Pol Pot (120 page)

The composition of the GRUNC, taking into account later reshuffles, was as follows (with the names of ministers living in the maquis in italics):

Prime Minister: Penn Nouth

Vice-Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office: Keat Chhon

â

Foreign Minister: Sarin Chhak

Minister of Economy and Finance: Thiounn Mumm

Minister for Special Missions: Chau Seng

Minister of Co-ordination: Thiounn Prasith

Minister of Education and Youth: Chan Yourann

Minister for Armament: General Duong Sam Ol

Minister of Justice: Chea San

(later Prince Norodom Phurissara)

Minister of Rites and Religious Affairs: Chey Chum

Minister of Public Works: Huot Sambath

Minister of Public Health: Ngo Hou

Phurissara resigned as Lon Nol’s Foreign Minister a few days after the coup. He fled with his wife to the maquis in January 1972.

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In interviews with former Khmers Rouges, I was frequently made aware by a change of tone or expression that I had overstepped the bounds of what was deemed to be acceptable questioning, and that the answer given would then be a transparent fiction. This was even more true of Western-educated leaders like Khieu Samphân than of unlettered peasants. There was no embarrassment about the lie: it was the answer such a question merited. Cambodian officials under Sihanouk, Lon Nol, Pol Pot and Hun Sen — not to mention the leaders themselves — have all, in their different ways, been insouciant of truth, viewing it as a practical, not a moral commodity. In communist Vietnam and China, the approach is different. Lying is equally common (as indeed it is in Europe and America) but efforts are made to cloak the deception in verisimilitude, and political statements, even when riddled with distortions and omissions, usually have some basis in fact. In Cambodia, they are often pure invention.

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William Shawcross, in

has argued the contrary case, writing eloquently of ‘peasant hoys and girls, clad in black, moving slowly through the mud, half-crazed with terror as fighter bombers tore down at them by day, and night after night whole seas of 750-pound bombs smashed all around’. He noted that Khmer Rouge casualties were often well above levels where, in orthodox military doctrine, units suffer ‘irreversible psychological damage’, and quoted Zhou Enlai as saying that the longer the war continued, ‘the more extreme and harsh will be the final victory’. All that is certainly true. However, policy was made not by the peasants but by Pol and the other members of the CPK Standing Committee, men who did not experience the bombing at first hand. The pitiless absolutism of Khmer Rouge rule after 1975 had other causes.

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Those present were: Pol, Nuon Chea, So Phim, Vorn Vet, Mok, Prasith, Ruos Nhim (all members of the previous CC); Chou Chet and Sê, from the South-West; Kong Sophal and Tol, the chief of the Mount Veay Chap base in the North-West; So Phim’s deputy, Phuong, and two other Eastern Zone leaders — Sok Knaol and Siet Chhê; Vorn Vet’s deputy in the Special Zone, Cheng On; Koy Thuon, Ke Pauk and Doeun from the Northern Zone; Hang, who had succeeded Vorn as underground Party chief in Phnom Penh; Va and Hâng, from Preah Vihear; Yem [Sin Son], later Khmer Rouge Ambassador to Pyongyang, and three others from Kratie; Khieu Ponnary, in her capacity as President of the Women’s League of Democratic Kampuchea; and Pang, to assure the secretariat. Of the five other CC members elected in 1963, Mang had died; Ieng Sary and Son Ngoc Minh were in Hanoi; and Thang Si and Son Sen, together with the other North-Eastern Zone leaders, were instructed to stay at their bases, presumably because it was felt they had already been sufficiently briefed before Pol’s departure from Ratanakiri.

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In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge movement consisted of four different categories of people: non-Party elements; ‘core elements’ (those awaiting admission to the Youth League or, more rarely, directly to the Party); Youth League members; and Party members. The last two groups were subdivided into candidate and full rights members.

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There is a close precedent in China, where the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 created a climate of patriotic exaltation which permitted a marked acceleration in the dispossession of the landlords, the creation of agricultural co-operatives, the elimination of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and the nationalisation of commerce and industry. As a result, social and economic changes which had been expected to take twenty years were completed in five.

