Sihanouk’s use of police methods to crush the opposition led the communists to impose a more rigorous separation of ‘legal’, ‘semi-legal’ and ‘secret’ work than had been the case before. Legal activities virtually ceased as the Democratic Party was reduced to a shell. Ping Sây started a new journal,
Ekhepheap
(‘Unity’), which defended neutralist (and hence, anti-American) theses, not very different from those of Sihanouk himself. But the mere fact that it was not under the government’s control made that unacceptable. When temporary closure orders failed to make Sây see the light, the police arrested him on his wedding day and put him in prison for seven months.
The Pracheachon — the Party’s ‘semi-legal’ arm — survived despite constant government harassment. Keo Meas remained its leader but gave up his position as Secretary of the clandestine Phnom Penh Party Committee. The other members of the group — Non Suon, a young peasant from Kampot province who had risen to become South-Western Zone Secretary during the war against the French; Ney Sarann, a member of the Khmerland provisional government set up in April 1950, who was close to the Eastern Zone military commander, So Phim; Chou Chet, a young PRPK cadre from Kompong Cham; two returned students, Chi Kim An and Ieng Sary’s former classmate Sien An; and two journalists, Nop Bophann and Penn Yuth — had all worked with Meas as members of Nguyen Thanh Son’s Viet Minh delegation at the ceasefire talks in Svay Rieng.
To the Cambodian government, and to foreign embassies in Phnom
Penh, the Pracheachon were ‘the communists’ — or as Sihanouk began calling them around this time, the
‘Rouges’
, to distinguish them from the ‘Khmers Roses’, the pink liberals in the Democratic Party. That there might be an inner, secret Party organisation, for which the Pracheachon was merely a façade, seems never to have crossed anyone’s mind.
Initially the group
tried to act as a loyal opposition, applauding the Prince’s journey to China in February 1956, Zhou Enlai’s return visit that autumn and the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries — moves viewed with grave misgivings, not only by the United States but also by Britain and France, which wondered anxiously whether the Prince would be able to cope with the forces that his ‘slide to the Left’ unleashed. But Sihanouk was more adept than his critics gave him credit for. The tilt towards communism abroad was matched by increased repression of communism at home. The Pracheachon became the Prince’s whipping boy, denounced at public meetings as a treacherous fifth column serving foreign masters.
With time, the group acquired, in the public mind and in the minds of its own members, a distinct identity. It still took orders from the secret Party leadership. But in practice it became a separate faction, or at least a separate sensibility, rather than the semi-public face of one and the same revolutionary organisation. It was the price the movement paid for splitting its activities into discrete branches which, for security reasons, kept contact with each other to a minimum.
The secret Party leadership itself, appointed by the Vietnamese in the winter of 1954, consisted of a five-man provisional Central Committee. Sieu Heng was Secretary, in place of Son Ngoc Minh, with Tou Samouth as his deputy. Minh himself, who had been given responsibility for the two thousand Khmer Viet Minh regroupees in Vietnam, ranked third. So Phim, representing the Eastern Zone military, and Tuk Nhung, the rural base areas, filled the remaining places.
Sieu Heng was a surprising choice. During the Royal Crusade, when Sihanouk had offered an amnesty to Khmer Viet Minh leaders who rallied to his cause, he had wavered and by some accounts came close to surrendering. Nguyen Thanh Son, however, regarded him as the brightest of the Cambodian communists. The North-West Zone military commander, Ruos Nhim, who worked with Heng, put it somewhat differently. ‘He knew how to please the Vietnamese,’ he said, ‘and as a result, he was promoted.’ Seconded by the veteran Tuk Nhung, Heng had responsibility for the 140 Party cells in the countryside. Tou Samouth was in charge of urban Party organisations. But the new arrangements broke down almost at once. Son Ngoc Minh was in Hanoi; Sieu Heng stayed in South Vietnam until
1956; Tuk Nhung abandoned the struggle altogether; and So Phim fled into the jungle. The rural Party organisation was left leaderless and slowly withered away. Of the five nominal leaders, only Tou Samouth was active inside the country. Since his primary responsibility was for the urban areas, the centre of gravity of the Cambodian movement shifted from the countryside to the towns.
Throughout this period, Sâr was living a double life.
