Pol Pot

by Philip Short

  As his illness worsened, he spent more time with his family, especially with his daughter, Sitha, who was then eight years old. He taught her to read and write Khmer and cooked her dishes that she liked. Like old men everywhere, he started to reminisce. In Sopheap remembered days when he would call them to a meeting and spend the afternoon regaling them with stories about his youth in Phnom Penh. Later he got Tep Khunnal to read to him extracts in Khmer translation from his biography, Brother Number One, by the American historian David Chandler. Shortly afterwards he began dictating his own version of his life, but the notebooks later disappeared. He drank whisky or cognac, when the Thais brought him a bottle, and spent hours listening to traditional Khmer music, which he had loved since learning to play as a child. ‘He appreciated the finer points,’ an aide remembered. ‘As he listened, he’d comment on the musicians’ technique.’ He also received newspapers and magazines sent in from Thailand, including, improbably, the French weekly Paris-Match. He told In Sopheap that it interested him because, when the political struggle resumed, the Khmers Rouges, too, would need to publish a glossy magazine promoting their cause. The real reasons are impossible to fathom. In Pol’s youth, Paris-Match had been widely read in Cambodia for its caricatures of Sihanouk, depicted as Saint-Exupéry’s character, the Little Prince. But one can only wonder what he made of the stories of philandering rock stars and film actresses, the intrigues of European royalty and the skulduggery of French politicians, that filled the magazine’s pages in the 1990s, as he presided from his mountain lair over the dwindling fortunes of the most radical revolutionary movement of modern times. As Ieng Sary once observed, ‘Pol Pot had a very complex character.’

  Age had not mellowed him, however, nor given him a moral sense extending beyond his own and his movement’s interests.

  In September 1994, the gentle old man who doted on his small daughter ordered the execution of three young backpackers — a Briton, a Frenchman and an Australian — who had been captured by Khmer Rouge forces in an attack on a train during the summer. There was no particular reason to have them killed. However, negotiations with the Royal Government had failed to elicit any offer which made it worth keeping them alive. Pol might have abandoned communism as a goal, but the line of demarcation between friends and enemies, between those who should be preserved and those whose lives had no value, was as absolute as ever.

  That winter, the fates began closing in. Their agent was Son Sen, the studious, bespectacled military commander who had spent the latter part of his career being alternately suspected by Pol of treason and groomed as his successor.

  Son Sen was particularly zealous in applying the ‘peasantisation’ policy. In Samphou Loun, a few miles south of Malay, where he had transferred his headquarters after the battles of the previous spring, communal eating was reimposed and private trade banned. On Sen’s instructions, Mam Nay, Deuch’s former deputy at the Tuol Sleng interrogation centre, established a prison to which recalcitrant peasants were taken for ‘re-education’, a term which soon acquired the same sinister connotation that it had had in the 1970s. Those who refused to mend their ways, about forty in all, were bludgeoned to death. So were a group of traders at Bavel, twenty miles south-west of Battambang, who ran an open-air market in the no-man’s-land between government and Khmer Rouge territory. Son Sen ordered their arrests as spies. Fifty-two people, including women and small children, were executed.

  Two of Son Sen’s principal subordinates, Y Chhean at Pailin and Sok Pheap in Malay, disapproved of these methods. In their own areas, they implemented the confiscation policy half-heartedly, and when Sen called meetings of the front commanders, they stayed away. Over the next year, relations between the three men became increasingly strained.

  Other factors exacerbated the tension. Pailin and Malay were the main centres for trade in gems and timber with Thailand. The local commanders were unwilling to give up their share of the proceeds. Then, in 1995, Hun Sen and Ranariddh set up a special military committee to make contact with potential Khmer Rouge turncoats. For a long time nothing happened. But in February 1996, a Khmer Rouge commander at Mount Aural defected with his men. Shortly afterwards Y Chhean and Sok Pheap travelled secretly to Chanthaburi for a meeting with the committee’s vice-chairman, Nhek Bunchhay of FUNCINPEC, and two senior CPP generals. They were told that if they changed sides they and their troops would be granted an amnesty, and they would be allowed to retain command of their areas. This was the same procedure that Sihanouk had employed half a century earlier, when Issarak defectors like Dap Chhuon and Puth Chhay were given commissions in the Royal Army and allowed to keep control of the districts where they had been based. Agreement was reached in principle, but no time limit was set. In the summer Chhean and Pheap attended another secret meeting at Chanthaburi, this time with Ieng Sary. Since the Paris accords, Sary’s eclipse had become total. He gave the plan his blessing.

