Pol Pot (57 page)

Differences were exacerbated by the high level of illiteracy and the paucity of qualified cadres. No matter how detailed the guidelines prepared by the CPK Standing Committee, the fact that they had to be transmitted orally to low-level officials meant that only the most simplistic, broad-brush principles were retained. All the rest was improvisation. The way in which policies were carried out depended on the whim of the individual and the attitude of the higher-ups in his

a word which means literally ‘string’ but has the sense of a vertical patronage network through which a mandarin distributes largesse and receives support from subordinates. Under the pre-colonial monarchy and under Sihanouk, such networks were the principal channels for the exercise of power in Cambodia. Revolutions, even as they destroy, build on the model of what has gone before. Power relations among the Khmers Rouges continued to be

channelled through

with the Zone Secretaries, latter-day mandarins, in the role of provincial warlords, loyal to the CPK Centre yet with considerable latitude of their own.

The other defining features of the evacuation — the systematic stripping away of the possessions of the rich and not-so-rich; the writing and rewriting of autobiographies to identify potential opponents; the summary executions; the near-total absence of resistance by millions of people, uprooted from their homes and going like sheep to the slaughter — were equally a foretaste of the regime to come.

The united front that had linked the Khmers Rouges with Sihanouk and other ‘bourgeois progressives’ had expired in fact, if not in name, the day Phnom Penh fell. Far from trying to broaden the communists’ support base, the CPK had reverted to its pre-1969 strategy of ‘quality rather than quantity’, promoting a narrow, puritanical regime, fit for carrying out an ultra-radical revolution and guided by the principle that it is always better to go too far than not far enough.

That doctrine lay at the root of many of the abuses both of the evacuation itself and of the years that followed.

Every rank-and-file soldier and village chief knew that insufficient vigilance against enemies would bring certain punishment, but excessive zeal in pursuing suspects would not. Thus, there was no central directive from the Party leadership ordering army clean-up squads in Phnom Penh and other towns to kill elderly and sick people who had stayed or been left behind during the evacuation — but the troops did so because they had been told to ensure that the area was emptied and that was the simplest way of doing it. There was no central directive, either, to loot libraries, scientific laboratories and research institutes, and to burn Buddhist and Western books. None the less, it happened. François Bizot saw the holdings of the Ecole Française de l’Extrême Orient, ‘precious works, laboriously collected by scholars, which we had deliberately kept in Phnom Penh to show our commitment to future generations of Khmers’, being thrown from the first-floor windows to be consumed in a ‘pathetic

é

Another foreigner watched piles of books from the library of the Roman Catholic cathedral being burned on the lawn in front of the bishopric. Months later, Thiounn Mumm, then a senior adviser to the Khmer Rouge Industry Ministry, stumbled across a laboratory formerly used for agronomical research. ‘The soldiers had smashed everything . . . They didn’t do it for any clear reason — but if you leave a house full of ten-year-olds for three or four days without the presence of adults, you know what the result will be.’ The explanation is self-serving but not without truth. The destruction of Western things was not ordered from on high, nor was

it universal.

*

It was the visceral reaction of men who had been force-fed with the idea that imperialism and all its works were absolute evil.

Soldiers everywhere are trained to secure their objectives without paying too much attention to the damage they cause along the way. In the case of the Khmer Rouge, this was compounded by ignorance and extreme youth. None the less, the political context which allowed them to act as they did had been defined over the previous decade by Pol and the CPK Standing Committee.

It need not have been so.

In April 1975, popular disgust with Lon Nol’s republic was at its zenith and the majority of the urban population was ready and willing to support virtually any policy the new regime chose to introduce. Different leaders, with a different ideology, might have chosen a policy of national reconciliation. Pol decided otherwise. To him, the city-dwellers and the peasants who had fled to join them in the dying months of the war were

collaborators and had to be dealt with as such. Only when they had been subjected to the regenerative power of manual labour and the rude battering of peasant life would the survivors emerge from purgatory, just as the Khmers Rouges themselves had emerged, toughened and purified, from their own years in the maquis.

Suffering and death were an essential part of this process. Mey Mak’s commanding officer told him:

‘If we worry

about that sort of stuff, we are no longer revolutionaries.’ Soldiers were urged to

‘cut off their hearts’

towards potential enemies, a category which included all urban deportees. It might be argued that such behaviour comes more naturally to Cambodians than to other nations because their culture regards forgiveness as a form of weakness. Buddhist detachment, in the shape of indifference, is so widespread that a Khmer proverb asks: ‘The marrow has pips: why has man no heart?’ But the argument does not hold up. War and revolution are by definition heartless, no matter where they are made. The only distinction that can be drawn is quantitative. As Cambodians were discovering, some revolutions are crueller and more unforgiving than others.

The urban deportees, the jetsam of the Cambodian revolution, tried in different ways to make sense of the sudden implosion of their lives. Many saw the evacuation, and the brutality with which it was carried out, as reflecting the Khmers Rouges’ numerical weakness, where ‘two or three

brainwashed teenagers with rifles’ had charge of thousands of displaced town-dwellers.

Others regarded it as an act of collective revenge by a neglected underclass against anyone who by birth, education, official position or wealth, had been privileged under the old regime. Revenge is the timid man’s weapon and, in Cambodia, where people flee open confrontation, it is a weapon of choice.

that ‘particularly Cambodian mentality of revenge’, one deportee wrote, ‘is the infection that grows on our national soul . . . If I hit you with my fist and you wait five years and then shoot me in the back one dark night, that is

. . . Cambodians know all about

To yet others it was a practical measure, designed to disorientate the town-dwellers and place them in a position of dependency vis-à-vis the country’s new rulers.

