That summer, there was an unnatural calm. It was plain to everyone that the Democrat-led National Assembly could not cohabit indefinitely with a government, led by the King, which was committed to the Democrats’ downfall. Cambodian schools closed for the holidays. Parliament went into recess. The AEK organised a holiday camp at Pornic in Brittany, opposite the island of Noirmoutier, where Thiounn Mumm, Rath Samoeun, Ieng Sary, Sâr and other members of the Cercle swam, went hiking and put on a show of traditional Cambodian dances for a group of French students camping nearby. They also held long discussions about Cambodia’s future. No decisions were taken. But when the new academic year began in October, Sary and Thiounn Mumm convened a meeting, attended by about fifteen members of the Cercle, at a farmhouse in the countryside an hour’s drive from Paris, owned by a member of the French Communist Party.
There were three questions on the agenda: which rebel organisation they should support, now that Sihanouk had been discredited by his
defacto
alliance with the French; whether anything could still be done to bring the different resistance groups together, following Son Ngoc Thanh’s failure to achieve unity; and whether the time had come for members of the Cercle to return to Cambodia to take part in the struggle themselves.
Some of those present argued that Thanh’s group, which included former colleagues like Hang Thun Hak and Ea Sichau and had impeccable Khmer nationalist credentials, offered the best hope of wresting power from the French. Others, including Ieng Sary, felt that Son Ngoc Minh’s ‘Khmer Viet Minh’ were more serious, although tainted by their association with the Vietnamese, whose motives the students mistrusted. But as the afternoon wore on, it became clear that they lacked the information on which to base a rational decision. No one in Paris had any idea how strong Son Ngoc Thanh’s Khmer Serei really were; of the extent to which the Vietnamese were manipulating Son Ngoc Minh and his followers; or the true stance of independent Issarak leaders like Chantarainsey in Kompong Speu. It was suggested, Sâr recalled, that someone go back ‘to carry out a
reconnaissance
. . . and make an assessment of the different resistance organisations. [Then we would] take a decision over which movement we should support — and which organisation we should join.’ The Cercle s Co-ordinating Committee agreed, but added a
second task
: whoever was sent should also report on the prospects of uniting the main resistance groups. Sâr volunteered to go. Mey Mann, who was present, remembered him being chosen because ‘he had a lot of contacts. He knew people at the Palace, and had met Chantarainsey there [as a child] . . . He had known Hang Thun Hak in Paris, and had also met Son Ngoc Thanh.’
Vannsak claimed afterwards that Sâr had jumped at the chance because he was missing his girlfriend, the beautiful Soeung Son Maly. But that was mischievous. It was true that he had failed his exams at the Radio-Electricity School for the second year in a row, which meant his bursary was cut off. However, that had not stopped others staying on. In Sâr’s case, he seems to have reached the conclusion that his useful years in France were over and that whatever the future might hold for him, he now belonged at home. He passed on the grim little bedsit in the rue Letellier to a political science student named Son Sen, who came from the same Khmer-speaking district of South Vietnam as Ieng Sary and had arrived in Paris at the same time. In Marseilles, on December 15, Sâr boarded the SS
Jamaique,
the same ship that had brought him to France three years earlier, now making one of its last voyages before being sold for scrap. As before, he bunked in the hold with the soldiers. The atmosphere was no longer as carefree. The war in Indochina was not going well for France. Among each new shipload of conscripts, some would not return.
Even before Sâr left Paris, there had been clear signs that the simmering confrontation between Sihanouk and the Democrats was coming to a head.
In November, students in Phnom Penh and several provincial towns
went on strike. When the King appealed to them to return to their classes, more than a hundred took refuge in the National Assembly, which, in a calculated display of defiance, announced that it was setting up a commission to study their grievances. Next came demonstrations by monks, who charged the government with complicity with the French. Then, in December, the Assembly refused to vote the budget on the grounds that it provided too much money for defence and not enough for economic and social purposes. Sihanouk fumed, but his mind was elsewhere: his youngest child, a four-year-old girl whom he adored, had suddenly fallen ill and lay dying.
