When the War Was Over (58 page)

The elite standing committee of the central committee of the party was either consciously lying to itself or so steeped in false optimism that its members knew no better when they declared in the middle of 1977 that the revolutionary base was solid. If anything, the foundation of support was cracking. The Khmer Rouge probably had 15 to 25 percent of the population behind them, largely the poorer peasants and the young. But many of the other “old people” who thought they would benefit from the revolution now resented it. Food consumption was dropping. As the purges of the regions began to cross the country they feared for their lives.

As was shown in the Northwestern Zone purge, the old people became more suspect than the new in 1977; they were executed or lost their positions and privileges in the reshuffles. Their families became suspect and vulnerable in any future rounds of reprisals. About this time the standing committee instituted a new “liberal” policy toward executions. Previously three accusations of traitorous behavior were enough to send someone to prison and sure death. Now the Center security bureaucracy required five accusations, a move Ieng Sary said was more humane. In fact, it just demanded more victims.

As the targets changed, the killing and purges continued and grew bloodier. Each time the Phnom Penh leaders moved to counteract what was seen as traitorous behavior with executions, the result was a multiplication of blood debts. In the middle of 1977 when the Center decided an old, carefully disguised plot was sabotaging Cambodia's revolution, they arrested leaders near the top, who were in a position to perpetrate such a plan.

Previously they had generally purged the top leaders, who were among the more educated with bourgeois backgrounds—Koy Thuon, the purged head of the Northern Zone, Khek Phen of the Northwestern Zone, and Hu Nim, the minister of information. All of these men were accused of working for the American CIA; in some cases the charges were later amended to include working for the Vietnamese. But the execution of Keo Meas, the ranking party member involved in the dispute over the party's history, was a harbinger of the purges to come in late 1977 and 1978. The Vietnamese replaced the United States as the foreign power to credit for masterminding networks of spies.

Until the middle of 1977 the Eastern Zone under So Phim had seemed one of the two most favored in the country. Like the Southwestern Zone, the Eastern Zone had largely escaped the Center's paranoia. From the silver-green forests of the rubber plantations to the palm-lined rice paddies stretching to the Vietnamese border, and the fishing villages along the east bank of the Mekong, the Eastern Zone had been protected from Center interference. Phim had won that protection by accepting Center policy directives and demands including the arrest and murder or purge of some of his cadres. Phim's actions showed his strong Machiavellian instincts, which were enough for his survival until 1977.

His fatal flaw was the obvious—he was too much a part of the system to imagine it turning against him or to recognize the clues when the Center did turn on him. He was a party elder. He had been a member of the elite standing committee since the 1950s. He had been party secretary of the Eastern Zone since 1060.

He had personally built up the legendary Eastern Zone army. He began the armed struggle in 1968, even though the Vietnamese refused to give him the weapons his troops needed desperately. Although he reputedly never forgot how the Vietnamese turned him down, he was clever enough to maintain correct relations with them. By 1969 he was using Vietnamese territory to hide and regroup his troops. In 1970, when the Vietnamese came
en masse inside Cambodian territory, So Phim and his troops were fighting alongside the Vietnamese.

Phim proved adept at bargaining with the Vietnamese but never giving in to their demands for joint control over Vietnamese and Khmer troops or joint headquarters. He reaped the immediate benefits of the Vietnamese army fighting the war for the Khmer Rouge. The Vietnamese passed on captured weapons and gave the Eastern Zone the time to build up its forces. Yet when Pol Pot ordered the execution of the Khmer communists who returned from Hanoi with the Vietnamese troops, Phim obeyed. Eastern Zone deputies like Ouch Buon Chhoeun oversaw the detention and execution of the returnees within their region in 1974.

After victory Phim retained control over the Eastern Zone. When the government was announced the next year, Phim was named first vice-chairman of the state presidium, directly below Khieu Samphan. One of his chief lieutenants, Phuong, was put in charge of the ministry of rubber plantations and replaced, at the Center's orders, by another Eastern Zone figure—Chan, whom Phim considered in total accord with his own views. The Center dictated a few other changes in the Eastern Zone hierarchy but largely left it alone, particularly when compared with the major changes ordered in other regions, such as the Southwest, which was split in half, and the Special Zone, which was abolished.

Phim not only followed Center orders; he was a part of the Center, as a member of the standing committee of the party and the state presidium of the government. His troops had faithfully carried out the evacuation of Phnom Penh. They executed religious people and especially the Cham Muslim minority who traditionally lived in the east. The Eastern Zone, however, was late in adopting communal eating and in some areas resisted orders to abolish the concept of private property. For this So Phim was later accused of being too slavish an admirer of the Chinese model of cooperatives.

But nowhere in this record is there a hint of So Phim being a close friend of Vietnam; rather he was proud of his record of refusing to become dependent on Vietnam in war or peace. Nor was there a hint of rebellion—Phim openly admired the North Korean model, which was considered correct in Democratic Kampuchea. Despite Cambodia's utter dependence on China at this point, the leaders in Phnom Penh preferred to see North Korea as its inspiration, another relatively small, rigid communist country preaching self-sufficiency and practicing a strict totalitarian control over its population.

Moreover, there had been a large number of purges within the Eastern Zone before 1977, purges carried out by the zone's own security forces. One
expert put these purges at 500 to 1,000 cadre—a high figure even for the Eastern Zone, which had one of the largest corps of trained cadre. There is some doubt whether So Phim ordered these purges or whether they were done at the behest of the Center. But regardless, Phim knew of them and went along with them, probably accepting the evidence that these cadre were somehow treasonous. Like Nhim Ros, the secretary of the Northwestern Zone, Phim allowed the early purge of his region trusting that the Center or his own security forces had evidence against the cadre.

