For the Sake of All Living Things (2 page)

He seemed blind to the dynamic changes surrounding him. From 1945 to 1968 the population doubled. Half of all Cambodians were under fifteen years of age. In the six years 1962 to 1968, the population of the core areas around the major cities increased by 30 to 50 percent. Phnom Penh grew from 394,000 in 1962 to nearly 550,000 in 1968. The move to urban centers was coupled with the establishment of a large secular block which began to shed its Buddhism and its belief in the divinity of the monarch.

Outside the capital, the underlying feudal structure of barons, warlords and powerful landowners severely hampered the development of a modern state, and Sihanouk’s monarchy did little to lessen the power of that traditionally corrupt class. His control of the national government and his influence over the regional barons was nearly absolute, but he was a man of contradictions. He pressed for universal primary education and encouraged secondary and university study. If the nation were to grow, he believed, it would need an educated class. Yet he was afraid that those with education would become prominent and powerful, potential enemies. Sihanouk and the ruling class undercut the institutions and blocked graduates from gaining employment, thus rendering them powerless. By 1968, protest and criticism were being dealt with by the jailing of teachers and students without charges being filed and without families being notified. These and other human rights violations were rampant.

Sihanouk also controlled the national “Buddhist-oriented system of voluntary contributions”—that is, taxes. To earn merit and achieve a better station in the next life, a Buddhist must be charitable. Sihanouk argued that because the rich were all devout Buddhists their contributions would support the poor and the state. In reality, the rich gave little to the poor and almost nothing to the state. The merchant or middle class, though taxed, was tiny, and state income from it amounted to little. This left only farmers to support the state, and they were heavily taxed, even though farmers as a percentage of the population had shrunk from nearly 80 percent to about 50 percent. Payment from them was usually in rice, which the government sold on the export market. By 1966, two thirds of the peasants were burdened by indebtedness, loans which carried interest rates of 12 percent
per month.
The new population pressures, the tax-caused indebtedness and the feudal order combined to create unstable land tenure conditions. In 1950, only one in twenty-five Khmer farmers rented his land. By 1968, the figure was one in five.

Without broad-based taxes the government had no capital with which to modernize the state, to improve or maintain the transportation and telephone systems or to raise, equip and train a viable national army. Cambodia, from 1954, was an ever-increasing low-pressure area—a power vacuum—a nation unable to ensure domestic tranquility, much less the integrity of its borders.

ELEMENTS, ARMIES AND FACTIONS

By 1968 this power vacuum had attracted, nourished or allowed the imposition of seven nongovernmental forces with seven different political agendas, each, at times, set against Sihanouk’s poorly equipped Royal Cambodian Army.

Not yet on Khmer soil but of influence were two major forces: the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Viet Nam) and the Americans with assorted allies, including those from the Republic of Korea and Australia. In the northeast border region of the highlands and Srepok Forest (from the Mekong River east to the crest of the Annam Cordillera) was the Mountaineer organization FULRO (French acronym for the United Front of the Oppressed Races) struggling to maintain the autonomy of their region, the old Crown Dominion Lands, from Viet Namese and Khmers, from Communists and non-Communists.

There were four major Communist factions operating in Cambodia in the late 1960s—the Viet Cong (indigenous South Viet Namese rebels), the North Viet Namese, the Khmer Viet Minh, and the Khmer Krahom. The Viet Cong operated from bases along the border and concentrated their efforts on their war with the ARVN and the Americans in South Viet Nam. This was not so for the North Viet Namese Army (NVA). By 1968 the NVA, by far the strongest force in Cambodia, had transformed the Northeast—Ratanakiri, Mondolkiri and portions of Stung Treng and Kratie provinces—into their own uncontested base area. In a different manner, they also controlled large portions of the South and Southeast. There they were entrenched—through bribery, through corruption, through threat of force and through assassination—in every area along the Sihanouk Trail from Kompong Som (Sihanoukville) northward to Phnom Penh and eastward, along coastal Highway 3 through Bokor and Kampot, to the border regions. Indeed, in many of the villages in Svay Rieng, Prey Veng, Kandal, Kompong Speu, Takeo and Kampot provinces, the North Viet Namese maintained at least a parallel governing administration to that of Sihanouk’s government. In portions of the southeastern provinces, especially along the border, they controlled the economy so completely they printed their own currency and forced local inhabitants to use it instead of the Cambodian riel. In addition, the NVA had established a front headquarters just outside Angkor Wat in Siem Reap Province in the Northwest.

