faith’; and maintaining ‘a proper conception of life’ — none of which had much to do with anything Marx ever wrote. Above all, they emphasised the need for total secrecy:
The constant growth of . . . the Party’s revolutionary potential . . . has led enemy spies, traitors and reactionaries to step up their sabotage activities. This is why the Party must in no way relax its vigilance . . . but, in carrying out its operations, should attach the greatest importance to the preservation of secrecy . . . [To do otherwise] presents a danger of exceptional seriousness . . . The Party member . . . must observe absolute discretion. . .
At the higher levels of the Vietnamese Party, this distinctive Asian gloss was partly offset by the study of translations from Marx, Lenin and Stalin, which reaffirmed the fundamentals of orthodox communist thinking: materialism, dialectics and historical determinism. In Cambodia, no such translations existed. Members of the PRPK — apart from the handful, like Sâr, who had gone to Paris and tried, with imperfect French, to read the original texts — acquired what little they knew of Marxism via its Vietnamese variant, which they then reinterpreted in cultural terms that were in many ways fundamentally at odds with Marx’s materialist view of the world. Even the Vietnamese acknowledged that this often led to ‘
real difficulty
in assimilating the scientific arguments of Marxism-Leninism’.
Despite their subaltern status, none of the young Khmer students — not even the restive Chi Kim An — was seriously shaken from his decision to espouse the communist cause.
Sâr himself
wrote later: ‘[Although] I saw that the Cambodian movement was completely controlled by [them] . . . it did not shape my thinking to be anti-Vietnamese . . . I thought we should have a good relationship with Vietnam. I just wanted to make our movement independent.’
Moreover, even if the PRPK was not a full-fledged communist party, to Sâr and the other students from Paris much about it was very familiar.
As in the Cercle, the basic unit was the three-man cell, bound by ‘iron discipline, freely consented’, and ‘criticism and self-criticism to maintain unity of belief and action’. Like the French Communist Party, it had a strong anti-intellectual bias. Peasants and workers who had been in the resistance for three months could become Party members after one month’s probation; intellectuals were required to spend six months in the resistance followed by three months’ probation.
But what set the Cambodian movement totally apart from anything they had experienced before was the context in which it operated. It was one thing to discuss revolution in a comfortable hotel room in the Latin
Quarter, quite another to study the tactics of armed struggle in a clearing in the jungle.
The Vietnamese communists were practical men — the French were constantly surprised by the precision planning of Viet Minh sabotage attacks — and Pham Van Ba and his colleagues regarded it as their first task to teach the young Khmers the nuts and bolts of making revolution among a population of illiterate peasants.
Ba remembered
instructing Sâr how to ‘work with the masses at the base, to build up . . . village committees, one member at a time’. The Vietnamese had a system of ‘armed propaganda teams’ whose job was to infiltrate Cambodian hamlets and then patiently win over ‘progressive elements’ until a solid core-group existed, at which point the village would be occupied by force, the old leadership evicted or killed (to serve as a warning to others) and a new revolutionary administration installed in its place.
The mixture of indoctrination and terror was fundamental. ‘Making propaganda means mobilising the population to hate the enemy’, a Viet Minh broadcast explained. ‘Once people have the right feelings in their hearts . . . they will act accordingly’ Winning the support of the masses was the key to everything else. ‘Otherwise,’ a French officer wrote, ‘the Viet Minh could have not existed. They have succeeded because they have been able to channel the confused aspirations of the people, to fire their enthusiasm and to bring them hope.’ If the population refused to cooperate, a scorched earth policy was enforced: the village was razed and the inhabitants scattered.
Sâr never forgot those lessons.
He did not see them carried out in practice because the students were not allowed to go out on operations. But after a while the Viet Minh cadres let him
visit nearby villages
to help out with the farm work, which opened his eyes to the poverty of the border region and enabled him to see for the first time how the peasants adapted to life under a revolutionary regime. Later
he made friends
with two officers from the Po Kombo Regiment, a nominally Khmer unit of about three hundred men based ten miles to the north-west. The commander, Phay, a former rifleman in the French colonial army, and his political commissar, Chan Samân, were both Khmer, but Sâr noted with disgust that more than 80 per cent of the other ranks were from Vietnam..
