by Philip Short
From this vantage point Pol watched events unfold in Phnom Penh. He did not much like what he saw.
Immediately after returning, Sihanouk went on the warpath. He told a news conference that he regarded Hun Sen as a son; that ‘without Vietnam we would all be dead’; and that the Khmer Rouge leaders should be put on trial. He then endorsed the claims of the State of Cambodia to be the country’s de facto government and proposed an alliance between FUNCINPEC, led by his son Prince Ranariddh, and Hun Sen’s PRPK, now renamed the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), which, like Pol’s own movement, claimed to have become an avid convert to pluralism, liberal democracy and the free market. None of this augured well for the neutral political environment’ envisaged by the Paris accords. Nor did the reception given to Khieu Samphân when he came to inaugurate the Khmer Rouge mission in Phnom Penh ten days later. A mob, organised by Hun Sen’s security police, broke into the building, forcing him to hide inside a wardrobe. His life was never in danger: men with walkie-talkies discreetly controlled the proceedings. But he was beaten and humiliated. Television pictures showed him, with blood streaming down his face, ‘protected’ by government soldiers, crawling into the back of an armoured personnel carrier which had been sent to ‘rescue’ him.
The incident had long-term repercussions. The other member of Pol’s new leadership team, Son Sen, who had arrived in the capital a week earlier, had apparently heard rumours of the impending demonstration. But no action had been taken. To Pol’s suspicious mind that raised questions about Sen’s loyalty. Soon afterwards, he reclaimed the authority he had devolved in the late 1980s and resumed direct control over Khmer Rouge decision-making.
It also offered a foretaste of Hun Sen’s ruthlessness. As the months passed, Pol would discover that his youthful adversary was not only as hardbitten and tough as himself, but hungrier for power.
At a meeting held in Pailin on December 13 to discuss these developments, Pol set out the movement’s strategy. It would continue to observe the provisions of the Paris accords, but in its own fashion. The 70 per cent of Khmer Rouge troops who were to be demobilised, along with the same proportion of the other factions’ forces, would remain on standby awaiting cantonment, but nearly 10,000 men would be passed off as civil police, entitled to keep their arms. Meanwhile the movement must redouble its efforts to ‘liberate’ the villages, replacing CPP headmen and local officials with pro-Khmer Rouge elements. As Pol well knew, this was a violation of what had been agreed. However, he could argue that Hun Sen’s government had also refused to disarm its police. It, too, used violence and intimidation to repress opponents in the countryside. In reality, neither side intended to honour the Paris accords to the letter. But Hun Sen had a major advantage: the support of Sihanouk. The Prince had experienced Pol’s rule once. He was determined to prevent him ever holding power again, even if it meant allying himself with a regime installed by the Vietnamese.
By February 1992, Pol had recognised the danger.
If the Khmers Rouges allowed themselves to become isolated, he warned his colleagues, the UN and the Western powers ‘will drag the other forces into joining with Phnom Penh. It will become an alliance of the West, Vietnam, Hun Sen, FUNCINPEC and Son Sann — and the Chinese, the Thais and [the other] South-East Asian nations will [have to] accept it, whether they like it or not.’ The answer, he decided, was to follow a two-pronged policy — a posture of cautious co-operation’, as one observer described it — designed on the one hand to prove to the outside world and the two other former resistance factions that the Party of Democratic Kampuchea would play the democratic game so long as the Phnom Penh government did the same, and on the other to show what would happen if the movement were backed into a corner. Accordingly, the movement’s troops committed innumerable ceasefire violations; it attempted forcibly to repatriate refugees from Thailand to territories under its control; and it was refractory in permitting access by UN military observers — while at the same time continuing to obey the rules just enough to make the UN believe that it wished to remain part of the peace process.
But then in June Khieu Samphân informed the Supreme National Council that Khmer Rouge troops would not disarm. The pretext was that Vietnamese forces had not completely withdrawn. The charge was untrue but impossible to disprove and politically rewarding. Over the past decade, with the Phnom Penh government’s encouragement, an estimated 400,000 Vietnamese settlers had come to Cambodia. They now formed a highly visible minority whose presence lent vicarious credibility to the idea that Vietnamese troops had remained behind in disguise.
