Pol Pot (75 page)

for a peaceful settlement so infuriated the Cambodian leaders that Radio Phnom Penh delivered a public rebuke. But just as the Khmers Rouges were now interpreting every Vietnamese action through a prism of ancestral hatred, so Le Duan’s view of Beijing was distorted by atavistic memories of Chinese suzerainty and repression.

The result was to generate a series of self-fulfilling fears.

China’s military aid programme to Cambodia, launched two years earlier, now appeared to Hanoi in a new and sinister light. Vietnamese military planners noted with alarm that the new military airport being built at Kompong Chhnang, with camouflaged hangars and munitions dumps burrowed into the hills, was less than thirty minutes’ flying time from Ho Chi Minh City. Border clashes were becoming increasingly frequent, not just with Cambodia, but also on Vietnam’s frontier with China. In March, a dispute broke out over the status of the million strong Overseas Chinese community in South Vietnam. Hanoi saw them as a potential fifth column and, to break their economic power, announced the nationalisation of all private business. China retaliated by suspending economic aid to Hanoi and pulling out Chinese technicians. By June, 130,000 refugees had fled across the Chinese border. The stage was set for one of the most egregious tragedies of the latter part of the twentieth century — the exodus of the ‘boat people’. A quarter of a million emigrants, stripped of their possessions by the Vietnamese police, set out in floating coffins to seek a new life abroad. Tens of thousands drowned or were murdered by Thai and Malay pirates. The operation was approved by Le Duan himself. By the time it ended, the moral high ground that Vietnam had conquered in the long years of struggle against the United States was definitively lost.

By the early summer of 1978, the two principals in the drama that was beginning to unfold — Vietnam and China — had put their uncertainties aside and begun preparing in earnest for the inevitable dénouement.

The Vietnamese set up training camps for Khmer refugees at former US military bases in the south. Le Duan and Le Duc Tho had their first meetings with potential leaders of the future Khmer resistance. Son Ngoc Minh, who had headed the Cambodian Party in the early 1950s, had died after a stroke in 1972, but some of his colleagues had stayed on in North Vietnam and since been joined by Khmer Rouge cadres who had fled after 1975. All were relatively junior figures: Pen Sovann had worked for the FUNK radio station in the early 1970s before becoming a major in the Vietnamese army; Bou Thang was an Issarak veteran from the North-East; Hun Sen, a young Khmer Rouge military commander, had defected in the summer of 1977. But they were the only material available from which to create the

nucleus of a future post-Khmer Rouge regime. An intensive programme of indoctrination was started, and in April, the first battalion of the future rebel army was commissioned.

Three months later in Beijing, the Chinese Politburo approved contingency plans to ‘teach Vietnam a lesson’ for its mistreatment of the Overseas Chinese. A discreet build-up of Chinese forces was ordered along Vietnam’s northern border. Le Duan travelled to Moscow to strengthen ties with the Russians. As a token of its good faith, Vietnam joined the Soviet-bloc economic grouping, Comecon, a step it had until then avoided for fear of needlessly antagonising China and the United States. Soviet arms and military advisers began pouring into northern Vietnam to bolster Hanoi’s defences against what were now described as Beijing’s hegemonic designs. Chinese arms, including 130-mm artillery, anti-tank weapons, armoured cars and complete sets of infantry equipment for an additional 60,000 men, were shipped to the port of Kompong Som as Chinese engineers raced to complete the new, more secure railway line under construction from the coast to Phnom Penh. Belatedly endorsing long-standing Khmer Rouge claims, the Chinese accused the Vietnamese of seeking to extend their over-lordship not only in Indochina but to all of South-East Asia. Brzezinski’s ‘proxy war’ formulation had struck a chord in Beijing. Vietnam was ‘the Cuba of the East’, a stalking horse for Soviet ambitions, undertaking in Asia the same role that Castro’s forces were playing in Africa and Latin America. Behind the Cambodia-Vietnam conflict lay a Kremlin plot to dominate the entire region. No longer was it merely a local dispute. The outcome would affect the global balance of power.

