Shortly after the elections, a second delegation went to see the Prince, this time led by Penn Nouth and including all three vice-premiers. Again, he refused their entreaties. On the morning of April 2, after being informed that his resignation had been accepted, he recorded a farewell statement in French and Khmer, which was broadcast later the same day. His voice, bleached of emotion, testified to his distress. Yet, however difficult it was for him at that moment, and whatever the true reasons for his action — which were certainly less altruistic than he claimed — the move was inspired. Like his abdication in 1955, it left him uniquely placed to play a pivotal role in the future.
If there was a price to pay, it was paid mainly by those around him. Relatives who until then had been spared were sent to the countryside, where none survived. His aide-de-camp ‘disappeared’. But Sihanouk himself and his immediate family — his two sons, Princess Monique, her mother and a young cousin — were too important politically and diplomatically to suffer the same fate.
Even by his own account, the ‘golden cage’ to which he had returned — he had used the same term for the kingship, twenty years earlier — was none too arduous. For the next year, he retained the services of his Khmer Rouge ‘retinue’. Khieu Samphân continued to invite him on visits to the provinces, which he apparently refused.
Although forbidden any contact with the world beyond the palace walls, other than listening to radio broadcasts, Sihanouk’s material needs were amply provided for — to the point where, in his memoirs, he grumbled about running out of rum to make
bananes flambées
for dessert. At a time when hundreds of thousands of his compatriots were dying of starvation, the complaint rang a little hollow. He was allowed to have air-conditioning because he was averse to the heat. Although the Chinese doctor attached to the palace was withdrawn, he had access to hospital treatment from the same medical and dental teams that cared for Pol and his colleagues. To reassure China and North Korea, the government declared him to be a ‘great patriot’, announced that a monument would be built in his honour and that he would receive a state pension of 8,000 dollars a year, promises observed in the breach but indicative none the less.
Sihanouk’s decision to separate himself from the Khmers Rouges in April 1976 had unintended repercussions.
It ended the last pretence that Democratic Kampuchea had a united front
government, in which key posts were held by men outside the revolutionary ranks. Instead of Sihanouk, Khieu Samphân — the ‘dauphin’, as Thiounn Thioeunn and his wife started calling him — now became Head of State, a ceremonial post, admittedly, but beyond his wildest expectations only a few weeks before. To Sihanouk, Samphân was ‘a figurehead, a dummy’. But Pol placed growing trust in him. He appreciated his patience and perseverance, and the fact that when he was given a task, he would carry it out to the letter, doing neither more nor less than he was asked. Samphân was one of only two Khmer Rouge leaders Pol ever singled out for public praise (the other being Nuon Chea). He was passive, but loyal; incorruptible, but small-minded.
Initially it had been intended to have Penn Nouth, the outgoing Premier, take the post of Vice-President. But in the end that idea was dropped too. The new government was purely Khmer Rouge.
To Pol
, notwithstanding the disadvantages, Sihanouk’s departure had a silver lining. The monarchy and the legacy of feudalism, he declared, had been definitively dismantled and foreign policy would be more clear-cut. ‘Our government is not mixed, as before,’ he told the new cabinet at its first meeting. ‘We alone now have total responsibility for what goes right and what goes wrong, what is good and what is bad, what we lose and what we gain . . . No one rules the country except us.’
Nuon Chea was appointed President of the Standing Committee of the National Assembly, a post which, like many others in Democratic Kampuchea, existed only on paper. Pol became Prime Minister, assuming at this point the name by which the world would remember him: Pol Pot. It was a decision he took with some reluctance. In February, the Standing Committee had designated Son Sen as Premier. But after Sihanouk’s resignation, Pol had second thoughts. ‘The new government must have prestige at home and abroad,’ he said, ‘and it needs sufficient authority.’ Son Sen, he argued, had his hands full at Defence. Penn Nouth, though competent and trustworthy, was not Khmer Rouge material. That left only himself.
*
In hindsight this was perhaps the most important effect of Sihanouk’s departure. After a lifetime spent in the shadows, hiding from the limelight, Pol was forced to take centre stage.
