de facto
alliance of Ieng Sary, Rath Samoeun and Thiounn Mumm, became more pronounced. Vannsak swallowed his rage over the Berlin episode and continued to try to mediate between them, joining Mumm in Warsaw in late August for a congress
of
the International Students’ Union. But the fundamental issue in dispute — whether or not to endorse
armed struggle
against the French — was not one that could be papered over. Mumm said later that he had first realised the importance of a military struggle when his fellow officer cadets at the Ecole Polytechnique (run by the French Defence Ministry) had shown polite interest in Cambodia’s campaign for independence and a very different sort of respect for the fight the Vietnamese were waging. ‘I understood then that without armed struggle, we could not obtain independence. Ieng Sary felt the same way. And since we didn’t want the Vietnamese to have the monopoly of military power, it meant we had to have our own army and fight for our own cause.’ After the meeting with the Viet Minh in Berlin, this belief became a certainty. In Vannsak’s words, ‘
[they] came back convinced
that . . . the Viet Minh were right, that the French had to be forced to yield and armed struggle was the only way’
Ea Sichau and the Thanhists saw things differently. They argued that to take up arms would be to court Vietnamese domination. Burma and India had both won independence by non-violent means: why could not Cambodia do the same?
Son Ngoc Thanh himself equivocated. Mumm and Sary went to see him at Poitiers, where they noted, disapprovingly, that the
Collected Works
of Marx, prominently displayed in Thanh’s library, had never been opened. Thanh’s reluctance to commit himself was understandable: he had
been trying for years to persuade Sihanouk to grant an amnesty allowing him to return and at long last there were signs that the King might soon do so. Laying himself open to accusations of endorsing armed revolt was the last thing he needed. To Ea Sichau and his supporters, moreover, Thanh’s return was the best, last hope of gaining independence without Viet Minh involvement. Sihanouk appeared more than ever a French puppet, a weak, capricious man whom none of the Paris students believed was capable of ending colonial rule. Vannsak, who was deeply mistrustful of Vietnamese motives, also urged Thanh to return and take control of the independence movement so as to forge the disparate Issarak groups into an authentic Khmer force, capable of ousting the French without foreign aid.
In the middle of October, Sihanouk announced that Thanh’s exile was to end. Ten days later, accompanied by Ea Sichau, he set out for Phnom Penh, where he was given a hero’s welcome by a crowd estimated at 100,000 people, who lined the route from the airport as he drove in an open limousine the five miles into the city, slowing the cortege to walking pace in their efforts to see and touch him. It was the kind of welcome that hitherto had been reserved for Sihanouk alone and it gave the young King much pause for thought. Thanh declined the offer of a government post, and after consultations with Democratic Party leaders, set out on a tour of the provinces, hoping to build his popularity further before making a bid for power. Sihanouk watched uneasily, but could only let events take their course.
The effect of the Berlin Festival and the departure of Son Ngoc Thanh was to move the political centre of gravity of the Khmer student movement in Paris sharply to the left. In October 1951, the AEK chose Hou Yuon as its new president. Nghet Chhopininto remembered him as ‘an independent spirit. Once he had traced his path, he followed it.’ Of humble origins, Hou was appreciated for the care with which he managed the association’s meagre funds and for his frankness and loyalty.
Under Hou Yuon, the AEK established close links with the left-wing French National Students’ Union (UNEF) and, through Jacques Verges, with the ISU and another group he headed, the Liaison Committee of Colonial Students’ Associations, which had its headquarters in the rue St Sulpice. From then on, the AEK adopted an openly political stance, approving the ‘struggle for national independence in all its forms’, a phrase which covered armed struggle as well as negotiation.
