at Loc Ninh
, fifty miles further east in a thickly forested, mountainous region adjoining Cambodia’s Memot district. Three young Khmers, together with twenty Viet Cong guards, stayed behind to assure communications with the interior.
At Loc Ninh, the top military leader of the COSVN, General Nguyen Chi Thanh, took aside Ieng Sary and Nuon Chea, who was then passing through on one of his periodic visits from Phnom Penh, and urged them to continue supporting Sihanouk’s neutrality policy, the same argument that Le Duan had advanced the previous autumn. Thanh’s action angered Sâr, saw as an attempt to go behind his back. In this mood he summoned members of the Central Committee and senior Zone officials to an enlarged Third Plenum in September to discuss an entirely new Party programme, inspired by the Maoist credo that the world as a whole, and Asia in particular, were in the throes of a revolutionary upsurge in which imperialism was doomed to extinction in the flames of ‘people’s war.’
The meeting lasted six weeks. By the time it ended, on October 25 1966, the Cambodian leaders had taken three crucial decisions.
They changed the name of the Party: instead of being a ‘Workers’ Party’, like that of Vietnam, it would henceforth be known as the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). The decision was kept secret, however. The Party rank and file were not informed. Nor were the Vietnamese.
They decided to move the Party headquarters from Office 100, which had resumed operations during the summer, to Ratanakiri, in the far north-east. The excuse given to the Vietnamese was that the expanding war in the south made it necessary to find a safer location. But the real reason was to escape COSVN surveillance. At Office 100, Ieng Sary complained, ‘even telegrams from Nuon Chea in Phnom Penh had to go through the Vietnamese first’. In Ratanakiri, the Cambodians would have a base of their own, free from Vietnamese snooping and, unlike Office 100, it would be on Cambodian territory.
They also agreed that each Zone Committee should begin making preparations for the launching of armed struggle in the rural areas. The wording was still cautious. The Cambodians were not yet ready openly to defy their Vietnamese ‘elder brothers’. But they approved the expansion of underground networks in the towns; a more active political struggle; and the development of ‘political violence’ and eventually ‘armed violence’ when circumstances warranted. There was nothing in this that Hanoi could seize on as unacceptable, but between the lines, one participant noted, it prefigured ‘the start of the internal war’, signifying an implicit rejection of Le Duan’s plea that the Khmers wait patiently for the Vietnamese to decide when they should begin to act.
The Party leaders’ decision to adopt a more aggressive stance towards Sihanouk’s regime was vindicated by events in Phnom Penh.
That summer, the Prince had called parliamentary elections. For the first time since the 1950s, he did not choose the candidates himself. It was an odd move on his part, though not exactly a surprise: he had been threatening something of the sort for the previous three years. It may be that, after ten years of hand-picked parliaments which constantly failed his expectations, he wanted a change — and, in the absence of any better method, determined to ‘let the dice fall where they may’. If so, the results were not what he had hoped for. The new Assembly, elected on September 11, was more conservative than its predecessors, being composed almost entirely of bureaucrats and businessmen. A month later, the Prince sprang a second surprise. Instead of designating the Prime Minister and the cabinet himself, as was his custom, he invited the Assembly to make the choice. Again, the result was not to his liking. On October 18, the deputies selected Lon Nol, who a week later inaugurated a government made up entirely of right-wing sympathisers. ‘The only thing the new members of the cabinet have in common,’ the
French Ambassador cabled Paris, ‘is that none of them is a Sihanouk loyalist and, in all likelihood, none would have been chosen by him.’
It is not easy to understand, even with hindsight, what led the Prince to administer this self-inflicted wound. He had been leading Cambodia for twenty-five years, first as King, then as President of the Sangkum, finally as Head of State. The corrosion of power, the weariness that comes from a satiety of one-man rule in a country where absolutism masquerades as democracy and judgement is sapped by the fawning of courtiers, is certainly part of the answer. By the mid-1960s, Sihanouk’s photograph was on every page of every Cambodian newspaper, accompanied by articles of nauseating servility. If a Western journalist incautiously described Cambodia as ‘minuscule’, newspaper editors around the world would be inundated for weeks afterwards with letters, signed by the Prince himself, listing all the thirty-nine United Nations member states with smaller territories and the fifty-four with smaller populations. His susceptibility became so outlandish that illiterate villagers at provincial rallies were treated to long, ranting accounts of articles in
Le Monde
or the
New York Times
supposedly denigrating their ruler.
