In each factory [or school, or university], there is one leading cadre. Only he knows this . . . Contacts between [him] and the leadership . . . are arranged through a third person. If the enemy captures the leading cadre, he will not be able to identify the leadership, only the go-between . . . [Such designated leading cadres] should not live with their families. When they do, things get complicated. [If they have to leave in a hurry], it takes them longer to escape. We have had some bitter experience with these things . . .
Contacts between publicly well-known leaders, such as those who work in parliament, and secret leaders are arranged through two or three other persons. We employ various . . . signals, such as a scarf in front of a house. If the scarf is in place, it is safe to enter; if not, it means the enemy is there
*
. . . [Our] couriers are not allowed to know our real places of residence. Otherwise captured couriers could be forced to reveal them . . . We have learned to abandon a safe house at once if a messenger is two or three hours late.
By the early 1960s, Phnom Penh had one policeman for every sixty inhabitants, one of the highest urban ratios in the world. A significant number came from a special security unit reporting directly to the Prime Minister’s Office. Communist Party organisers, if caught, were shot without trial. Charles Meyer, who was one of Sihanouk’s close advisers throughout the 1960s, wrote that ‘
several hundred
’ disappeared in this way The figure seems exaggerated, but the practice was not. Even sympathisers put their lives on the line. One youth from a suburban lycée was detained at pistol-point by plain-clothes police, stripped naked and thrown into a small cell, just big enough to stand up in, before undergoing a week-long interrogation, accompanied by beatings during which his head was immersed in water until he passed out. No charges were brought. He spent the next two years in prison.
In the provinces, on the other hand, the communists fared better. The rural networks that had been destroyed under Sieu Heng were gradually rebuilt, and by 1965 the Party’s strength was back up to
2,000
members, the same level as at the time of the Geneva Conference, ten years earlier.
Still more encouraging for the long term was that, after a decade in which it had seemed that none of the conditions was present for a communist movement to exist in Cambodia, Sihanouk’s policies were at last beginning to create a social and political climate more favourable to communist goals.
The student population had decupled. By the time Sâr left Phnom Penh, 600,000 young people were in full-time schooling. But the only posts they wanted were in the administration where there were limitless possibilities for ‘squeeze’ and, in consequence, more than a hundred candidates for every available position. The result, as the Prince himself noted, was to throw into unemployment ever-increasing numbers of disaffected, semi-educated young men, too proud to work in the rice-paddies as their parents had done but unable to find anything better. At a humbler level, peasants, ruined by bad harvests and usurious interest rates, flooded into the towns to form a lumpen-proletariat of coolies and
cyclo-pousse
drivers living at the margins of society, often in wretched conditions. Everywhere, living standards stagnated when they did not actually fall — except among the elite, where, in the words of one observer, there prevailed ‘a total absence of civic sense and insatiable appetites for gain’.
Foreigners liked to say that Sihanouk himself was honest but those around him were not. That was too kind. As Head of State, he had no need to be corrupt. Years later, when opponents accused him of selling Cambodia to the Vietnamese, an old lady in the suburbs of Phnom Penh demurred. ‘It’s his country, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘He can sell it if he likes.’
Sihanouk’s rule was a continuation of the tradition that makes the verb ‘to reign’ translate into Khmer as ‘to eat the kingdom’. His mother, Queen Kossamak, his consort, Monique, and her relatives, did just that. So did hundreds of lesser figures: ministers, civil servants, courtiers and cronies whom Sihanouk could never bring himself to discipline, let alone dismiss. He was well aware of the consequences. ‘This ball and chain of corruption will finish by bringing me down,’ he wrote in 1962. But the one serious attempt to do something about it, by his high-minded uncle, Prince Monireth, was countermanded before it began lest it incriminate his entourage.
