Pol Pot (65 page)

of Pol’s childhood, it was an aid to memorisation and an ideological guide, depicting the world as it should be, a place of joy and exaltation, where everyone struggled constantly to build a better life, seethed with class hatred against the exploiters of old and showed absolute faith in Angkar, the ‘correct and clear-sighted revolutionary organisation’. ‘The implication,’ one woman wrote, ‘was that if we did not share the general joy, the fault lay with us. We must work harder . . . to weed out selfishness, laziness and desire.’

From the winter of 1975, the radio started urging people to ‘fight non-revolutionary moral and material concepts, including those of private property, personality [and] vanity, and . . . [to] adopt the stand of collective ownership and austerity’. It

called for ‘renunciation’

— another Buddhist notion — which the cadres explained meant devoting oneself body and soul to the collective without being swayed by personal interests:

’

Renunciation of feelings

of ownership’ meant that one must concentrate completely on the task at hand without thinking of oneself, as in Buddhist meditation. ‘Renunciation of material goods’ implied detachment from one’s wife, one’s children and one’s home, just as Buddha once renounced those things. ‘Renunciation of control over one’s own life’ meant digging out from oneself the roots of pride, contempt for others and complicated thoughts, as the monks used to preach before. The ‘renunciation of the self’ is particularly necessary as it concerns the emotional ties within the family — between husband and wife, parents and children, and children and parents. [They used to tell us:] ‘You should purify yourselves, free yourself from emotional bonds’; ‘You still have feelings of friendship and goodwill. You must eliminate from your mind all [such] individualistic notions.’

However, indoctrination was carried out principally through the practice of daily life.

Language was stripped bare of incorrect allusions. Instead of ‘I’, people had to say ‘we’. A child called its parents ‘uncle and aunt’ and other grown

ups, ‘mother’ or ‘father’. Every relationship became collective; words distinguishing the individual were suppressed or given new meanings. Terms denoting hierarchy, like the dozen or so verbs meaning ‘to eat’, whose use depended on the rank and social relationship of those involved, were replaced by a single verb previously used only by peasants. Nuon Chea, who masterminded these changes, devised neologisms, often based on scholarly Pali terms, to convey political concepts for which no equivalent existed in Khmer. Other new coinages were taken from peasant slang:

’to launch an offensive’, meant literally ‘to ram a stake into a hole’, with the sense of violent buggery. The sexual connotation was odd in such a puritanical regime, but it conveyed well enough the idea of an elemental, brutish struggle to overcome material obstacles and bend nature to man’s will. Nuon, as the final authority, other than Pol himself, in all matters concerning propaganda, also supervised Radio Phnom Penh. At his insistence, words conveying lyrical or ‘bourgeois’ sentiments, like ‘beauty’, ‘colourful’ and ‘comfort’ were banned from the airwaves. The goal was that described in Orwell’s

a book which neither Pol nor Nuon had read but whose principles they grasped intuitively:

The whole aim

of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought . . . In the end we will make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that will ever be needed will be expressed by exactly

word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten . . . Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller . . . In fact there will be no thought as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking . . . Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Reality mirrored the notions this new language conveyed. The family continued to exist but, as Orwell had imagined, its primary purpose became ‘to beget children for the service of the Party’. Ties between individual family members were diluted within the larger community. ‘Mothers should not get too

entangled

with their offspring,’ Pol told the Central Committee. Similarly, if a man felt a sentimental attachment developing with a woman, he should ‘take a collectivist stand, and resolve it . . . To do otherwise is to have a strong private stance.’ Marriage — not merely between Party members, as Orwell had envisaged, but between any two people — was a Party, not an individual affair. Khieu Samphân married in December 1972 because Pol told him he should and personally served as his go-between. Traditionally, in Khmer society, marriages had been arranged between families. Now Angkar played that role. ‘Free choice of spouses’ was explicitly condemned. To underline the social aspect, weddings were celebrated collectively for a

minimum of ten couples. After a marriage had been consummated the couple often lived apart.