In fact, the allegations of a Vietnamese presence were a red herring.
The real problem for the Khmers Rouges was the UN’s failure to control the Hun Sen administration. The head of the peace-keeping operation, Yasushi Akashi, acknowledged that the ‘neutral political environment’ required by the Paris agreement had not been achieved. This was partly due to the limitations imposed by the UN’s charter, which requires its troops to serve as ‘peace-keepers, not peace-enforcers’, and its civil servants to find ways round problems, not meet them head on. The result was that bureaucratic sleight of hand substituted for political choice. By the summer, Pol had begun to doubt whether, in such circumstances, even a modest place in the next government — in his eyes the one merit of the parliamentary process that the Paris Accords laid down — was still a realistic goal.
The decision not to disarm marked a fundamental change in Khmer Rouge strategy. From then on, the movement adopted a much more confrontational stance, putting pressure on the UN Transitional Authority to rein in the Phnom Penh government while at the same time, in total violation of the Paris accords, aggressively expanding the territory under its control. Future Khmer Rouge military co-operation, Akashi was told, would depend on the UN creating the ‘neutral political environment’ all sides claimed to want. Over the next nine months, matters went from bad to worse. The Khmers Rouges organised sporadic massacres of Vietnamese settlers, causing tens of thousands to flee in terror across the border. Political violence by Hun Sen’s CPP likewise continued. The peace-keepers were no better able to deal with the one than with the other.
In January 1993, Sihanouk retired in disgust to Beijing, declaring that he would have nothing further to do with the UN or the Phnom Penh authorities until the intimidation stopped. ‘None of the conditions for the election has been met,’ he said. ‘None!’ The UN’s insistence on going ahead was ‘a hideous comedy’.
The Khmers Rouges went through the motions of preparing to take part in the vote, announcing the formation of yet another new political body, the Cambodian National Union Party, to put up candidates. But their refusal to disarm made it seem increasingly unlikely that they would actually do so.
Pol confirmed his movement’s decision to boycott the election towards the end of March. A few days later he moved his headquarters from Pailin to Phnom Chhat (‘Umbrella Mountain’), a low hill on the Thai border, twenty miles north-east of Aranyaprathet, where Khieu Samphân soon joined him. In April, just as the election campaign was about to begin, the Khmer Rouge delegation withdrew melodramatically from Phnom Penh, claiming inadequate security. As the movement seemed poised for a return to illegality, the normally impassive Akashi warned angrily that it was taking ‘a dangerous step towards outlaw status . . . There should be no more sanctuaries for that party and no more chances.’
The Khmers Rouges now controlled about a fifth of Cambodia’s territory (but only 5 per cent of the population), in an easterly arc along the Thai border from the Cardamom Mountains to Preah Vihear. They had money: the cross-border trade in gems from Pailin and in tropical timber, cut by Thai companies — in disregard of a UN embargo — brought in tens of millions of dollars a year. China no longer supplied weaponry, but there were still large stocks in the warehouses, which had been moved from Soy Dao to the frontier area near Kamrieng, and whatever was lacking could be bought through the Thai army. Most important of all, the Thai government, whic
h like everyone else now expected Hun Sen’s party to win the election, bringing to power a pro-Vietnamese government in Phnom Penh, had decided its interests would best be served by having a Khmer Rouge buffer zone along the border. Son Sen established his headquarters at Oda, halfway between Pailin and Malay, while Nuon Chea took charge of the area around Samlaut. Together they controlled what was known as the Southern Front, while Pol and Mok were in command in the North.
In short, if the civil war were to resume, the Khmers Rouges had everything they needed in order to fight: arms, financial resources and the discreet support of a friendly foreign power.
When the election results were announced at the beginning of June 1993, however, these calculations were put in doubt. Contrary to expectations, Prince Ranariddh’s FUNCINPEC emerged the winner, with 58 seats in the 120-seat assembly to 51 for Hun Sen’s CPP Hun Sen refused to recognise the results, prompting ten days of feverish manoeuvring until Sihanouk imposed a Cambodian-style solution: the country would have not one Prime Minister but two. Ranariddh and Hun Sen would jointly head a coalition government in which each ministry would have twin incumbents.
