Early in 1964,
Sâr persuaded
the Viet Cong to allow the Khmers to set up their own camp ‘to avoid political complications and build the revolution step by step by ourselves’. The new base, known as Office 100, was also on the Vietnamese side of the border and, like its predecessor, under tight Viet Cong control. Ney Sarann, who arrived from Phnom Penh in August to become the base administrator, found that they had to ‘rely on the Vietnamese for everything, food, materials, security, the lot . . . To go from one bureau to another, we had to have a Vietnamese guard to escort us . . . They were the hosts and we had to obey.’ But Sarann also noted that, in terms of policy and ideology, ‘little by little . . . we were developing an independent stance.’
The first concrete sign of that came in the autumn, when an enlarged plenum of the Central Committee — the first such meeting the Cambodians had ever held
*
— took place in a forest on the Cambodian side of the border. It lasted several weeks and ended by producing a draft resolution which endorsed ‘all forms of struggle’, including ‘armed violence’ against Sihanouk’s government, and emphasised ‘self-reliance’, the Khmers’ codeword for freedom from Vietnamese control.
Copies
were run off using a glass bottle as a roller, stencils of waxed paper on which a text was scratched by hand with a stylus, and ink made by burning rubber, and despatched throughout the country Son Sen’s younger brother, Nikân, remembered that the messengers hid them in cakes or bottles of
prahoc,
the pungent fish relish which is the Khmers’ national dish, or rolled them inside tubes of bamboo, to avoid discovery by Sihanouk’s police.
In January 1965, the Central Committee met again to put the resolution into its final form. The version approved by this Second Plenum attacked ‘modern revisionism’ — meaning Khrushchev’s ideas about the ‘peaceful transition’ to socialism — and affirmed the role of ‘revolutionary violence’ in the struggle against ‘imperialism and its lackeys’. To the Khmers, Sihanouk was just such a ‘lackey’ — ‘a chieftain of the feudalists and imperialists [wreaking] terror on the Cambodian people’, as one of their pamphlets put it — and therefore a legitimate target. To the Vietnamese, he was a patriot. But this and other issues which risked creating discord — such as the Central Committee’s decision not to accept Vietnamese advisers — were either finessed or omitted from the written text altogether.
Alongside these incremental, snail’s-pace steps towards an independent Khmer communist identity, Sâr began to reflect on the kind of system he wanted to create in Cambodia.
‘
After 1963
,’ he explained, ‘when I withdrew to the countryside, my opinions and my thinking and views changed a lot, because I was in a very isolated, remote, rural area, far from the city . . . I lived among the masses [and] I realised I could trust them.’ Towards the end of his life, he spoke again of this period on the border.
In Paris
, he said, he had understood little, because he had been surrounded by intellectual high-fliers; in Cambodia, he was in contact with ‘the lower levels, the monks, the ordinary people, so I understood the problems.’ In the villages his modest educational level was not only no hindrance but in many ways a help, for he was closer to peasant realities than his university-trained colleagues. Nevertheless, it was a journey in the dark. ‘
We applied ourselves
to [define a direction] and then to put it into practice without knowing whether it was right or wrong.’ There was no model, no blueprint, but rather ‘a
mixture [of influences]
, a little of this, a little of that . . . I copied no one. It was what I saw in the country that made an impression on me . . .’
Those remembered fragments are revealing. Not for Sâr and his colleagues the certainties of ‘scientific socialism’, in which the writings of Marx and Lenin, of Mao and Stalin, would provide ready-made answers
for every problem that might arise. The Cambodians sought their path to communism intuitively. ‘Marxism-Leninism,’ Sâr said later, ‘
resides within
the movements forged by the people, and the people’s movement in each country puts together [its own] Marxism-Leninism. Cambodia is also [able to] contribute to the building of Marxism-Leninism.’ The inference was that there was no need for Party members to study the Marxist classics and therefore no need to translate them into Khmer. Sâr acknowledged that foreign experience could provide useful lessons. But the goal was an authentically Khmer doctrine, rooted in Cambodian identity.