It was during this time that he met a young man of his own age who had joined the maquis four years earlier. Keo Meas had hated the French ever since reading
Nagaravatta
as a precocious fifteen-year-old. He dropped out of a teacher training course to join a Khmer Viet Minh group in Svay Rieng province and, in March 1950, was among the twenty-one Khmer
members of the ICP who approved the guidelines for the future Cambodian Party during the meeting at Hatien. The following year he was appointed Commissar of the Action Committee for Phnom Penh, and in 1952 travelled to Beijing, where he became the first Khmer to meet Chairman Mao and the Red Army commander, Zhu De, before going on to attend the World Peace Conference in Vienna.
Keo Meas was keenly aware of his high status. He lived with Tou Samouth and the rest of the leadership in a different part of the forest, which was out of bounds to the students. Sâr learnt a lot from him, especially in the later months at the camp, when Meas was put in charge of the new ‘Voice of Free Cambodia’ radio station and Sâr helped to write the commentaries. How well they liked each other is another matter. Keo Meas already thought of himself as the future leader of the Cambodian Communist Party and Sâr would have been less than human had he not discerned a potential rival. But whatever he may have felt, he showed nothing. Years later, when Meas searched desperately in his memory for clues to the cause of their subsequent estrangement, the idea that it might have stemmed from their months in the maquis together never entered his head.
As proof of his commitment to the cause, Sâr started to learn Vietnamese and eventually, by his own account, could speak and understand it
after a fashion
. That was more than most of the others could do and it brought him to the notice of Tou Samouth. The Eastern Zone Secretary was a traditionalist — one Vietnamese official likened him to ‘an old monk, sweet and good-natured’ — and Sâr’s Buddhist upbringing and calm,
unruffled manner
won his confidence. At Samouth s request, Sâr began to act as his assistant, helping him to prepare political seminars. Imperceptibly, he established himself as the older man’s secretary and
principal aide
, a position he would hold for the next five years.
Sihanouk’s ‘Royal Crusade’ had forced the Viet Minh to change tactics. No longer could they claim that the King’s heart was with the people but he was a captive of the French. From the summer of 1953, they were caught up in a triangular struggle: the King tried to win over the insurgents; the French tried to deter him from making common cause with the Viet Minh; and the Viet Minh tried to prevent the Khmer rebels from making common cause with the King. For a time, Vietnamese propagandists attempted to fudge the issue, arguing that Sihanouk had been duped. But that was too subtle to be convincing and Hanoi and Beijing soon adopted a harder line. ‘This traitorous king has become a lackey of world imperialism,’ thundered the Vietnamese Workers’ Party daily,
Nhan Dan.
The French were offering ‘fake independence’ because they wanted to
send Cambodians to fight for them in Laos and Vietnam. ‘Puppet King Sihanouk is not concerned about the independence of his country or the interests of the Khmer people. He simply wants [American aid] . . .’ True independence would be achieved ‘only by fighting to the last and . . . eliminating the puppet regime’.
In the villages, it was put in simpler terms, Sieu Heng’s deputy, Ruos Nhim, the Khmer Viet Minh military commander in the North-West, told one group of peasants: ‘Why doesn’t the King ask us to help him [in the struggle for independence]? . . . It is because he is mobilising the Cambodian people to help the French. You will all be sent far from your homes to die. From now on, I forbid you to leave your villages to respond to the King’s appeal.’
After the transfer of power from the colonial authorities to Sihanouk in November 1953, the conflict intensified, as the King, backed by the French, on one side, and the Viet Minh and their Khmer allies on the other, manoeuvred for advantage ahead of the Indochina Peace Talks which everyone now realised were only a matter of time.