That was not what the people of Cambodia had voted for. But the UN, having invested 2.8 billion dollars and sent 20,000 soldiers and civilian administrators to oversee the peace process, had no intention of imperilling its success by standing on principle. Hun Sen learnt a lesson he would never forget: that whenever he played fast and loose with the rules of democracy, the international community would sit on its hands and look the other way. Sihanouk was rewarded by the restoration of the monarchy with himself as King, which through all the vicissitudes of the previous quarter-century, had been his one constant and overriding goal.
The Khmers Rouges’ situation was almost equally bizarre.
Their representatives returned to Phnom Penh and talks were held on how they might re-enter the peace process. But at the same time, the new Cambodian National Army — now including former FUNCINPEC and Son Sann troops as well as Hun Sen’s forces — launched a military offensive to try to reoccupy the territories which the Khmers Rouges had seized since the Paris accords. Initially, it was highly successful. In August Phnom Chhat was overrun — sending Pol and Khieu Samphân scurrying into Thailand — and then, six months later, Anlong Veng and Pailin. But the bicephalous royal government was unable to hold on to these gains, and one after another they passed back into Khmer Rouge hands. By May 1994, Son Sen’s troops were in control of almost as much territory as before the offensive began. There was a stalemate. Neither side had the strength to do decisive damage to the other.
Having failed to solve the problem militarily, Hun Sen and Ranariddh tried political pressure. In June, the Khmers Rouges were ordered to close their mission in Phnom Penh. The following month, parliament unanimously passed legislation declaring them ‘outside the law’. The wheel had gone full circle. The insurrectionary movement Pol had launched in the 1960s had returned to the maquis from which it came.
Peace had never been helpful to the Khmer Rouge cause.
The three years during which they held power, from 1975 to 1978, were so ghastly that most Cambodians wanted nothing to do with them ever again. The three years after the Paris agreement, from 1991 to 1994, rotted the movement from within.
After a quarter of a century of warfare, the rank and file had had enough. ‘They wanted to be with their families, to raise their children and farm,’ one regimental commander remembered. Markets reopened, private agriculture resumed, the more go-ahead villagers bought saws and ox-carts and started logging for the Thais. Radio broadcasts from Phnom Penh brought a seductive whiff of debauchery and corruption. The draconian internal controls which had always been the movement’s strength began to crumble. The desertion rate, which had been running at about three hundred men a year in the 1980s, rose tenfold. Even the election boycott which Pol had decreed was honoured in the breach. In many areas, local Khmer Rouge commanders allowed villagers and even, in some cases, their own troops, to vote for FUNCINPEC. Pol’s long-time aide, Phi Phuon, reflected with some bitterness:
Most people at that time were against continuing to fight. The vast majority thought that the Paris accords were the last chance for Cambodia, and the decision not to take part in the elections shocked them. A lot of us had sent our families to our home villages, or had children studying in Thailand. Now we were told to bring them back, otherwise we would be considered traitors. How could Pol Pot make such a serious error of appreciation about the reality of the situation — about the way the people on our side really felt? . . . It was because anyone who disagreed with him was accused of being ideologically backward, or of falling under the influence of enemy propaganda. So everyone kept quiet.
That was not quite true. Pol was well aware of the popular mood. His own private secretary, Keo Yann, told him he felt that the struggle was over and he intended to stay and farm in Pailin. Pol allowed him to do so, a reaction that would have been unthinkable a few years before. But he did not change his mind about fighting. It was a decision that puzzled many of those around him. ‘He ought to have known that resuming armed struggle wouldn’t work,’ Long Nârin said later. ‘I don’t know why he did it. But he did.’
