Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  They were wrong. Change was truly in the air. It was not what the regime pretended, nor could it have been. Sihanouk had told Deng Xiaoping, when the latter tried to persuade him that the Khmers Rouges now respected human rights: ‘Vice-Premier, I am not able to believe you. Tigers don’t change into kittens.’ But the ultra-radical ideology that had underpinned the Khmer Rouge revolution, and which for years had seemed its raison d’être, was being quietly jettisoned, as though it had never been important, with hardly a backward glance.

  The new-look Khmers Rouges shed their black peasant garb. The troops now wore jungle green, courtesy of their Chinese allies; the cadres, white shirts and dark trousers. Pol did the same until he discovered the attractions of safari suits, which were made to measure for him in Bangkok. He liked pastel colours, especially pale blue. Ministers affected business attire, rather than high-collared Mao jackets, when travelling abroad. Laurence Picq remembered putting on a short-sleeved pink blouse for the first time in July 1979. ‘I felt indecent,’ she wrote. ‘It was like wearing a disguise. We weren’t ourselves any more.’ The young men and women recruited that winter to work at Office 131 were chosen, not on the basis of class, as would have been the case in the past, but ability. They had to have some secondary education and were made to take an exam in Khmer, French and English — skills which, one of them observed, ‘would have got us killed before’. In October, Pol gave orders that there should be no more executions and, for the most part, these stopped. Ieng Sary told closed Party seminars that there had to be ‘a new beginning’.

  The refashioning of Khmer Rouge social behaviour was accompanied by a reorganisation of the movement’s political institutions.

  In September 1979 Khieu Samphân announced the creation of a new united front body, memorable mainly for the clumsiness of its name, the Patriotic Democratic Front of Grand National Union of Kampuchea (known by its French initials as FGUNDPK). More significantly, three months later, Samphân took over the Prime Ministership, ostensibly to allow Pol to concentrate on his role as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces but in fact to try to give the Khmers Rouges a more acceptable public image. It was the opening gambit in a long-drawn-out political game.

  That autumn, Pol had belatedly come round to accepting Deng Xiaoping’s suggestion that Sihanouk should be made Head of State. But the Prince, infuriated by Chinese entreaties that he co-operate with ‘those people who killed my children and grandchildren’, was sulking in Pyongyang. For another year, neither side blinked. But in February 1981, after a further Vietnamese dry-season offensive had failed to crush Khmer Rouge resistance, Sihanouk took the bait.

  By then his political options had narrowed. It had become clear that neither Vietnam nor the Phnom Penh authorities was willing to make a separate deal with him and his attempts to build a credible, non-communist third force had got nowhere. Unless he wished to retire from politics altogether, forfeiting any hope of ever seeing the Cambodian monarchy restored, he had no choice but to come to terms, for the second time in his life, with his hated communist opponents. Accordingly he proposed the creation of a tripartite coalition, composed of the Khmers Rouges; a non-communist resistance group headed by former Prime Minister Son Sann; and his own movement, the United National Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia, known by its French acronym, FUNCINPEC. The offer came with numerous face-saving conditions and, unsurprisingly, when Khieu Samphân met Sihanouk in North Korea in March, they failed to agree. But a dialogue had begun. All those involved understood that, after a suitable interval, it would lead to an accord.

  In August 1981, Pol travelled to Beijing to meet Deng Xiaoping and Premier Zhao Ziyang. A specially chartered Chinese airliner was sent to Bangkok to collect him. Security was so strict that the half-dozen aides who went with him carried passports in false names.

  ‘We think you should be flexible,’ Zhao told him at their first meeting. ‘You have to adapt your policy to the twists and turns of the road ahead.’ According to Mey Mak, who was present, Pol bristled. ‘We know we have suffered a defeat,’ he replied. ‘But we still adhere to the stance of independence-mastery. It will be up to our Central Committee to decide what policy we follow.’ Later, at a meeting from which the rest of the delegation was excluded, Deng explained what Zhao had meant. In order to retain the support of non-communist South-East Asia, he said, the Khmers Rouges’ differences with Sihanouk — in particular, their objections to giving a pledge to disarm after an eventual Vietnamese withdrawal — should be papered over. In return he promised that China would use its influence to ensure that, in the detailed negotiations that would follow, Khmer Rouge interests were protected.

