted to enter Thailand, but no Cambodian had yet been allowed across. If the Thai government sealed the border or, worse, reached an understanding with Vietnam to establish a condominium over Cambodia, as had happened during a similar crisis a century and a half before, the resistance would be stillborn. Nikân, who had negotiated the diplomats’ passage, was instructed to seek authorisation for Ieng Sary and his party to transit through Bangkok.

  To Pol’s relief, the Thai Premier, General Kriangsak, decided that an arrangement with the Vietnamese would not be in his country’s interests. On the afternoon of January 11 1979, a military helicopter landed near Poipet, a few yards inside Cambodian territory, to take out Sary, Son Sen’s wife, Yun Yat, In Sopheap and a group of broadcasters from Radio Phnom Penh. They were to set up a radio station in China, the ‘Voice of Democratic Kampuchea’, which for the next few months would be the regime’s sole channel of communication with the outside world.

  The Thais supped with a long spoon. The Cambodian delegation was set down after nightfall in a deserted area of Bangkok’s Don Muang Airport. No Thai official was present. They were driven across the tarmac and hustled on to a commercial airliner for Hong Kong after all the other passengers had embarked. None the less the die had been cast. The decisions of those first few hours determined the course of a war which would last two decades.

  In Beijing next morning, Ieng Sary met Deng Xiaoping. The Chinese leader gave him a dressing-down for the excesses of Khmer Rouge rule and its ‘deviations from Marxism-Leninism’. But most of the discussion then and at a further meeting the following day was taken up with the practicalities of resisting Vietnam. The Cambodians, Deng said, would need to prepare themselves for a long war. Instead of modern weapons they would use ‘the methods of the past’, fighting in small groups to wear the Vietnamese down. It was important to win Thailand’s agreement to allow arms shipments to traverse its territory. And they must ‘examine with the greatest attention the idea of a united front with Sihanouk’. After his arrival in Beijing, Deng said, the
Prince had harshly criticised the Khmers Rouges, and, he noted pointedly, ‘there were reasons for that’. On the other hand he had done everything Pol Pot asked, travelling to the UN to give a rousing speech in Cambodia’s defence, after which the Security Council had voted by thirteen to two (the dissenters being the USSR and Czechoslovakia) to condemn Vietnam’s aggression; and he had deftly deflected journalists’ questions about Khmer Rouge atrocities. The CPK Central Committee, Deng went on, should seriously consider naming Sihanouk Head of State and bringing non-communists into the government to canvass support abroad.

  It was a reprise of the united front which Sihanouk had headed after the 1970 coup. As though to underscore the parallel, Deng offered Sary five million dollars to defray immediate expenses, the same sum that Beijing had given the Khmers Rouges each year during the civil war. The only question was whether Sihanouk would agree to play the same role a second time. ‘Sây nothing to the Prince,’ the Chinese leader told Sary, ‘because it’s not sure he will accept. If you agree with our idea, we will try to help [persuade him].’

  They proved to be prescient words.

  That same evening, as Sihanouk was returning with his Khmer Rouge minders to his hotel room in New York, he slipped a short note into the hand of the American policeman who had been assigned to guard him. It was a request for political asylum.

  At 2 a.m., four burly secret servicemen escorted the Prince from his hotel to a waiting police car. For the next two weeks, he remained cloistered in a private suite at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital. The press was told that he was suffering from ‘extreme stress and exhaustion’. The United States was as anxious as China to avoid doing anything which might weaken international opposition to Vietnam. American diplomats remained silent over the asylum request, and eventually, after France, too, proved unwilling to accept him as a political exile, Sihanouk agreed to return to Beijing. The deal was clinched when Deng Xiaoping, in the midst of a triumphal visit to America that month to celebrate the establishment of US-Chinese diplomatic relations, invited him to dinner at Blair House, the official residence for state guests in Washingon, and promised — untruthfully, as they both knew — that China would never again put pressure on him to co-operate with Pol Pot.

  The main effect of Sihanouk’s escapade was to persuade the Chinese to take a tougher line with the Khmers Rouges, whom they held responsible for the Prince’s conduct. In Beijing, Chairman Hua summoned Ieng Sary and upbraided him in terms harsher than any Chinese leader had used before.*

  The problem was that when you achieved victory and Sihanouk returned, you weren’t very clever in the way you treated him . . . He had joined you in the struggle against the Americans . . . and what did you do? You were unjust to him . . . He asked to see his daughter. You didn’t let him. He wanted to see Penn Nouth. You didn’t let him. He wasn’t allowed to have newspapers or to see foreigners . . . Why did Sihanouk ask for asylum? Because for three years he suffered . . . There is a lesson to be drawn from this . . . In future, if Sihanouk says bad things about the Khmer Rouge leaders, you should [let it pass]. When the wolf is at your door, you don’t worry about the fox.

  Not only should Khmer Rouge policy change towards Sihanouk, Hua declared. Khmer Rouge policy towards the Cambodian people should change too:

  Will the war [in Cambodia] end in victory? That depends on whether the people’s hearts are with you or not. For that reason, [you] must re-examine [your] previous experience to see what was done well and what was done badly. Only thus can one build a broad, unified national front against Vietnam and attract the majority [of the people] . . . The puppet [Vietnamese-installed] government has elaborated its programme on the basis of the errors in your policies. Of course they are doing so to deceive the people . . . But . . . you must make efforts to improve people’s living standards in the liberated zones . . . to bring them democracy and happiness . . . This is a struggle for their hearts . . . You must also draw political lessons from your earlier campaigns against counter-revolutionaries. It is true that [such people existed] but they were very few. In [such matters], one must always be very cautious . . . In the present situation you must chart a new strategy and a new political direction . . . because, in guerrilla war, without the support of the people you can do nothing.

