1963. ‘There is perhaps one thing I regret,’ he conceded tetchily twenty years later. ‘This was to have rejected . . . the humiliating aid accorded by the United States to my army and my administration.’
In January 1965, the same Central Committee plenum that approved the use of ‘revolutionary violence’ had decided that Saloth Sâr should lead a Cambodian Party
delegation to Hanoi
.
Up till then
the Khmer communists had been in contact only with the VWP’s Southern Bureau. Now the aim was to establish full Party-to-Party relations and to agree guidelines for the Cambodian Party’s future strategy in light of the spreading war between the communists and the American-backed government in southern Vietnam.
By the time Hanoi’s agreement had been obtained, it was the beginning of April.
Sâr set out
on foot for north-eastern Cambodia, accompanied by Keo Meas. They then took the Ho Chi Minh Trail, at that time no more than a network of footpaths used by porters, across the mountains of southern Laos to the Annamite cordillera. The journey took two and a half months.
On arrival
, Sâr met Ho Chi Minh — whom he would see twice more during his stay — and Le Duan, the VWP General Secretary, who had had dealings with the Cambodian communists as head of the Southern Bureau in the 1940s and ‘50s. Le Duan was twenty years Sâr’s senior, a dour, rather uninspiring man who owed his rise to his bureaucratic skills and unquenchable patriotism. Over the next five months they met more than a dozen times. But if Sâr had hoped for Vietnamese support for the launching of armed struggle against Sihanouk, he was sorely disappointed. Hanoi would have been reluctant in any circumstances to see insurgency spread to Cambodia. But since the beginning of the year, a number of events had occurred which made it unthinkable. The entry into the war of American ground troops had focused all Vietnam’s attention on the south; the last thing it wanted was a risky distraction elsewhere. Cambodia’s decision to break diplomatic relations with the US meant that objectively Sihanouk had become an ally. Still more important, during the spring, probably in March or April, the Prince had agreed to allow the South Vietnamese NLF to establish permanent sanctuaries on the Cambodian side of the border, rather than simply turning a blind eye to Viet Cong incursions, as had been the case before. Negotiations were also under way for an agreement to allow arms shipments from China to the NLF to pass through the Cambodian port of Kompong Som, to supplement the supplies being laboriously manhandled down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Le Duan tried
his best to persuade the Cambodians that political struggle was a noble end in itself and an ‘Organisational and military preparation for armed struggle’, and he assured them that ‘if the Americans widen the war, we will make the transition to armed struggle accordingly’. But the bottom line, bereft of high-sounding phrases, was that, for the moment at least, Sihanouk must be left in peace. To Sâr, Vietnamese policy was still stuck in the same groove it had been in since 1955.
A more subtle negotiator, a Zhou Enlai or a Ho Chi Minh, might have been able to sweeten the pill. That was not Le Duan’s style. He showed an almost visceral insensitivity to Cambodian concerns. All the old Vietnamese
hobby-horses
were trotted out anew: the Khmer struggle was inseparable from those in Vietnam and Laos; Vietnam had had to wait for the success of the Chinese revolution before it could defeat the French, similarly Cambodians would have to wait for a Vietnamese victory before their revolution could triumph; after Vietnam won its freedom, Cambodia’s would automatically follow.
The Cambodian Party’s stress
on ‘self-reliance’ was excessive, Le Duan argued. The principal contradiction in the world was between socialism and capitalism, not between the oppressed peoples and imperialism as the Cambodians wished to believe, and in these
circumstances what mattered was international solidarity.
To bolster
his case, Le Duan proposed that the Cambodian leader review the history of the two Parties’ relations from texts in the Vietnamese archives — certain that the accounts of Vietnam’s heroism and selflessness in aiding the Khmers’ struggle over the years would win him round. Sâr spent days poring over Party documents and drew his own conclusions:
I found that from 1930 . . . to 1965, all the Vietnamese Communist Party documents depicted the Cambodian . . . and Lao People’s Revolutionary Parties as branches of the Vietnamese Party . . . Both [Parties] implemented the rules, the political line and the strategy of the Vietnamese Party. Until I read these documents myself, I trusted and believed the Vietnamese. But after reading them I didn’t trust them any more. I realised that they had set up Party organisations in our countries solely to achieve their aim of the Indochinese Federation. They were making one integrated party to represent a single, integrated territory.