THE KHMER COMMUNISTS AND NORODOM SIHANOUK

The two Cambodian Communist factions, the Khmer Krahom (KK) and the Khmer Viet Minh (KVM), trace their lineage back to common cadre trained by Ho Chi Minh between 1925 and 1930 at the Hoang Pho Military Academy in Canton, China. In the early 1940s the forerunners of these movements were functionally operating as anti-Sihanouk, anti-French organizations. In 1943 these movements proclaimed an end to the monarchy and, fearing retaliation, disbanded. Some rebels remained in the wilds of Cambodia, others went into exile in China.

The term
krahom
was never picked up by the ethnocentric free-world press and seldom used by Allied military intelligence. But the distinction between the two factions is important. Without an understanding of the differences, one cannot understand what took place in Cambodia. Those rebels who stayed in the Cambodian wilderness established the Krahom.
Krahom
is Khmer for “red,” a designation used long before Sihanouk gave all insurgents the monolithic label “Khmer Rouge.” It was the Khmer Krahom, Pol Pot’s faction, which came to power in 1975.

In 1947, more than a year after France granted internal autonomy to Cambodia, Ho Chi Minh tapped the externally exiled cadre to establish a second front for his revolution.

This marked the birth and became the core of the KVM. In the 1960s and 1970s, the KVM, sometimes called the Khmer Hanoi, was commanded by Le Duc Anh, a North Viet Namese politburo member and head of Hanoi’s Central Office for Kampuchean Affairs (COKA).

The internally based Krahom necessarily wrapped itself in a tighter cloak of secrecy than did the externally based KVM. Also, the KK, untainted by the Viet Namese, attracted the Paris-educated Marxist extremists and the supernationalists.

From 1954 to 1968 Sihanouk’s Royal Government
selectively
increased its harassment of the internal Communists, the KK, while pandering to the sponsors, the NVA, of the KVM—a fact that bred Krahom resentment toward the KVM.

Independence, in 1953, was a severe political setback for the Communists though the event had little military effect on the small bands of armed guerrillas. During the early 1950s, the exiled KVM fell more and more under the control of Hanoi, while the Krahom, under the covert guidance of Communist China, grew steadily in number and evolved ideologically. Saloth Sar, using the name Pol Pot, was among the leaders of the Krahom. He established relations with and became a disciple of Mao Zedong at the time when Mao was formulating the ideas that led to the Great Leap Forward, a major social experiment of 1958 to 1960.

During those years, Sihanouk, attempting to walk a tightrope between all the internal and external elements, squandered much of the goodwill of his own people. Sihanouk feared Ho Chi Minh and North Viet Namese hegemony. At Geneva in July 1954, the North Viet Namese had attempted to have a KVM area designated in northeastern Cambodia—patterned on the Pathet Lao zone they were able to secure in Laos. This amounted to an attempt to have Cambodia partitioned into Communist and non-Communist halves, like Viet Nam.

After the Geneva Agreements of 1954 Ho Chi Minh ordered the fledgling Cambodia-based KVM to maintain their jungle hideouts and to form an infrastructure that would eventually carry on
his
Indochinese revolution. At this time he also ordered these rebels to conscript and bring to Hanoi as many as 10,000 Mountaineer and Khmer boys to be trained as teachers, political agents and medical technicians. Hanoi strategists had determined very early, as NVA chief General Vo Nguyen Giap stated, “To seize and control the highlands is to solve the whole problem of South Viet Nam.”

It was this perception which led the North Viet Namese to establish sanctuaries and bases—at whatever cost to the mountain peoples—on the Cambodian side of the border.

Over the years there was a growing animosity between the KK and KVM, yet both benefited from the established bases and the protection of Viet Namese Communist armies. Though an overt spirit of cooperation existed, each sought advantage over the others. The Royal Cambodian Army had 30,000 to 35,000 troops—11,000 in combat units and the remainder in public works detachments doing road repair and like jobs. While rebel factions were building their military forces, Sihanouk, who feared a strong army would seize power and discard him, kept the Royal Army weak.