It was not a role which came to him easily. At first, Cambodian officials were told to say the new Premier was ‘a rubber plantation worker’ from the Eastern Zone, and a
fictitious
biography was circulated, claiming that he had fought with the Issarak during the Japanese occupation. In Paris there was speculation that ‘Pol Pot’ might be an alias for Rath Samoeun. When the first photographs of him appeared, old friends from his student days, like Nghet Chhopininto, to say nothing of his own brothers, working as peasants in Kompong Thom, were amazed to discover that their new leader was the self-effacing Saloth Sâr. It was the old instinct, born of years of clandestinity, that information must be jealously guarded and the less that got out, the better. As Nuon Chea explained:
Even now, after ‘liberation’. . . secret work is fundamental in all that we do. For example, elections of comrades to leading work are secret. The places where our leaders live are secret. We keep meeting times and places secret . . . On the one hand this is a matter of general principle, and on the other it is a means to defend ourselves from enemy infiltration. As long as there is class struggle or imperialism, secret work will remain fundamental. Only through secrecy can we be masters of the situation . . . We base everything on secrecy.
Other considerations, stemming from a much older tradition also came into play. A popular Buddhist text explained that the happiness of the people was in proportion to the wisdom of the King. In a revolutionary context, it depended on the Party leadership, which must therefore be defended at all costs. In Nuon Chea’s words:
If we lose
members but retain the leadership, we can continue to win victories . . . As long as the leadership is there, the Party will not die. There can be no comparison between losing two to three leading cadres and two
to three hundred members. Rather the latter than the former. Otherwise the Party has no head and cannot lead the struggle.
This was the Angkorian model of statecraft, dressed in communist clothes. There were no intermediate layers of power, no pyramid of responsibilities, as in a modern state. The feudal system which Cambodia had inherited had comprised Sihanouk and a handful of mandarins who held office at his pleasure — and his subjects. The King was now replaced by Angkar, personified by Pol Pot — and Sihanouk’s ‘subjects’ by ‘the masses’.
Throughout the years of revolutionary struggle, the demands of secrecy had meant that this mysterious and omnipotent leadership had remained anonymous. Now, for the first time, the ‘Comrade Secretary’, like the god-kings of old, had to reveal himself with a human face.
It was a face that was very hard to fathom.
‘Pol Pot,’ Ieng Sary recalled, ‘even when he was very angry, you could never tell. His face . . . his face was
always smooth
. He never used bad language. You could not tell from his face what he was feeling. Many people misunderstood that — he would smile his unruffled smile, and then they would be taken away and executed.’ Sihanouk admired Pol’s eloquence and charisma. ‘He
seduced you,’
he wrote, ‘speaking softly [and] always with courtesy.’ Kong Duong, who worked with him in the 1980s, remembered his warmth and his obliquity:
He was
very likeable
, a really nice person. He was friendly, and everything he said seemed very sensible. He would never blame you or scold you to your face. He would imply things, so that we would have to think about them ourselves . . . [Because of this indirectness], it was sometimes very difficult to figure out what he was getting at. So we were very cautious, because we used to worry about misinterpreting his meaning.
Mey Mak, later one of his secretaries, recalled one such allusive
parable
:
He once called me over to sit near him and told me a story. It was about a king and an official. The official was very clever and the King valued him. The King called him to come and play chess. But he laid down one condition. ‘If I lose the game,’ the King said, ‘I will let you rule the kingdom in my place. But if I win, I will send you to work in the countryside as a peasant.’ While they were playing, the official saw an opening to win. But he didn’t follow up. Instead he found a way to allow the King to break through his defence. So finally, he lost. The King was very happy. And because he was very happy, instead of sending him to the countryside to become a peasant, he promoted him to a still higher post. Pol Pot told that story because he wanted us to think about it. He said: ‘You must interpret it as you think.’
The anecdote is intriguing for the layers of subterfuge and ambiguity it reveals. Ieng Sary might condemn Pol’s ideas as simplistic, but he also acknowledged that his character was
complicated
. The Khmer sociologist Vandy Kaonn, who survived the Khmer Rouge years by pretending to be mad, saw no contradiction in that. ‘
[Pol] demanded
a radical, intransigent application of the principles adopted,’ he wrote, ‘but at the same time he required maximum creativity and tact.’
