The constant progression of communism throughout the world is undeniable, and I cannot see what will stop it and make it retreat . . . The Western conception of Democracy seems to me the only one that is worthwhile from the viewpoint of the human condition, of human rights and freedoms. Its superiority resides in the fact that it places Man at the summit, while Communism reduces him to the state of a slave to an all-powerful State . . . But the great weakness of Western Democracy is its failure to deliver social justice . . . In most of the countries where they build up military forces as a rampart against totalitarian, freedom-hating communism, our American friends close their eyes to the violations of Democracy perpetrated by the governments concerned — violations which lead to a system no less totalitarian than the one they are fighting against, and without the latter’s advantages . . . The West must try to understand that . . . its aid will never cure the Red fever if it is used to prop up regimes which lack the support of their own people.
Within this unpromising global context, Cambodia’s fate, Sihanouk concluded, depended largely on factors over which it had no control. The realisation marked the beginning of a long and perilous tightrope walk, balancing between East and West — leaning first one way, then the other — that Sihanouk would execute in bravura fashion throughout the next decade, keeping Cambodia insulated from the firestorm in neighbouring Vietnam until, finally, the forces that the war had unleashed overwhelmed him, dragging him and his country into the inferno.
At home, repression spread in all directions. ‘Arrests and searches are taking place everywhere,’ wrote one diplomat, shortly after Nop Bop-hann’s murder. ‘People in Phnom Penh are frightened, and this is exacerbated by rumours of the brutal treatment the security police are said to be inflicting on those they interrogate.’ By the spring of 1960, some two thousand people, Vietnamese, Chinese and Khmer, were being detained in a holding camp on the outskirts of the city.
The Vietnamese, prime targets of suspicion, were the object of a full
scale witch-hunt. While Sihanouk maintained publicly that his ‘constant aim’ was ‘sincere reconciliation with [Vietnam]’, he sent a secret memorandum to his cabinet stating that security measures must be based on the explicit premise that ‘all Vietnamese, no matter what group or political party they belong to, constitute an
eternal
and
mortal
danger for the Khmer nation’. The government acted accordingly. Vietnamese communist cells — re-implanted in eastern Cambodia to prepare for the resumption that summer of communist insurgency in South Vietnam — were smashed and their members arrested. Khmer Krom saboteurs sent in by Son Ngoc Thanh’s Khmer Serei movement from CIA training camps across the border in South Vietnam were hunted down and killed. In one
celebrated incident
, probably imagined by the Prince himself, the two targets were combined: the security services detained and ‘turned’ a naïve young member of a Viet Minh cell in Svay Rieng, who was then sent to the US Embassy to ask for help with a plan to assassinate Sihanouk. The Americans, as might have been expected, handed him over to the police. But the result was an embarrassing scandal in which all the Prince’s adversaries — the US, the communists and the Vietnamese — were dragged through the mud. The unfortunate youth at the centre of the affair, who had apparently been told he would be released as the price of his co-operation, was sentenced to death.
A Military Tribunal, whose judgements were not subject to appeal, dealt with state security offences. In its first two months of operation it handed out twenty-two death sentences to associates of Sam Sary and Dap Chhuon, generating what one observer termed ‘a psychosis of fear’. Another nine death sentences followed that spring. The verdicts, the French Embassy noted, were decided by Sihanouk in person, ‘without the least concern to maintain even the appearance of judicial independence’ and in flagrant disregard of the evidence, or rather the lack of it, against the individual accused:
Over the last eighty years . . . Cambodia has grown unused to such outbursts of [royal] hatred which do not spare even women and children. Many Cambodians are talking privately among themselves of the odious nature of the sentences. Unfortunately, in this country . . . few dare speak out openly . . . [for] it is true that opposition is neither possible nor feasible in the presence of a Prince who will not tolerate even the slightest infringement of his authority
After the death of his father, King Suramarit, in April 1960, Sihanouk’s ‘façade of liberal democracy, concealing the reality of personal dictatorship’, became a little more threadbare. The Prince’s mother, Queen Kossamak, a strong-willed, highly political woman, whom Zhou Enlai
once compared to a scheming
Chinese empress
, made clear that she wanted the throne for herself After weeks of Byzantine palace intrigue, Sihanouk forced her to accept a powerless, ceremonial position as Guardian of the Throne, while a constitutional amendment was pushed through making him Head of State for life. It was a coup d’état in disguise.