In this new era of the outsider, however, leading party figures like So Phim were the most vulnerable. What in the earlier years had been sterling credentials that led to Phim's promotion, were now suspicious traits and the bill of particulars for his condemnation. If Phim had paid closer attention to the purges of the zones and the rationales behind them he might have seen the purge of his zone in the making.

The Northern Zone had been purged first, largely because some of the revolution's basic problems cropped up there first: the inability to maintain absolute security (the Northern Zone had the only major wartime breach, 1974); and the inability to bring the economy under control while enforcing the revolution's Draconian social program. The Northwestern Zone had been the second target because it was the scene of even greater failure: The Center's ambitious scheme to re-create the wealth of Angkor there fell apart; instead the northwest was the scene of famine, crop shortages, and appalling rates of executions.

The next scene of failure had to be the zone where the Center expected success, if one follows Center logic, and that was the Eastern Zone. The Center expected Phim to bring victory in the border war with Vietnam. Early signs that Vietnam had the obviously superior army led the Center to suspect Phim of collusion with Vietnam. Phim's party history made him a perfect candidate for charges that he was a ringleader of the network of spies set up by Vietnam to subvert the party and the revolution.

A comparison of Phim and the Eastern with Ta Mok and the Southwestern Zone is instructive. By the middle of 1977 Mok and the Southwest were in the best political positions of the zones. Mok's men had moved in with cadre of the West Zone to replace those purged in the Northwest. His region was among the poorest and hence never a focus of the Center's grander economic schemes. Although his zone bordered on Vietnam it had a more naturally defensible border than the East.

Moreover, Mok did not hold a position in the national government. He had risen in the movement first as a district chief and only had become his
zone's secretary in the late 1960s. About the same time he probably became a member of the standing committee, very much a junior member to So Phim. But Mok's ruthlessness and his military acumen quickly gave him a major voice in Center politics. He was a useful henchman who zealously protected his own zone and obeyed orders from Pol Pot, staying out of trouble and out of the limelight. Pol Pot saw Mok not as a threat but eventually as one of the Center's greatest assets in the party purges, at least until he, too, outlasted his usefulness.

The purge of So Phim came before that point was reached, but Mok seems not to have realized that his zone was simply further down Pol Pot's list of potential traitors.

In 1977 there was a violent fight between the patriots who said that
Kampuchea must be independent of Vietnam and those who said
Kampuchea must be close friends with Vietnam. This battle continued
until the middle of 1978. . . .

 

In the modern era there was an ideological neatness to the Cambodian-Vietnamese border disputes. Sihanouk's problems were with regimes backed by the United States. In 1967 the Vietnamese communists recognized Cambodia's borders, and to the outside world, at least, it appeared as if the communists were willing to resolve the national conflicts between the two countries.

This proved as illusory as most of the other assumptions about the nature of the conflict in Indochina. Under their new communist governments, the Vietnamese and Cambodians clashed over border disputes immediately. Between 1975 and 1977 the Vietnamese and Cambodian leadership held a number of meetings to discuss their disputed common land and sea borders, but they could not reach an agreement. To the Cambodians it appeared as if the Vietnamese were backing down on the agreement reached with Sihanouk in 1967. The Cambodian communists accepted the borders established by Sihanouk and the Vietnamese. These French-drawn borders had been greatly to Cambodia's disadvantage. They gave up all the old claims to Kampuchea Krom as long as the Vietnamese promised to respect the border. To give up an inch of Khmer territory would be courting disaster, if accepted history was a proper guide.

As one Khmer expert noted: “Since the Sihanouk era, when an intense public education effort focused on the history and problems of Cambodia's frontiers, the border issue has consistently been for Cambodians the key barometer of the state of Vietnamese-Cambodian relations. . . . Concessions of the border issue entail even greater and more certain risks and sacrifices than friendship with Vietnam, since even the appearance of concession can be destabilizing, perhaps inviting a coup by those who would renounce or reverse the apparent concession.”

Lon Nol had trumpeted his holy war against the Vietnamese communists with the cry that they had crossed into Khmer territory, violated the independence of Cambodia, and treated the border as an inconvenience. In all likelihood, the Vietnamese were insensitive to the fear they raised in Cambodians over these border issues. The balance of power is so dramatically in their favor they cannot understand how their every action affects the sense of national security in Cambodia, because the reverse is hardly true.

By the time the border issue flared open again, Pol Pot and Duch believed they had gathered more than enough evidence of Vietnamese meddling in Cambodian party politics from Tuol Sleng confessions. As early as September 1976 the party's journal had declared: “From now on we must arrange the history of the party into something clean and perfect, in line with our policies of independence and self-mastery.” The changing of the party birth date quickly developed into a serious maneuver by Pol Pot and his inner circle to force the “friends of Vietnam,” those supposedly willing to be subservient to Vietnam, to show themselves by protesting the change. In fact, the change undermined both the truth and the seniority of those who had joined the party in Cambodia before Pol Pot, regardless of their views of Vietnam. If they accepted this change, they lost all of their seniority.

Pol Pot tore apart the carefully built coalitions in the party that had bound communists of different backgrounds during their long battle in obscurity and their war against Sihanouk and then Lon Nol. It was a move meant to isolate those party Veterans with roots deep in the Indochinese Communist Party, men like So Phim of the Eastern Zone and Ta Mok of the Southwest. As Thiounn Mumm admitted all too easily, “We switched to the 1060 date in order to disconnect ourselves from the ICP.”