More ominous were Pol’s silences. When he ‘sat quietly and did not reply’, it was the prelude to political disgrace. Those Pol trusted might be granted uncommon latitude. But once a grain of suspicion had taken root in his mind, there was no way to stop it growing.
The verbal precautions with which he cloaked brutally simple policies lent his pronouncements an enigmatic quality. Thus, agricultural mechanisation was the aim, but to get there it was necessary to use as little machinery as possible. Cambodians must reject private ownership, but that did not mean they could not have ‘numerous possessions’ — this was ‘a false contradiction . . . The material livelihood of the people must be encouraged’. ‘New people’ were unreliable and in many cases unreformable; yet it was wrong to treat them all as enemies. None of these statements was incoherent
per se:
even the puzzling reference to private property merely meant that poverty was not the goal; the more possessions people had, the better, provided they were collectively owned. Like the
k’ruu,
the sages of Khmer antiquity, who spoke in riddles, imparting wisdom in return for obedience and respect, Pol preferred not to be explicit. He believed the revolution would prosper only if the cadres developed a ‘revolutionary consciousness’ which enabled them to act on their own with a minimum of guidance.
The result was that he was constantly disappointed by his subordinates’ capabilities. That fuelled the purge of elements judged to be disloyal. It also made him spend time on trivia that would have been better left to others. Like Sihanouk, who personally inspected the place-settings before official banquets, Pol approved the menus for state receptions, sent laundry lists
*
of instructions to provincial officials receiving government guests, chose the announcers for Radio Phnom Penh and supervised the programme
schedules. In a society where the word of the King had always been law, initiative was still-born. To Suong Sikoeun, ‘micro-managing the smallest details was part of Pol’s conception of leadership. A firm hand, with no sharing of power. He wanted to monopolise everything.’
Over time, this tendency became more pronounced.
In theory, meetings of the Standing Committee were conducted on the principle of democratic centralism or, as it was rendered in Khmer, ‘the collectivity decides; the individual is responsible for implementation’. In practice, Khieu Samphân said, from 1976 on, Pol decided alone:
He would listen
impassively and with immense patience to detailed reports from lower-level officials. . . . He liked to hear the views of many different people . . . The more information the better. He would retain whatever was relevant to the problem at hand, and work out an initial hypothesis, which he would keep to himself. When he had refined it and reached a conclusion which satisfied him, he would make his decision, which then became irrevocable. Afterwards he would call a meeting [of members of the Standing Committee], explaining the problem before them in such a way that, without anyone realising it, the discussion was orientated towards the result he desired . . . After everyone had spoken, he would make the summing up — selecting points from their speeches which buttressed his position. He would relate these to a number of fundamental principles, including the Party’s political line and the dialectical rule that all things are linked and exist in relation one to another. Then he would announce the decision, making it appear that everyone had contributed to its formulation. There was no vote. It was stated: ‘The collectivity has decided.’
Imperceptibly, Pol slipped into the role that his position as Premier required. He gave his first interviews to communist journalists. He chaired cabinet meetings. When Mao died in September, Pol delivered the memorial speech. In Sopheap, who heard him speak at Party meetings, was struck both by his personality and by the cultural roots on which he drew:
Pol Pot liked
to talk about his ideas. Whether he was a ‘great communicator’, I don’t know . . . But in any case, he spoke well. He was very Khmer . . . He could find the words that went to your heart, that touched every fibre of your being. To Europeans, his way of reasoning may have seemed outlandish. But for Cambodians, it worked . . . When he spoke he hardly moved . . . He never raised his voice. It’s a very Cambodian way of behaving . . . He was serene, like a monk. For a monk, there are different levels. At the first level, you feel joy. And it’s good. Then there’s a second level. You no longer feel anything for yourself, but you feel the joy of others. And finally, there’s a third level. You are completely neutral. Nothing moves you. This is the highest level. Pol Pot situated himself in that tradition of serenity.