Nuon Chea had come to the communist movement by a different path from the others. Two years older than Sâr, he had grown up in Battambang. During the Thai occupation of the province in the 1940s, he attended secondary school in Bangkok and worked for a time as a clerk at the Thai Foreign Ministry before enrolling at Thammasat University, where he studied law. While there, he became a member of the Thai Communist Party, but left in the late 1940s to join his cousin, Sieu Heng, at the Northwestern Zone headquarters in the mountains of Samlaut district, not far from Pailin. His Party membership was transferred to the ICP and, in September 1951, he was appointed to the newly created PRPK Central Committee. Subsequently he spent a year studying at the Vietnamese Higher Party School. The most secretive of all the Khmer revolutionaries, he returned unobtrusively to Cambodia in the summer of 1955 and found
employment with a Sino-Khmer trading company, where he would remain, under deep cover, long after his colleagues had fled back to the maquis.
Sâr, meanwhile, had taken a job teaching history and French literature at a private school not far from his old home in Boeung Keng Kâng. Chamraon Vichea (Progressive Knowledge) was one of three such establishments in the city where young radicals who lacked the qualifications to teach at state schools were able to find work. Here, a third Sâr emerged, complementing the revolutionary and the smartly dressed young man of the world. Having been a mediocre student, he proved an unusually gifted teacher. Soth Polin, later a well-known Khmer novelist, studied French literature with him:
I still remember
[Saloth Sâr’s] style of delivery in French: gentle and musical. He was clearly drawn to French literature in general and poetry in particular: Rimbaud, Verlaine, de Vigny . . . He spoke in bursts without notes, searching [for his words] a little but never at a loss, his eyes half-closed, carried away by the lyrical flow of his thoughts . . . The students were enthralled by this teacher who was so approachable, always dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt and dark blue trousers.
On this point, all testimonies concur. He was ‘a self-composed, smooth-featured teacher who was fond of his students, eloquent, unpretentious, honest, humane’. One young man, struck by Sâr’s evident good nature and attractive personality, declared after their first meeting:’I [felt] I could easily become his
lifelong friend.’
The new leadership met at Tou Samouth’s home, once every two or three weeks, to discuss the political situation and how best to promote the communist cause. It was an uphill struggle. The agreement, tacit or otherwise, whereby Sihanouk turned a blind eye to the Vietnamese communists’ activities on Cambodian territory provided they kept out of its internal affairs, had freed his hands to carry out a harsh but highly effective campaign of repression against former Khmer Viet Minh activists. By 1957, the number of Party members had been halved, from 1,670 at the end of the war to 850. Most of the former rural leaders were inactive. Ruos Nhim, in the North-West, was living on a farm in Battambang. Ke Pauk, who would later head the Northern Zone, had gone back to his home village to work as a peasant. So Phim, the fourth ranking member of the provisional Central Committee, had made his way to Phnom Penh, where Mey Mann and Toch Phoeun, then a senior official in the Public Works Department, found him and a group of thirty followers employment as carpenters on government building sites.
When Ieng Sary returned from Paris that January, leaving the Cercle Marxiste in the hands of Khieu Samphân, who was studying for an
economics doctorate, he came to the conclusion that the movement was moribund.
Part of the reason was that the Vietnamese, the begetters of the Cambodian communist movement, were overwhelmed by their own problems. A shadowy ‘Work Committee’, headed by a southern Vietnamese who used the alias Hay So, had been set up in Phnom Penh by the VWP’s Southern Bureau, the future Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), to handle liaison with the Khmers.
*
But its main concern in the late 1950s was the safety of its own leadership. In 1957 the Southern Bureau itself was forced to take refuge in the Cambodian capital to escape the wave of repression unleashed by the South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. Le Duan, soon to be designated Ho Chi Minh’s heir apparent, was based there for part of that year. The Southern Bureau continued to operate clandestinely from safe houses in Phnom Penh until 1959, when guerrilla fighting resumed in the south and it re-based inside Vietnam. In practice, so long as the Cambodian Communists did nothing which might jeopardise Hanoi’s relationship with Sihanouk, they were left to go their own way. The links with the Vietnamese ‘elder brother’ slowly weakened. Speaking many years later, Sâr argued that this had been a good thing because
‘it gave us the chance
to be independent and to develop our movement ourselves’. But to the beleaguered little group of Khmer communists, trying desperately to survive on their own, it cannot have seemed like that at the time.