Sihanouk’s political sleight of hand, which in the early days had dazzled and bemused supporters and opponents alike, now began to pall. To many, even within his own circle, it seemed that Cambodia was being ruled by whim and royal bullying. The new French Ambassador, Jean de Beausse, likened him to a satrap, subjecting all around him to
public ridicule
:
The Prime Minister, members of the Cabinet, MPs, civil servants, no one is spared! All have to stop their official business and submit to the Prince’s fantasies. Last year it was manual labour. [Everyone had to spend one day a month working on dams and irrigation canals.] This year it’s sport. A small thing, you may say . . . but infuriating for middle-aged men who have to display themselves in volley-ball and basket-ball matches, which naturally the Head of State’s team . . . always wins. [They] make a sorry spectacle in athletics shorts . . . and are roundly jeered by the good people of Phnom Penh, whom the Prince invites to watch . . . There was a time when, to succeed in life, one had to be seen at the Court of Versailles. Here it is at the sports field of the princely residence at Chamkar Mon that anyone who is anyone in Phnom Penh has to be seen . . . The country, or rather the Prince, is in a frenzy. Everything is sacrificed to sport. A fifth of the annual budget is being spent on preparing the South-East Asian Games which are to be held in Phnom Penh in December . . . At a time of acute financial crisis . . . [in a country] where hospitals are cruelly lacking, such expenditure is scandalous.
For more and more young Cambodians, Sihanouk was not the solution but the cause of their country’s problems — the ‘incarnation’, to use his own word, of an outdated, venal, feudal system which had brought the appearance of modernisation but not the reality.
Teachers like Ping Sây and Dam Pheng in Phnom Penh, Koy Thuon in Kompong Cham, Tiv Ol in Prey Veng and Nikân at Kompong Kdei led ‘strings’ of colleagues who sought out promising students to join ‘core groups’.
The most committed
among them would be invited to become members of Kong Sophal’s Revolutionary Youth League, which made them feel ‘that we were part of the leadership of Angkar, because the Youth
League was associated with the Communist Party — so we were above the ordinary people.’ Phal, a twenty-year-old at the lycée at Takhmau in 1965, later a Khmer Rouge military commander, was one of this new generation of communist recruits:
The teachers . . . were closely watched by Lon Nol’s police. They couldn’t do anything — even if they went out to a restaurant together it would attract the attention of the police. But we students could meet as we liked, and no one could claim there was anything wrong in it. So it was the senior students who recruited the younger ones. That was happening at lycées all over Cambodia.
At that time, everything was by word of mouth. We had no documents. I never read any books in French about Marxism or Mao’s ideas. Nor were there any books in Khmer for us to read. What we knew about communism came from the senior student who led our ‘string’ . . . One senior student might be in charge of several ‘strings’ of younger students, each with three or four members [who would] meet and hold discussions. [To us], communism meant the hope of a better and more just society. I joined the movement because I was against injustice . . . That was something that we heard about from the old people; they would tell us stories of how they had been oppressed. I wanted to overthrow the government, and that was the goal that Angkar — the revolutionary organisation — was striving for. Maybe I didn’t have any clear idea of what kind of system we were going to put in the place of the old one, once it had been overthrown. But I knew I wanted to overthrow the existing government.
By the mid-1960s Cambodia’s schools had become a breeding ground for anti-royalist youth in the same way that, fifteen years earlier, teachers committed to the Democratic Party had fostered student networks supporting Son Ngoc Thanh. Clandestine pro-communist ‘strings’ were bolstered by legal organisations — the General Association of Khmer Students (AGEK), set up in 1964 by a law graduate named Phouk Chhay; and a Teachers’ Association, founded by Uch Ven and based at Kampuj’bot. Both were secretly controlled by Vorn Vet’s Phnom Penh city committee. In Paris, the AEK’s successor, the Union of Khmer Students (UEK), manipulated by the Cercle Marxiste, which Thiounn Mumm now headed, ensured that Angkar would not lack intellectual supporters when the revolution finally came. A similar organisation was set up among Khmer students in Moscow. There were even attempts — partly successful, judging by the portraits of Mao Zedong that the authorities sometimes found in the dormitories of the younger monks — to recruit inside the Buddhist
wats,
which in earlier times had been a source of support for both the Thanhists and the Issaraks.
