Whatever the reason, Hanoi’s failure to carve out a communist-administered region to serve as a base for Khmerland on the model of the Pathet Lao dealt the Cambodian communists a fatal blow. Keo Moni and Mey Pho, who travelled to Switzerland to represent the Khmer resistance, could argue as much as they wished that Cambodia was an integral part of the Indochinese battlefield; that stable resistance bases existed in thirty-six out of Cambodia’s ninety-eight districts; that Son Ngoc Minh’s government had 800,000 people and 40 per cent of the country’s territory (more or less) under its control; and that therefore Khmerland should enjoy the same rights as the Pathet Lao and North Vietnam. The fact that they held no clearly defined ‘liberated zone’ meant that their claims, and their presence, were ignored.
On May 3, the demand of the Khmer ‘ghost government’, as the Americans called it, to be seated at the head of a separate Khmerland delegation was rejected. Over the next few weeks, Sihanouk’s representatives won back at the conference table everything his army’s incompetence had lost on the ground. The North Vietnamese Vice-Premier, Pham Van Dong, with support from the Soviet Union, which was far enough away from Indochina to be able to hang tough, but not from Zhou Enlai — who was acutely aware, after China’s experience in Korea, of the risk of being dragged into yet another war if the conference should fail — forcefully pressed the Khmer communists’ case for two regroupment zones, east and south-west of the Mekong, like those at Sam Neua and Phong Saly in Laos. But Sihanouk refused to budge. In the end, the Khmer resistance was sacrificed to the greater good of communism in Vietnam and Laos. Unlike those two countries, which were divided into communist and non-communist areas, Cambodia emerged from Geneva with its political and territorial integrity intact. Sihanouk’s sole concession was to agree that in Cambodia, as in government-controlled areas of Laos and in southern Vietnam, insurgents who did not wish to surrender could accompany the Viet Minh forces being repatriated to North Vietnam.
The ceasefire took effect at dawn on August 7. After technical discussions in New Delhi, the International Control Commission, composed of Canadians, Indians and Poles, began work on the 12th in Svay Rieng. Lon Nol led the government side, Nguyen Thanh Son the joint Viet Minh/Khmer resistance delegation. Almost at once the talks hit procedural problems, which dragged on into September. The deadline for the reintegration of the Khmer rebels came and went. France thought Thanh Son’s men were dragging their feet ‘to gain time to set up a clandestine propaganda network ahead of the forthcoming elections’.
In fact the explanation was simpler. Time was needed to hide weapons against the day when the struggle would resume. At the Eastern Zone HQ at Krâbao, Mey Mann remembered spending most of August greasing rifles and other weapons with beef fat before putting them in waterproof wrappers for the Vietnamese to bury in the forest.
Time was needed, too, for the Khmer leaders to decide who was to be sent to Vietnam and who would stay behind. In the East, Tou Samouth and one of his district chiefs, Tuk Nhung, made the final selection. Rath Samoeun, Yun Soeun and several other students were among those who left, walking overland to Chau Doc, on the Vietnamese border, where they boarded sampans for the 200-mile river journey across the Mekong delta to Cape Camau. There a Polish cargo ship, the
Jan Kilinski,
was waiting to take them north.
Conditions were grim. On each voyage, 3,000-4,000 troops, most of them Vietnamese, were crammed into the holds with no medical treatment for the wounded, along with arms and munitions and, on one journey, a dozen elephants used by the Viet Minh transport corps.
Altogether 1,900 Khmer men and thirty-six women made that journey. They landed at a fishing port a hundred miles south of Hanoi, and from there were taken in lorries to a camp newly built for them in the high plateaux near the Laotian border, where Son Ngoc Minh, in his speech of welcome, warned them against the rigours of the North Vietnamese winter. They could expect to spend two years in Vietnam, he told them, studying the land reform and undergoing political training.
The last Khmer Viet Minh units left Cambodia on October 18 1954.