  Two weeks later, on September 4 1981, Sihanouk, Son Sann and Khieu Samphân met in Singapore and issued a joint statement announcing their intention to form a coalition government and wage a common struggle ‘for the liberation of Cambodia from the Vietnamese aggressors’.

  In December, the Communist Party of Kampuchea announced its self-dissolution. This was not, as was widely assumed, a public relations stunt. Had it been, the movement would have continued to operate in secret, as happened in other countries in similar circumstances. It did not. The CPK became the first and only Party in the history of international communism to terminate its own existence.

  The decision, taken by Pol and Nuon Chea, with little discussion beyond the inner circle, caused consternation among the Party rank and file. ‘People were very shocked and disoriented,’ one of Son Sen’s aides recalled. ‘We tried to convince them that, even without a Party, it was still possible to organise. Son Sen told them the main problem was the survival of the Cambodian nation. ‘Do you want to keep the Party and continue to struggle alone?’ he asked them. ‘Or is it better to unite with other national forces?’

  One problem was that Party membership conveyed a certain status. To get round that, Pol proposed the creation of a ‘Movement of Nationalists’ to which former full-rights Party members would be given automatic entry. Even if the Party itself no longer existed, he said, there needed to be a mechanism to form ‘progressive elements’. But the nationalist movement never caught on. ‘It was too like a political game,’ one man said. ‘People just lost interest and it folded after a few months.’ In fact, it seems Pol decided that any formal political structure would be counter-productive at that stage and quietly dropped the idea.

  In many ways the dissolution of the Party was a very odd move. It removed part of the glue that held the Khmer Rouge movement together. Abroad, it brought no benefit because no outsider believed it had happened.

  Yet at home it made sense. No Party meant no Angkar. The ‘new’ Khmer Rouges were now, in theory and to a large extent in practice, a purely military organisation dedicated to fighting the Vietnamese. The movement’s ruling body, the CPK Standing Committee, was replaced by a Military Directorate comprising Pol, Nuon Chea, Mok, Son Sen and Ke Pauk. The new Khmer Rouge radio station was named the ‘Voice of the National Army of Democratic Kampuchea’. Its broadcasts were a mix of traditional Khmer music and military communiqués. Political propaganda was out; what mattered was the progress of the war.

  As loyal foot-soldiers, defending the Khmer nation, the ‘new’ Khmers Rouges wished to divest themselves of the nightmarish memories associated with communist rule. Pol had finally taken to heart Hua’s warning that a guerrilla war was unwinnable without popular support. From 1981 onwards, his overriding goal was to win back the support of the countryside that he had squandered during his years in power. To achieve that, he explained, it was necessary to wage armed struggle but ‘not to accumulate military successes. We [are] fighting . . . to build our forces politically and weaken those of the enemy.’ The aim, a Khmer Rouge officer recalled, was ‘to win the hearts and minds of the villagers in order to bring them to the side of Democratic Kampuchea’. In many areas the policy succeeded. A year later a Vietnamese officer complained: ‘In certain places where we have no permanent military presence . .
. the Khmer local authorities are two-faced. One face smiles at us, the other smiles at the Khmers Rouges.’

  There was a second reason for the dissolution of the Party. The bulk of Democratic Kampuchea’s diplomatic support at the United Nations and elsewhere came from capitalist countries — notably the United States and its allies — while the supply lines which kept the Khmers Rouges alive passed through pro-Western Thailand. Most of the communist world except China was hostile to the Khmer Rouge cause. And even China, in Pol’s view, was already by 1981 well on the capitalist road. ‘One day China will have a capitalist system,’ he told In Sopheap. ‘That’s not a criticism. But we must take it into account. It’s no good trying to comfort ourselves because their system still contains crumbs of socialism.’ The point he wished to make, Sopheap concluded, was that ‘we must adapt our policy in the light of the dominant trend in the world’. If Democratic Kampuchea retained a communist system, it would be out of step with its main allies. A few years later, Pol put it more succinctly: ‘We chose communism because we wanted to restore our nation. We helped the Vietnamese, who were communist. But now the communists are fighting us. So we have to turn to the West and follow their way.’

