Pol Pot (37 page)

For Sâr, too, the last months of 1969 had been frustrating, if less dramatic. The rebellion was slowly gathering strength and the new ‘united front’ strategy was beginning to bear fruit. CPK ‘armed propaganda teams’, closely modelled on those the Viet Minh had brought to

Cambodia in the early 1950s, were gradually building support in the villages. But the insurgents were still extremely short of weapons, and without external support, it looked as though the current stand-off — in which neither side had the strength to inflict decisive damage on the other — would continue indefinitely.

In November, Sâr, accompanied by Khieu Ponnary, his assistant, Pâng, and two bodyguards, set out once again on foot up the Ho Chi Minh Trail to Hanoi, to try to persuade Le Duan and Pham Van Dong that the time had finally come for the Vietnamese communists to aid the rebellion directly.

The moment was ill-chosen. Sihanouk himself had travelled to Hanoi two months before to attend the funeral of Ho Chi Minh and had made clear to the Vietnamese leaders that if they wanted to keep Cambodia neutral’ and open to the transit of supplies to the Viet Cong, they would have to show support for him. Sâr’s importunities got nowhere. Le Duan urged him to call off the rebellion altogether and revert to political struggle. ‘The talks took place in a

very tense

atmosphere,’ Sâr wrote later. ‘The contradiction between [us] was unbridgeable.’ There were differences on other issues, too. When the Vietnamese suggested that he travel on to Moscow, he said he did not wish to become involved in the Sino-Soviet dispute. When, in turn, he proposed visiting Pyongyang, the Vietnamese replied, mendaciously, as he learnt later, that the Korean Party leaders were ‘not ready to receive him’. His request to visit the Pathet Lao was

likewise deflected

. By the time he flew to Beijing in January, nothing had been resolved and no progress made on any of the issues he had discussed.

Sihanouk was equally unsuccessful in extricating himself from his dispute with Lon Nol. At one point, according to his cousin, Prince Sisowath Entaravong, he considered having himself crowned King again, but was dissuaded by his mother, Queen Kossamak, who told him he would look ridiculous after his repeated promises never again to wear the crown. Then, at the end of December, he ordered four government ministers, all long-time Sihanouk loyalists, to submit their resignations in the hope of triggering a cabinet crisis. The four complied. But no crisis ensued. A few days later, in a black depression, Sihanouk retired to the French hospital in Phnom Penh, suffering from nervous exhaustion. On January 6 1970, with only a few hours’ warning to his wife and family and none at all to the government or the diplomatic corps, the Head of State flew out to France for a much-delayed rest-cure at a clinic in the Mediterranean town of Grasse.

It was three years, almost to the day, since he had left, in similar circumstances, during Lon Nol’s first premiership. On that occasion, his absence had helped to unblock another difficult situation. This time, with Sirik

Matak in charge and Lon Nol convalescing in Europe, the Prince felt that by ‘standing back at a distance’, he would give his troublesome cousin enough rope to hang himself. As the new decade began, for Sihanouk, as for Sâr, everything was still to play for.

UNTIL THE SPRING

of 1970, nothing that Saloth Sâr had done or permitted to be done by the Party he led gave any intimation of the abominations that would follow.

To all appearances, he was still the same soft-spoken, smiling, amiable man who, as a student in Paris, was remembered for his sense of fun and good companionship; who later, as a teacher in Phnom Penh, had been adored by his pupils; and who finally, as a communist, was valued for his ability to bring together different tendencies and groups. His revolutionary alias in the 1960s reflected his reputation. He called himself

Pouk

, meaning ‘mattress’, because his role was to soften conflicts.

True, under his leadership the Cambodian Communist Party had started a guerrilla war against Sihanouk. But that was a decision which, to a great extent, had been forced on him. As the portly young banker Pok Deuskomar had explained two years earlier, shortly before setting out for the maquis: ‘there are no legal avenues of struggle left to us, so we have to take up arms.’ By the late 1960s, Sihanouk’s inability to tolerate criticism or even argument, his conviction that no one knew better than he on any conceivable subject, had killed political debate in Cambodia. Those who might have formed a constructive opposition had been silenced or forced to flee. In a deeply corrupt state, ruled by an autocrat and racked by social and economic injustice, armed rebellion had become not just the natural but the inevitable choice of any idealistic young man or woman committed to the country’s good. Moreover, the rebellion was not, in the early stages, markedly different from similar conflicts elsewhere. Village headmen and others who collaborated with the government were brought before mass meetings and publicly executed. But the same thing was happening in neighbouring Vietnam and on a far larger scale. There were acts of petty banditry which the government assimilated to terrorism — an attack on a bus in Koh Kong in which five people died; and random shootings near Phnom Penh during the New Year holiday — but nothing remotely comparable with terrorist incidents in South Vietnam or even with the train massacre perpetrated by the Khmer Viet Minh in 1954. Most