More fundamental, however, was the Cambodian Party’s crisis of identity. The PRPK, to which all Khmer communists theoretically belonged, was not even a proper communist party. How could one be a communist as a member of a party which was not?
Those like Sâr, Sok Knaol and Mey Mann, who had belonged to the French and Indochinese Parties, insisted in later life, not always truthfully, that they had never been officially inducted into the PRPK but had been members of ‘the Cambodian section of the ICP’. In Mann’s words: ‘It was all very vague. There wasn’t a proper structure . . . We had a leadership core . . . and [we] worked together. We felt we were members of the Communist Party, but what communist party I couldn’t say’ Sâr spoke in similar terms. From the mid-1950s, they began referring to their movement among themselves not as ‘the Party’ but as
angkar padevat,
the ‘revolutionary organisation’, or more often just as
Angkar
.
In 1957, Tou Samouth, Sâr and Nuon Chea began drafting a new political programme and statutes for a re-launched Cambodian Party to replace
the PRPK, which they regarded more and more as an alien implant. The revived party would be allied with, but not subordinate to, the Vietnamese. A recruitment drive was launched, based on the Viet Minh principle of ‘quality rather than quantity’. In practice, this meant building up core groups, ‘one member at a time’, as Pham Van Ba had taught them in the maquis, and then gradually, after a lengthy apprenticeship, inducting into the movement those who had proved themselves. Suong Sikoeun, then nineteen years old and in his final year at the Lycée Sisowath, was among the new intake:
We used to meet
once a week at a worker’s house in the southern part of the city. Every time I left home, I wondered whether I would get back that night. Because it was clandestine. I used to imagine that someone might shoot at me. We always told the cyclo driver to drop us some way beyond, and then walked back making sure that no one was following. . .
The meetings used to last about two hours, from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. . . . Mainly we talked about the political situation — there was very little discussion of ideology . . . The [political] line was essentially the same as what we read in the left-wing press: neutrality, a parliamentary system, multi-party democracy and constitutional monarchy. The difference was that now we were members of an organisation, with its own internal discipline and rules . . . [One of the rules was that] we each had to contact three or four potential sympathisers and then observe them over a long period to see how they behaved. Eventually, the most progressive element among them might be asked to join the cell . . . They were cells, not discussion groups. But they were the cells of a party that was still in the process of being formed.
To Sikoeun, the conspiratorial side of the movement was part of the attraction. That was true for Sâr, too. He did not take part in cell meetings — nor did Tou Samouth or Nuon Chea — to avoid the risk of exposure. But
he organised
informal gatherings with groups of students at his home, a brick-built Chinese-style house, not far from Tou Samouth’s dwelling, to which he and Ponnary had moved soon after
Ieng Sary’s
return. The house was spotlessly clean, one participant remembered, but almost bare except for a few books and some Chinese prints on the walls. Sâr led the discussions and encouraged the others to speak out, but apart from criticising corruption never revealed his own political stance. Ieng Sary and Son Sen who, after returning from France, had become Director of Studies at the Phnom Penh Teacher Training College, chaired similar discussion groups and participated in cell meetings like those which Suong Sikoeun attended. At a still more restricted level, Samouth, Sâr and Nuon Chea held political training seminars in safe houses for the most reliable elements, essentially those who had joined the PCF or the ICP in the pre-Geneva period and a handful of younger people who had proved their loyalty.
The movement was hardly flourishing, but by the summer, at least in Phnom Penh, it was no longer in decline. Chamraon Vichea and the two other ‘progressive’ schools in the capital, Kampuj’bot and Sotoân Prychea In, were staffed largely by communists, and growing numbers of students were being attracted to the cause. Core groups existed at the Lycée Sisowath, where Ponnary and her sister Thirith taught; at the Teacher Training College; and at the Sisowath Alumni Association, headed by Sâr’s protégé Sok Knaol. Similar networks were being built up in provincial cities, including Battambang and Kompong Cham.
