Pol Pot (3 page)

On April 17

1975, Saloth Sâr was at the CPK Central Committee’s Forward Headquarters, in a tract of thick jungle heavily scarred by B-52 bomb craters, near a wretched hamlet called Sdok Toel, south of Cambodia’s former royal capital, Oudong. Conditions were spartan. The cadres lived

in palmthatched bamboo huts, built on stilts and open to the elements on all four sides. Sâr’s hut stood beneath the spreading branches of a banyan tree, whose broad, dark-green leaves provided cover from aerial reconnaissance. He had no furniture and no bed, just a sleeping-mat on the floor. A second hut, thirty yards away, was occupied by Khieu Samphân.

That day, as the radio crackled away bringing news from newly ‘liberated’ Phnom Penh, they had taken their midday meal together. It was an understated, low-key occasion, ‘totally different from the way it would have been in the West’, Samphân recalled. ‘We avoided showing our feelings. There was no explosion of joy, or anything like that . . . I didn’t congratulate him. He said simply that it was a great victory which the Cambodian people had won alone. That was all.’ A bodyguard confirmed his account. ‘There was nothing special,’ he remembered. ‘It was just like any other day’

A few weeks later, diffidence would give way to apocalypse.

April 17 became the day when ‘two thousand years of Cambodian history ended’ and Cambodians began building a future ‘more glorious than Angkor’, whose kings, at the peak of their power in the thirteenth century, had ruled an empire stretching from Malaysia to Laos, from Vietnam to Burma. The new regime would reverse the long decline that had lasted ever since.

It would build

socialism ‘without reference to any existing model’, Ieng Sary told an interviewer. The CPK would lead Cambodia along roads where ‘no country in history has ever gone before’.

It would be impossible, as well as meaningless, to try to pinpoint the moment at which Cambodia’s descent into madness began. Like a medieval incubus, it grew from a coalition of differing causes and ideas. But one can fairly ask at what point the nightmare became irreversible. In the autumn of 1974, when the decision was taken to evacuate Phnom Penh? On April 19 1975 — two days after Phnom Penh fell — when Sâr first expounded to the Standing Committee the deceptively simple guideline for the new polity he wished to create: ‘Build and Defend!’? Or in January 1976, when the CPK Central Committee formally approved the abolition of money?

The most plausible answer is none of these, but a leadership work-conference whose secret was so closely held that for a quarter of a century afterwards no one outside the twenty or so participants knew that it had even taken place.

The Khmer Rouge leaders met in May 1975 at the Silver Pagoda, the holiest of the Buddhist shrines inside the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, at a time when the regime was still weighing its future course. A new currency had been printed, but should it be circulated or withheld? The capital had been

evacuated, but was it to be emptied permanently or just for a time? What role should be assigned to Prince Sihanouk, still in exile in Beijing? What policies should be adopted to meet the perceived threat from Cambodia’s larger, more powerful neighbours, Thailand and, above all, Vietnam?

The pagoda, built at the turn of the century for Sihanouk’s great-grandfather, King Norodom, is stronger on symbolism than antiquity. Its steeply raked roof, covered in green and gold tiles, with elaborately carved, gilded beams and soaring antler finials, epitomises Khmer tradition. But the so-called Emerald Buddha in its central hall was manufactured by the French glassmaker Lalique, and its stone base is overlaid with Italian marble. The incongruous-looking veranda, ornamented with mock-Grecian columns, was added in the 1960s.

There the assembled

leaders of the new Cambodia slept, out in the open air, like schoolboys at a summer camp, on iron-framed beds with wooden slats brought from a nearby hospital. The fact that they now held power seemed to have changed nothing. In their minds they were still guerrillas fighting a jungle war.

Only Saloth Sâr chose to sleep elsewhere. His aides set up a bed for him, with a mosquito net, on the raised dais in the centre of the sanctuary normally occupied by statues of the Buddha.