Such an unschooled, almost mystical approach to communism had no precedent either in Chinese or in European Marxism.
There were superficial parallels in Mao’s writings. Sâr believed, like him, that revolutionary truth came ‘from the masses, to the masses’. Both romanticised the peasantry. To Mao, in his more megalomaniac moments, the peasants were pure and unsullied, ‘poor and blank . . . Poor people want change, want revolution. A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the purest and most beautiful words can be written on it.’ To Sâr, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, they epitomised the noblest, most profound yearnings of their race. But Mao’s revolutionary romanticism was tempered, in theory at least, by an awareness of reality. As he had explained in
On New Democracy,
which Sâr had read in Paris: ‘We are not Utopians and cannot divorce ourselves from the actual conditions confronting us.’ It was necessary to ‘seek truth from facts’ and ‘test the correctness of ideas in action’.
To Sâr and his colleagues, such considerations simply did not apply. What mattered was the vision, the inspiration. Whereas Mao was the product of an intensely rational, literate society, with highly developed traditions of philosophical debate, Sâr’s cultural heritage was irrational, oral, guided by Theravada transcendentalism and by
k’ruu,
spirit-masters, whose truths sprang not from analysis but from illumination. As the Cambodian communist leaders groped towards a model for their future revolution, they never once, either at Office 100 or later, carried out any form of investigation of the social conditions in which that revolution was to occur. The contrast with Maoist China could hardly be greater.
What the two countries did have in common, as did Vietnam, was that the bulk of the population were peasants. Accordingly, the Cambodian Party identified lower-middle peasants as the ‘semi-proletariat’ of the countryside and poor and landless peasants as a ‘core element of the working class . . . the lifeblood of the revolution’ — a heresy in Marxist terms, which it tried to gloss over by insisting on the leading role of the country’s minuscule industrial workforce, at the time only 10,000 strong. But efforts to
create clandestine pro-communist workers’ associations were unsuccessful, partly because no senior Khmer communist had a working-class background. Whereas Mao had started his communist career as a trades union organiser and Ho Chi Minh had been a deckhand and a washer-up in a London restaurant, neither Sâr nor Nuon Chea nor Ieng Sary nor So Phim nor any other Cambodian leader had experience of working-class life. They were peasants, students of peasant origin, or both: to all of them, industry was a closed book.
The Cambodian Party’s inability to penetrate the country’s nascent proletariat was to have far-reaching consequences. Sâr and his colleagues did not ask themselves what they were doing wrong. Instead, in a pattern of behaviour that would be repeated whenever they were faced with failure, by 1965 they decided that the factories had been ‘infiltrated’ and ‘the workers transformed into enemy agents’. From then on, factory workers were
systematically refused
admission to the Party.
For a communist party, whose
raison d’
ê
tre
is to represent the working class, this was an astounding decision. Khieu Samphân would argue later that the Party had
no choice
:
[It is true that] the Cambodian communist party was based on the poor peasantry rather than the working class . . . But you can’t use that as an argument for saying it wasn’t a Marxist party, or that there was no economic basis for a communist party in Cambodia. In fact, we applied the criterion of ‘material conditions’ quite correctly, because the poor peasants were the most impoverished, the most oppressed class in Cambodian society, and it was this class that was the foundation of the Cambodian Party.
The problem with this approach was that it stood Marxism on its head. To Marx, the industrial proletariat represented progress; the peasantry represented backwardness and petit-bourgeois extremism. For the peasantry to develop proletarian characteristics, its role in society would have to change in ways that, to an orthodox Marxist, could come only from the transformation of its economic role.
To Sâr, the way out of this difficulty was provided by Buddhism.
The Khmer word
viññãn
,
which is derived from the Sanskrit
vijñãna,
‘to distinguish or comprehend’, represents, in Theravada metaphysics, the last of the five sensorial aggregates which condition life. It is usually translated as ‘consciousness’ and is the animating force of all human endeavour. To ‘proletarianise’ the peasantry, all that was needed, in this Buddhist-inspired scheme of things, was ‘proletarian consciousness’. Class, which to Marxists everywhere else, including the Chinese, was determined by a person’s economic activity, was for Cambodian communists a mental attribute.