But the great majority, especially among the poor, interpreted what happened in April 1975 in terms that were not rational but reached back to the wellspring of Cambodians’ cultural identity. The

a book of Buddhist prophecies, written in the nineteenth century but imitating much earlier works, had warned of a dark age, a black time, when hooligans would rule, the cities would be emptied, ‘people will be so hungry that they will run after a dog to fight for a grain of rice that has stuck to its tail’, the monkhood would be destroyed and a demon king would come, who would ‘make people think that wrong is right, black is white, good is bad’.

The predictions of the

like those of Nostradamus and the oracles of old, were framed so elastically as to fit a wide range of situations. None the less, to Khmers trying to understand an incomprehensible revolution, they offered a familiar and traditional means of coming to terms with the events they were living through by placing them within the cyclical flow of Buddhist history. In Theravada lore all over South-East Asia, there are tales of flesh-eating ogres and evil spirits who gather to attack the Buddhist religion. The Khmers Rouges were equated with the

‘500 Thieves’

, a legendary group of millennial bandits who ‘rob us of all the things we possess — our families, our children, our property and even our lives’. Another version described how ‘

black crows

will scatter l

fruits throughout the land’. The

fruit is round and green, with a beautiful shiny surface. But when it is opened it is full of lice. The ‘black crows’ were the Khmers Rouges; the

fruit’ the alluring ideas of Utopian communism; and the ‘lice’ the reality of killings, famine and privation. The one consolation was that all the prophecies agreed the black time would be of brief duration.

IT WAS NOT

the triumphal entry that most insurgents dream of.

Three days

after the fall of Phnom Penh, on the morning of April 20, Pol returned to the city he had last seen twelve years before. Then he had been a fugitive, hidden in the back of a lorry, fleeing to Vietnam. Now he was escorted from the forward headquarters at Sdok Toel in a captured armoured car, surrounded by a phalanx of jeeps carrying the leaders of the three Zones which had co-ordinated the offensive – Mok from the South-West; Koy Thuon and Ke Pauk from the North; Vorn Vet and Cheng On from the Special Zone – Pol’s deputy, Nuon Chea; Khieu Samphân; the Chief of Staff, Son Sen, and the four chief division commanders, San, Saroeun, Soeun and Thin.

But old reflexes die hard. Instead of proceeding directly down Highway 5, which would have taken them past dense crowds of urban deportees, the convoy took a devious back route, along narrow dirt roads through bombed-out hamlets and paddy-fields, to emerge near Pochentong Airport and enter the city from the west. At the railway station, where communist Cambodia’s new leaders would spend the next few weeks, there was no honour guard. ‘Pol’s arrival was secret,’ his aide, Phi Phuon explained. ‘There was no announcement, no ceremony, nothing to show he was there.’

The railway station had been chosen because it stood well apart from other buildings and was easy to defend. It had been built in the 1930s to a French-Cambodian colonial design, with an art deco, Mediterranean-style façade of concrete latticework, decorated in ochre and white, for light and ventilation, and inside, above a cavernous passenger hall, a single floor of offices. It was there, in a large,

open work area

with three small enclosed bureaux on either side, that Pol and his colleagues spent their days discussing the outline of their new state, sleeping at night on rattan mats spread out on the concrete floor.

Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphân were sent to inspect the Northern Zone checkpoint at Prek Kdam, on Highway 5, while Mok shuttled back and forth to the South-Western Zone HQ near Takeo. All three reported

that the evacuation was proceeding smoothly. And, to them, it was. For the CPK leadership, 20,000 dead was a small price to pay for demolishing, at a stroke, Cambodian capitalism, and erasing the social frontier between the city and the countryside.

Yet, crucial though the evacuation was for the future Khmer Rouge polity, the leadership did not find it easy to justify.

Pol himself offered two contradictory sets of reasons. To Westerners he maintained that ‘this action was not pre-planned . . . It was the realisation that a food shortage was imminent . . . and that there was a plan by US lackeys to attack us that prompted [it].’ None of that was true. Not only were food supplies adequate, but it was far more difficult logistically for the Khmers Rouges to provide grain to moving columns of deportees than it would have been if they had stayed put. The ‘plan by US lackeys’ was a figment of Pol’s imagination. Moreover, the evacuation had indeed been preplanned, and not, as he asserted on another occasion, equally untruthfully, in February 1975, but the previous October. He was more honest at a meeting with Chinese journalists, when he admitted: ‘Until we had smashed all kinds of enemy spy organisations, we did not have enough strength to defend the revolutionary regime.’ That much at least had a basis in fact.

CIA officials

, including the Chief Strategy Analyst in Saigon, Frank Snepp, later confirmed that the evacuation of the towns, where the agency had established secret radio terminals and clandestine spy cells, ‘left American espionage networks throughout the country broken and useless’.

However, the real reasons for the evacuation were more complex. According to Ieng Sary, Pol cited the example of the

Paris Commune

, whose eightieth anniversary they had celebrated together as students in France. The Commune had been overthrown, Pol said, because the proletariat had failed to exercise dictatorship over the bourgeoisie. He would not make the same mistake.

An internal Central Committee study document stated that, besides ensuring security, the evacuation was designed ‘to preserve the political position of cadres and combatants; to avoid a solution of peaceful evolution which could corrode [the revolution] from within; to fight corruption, degradation and debauchery; to get the urban population to take part in [agricultural] production; [and] to remove Sihanouk’s support base.’ The students and intellectuals among the deportees had been ‘extricated from the filth of imperialist and colonialist culture’, and ‘the system of private property and material goods [was being] swept away’.

Most