Illicit love affairs were punished by death. Women wore their hair short in a regimented Maoist bob with shirts buttoned to the neck. At work the sexes were segregated, regardless of age. Sport was banned as ‘bourgeois’. So were children’s toys. There was no free time. The only reading materials were two Party journals, which were exclusively for cadres, and a fortnightly newspaper,

(Revolution), which circulated within the ministries in Phnom Penh. The Buddhist

formerly the centre of village life, were closed. Some were demolished, as the Catholic cathedral had been, to recover the iron struts that reinforced their concrete frames. Others were turned into prisons or warehouses, much as Cromwell’s New Model Army in seventeenth-century Britain had turned the churches into stables. Because they lived on charity, the monks were regarded as parasites: in Khmer Rouge terminology, they ‘breathed through other people’s noses’. Along with expatriate intellectuals and officials of the republican regime, they were designated a ‘special class’ — a singularly un-Marxist category — and within a year had been defrocked and put to work in co-operatives or on irrigation sites.

In short, everything that had given colour and meaning to Cambodian life was comprehensively suppressed.

Certain groups had special difficulty in accommodating to the new regime. As in Lon Nol’s time, Christians were suspected of being Vietnamese. Sino-Khmers were forbidden to speak Chinese, on the grounds that Khmer, or Kampuchean as it was now termed, was the single national language. The Chams, already under suspicion during the civil war, had the worst of all worlds, since their history, religion and culture made them a people apart. The Khmers looked down on them because their kingdom, Champa, had been overrun by the Vietnamese in the fifteenth century, an event constantly cited as a warning of Cambodia’s fate if its resolve weakened. Moreover, the fact that they lived and intermarried in self-contained communities, often having little contact with other Cambodians, was a security concern. In 1974, the CPK had begun speaking of the need to ‘break up this group to some extent; do not allow too many of them to concentrate in one area.’ A year later, the dispersal of the

150,000

Chams in the Eastern Zone to villages in the North and NorthWest became established policy.

This was

not racism

in the normal sense of the term. The aim was uniformity — a country where, as Mey Mann put it, ‘everyone was exactly Im. 60 tall’ — not the suppression of a particular group.

In practice, local cadres sometimes simplified their own lives by singling

out such people for punishment, not because of anything they had done but because they were seen as more likely than others to deviate from Khmer Rouge norms, in the same way as anyone wearing spectacles was regarded as bourgeois or an intellectual or both and hence untrustworthy. The Issarak, twenty-five years earlier, had acted in much the same way. They, too, had killed people who wore

glasses

. It was the right to difference that was at stake. The Chinese suffered disproportionately because they found it harder than others to adjust to peasant life. The Chams, having lost their own country, were more reluctant than other groups to abandon the cultural and religious specificity that constituted the only identity they had left. The result was a vicious circle: the more the Chams were perceived as anti-revolutionary and anti-national, the more they were repressed. But there is no convincing evidence that Chams died in vastly greater numbers during the Khmer Rouge period than did other racial groups. The criterion was not ethnicity; it was whether people behaved like Khmers or, as they were now called, Kampucheans, a term that had been adopted for the nation as well as the language precisely in order to avoid the impression of racial exclusiveness. That may have been disingenuous, but it was in line with the traditional thinking which had always defined the ‘Cambodian race’ as those who lived like Khmers. Until recent times, the Khmer language employed the same word for race and religion: to be Khmer was to be Buddhist. Cambodia has never seen itself as a multicultural state. ‘This is

not America

!’ Khieu Samphân exclaimed when asked why the Vietnamese had been repatriated in 1975.