Khmer Buddhist temples rarely inspire awe and exaltation, as great Christian cathedrals do. Bereft of worshippers, the Silver Pagoda is a tawdry place. But it is sacred ground. Sihanouk lived there as a monk during the year of his ordination in 1947, when the divinity of his kingship was ritually affirmed. In the courtyard outside stand four towering, ornately carved white stupas, containing the ashes of dead kings, An artificial hill symbolises Mount Kailash, the Buddhist Paradise. The

is surrounded by a covered gallery, 600 yards long, decorated with frescoes depicting the Reamker, the Khmer version of the Ramayana, an epic tragedy of war between the forces of good and evil. One of the cadres, a former professor, explained to Samphân and some of the other leaders the significance of the different scenes, which are crueller and more violent than the Indian original.

Sâr’s choice of living quarters revealed more than he knew. Nowhere else in the Cambodian capital do memories of past glory and the mirage of future greatness fuse so easily. No Cambodian leader, however determined to expunge the old, could spend his days in a place so saturated with national identity and still remain insensible to the tenants of history and the legacy of the Khmer race.

In this surreal setting, the arbiters of the worlds most radical revolution took the

fateful decision

, after ten days of discussion, to disband the so-called united front with Sihanouk’s supporters and other non-communist

groups who had helped them to win power; to jettison the relatively moderate policies that such an alliance implied; and instead to make the leap — the ‘extremely marvellous, extremely wonderful, prodigious leap’, as the Khmer expression has it — to install, in one fell swoop, full communism, without compromise or concessions. The die had been cast.

While Sâr dreamed his terrible, and terribly beguiling, dreams, the Cambodian people stared into the hallucinative gulf between vision and reality.

The inhabitants of Phnom Penh, as well as many of the urban intellectuals who had joined the Khmer Rouge cause, had expected the war’s end to bring a return to normality. Revolution, yes — but peace and a civilised life as well.

Thiounn Thioeunn, the Khmer Rouge Health Minister, and his wife, Mala, were the heirs to Cambodia’s two wealthiest aristocratic families. Mala liked to say, only half in jest: ‘No one possessed more than we did, except perhaps the King.’ They disapproved of Sihanouk, whom they saw as a worthless playboy. Their defection to the Khmers Rouges four years earlier had been the equivalent, in Cambodian terms, of a Kennedy couple joining the ranks of Al-Qaida. Sâr had let it be known that the family enjoyed his personal protection. Thioeunn was a whimsical, otherworldly man, whose life revolved around his work as a surgeon. He had named his eldest daughter, Genevieve, after the car that was the eponymous heroine of a 1950s musical starring Kenneth More and Kay Kendall. The day that Phnom Penh fell, Genevieve was serving as a nurse at a military field hospital not far from the HQ at Sdok Toel. ‘We all cheered,’ she remembered. ‘Everyone started talking about what we’d do when we saw our relatives again, and how, now the war was over, there’d be national reconciliation.’Mala, more down-to-earth, thought of her elderly parents: ‘I told myself I’d make them a big cake, with lots of rum in it, and we’d enjoy it together.’

But by the time the Thiounns were allowed back into the city, ten days later, Phnom Penh was already a place of desolation, and rum was the last thing on their minds. Instead of returning to the family home, an immense colonial-style mansion near the palace, they were taken to a barrack-like apartment block at the former Khmer-Soviet Friendship Hospital, where they found that the Khmer Rouge political director had ordered all the mattresses and armchairs removed. ‘Luxury poisons the mind,’ he told them.

Despite Thioeunn’s high rank and his privileged relations with Sâr, Mala was able to meet her parents only once, some months later, for a few hours in a small town in the provinces. Subsequently they starved to death.

All through the late spring and early summer of 1975, columns of evacuees continued to criss-cross the country Khieu Samphân’s colleague, Hou Yuon, whose blunt talking had started to infuriate the higher echelons of the leadership, watched an unending procession of city-dwellers struggling past the bombed-out town of Skoun, fifty miles north-east of Phnom Penh, at the beginning of May. The sight of their fires, burning in the darkness by the roadside, haunted him. ‘Those people were truly wretched,’ he told Nuon Chea later. ‘It’s not normal, it’s not reasonable, to evacuate everyone like that. What the Standing Committee has done is wrong.’