  At one level, the decision, and Pol’s explanation for it, provided confirmation, were any needed, that the veneer of Marxism-Leninism which had cloaked Cambodian radicalism had only ever been skin-deep.

  Disbanding the Party meant changing a label, little else.

  It also reflected the perpetual Khmer tendency to take things to extremes. Almost three years earlier, Deng Xiaoping had recommended that in the interests of the united front, the Khmers Rouges should ‘not put the Communist Party in the foreground’ but emphasise patriotism, nationalism and democracy instead. Pol took that literally. If the Communist Party had become a hindrance, better to get rid of it altogether.

  In documents destined for a wider audience and in his speeches at political seminars, he was less explicit. ‘The method has changed, but the spirit remains the same,’ he told one meeting. The movement’s ‘ideals’ had not altered, merely ‘to a certain extent, the form of the struggle’. The ambiguity inherent in such lapidary formulae was deliberate. Apart from Pol’s natural preference for obliquity, he could not expect men who had spent all their adult lives fighting for socialism to change their ideas overnight. Instead, each person was left to work out for himself exactly what the movement’s ‘spirit’ and ‘ideals’ now consisted of.

  The changes were real. The goal of communism was abandoned. Offenders were re-educated rather than killed. The ban on individual possessions was lifted. Collective eating ended. Families lived together normally again. Young people chose their own marriage partners. Social restrictions were eased. In many ways even more striking — because it marked a break not only from previous Khmer Rouge practice but from the conduct of the military under Lon Nol, under Sihanouk and every other regime in Khmer history — captured Phnom Penh government soldiers were no longer executed. Instead they were invited to choose between joining the guerrillas or being freed and allowed to return home. ‘Each person you kill has a family,’ Pol explained. ‘Each family will bear a grievance . . . That way you increase the number of our enemies, and we will have fewer friends.’

  In most other respects, however, the Khmers Rouges remained as before.

  Despite promises, soon after the Vietnamese invasion, to ‘draw lessons from past mistakes’, Pol never admitted responsibility for the 1.5 million deaths under his rule, nor did he repudiate the policies that had caused them. Once, in a moment of honesty, he admitted that the movement had been immature, ‘drunk with victory and incompetent’ and had shown itself not up to the task of running the whole country. But usually the most he would say was that ‘the line was too far to the left’ and that he had placed too much trust in those around him: ‘They made a mess of everything . . . They were the real traitors.’

  The basic strategy — to win power by forging an alliance of intellectuals and poor peasants — was unaltered. If he now eschewed political violence, it was not because he thought it morally wrong but because, at a time when the first priority was to build popular support, it was inopportune.

  In the Khmer Rouge guerrilla camps, whether at the border or in the interior, the military hierarchy continued to impose a totalitarian regime of unparalleled severity. The same methods that had been used in the past to indoctrinate Party members — isolation from the outside world; rigid compartmentalisation between units; restrictions on movement; the use of hunger as a punishment and food as an incentive; the subordination of the individual to the collective; and the renunciation of personal advantage — were now applied to the training of an army imbued, as Khieu Samphân put it, with ‘razor-sharp patriotism’ and ‘an absolute determination to make any sacrifice for the nation’.

  Even in its new, more moderate guise, the movement remained the personal despotism of one man, whose views could not be challenged and whose hold over his followers was undiminished by defeat. It was less awful than before, but the change was relative: in place of terror, Pol ruled by fear.

  The negotiations to form a coalition government dragged on for nine more months. Periodically, China knocked heads together, insisting that the new arrangements, whatever form they took, ‘must not weaken the anti-Vietnamese forces who are fighting on the front line’ (in other words, the Khmers Rouges), and threatening to block arms deliveries to the other two movements if they refused to compromise. Finally, in Kuala Lumpur on June 22 1982, the three parties announced the formation of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea with Sihanouk as Head of State, Son Sann, Prime Minister, and Khieu Samphân, Vice-Premier with responsibility for foreign affairs — which, in a government without domestic jurisdiction, was the only post that mattered.