The Vietnamese leader apparently assumed that his arguments had carried the day and that, even if the Cambodians had reservations, in practice they would do as they were told. Sâr remembered the talks as ‘uncongenial’. The Vietnamese paid lip-service to the Khmer Party’s independence, he said later, but ‘in their bones they did not recognise us [as equals] . . . We had many differences. We were unable to reach a common view.’ Characteristically he hid his feelings behind a wreath of smiles. His hosts failed to register the malaise developing between them.
Accompanied by Son Ngoc Minh, now Secretary of the Hanoi-based branch of the Party, Sâr also addressed a meeting of former Khmer Viet Minh ‘regroupees’, many of whom had taken Vietnamese wives and found jobs as public servants in the Vietnamese administration.
He appears to have said little about the proposed shift to ‘non-peaceful struggle’ or about ‘self-reliance’ — partly, no doubt, to avoid irritating Le Duan, but also out of wariness towards this group of Khmer communists, four or five hundred strong, representing almost a fifth of the Party’s total strength, who had lived outside Cambodia for ten years, whose thinking was deeply influenced by Vietnam and whose allegiance must have seemed uncertain. The Vietnamese, too, despite their ostensible embrace of the new Cambodian Party leader, showed proof of a certain caution. After Sâr had left, they distributed to the Khmer colony in Vietnam copies of Lenin’s text
Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder,
as a warning against Cambodian ‘adventurism’; and a secret military unit, codenamed P-36, was set up under Le Duc Tho to train Khmer officers, so that if and when armed struggle did break out in Cambodia, Vietnam would have its own
force of tried and tested Khmer cadres, loyal to Hanoi, ready and waiting to assume the leadership of native Khmer communist units.
The 1965 visit was a watershed. Until then, the Cambodians had chafed at what they saw as heavy-handed Vietnamese paternalism, but had never seriously questioned that they shared a common objective. After the talks in Hanoi, Sâr concluded that Vietnam’s interests were incompatible with, if not inimical to, those of Khmer communism. On ground made fertile by old hatreds, the seeds of enmity were re-sown. But that was not apparent at the time, and both sides continued to act as though they were brothers-in-arms.
The Vietnamese put Sâr in contact with the Lao Party leadership and then arranged for him to fly on alone to Beijing, while Keo Meas, who had a gall-bladder condition, remained in Hanoi for medical treatment.
Sâr arrived in the Chinese capital towards the end of December and spent about a month there.
He stayed
at the
Ya fei la peixun zhongxin,
the Chinese communist training centre for African, Asian and Latin American revolutionaries situated near the Summer Palace, a few miles north-west of Beijing.
Officially his host
was Deng Xiaoping, then CCP General Secretary. However, most of his meetings were with Peng Zhen, Deng’s deputy and Mayor of Beijing. He also saw the Head of State, Liu Shaoqi, who had just played host to Sihanouk on a goodwill visit to China, but not Mao or Zhou Enlai. Four months later, Peng would become the first top-level victim of the Cultural Revolution, and Liu and Deng would quickly follow. But in the winter of 1965, that great upheaval was still only a sardonic twinkle in Mao’s eye. None of the Chinese Politburo as yet had any inkling of the cataclysm about to be unloosed — still less a young Cambodian communist who did not speak Chinese.
Nevertheless, there was already an impassioned, radical edge to the political climate in Beijing which Sâr found exhilarating after his tribulations in Hanoi. Where Vietnamese minds were focused on the practicalities of war with America, China was caught up in a vast ideological campaign — the ‘Socialist Education Movement’ — to transform the thinking of hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants. While the Vietnamese worried about sanctuaries and logistics, the latest weaponry from Moscow and munitions flows from Beijing, the Chinese published a
seminal article
, under the signature of the Defence Minister, Lin Biao, entitled ‘Long Live the Victory of People’s War!’ Its message — that the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America were now the standard-bearers of the world revolution, who would storm the citadels of capitalism in the United States and Europe — galvanised communists throughout the developing world. To Sâr, here was the justification for all his arguments that had fallen on deaf ears in Vietnam:
The liberation of the masses is accomplished by the masses themselves — this is a basic principle of Marxism-Leninism
[the Chinese leaders wrote].
