Pol Pot (19 page)

How wide of the mark they both were was shown by a

secret memorandum

which the King drafted in Thailand for the American and British Legations:

I am asking the U.S.A and Great Britain if, just for once, they will kindly consider the problem of Cambodia from the viewpoint of the Khmers instead of that of the French . . . My people will tell you: ‘We don’t know what communist slavery means. But the slavery imposed by the French we know well, for we are now living under it. If we fight alongside the French against the Viet Minh and the Issaraks, we are simply strengthening the

chains of that slavery . . .’ [The problem is that] in Indochina, you are either a communist or a lackey of the French: there is no middle course. We are not allowed to hope for an independence like that of India or Pakistan within the British Commonwealth . . . The question is: Does French military power on its own have any chance of defeating communism in Indochina?

. What is at stake in this struggle, and what will determine its outcome, is the [native] population. The Viet Minh have understood that from the start. If we [who oppose communism] wish to have the population with us, we must . . . make [our country’s] independence . . . real and unquestionable, so that [no one] will listen any more to the Viet Minh propaganda about ‘liberation’. . . This is the whole problem.

It has nothing to do with the science of war . . . If France does not boldly face up to [this] . . . then one day, sooner or later, it will be forced to abdicate from Indochina.

At a time when national passions were boiling up uncontrollably, it was a remarkably lucid and sober analysis.

Had the United States been willing to understand the message Sihanouk was trying to convey — had it been able, in his words, ‘to consider the problem from the viewpoint of the Khmers’ — twenty-five years of war in South-East Asia might have been avoided. But Great Powers are by definition blind to the concerns of lesser peoples. Decades later, after America had been forced to leave mainland Asia, the lesson was still imperfectly learnt and just as quickly forgotten.

The French understood better, not because they were cleverer but because they were a minor power and circumstances left them little choice.

Even before the King’s sortie to Bangkok, Risterucci had noticed that the tone of his speeches had changed: he had started haranguing his audiences in terms that, from anyone else, would have been considered seditious. After his return, his appeals to revolt became more explicit. He would not set foot in Phnom Penh or have any further contact with French officials, he said, until France had conceded independence, adding menacingly that ‘if we cannot obtain what we want peacefully, the entire Khmer people are resolved to obtain their freedom by other means and are ready to sacrifice their lives’. On June 26, the two main Buddhist orders called for a holy war. Next day, with Sihanouk’s encouragement, large-scale desertions began from Khmer units of the French Army. When De Langlade summoned reinforcements from Saigon, the Prime Minister, Penn Nouth, accused France of putting itself ‘on a war footing against our country’. Finally, on Sunday June 28, the King called for nationwide mobilisation of all citizens between twenty and thirty-five years old — the

or ‘live forces’, as he called them — to join the struggle for Cambodian independence.

In Phnom Penh, an ‘Assassination Committee’ was formed, headed by Puth Chhays deputy, Seap, to throw grenades into crowded dance-halls and cinemas. Over the next few weeks, twenty-four French soldiers and civilians were killed or seriously injured in such attacks. A French intelligence report noted laconically: ‘These incidents have been, if not provoked, at least tolerated by the Khmer authorities, in order to put pressure on us to speed up the re-opening of [independence] negotiations.’ But even without terrorism, the situation was moving inexorably in the Cambodians’ favour.

On July 3

, after a new French government had been sworn in, headed by Joseph Laniel, a Social Democrat, De Langlade told Paris bluntly that there was no choice but to accept Sihanouk’s demands:

Let us be logical. If the King calls on the country to rise up, he can count on 7,000 rifles . . . We can rely only on French troops . . . The balance of strength is against us. We cannot carry out a strong-arm policy, because we do not have the means. The King has gone too far to be able to draw back. He will see it through to the end . . . What then can we do? If we pull out, the country will fall into anarchy . . . and the Viet Minh will occupy the whole area East of the Mekong . . . If we fight, we will have to bring in at least 15 more battalions and open up an entire new front, which is something no one wants. If on the other hand, we grant Cambodia complete independence, the government, which knows that our aid is indispensable, will give us all the guarantees we could wish for . . . We need to take into account the pride, the sensitivity and the stubbornness of the Khmer. Confronting him head-on is pointless. But if we yield at the point where his vanity is at stake, we may hope to bind the country to us once more for many years to come.