Sâr, Mey Mann
and Chan Samân, the commissar of the now defunct Po Kombo Regiment, were not among them. After leaving the camp at Krâbao, they walked southward by a roundabout route across Svay Rieng as if making for Chau Doc, then crossed into southern Vietnam and headed west for several days before traversing the Cambodian border again and entering Kompong Trabek district in Prey Veng. The journey took a month. Mey Mann remembered that they made frequent stops to disguise their eventual
destination. Nguyen Thanh Son’s special representative, Pham Van Ba, and his wife travelled with them. After waiting another week in Kompong Trabek, they separated. Sâr took a bus to Phnom Penh, followed, a few days later, by the two Vietnamese. Mann and Samân set out last.
During the political training classes at Krâbao, Pham Van Ba used to tell his Khmer listeners that Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam were ‘like lips, teeth and tongue; each needs the other two’. Now, he said, the Cambodians’ role had changed. They had to make the transition ‘from armed struggle to political struggle’. The
three young Khmers
discussed this among themselves during the journey. As a proposition, it seemed logical enough. But none of them had any clear idea of what it might involve.
4
Cambodian Realities
AS THE YEAR
1954 drew to a close, Sihanouk found himself confronted with the perils of his own success. The Viet Minh had gone. The French protectorate was finished. Now that he had the plenitude of power, there were no excuses left.
Already
, a year earlier, half-jubilant, half apprehensive, he had told the French commander, General de Langlade: ‘Getting independence all at once makes it so indigestible I may choke. It was never my intention to go this fast.’ His cousin, the Defence Minister, Sirik Matak, predicted gloomily that the withdrawal of the French army would lead ‘to the overturning of the Throne and power passing into the hands of Son Ngoc Thanh, which will mean the end of Cambodia.’
In the event, French troops stayed on until after the Geneva talks, which gave the government a breathing space. But under the terms of the peace agreement, elections had to be held in 1955. Most observers, Cambodian and foreign, predicted a Democratic Party landslide. That would open the way for Thanh’s return to office and, eventually perhaps, the proclamation of a republic, which the Americans — ever ready to cock a snook at the French — regarded as greatly preferable to the corrupt and decadent Cambodian monarchy and its unreliable King.
Son Ngoc Thanh came down from his mountain lair in the Dangreks, with an escort of two hundred armed men, to pledge allegiance to the government at a ceremony at Siem Reap on September 30. Sihanouk refused to see him. ‘Son Ngoc Thanh is not a communist,’ Penn Nouth told a French reporter; ‘however he is certainly a republican, and that makes him a danger to the regime.’ But ostracising the former rebel leader did not make the problem disappear. The Indian Prime Minister, Pandit Nehru, who met Thanh during a visit in October, came away convinced that he would play a key role in Cambodia’s future. Washington instructed its Ambassador in Phnom Penh to re-establish contact with him. French intelligence was convinced that Britain was giving Thanh’s forces covert aid through its mission in Bangkok. By Sihanouk’s own estimate, half the Democratic Party was firmly committed to Thanh’s cause, and theirs was
the only party in the country capable of organising a credible election campaign. The King was worried, and showed it; but the only remedy he could think of was to put off for as long as possible the day when Cambodians would be called on to vote.
This was the political situation to which Sâr and the others returned.
Viet Minh rules for organisational work in ‘enemy-occupied areas’, which the Cambodians tried to apply, laid down: ‘Legal, semi-legal and secret forms of action must be carefully distinguished . . . Groups that work openly must maintain close links with secret organisations, which should on no account be dissolved . . . For Party work, secrecy is fundamental The overriding priority was to limit to the maximum the consequences of betrayal or infiltration of Party organisations.
Keo Meas, by virtue of his membership of the old Phnom Penh Action Committee, was designated acting head of the city’s clandestine Party branch. On Tou Samouth’s instructions,
Sâr was chosen
to handle ‘legal’ action, which meant infiltrating the Democratic Party and trying to influence its policies. Meas himself took charge of ‘semi-legal’ operations and set up a communist front organisation to serve as the public face of the Khmer Viet Minh during the coming elections. He wanted to call it Khmer Toosu (Khmer Resistance). But Sihanouk refused, regarding that name as a slight on his own ‘Royal Crusade’. After an appeal to the International Control Commission, registration was accorded, but under the more neutral ensign [Krom] Pracheachon (the ‘People’s Group’). Its statutes contained no reference to communism because under the Cambodian constitution all political parties had to support the monarchical system.
