Pol Pot (6 page)

Your eyes

are open and can see,

But see only the surface of things . . .

Learn arithmetic . . . with all your energy

Lest the Chinese and Vietnamese cheat you . . .

The Khmers are lacking in judgement

They eat without giving thought for what is proper and right, Each season they borrow from the Chinese,

And the Chinese gain control of the inheritance their parents have bequeathed.

If the

were a practical code of conduct to regulate life in the world beyond the monastery walls, the monks also sought to inculcate in their young charges a spirit of detachment. Nhun Nhget remembered that as the hardest thing to accept. ‘

They taught us

to renounce worldly desires, not to covet material things. If you are an ordinary person, you can [behave normally], you can have nice meals, you can marry . . . When you become a monk, you have to forgo all that.’

One wonders whether Sâr, as a child, was also struck by this emphasis on detachment. There is no way of knowing. But subconsciously it must have registered, for in later life the abandonment of personal ties and the suppression of individuality — in both thought and behaviour — would become key elements of his political credo.

In the summer of 1935, at the age of ten, Sâr left Wat Botum Vaddei and went to live with his brother Suong, his wife and their baby son, in a large, rambling wooden house, built on wooden pillars, with a spacious front veranda overlooking a small courtyard planted with trees and tubs of flowers. His older brother Chhay was already staying with them, and soon afterwards Nhep, the youngest, arrived too.

That September, Sâr joined Chhay at the Ecole Miche, named after a nineteenth-century missionary bishop. The lessons were in French, dispensed by Vietnamese and French Catholic fathers, and each day’s classes began with an hour spent learning the

catechism

, followed by a collective recitation of the Lord’s Prayer or one of the Psalms. At first sight it might seem an odd choice. Sâr’s family had no connection with the Catholic Church. But the school had a good reputation and, catechism apart, the curriculum was the same as at the other main primary school in Phnom

Penh, which was run by the protectorate authorities and catered exclusively for Europeans and a handful of assimilated Khmers from aristocratic families, like Thiounn Thioeunn and his brothers. Even primary schooling was hard to come by in the Cambodia of the 1930s, and the fees at the Ecole Miche, modest though they were, were far beyond the reach of all but a tiny fraction of the population. In the country as a whole, no more than a few thousand children, among half a million of school-going age, had access to even the rudiments of a ‘modern’ education.

Phnom Penh, at that time, was an unusual capital city. It was strangely un-Khmer.

Visitors found ‘tables of chattering Frenchmen . . . Chinese in white suits and helmets, Annamites with bare torsos and full black trousers — and, among them, surprisingly few Cambodians.’ Khmers accounted for little more than a third of the population of 100,000. Most of the others were Chinese-speaking merchants, who controlled the country’s commercial life, and Vietnamese, who worked as junior civil servants, fishermen or coolies. There was also a scattering of Thais, Malays and Indians from Pondicherry. The few hundred French families formed a tiny, if highly visible, microcosm, who put their stamp on what passed for the cultural and intellectual life of the city, its pavement cafés, tree-lined boulevards and colonial, Mediterranean-style buildings. The result was a cosmopolitan, contradictory place — languid yet bustling — a hodge-podge of conflicting styles:

The street traffic

is a mêlée of rickety native-built gharris [known locally as matchboxes], glittering motorcars, rickshaws, top-heavy omnibuses drawn by tiny ponies . . . and bullock carts exactly like those illustrated on the walls of Angkor . . . all moving against a background of avenues and suburbs full of typically French villas . . . The street-markets of Phnom Penh are peculiarly its own, yet have much in common with those of France . . . The goods are set neatly out on the pavements instead of on raised stalls . . . Flowering plants in home-made basket-pots [stand] in ranks of scarlet and orange, white and mauve, pink and green . . . As the sun moves across the heavens, the goods are [transferred to the other pavement] and laid out patiently and methodically all over again.

Even the King’s palace, a gilt-and-gingerbread confection with crenellated yellow-plaster walls, ornately curlicued sentry-boxes and imposing wrought-iron gates — not to mention a

summerhouse, used by the Empress Eugénie for the opening of the Suez Canal before being dismantled and shipped to Indochina — seemed to have been created by its French architects with an oriental Monaco in mind.

