Pol Pot (2 page)

Pol Pot

History is to a great extent detective work. Contemporary documents, the statements of witnesses, their later recollections, compared and combined with other sources, provide essential clues as to the nature of the ‘crime’ —that is to say, the historical truth — concealed beneath. The biographer strives to draw from this amorphous mass of detail a credible portrait of the hero, or anti-hero, of his tale.

Many people helped me to assemble the mosaic of fragments of truths, half-truths and lies, related by the perpetrators of the Cambodian nightmare as well as by its victims, on which this book is based. Caroline Gluck gave me the W rst pointers. Bill Herod and Michael Vickery oVered early encouragement. David Ashley, Ben Kiernan, Henri Locard, William Shawcrosss, Sacha Sher and Serge Thion shared documents. Christopher Goscha allowed me to translate the Vietnamese-language copies of dozens of original Khmer Rouge texts which he had been authorised to transcribe by hand at the Military Library in Hanoi. Others assisted with Chinese archival materials. Nil Samorn, my Khmer research assistant, spent two years accompanying me across Cambodia, reading and translating, with undented good humour, thousands of pages of opaque Khmer Rouge internal journals, CPK Standing Committee minutes and prison confessions, which form much of the documentation for the later chapters. Stephen Heder and David Chandler generously read the typescript, o Vering pithy and often pungent comments which gave me much food for thought even if, on certain points, we continue to diVer.

Several of the leading protagonists of the Khmer Rouge revolution told me their life stories, often at length over a period of months. They include the former Head of State, Khieu Samphân; Pol Pot’s brother-in-law, the Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister, Ieng Sary; Nikân, whose brother, Son Sen, was Defence Minister; Phi Phuon, the Chief of Security at the Khmer Rouge Foreign Ministry; and two other former oYcials, Suong Sikoeun and In Sopheap, as well as a host of lower-ranking individuals. Their motives were mixed. Some were more truthful, others less so. But like interviewees everywhere, the more they talked the more of themselves

THE NEWS REACHED

leng Sary in Hanoi soon after 10 a.m.

A messenger arrived with a ciphered telegram, transmitted in morse code from Khmer Rouge headquarters north-west of Phnom Penh. When the first few words had been decoded, Sary telephoned the office of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party Central Committee and asked to be put through to Le Due Tho, the Politburo member who the previous year had shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Henry Kissinger for ending the war in Vietnam. Tho had ultimate responsibility for relations with the Cambodian communists.

’We have taken Phnom Penh,’ he announced proudly.

A quarter of a century later, Sary still smarted at the memory of the Vietnamese leader’s response. ‘Be careful not to be misled by false reports!’ Tho said acidly. ‘Remember what happened when you told us that Takeo had fallen’ — a reference to a conversation they had had a week earlier, when Sary had informed him, prematurely, that a town south of the capital had surrendered.

Ieng Sary was then one of the six members of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), the Khmer Rouge supreme leadership. He was fifty years old and balding, with an incipient paunch. A devious, manipulative man, crafty rather than clever, his smooth domed forehead, pale complexion and part-Chinese ancestry gave him a striking resemblance to an ultra-leftist Chinese Politburo member named Yao Wenyuan, one of the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ headed by Mao Zedong’s widow, Jiang Qing. Sary was capable of singular vindictiveness but also of loyalty to useful subordinates, who repaid him with lifelong devotion. He concealed insincerity beneath a calculated ability to make himself agreeable. A British Ambassador who, many years later, attended a lunch with Sary and his wife, Khieu Thirith, likened the experience to having tea with Rosemary West and her husband, two murderous sexual deviants whose names became a byword in Britain for grisly perversion. But that was the distaste of hindsight, at a time when the image of the Khmer Rouge leaders had become inseparable from the abominations

their regime had committed. In the early 1970s, the heroic age of Indochinese communism, Sary and his comrades were riding the wave of the future, symbolising for radicals everywhere and for millions of sympathisers in the West hopes of a more just and democratic world.

Sary’s chagrin was short-lived. A few hours later, Tho arrived in person, wreathed in smiles, accompanied by aides bearing enormous bouquets of flowers — with a request, slipped in deftly between the Vietnamese leadership’s congratulations, that the new Cambodian authorities allow free passage across their territory to Vietnamese troops coming south for the final offensive against the American-backed regime in Saigon.

The request was granted. That day, April 17 1975, the Khmers Rouges could afford to be generous as they savoured a triumph that was all the more gratifying because it had been achieved ahead of their disdainful Vietnamese allies.

They had captured Phnom Penh, as they would never tire of repeating, without outside help. US officials claimed that the final assault on the Cambodian capital was spearheaded by regular Vietnamese units backed by heavy artillery, but, like much else the Americans said at that time, this was false. No Vietnamese main-force unit had fought in Cambodia since 1973. The US had dropped more than 500,000 tons of bombs on Cambodian resistance bases and had spent hundreds of millions of dollars propping up the corrupt and incompetent anti-communist regime of Marshal Lon Nol, who had seized power in 1970 from the country’s hereditary ruler, Prince Sihanouk. But it had been to no avail. The Khmers Rouges told themselves proudly that their ill-educated peasant troops had defeated all that the mightiest military power on earth had been able to throw in their direction.

