The Red Flag: A History of Communism (89 page)

Pol’s monastic teaching style was also effective in recruiting the monks, teachers and students of Phnom Penh for the Communist party at a time when Sihanouk, an authoritarian modernizer, was expanding education. In 1962, with the mysterious death of the Communist Party’s leader, Pol became acting secretary of the party. But student riots in 1963 forced him to flee to guerrilla camps in the east and north-east of the country. Pol was following the route followed by Mao and the Chinese Communists after 1927, from the town to the countryside.

By the early 1960s Sihanouk, desperate to keep Cambodia out of the Vietnam War, had broken with the United States and forged an alliance with China and North Vietnam, allowing the Vietnamese guerrillas to use his territory. The Vietnamese were therefore not eager for the Cambodian Communists to attack the Sihanouk regime, a message that was clearly communicated when Pol Pot visited Hanoi in 1965. The radical Pol was looking for support for his insurgency, and resented the patronizing Vietnamese, but he found a much warmer welcome in Beijing when he visited at the end of the year. The Chinese did not want to help him against Sihanouk either, but they were politer, and Pol was excited by the radical atmosphere he saw there. The Socialist Education Movement was in full swing, and the Cultural Revolution was only months away. The 1965 Chinese visit, and a subsequent one in 1970, were to have an enormous impact on Pol’s thinking, and would provide him with a new vision. On his return he changed the name of the Communist party from the Vietnamese-style ‘Revolutionary Workers’ Party’ to the Chinese-style ‘Communist Party of Kampuchea’, and departed from Vietnamese-influenced areas to a more remote Yan’an-type part of the north-east, inhabited by ‘tribal’ minorities. The Khmer Rouge also began to prepare for an armed struggle against Sihanouk, which they launched the following year.
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The prospects for the radicalized Pol’s Communists began to look much brighter in 1969–70, partly as a result of Washington’s Vietnamese strategy. In 1969 Washington began to bomb Vietnamese bases in Cambodia, thus demonstrating the abject failure of Sihanouk’s efforts to avoid war. It also helped to precipitate his fall in a pro-American coup. The Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge and Sihanouk were now all united against the Washington-backed regime of Lon Nol, and by 1972 the Khmer Rouge controlled about half of Cambodia’s territory, mainly in the countryside. Led by teachers and urban people, most of its recruits were young poor peasants, and the classic Maoist methods of self-criticism, study sessions and manual labour were used to forge a united force. It was from this time that the Khmer Rouge began its campaigns against ‘feudalism’ in its ‘liberated’ areas, eradicating Buddhism and imposing an extreme egalitarianism and collectivism, symbolized by the demand that peasants wear sets of identical black pyjamas.

In 1973 the constellation of forces changed yet again, as the Vietnamese agreed with the Americans to withdraw from Cambodia, and the Khmer Rouge were left alone, bitter at Hanoi, but continuing the struggle. American bombing intensified, but it probably only increased support for the guerrillas. On 17 April 1975 the residents of Phnom Penh looked on anxiously as the victorious young peasants of the Khmer
Rouge entered the capital – much as the residents of Beijing had in 1949. It soon transpired that they had a lot to be anxious about.

The party that took control of Cambodia looked so unusual that some have doubted whether we should really call it Marxist at all. Several have pointed to the influence of Theravada Buddhism, its collectivism and fatalism, and this was François Bizot’s own explanation for this extraordinary movement.
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As he asked an angry Duch:

The Khmer Rouge’s peasant recruits were certainly taught its teachings without reference to Marx or Lenin, and until 1977 it even hid the fact that it was a Communist party, demanding allegiance to the ‘Revolutionary Organization’ (
Angkar Padevat
) instead. This was partly for nationalistic reasons: the Khmer Rouge was highly xenophobic, and did not want to acknowledge any foreign descent, especially from the hated Vietnamese. As Pol Pot declared in his victory speech: ‘We have won total, definitive, and clean victory, meaning that we have won it without any foreign connection or involvement.’
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But the Khmer Rouge was also extraordinarily secretive. Convinced that they had very little time to carry out a total revolution to prepare for a counter-attack, they continued to behave as if they were fighting a revolutionary war. The government was formed in secret, and the leaders all had code names: ‘Brother No. 1’ (Pol Pot), ‘Brother No. 2’, and so on. The first time the public heard the name ‘Pol Pot’ was during the ‘elections’ of April 1976, when this mysterious figure was identified, bizarrely, as a ‘rubber plantation worker’.
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Khmer Rouge officials told foreigners that Saloth Sâr was dead.

War and an extreme, resentful nationalism undoubtedly contributed to this secrecy and xenophobia, but so did the example of the Khmer Rouge’s erstwhile Vietnamese patron. The Viet Minh also presented itself as a broad nationalist front, and never officially referred to Marxism-Leninism.
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In other respects, the Khmer Rouge followed Maoist traditions in elevating the peasantry to the status of revolutionary class. However, the Cambodians went much further. As has been seen, Mao idealized the virtues of the peasantry, but he always remained committed to the ultimate supremacy of the proletariat. The Khmer Rouge, in contrast, saw the poor peasantry as a ‘working class’, and discriminated against all city-dwellers. One of their first decisions was to order that Phnom Penh and all other cities be evacuated and their residents – over 2 million people – be sent to the countryside to work, under coercion, in collective farms.

It is unclear what the precise motivation was.
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In large part, it exploited the resentments of the peasantry at the richer, cosmopolitan cities. This was a politics of revenge. As the party explained to its members when beginning the evacuation of the cities, ‘The city people have had an easy life, whereas the rural people have had a very hard time… The morality of the cities under Lon Nol was not pure and clean like in the liberated areas.’
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But it was also reminiscent of persecutions in other Communist states in mixing ideology and security. The urban residents were seen as potential opponents, but they were also seen as ideologically corrosive because they had grown up in the ‘filth of imperialist and colonialist culture’.
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In other respects, however, Khmer Rouge policy was an extreme version of the egalitarian Maoism of the Great Leap Forward. Money was abolished, and everybody, including the deportees, became labourers on collective farms. Urban life was destroyed, the cities emptied, schools closed. The country became one large agricultural labour camp, and the lives of all were devoted to labour and political education. The regime sought to destroy old hierarchies of all sorts. Children were expected to call their parents ‘comrade father’ and ‘comrade mother’ and the use of the term ‘sir’ was banned.
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Only marriages approved by the party were allowed. Pol Pot even declared that ‘Mothers should not get too entangled with their offspring’, and communal dining halls were introduced to stop family bonding.
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At the same time, however, society was divided in new ways, according to class and ideology: the deportees from the towns (the ‘new people’) were treated as second-class citizens, whilst the ‘base people’ were divided into two groups: the loyal poor peasants (‘full-rights members’), and the semi-reliable (the ‘candidates’). Rations and privileges depended on one’s status in the new hierarchy, although in theory one could rise through hard work and commitment.
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Pol also followed Mao, and the Radical Marxist-Leninist tradition, in his desire to engineer a ‘great leap forward’ towards agricultural plenty and, ultimately, industrialization. As the Khmer Rouge launched border raids into Vietnam and the conflict with its neighbour escalated, Pol Pot announced his ‘Four-Year Plan to Build Socialism in All Fields’ in 1976, as part of his strategy to defend the nation. The ‘Plan’ was one of the most unscientific ever produced in the Communist world. Lacking detail, sloppily constructed and hugely overambitious, it revealed the Khmer Rouge leadership’s fundamental lack of interest in the discipline of economics, and depended largely on willpower. ‘When a people is awakened by political consciousness,’ one official declared, ‘it can do anything’; ‘our engineers cannot do what the people do’.
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The hubristic Pol Pot was convinced that ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ would not just catch up with its neighbours, but become a beacon for all other Communist states. It would truly be ‘Communist State No. 1’.