Revolution or people’s war in any country is the business of the masses in that country and should be carried out primarily by their own efforts: there is no other way . . . It is imperative to adhere to the policy of self-reliance, rely on the strength of the masses in one’s own country and prepare to carry on the fight independently even when all material aid from outside has been cut off . . . In the last analysis, whether one dares to wage . . . a people’s war . . . is the most effective touchstone for distinguishing genuine from fake revolutionaries . . . The peasants constitute the main force of the national democratic revolution against the imperialists and their lackeys . . . The countryside, and the countryside alone, can provide the . . . bases from which the revolutionaries can go forward to final victory.
The
principal contradictions
, the article said, were ‘between imperialism and the oppressed peoples . . . [and] between feudalism and the masses’ — which was the Cambodian Party’s position — not between ‘the imperialists and the socialist camp’, as the Vietnamese maintained. It added, for good measure, that the outcome of revolutionary struggle was decided not by weapons but by ‘the proletarian revolutionary consciousness and courage of the commanders and fighters . . . The experience of innumerable revolutionary wars has borne out the truth that a people who rise up with only their bare hands at the outset finally succeed in defeating the ruling classes who are armed to the teeth.’
Rhetoric aside, the Chinese were, at heart, no more anxious than Vietnam to see armed struggle develop in Cambodia — and for exactly the same reasons: Sihanouk’s co-operation was vital to the pursuance of the war in the South.
But Peng Zhen and his colleagues found cleverer ways to say so. They approved of the Cambodian Party programme; endorsed its anti-revisionist stance; praised its ‘authentic Marxism-Leninism’ and its reliance on the peasantry; and encouraged Sâr to ‘struggle actively . . . to confront American imperialism’.
Two younger men
— a radical theorist named Chen Boda, who had been for many years one of Mao’s secretaries; and Zhang Chunqiao, an up-and-coming Shanghai leader — were particularly supportive. Together they discussed ‘the concept that political power comes from the barrel of a gun, class struggle and proletarian dictatorship’. The Chinese Party even offered
material support
, which Sâr politely declined on the grounds that the time was not yet ripe. Of course, it was easier for China to appear sympathetic to the Khmer communists’ cause. Unlike Hanoi, Beijing was not directly at war with an American expeditionary force which, by early 1966, numbered
300,000
men. The Chinese were always looking for new allies in
their dispute with the Soviet Union — indeed, had there been no Sino—Soviet dispute Sâr’s task would have been far harder — and despite the fraternal relationship between Vietnam and China (which, throughout the 1950s and ‘60s was far and away Hanoi’s biggest provider of military aid), the emergence of an independent Khmer Party to offset Vietnamese dominance in Indochina was certainly not against Chinese interests.
The month Sâr spent in Beijing marked the start of a
defacto
alliance. ‘If we want to keep our distance from Vietnam,’
he told Keo Meas
on his return, ‘we will have to rely on China.’ He was much encouraged, he said, by the warm welcome he had been given, and ‘
reassured
to have friends in China . . . who give us spiritual, political and strategic support . . . [Now] we need have no more doubts about the correctness of what we are doing.’
In February 1966, after a final meeting with Le Duan in Hanoi, Sâr and his companions set out for home along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The journey took more than four months, almost twice as long as the outbound trip, because of massive American bombing to disrupt North Vietnamese supply columns. Office 100 also suffered from the intensification of the war. Towards the end of 1965, the US government had authorised B-52 raids along the length of the South Vietnamese/Cambodian border. They were audible as far away as Phnom Penh, reverberating like distant thunder. After being forced to move several times to avoid enemy ‘search-and-destroy’ operations, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Ney Sarann and most of the rest of the communist leadership were taken by the Viet Cong in January 1966 to a more secure camp