  Matters came to a head in July 1996. Son Sen reported to Pol that Y Chhean was refusing to obey orders. Mok was sent to investigate.

  But Mok was not a conciliator. As one of Pol’s aides put it: ‘He went to put out the fire and he made it worse . . . Mok was good at messing things up. He just said what came into his head, cursing and blaming people. He was not a thoughtful man.’ Son Sen then sent troops to put down what the Khmer Rouge radio described as a rebellion by traitors. But by this stage it was hard enough to get the soldiers to fight Hun Sen’s forces; they had no interest in killing each other. The majority mutinied. On August 15 1996, it was announced that Ieng Sary, Y Chhean and Sok Pheap had severed their ties with the Khmers Rouges and formed a new political movement which would co-operate with the government. All the remaining bases along the southern part of the border, from Samlaut to Phnom Chhat, joined them. Sary received an amnesty from the King for ‘a good deed worth the lives of thousands of people’, and thereafter divided his time between Pailin, where he became unofficial satrap, and Phnom Penh. Some four thousand soldiers — nearly half the total Khmer Rouge troop strength — were integrated into the Royal Army.

  Ieng Sary’s defection was a body-blow from which the Khmers Rouges never recovered.

  By the end of the year they had also lost almost all their bases in the interior, which left them hemmed in to a narrow band of territory spread over a few hundred square miles of jungle along the country’s northern border. ‘We are like a fish in a trap,’ Pol told his aides. ‘We cannot last like this for very long.’

  The way forward, he concluded, was to make the transition from armed to parliamentary struggle that he had rejected three years earlier. But had he done so then, it would have been from a position of strength: in 1993, the movement was still intact, it had international support and Sihanouk and Hun Sen both paid lip-service to the idea that the Khmers Rouges should have a role in the nation’s political life. Now it would be from a position of weakness: the movement was outlawed. Its numbers were fast declining and the Thais, sensing the end approaching, had cut back their support. By this time it must have been clear to Pol that his refusal to implement the Paris accords had been a capital error. But whatever thoughts he had on that subject he kept to himself.

  Ieng Sary was denounced as a traitor and accused of having embezzled large amounts of Chinese aid. Nuon Chea and Son Sen were blamed for the loss of the southern bases, stripped of their responsibilities and assigned to what were known as the ‘Middle Houses’, an isolated cluster of dwellings half-way down the mountain, not under arrest but out of power. Mok retained his command. But he too was under a cloud. Having decided that the older generation had failed him, Pol now turned to more junior members of his dwindling entourage. At a mass meeting in February 1997, it was announced that two veteran division commanders, Saroeun and San, were to head a ‘Peasant Party’ which would operate in the rural areas, while Khieu Samphân and a group of younger intellectuals would form a ‘National Solidarity Party’ as the movement’s parliamentary face.

  It all smacked of desperati
on. Pol’s health was rapidly deteriorating. He needed oxygen every day, and attended meetings with tubes fixed to his nose. In Sopheap remembered him telling them, ‘We are at the crossing of a river. If I can get you to the other side, you can go on by yourselves.’

  Succour came from an unexpected quarter.

  The previous year, at about the time Y Chhean was preparing to talk to Nhek Bunchhay, FUNCINPEC had held a party congress at which Prince Ranariddh threatened to withdraw from the government unless his party was given a bigger share of power. Shortly afterwards, senior FUNCINPEC leaders met secretly in Kompong Som and decided to try to build a political alliance with three other small parties — one of which was led by Sam Sary’s son, Rainsy — and, more importantly, a military alliance with the Khmers Rouges.