Sihanouk’s domestic policies and, even more, his style of rule, gave the communists all the scope they needed to build the peasant-intellectual
alliance which Sâr viewed as the driving force of the future revolution. Certain aspects of his foreign policy also helped their cause.
Every time the Prince proclaimed, as he did with increasing frequency from 1962 onwards, that within ten years South Vietnam would turn communist and Cambodia would inevitably follow, the effect was to boost the Party’s appeal. His aim was to shock the West into adopting wiser policies in Asia. But at home his message was taken literally: it meant that the monarchy was doomed and communism was the country’s future. The same was true of the tilt towards China. The more the Prince praised the Chinese, the more China’s experience appeared to be a model for Khmers to emulate.
Ultimately even more dangerous for Cambodia’s stability was the slow derailment of the Prince’s neutrality policy.
This was not entirely Sihanouk’s fault: it is hard to maintain a balance between East and West when the intelligence service of one side keeps trying to assassinate you for fear you might get too close to the other. But the effects were profoundly destructive. In November 1963, South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother were murdered after an American-inspired coup. Three days later, incandescent with fear and rage, the Prince announced the rejection of all future US military and economic aid. ‘Look what happens when you put your trust in the Free World,’ he spat. ‘The Americans have so many ways to eliminate those they no longer need.’ The killings confirmed his belief that the US would not rest until Cambodia became part of an anti-communist front and was sucked into a war which America was doomed to lose. When Diem’s murder was followed by the assassination of President Kennedy and the death of another American ally, the Thai Premier, Field-Marshal Sarit, Sihanouk gloated that Our enemies have departed one after the other . . . Now they are all going to meet in hell, where they will build military bases for SEATO . . . The gods punish all the enemies of peaceful and neutral Cambodia.’
Two other major decisions were taken that November.
Sihanouk announced the nationalisation of the banks, insurance companies and import-export businesses — a move intended to compensate for the ending of US aid by giving the Cambodian economy a dose of austerity: instead, it alienated businessmen and created huge, new opportunities for corruption among the political elite. Then, a few days later, the Prince took public and very feudal vengeance on a hapless young Khmer Serei who had fallen into the government’s hands. The man, Preap In, had entered Cambodia from South Vietnam on a safe-conduct from the governor of Takeo which had been authorised by Sihanouk himself. He was arrested and brought in an iron cage to a hastily arranged Sangkum Congress. When he refused to recant, a mob of the Prince’s supporters screamed abuse and
pelted him with refuse for two hours until he was hauled away to face a military tribunal. It was, a Western diplomat commented, ‘an odious proceeding . . . a spectacle from another age — a mixture of buffoonery and barbarism as a man was pilloried in total disregard of assurances given for his safety.’ Preap In was sentenced to death and, a few weeks later, taken before a firing squad. His execution was filmed and, for the next month, a fifteen-minute newsreel, showing his last moments in unsparing detail, was screened before every séance in every cinema in the country. Decades later, people still squirmed at the memory. It was a reminder of Khmer savagery that Cambodians, in the 1960s, would have preferred to forget.
For the next eighteen months, relations with the US continued to deteriorate until, in May 1965, Cambodia severed diplomatic ties. South Vietnamese raids on frontier villages, occasionally with the participation of American advisers, had become an almost weekly occurrence, leaving dozens of villagers dead or injured. Then, as the first US marines waded ashore at Danang, hawks in Washington began urging the right of ‘immediate pursuit’ into Viet Cong sanctuaries. In response, Sihanouk sought closer ties with North Vietnam and the South Vietnamese NLF. The result was a structural distortion, a skewness, in Cambodian policy. No longer could he be the tightrope walker, balancing leftists against rightists in Cambodia and Americans against Chinese abroad. Instead, the communists who supported him in Beijing and the anti-communists who supported him at home were tugging in opposite directions. It would take another five years before the tightrope snapped. But as Sihanouk himself later admitted, the fatal error had been made in the
annus horribilis,