He stopped short of saying that Sihanouk had been right all along, but his colleague, Risterucci, the civilian commissioner, told a fellow diplomat the same week that ‘History is on Cambodia’s side’. Similar arguments applied, De Langlade suggested, to Laos and Vietnam.

His advice fell on receptive ears. The Laniel government — like the Nixon administration twenty years later — was bent on finding a way to extract France from an unwinnable and increasingly unpopular war. It announced that it would take steps to ‘complete the independence’ of the Indochinese states, triggering three months of frantic negotiations as each side manoeuvred to get the best deal it could. All the non-communist Issarak groups, except those of Chantarainsey, Savangs Vong and the Khmer Serei, pledged their support to Sihanouk’s cause. More than 150,000 young men and women came forward in response to his mobilisation appeal. The French agonised about the desertion rate from the army

— six hundred officers and men had voted with their feet despite warnings that they risked the firing squad — and about the possibility of Sihanouk striking a deal with the Viet Minh, which would make a negotiated independence agreement impossible. But that did not happen. On October 17, Paris announced the transfer of full military powers to the Cambodian government. Three weeks later, on Monday November 9, Sihanouk took the salute at a march-past of French and Khmer troops in Phnom Penh, joined by 35,000 civilian volunteers. The ceremony ended with his acceptance of the instruments of command, signifying that almost a century of French tutelage was at an end.

It was not quite the ‘delirious triumph’ that royal propagandists claimed. General de Langlade noted pensively that the crowds acclaiming the King’s return were ‘smaller and much less enthusiastic’ than those which had welcomed Son Ngoc Thanh two years before. Nor was independence yet complete: the disentangling of Cambodia’s economy from the institutions of the former French Indochina would drag on for another year. None the less, November 91953 was consecrated Independence Day and Sihanouk basked in the glory of it. He had staked his throne on the battle with France and he had won. At thirty-one, he had proved himself a worthy successor to the long line of Khmer kings who, over the centuries, had made the preservation of an independent monarchy, indistinguishable from Cambodia itself, their overriding goal.

When Sâr and Rath Samoeun reached the Viet Minh Eastern Zone Headquarters in August, this fortunate outcome was not yet assured.

There is no record of their journey. Those who set out later were told to go to Prey Chhor district, on the main road from Phnom Penh to Kompong Cham, where they would be met by Viet Minh guides. Mey Mann travelled that way with half a dozen others the following spring, escorted by a Vietnamese who made them march for two weeks through the forest until they reached the outskirts of Stung Trâng, where they were to cross the Mekong. The first attempt, he remembered, ended in disaster. Their sampan capsized and sank, and Mann’s prize possession, a new watch he had brought back from Paris, was ruined. At the second try they crossed successfully and then walked for a further ten days through rubber plantations and jungle before reaching the village of Krâbao, at the frontier of Kompong Cham and Prey Veng, about three miles from the South Vietnamese border.

The camp itself was rudimentary. It had been identified by French intelligence two years earlier as the site of the Eastern Zone HQ, and the area was subjected to periodic artillery bombardment and air raids using incendiary

bombs. There were no permanent buildings, just canvas shelters in the forest which could be moved at a moment’s notice. On arrival each recruit was given a black shirt and trousers, dyed with the juice of

berries, a red-and-white checked

and the inevitable car-tyre sandals, with laces cut from inner tubes. ‘Everyone wore black,’ Mann wrote later, ‘even the Vietnamese. That way you melted into the mass of the peasants, and it didn’t show the dirt.’