  This was less far-fetched than it might sound. Ranariddh’s forces and the Khmers Rouges had been allies against the Phnom Penh government in the 1980s. What had been done once could be done again. However, news of the Kompong Som meeting reached Hun Sen, who warned Ranariddh that splitting the coalition would carry a high political price. To show that he meant business, in March 1997 he sent a group of bodyguards to break up an anti-government demonstration by members of Sam Rainsy’s party. They used hand-grenades — a method that successive Cambodian governments have favoured for dealing with political opponents since leu Koeuss’s assassination in 1950. Four were thrown into the crowd, killing fifteen people and wounding scores of others. Meanwhile Ranariddh’s efforts to put out feelers to the Khmers Rouges got off to a bad start when a helicopter carrying a FUNCINPEC negotiating team landed in the mountains above Anlong Veng, ostensibly for talks within the framework of the government campaign to promote defections, and the entire delegation was detained. It was later claimed that the Khmer Rouge commander who had authorised the landing had omitted to inform Pol Pot, who, suspecting betrayal, had sent in his own troops. The envoys were held in ‘tiger cages’, free-standing iron cells used as military prisons in the jungle. By the time they were freed five months later, only four of the fifteen were still alive.

  The two incidents illustrated the climate of extreme tension that had developed. To Hun Sen, all means were good to prevent a FUNCINPEC-Khmer Rouge alliance and, in the process, to humble Ranariddh. Pol wanted a deal with FUNCINPEC but feared that by negotiating he would encourage other leaders to follow Ieng Sary’s lead and seek a separate accommodation with Hun Sen. Only Ranariddh himself seemed oblivious to the dangers. His insouciance would cost him dear.

  On May 16 1997, a FUNCINPEC emissary travelled from Bangkok to meet Pol’s secretary, Tep Khunnal, at the border. Agreement was reached in principle for Khieu Samphân’s National Solidarity Party to join FUNCINPEC in a united front. On June 1, Samphân and Ranariddh met over lunch at the house of a Thai general in Prasa, twenty miles north of the border in Surin province, and confirmed the accord. Samphân said later that after this meeting, ‘I began to believe that what I had been waiting for was finally happening — the parliamentary road was becoming a reality’.

  At this point the Prince made a serious misjudgement. Without consulting Samphân, FUNCINPEC announced that, as part of the agreement, Pol Pot, Mok and Son Sen would go into exile. The aim was to present the accord to Cambodians not as an electoral manoeuvre but as a statesmanlike effort to end the insurgency by bringing Khmer Rouge ‘moderates’ into the fold while banishing those viewed as hardliners. Indeed, Ranariddh was angling for something even better than banishment. With his blessing, Nhek Bunchhay had been negotiating with the US military attaché in Bangkok. As he explained,

  the plan was to seize Pol Pot and bring him to our base at Tatum, which is on the Thai-Cambodian border about twelve miles west of Anlong Veng. The US would send a helicopter from a naval ship in the Gulf of Thailand and fly him back to the ship. A unit of my troops actually set out from Tatum, but to reach the area where Pol Pot was, they had to travel through Thai territory and as soon as they crossed the border Thai units pushed them back. I had arranged things with the Thai military on the border and they were prepared to cooperate. But then a senior commander — one of Chaovalit’s men — arrived from Bangkok by helicopter and vetoed the idea. So they wouldn’t let our troops come across. But it was close: we nearly succeeded.

  There is no reason to believe that Pol ever got wind of the plot. But the talk of enforced exile evidently troubled him. On June 7, the Khmer Rouge radio formally denied that any negotiations had ever taken place. Two days later, Sihanouk issued a statement, ruling out pardons for Pol Pot and Mok but not for Son Sen. The latter was still in disgrace for his part in the loss of Pailin and Malay. His position had not been helped by the defection of two of his brothers, Nikân and Son Chhum, the former Khmer Rouge Ambassador to North Korea. The combination of events reawakened in Pol’s mind his old suspicions about Sen’s loyalty. Sihanouk’s remarks — making it appear that Sen was in a different category to the others — were the final straw.

  At about midnight Pol summoned his division commander, Saroeun, informed him that Son Sen and his wife were traitors and pronounced the fateful words which over the years had signalled the liquidation of so many of his associates: ‘I would like you to take care of it.’ In the early hours of the morning, In Sopheap heard the sound of distant gunfire. Son Sen, Yun Yat, and thirteen other family members and aides, including a five-year-old grandchild, were shot to death in the ‘Middle Houses’ by Saroeun’s troops. Pol later told an interviewer that he had given orders Only for Son Sen and his wife to be killed’, as though those killings were acceptable; the others, he said, were ‘a mistake’.