The next problem was how to reimpose wartime discipline. Pol’s answer was that everyone should once again take the poorest peasants as their model, as they had in the early 1970s. The old slogan of ‘independence-mastery’ was revived, and red flags, bearing a sickle but no hammer, were flown in Khmer Rouge villages. The aim of ‘peasantisation’, as it was called, was to bolster military morale. ‘If the soldiers saw that the villagers in the rear areas were getting rich by selling logs to Thailand, while they were risking their lives,’ a cadre explained, ‘they would lose heart. The rear had to support the front. It couldn’t be left loose.’
Tightening discipline in the rear, however, meant stopping cross-border trade. To that end, in the autumn of 1994, Pol issued a directive, signed with his personal code, ‘99’, ordering the confiscation of privately owned means of transport. Initially, ox-carts and lorries were targeted, because they could be used to take logs across the border. But soon afterwards private cars and motor-bikes were seized, too, and stored in makeshift entrepôts. In some areas, the new rules were enforced more strictly, in others less. On the surface, they were accepted. ‘What could people do?’ a cadre asked. ‘They didn’t have guns.’ But throughout the Khmer Rouge areas, there was deep-seated, sullen, peasant anger. The population had not wanted to resume fighting in the first place. Now, the first glimmer of prosperity after twenty years of privation had been brutally snuffed out. ‘The ox-carts were the peasants’ life,’ Long Nârin remembered. ‘And Pol Pot took them away.’
After the fall of Phnom Chhat, Pol moved to Anlong Veng. When that base, too, was overrun during the spring of 1994, he retreated to Kbal Ansoang, on the crest of the Dangrek Mountains, abutting the Thai border, eight miles further north.
It was an idyllic setting. Pol’s house stood on the edge of a cliff, a thousand feet above a perfectly flat plain that stretched away to the horizon in the south. It was built of brick, with ceramic tiles and bathroom fittings from Thailand; there was a terrace, where he sat in the evenings, with an iron balustrade, shaded by creepers, and orchids growing in coconut shells, hanging from the trees; and below, blasted out of the rock, a basement sealed with iron doors, where documents and weapons were stored. The interior was furnished simply with heavy tropical wood armchairs, in the French colonial style, and a chaise-longue made from rattan and bamboo.
Nearby stood a traditional Khmer wooden house for Tep Khunnal, a young engineer with a doctorate from Toulouse who had taken Keo Yann’s place as Pol’s secretary. Slightly further away were other dwellings: for Khieu Samphân, for Thiounn Thioeunn, the apolitical aristocrat who, alone of the Thiounn brothers, had remained faithful to the Khmer Rouge cause, and for four intellectuals — Chan Yourann, In Sopheap, Kor Bunheng and Mak Ben — who had been among
the leaders of the shortlived Cambodian National Union Party, formed for the elections. In July 1994 Pol had appointed them ministers in a fictive ‘government’ of the Khmer Rouge territories, which no one ever recognised and whose existence was quickly forgotten.
Just beyond the outer perimeter, protected by a minefield, stood an open-air meeting hall, with dormitories for visiting cadres. Pol conducted political seminars less often than in the past, but when he did so he was as convincing as ever. One participant remembered:
Every time we returned from a seminar, we felt full of gratitude and loyalty towards Pol Pot . . . He made a tremendous impression, especially on those who came for the first time. They always wanted to come back and study more . . . As a teacher, he was brilliant. He has a sense of humour and he’s warm-hearted towards you . . . He gives you confidence in yourself . . . He always left us feeling illuminated by his explanations and his vision . . . Even the other leaders felt he was the heart and soul of the movement . . . [We] worried that one day he would die and there would be no one to replace him.
In 1994, Pol was nearing seventy. Until the previous year, while K-18 remained open, he had been able to get follow-up treatment for his cancer from Thai doctors in Trat. At Kbal Ansoang, that was not possible. He also developed heart trouble. Thiounn Thioeunn diagnosed aortic stenosis, a congestive condition in which the aortic valve no longer functions properly. In the West, such patients are usually given open-heart surgery. But in Pol’s case, Thioeunn said, he had left it too long and it had become inoperable. Already at Trat he had sometimes required an oxygen cylinder in order to breathe. At Kbal Ansoang, he needed oxygen frequently and, the following year, suffered a minor stroke which impaired his vision and left him partly paralysed down his left side.