But this was merely the outward face of a deeper change. A few weeks earlier,
Thiounn Mumm had invited
some thirty Khmer students, chosen
for their progressive ideas, to a meeting at the home of his French girlfriend’s mother in Sceaux, a few miles south of Paris. They heard a report on the Festival in Berlin, followed by a discussion of the best way to promote independence. ‘No one used the word, “communism”,’ Nghet Chhopininto recalled. ‘[Mumm and Ieng Sary] were very cautious in what they said — and I think if they’d spoken in too ideological a fashion to begin with, people wouldn’t have gone along with them. Those who attended were patriots, whose aim was to get rid of the French.’ Mey Mann, who was also present that night, agreed. ‘
The main question
was always to get the communists to help us to free ourselves from the colonialists. But the appetite grows with eating. Once you study it, you start to like Marxism because it is so rational and scientific’
The meeting at Sceaux was designed to test the waters. Soon afterwards,
selected participants
were approached individually and asked if they would like to participate in a new, secret organisation: the Cercle Marxiste.
The Cercle was built up of individual cells, each comprising between three and six people. It was rigidly compartmentalised: one member of each cell was in contact with a single member of the leadership, and no cell member knew who belonged to the other cells or how many cells existed. Years later Ping Sây and Chhopininto were still unsure who had really been in charge.
In fact the three-man Co-ordinating Committee which ran the Cercle was headed by Ieng Sary, assisted by Thiounn Mumm and Rath Samoeun. Initially there were about a dozen members. One group met at the Hotel Anglo-Latin on the rue St André-des-Arts, where Ieng Sary and Thiounn Mumm were then living. Keng Vannsak attended the initial meetings but then lost interest, finding the discussions
too doctrinaire
. Another cell, to which Chhopininto belonged, was based in the suburb of Antony. A third was led by a mathematics student named Ok Sakun and included Ping Sây and Mey Mann. Quite when Saloth Sâr joined is unclear. He may have been at the meeting at Sceaux but, if so, took little part in the discussion, for no one remembers his presence there. Indeed, Thiounn Mumm had no recollection of meeting him at any time in Paris. Nevertheless, some time in the autumn or winter of 1951, Sâr was admitted to a group which met in the
rue Lacepède
, near the Radio-Electricity Institute. Hou Yuon was in the same cell. So was Sary’s friend Sien An, and a boy named Sok Knaol whom Sâr had befriended. Knaol was several years younger than the others and was studying fashion design.
For the next nineteen years, the Cercle operated as a secret core group, manipulating from behind the scenes the AEK and its successor organisations. The French police Special Branch, the Renseignements Généraux,
estimated that in 1953, by which time the Cercle had about thirty members, it exerted a direct influence on approximately half the Cambodian students in Paris. That did not mean they were all Marxists. But all had ‘progressive’ views and saw the communists as allies in the independence struggle.
The cells met once a week, usually for a couple of hours in the evening, to discuss the week’s events and to study Marxist texts. They started with Lenin’s
ABC of Communism,
followed by the
Communist Manifesto
and Mao Zedong’s
On New Democracy.
There were also evenings of ‘criticism and self-criticism’, when cell members analysed their shortcomings and those of their comrades. Such sessions were relatively benign, one participant recalled, with none of the systematic demolition of personality that would characterise self-criticism in Cambodia when the communists were in power. None the less, there was an undertone of severity, which everyone knew came from Ieng Sary. As Ping Sây put it: ‘Sary worked a lot and he was quite broad-minded. But he wasn’t amusing like Sâr [or Rath Samoeun] . . . He was tough — and he had a strong character.’ Thiounn Mumm charged that some students quit the Cercle altogether because of Sary’s excessive demands. Mumm himself and his girlfriend moved to a different hotel after Sary took to banging on their door at six o’clock in the morning to tell him that there was ‘political work to be done’. Another Cercle member remembered Sary advising him to
masturbate
instead of wasting his time with young women. Yet Sary did not always live up to his own exacting standards. A year later, when his fiancee, nineteen-year-old Khieu Thirith, the daughter of a judge, came to join him in Paris, he promptly made her pregnant. Mumm and a couple of friends lent them money to go to Switzerland for an abortion, it being unthinkable for a Cambodian girl of good family — Marxist sympathiser or not — to bear a child
out of wedlock
. In one sense the incident was banal, proof that Sary was, at heart, no different from other young men of his age. But it reflected a double standard — one set of rules for himself; another for those around him — that would characterise his behaviour all his life.