rebel attacks were carefully targeted to serve political or military goals and the groups involved were so small that ‘excesses’ were rare. The atrocities, in these first years of the war, were the work of government troops.

That is not to say that the forces which would give the Khmer Rouge revolution its peculiarly malignant form were not already at work. In retrospect it is clear that the ground had been prepared, the seeds of the future polity were already sown. But at the time no one foresaw — not the Vietnamese, not the intellectuals who flocked to the CPK cause, not even Sâr himself — the poisoned harvest that would follow. Questioned about the way the communist guerrillas treated their opponents, one of Sâr’s bodyguards, who had fought in Ratanakiri, responded thirty years later:

You’re asking me

if we took prisoners? No . . . and on our own side we had orders not to allow ourselves to be taken alive. If we captured a villager, and it was someone from the area, we sent him back home. But if we caught a government soldier, we killed him. There wasn’t any explicit guideline to that effect, but everyone understood it was what we should do. It was a struggle without pity. We had to draw a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves. That was the guiding principle.

That was also how the government troops acted. They, too, took few prisoners. But the justification of the communists — ‘drawing a clear line of demarcation’ — raised different issues. Government forces killed their prisoners because Sihanouk had ordered exemplary repression. The Khmers Rouges did so because ‘enemies’ were defined as irredeemably hostile. This was not yet an article of faith: there were cases in the early 1970s of Khmers Rouges releasing their prisoners in the hope that they would mend their ways. But the Maoist approach, instrumental in achieving victory in the Chinese civil war, that enemy prisoners could and should be won over to fight for the communist cause, did not come naturally to Cambodians. In the Confucian cultures of China and Vietnam, men are, in theory, always capable of being reformed. In Khmer culture they are not. The ‘line of demarcation’ is absolute. Just as Cambodians are what they are because they are not Vietnamese or Thais, just as the village exists in opposition to the forest and what is civilised in opposition to what is wild — so those beyond the ‘line’ are irretrievably divided from those within. Their existence has no value.

This attitude informs much Khmer thought and behaviour, but its application depends on circumstances. Eventually, it would come to dominate every aspect of CPK policy and practice. But not in the spring of 1970. The tragedy that was about to unfold did not have to happen.

The same was true of other facets of the emergent Khmer Rouge movement.

Sâr’s insistence that the revolution be led by an alliance of peasants and intellectuals was, in orthodox Marxist terms, a recipe for extremism. Both classes, according to Marx — and to Mao — had the characteristics of the petty bourgeoisie: individualism, volatility, indiscipline and a tendency to metaphysics and anarchism. They would behave as revolutionaries only if led by the proletariat. But extremism was a risk, not a certainty. It was not set in concrete that a revolution led by intellectuals and peasants had to be a blood bath.

The same applied to the CPK’s obsession with secrecy. In the conditions of Sihanouk’s Cambodia, a revolutionary party had no choice but to be secretive. The CPK’s Vietnamese mentors themselves insisted on it. It was from Hay So, Teur Kam and the other pseudonymous Southern Bureau comrades in Phnom Penh in the 1950s that Sâr and Nuon Chea had learnt to use aliases and code numbers rather than place-names — ‘Office 100’; ‘Office 102’; K-I; K-5, K-12; and all the bewildering array of messenger offices (designated by the letter ‘Y’), bureaux (‘S’), logistics and medical units (‘V’ and ‘P’) that followed. The Chinese communists never used such codes: they were a purely Vietnamese invention.