It was not that he was unhinged. But the nature of the system he had inherited and built was such that none of his closest advisers dared reason with him. ‘There is a
malaise
developing,’ one diplomat wrote before the election. ‘The Prince’s behaviour is plunging even his most faithful supporters into perplexity and dismay.’ Earlier that year Indonesia’s President Sukarno had been eased out of power in an army coup. Lon Nol — an imperturbable, heavily-built man, who professed a mystic loyalty to the monarchy — might have no thought of emulating the Indonesian military. But it was better not to tempt fate. For the next six months, Sihanouk worked assiduously, and not without difficulty, to circumscribe the new Premier’s powers. Assailed by self-doubt, he took refuge in amateur filmmaking. In the 1950s one canny observer had compared Cambodia to a stage-show in which the Prince had the starring role. Now theatre and reality were one. He wrote, directed and starred in a series of maudlin romances with his wife, Monique, as the leading lady, and sundry members of the government, including the Chief of Staff, Nhek Tioulong, in supporting roles. Sihanouk monopolised the screen as he did his country. Neither his films nor, from then on, his policies, would have any lasting success.
To Sihanouk, Lon Nol’s emergence as Prime Minister at the head of a right-wing government more independent than any that had gone before was a challenge that needed to be blunted. To the Cambodian communists, it was a godsend. As Defence Minister for more than a decade, Nol had been in charge of anti-communist repression. As Prime Minister, he
was the ideal target against which to mobilise opposition to Sihanouk’s regime.
A week after
his appointment, the CPK Central Committee denounced his government as ‘lackeys of the United States’ and attacked Sihanouk by name ‘not just as a King who reigns but worse, a reactionary . . . who should be overthrown’. Lon Nol’s nomination justified ‘the use of political violence at a high level’, it declared. The revolutionary movement had arrived at the stage of the ‘direct seizure of power . . . and if [Lon Nol] oppresses and terrorises [the population] strongly, we will have to resort to armed struggle’.
The fate of the Indonesian Communist Party, which had supported Sukarno, gave legitimacy to this new strategy. After his overthrow, some 300,000 Indonesian Party members had been slain in anti-communist massacres. The lesson for Sâr was that the bourgeoisie could not be relied on. The Vietnamese strategy was wrong. It was not possible for the communists to ‘
live together
with Sihanouk’ because the contradictions between them were too deep. Policy towards non-Party sympathisers was therefore modified. In theory, the guideline remained ‘to unite with all those who can be united with’, but in practice the movement behaved more and more as though ‘all those who are not with us are against us’. Khieu Samphân, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim, who had kept their seats in the September elections, began to distance themselves from the Prince. It marked the start of the politics of exclusion that would become one of the hallmarks of the Cambodian Party’s style. From now on, the CPK required its supporters ‘to draw a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves’.
The new line on armed struggle was first applied in the North-West, where Ruos Nhim had strong support in the villages south of Battambang.
Nhim’s career as an Issarak commander stretched back to the 1940s. When the idea of relaunching guerrilla activity was broached at the Central Committee meetings of late 1964 and early 1965, he had immediately started preparing his followers. One of their first actions had been to mine a railway bridge over the Dam river, between Battambang and Poipet, damaging a passenger train. After that, Lon Nol and Nhek Tioulong began installing guard posts in the villages and new roads were driven through the jungle to make troop movements easier. The soldiers’ presence, in turn, brought petty exactions and harassment, fanning local discontents. In December 1966, after the CPK’s Third Plenum had endorsed the principle of ‘armed violence’, Nhim stepped up his campaign. ‘We decided to arm the people . . . [to] attack Lon Nol’s secret police and soldiers,’ one of his aides wrote later. ‘The government then sent in reinforcements.’ The spiral of violence and counter-violence was beginning to bear fruit.