Keo Meas’s group was not alone in viewing the election campaign as an opportunity to win a place in mainstream Cambodian politics. Sâr’s old mentor, Keng Vannsak, now a teacher at the Lycée Sisowath, had joined the Democratic Party that autumn. His philippic against Sihanouk two years earlier had been followed by a book of poems,
Virgin Heart,
which used Buddhist metaphors for coded attacks against the monarchy (portrayed as an enormous stomach, feeding on its own excrement). To the party elders, Vannsak was a dangerous if beguiling young firebrand, whose barely concealed republicanism and sympathies for Son Ngoc Thanh made him a potential vote-winner. In September, Thiounn Mumm, the other intellectual force behind the Cercle Marxiste, had also arrived from Paris. Together he and Vannsak set about remaking the Democratic Party from within. Four months later, on January 30 1955, at a rowdy meeting held in one of the city’s cinemas, the old guard was pushed aside. A left-wing prince, Norodom Phurissara, was elected Secretary-General. Vannsak became his deputy. Ea Sichau and Hang Thun Hak represented the Thanhists, Thiounn Mumm the Left.
Sâr had gone
to see Vannsak shortly after returning from the maquis. ‘I asked him what he’d been doing,’ Vannsak recalled. ‘He laughed a bit shamefacedly and said he’d been stuck with Chantarainsey all the time. He’d never managed to get to the Viet Minh zone!’ Sâr’s story was sufficiently convincing that, years later, Vannsak continued to insist that reports of his presence among the Viet Minh were mistaken; people were confusing him with someone else. That part of Sâr’s life was secret to all except his Party colleagues.
He played his new role skilfully. ‘He used to carry my briefcase at meetings,’Vannsak said. ‘It wasn’t that he was my secretary, he would have been hopeless at that. But he kept me company and he was pleasant to have around.’ As the campaign heated up, the two men took breakfast together each morning at Vannsak’s house, a two-storey colonial villa in the Lycée grounds, surrounded by palm trees and bougainvillea. Sâr said little, listening while Vannsak held forth on his efforts to weld the three strands of the party — the Thanhists; the Left; and the notables — into a united force.
How much Sâr was able to influence the Democratic Party’s policies is a matter of debate. Vannsak has repeatedly claimed that he had no input at all; but it plainly never occurred to him that his protégé might have an ulterior motive. Ping Sây, who was then editing the Democrats’ newspaper,
Pracheathippadey,
had a very different impression. ‘Sâr had an
important role
at that time,’ he remembered. ‘It was he who [helped] lay out the party’s political line.’ Thiounn Mumm concurred. ‘Sâr was
manipulating Vannsak,’
he recalled. ‘When I met him, he told me that since we controlled the Democratic Party, we must take a tough line against the Americans. I didn’t agree. I thought it was more important to have a programme which everyone could support. But Vannsak went along with him.’
How to treat the United States was a headache not merely for the Democrats but for Sihanouk as well.
To the King, Cambodia’s fate would be sealed if it allowed itself to become just another pawn on Washington’s Cold War chessboard. To Washington, in the era of Dulles, foreign governments were either ‘with us, or against us’. When the Cambodian Prime Minister, Penn Nouth, declared on Sihanouk’s orders towards the end of 1953: ‘It is not for us to take sides against communism, so long as the Viet Minh do not try to impose it on our people by force,’ President Eisenhower was outraged. On the other hand, at Geneva, which officially enshrined neutralist policies for the whole of Indochina, Washington was agreeably surprised to find that Cambodia, alone of the participating states, adopted an independent stance. But then, on a visit to India, Sihanouk endorsed the
pancasila,
the five principles of peaceful coexistence, which to the Americans put
Cambodia back in the same league as Burma and Red China. Next he delayed approving a US military aid package, saying there were too many strings attached. When that hurdle was passed, he told the American Ambassador, Robert McClintock: ‘Nehru thinks he has me in his pocket! He’s wrong’ — only to launch into a diatribe against American stinginess and interference in Cambodia’s internal affairs. ‘The US is building engines to go to the moon,’ he complained, ‘but they won’t give us even one airplane. The French are poorer, but far more generous.’
It was a bewildering display of political equivocation. As the King blew hot and cold, he kept America at arm’s length while encouraging the belief that one day it would be able to lock Cambodia securely into the Western camp.