So was the system

of naming leaders. Ho Chi Minh chose aliases for his Politburo colleagues on the model of the Vietnamese family, in which the siblings are numbered in order of seniority. When Sâr visited Hanoi in 1965, the Vietnamese addressed him, likewise, as

’[First] Brother’, the eldest member of the Cambodian revolutionary ‘family’, and thereafter he used the soubriquet

whenever he dealt with Vietnam. The Khmers subsequently adopted these appellations as their own. Sâr was known among the Party elite as

’First Brother’, and Nuon Chea as ‘Second Brother’.

*

The Orwellian overtones conveyed in western languages by the usual translation, ‘Brother Number One’, are absent in Khmer. ‘First Brother’ was chosen precisely because it was reassuring and ordinary, a familiar name for an eldest brother in every family everywhere in East Asia. But whatever meanings are read into these names, the conspiratorial system of which they formed part was not uniquely Khmer.

Other characteristics of the Cambodian movement were also less singular than hindsight made them appear. Despite or perhaps because of the

fact that the Party was led by intellectuals, it was contemptuous of book-learning: from the mid-1960s on, students were encouraged to show their revolutionary commitment by dropping out and joining the maquis, rather than completing their studies. But the PCF and other European parties had the same anti-intellectual bias.

Even the absence of any serious effort to

translate Marxist

texts into Khmer could be explained by the orality of Khmer culture.

The one thing that really did set Khmer communism apart at the end of the 1960s was its monastic stress on discipline. Son Sen’s younger brother, Nikân, spent three months holed up in a peasant’s hut in rural Kompong Cham while he was on the run in 1968. He was not allowed to go outside to wash or even to use a latrine, ostensibly for security reasons but in fact to temper him, enabling him to prove that his loyalty to the Party had no limit. Khieu Samphân endured similar isolation when he first arrived in the maquis. Others spent years immured in secret hideouts in Phnom Penh. It was behaviour more appropriate to a religious sect than a political movement. In retrospect, it contained the germs of the systematic destruction of the individual that would later become a hallmark of Khmer communist ideology.

But no one saw that at the time. It seemed then to be merely a reaction against the careless, laissez-faire ways of a gentle, laid-back people whose would-be leaders had to be constantly on their guard in order to escape the attentions of Sihanouk’s security police.

In short, at the beginning of 1970, none of the elements that would fuse into the murderous specificity of the Khmer Rouge regime in power was unambiguously present. The ideological potential was there. But it was not preordained to take the form it did.

Similar considerations applied to Sihanouk’s position. He, too, had reached an invisible crossroads. Rumours that Lon Nol was plotting to overthrow him surfaced at the beginning of January. But by then there had been so many false alarms that the French Ambassador reported dismissively to Paris that it was mischief-making by Soviet-bloc diplomats with nothing better to do. Western chancelleries had been preparing contingency papers about the possibility of a military coup for the best part of a decade, but it was not a prospect they took seriously — any more than did the Prince himself.

*

To the outside world, Sihanouk personified Cambodia. Even the

Americans, who had unsuccessfully sought his replacement by a more congenial figure in the 1950s and early ‘6os, were wary of becoming involved in any fresh attempt to unseat him. In January 1970, there seemed no reason to suppose that he would not be able to turn the tables on his adversaries by some dazzling pirouette, as he had done so many times in the past.

Over the next few weeks, all these comforting certitudes would prove hollow. For Sâr, for Sihanouk, for the Khmer people, the world would be turned on its head with brutal thoroughness. The ideology of the Khmers Rouges, hitherto confined to the thoughts and private discussions of Sâr, Ieng Sary, Nuon Chea and a handful of others, found its

For them, as for the Prince, the moment of truth had arrived.

On March 8, a Sunday, demonstrations against the presence of Viet Cong guerrillas took place in the provincial capital of Svay Rieng and several district centres. By then the Parrot’s Beak, as the area was called, was reluctant host to some 20,000 Vietnamese communists. To Sihanouk, the build-up was one more factor sucking Cambodia into the Vietnam War. His efforts the previous autumn, when he had attended Ho Chi Minh’s funeral, to persuade Hanoi to exercise restraint had been to no avail. Now the time had come to get nasty. He planned to travel home from France via Moscow and Beijing to ask the Soviet and Chinese leaders to put pressure on their protégés to be more discreet. To dramatise his plea, he had proposed to Lon Nol that ‘spontaneous protests’ be organised against the Vietnamese a few days beforehand.