Western historians have referred to the insurgent forces in Cambodia in 1968, particularly the KK, as insignificant. The Krahom, Pol Pot’s group, had an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 regular fighters plus a large contingent (Pol Pot claimed 50,000, though reality would probably be closer to 10,000) of irregular guerrillas and urban spies. The KVM had between 4,000 and 12,000 soldiers and cadre trained and stationed in North Viet Nam. The Viet Cong (VC), for whom figures vary drastically, had perhaps 20,000. The North Viet Namese, according to Royal Cambodian Government intelligence estimates, had 40,000 soldiers on Khmer territory. Thus the Khmer Communist movements, by 1968, had 8,000 to 17,000 combat troops to attack a Royal Cambodian Army, top-heavy with rear-echelon soldiers. Plus, the Khmer Communists had the backing of at least 60,000 Viet Namese Communist troops. This would be the equivalent of an insurgent force in the United States of 127,000 armed and organized troops, with a well-equipped reserve force in Canada of perhaps 254,000 political and combat cadres, plus an allied hostile force, stretching from Texas to California along the Mexican border, of 1.7 million troops. That can hardly be called insignificant. These figures are from May 1968, ten months before secret U.S. bombings began. Obviously, neither the KK nor the KVM was born out of the inferno that U.S. bombing created.

REGIONAL WAR—THE AMERICAN PRESENCE

To see the war in Southeast Asia as having occurred in South Viet Nam or Cambodia or North Viet Nam or Laos leads to conclusions which are necessarily untrue. To see the war in Cambodia as having spilled out of South Viet Nam is equally erroneous.

In January 1959 Hanoi directed its army to establish operation bases at Tay Ninh on the Cambodian border and in the Central Highlands east of Ratanakiri Province. By May large-scale infiltration forces were tramping out the Ho Chi Minh Trail in eastern Cambodia. By August 1960, NVA assassination teams were killing 100 to 200 local officials in South Viet Nam each month. The figure rose to between 300 and 350 each month in 1961 and to 1,000 each month in 1962. That element of the war also spilled onto Khmer territory.

1962 marked the beginning of the full-scale NVA buildup
on Cambodian territory.
This early heavy buildup was characterized by the bribing of local officials, local and national military leaders,
and
the royal family. Sihanouk, who, like Diem in South Viet Nam, would stand for no internal opposition, was not only acquiescent to Hanoi, but clearly accepted them as partners. With that acceptance, however, came the de facto forfeiture of Cambodian territory and the lessening of control over the population in areas where the Royal Cambodian Army continued to maintain a presence.

Relations between the United States and Cambodia deteriorated throughout the 1950s. In 1959, out of Bangkok, Thailand, a right-wing coup attempt was foiled by Sihanouk’s secret police. The Prince implicated the American CIA, resulting in Sihanouk’s increased suspicion of the United States, Thailand and South Viet Nam. The Prince severed relations with Bangkok in 1961 and with South Viet Nam in 1963. In November 1963, after the death by assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, Sihanouk, declaring that the CIA was targeting him next, ordered the U.S. AID office in Phnom Penh closed. At that time, Cambodian defense minister Lon Nol and economic advisor Son Sann advised Sihanouk to proceed with caution and to allow the Americans to remain.

On 17 March 1964 the American National Security Council decided to allow the U.S. Air Force to retaliate against NVA/VC sanctuaries in Cambodia. This resulted in incidents, charges and countercharges between the two countries. On 10 April 1965 four RVNAF (Republic of Viet Nam Air Force) jets, strafed two Cambodian villages, leading Sihanouk to break diplomatic relations with the United States and to establish formal relations with North Viet Nam and with the National Liberation Front (NLF), the political arm of the Viet Cong.

Attempting to cover his flanks, Sihanouk, in October 1964, entered into a mutual declaration with Red China in which the Chinese vowed to work tirelessly to strengthen Sino-Khmer friendship. Sihanouk received a military assistance agreement and China’s affirmation of Cambodia’s territorial integrity (that is, lands in the Northeast that the North Viet Namese had claimed in 1954 for the KVM). In exchange, he gave his formal agreement to allow NVA/VC forces full access to and use of eastern Cambodia.

When U.S. bombing slowed traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, Zhou Enlai personally asked Sihanouk to allow materials to be landed at Sihanoukville (Kompong Som) and to be shipped overland to Communist forces along the border. This route became known as the Sihanouk Trail. A tacit side agreement gave one third of all arriving supplies to the Prince.