Hubris is the besetting sin of despotisms everywhere. In later years, Khmer Rouge officials, including Ieng Sary himself, contemplating the ruins of the Utopian vision to which they had devoted their lives, would argue that the very speed of their victory in 1975 had held the seeds of their undoing. As a Khmer Rouge village chief put it: ‘The train was going too fast. No one could make it turn.’

But even to the extent that it is true, such reasoning is self-serving. There were many causes of the egregious tragedy that befell Cambodia in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and many actors amongst whom responsibility must be shared. The overconfidence of the country’s new leaders, above all of its principal leader, the man who would become Pol Pot, was but one element among them and, at the time of the Khmer Rouge victory, it was artfully dissembled.

*   *   *

Another full year would pass before the reclusive figure who had guided the Cambodian communists to victory would emerge from clandestinity and take the name by which his compatriots, and the rest of the world, would remember him.

Even then, he did so reluctantly. For two decades he had operated under multiple aliases: Pouk, Hay, Pol, ‘87’, Grand-Uncle, Elder Brother, First Brother — to be followed in later years by ‘99’ and Phem. ‘It is good to change your name,’ he once told one of his secretaries. ‘The more often you change your name the better. It confuses the enemy’ Then he added, in a phrase which would become a Khmer Rouge mantra: ‘

If you preserve

secrecy, half the battle is already won.’ The architect of the Cambodian nightmare was not a man who liked working in the open.

Throughout the five years of civil war that pitted the communists against Lon Nol’s right-wing government, most people, inside the country as well as out, were convinced that the movement was led by Khieu Samphân, a left-wing intellectual with a reputation for incorruptibility who had won widespread popular support as a champion of social justice in the time when Sihanouk had been in power. He had joined the maquis in 1967 and, after the Prince’s overthrow three years later, became the Khmers Rouges’ principal spokesman. As nominal Defence Minister and Commander-in-Chief of the resistance army, Samphân travelled to Beijing to meet Mao. He issued communiqués detailing the war’s progress, and in 1973, when Sihanouk, having concluded an improbable alliance with his former communist opponents, visited the ‘liberated zones’, Samphân acted as host.

But that was a smokescreen. Power lay in the hands of others, whose names were unknown outside the inner circle of the communist leadership itself.

Nuon Chea, for instance, had come to the notice of the colonial government in 1950 as a member of the Issarak movement, fighting for independence from the French, who had established a protectorate over Cambodia almost a century before. But in those days he was called Long Rith. No one ever made the connection between Rith and a portly Khmer businessman, employed by a Sino-Cambodian trading house, who travelled all over the country in the 1950s and ‘60s, ostensibly selling building materials. Still less did anyone, either in Sihanouk’s or in Lon Nol’s government, identify ‘Nuon’ as the Khmer Rouge second-in-command.

And who had heard of Saloth Sâr, who in 1971 was listed merely as one of ninety or so ‘

patriotic intellectuals

’ rallying to the revolutionary cause?

A teacher of that name who had frequented ‘progressive circles’ had attracted the attention of the Phnom Penh police twenty years earlier and subsequently figured on a blacklist of suspected subversives. But there had

never been anything to suggest that he was more than just another

disaffected schoolmaster

. Even when Sâr’s name

cropped up again

in 1972 as Chief of the Military Directorate of the Front’s guerrilla army, bracketed with that of Nuon Chea, the Chief of the Political Directorate, they were assumed to be just two among many, more or less anonymous, second-echelon figures in the opaque Khmer Rouge hierarchy. During Sihanouk’s visit to the resistance-held areas, photographs show Sâr sitting unobtrusively to one side, leaning forward politely to listen as the stars of the occasion, Khieu Samphân and another former parliamentarian, Hu Nim, expounded to their entranced royal visitor the prospects for the coming victory. In other pictures Sâr is barely visible, in a back row at a theatrical performance or on the fringes of a welcoming party.

Like a Hollywood director making a fleeting, incognito appearance in one of his own films, Saloth Sâr, the one-time schoolteacher, delighted in appearing to be what he was not — a nameless face in the crowd, whom everyone glimpsed but nobody remembered. He had told a follower ten years earlier:

The enemy is searching

for . . . us everywhere. They are like noodle-sellers mincing pork. They mince from the top and the side. The enemy is trying to mince us, but they miss us, [they can’t do it] . . . That means the enemy is weak. The enemy must lose and we must win.

Sihanouk’s police in the 1950s, he recalled with his characteristic, gentle smile, ‘

knew

I was

; but they did not know

I was’.

As the Khmer Rouge forces rolled to victory in April 1975, that boast still held good. In the whole country, probably fewer than two hundred Cambodians — CPK Central Committee members, divisional commanders and their deputies, trusted cadres and personal aides, including his doctor and his

bodyguards — knew

Sâr was, and even then, in most cases, not under that name. One of Lon Nol’s secret agents got close to him in 1974 but did not realise his importance. The CIA knew he existed but failed to connect him with the mysterious ‘Pol’, whom the agency had identified as the head of the Khmer communist movement. It was hardly surprising when some mid-level officials within the CPK itself remained ignorant of their leader’s identity until almost two years after the communist victory.