Little came of the industrialization projects, but plans to increase the rice harvest sent about a million workers – many of them the urban ‘new people’ – to create new agricultural land out of wilderness. Tens of thousands died of hunger and disease, and the Khmer Rouge treated these class enemies callously, declaring in the notorious phrase, ‘To keep you is no benefit and to destroy you is no loss.’
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They were seen as second-class citizens, and could be killed for minor infringements. But all peasants, whether ‘base’ or ‘new’, were subjected to high rice delivery targets, and suffered as a result.

However, there were also more Stalinist aspects to Khmer Rouge thinking, as one might expect given the influence of the French Communist party on its leaders. Close contacts were also maintained with North Korea.
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There was no Cultural Revolution-style mobilization, and the attitude towards ‘enemies’ also echoed the Stalinist one of the late 1930s: they were to be executed, not re-educated. Like Stalin, Pol Pot argued that success in war required campaigns against hidden internal ‘enemies’, and he blamed economic failures on the lack of commitment of the ‘new people’, on enemy ‘microbes’ that were ‘seeping into every corner of the party’ and had the potential to do ‘real damage’. In a striking echo of Stalin’s language, he declared: ‘Are there still treacherous, secret elements buried inside the party, or are they gone? According to our observations over the last ten years it’s clear that they’re not gone at all… Some are truly committed, others waver in their loyalties. Enemies can easily seep in.’
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A vast spectrum of people was targeted, some of them previous party loyalists. About 14,000 passed through Comrade Duch’s S-21 prison, most of them forced by torture to confess to bizarre conspiracies, and then executed. Meanwhile, the regime launched a series of persecutions of various groups, both ‘class enemies’ and ethnic minorities.

The violence varied over time, and deaths were higher in some areas than others. But in all, the death toll from murders and famine was horrific: estimates range from 1.5 to 2 million, or 26 per cent of the population.
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Of course, the regime relied on supporters to carry out the killings, and individual motivations differed. Most were young peasants who had initially been enthusiastic about land reform, and the Khmer Rouge created an atmosphere in which there were strong pressures to mete out violence against ‘enemies’. ‘Cutting off one’s feelings’ towards all ‘enemies’ of the revolution, even they were relatives, was considered a virtue, and killing them was seen as a way of achieving ‘honour’ in the new society. One ‘new person’ remembered how his boss believed that ‘if he purged enough enemies, he satisfied his conscience. He had done his duty to Angkar [the Organization]’;
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others were pressured into conforming, afraid that if they did not kill they would be suspected of being an enemy themselves.

The nightmare of ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ came to an end at the beginning of 1979 with a Soviet-backed Vietnamese invasion. Unsurprisingly, the poorly prepared Kampuchean military was no match for its well-armed and battle-hardened neighbours. But the Khmer Rouge, backed by the Chinese, continued the guerrilla struggle throughout the 1980s, until the Soviets withdrew support and the Vietnamese left in 1989.

The experience of Kampuchea and Ethiopia was seriously to damage the reputation of Third World Communism, even amongst Communists themselves. Both the Soviets and the Chinese saw how much these regimes resembled their own militant pasts – histories they were now eager to forget.

The Chinese continued to support the Khmer Rouge militarily, even though on Mao’s death they moved away from the radicalism they had
once espoused, for they wanted the Cambodians’ support against the Vietnamese. Similarly, Soviet policy-makers became increasingly disillusioned with some of their clients. Initial enthusiasts within the party for the African adventures, such as Brutents, Shakhnazarov and Zagladin, found that protégés such as Mengistu refused to take their advice and moderate their ambitions. As they witnessed the purges and the bloodshed, they wondered whether some of these supposedly Marxist-Leninist vanguard parties might actually be self-interested elites, who were not promoting real socialism in the interests of society as a whole, and who had excessively ambitious goals given the level of economic development.