The foreignness of Phnom Penh, and the leading role played by other

Asians at the expense of Khmers, appear to have had little impact on Sâr. ‘It

didn’t surprise us

,’ Nhep explained later, ‘because . . . there were Chinese everywhere in Cambodia.’ Even in a place as small as Prek Sbauv, there was a Chinese shop — the only one in the area — where the merchants from Kompong Thom congregated each year to purchase the rice harvest.

The Vietnamese were viewed differently. Every Khmer child knew the story of the three Cambodian prisoners, whom the Vietnamese buried up to their necks so that their heads formed a tripod on which a kettle could be placed, lighting a fire in the middle and enjoining them not to move lest they ‘spill the master’s tea’ — just as every child knew that sugar palms, or

emblematic of Cambodia, stopped growing a few miles before the border ‘because they don’t want to grow in Vietnam’. That such tales were patently untrue was irrelevant; they summed up a perception of a country which Cambodians viewed as an hereditary enemy. Despite the atrocities committed by the nineteenth-century Siamese, there were no comparable stories about the Thais.

Vietnam was the Cambodian bogeyman. When Khmer children squabbled, one of Sâr’s friends recalled, an older child would intervene, reminding them that Cambodians had enemies enough without fighting among themselves. Yet it was above all the

of the Vietnamese that was hated. They seemed to be everything the Khmers were not: a disciplined, vigorous, virile people, whose relentless, centuries-long southward migration had swallowed up Kampuchea Krom, or Lower Cambodia, in the area of what would become South Vietnam, and now threatened a creeping takeover of Cambodia itself, aided and abetted by the French authorities, who encouraged large-scale Vietnamese immigration to staff the lower echelons of the colonial civil service and furnish the skilled manual labour which Cambodians were judged incapable of providing. The result was more than mere racial antipathy. It was a massive national inferiority complex, which took refuge in dreams of ancient grandeur. At a personal level, Khmers and Vietnamese might befriend each other; Khmer pupils often remembered their Annamite teachers with affection. But the cultural fracture between the two peoples — between Confucianism and Theravada Buddhism, between the Chinese world and the Indian — was one of mutual incomprehension and distrust, which periodically exploded into racial massacres and pogroms.

The different quarters of Phnom Penh were strung out along the riverside: the Vietnamese ‘Catholic village’ in the north; the French district around Wat Phnom, the ancient grave mound from which the city takes its name; the Chinese in the commercial area in the centre; and the Khmers in the ‘Cambodian village’ in the south.

It was there that Saloth Suong had built his house, on a newly-laid-out street, across fields and marshland, half a mile west of the palace. The city is situated on a flood plain, at the point where the Mekong is joined by two other rivers, the Tonle Sap and the Bassac. In the early 1930s, the French had undertaken a drainage programme and large areas of swamp and lakeland had been reclaimed. Suong’s house was in one of these new districts, inhabited mainly by minor officials and palace functionaries. A mile or so to the north, near Wat Phnom, stood the railway station, also built on reclaimed land, where the first train service was inaugurated in 1935. Between the two, on the route which Sâr and Chhay took each morning as they walked to school, a new Central Market was being erected on what previously had been yet another swamp. It was an imaginative, cruciform structure in art deco style with an immense concrete dome (taller than the basilica of St Peter’s in Rome, the French architects boasted). In September 1937, Sâr and his brothers watched the grand opening, performed by the French governor, the

é

in the presence of the city mandarins and notables.

For the young, Phnom Penh in the 1930s was a place of wonderment. Each November during the Water Festival, the floodwaters that gorge the Great Lake, backed up by the monsoon rains, cause the Tonle Sap to reverse course and flow out towards the sea. The King, escorted by white-robed

the spiritual descendants of the brahmins of Angkor, their long hair in chignons, bearing trumpets made of conch-shells, boarded the royal barge to watch dragon-boat races, signalling the start of three days of bacchanalian excess when the taboos proscribing flirtation between young men and unmarried girls of good family were temporarily eased. Apart from the Khmer New Year, in April — when Sâr returned to Prek Sbauv to be with his parents — the major ceremonies all revolved around the Throne and the Buddhist faith. Each spring crowds gathered to watch the Royal Oxen plough the Sacred Furrow, from which the King’s astrologer would divine whether there would be plenty or famine in the year ahead; and at Tang Toc, the King’s birthday, the provincial governors came to pay homage. Royal protocol was draconian. In his palace, if no longer in the colonised state over which he reigned, the King was still an absolute ruler, the ‘Master of Life.’, venerated by the populace as a sacred, quasi-divine figure:

At

royal audiences

the princes, mandarins and other dignitaries crouch on all fours, with their knees and elbows on the floor, and their hands raised together before their heads. The King sits above them, enthroned on a dais, sitting cross-legged like an Indian idol. When he enters or leaves, all present prostrate themselves three times. No one has the right

to speak unless the King addresses him . . . and no one may publicly disagree with anything the King says.

The symbolism was explicit: the heads of the courtiers, in Khmer culture the most sacred part of the body, were beneath the King’s feet. A special vocabulary had to be used when addressing him, and all those not of royal blood, even the grandest ministers, were, in the consecrated formula, ‘we who carry the King’s excrement on our heads’.

Sâr used to visit the palace to see his sister, Roeung, and the Lady Meak, each of whom occupied a small wood-and-brick house in the precinct reserved for secondary wives. There he sometimes encountered Sihanouk’s mother, later to become Queen Kossamak. When she passed, he remembered, he and the other children would fall to their knees. Towards the end of his life, he would look back on those visits with

nostalgia

, speaking of the Queen, in particular, with affection.

There may have been another reason why Sâr’s visits to the palace remained engraved on his memory. The harem of a Cambodian king in the 1930s was awash with repressed sexuality. As well as his official wives, King Monivong had innumerable concubines and serving girls, most of them in their teens or early twenties. Monivong was elderly and not in good health. Necessarily, most of these young women were physically unsatisfied.

At fifteen, Sâr was still regarded as a child, young enough to be allowed into the women’s quarters. Decades later, two of the palace women, living out their old age on French government stipends in Paris, remembered ‘Little Sâr’, who used to come to visit them wearing his school uniform, a loose, white shirt with baggy trousers and wooden shoes. The young women would gather round, teasing him, they remembered. Then they would loosen his waistband and fondle his genitals, masturbating him to a climax. He was never allowed to have intercourse with them. But in the frustrated, hothouse world of the royal pleasure house, it apparently afforded the women a vicarious satisfaction.

*

Roeung by then enjoyed the King’s favour. Monivong himself had supervised the furnishing of her house and had given her jewellery and a motor-car. She, too, recalled Sâr’s visits — and she remembered, also, that ‘whenever he had something serious to say, he would make a

joke

of it.’

It would be wrong to read too much into that. In Khmer culture,

politeness

— which, as Nhep noted, was another of Sâr’s early characteristics — always implies indirection. None the less, it offers an intriguing glimpse of a child who would spend the rest of his life dissimulating his thoughts behind an impenetrable wreath of smiles and laughter. The sense’ of fun, moreover, was genuine. Not only Nhep, but all Sâr’s friends during his schooldays remembered him as an amusing companion — ‘a boy it was

nice to be with’

, as one of them put it — and even Suong, his elder brother, whom the neighbours regarded as rather strait-laced, agreed that young Sâr was an

‘adorable child’

who ‘wouldn’t hurt a chicken’ and never caused them any worry.

The one black spot was his academic record. Chhay was evidently a gifted student and sailed through his exams. Sâr did not. He should have passed his primary school leaving certificate — the Certificat d’Etudes Primaires Complémentaires — in 1941. But it seems he did not obtain it until two years later, when he was already eighteen, having twice been held back a year, common practice in the French educational system when children have difficulty keeping up. Nhep, who attended an elementary school in the southern part of Phnom Penh, was also an indifferent student and after three years his parents called him home to help on the farm. Chhay went on to study at the highly regarded Lycée Sisowath, the oldest secondary school in Cambodia. Sâr took the admission exam, but failed and was fortunate to secure a place as a boarder at a newly opened junior middle school, the College Preah Sihanouk at Kompong Cham, fifty miles north-east of Phnom Penh on the Mekong river, where he moved in the autumn of 1943.