  The creation of the CGDK, as it was known, brought a number of changes.

  Ieng Sary was sidelined, publicly at first but also gradually in the movement’s private councils. His last major appearance had been at the UN General Assembly in the autumn of 1981. In December, he lost his post on the Standing Committee, which ceased to exist when the Party was dissolved. Thereafter, being neither a member of the Military Directorate nor of the new coalition government, he had no official role. He claimed later that he had been excluded because he advocated a political settlement to end the conflict rather than a purely military solution, but like many of his statements that appears to have been untrue. He was probably pushed aside because Sihanouk detested him, and because his name was too closely linked abroad with the horrors perpetrated during the Khmers Rouges’ years in power. He continued to participate in leadership meetings, but his influence waned.

  Base 808, the former Khmer Rouge seat of government, was closed, and over the next two years, most of the civilian ministers who had worked there, including Thiounn Mumm and his brother, Chum, went into exile in China or France. Sary himself moved to the Thai village of Tamoun, near Soy Dao, the ‘Mountain of Stars’, twenty miles north of Chanthaburi, where he was in charge of an ultra-secret base called D-25, which now replaced the old facilities at Kamrieng as a permanent transshipment point for all Chinese military aid sent through Thailand to the Khmers Rouges.

  Sihanouk, meanwhile, after three years waiting in the wings, returned to centre stage in his new role as Head of State.

  Thailand and the other non-communist South-East Asian states welcomed it as a first step towards a negotiated end to the conflict. China had mixed feelings. Sihanouk was not as easy to deal with as he had been in the early 1970s. Having allied himself once with the Khmers Rouges, only to be marginalised after their victory, he was not going to be burned a second time. His interests coincided with those of the Khmers Rouges to the extent that both wished to force Vietnam to withdraw its troops from Cambodia. But it was clear to Beijing that the moment a political settlement loomed, they would have very different agendas.

  At this stage, moreover, China did not want peace. Nor did the Uni
ted States.

  The object was not to end the war against Vietnam, but to prolong it. Deng had told the Japanese Prime Minister, Masayoshi Ohira, early on in the conflict: ‘It is wise for China to force the Vietnamese to stay in Cambodia because that way they will suffer more and more.’ His Vice-Foreign Minister, Han Nianlong, urged that nothing be done ‘to lighten [the Russians’] burden’. Only when that burden became intolerable and Moscow could no longer bear the cost of supporting Vietnam, he said, would a political solution become possible. Nor did the Chinese have any illusions about how long this would take. In the summer of 1983, they told Sihanouk that the guerrillas would need to go on fighting ‘for another four or five years’. The implication — that peace talks might begin in 1987 or 1988 — would prove remarkably accurate.

  The US administration was less frank, and less than truthful. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Adviser, acknowledged: ‘I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot . . . Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.’ It was not very brave.

  At the UN General Assembly, the Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, and his aides ostentatiously walked out when the Khmer Rouge delegate stood up to speak. But while they held their noses in public, they worked overtime in private to canvass diplomatic support to enable the Khmers Rouges to keep their UN seat. China could never have persuaded right-wing African countries like Kenya and Malawi to vote for Pol Pot, still less to receive a Khmer Rouge Ambassador. The United States could and did. ‘All you [Americans] had to do was to let Pol Pot die,’ Prince Sihanouk said later. ‘[In 1979] Pol Pot was dying, but you brought him back to life . . . and sent him into battle to kill and kill and kill . . . But now you say the Khmers Rouges are unacceptable. What hypocrisy! What hypocrisy!’ For America, as for China, the aim was to make Vietnam bleed and through Vietnam’s pain to weaken its patron, Russia. The ‘proxy war’ Brzezinski had spoken of had finally become a reality, and it was partly of America’s making.