Meanwhile the left-wing press became a special target for attack.
The most dramatic incident involved a French-language newspaper called l’
Observateur.
It had been founded the previous autumn by Khieu Samphân, Ieng Sary’s successor at the head of the Cercle Marxiste, who had returned to Cambodia from Paris after completing his doctorate (and, along the way, becoming a committed member of the French Communist Party). With Sary’s encouragement, he had followed Hou Yuon’s example and joined the Sangkum. But then, to the dismay of his elderly mother, who expected him to begin a lucrative career as a high official, he invested his savings in a stock of lead type and began producing a twice-weekly broadsheet. His assignment from the underground Phnom Penh City Committee was to rally intellectual support and reach out to potential communist sympathisers in mainstream political life. It was a role to which Samphân was well-suited. He was an idealist, in whom personal morality and social conscience were indissolubly linked. To help make ends meet, he taught maths at a private school at weekends. One of his students remembered:
He was always punctual
and there were no jokes in his lessons, but he was a good teacher who won our respect. He would insist on our homework being done on time and we obeyed him even though he never punished us . . . He used to say, ‘I can’t understand why the trees are planted in the countryside but they fruit in the capital,’ by which he meant that the hard work of the farmers turned into wealth for the city people . . . His clothes were simple and he drove a rusty old sky-blue Mobylette. We used to laugh about the noise it made, like a tubercular cough . . . He dressed like a peasant, with sandals instead of shoes. His house was simple and small. In all these things he was setting an example. Above all, he disliked the corruption of the capital.
Samphân had a nimble, even mischievous mind, a ready pen and a dry sense of humour; but there was also something blinkered about him, an austere side to his character which treated life as though it should be lived along geometrical lines of discipline and self-denial.
His younger brother
, Khieu Sengkim, remembered how one day Samphân had invited him out to dinner:
He told me to order anything I liked. I ordered duck. When I had finished, he asked me: ‘Was it good?’ I said, ‘Yes, very good.’ His face darkened and
he levelled a finger at me. ‘You ought to be ashamed of sitting here eating such good food when most people who work ten times harder than you have nothing at all!’
In Paris, friends recalled how he had fallen in love with a
French girl
but had broken off the affair after deciding that his personal happiness should take second place to the quest for social justice at home.
L’Observateur
infuriated Sihanouk because, while plainly subversive, it was so carefully written that it was hard to establish seditious intent. It was anti-American and anti-colonial; it campaigned against the use of French in the lower classes at primary school on the ground that children from poor backgrounds were disadvantaged by not being taught in Khmer; and it carried a regular column, of which Samphân was particularly proud, which chronicled the wretchedness of the city’s poor — the water-carriers; the coolies who worked in the market, ‘so used to being beaten by police truncheons that they don’t even cry out, their skins hardened to the blows’; bicycle repairers; slum-dwellers; rickshaw men. Official spokesmen charged that it ‘never [contains] any constructive suggestion — and [there is] always complete silence about the social measures the government has taken.’ In short, the newspaper unctuously flattered the Prince’s person while perfidiously deploring the social ills that resulted from his policies.
That spring Khieu Samphân was summoned by the Security Minister, Kou Roun, ‘a thuggish individual’, as one diplomat described him, and crudely put on notice that the government would not answer for the consequences if he did not fall into line. In the next issue of
l’Observateur,
Samphân printed a record of the conversation, ‘omitting neither threats nor blows . . . something which,’ the French Ambassador noted, ‘very few Khmers would have dared to do’.