  While Deng concentrated on bringing Sihanouk back into the Khmer Rouge fold, the Secretary-General of the Chinese Party’s Military Commission, Vice-Premier Geng Biao, flew to Thailand to see Prime Minister Kriangsak.

  Geng found his host nervous. ‘He kept stressing that everything must be kept secret,’ he told Hua on his return to Beijing. ‘He isn’t at all confident. During our talks he kept asking again and again whether the Cambodians could really hold out. He seems to be full of worries.’ At the Thais’ insistence, they met not in Bangkok but at Utapao military airbase on the coast, 90 miles to the south. Kriangsak confirmed that Ieng Sary would be allowed to pass through in transit on his way back to Cambodia, but said he would not be allowed to stop over in Bangkok or to meet any Thai official. Messages between Cambodia and the Thai government would be routed via China and a single designated Thai official would liaise with the Chinese Embassy in Bangkok for that purpose. No other communications channel would be authorised.

  However, Geng reported to Hua, on the issue that was of overriding importance — the shipment of Chinese aid to the Khmers Rouges — the Thai Premier was much more forthcoming:

  He proposed three routes. The first would be . . . for China to send merchant ships, flying a foreign flag, to Cambodian waters off the coast of Koh Kong, where the arms could be transshipped and brought ashore in small boats . . . I told him I thought that was possible . . . The second, he said, would be for . . . Chinese aircraft to parachute arms into northern Cambodia . . . But that would be difficult to keep secret. The third method would be for China to ship arms and other aid in small quantities through the commercial port of Bangkok . . . They would be packed to look like consumer goods . . . The Thai army would unload and store them in military warehouses, after which they would be transported by road to Ubon, west of Preah Vihear. From there Kriangsak would arrange for them to be taken into Cambodia.

  The Thai government, Kriangsak indicated, would also allow the Khmers Rouges to buy arms and other supplies from Sino-Thai merchants in Bangkok.

  The day that Geng Biao was in Thailand, January 15, the vanguard of the Vietnamese invasion force reached Sisophon. They had been held up not, as the Chinese believed, by Cambodian defences, but because they had advanced so much faster than expected that their armoured columns ran out of fuel. Except at Siem Reap, where they encountered significant guerrilla attacks, the Khmer Rouge army put up even less of a fight after the fall of Phnom Penh than it had in the East.

  The progress of the invasion force was in a sense deceptive: Vietnam had seized only the urbanised skeleton of Cambodia — the main roads and the towns — but none of the countryside between. None the less, the appearance of the first Vietnamese infantrymen at the Thai border concentrated minds in Bangkok. On January 21, the Foreign Ministry announced that Thailand would continue to recognise ‘Democratic Kampuchea’, thus placing itself alongside China and the US squarely in the anti-Vietnamese camp. The other non-communist South-East Asian nations followed suit. By the time Ieng Sary arrived, a few days later, Kriangsak’s injunction that he have no contact with Thai officials had been quietly forgotten.

  To escape the Vietnamese advance, Pol, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphân moved to Pailin on the Thai border and then, in late January, to Tasanh, further to the south, where Ieng Sary joined them.

  There, on February 1, the Central Committee convened a two-day work conference, attended by divisional and regimental commanders, to discuss future strategy.

  The discussion showed that Pol had learnt very little from the setbacks of the previous weeks. Sihanouk’s name was not mentioned. In lip-service to the united front, there was praise for the role of ‘Cambodian Buddhists’, a term not heard since 1
975. But the main thrust of Pol’s remarks was that Vietnamese-installed district administrators should be ‘wiped out’ (Hua had urged that they be ‘won over’); Vietnamese spies and agents should be killed; and the army should ‘keep tight control’ over the civilian population. All the old Khmer Rouge instincts had resurfaced. Hua’s warning that a guerrilla war was unwinnable without mass support was ignored.

  But whatever their shortcomings, the Khmers Rouges were the only Cambodian asset China had with a significant capacity to wage war against Vietnam, and Beijing was determined to make the most of them.

  On the night of February 9, eight Chinese diplomats, led by Ambassador Sun Hao, each carrying a 40-pound rucksack, crossed into Cambodia near Poipet. They were greeted by Nikân and Pol’s nephew, So Hong, who led them on foot through the jungle to Malay, a then almost uninhabited area twelve miles to the south. There the ‘embassy’ was received by Ieng Sary. A week later they moved again, this time by car, to another stretch of empty jungle near Pailin, where Pol briefed them on the military situation. Finally, on February 23, they donned black Khmer Rouge outfits and kramas, and set off in a convoy of jeeps for Tasanh. But, contrary to their own and Beijing’s expectations, they were not based at Pol’s headquarters. Instead yet another isolated jungle clearing was prepared for them, with four open-sided thatched huts as embassy residences. Even in the middle of a war, the CPK kept its allies at arm’s length. Pol’s command centre was only two miles away, but Ieng Sary assured the Ambassador that the journey ‘took three hours and was unbelievably difficult’, so Khmer officials would come to them rather than the other way round. Over the next five weeks, Pol visited the ‘embassy’ twice and Ieng Sary once. The diplomats’ only other contact was with a liaison officer, to whom they gave a daily briefing note for the Cambodian leaders on the basis of the coded telegrams they received each morning by radio from Beijing. The rest of the time they spent digging an air-raid shelter and clearing land for a vegetable garden.