Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  Much of the cable traffic that month was devoted to the ‘appropriate, limited lesson’ which Deng Xiaoping had promised to administer to Vietnam.

  It had started on February 17, with a sustained pre-dawn artillery barrage pouring 130-mm shells and rockets at a rate of one a second across the Chinese-Vietnamese border. This was followed by 85,000 Chinese troops, who headed for the five provincial capitals in the border region. Over the next two weeks they penetrated Vietnam to a depth of about fifteen miles. By the time the last Chinese soldier withdrew a month later, the Vietnamese had lost 10,000 dead, their military infrastructure along the border had been destroyed and their already weak economy crippled. Politically, the invasion had discredited the Soviet Union, which had conspicuously failed to come to the aid of its ally; it had cemented the growing Sino-American military entente; and it had given substance to Deng’s bold assertion, made during his visit to the US, that ‘we Chinese mean what we say.’*

  But its immediate goal — to make Vietnam withdraw regular units from Cambodia to reinforce the border with China, reducing the pressure on the Khmers Rouges and allowing them to establish a ‘liberated zone’ where the new Chinese Embassy could be based, so confirming their claims to be regarded as the legitimate government — proved a failure. Not only did the Vietnamese expeditionary force remain in place but in mid-March it launched a new offensive against Pol’s base at Tasanh. On March 27, the Chinese diplomats were asked to withdraw to a new site, a day’s march away, higher up in the mountains. The following morning Ieng Sary arrived, gasping for breath, with the news that a Vietnamese special forces unit was nearby and they must set out at once towards the south. The same day Tasanh was overrun. Pol, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphân had left a few hours earlier, abandoning part of the Central Committee archive, vehicles and weapons, reserves of rice and 3,000 tons of ammunition.

  On April 8, after a gruelling twelve-day trek across the mountains, Ieng Sary and his Chinese charges reached the Thai border. There, to their astonishment, they stumbled upon a group of Khmer Rouge officials bathing in a river. Among them Sun Hao recognised Pol and Nuon Chea. The CPK leadership had established its new temporary headquarters just inside Cambodian territory. But the fate of the ‘embassy’ was already sealed. Beijing had decided the diplomats should be pulled out. Not only were the Khmers Rouges unable to guarantee their safety, but there was no longer a ‘liberated zone’ in which they could be based. Three days later, they bid Pol’s ‘government’ farewell and crossed into Thailand, where they were detained by Thai border guards until urgent phone calls to Bangkok established their identity.

  The Chinese diplomats were not alone in fleeing Cambodia that spring.

  In the second half of March, Vietnamese units fanned out in an arc from Koh Kong to northern Battambang with orders to hem in the remnants of the Khmer Rouge army and the peasants they controlled — most of them ‘old’ people who had left their co-operatives more or less willingly to escape the Vietnamese advance — and to push them towards the border. The first groups crossed into Thailand in early April. Kriangsak’s government was appalled but could do little to stop them. Bangkok had already chosen its side. After consultations with China and the United States, it was agreed that the refugees would be allowed to enter temporarily until the situation stabilised and they were able to return. Over the next few weeks, some 200,000 people, soldiers as well as civilians, flooded into the border areas. Some left almost at once, marching in disciplined columns along the frontier to re-enter Cambodia in areas free of Vietnamese control. The majority lived rough in primitive squatter camps, a couple of miles inside Thai territory.

  In May, Pol, too, slipped across the border. He, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphân were given the protection of the Thai army’s 3rd Bureau, headed by the Military Intelligence Chief, General Chaovalit. Mok was still inside Cambodia, along with Son Sen, Ke Pauk and some 20-25,000 soldiers, most of them in the Eastern Zone, at Mount Aural, in Pursat, Koh Kong and parts of Battambang. But the majority were dispersed in small, isolated groups, hiding in the jungle, without contact among themselves and with no means of communicating with their leaders. The Khmer Rouge military command structure had been smashed in January. Now the movement’s principal leaders, and the bulk of their followers, were in exile.