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Suong Sikoeun has said that when he worked at the Democratic Kampuchea Foreign Ministry after 1975, he found repeated errors in Pol’s speeches and other documents. But when he proposed a correction, ‘What do you think I was told? That I was casting doubt on the abilities of the leadership!’ After that he kept quiet.

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According to Pol’s aide-de-camp, Phi Phuon: ‘After the Paris peace accords, all the former Khmer Viet Minh had problems . . . Some of them disappeared altogether; others were dismissed from their posts; still others had their responsibilities reduced.’ It appears that the killing of the returnees began in earnest in the autumn of 1974, but it was not systematic: some of those at Chhlong survived until at least mid-1976 and possibly as late as mid-1978. Among those who were left at liberty, but with diminished responsibilities, were Yun Soeun, who had been with Pol at Krâbao in 1954; Mey Pho, one of the group of Young Turks who had taken Sihanouk prisoner in the abortive coup of August 1945; and a young man who became Ieng Sary’s private secretary and managed to hold the post throughout the time the Khmers Rouges were in power. One of the unresolved mysteries of the period is what happened to Rath Samoeun, Sary’s close friend and co-founder of the Cercle Marxiste. He was last seen in Hanoi in mid-1970 by Thiounn Mumm’s younger brother, Prasith. Sary has claimed that he was killed ‘immediately after returning to Cambodia’. However, in 1976 he was still referred to as a Party ‘comrade’, which would not have been the case had he been liquidated. It seems most probable that, like Uch Ven and Pok Deuskomar, he died from illness while in the ‘liberated zone’.

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This was amply demonstrated by the accuracy of a contemporary Interior Ministry report on Thion’s visit: ‘Agent 044 reported that in early January 1972, a Frenchman, name unknown, thin and tall with a pointed nose, red hair and sandals, left Phnom Penh on National Road 5 for Thpong district of Kompong Speu in enemy-controlled territory in the South-West. When he reached [their area], he presented the enemy with a pistol. On January 13 1972, the Frenchman was seen taking part in a celebratory meeting at Wat Krang Phngea, Sangkat Veal Pun, in Oudong district of Kompong Speu. He carried a notebook and a bag full of documents. The source stressed that those Khmers [Rouges] strictly banned the Frenchman from seeing any Vietnamese.’ In December 2001, the village chief of Ra Smach, who had escorted Thion thirty years earlier, confirmed that they had indeed been under instructions to prevent their visitor seeing any sign of the Vietnamese presence.

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The quotation may be apocryphal. Certainly, in the light of later events, it reads a little too pat. However it is frequently cited in Khmer Rouge circles, and the fact that, from 1974 onwards, Hou Yuon had disputes with Pol over policy is widely attested.

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So did Ke Pauk. His Northern Zone troops regularly executed villagers after US bombing raids, claiming they must be CIA spies who had called in enemy air strikes.

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It is frequently claimed that the Khmers Rouges purchased the floating mines from China with the promise of rubber exports from the formerly French-owned estates in eastern Cambodia whose nationalisation Sihanouk had announced the previous autumn. This is untrue. All Chinese military assistance to Cambodia, both before and after 1975, was made in the form of grants, as was China’s far greater military aid to Vietnam during a quarter of a century of Indochinese wars.

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The

one certainty

is that the bank was

deliberately blown up by the new regime itself. Not only were other, more visible symbols of capitalism, like the Central Market, left untouched, but in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge leadership had every intention of issuing currency and establishing a banking system of its own. A month later, when the preparatory team started work, it was based in an undamaged area of the bank premises.

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The National Library, for instance, was protected throughout the period the Khmers Rouges were in power. The pulping of its collections did not occur until 1979, when the government of Heng Samrin ordered it as a stopgap measure at a time of an acute shortage of paper.

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Mao quoted Kumârajîva, as saying: ‘If you copy everything I do, it will be a fatal mistake’. He did not explain the story behind it, which recounts that the Buddhist master had numerous mistresses. When his disciples started to follow his example, Kumârajîva filled his alms bowl with sharp iron needles and, showing it to them, said: ‘He who wants to do as I do must first eat this; then he will be able to keep women.’ He took a spoonful of needles and ate them as easily as rice. The disciples were mortified and mended their ways.