After his return
from the maquis, he had rented a house in a marshy area of southern Phom Penh known as Boeng Keng Kâng. ‘It was ideal for someone who wished to be anonymous,’ Ping Sây remembered. ‘The whole place was a maze of crooked little wooden houses, built on stilts, joined by flimsy, bamboo walkways, just above the level of the swamp, with dozens of ways in and out.’
Sâr’s house was simplicity itself. The only furnishings were a sleeping-mat on the wooden floor and a pile of books he had brought back from Paris. There was no street lighting and at night, when the district was in darkness, he could meet colleagues who were working openly, like Sây and Thiounn Mumm, as well as secret emissaries from Tou Samouth, without anyone being the wiser. Keo Meas and Ney Sarann, from the Pracheachon, came to the house to co-ordinate the group’s campaign activities with those of the Democratic Party; and Sâr, in turn, visited the Pracheachon offices — but, just as he had managed his association with Vannsak without attracting the attention of the police, so too his meetings with Meas passed unnoticed.
Even Non Suon
, Meas’s deputy, who saw him come to call several times, always wearing a white short-sleeved shirt, did not learn the visitor’s identity until much later. This gift for subterfuge, coupled with an ability to combine ‘open’ and ‘secret’ work, put Sâr in a strong position. All contacts between the Pracheachon and the Democrats passed through him, as did most, though not all, communications with the underground Party apparatus.
But there was also a second Sâr, who seemed to have little in common with the first. This Sâr drove a
black Citroën
sedan of a type which, not many years earlier, had been reserved for the exclusive use of the French
R
é
sident Supérieur.
Admittedly, it was not new — it had apparently belonged to his sister Roeung, the ex-royal concubine — but
it enabled him
to cut a figure before his society belle, Soeung Son Maly, whom he was once again courting assiduously. Keng Vannsak let them meet at his house at the Lycée Sisowath while he and his wife were out teaching. He was sure, he said later, that ‘nothing untoward happened . . . They probably sat some way apart, talking about their feelings for each other . . . Maly wouldn’t have
let it go further because she was waiting for him to get a proper position. Her idea was that when the Democratic Party triumphed, Sâr would become an important official and then they would be able to marry.’
It is not easy to reconcile the dedicated young activist, plotting revolution from his empty house in the slums, and the elegant young man-about-town arranging trysts with his lady-love. But it would be wrong to assume that the second was simply a cover for the first.
Sâr was no ascetic. His youthful escapades with the young women of the palace, his reputation in his first year in Paris and earlier as a young man ‘who likes to have a good time’, his love of music and of dancing — ‘he
dances very well
, in the Western style with a girl in his arms,’ one of his colleagues noted a few years later — all suggest that if he was playing a part, it came naturally to him. One may wonder how the story would have ended if the Democrats had won in 1955 and Sâr obtained the post that Maly hoped for. But the Democrats lost and
she dumped him
, becoming a few months later the junior wife of Sam Sary, the nemesis of the Left and the second most powerful politician in the land after Sihanouk himself.
Keng Vannsak claimed later that this dual setback touched off a cycle of sexual and political frustration which embittered Sâr for the rest of his life. That is excessive. But at a political level, the events of 1955 undoubtedly steeled Sâr’s determination to hold to his revolutionary course, and over the next five years, while the Party gradually imploded and a less engaged man would have given up — as many did — his commitment did not waver. At a personal level it led him to marry — ‘on the rebound’, as Vannsak put it — a fellow revolutionary whose convictions were equal to his own.
Sâr and Khieu Ponnary
, the elder sister of Ieng Sary’s wife, Thirith, whom he had first encountered in Paris, had met up again after his return from the maquis. Vannsak remembered her as one of a group of Democratic Party women who always sat in the front row at rallies. She was also, which Vannsak did not know, the main point of contact between Phnom Penh and the Viet Minh prior to the Geneva accords. A messenger would come at night from Prey Chhor to a meeting place near the house on rue Dr Hahn which Ponnary shared with her mother, just behind the palace. Then she would take him to a rendezvous, always in a different place, to meet students waiting to be escorted to the camp at Krâbao. She was a person who could be relied on, and after the turmoil of the election defeat and Maly’s betrayal, reliability was something Sâr desperately needed. Towards the end of 1955, he left the bare, wooden house at Boeung Keng Kâng, and took lodgings with Ponnary and her mother. Six months later they married.