  To the overwhelming majority of Cambodians in January 1979, the Vietnamese appeared as saviours. Hereditary enemies or not, Khmer Rouge rule had been so unspeakably awful that anything else had to be better. Vietnamese propagandists exploited this to the full. Vietnam’s army, they claimed, had entered Cambodia not to occupy it but to deliver the population from enslavement by a fascist, tyrannical regime which enforced genocidal policies through massacres and starvation. That was of course untrue. The Vietnamese leaders had not been bothered in the least by Khmer Rouge atrocities until they decided that Pol’s regime was a threat to their own national interests. But the notion of a ‘humanitarian intervention’ influenced opinion abroad and, for a time, coloured attitudes inside Cambodia as well.

  Human gratitude, however, is fleeting. Within months the Vietnamese had outstayed their welcome.

  In one sense, this was inevitable: foreign armies stationed in other people’s countries are subject to the law of diminishing returns. In Cambodia, the alienness of the Vietnamese presence was all the more glaring because the Khmer figleaf, KNUFNS, was so small. A nominally Cambodian government had been established in January — headed by an ex-Khmer Rouge military commander, Heng Samrin, with a former Hanoi-based Issarak, Pen Sovann, Secretary-General of the revived People’s Revolutionary Party of Kampuchea (PRPK), as his deputy — ruling a country which now called itself the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK). But policy was set by Vietnam, transmitted through a VWP Central Committee liaison group known as A-40, and implemented by Vietnamese ‘advisers’ who were in charge of every Ministry and provincial administration.

  It was the same system that the Vietnamese had used in Laos since the early 1950s. The impression of a country under occupation was heightened by the way the army behaved. In the spring of 1979, Phnom Penh was systematically looted. Nayan Chanda, of the Far Eastern Economic Review, reported:

  Convoys of trucks carrying refrigerators, air conditioners, electrical gadgets, furniture, machinery and precious sculptures headed towards Ho Chi Minh City . . . The once busy Chinese business section of Phnom Penh looked like a scene after a cataclysmic storm. Every house and shop had been ransacked and remains of broken furniture and twisted pieces of household goods were strewn over the road. Damp nodules of cotton from ripped-open mattresses and pillows covered the ground. Clearly marauders had gone through the households, searching for gold and jewellery.

  Factories were dismantled and equipment sent back to Vietnam. As famine set in, rice from Khmer Rouge stockpiles left by the same route — or so, at least, many Khmers believed. When international organisations finally started sending food aid, part of that, too, was diverted to Vietnam.

  Restrictions were placed on entry to the towns, which, with the exception of Phnom Penh, had been open during the initial months after the invasion. Former town-dwellers who had managed to return — often to discover that their old home had been requisitioned by a Vietnamese officer or a cadre in the new regime — were threatened with being packed off to the countryside to go back to working in the fields. Despite the government’s promises that basic freedoms would be restored, there was no return to private farming.

  Former civil servants and professional people who had survived the Khmer Rouge years and were now recruited to build the new administration found themselves under Vietnamese tutelage. At the obligatory indoctrination sessions it was made clear that their future depended on having a ‘correct attitude’ towards their Vietnamese comrades. Those who refused to co-operate, or were suspected of opposing the new regime, risked imprisonment in very harsh conditions.

  As a result, in April and May 1979, tens of thousands of Cambodians, mostly ‘new people’ from th
e towns — former Sino-Khmer shopkeepers and their families and members of the pre-Khmer Rouge intellectual elite — voted with their feet. Thailand became the highway to a new life in the West. But if the Thais had turned a blind eye to the arrival of the Khmers Rouges and the peasant population they controlled — seeing them as a crucial defence against Vietnamese military pressure along the border — they took a very different view of a massive influx of civilian refugees who wished to leave Cambodia permanently and might end up spending years as uninvited guests before other countries agreed to take them. The lesson of the Vietnamese boat-people, washing up in their hundreds of thousands on South-East Asian beaches — to a great wringing of hands from the West but at that stage not much else — was already there as a warning. In June, most of the refugees were forcibly repatriated by the Thai army, often with great callousness. At Preah Vihear, in the north, 45,000 people were made to scramble down a precipitous mountainside into an uninhabited, heavily mined area of jungle. Several thousand died, either shot by Thai soldiers to prevent them trying to cross back or blown up in the minefields.