  It was a murder too far. Khieu Samphân dutifully endorsed it. Nuon Chea kept silent. But Mok felt that if Son Sen could be killed, no one was safe.

  On June 11, he rallied his troops at the district centre of Anlong Veng, telling them that Pol Pot had betrayed their movement and that his tyranny must end. Twenty-four hours later, the vanguard of Mok’s forces reached Kbal Ansoang. They met virtually no resistance. That afternoon Pol, his wife, eleven-year-old daughter and another child left on foot with twenty bodyguards along a dirt track leading eastward along the crest of the mountains towards the ancient temple complex of Preah Vihear. Pol was in no state to walk and the bodyguards had to carry him on their backs. In Sopheap remembered their flight as ‘a total shambles. It wasn’t organised—it was chaos.’

  They were tracked by Thai air-force L-19 spotter planes. Two or three days later, probably on June 15, several of the bodyguards were detained by Thai troops when they crossed the border to get water. They were found to be carrying rucksacks containing several hundred thousand dollars in cash. When Pol himself was eventually located, he was being carried in a hammock, slung from a bamboo pole. In Sopheap remembered that next morning he met Saroeun’s deputy, San. ‘Elder Brother,’ San said to him, ‘Our movement is finished now, isn’t it?’ Sopheap could not bring himself to answer, but they both knew he was right.

  In the event, the death throes of the Khmers Rouges dragged on for almost two more years. Pol was placed under house arrest in a small cottage near the ‘Middle Houses’ where Son Sen had died. Khieu Samphân, Nuon Chea and the ‘ministers’ in Pol’s imaginary government rallied to Mok’s support. The talks with Ranariddh continued and on July 3, Khunnal and Bunchhay initialled an agreement, which the Prince and Khieu Samphân were to sign three days later, formally integrating what was left of the movement into Ranariddh’s new united front.

  But it was not to be. On July 5 1997, Hun Sen staged a military coup, summarily executing dozens of FUNCINPEC officials, including two ministers, arresting hundreds of others and driving Ranariddh into exile. His action nullified the Paris peace accords and destroyed what remained of the UN’s multi-billion-dollar effort to impose ‘democracy’ on Cambodia. The West looked away in embarrassment and accepted the fait accompli.

  At the end of July Pol and the three Khmer Rouge commanders who had remained loyal to him, Saroeun, San and Khon, were brough
t before a mass meeting near the Thai border crossing at Sang’nam, half a mile from the ‘Middle Houses’, at which the movement’s new leadership solemnly proclaimed its attachment to liberal democratic values and vilified Pol for all the horrors committed during his time in power. The American journalist Nate Thayer, who was invited to film the proceedings as proof of the Khmers Rouges’ change of heart, found the atmosphere very odd:

  [He sat] in a simple wooden chair, grasping a long bamboo cane and a rattan fan . . . an anguished old man, frail eyes struggling to focus on no one, watching his life’s vision crumble in utter, final defeat . . . Pol Pot seemed often close to tears, [while] the three [detained] commanders, in contrast . . . had menacing, almost arrogant expressions, staring coldly and directly in the eyes of . . . the speakers and members of the crowd. They showed no fear . . . The crowds, though robotic, appeared to be both entertained and awestruck by the event, [but many of] those who had overthrown Pol Pot [were] deferential . . . [They] spoke in almost gentle, respectful terms about their deposed leader. . . [When he left], some people bowed . . . as if to royalty.

  Pol was ‘sentenced’ to life imprisonment. The three commanders were executed.

  Three months later, Mok arranged for Thayer to return to interview Pol. It was his first meeting with a foreign journalist for fourteen years.

  Thayer found him slowly dying, but ‘chillingly unrepentant’. He had nothing to apologise for, he said. ‘My conscience is clear . . . I’m old and ill . . . My life is over politically and personally . . . The Khmers have a saying about old age, illness and death. Now only death remains, and I don’t know the date. The following spring, Mok presented him to two other journalists, apparently to prove that he was still alive and available as a bargaining chip.