At lunchtime on Wednesday, July 13, Kou Roun put his threat into effect. As Khieu Samphân was leaving his office on his motor-scooter, a dozen or so cyclo drivers suddenly blocked his path. When he enquired what they wanted, they pinned his arms behind his back, beat him up and stripped off all his clothes. One of his assailants took a photograph of him standing naked in the street, after which they made off. A passer-by gave him a
krama
to cover himself He then walked to the Central Police Station, a few hundred yards from where the attack occurred, lodged a complaint, and next day wrote a detailed account of what had happened, in which he accused the security police of responsibility for the outrage.
When parliament summoned the Minister to explain himself, Kou Roun baldly declared that it was not the job of the police to protect opponents of the regime. The National Assembly, he added menacingly, itself
contained people of that ilk, and he proceeded to name Hou Yuon, Hu Nim, So Nem, Uch Ven and Chau Seng (who happened at the time to be a fellow member of the cabinet). Uch Ven, on behalf of his colleagues, then tabled a censure motion. But before it could be debated, Sihanouk issued a statement sharply reprimanding the deputies for their ‘hostile attitude’ towards his security chief and denouncing the Left in general and Khieu Samphân in particular as irredeemable troublemakers. Shortly afterwards, Hu Nim, the political director of the Prince’s newspaper,
R
é
alti
é
s Cambodgiennes,
who had used its pages to express his indignation against what he termed this ‘cowardly [and] brutal intimidation’, was sacked. Two days later, fifty more leftists were taken in for questioning and l’
Observateur
and three other pro-communist papers were closed. Fifteen of those detained, including Khieu Samphân and a group of Pracheachon leaders, headed by Non Suon, were placed in preventive detention in police cells. The Prince told a cabinet meeting that they were guilty of treason and ‘sowing hatred of the monarchy’, and that the Pracheachon’s ‘moral and political swindle’ could not be allowed to continue. But no charges were brought and a month later they were all freed.
In one sense the targeting of the Left was almost a compliment. The contrast between ‘this small group of resolute men . . . [who] put their beliefs before their own safety’ and the ‘spinelessness’ of the mass of the Sangkum, in Ambassador Gorce’s words, cried out for all to see. Sihanouk himself had written earlier that year that though there were ‘probably only a few dozen true communists in Cambodia, they are militants of real worth, deeply convinced in their beliefs, doctrinally rigid but flexible in their tactics, capable of any sacrifice — even of their own self-respect — in order to attain their goals.’ But at another level the systematic resort to illegality, justified, when not instigated, by Sihanouk himself, augured ill for the future.
To most Westerners, the early 1960s were a golden age for Cambodia. One American resident recalled: ‘[There was] complete peace and internal security, something which the country has not known within living memory . . . By 1960 . . . one could travel anywhere without danger from outlaws or hindrance from the authorities.’ The same week that Khieu Samphân was imprisoned, Sihanouk presented the prizes for ‘the most glamorous motor-car and owner’ at a
Concours d’El
é
gance
at Kep, won by Miss Kenthao de Monteiro and her Ford Thunderbird, with a Dutch businessman’s wife the runner-up. To the affluent, Cambodia was an oriental paradise ruled by an entrancing playboy prince. The other side of the coin was better not thought about. ‘He is so
thirsty for power
that he can admit no opposition,’ Gorce had written that spring. ‘The system [he has created]
accepts no contradiction. [To maintain it] the police impose a sort of reign of terror.’
In wonderland, the worm was in the fruit.
While Sihanouk tilted quixotically at the communists’ public emanations, the movement’s secret leadership went ahead with preparations for a Party Congress to transform the PRPK into an authentic Marxist-Leninist party. The original intention had been to meet in 1958, but the Vietnamese, whose approval had been sought, hurried slowly, rightly suspicious that the Khmers wanted to strike out on their own. Finally, however, Hanoi was persuaded that the existing structure, with separate rural and urban organisations, must be changed, and it was agreed that a Congress should take place in the second half of 1959. Then came Sieu Heng’s defection. Everything else was pushed into the background; the priority became damage control.