  That finally got the attention of Western governments. But another four months passed before Thailand reached agreement with UNICEF and the International Red Cross on an orderly arrivals’ programme — to be funded, Kriangsak’s office emphasised, entirely by foreign aid — to deal with the refugee influx. For many, it was already too late. The famine which had spread through Cambodia that summer was as bad as, if not worse than, any in the Khmer Rouge period. To compound the misery, Vietnam initially refused to accept food aid from non-communist sources, fearing, correctly, that if it did so, relief would also be provided to the Khmers Rouges on the border. The upshot was that the number of refugees in Thailand jumped from 150,000 in October to well over half a million two months later.

  Whatever else the Vietnamese were doing in Cambodia, they were not winning hearts and minds.

  During the summer of 1979 the Khmers Rouges got their second wind. While the monsoon rains beat down, turning the roads into rivers of mud, and the Vietnamese remained in their barracks, the guerrillas and the population they controlled made their way stealthily back across the border. They had four months to reorganise before the next dry-season offensive began.

  In July, Pol set up a new permanent headquarters, known as Office 131, on the western flank of Mount Thom, just inside Cambodian territory about twenty miles north-east of the Thai town of Trat in the coastal province of Chanthaburi. To mark the move, he changed his name to Phem.

  Like the old HQ on the Chinit river, ten years earlier, Office 131 was a forbidden zone, protected by minefields and camouflaged pits filled with punji sticks. Access from Thailand was controlled by a Thai Special Forces group called Unit 838, formed by General Chaovalit to assure the Khmer Rouge leaders’ protection. A network of well-camouflaged trails led across the mountains to Samlaut, which became a staging area both for Khmer Rouge units, making their way out of the jungle to try to reach the border, and for the messengers Pol despatched to re-establish contact with the scattered groups of soldiers still dispersed in the forests.

  Many of those who emerged were walking skeletons, having survived on leaves and roots. Dysentery, malaria and oedema were rampant. The civilian population under Khmer Rouge control, especially ‘new’ people, accompanying them against their will, suffered even more. Mey Mak encountered cannibalism in the jungles of Pursat. In one case, which still made him shudder, a woman ate her own child. Tens of thousands starved. By October, in the words of the writer, William Shawcross, ‘awful spindly creatures, with no flesh and with wide vacant eyes, stumbled out of the forests and the mountains into which the Khmer Rouge had coralled them . . . In many cases they were so badly starved that their bodies were consuming themselves . . . The lassitude of death had taken over.’ Yet it was not just captive villagers who suffered. Men and women who had served the Khmer Rouge cause all their adult lives were in no better state.

  Only the movement’s leaders and their senior aides ate well.

  In the makeshift camps on the border, Laurence Picq wrote in her diary, the rank and file subsisted on one daily bowl of watery soup made from the chopped-up stems of banana trees. But the top cadres were as ‘fat and sleek as otters’, dining on fish and fresh vegetables and rice. Photographs from the period show Pol and Ieng Sary looking stuffed.

  Towards the end of the year, as relief supplies from the Red Cross and the UN began to reach the area, conditions improved. Peasants in ox-carts, loaded with sacks of rice, and long lines of porters made their way across the border passes. Chinese aid also started flowing in, not just arms and ammunition, but mosquito nets, water-bottles, uniforms, sugar and salt, packed biscuits, quinine and antibiotics.

  Politically, two other events occurred to strengthen the Khmers Rouges’ position. In November 1979 the UN General Assembly voted to seat the delegation of Democratic Kampuchea and exclude the Vietnamese-backed regime in Phnom Penh. The following month, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. To the West, this was the ultimate proof that the rulers in the Kremlin were committed to a policy of global expansionism. It redoubled non-communist South-East Asia’s support for Thailand, which was seen as the next target in this new game of Russian roulette, and sealed a Faustian pact between the US, China and the Khmers Rouges to do whatever was necessary to make Vietnam’s burden in Cambodia intolerable.