Thiounn Mumm was a very different character and in later years he and Sary came to loathe each other. Mumm’s intellectual brilliance and aristocratic ways gave him a sense of detachment which made him insensitive to the concerns of lesser beings. He was an amoral Utopian, consumed by a voracious curiosity for whatever touched on the realm of ideas but seemingly armour-plated against sentimentality and human weakness.
Of the three leaders of the Co-ordinating Committee, only Rath Samoeun commanded real affection. Khieu Samphân recalled his modesty and kindness; Ping Sây found him ‘a gentle man’. To Keng Vannsak he was
’honest and pure’. But Samoeun died before the Khmers Rouges took power. Otherwise he might have been remembered differently.
If Saloth Sâr remained inconspicuously in the background for his first two years in Paris, it was partly his character — as he put it many years later, ‘
I did not wish
to show myself — and partly because he had yet to find his role. He breathed the ‘air of the times’, as the French expression has it, and was carried along, with little effort on his own part, by more assured, dynamic colleagues.
Keng Vannsak thought he was ‘
out of his depth
’ in France, unable to cope with Parisian ways. To him, Sâr was ‘a poor fellow who hardly knew anybody and found it difficult to manage’. That judgement sits ill with the image of the ‘bon vivant’ that Ping Sây and Mey Mann remembered, and it may say more about Vannsak — whose high opinion of himself was reflected in a certain contempt for those he viewed as less gifted — than it does about Sâr. Yet it held a grain of truth. By the autumn of 1951, Sâr was beginning to worry about what he was going to do with his life. The Radio-Electricity School was leading nowhere: he had lost interest in his studies and
that summer failed
his second-year exams. His hero Son Ngoc Thanh had returned home. Vannsak’s circle he found fascinating, but the discussions were often above his head. The same disdain that the boys at the Lycée Sisowath had shown for the ‘apprentices’ during Sâr’s last year in Phnom Penh had followed him to Paris. ‘I only had a
middle school certificate
,’ he recalled. Men like Vannsak and Phuong Ton, preparing doctorates — no matter how sympathetic they might be — did not have a great deal of time for a former carpentry student now training to become a radio technician. Even in the Cercle Marxiste, he admitted ruefully, ‘the leaders were appointed on the basis of the diplomas they held —so I was not among them.’
But for Sâr, that winter, something clicked. He found his purpose in life. It was revolution.
He was not alone in that. The discovery of Stalinism — the PCF’s official ideology and constant rallying cry — gave the Khmer students in the Cercle something they had all lacked: a sense of belonging and a goal. Suddenly they were part of a world-wide movement endowed with a transcendant mission. Like communists everywhere, they interpreted Marxism through the prism of national culture, in their case an intensely normative form of Buddhism. Unsurprisingly, they saw themselves not as the avatars of a proletarian society which would transform the economic basis of a new, industrialised world, but much more simply — as the incarnation of good that would triumph over the forces of evil.
Most of them, moreover, had only the vaguest notions of Marxist
theory. Thiounn Mumm, Khieu Samphân and, a generation later, radical students like Suong Sikoeun and In Sopheap waded through Lenin’s
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
and
State and Revolution,
Stalin’s
Economic Problems of Socialism
and other ponderous tomes, but they were the exceptions who proved the rule. Sâr confessed later that when he read ‘the
big, thick works
of Marx . . . I didn’t really understand them at all.’ Ping Sây, too, thought that ‘Marx was too deep for us’. Ieng Sary, as an old man, would still occasionally lapse into Marxist categories when speaking of his Khmer Rouge days, and colleagues recalled how proud he was to have been one of only two Cambodians who had studied at the PCF Cadre School. For the others, Marxism signified an ideal, not a comprehensive system of thought to be mastered and applied.
A few months after the Cercle was established,
Sâr joined
the French Communist Party. Rath Samoeun, Ieng Sary, Mey Mann and half a dozen others did the same. They attended lectures on communist policy given by PCF leaders in a hall near the Opera, and meetings of the PCF’s Cambodian ‘language group’, which included both Party members and sympathisers.