The following month, Sihanouk, still preoccupied with what he saw as the political challenge from the Right, departed for his annual dietary cure in France. His absence, he thought, would be salutary, making it possible for him to install after his return a cabinet more responsive to his wishes.
In the event that was what happened, though not for the reasons Sihanouk anticipated.
Lon Nol spent much of January and February in Battambang supervising state purchases of the rice harvest. The previous year 60 per cent of the crop had been sold to Chinese middlemen acting for the Viet Cong and smuggled out to liberated zones in South Vietnam and Laos, creating a huge shortfall in state revenues. The problem, as a US National Security Council study noted, was that the Vietnamese communists paid far higher prices than the Cambodian government. To make the peasants sell to the state, compulsion was necessary. In southern Battambang, where centrifugal tendencies were strong because of the province’s links with Thailand, where Phnom Penh had always had difficulty in making its writ run and where Ruos Nhim’s communist agitators had been hard at work for two years, this was a recipe for disaster.
It is
impossible
to tell which of the various factors involved was most responsible for the events that followed. Kong Sophal, who had become North-West Zone Deputy Secretary, remembered ‘
pushing the peasants
more and more strongly until early 1967, at which point the conflict became ripe for the internal war to explode’. The villagers were angry over the forced rice sales and the corruption of local officials. There was resentment at the authorities’ demands for free labour and ‘voluntary financial contributions’ to carry out government projects, and over the seizure of peasant land-holdings, which were given to army officers for development as large, private estates or redesignated as youth settlements to provide work for the urban unemployed. There was friction, too, caused by the resettlement in the area of Khmer Krom refugees who had fled from South Vietnam, a group notably recalcitrant to authority and — understandably, after two hundred years of persecution by the Vietnamese — obsessed with its own survival.
Whatever the precise mix, the pot soon boiled over. In mid-February clashes occurred between soldiers and local people in the gem-mining town of Pailin on the border with Thailand. Anti-government demonstrations broke out in Battambang, where three city officials were hacked to death. In the thickly wooded hill-country around Samlaut — which had been an Issarak stronghold twenty years before — village armouries were raided and the population fled into the jungle. On March 11, protesters demanded that the Pailin garrison be withdrawn, a call which Sihanouk, just back from France, angrily rejected.
Thereafter the situation degenerated rapidly. On the morning of April 2, villagers in Samlaut attacked a group of soldiers overseeing rice purchases, killing two of them and stealing several rifles. Two hundred peasants then marched to the nearby village of Kranhoung, the site of a large youth settlement, a fitting symbol for all the aggravations the authorities had made them endure, which they proceeded to burn to the ground. By nightfall, army posts in two other villages had been attacked and a commune chief killed. Over the next four days more attacks followed, two road bridges were destroyed and another local official was executed. Then the first units of paratroops arrived to begin what Sihanouk euphemistically called ‘repression and pacification’.
By late April, two hundred rebels had been captured and nineteen killed, against four dead on the government side. The Prince himself visited Samlaut, offering an amnesty and making liberal distributions of food and clothing. However, attacks on army posts continued, and the inhabitants of three more villages fled their homes to join the rebels. Communist cadres, accompanying a force of five hundred peasants, some of them armed, retreated to Mount Veay Chap, a highland area covered by dense jungle some twenty-five miles north-east of Samlaut. But the army poisoned wells and seized and burned their rice stocks, and by mid-May their position was critical.
At that point
Nuon Chea conveyed to Nhim and Kong Sophal a directive from the CPK Standing Committee ‘to stop the war and negotiate with the enemy’. Shortly afterwards talks began with the newly appointed Battambang governor, In Tam, through the intermediary of the Abbot of Wat Thvak, a large Buddhist monastery near the mountain. The government undertook not to carry out reprisals — a promise which it did not keep — and a month later, on June 20, Sihanouk was able to announce that the rebellion was over.