A Vietnamese Party historian, alluding to their revolutionary credentials, described it, only partly tongue-in-cheek, as a ‘marriage
made in heaven’
. In fact, it was a
very odd union. Sâr
was thirty-one; his bride, thirty-six — an age difference still more unusual in Cambodia, where men normally take much younger wives, than in the West. Moreover, Sâr had charm and good looks. Ponnary was prim and proper, and behind her back was nicknamed ‘the old maid’. Even her best friend could not have claimed she was beautiful; she had had smallpox as a child and her face bore the scars.
Yet marry
they did, at a three-day-long ceremony, conducted by Buddhist monks, chanting and swinging censers of incense in accordance with Khmer custom, which culminated in a huge banquet on Saturday, July 14 1956, attended by Mey Mann, Ping Sây, other friends from Sâr’s Paris days, and scores of guests from the village of Prek Sbauv and from Ponnary’s family.
The choice of the wedding day, Bastille Day, was not fortuitous. But revolutionary symbolism took second place to Khmer tradition.
As the high point
of the ceremony, Sâr insisted that his new wife prostrate herself before his father, then in his seventies. Ponnary, a well-educated, self-aware woman, who had been one of the first two Cambodian girls to pass the
baccalauréat,
reluctantly complied. Ieng Sary, when told about the incident later, was shocked. ‘No one could understand why he did that,’ he said. But Ponnary, too, was deeply conservative, and at one level this deference to ancient customs may not have displeased her. When the old man died, two years later, she accompanied Sâr to Prek Sbauv for the funeral.
One of her students
remembered her as
a very traditional Khmer woman — no lipstick or anything like that. Her sister, Thirith, was more modern, more liberal if you like. Thirith would say what she thought, like a European. She was more direct, more open. Ponnary didn’t do that . . . She was very
Khmer.
[Sâr] had that quality, too. Her way of behaving, her way of approaching people, were very authentic, reflecting Khmer culture and custom . . . The way she dressed wasn’t excessively prudish; it was traditional, that’s all. She was modest. She had a sense of humour but did not always show it — I wouldn’t say she was full of laughs. But she was thoughtful and she was interesting to be with. We all respected her immensely.
When Thirith and Ieng Sary returned to Phnom Penh from Paris in January 1957, they spent six weeks with the Sârs at the house at rue Dr Hahn.
‘They lived
in a very old-fashioned way,’ Sary remembered. ‘In theory, [Sâr] believed women should be equal. But with his own wife, for some reason he didn’t see it the same way. She was an intellectual. But when she talked to other people [instead of remaining silent, deferring to her husband in the traditional manner], he didn’t appreciate that. . .’
In the months before her marriage, Ponnary had become
more outgoing
. Another student remembered that she started to wear a little make-up and even jewellery. ‘She seemed so happy,’ he recalled, ‘and we were happy on her behalf But it proved short-lived. The following year, she found she had uterine
cancer
. The operation was successful but it meant that she could not have children. Sâr’s eldest brother, Suong, and his wife had hoped that having a family might make Sâr settle down. It was not to be.
In the winter of 1955, the underground Party apparatus was reorganised. Tou Samouth, who had spent most of the election campaign outside Phnom Penh, moved into a small house which Sâr had had built for him on land owned by Ponnary’s family near Tuol Svay Prey, the ‘Hill of the Wild Mango’, on the south-western outskirts of the city.
*
It was surrounded by a tall hedge of water tamarinds. A group of cyclo drivers hung around outside during the day and slept there at night, acting as bodyguards.
Samouth chaired the Party’s Urban Committee, which initially consisted of himself, Nuon Chea — who had replaced Keo Meas as Secretary of the Phnom Penh City Committee — and the trio who had returned together from the maquis a year before, Sâr, Mey Mann and Chan Samân. Mann dropped out some months later, ostensibly to devote his energies to reviving the now moribund Democratic Party. In fact he was excluded because he made clear that he was not prepared to sacrifice his family life to the cause, which earned him recriminations for ‘sentimentality and lack of courage’.