Sensing weakness, the Viet Minh intensified their attacks, setting ambushes in which a provincial governor and several district chiefs lost their lives. Agitation in the secondary schools, which had momentarily subsided, resumed more strongly than ever. On January 8 1953 a grenade went off in a classroom at the Lycée Sisowath, injuring two students; other devices were defused before they could explode. As usual in Cambodia, the perpetrators were never caught. It was probably a provocation, designed to force Sihanouk to act harshly or to give him justification for doing so. Two days later, the government sought emergency powers, asking the National Assembly to proclaim the nation in danger. It refused.
On January 13, the day that Sâr’s ship docked at Saigon, troops surrounded the parliament building in Phnom Penh. In a radio address, Sihanouk announced that he intended to rule by decree. The Assembly was dissolved and civil liberties suspended. ‘From now on,’he warned, ‘any individual or any political party that opposes My policies will be declared a traitor to the Nation and . . . punished [accordingly].’ The King’s resolve was said to have been stiffened by a lecture from his mother, the redoubtable Princess Kossamak, who regarded parliamentary democracy as not only inimical to Cambodian tradition but a personal affront. In any event, the French were delighted. ‘If Norodom Sihanouk can hold to this new position of firmness,’ wrote the Minister for the Associated States, Jean Letourneau, ‘we may hope that Cambodia’s pacification will make continued progress.’
Over the next few days, nine Democratic Party MPs, including Bunchan Mol and Khieu Ponnary’s cousin Im Phon, were imprisoned without trial on suspicion of ‘plotting against the state’. In Paris, the AEK, which had been fulminating for months against ‘the puppet, Sihanouk’ and his ‘government of traitors’, fired off a telegram of protest.
But the climate had changed. Hou Yuon, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Mey Mann, Ping Sây, Thiounn Mumms youngest brother, Prasith, and a dozen others, were informed that their bursaries were terminated. The AEK itself
was banned. In Phnom Penh the heads of the two Buddhist orders were treated to a humiliating public admonition against sympathising with the rebels. ‘For the first time in my life,’ Sihanouk raged, ‘I have to grab the monks by the throat. Me! The most religious man in the Kingdom! Because I’ve had enough — more than enough! My subjects and the elite among my subjects must
obey!’
An era had ended. The open expression of dissent would never be tolerated again. Cambodia had taken the first, critical step down the road to revolution.
3
Initiation to the Maquis
WHEN SÂR HAD
set out for France, three years earlier, one of his companions had remarked that, in contrast to Vietnam, there was ‘no fighting in Cambodia’. That was not completely true but it was what most of them believed. When he returned in January 1953, he found a country at war.
The bloodshed was not on remotely the same scale as in neighbouring Vietnam. Nevertheless, that month in Cambodia, according to the French, 115 Issaraks and Viet Minh were killed in clashes with government troops and 220 were taken prisoner. Internal Viet Minh reports spoke of a comparable level of government casualties. Far from being a comic-opera conflict, matching the kingdom’s Ruritanian image, it was ugly and brutal. In a typical action in Kompong Cham, a government patrol of fifty men, led by a Khmer sub-lieutenant, was lured into a Viet Minh ambush. The
regimental despatch
recounted impassively:
In the first burst of machine-gun fire, Sgt Roeung received a bullet in the head and was killed outright. Cpl Rhek, mortally wounded, crawled back towards our main force. Sub-lieutenant Chhim Yan ran forward to recover Sgt Roeung’s rifle and took cover behind an ant-hill . . . when he, too, was hit by a bullet in the head . . . Seeing that the situation was critical . . . our men counter-attacked. Four Viet Minh fell under our fire . . . Our men then formed a square . . . Towards 17.30 hours, the Viets approached . . . from the south-east. They called out to our men: ‘Don’t shoot. We are friends.’ Then they charged. Most of their fighters did not have firearms. They just ran towards us in a compact mass, yelling. We cut them down with machine-gun fire and grenades. Their shouts suddenly stopped as though their throats had been cut . . . The battle ended at nightfall . . . and our men marched back, reaching the HQ at 2 a.m.