Sihanouk, whose intuition in such matters was finely honed, sensed the danger.
In August 1957, he summoned the leaders of the Democratic Party, whose continued existence afforded a kind of vicarious protection for all with left-wing views, to a debate at the Royal Palace before an audience packed with his own supporters, which was broadcast over loudspeakers to a crowd of several thousand outside. As they left, after five hours of public humiliation, they were dragged from their cars and beaten with rifle-butts by palace guards. For the next two nights, soldiers from the Phnom Penh garrison, encouraged by the right-wing Chief of Staff, Lon Nol, rampaged through the streets, shouting ‘Death to the Democrats’ and molesting indiscriminately any Cambodian, Chinese or Vietnamese unfortunate enough to cross their path. To demonstrate Sihanouk’s magnanimity, the party was not banned outright but allowed to limp on until the parliamentary elections next spring, when it decided not to field any candidates.
The following month, September, the Prince announced the foundation of a government movement, the Royal Socialist Khmer Youth, whose primary mission was to prevent young people being seduced by communist propaganda.
Next came the turn of the Pracheachon, which decided, ‘not without courage . . . given the physical risks involved’, as one Western Ambassador noted, to put up candidates in the capital and four rural constituencies. Sihanouk seized the occasion to launch a violent anti-communist crusade, travelling in person to all five electoral districts to denounce his opponents’ ‘anti-national’ policies. His movement, the Sangkum, put up gory posters of communist terror attacks against Khmer civilians, dating from the war, and Radio Phnom Penh accused the Prince’s opponents of being puppets of the hated Vietnamese. The Pracheachon ran a skilful campaign, presenting its candidates as local men, who ‘travel on foot and by ox-cart and understand local problems’, unlike their rivals from the Sangkum, who came in fleets of American cars. But it made no difference. Systematic intimidation forced four of the five to drop out. The only one who stayed
the course, Keo Meas, in Phnom Penh, was credited with a mere 396 votes from an electorate of more than 30,000.
As if that were not enough, later the same year it was discovered that the Party leader Sieu Heng, and a Pracheachon member, Penn Yuth, had been working as government informers. Exactly when their betrayal began was never clearly established. Nor was it known how much Sieu Heng had told the police. He had been under suspicion within the Party for some time and Tou Samouth had taken steps to limit his access to information. But it is also likely that he held back much of what he knew, for his niece was married to Nuon Chea, and neither Nuon nor any of the other central leaders appears to have been compromised by his betrayal. The most serious effect of his action was to sever all communication between Phnom Penh and the rural networks. Already sorely tried by lassitude and government repression, these now imploded altogether. Of the 850 Party members in 1957, by the end of the decade only 250 remained.
Treason was in fashion in Cambodia in the late 1950s.
Sihanouk had a keen nose for those who showed signs of acquiring more power than was good for him. In the summer of 1957, he began to smell trouble in the shape of his Minister of State, Sam Sary, whom he packed off to London a few months later to serve as Ambassador to the Court of St James’s. Unfortunately, Sary was still the same
‘sulfurous
and vindictive personality’ who, as a young magistrate, had gained a reputation for beating prisoners.
This time he beat
up a young woman, described at first as his children’s governess. Soeung Son Maly, Saloth Sâr’s old flame, now Sary’s junior wife — for apparently it was she — went to the British police. The Embassy then issued a statement claiming that such behaviour was normal in Cambodia. The resulting scandal, amplified when the newspapers discovered that the ‘governess’ was in fact Sary’s concubine and had recently borne him a child, led to his immediate recall.
Sâr’s reaction is not recorded. But Sihanouk was furious. Not, as he explained later, because of what Sam Sary had done, but because of the discredit his behaviour had brought on Cambodia. Over the next few months, the ex-Minister moved gradually into open opposition, launching a newspaper to propagate his views and attempting, unsuccessfully, to form his own political party as a rival to the Sangkum. The Americans and their regional allies, the Thais and the South Vietnamese — ever anxious to find a counterweight to Sihanouk, if not an outright replacement — egged him on from behind the scenes.