Even for the Chams, moreover, the first year of Khmer Rouge rule was not unbearably harsh. That may seem a paradoxical statement when, all over the country, families were being torn apart and tens of thousands of people died. But revolution, like war, is an abomination

fine for theoreticians, but dreadful for most of those who have to live through it. What happened in Cambodia in 1975 was not qualitatively different from what had occurred in China or Russia, or the killings that accompanied the communist power-seizures in Albania, North Korea or Mongolia.

The vast majority of the population adapted and survived, in many cases far better than anyone could have expected.

Alongside the horror stories, many deportees described work in the cooperatives that first year as having been ‘not hard’ — in some cases easier than in the factories of Australia or the US where they went later as refugees. In Thmar Puok, in the North-West, it had been ‘a happy time’ and people ‘really liked the cadres, who were lenient and kind’. In the East, living conditions were often ‘good’ or ‘tolerable’ and ‘controls were very loose’.

Even usually critical

sources, such as Pin Yathay, in the South-West,

acknowledged that daily existence was not brutal; just steady, undifferentiated purgatory,’ or, in the phrase of a deportee in Prey Veng, not too onerous, but dirty and monotonous’. Haing Ngor, the future star of

thought that if the regime had relied less on fear and allowed a little more freedom, ‘I would have accepted my fate and become a rice farmer with all my heart and soul’. A Chinese businessman said drily that it was ‘pretty much life as usual except that you couldn’t spend money’. Such fortitude from men and women who a few months earlier had constituted a privileged elite offered a sobering lesson in the resilience of the human spirit. The ‘base people’ were not tested in the same way. The freedoms the town-dwellers missed were freedoms they had never had.

Drear and joyless it was, certainly. But that was what its leaders intended. Theravada Buddhism taught that

the realm of selflessness, could be attained only when the ‘thirst for existence’, made up of worldly and emotional attachments, had been totally extinguished. Under Pol’s rule, love, sorrow, anger, passion and all the other feelings that make up everyday life were seen as emanations of individualism to be banished for the collective good. In some parts of the country, it was forbidden even to laugh or sing. In pursuit of illumination, the people had to suffer.

WHILE POL AND

his colleagues were laying the foundations of the Khmer Rouge state, Prince Sihanouk spent the summer of 1975 kicking his heels in Beijing and Pyongyang. Neither of his ‘good friends’, Mao and Kim IL Sung, thought it necessary to mention to him that during that time, Pol had come secretly to their capitals to discuss the outline of their future relations, and Sihanouk did not learn of his presence until many years later. Power had slipped away from him while he had been in exile. Now that the Khmers Rouges had won, he was barely even a figurehead. But his prediction that, after victory, ‘they will spit me out like a cherry pit’, proved wrong. To Pol, the prospect of leaving Sihanouk abroad to serve as a rallying point for opposition was much more disturbing than the inconvenience of having to accommodate him at home. His presence in the new regime would reassure expatriate Cambodians and sympathetic foreigners, of whom there were many in this immediate post-war period, of its bona fides. His stature in the non-aligned movement was an asset not to be squandered. Moreover, it was clear that both China and North Korea, Cambodia’s two main allies, wanted Sihanouk to remain in office.

Mao had asked Khieu Samphân a year earlier, half in jest:

‘Do you intend

to overthrow these two princes, Sihanouk and Penn Nouth?’ On being assured that he did not, the Chairman had urged ‘small arguments, big unity’. In August 1975, Zhou Enlai met Ieng Sary to discuss ‘the way Sihanouk will be treated after his return’ and was told that he would have the post of Head of State for life. Only then, it seems, did the Chinese advise the Prince that the time was right for him to go back to Phnom Penh.

‘Don’t

be frightened of having to work with a hoe in the fields,’ Mao told him a few days later. ‘None of you will have to do that, but you might use a broom and sweep a bit’. He counselled Khieu Samphân not to make Monique and their two children do manual labour either. Then he held up his hand and bent down one of his fingers: ‘Between the Khmers Rouges and Sihanouk,’ he said, ‘there are four points of accord and only one of disagreement.’