Over the next nine months, a dozen or so members of the Cercle made their way to Krâbao,

*

along with some secondary-school students from inside the country. The Vietnamese kept them together to make it easier to verify their

Sâr and his colleagues presented themselves as members of the French Communist Party who had come to join the struggle. But if they expected a heroes’ welcome, they were sorely disappointed.

Sâr remembered

:

As I had just come back from abroad . . . they didn’t trust me. [Almost everyone] was Vietnamese — there were just a handful of Cambodians — and everyone spoke Vietnamese. They sent me to stay among this handful of Cambodians. They didn’t give me any kind of work to do. All I was allowed to do was cultivate cassava. After a while, they let me work . . . in the canteen. I was the deputy mess officer. The mess officer himself was Vietnamese. [At Krâbao] even the messengers were Vietnamese. The Cambodians were there in name only.

All of them found that hard to stomach.

Yun Soeun

, who had spent his years in Paris studying eighteenth-century European literature, complained: ‘The Vietnamese took all the decisions. We Khmers were just puppets.’ Chi Kim An blamed Mey Mann for having persuaded him to come. The Viet Minh, he fumed, were ‘just bastards’. Even Mann himself was fed up. ‘They left us for months without giving us proper jobs,’ he grumbled later. ‘We spent our days watering the vegetables, feeding the chickens, things like that. It was because they didn’t know who we were . . . they wanted us to prove ourselves.’

The Vietnamese themselves acknowledged as much. ‘We were verifying [what they said],’ one official explained. ‘That’s why we let them study . . . but we did not give them any important tasks.’ Only after Pham Van Ba, Nguyen Thanh Son’s representative at PRPK headquarters, had received confirmation of their claims from the PCF in Paris, via Bangkok and Hanoi, were their communist credentials finally accepted.

At the upper levels of the PRPK, the Vietnamese were equally heavy-handed. Two years earlier, Hanoi had decided — without consulting the Khmer leadership — that the division of Cambodia into four zones should be scrapped and a new system created, in which territory east of the Mekong would be treated as a single Eastern Zone while a new Western Zone would encompass all the rest. This was logical enough: the war in southern Vietnam increasingly depended on arms supplies coming down from the north — by sea from China, via Hainan, and overland through Laos and north-eastern Cambodia, along the network of jungle tracks which would become known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail — so it made sense to tighten control over what was now a vital area. But it caused turmoil in the PRPK. The South-Eastern Zone Secretary, Keo Moni, suddenly found himself subordinate to his former deputy, Tou Samouth, now promoted Eastern Zone Secretary. Son Ngoc Minh, whose power base was in the West, remained Khmerland’s ‘President’ and Party leader, but lost influence as Hanoi’s altered priorities gave pride of place to the East. Even Tou Samouth, the beneficiary of these changes, was outraged by Viet Minh high-handedness and the constant use of Cambodians to carry out menial tasks.

Samouth chaired the political training seminars held for the Khmer recruits. But, as one of them noted, ‘He

presided. It was always the Vietnamese who spoke.’ Political study meant learning Vietnamese Party texts, translated into Khmer and explained by Khmer-speaking Vietnamese instructors, led by Pham Van Ba. The study sessions began with a breviary entitled the ‘Six Rules of Party Life’:

1. Struggle all one’s life for communism.

2. Put the interests of the Revolution before everything else.

3. Uphold Party discipline and observe the utmost secrecy about all Party matters.

4. Carry out the Party’s decisions with an unshakeable will; never let oneself be downcast no matter how great the obstacle.

5. Be a model for the popular masses.

6. Study!

After the weighty, theoretical volumes they had grappled with in Paris, this seemed simple stuff. Yet between the lines of the ‘

Six Rules

’, there were tell-tale clues that Vietnamese-style communism, with its liberal admixture of Confucian ideas, was a very different beast — at least in the form in which it was taught to the Party rank and file — from the system of thought, based on European values, put forward by Marx and Lenin. The Vietnamese ‘Rules’ stressed the importance of ‘struggling for an ideal’; having ‘absolute