That this was totally heretical did not matter. To Khmers, it seemed an attractive and logical idea.
Theravada Buddhism is
intensely introspective
. The goal is not to improve society or redeem one’s fellow men; it is self-cultivation, in the nihilistic sense of the demolition of the individual.
In the 1960s even more than today, religious belief provided the primary value-system of ordinary people throughout South-East Asia. Sâr himself had been a Buddhist novice. The first communists, like Tou Samouth and Son Ngoc Minh, had studied at the Higher Pali Institute. So had younger leaders like Siet Chhê and Mok. Both within the Party leadership and among the rank and file, the grammar of Theravada Buddhism permeated Khmer communist thought, just as Confucian notions helped to fashion Maoism. In neither country was this a conscious undertaking. Sihanouk had called his policy ‘Buddhist Socialism’, and his doctrine of neutrality, the Buddhist ‘middle path’. The Cambodian communists eschewed such labels. But just as Mao had sinified Marxism, Sâr gave it a Buddhist tincture. The result, in both cases, was that it ceased to be a foreign transplant and flourished in autochthonous minds.
The idea that ‘proletarian consciousness’ could be forged, independent of a person’s class origins or economic status, became the central pillar of Khmer communism.
The distinction between peasants and workers was gradually elided. They were described as ‘
worker-farmers
’, led by a Party composed of ‘
proletarianised peasants
’ and intellectuals who had ‘reformed their thought and overcome their origins . . . to build [their] class position’. Beneath the thinnest of Marxist veneers, this was the same alliance of ‘peasants and intellectuals’ that Kropotkin had seen as the motive force of the French Revolution in 1789, and with the same primary goal: to overthrow the King — in other words, the feudal system personified by Sihanouk — and install an egalitarian communist polity based on a refurbished version of the old revolutionary trinity, ‘[collective] liberty, [mass] equality and [militant] fraternity’, all endowed with a distinctive Khmer flavour.
Nineteen sixty-three was a fateful year. It was when the seeds were sown from which, a decade later, Cambodians would reap the whirlwind.
A month after Saloth Sâr fled to the maquis, China’s President Liu Shaoqi came to Phnom Penh to pay a goodwill visit. It was emblematic in several respects. Shortly before Liu’s arrival, the Cambodian security services, alerted by Chinese intelligence, uncovered a Taiwanese plot to plant explosives in a tunnel under the highway from the airport and blow up the royal limousine as he and Sihanouk drove by. Given Taiwan’s alliance with the US
and recent precedents involving South Vietnam, the Prince concluded that the CIA was still bent on replacing him with someone more to Washington’s liking, a conviction that would be amply confirmed in the course of the next few years. The visit itself, meanwhile, signalled Cambodia’s increasing tilt towards Beijing, the bale-fire of Asian communism — complemented, but in no way diminished, by stepped-up repression of communists at home.
This pattern of growing amity with left-wing regimes abroad matched by increased reliance on right-wing forces domestically would continue and amplify throughout the decade.
Sâr remembered it as ‘a
black time
’, when ‘the
enemy furiously
arrested and killed our Party members and [we] suffered great losses’. That was certainly true in Phnom Penh, where Khieu Samphân and Hou Yuon were both forced to resign their ministerial portfolios (albeit retaining their parliamentary seats), and Vorn Vet’s city committee was under intense pressure. It was standard practice for a Party or a Youth League member in the capital to know only two others — his immediate superior, who gave him instructions, and the next man below him in the chain. Nuon Chea, the é
minence grise
of the clandestine Party in Phnom Penh, explained:
Operating secretly
, our organisation has the following rules. Three members are required to form a cell . . . If there are [more than three] people, we form two separate cells, having no contact with each other . . . If the enemy discovers one cell, the other can continue its work. There are no direct contacts among cells.