The Cambodian Army, which had retreated into inactivity throughout Sihanouk’s ‘Crusade’, launched a series of attacks on rebel bases in the southern provinces of Kompong Speu, Svay Rieng and Kampot, followed in December by an operation in Battambang led by the King himself. It was pure public relations: the French ensured that any rebels were kept miles away from the royal person. But it made for lavish photo-spreads in government publications, showing the King marching intrepidly through areas ‘infested with booby-traps and mines’, braving the Viet Minh’s ‘craving to kill’ in order to free his subjects from ‘the whip and lash of communist slavery’. More substantively, in February 1954, the Issarak leaders Chantarainsey and Savangs Vong formally pledged allegiance to the Throne. That left Son Ngoc Thanh as the only non-communist hold-out.
The Viet Minh response was not long in coming.
For the past nine months, Hanoi’s master-strategist, Vo Nguyen Giap, had been toying with the idea of a massive assault against eastern Cambodia, comparable to the invasion of Upper Laos in March 1953, when Vietnamese regular divisions had occupied two provinces which became the Pathet Lao ‘liberated zone’. That autumn, a mixed force of more than 11,000 Vietnamese, Khmer and Lao troops was assembled (at least, on paper), and by the beginning of 1954 French military intelligence reported that Giap had the material reserves to launch a co-ordinated strike against all of Cambodia east of the Mekong.
In the event, the attack never came. There were logistical problems, and by January, Giap’s attention, and that of his Chinese advisers, was directed
elsewhere: to the remote mountain base of Dien Bien Phu, two hundred miles west of Hanoi on Vietnam’s border with Laos, where the trap was being set which, a few months later, would bring the war with the French to an inconclusive close. Instead of a general offensive, the Vietnamese High Command ordered diversionary actions, first in Lower Laos in January and February and then in north-east Cambodia in March 1954, to distract attention from the Vietnamese battlefield where the end-game was to be played out.
Even that was more than Sihanouk’s forces could cope with. For weeks French intelligence had been reporting ‘a very serious crisis of morale’ in the Cambodian Army. Now it started falling apart. The district centre of Voeunsai was occupied by Viet Minh forces on April 2. Siempang and Bokeo were surrounded a few days later. Sihanouk, showing more courage than his cabinet, which resolved to take no action, set up a temporary headquarters in Kratie to direct the counter-attack. But, as one military observer noted drily, ‘the King’s army does not seem to follow’. Meanwhile another body-blow was in the making. A Viet Minh column of five hundred men, accompanied by ten elephants carrying heavy equipment and forty ox-carts, had marched across the Cardamom Mountains from the west, terrorising the population into secrecy. At dawn on April 12, the eve of the Khmer New Year, they laid mines along the main railway line to Battambang about fifty miles north-west of Phnom Penh. According to the official report:
The engine
was derailed and 40 carriages overturned. Immediately, [the] Vietminh, armed with sickles, rifles, grenades and automatic weapons poured out of the woods nearby and threw themselves on the defenceless passengers. A regular massacre followed . . . The injured were . . . doused with petrol and burned alive . . . Those who tried to escape were caught and killed slowly with knives . . . In this way, more than a hundred people perished, including 30 monks.
The report claimed, untruthfully, that the train had no military escort. In fact, the forty-five men assigned to guard duty had left their posts and were in the restaurant car or with other passengers, drinking. Another fifty soldiers, with full equipment, were also on board, travelling to Pursat, in the west. They, too, made no attempt to resist. By May the situation had deteriorated further. The government garrison at Pailin, on the Thai border, was under siege, and there were fresh incursions in the South-East as well as in the North. The weekly military intelligence summary warned:
The regular [Cambodian] forces are disintegrating so fast that any general attack by the V.M. could have the most serious consequences . . . Whole
units have mutinied, refusing to take part in operations. The brief incursion of V.M. Battalion 302 towards Prey Veng triggered scenes of indescribable panic. If this unit launches a concerted action with another V.M. battalion against the main highway to Phnom Penh, it will have every chance of succeeding because [the government] will probably be unable to find any viable force to send there.
The French were puzzled that the Viet Minh did not pursue their advantage. Had they underestimated their own superiority? Were they short of supplies? Or did North Vietnam — or, more likely, its Chinese and Soviet backers — judge that a dramatic extension of the conflict in Cambodia might torpedo the peace talks in Geneva, which had opened on April 28?