Much of this was as self-serving and false as Le Duan’s judgement of Chinese intentions. But it, too, became an unchallengeable truth.

For the umpteenth time in Cambodia’s tormented history, the paranoid miscalculations of its leaders meant that its fate would be decided not by its own people but by outside powers.

After General Giap’s forces had withdrawn, Pol sought to redefine Khmer Rouge strategy. He proposed the re-establishment of a united front, so as to maximise support for the regime at home; stepped up diplomatic efforts to win public and political sympathy abroad, notably in the West; and approved an easing of domestic policy.

Pol had first raised these ideas almost a year before.

‘We have to gather

all the forces that can be gathered,’ he had said. ‘Even feudalists, rich peasants, capitalists or whatever, if they are with us, they are not with the enemy and this is to our profit.’ At the time, that had remained a dead letter. But now, in 1978, it had become a necessity:

How do we gather

forces? We do so in the same way as [during the civil war]. But now it is more meaningful, because we hold power throughout the country . . . We must win over the petty bourgeoisie, the small capitalists and the landowners . . . and pull them to our side [without] discriminating against them . . . Why do we need to do this? In order to isolate the enemy . . . At the present time, we must do whatever we can to minimise the forces of the enemy [and] expand our own forces [so that] the Party will be stronger, the people will be stronger, the armed forces will be stronger, and the economy will be stronger. We should not reject [any] force that will join with us . . . We must apply [this] line correctly.

As part of this process, Pol toyed with the idea of taking a higher personal profile. It was not something that particularly appealed to him, but the experience of both China and North Korea showed that a

personality cult

was a powerful tool to rally a nation behind its leader. In the winter of 1977, a group of artists was ordered to paint his official portrait and to sculpt busts of him in a variety of materials including silver. It seems none was ever displayed, and a revolutionary monument, 25 feet high, showing Pol in a heroic pose leading a group of peasants, which was to have been erected at Wat Phnom, also remained at the design stage.

The search for broader international support went in tandem with the united front at home. It had begun with Pol’s visits to China and Korea. In November 1977, Burma’s Ne Win had become the first foreign head of state to visit Phnom Penh. Others, including President Ceauşescu of Romania, followed. Initially, the Chinese played the main role in urging the Khmers Rouges to be more open in their dealings with the outside world. But by early 1978, Pol had become a convert. Democratic Kampuchea had ‘great need of friendly countries’, he declared. It would make every effort to ‘unite with progressive and revolutionary forces the world over’. Khieu Samphân remembered the Standing Committee holding lengthy discussions on the subject. ‘It was not a decision that we took lightly,’ he said, ‘but in the end everyone realised it was necessary.’

Measures were taken to improve relations with Thailand, where the extreme-right-wing military government had been replaced by a mixed administration led by General Kriangsak. A stream of

Marxist-Leninist groups

from Western Europe, Latin America, Australia and even the United States began pouring into Democratic Kampuchea on goodwill visits aboard the now weekly flight from Beijing. Friendship delegations came from Japan and Scandinavia. A handful of foreign journalists and academics travelled to Phnom Penh, first from Yugoslavia, then from the United States and Britain. Weekly tourist flights were started from Bangkok offering half-day visits to Angkor. The UN Secretary-General,

Kurt Waldheim, was invited to visit the following year, and Japan agreed that a Khmer Rouge Ambassador should present his credentials to Emperor Hirohito at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, becoming prospectively the first major industrialised power to open relations with the Phnom Penh regime.

The conflict with Vietnam was not the only factor at work.

By 1978, Pol was forced to recognise that the Khmer Rouge system was functioning poorly. Officially the difficulties were blamed on ‘wrecking’ by internal enemies. But he himself acknowledged that 20 to 30 per cent of the population was still not properly fed and that, in some areas, people were starving. Over the next twelve months a series of measures were taken to make life more tolerable. Foraging and family cooking were permitted again. The regime took a hesitant, first step towards honouring its promises of a better diet by introducing a ‘dessert day’, three times a month, when rice soup sweetened with palm sugar was served. The ban on coloured clothes was lifted. The system of one day off in ten was reaffirmed and, in principle, made universal. Marriages were permitted for the first time between ‘old’ and ‘new’ people and, in the summer of 1978, the distinction between the two groups was abolished as the whole population was granted full political rights. As always, these changes were introduced unevenly, at the whim of local cadres. In many areas, conditions got worse rather than better in 1978. None the less, in the country as a whole, there was a trend towards greater tolerance, however imperfectly applied.