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It is commonly asserted that Hou Yuon was executed as an opponent of the regime in August 1975. This appears to be untrue. According to Yuon’s former bodyguard, Pol sent a Jarai messenger to escort him back to Phnom Penh. Either the Jarai mistook Yuon’s gesture and thought he was reaching for his pistol, or, fearing that he was about to be arrested, Yuon attempted to commit suicide, but in any case the man shot him dead. While the details remain obscure, it seems certain that his death was accidental. It may also have taken place a year later than is generally believed: Ping Sây says he was told that Yuon was still at Stung Trang in August 1976. Thereafter, Khmer Rouge cadres often referred to him as a traitor. But by late 1978 that charge was no longer heard; it was officially claimed that he had died ‘while on a mission for the Party’; and Pol himself, in conversations with aides, described him as a ‘comrade’, indicating that he was not suspected of treachery

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Three tons of paddy is equivalent to just under two tons of milled rice. In this book, all references are to unmilled rice, unless specifically stated otherwise.

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Despite their reputation for iconoclasm, the Khmers Rouges preserved the most important Cambodian historical monuments. The Buddha’s Tooth Stupa in front of the Phnom Penh railway station survived Khmer Rouge rule unscathed, as did the Royal Palace and the National Museum. So did all the major Buddhist monasteries in Phnom Penh and in most provincial towns. So, too, did Angkor Wat and the other Angkorian sites. The French-trained Khmer conservationists were kept together and given special protection at a cooperative in Bakong, in Siem Reap province, evidently with the intention that their skills would be used again when economic conditions improved.

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Apart from Sihanouk and his immediate entourage, Thiounn Mumm appears to have been the one man who escaped this rule entirely. He never went to the maquis; nor did he do manual labour or live in a co-operative. In Sopheap and Suong Sikoeun were allowed to go directly to K-33 (the Information Ministry) and B-I respectively, but both had spent a year working at the FUNK radio station in Hanoi before returning to Phnom Penh in May 1975, and both were regarded as essential personnel to get the new administration running. For the same reason Ok Sakun, Thiounn Prasith, and possibly one or two others, spent only a few weeks at co-operatives before Ieng Sary recalled them to Phnom Penh.

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The term ‘illumination’ was used not only by the Cambodians but also by Vietnamese communists, whose vocabulary was likewise Buddhist-influenced. But whereas in Vietnam it was simply a metaphor, denoting understanding of Marxist-Leninist ideas, the Cambodians used it literally in its original Buddhist sense. It is not found in Chinese or Korean communist texts.

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The new government comprised:

Pol Pot

Prime Minister

Ieng Sary

Vice-Premier, Foreign Affairs.

Vom Vet

Vice-Premier, Economy

Son Sen

Vice-Premier, Defence

Keat Chhon

Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office

Hu Nim

Minister of Information

Khieu Thirith

Minister of Social Affairs

Yun Yat

Minister of Education and Culture

Thiounn Thioeunn

Minister of Health

Kang Chap

Minister of Justice

Toch Phoeun

Minister of Public Works

Non Suon

Minister of Agriculture

Cheng On

Minister of Industry

Doeun

Minister of Commerce

Mey Prang

Minister of Transport

Phuong

Minister for the Rubber Plantations

The last six cabinet members, while holding ministerial status, were officially described as Committee Chairmen and reported to Vice-Premier Vorn Vet. None of the four Sihanoukist ministers in the previous united front government — Penn Nouth, Norodom Phurissara, Sarin Chhak and Chey Chum — was reappointed. Nor were Hou Yuon (Interior Minister) or two Khmer Rouge vice-ministers, Tiv Ol and Chou Chet. Koy Thuon, who had been designated Commerce Minister, never took up the post. From May 1976, Doeun and Non Suon shared responsibility for his portfolio. Doeun became titular Minister later the same year.