Two months later, the Cambodian people were still on the move. A Chinese interpreter remembered ‘long lines, with sacks of belongings and cooking implements’ heading south towards the port of Kompong Som in July. Hunger had already set in; famine would follow. Violence was both random and systemic. Murder had become routine, the administrative tool of first resort. All who had held senior positions in Lon Nol’s pro-American regime, officers from the rank of lieutenant upwards, higher civil servants and policemen risked death. So did any others who failed to fit into the Khmer Rouge scheme of things.

Chinese aid experts who had known Phnom Penh in earlier times and now returned to provide ‘fraternal assistance’ to the new communist government found the city unrecognisable. ‘The streets were deserted,’ the interpreter reported. ‘We saw no one. Some of the doors of the houses were padlocked; others were swinging open. In the factories and at the Ministry, everyone wore black. They had sandals made from car-tyres, and a checkered scarf, a

We used to try to talk to them . . . But all that came out was propaganda.’

For Cambodian students returning from abroad, it was infinitely more unnerving:

What I saw

was beyond imagining

The people [who met us] at the airport were not like human beings. You might have thought they were objects, automatons from another planet. They belonged to a race that was indefinable, neuter, phantoms enveloped in darkness from somewhere very far away. Physically they looked like me, like the rest of us . . . Their appearance was Asian, Cambodian. But it was only their appearance. In every other way, there was nothing in common between us . . . [As we were driven into the city] none of us said a word . . . Was this, then, the new Kampuchea, the new society of equity and justice, without rich or poor? Was this the revolution?

Over the next three years,

one and a half million

people, out of a population of seven million, would be sacrificed to the working out of Saloth Sâr’s

ideas. A sizeable minority was executed; the rest died of illness, overwork or starvation.

No other country has ever lost so great a proportion of its nationals in a single, politically inspired hecatomb, brought about by its own leaders.

It is facile, but pointless, to damn Pol Pot and his followers as Nazis or Maoists, visiting a nightmare of imperfectly understood, alien ideas on a supposedly gentle, serene land. It is understandable, but unhelpful, to speak of genocide: the word conveys the magnitude of the horror of what happened in Cambodia but allows Pol Pot’s regime to be dismissed, all too conveniently, as a unique aberration. Such terms create a pernicious amalgam, obscuring a reality that was at once more banal and far more sinister.

The sheer scale of death in Democratic Kampuchea, as Khmer Rouge Cambodia was officially known, is part of its gruesome fascination. But beyond the statistics of human callousness lie more troubling issues.

Why did so many Cambodian intellectuals throw in their lot with a movement that turned out to be so ghastly? Why do so many former Khmer Rouge cadres, educated, thoughtful people, including some whose own relatives were murdered under Pol Pot’s rule, still maintain that he was a great patriot, whose merits outweigh his faults? Why did the Khmer Rouge revolution go to such implacable, unbearable extremes? Communist regimes everywhere have sought to level income disparities; to make law an instrument of policy; to monopolise the press; to limit movement from the countryside to the cities; and to control postal and telecommunications links with the rest of the world. But Cambodians chose more radical, more insane solutions. Money, law courts, newspapers, the postal system and foreign telecommunications — even the concept of the city — were all simply abolished. Individual rights were not curtailed in favour of the collective, but extinguished altogether. Individual creativity, initiative, originality were condemned

Individual consciousness was systematically demolished.

There is no straightforward response to such questions, and to the extent that answers exist, they offer scant comfort — to Cambodians and outsiders alike.

Eighteen months after Pol Pot’s death in 1998, when the last of his guerrilla armies had laid down their weapons and peace had returned to Cambodia after three decades of war, a sixteen-year-old girl sat down at a stall in one of Phnom Penh’s markets and ordered rice soup for herself and her three-year-old niece. A well-dressed woman, accompanied by several bodyguards, came up behind her, grabbed her hair and pushed her to the floor, where the men kicked and beat her until she passed out. Two guards then carefully opened a glass jar containing three litres of nitric acid, which

the woman poured over the girl’s head and upper body. The pain made her regain consciousness, and she started to scream — splashing acid on the woman and one of the guards, who fled in a waiting car. People in a nearby house doused her with water, but by the time she reached hospital she had third-degree acid burns over 43 per cent of her body.