The same applied to matters of discipline. By 1977, execution had become the standard punishment, even for minor offences. Now Pol signed a Central Committee directive, laying down that only ‘those who are absolutely hostile to the Party, the revolution and the people, [and] who refuse to repent’ need be killed. All others, not ‘absolutely hostile’, including even those who had served the CIA, the KGB and the Vietnamese, were to be educated to ‘mend their ways, achieve illumination and return to the bosom of the Party’. The new rules did not exclude further purges when the Centre so decided. But arbitrary killings decreased. The directive was to be discussed in every unit ‘at least five or six times’, the Central Committee decreed, ‘so that everyone understands it completely’. An air-force officer, who returned that summer after two years’ training in China, was told by friends: ‘You’re lucky. Things are much better now. Before, everyone was worried about being arrested. Now, if you do something wrong, even if you have an illicit love affair, you’re demoted, but you survive.’ The change of policy was also felt in the co-operatives, where the pressures on intellectuals — former students and professional people — noticeably eased. Local cadres were ordered to stop referring to themselves as Angkar: that term was for the organisation, not for individuals.

Attitudes towards intellectuals changed in other ways. The returned students who had been reforging themselves through manual labour in the countryside were brought back to Phnom Penh and told they would be found jobs in the ministries. A school was opened in B-1 to provide language and secretarial training for future Foreign Ministry cadres. Technical instruction, until then scorned as a mark of the bourgeoisie, made its appearance again in the factories. Thiounn Mumm was put in charge of a new National Technical College, with three hundred pupils, who were to be trained as agronomists, engineers and scientific workers.

Much of this had been prefigured in Pol’s speeches and writings during the previous two years. But now it was being put into effect. It might be inspirational to claim that ‘revolutionary consciousness’ could accomplish anything, but not if, as a result, the country had to rely on Chinese experts. Even the decision to do without money, which the CPK leadership had vaunted as the regime’s most original feature, was examined afresh. When Democratic Kampuchean delegations travelled abroad, they had to carry with them suitcases full of US dollars, the symbol of American imperialism. Was that independence? As relations with Vietnam deteriorated, and Cambodia developed trade ties with non-communist South-East Asia, Japan and Europe, the arguments in favour of a national currency became stronger. That spring, Pol told a group of Yugoslav journalists that

‘we have ceased

to use money up to now . . . [but] we do not take the present system as a permanent one’. Money and wages could be reintroduced if the practical situation required it. According to Khieu Samphân, Pol and Ieng Sary decided in the autumn that money should indeed be used again, but by then it was too late for the decision to be implemented.

The changes introduced from the spring of 1978 — more openness; greater tolerance; a bigger effort to win domestic support — were incremental and small-scale, but by comparison with a year earlier they were a sea change. However they were only one side of the coin. The same year Pol and Nuon Chea launched the biggest and most murderous purge since they had taken power. Tens of thousands of people were bludgeoned to death in prisons and on execution grounds, accused of having ‘Vietnamese minds in Khmer bodies’, the same charge that had been hurled at the Hanoi returnees five years earlier.

This dichotomy went to the heart of the system Pol had created. It could not exist without terror, even when its leaders were convinced that a more moderate approach was needed. The two were linked by a dialectic in which the massacre of suspected opponents and calls for fewer executions were seen not as diametrical opposites but as complementary

halves of the same whole. In Pol’s mind, the united front against Vietnam had to be offset by an all-round tightening of discipline within the regime itself — just as, in the early 1970s, the establishment of a united front under Sihanouk had been counterbalanced by stricter class criteria for the Party.