In that engagement, the French admitted losing five dead and four injured for thirty-seven Vietnamese put out of action, allegedly including a Viet Minh lieutenant. Both sides habitually inflated casualty figures. None the less, the carnage — especially among the Viet Minh auxiliaries, unarmed villagers from the Khmer districts of Cochin-China who fought with staves
and axes — was grim, and French military reports spoke of sorties to ‘kill us some Viet’ in the same way as Americans would later talk of’killing gooks’.
To Saloth Sâr, the change was clear the moment he disembarked in Saigon. No longer could one simply go to the bus station and board a coach to Phnom Penh. Now there was a daily convoy, protected by a military escort. Troops patrolled the Cambodian capital. Puth Chhays men held large areas to the north, west and south of Phnom Penh and the population lived in constant fear of terrorist attacks.
But it was the journey back to Sâr’s village at Prek Sbauv that really brought home to him how much Cambodia had altered while he had been away:
Before I went away
to study, my relatives were . . . mostly middle class farmers. When I returned, I took a bus home. [At the terminus], someone — one of the cyclo-pousses — called out to me: ‘Oh, you’re back!’ I looked, and it was one of my uncles. He asked me: ‘Do you want a ride home?’ I was so shocked! That man used to have land, buffaloes, everything. I wept to see him like that. I rode home with him, and over the next month or so I talked with [other] relatives who had also lost everything . . . The Cambodian countryside was being pauperized. Having lived in Europe, seeing these things hurt my heart.
To Sâr
, the cause was colonialism, the remedy, independence, so that Cambodians could run their own affairs under a system that was socially just. The French might retort that the cause was the war and the insecurity it engendered — villagers were unable to harvest their crops; transport was disrupted; the rubber plantations were being sabotaged; and areas producing pepper, the second most important cash crop, had fallen under Viet Minh control. Defence was taking so much of the budget, one official complained, that ‘there is nothing left for anything else’. But young nationalists like Sâr were unimpressed. Without colonialism, they argued, there would be no war and therefore no insecurity. The fundamental contradiction was between the continuing French presence and Cambodians’ desire for freedom.
The previous winter, Sâr’s elder brother Chhay had been appointed Son Ngoc Thanh’s representative for much of northern and eastern Cambodia, including their home province of Kompong Thorn and neighbouring Kompong Cham. Chhay had little difficulty convincing Sâr that the former Premier was a force to be reckoned with. It was the Thanhists, not the Viet Minh, who controlled Cambodia’s secondary schools, and in the urban areas they boasted a sophisticated intelligence network which usually kept them a step ahead of the police.
Apart from the Khmer Serei and the Viet Minh, the only other serious opposition to French rule came from older-generation Khmer Issarak leaders like Prince Chantarainsey and Puth Chhay. But by the spring of 1953, these men were being approached by the palace or its provincial representatives and invited to lay down their arms and join Sihanouk’s ‘Royal Crusade’. Most succumbed to the royal blandishments. By May only Chantarainsey remained as an independent force. To the French he was useful because he prevented Viet Minh units entering his territory. The French commander, General de Langlade, described him as ‘a true feudal lord’, but regarded the thousand or so troops that he led as a rabble of bandits and mercenaries. Sâr, who spent two or three months at Chantarainsey’s headquarters at Trapeang Kroloeung, in south-west Kompong Speu, in the first half of 1953, reached a similar conclusion. The Prince’s camp, of thatched huts, was situated in a poor, arid region of brush and sparse forest. Sâr’s report on his stay has been lost, but another student recruit remembered it as ‘not well structured or commanded. The men were organised in battalions, and lived with their wives and children . . . When [eventually] they were amnestied, they organised themselves into gangs and went straight back to being highwaymen again, robbing travellers at night.’
Banditry is usually associated with poverty. In many countries, it gives rise to horrific cruelty. Cambodia was no exception. Thiounn Mumm’s uncle, Bunchan Mol, one of the founders of the Issarak movement in the 1940s, recounted in his memoirs:
If we thought a Cambodian was spying for the French, we tortured him and then [killed] him . . . If the executioner clubbed him to death cleanly with a blow on the back of the neck . . . it was not so hard to look at. But sometimes they used other means . . . They had a method called
sra-nge pen.