  That winter’s dry-season offensive failed to dislodge the Khmers Rouges from the border. New area commanders had been named — So Hong at Kla’ngop, Sok Pheap in Malay; Nikân in Sampou Loun; Phi Phuon in Kamrieng; and Y Chhean in Pailin. Thanks to China, their troops were now adequately armed, and each battalion had a signals unit. In the interior, as well, guerrilla activity was increasing and the military structure was being rebuilt. In January 1980, Son Sen transferred the Eastern Front HQ from the Chinit river, where he had spent the first year after the Vietnamese invasion, to Paet Um, an old Issarak base at the junction of the borders of Cambodia, Thailand and Laos. Ke Pauk headed a new Northern Front, with its HQ in Kompong Thom. Mok, at Mount Aural, retained command of the South-West. More significantly, young Khmer villagers began leaving their homes to join the maquis. By the middle of 1980, the Khmers Rouges claimed to have 40,000 troops in the field. Not all were well-trained. But neither were the Vietnamese. Although their troop strength in Cambodia would soon reach 180,000, many were from regional units.

  As the resistance expanded, so did Office 131. Wooden huts were erected to accommodate bureaux handling military planning, foreign policy, economics, health, information and social affairs, with a staff of more than a hundred and a large open assembly hall for seminars and meetings. A monitoring group provided Pol with daily summaries of broadcasts from foreign radio stations and translations from Thai and Western newspapers. He himself lived higher up the mountain, in an area that was off-limits to all except the montagnard bodyguards, protected by yet another minefield and a ditch full of sharpened bamboo stakes, patrolled day and night by a special security battalion.

  Office 131 was the Khmer Rouge nerve centre. But it was not the seat of government of Democratic Kampuchea. That lay two hundred miles to the north-east, at a border camp called 808. Henry Kamm of the New York Times was taken there early in 1980. He found himself, he wrote, in a looking-glass world:

  [On] a table, decorated with flowers and greenery, placed under a handsome, thatched vaulted roof, hot coffee . . . was served with shy smiles by young Khmer Rouge soldiers . . . A courteous young man speaking flawless French collected our passports to issue us visas. Mine was returned bearing the only visa in longhand I have ever received. . .

  The Khmer Rouge guest-house was the very latest in jungle luxury. It was clearly modelled on the sumptuous hunting lodges to which French planters of the past invited guests for weekend shoots . . . [There were] four guest bungalows and paths linking them to the bath-houses, toilets, dining pavilion, meeting lodge and communications shack. Local materials had been taste
fully used . . . Soldiers swept the entire camp daily to keep the falling leaves from cluttering. In front of each bungalow, our attentive hosts had placed trays of glasses, a thermos of hot water, a packet of Chinese tea and packs of American cigarettes . . . Vases of bamboo . . . were filled with fresh flowers . . . The plates of fruit brought from Bangkok were renewed each day . . . The best Thai beer, Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch, American soft drinks and Thai bottled water were served.

  At a time when many Cambodians were still close to starvation, Kamm found the display nauseating. That was not a thought that would have occurred to his hosts, Khieu Samphân and Ieng Sary To them, 808 was the smiling, new public face of Democratic Kampuchea. Reporters were told it was the CPK Central Committee’s headquarters. Pol himself went there to give interviews to favoured foreigners. The private face — Office 131 — was secret. In the first years not even Chinese journalists were told of its existence.

  The Khmers Rouges purpose in arranging Kamm’s visit, and many others like it at that time, was to persuade public opinion abroad that they had changed, to counter the atrocity stories filling Western newspapers and to make it easier for Western governments to continue upholding Democratic Kampuchea’s right to be represented at the UN and in other international bodies. To that end, Pol and his colleagues were prepared to go a long way in publicly denying everything that their movement had once stood for. ‘Our main duty is not to . . . build socialism,’ Samphân declared, ‘[but] to drive all the Vietnamese forces out of Cambodia and to defend our nation, our people, our race.’ Ieng Sary, a few months later, was even blunter, telling Kamm: ‘We are abandoning the socialist revolution.’ At the time most journalists covering the region, and most governments, assumed this was simply a ploy, just another of the endless tissue of lies and deceit which Pol and his colleagues had spun throughout their years in power.