The ‘Samlaut events’, as they became known, posed problems both for the Communist Party and for Sihanouk.
For the former, the welling up of peasant anger had been too good an opportunity to miss. But it had happened too quickly for the Party to be able to exploit it to the full. ‘Non-peaceful means of struggle’ had been on the agenda as a principle ever since 1960. But the Central Committee’s Third Plenum, in October 1966, had fixed no date for it to begin and still less a co-ordinated programme for a nationwide uprising. That was to await the establishment of Sâr’s new headquarters in Ratanakiri and the organisation of a courier service capable of assuring communications with the rest of the country. In the meantime all that had been decided was to start ‘active preparations’ for rebellion. On the other hand, having ordered a vigorous campaign against the compulsory rice purchases, Sâr could
hardly ask Nhim and Sophal to douse the anger they themselves had fanned. Yet the fact was that the Samlaut peasants were out on a limb. Only in one small area, covering about 300 square miles, where communist influence was strongest, did the countryside catch fire.
By May
it was obvious that unless a peaceful outcome could be found, the movement would be ruthlessly crushed.
Sihanouk, too, was in a quandary.
The idea that Cambodian peasants, his children, as he liked to call them, should rise up against him —
Samdech Euv,
’Monseigneur Papa’, the father of the nation — was politically intolerable, and he flew into a rage when
Le Monde
and other French newspapers interpreted the unrest in those terms.
His explanation was that it was the work of Khmer Viet Minh cells which had been left behind in the former Issarak base areas in 1954 and lain dormant ever since, awaiting their opportunity. Their ‘backstage bosses’, he claimed, were none other than the three left-wing Sangkum MPs, Khieu Samphân, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim, who were deliberately stirring up trouble to destabilise Lon Nol’s right-wing government. How much of this the Prince actually believed is another matter, but it was his story and he stuck to it. He therefore followed a two-handed policy, showing royal indulgence to the majority of the four to five thousand rebel villagers who eventually returned to their homes, but giving the army a free hand to take vengeance on the rest as soon as the insurgency was over.
The punitive raids which followed took hundreds of lives and left much of the population of Samlaut and the surrounding area irremediably hostile to the regime. The communists’ jungle bases were bombed, villages strafed and burned to the ground. ‘
The pacification
of the disturbed region,’ wrote Donald Lancaster, a Briton who was then working in Sihanouk’s office, ‘was undertaken with the rude vigour peculiar to soldiery who have been promised a monetary reward for each [rebel] head they might forward to military headquarters.’ Another foreigner, returning to Cambodia after a year’s absence, found Phnom Penh alive with ‘
ghoulish details
. . . of trucks filled with severed heads that were sent from Battambang . . . so that Lon Nol should be assured that his programme was being followed.’
Whether or not this was actually true, it was what everyone, both senior Cambodian officials and foreign ambassadors, believed, creating an expectation of brutality that would increasingly affect the behaviour both of the regime itself and of its left — and right-wing opponents.
A striking example of this concerned Khieu Samphân, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim. On April 22, Sihanouk announced on the radio that the three MPs might be brought before the Military Tribunal for a confrontation
with their accusers, after which, if appropriate, the government would bring charges. This was not a threat to be taken lightly. Two days later, Samphân failed to return home. ‘My mother served dinner as usual at 7.30 p.m.,’ his younger brother, Khieu Sengkim, remembered. ‘The two of us sat at the dining table and waited for [him] to arrive . . . We stayed there till 11 without eating, listening for every footstep and every sound. Then my mother broke down and began to cry. She cried all night.’
When it was learnt that Hou Yuon had also vanished, most people assumed that Lon Nol and, in the background, the Prince himself, were responsible. Grisly rumours began to circulate about the way their bodies had been disposed of, later confirmed by one of the Prince’s long-time French advisers.
He told guests
at a private dinner party hosted by a cabinet minister that he knew precisely how the two MPs had been killed. ‘He said one was burnt alive with sulphuric acid,’ one of them recalled. ‘The other was crushed by a bulldozer.’ There was a thoughtful silence, he remembered, as the Cambodians present looked at their plates. ‘Everyone knew that was exactly the way Sihanouk would have behaved.’
In fact the rumours were false. On April 23, the day after Sihanouk’s threat, Khieu Samphân spoke to a contact in the Party’s clandestine network in Phnom Penh. Next day, police spies reported, he and Hou Yuon met twice. As instructed, Samphân said nothing to his family. Yuon, a less disciplined, more sentimental man, probably warned his wife.
That evening
at dusk, they were collected by a driver, who took them to an isolated spot in Ang Tasom district, 50 miles south of Phnom Penh on the road to Kampot. There they linked up with cadres from Mang’s South-Western Zone Party Committee, who guided them to a hamlet in the woods about a mile from the main road. The half-dozen families who lived there were all related, which, as Samphân said later, meant ‘there was no risk of betrayal because they were bound by the fidelity of blood’. None the less, the cadres, all veterans who had fought with the Viet Minh, took no chances. After three months in a village house, the two men were moved to a makeshift wooden cabin deeper in the forest. Samphân, a fastidious man, insisted on a daily bath, and each night after dark was accompanied by two village girls to a stream a couple of miles away to perform his ablutions. ‘I was on my guard,’ he said primly. ‘Having left Phnom Penh for reasons of principle, I wasn’t going to sully myself with a village woman.’ Apart from a radio set and occasional contacts with the villagers, they were completely cut off from the outside world. Hou Yuon railed at their enforced inactivity. Samphân, being of a very different temperament and never having lived in the countryside, followed the cadres’ instructions to the letter, dreamily contemplating, like his hero, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the mysteries of peasant life.
The disappearance of Khieu Samphân and Hou Yuon embarrassed Sihanouk and helped trigger the resignation of Lon Nol, who was replaced as Prime Minister at the end of April. The new government, headed by the Prince himself, included several moderate left-wing ministers as well as elder statesmen like Son Sann and the former Democratic Party leader, Prince Norodom Phurissara, who became Foreign Minister. On the strength of these changes, Vorn Vet, the top Party leader in Phnom Penh, told Hu Nim, who had also been planning to flee, that he should stay on to see how the situation developed. A few days later, Nim issued an effusive statement of loyalty, declaring that he would ‘remain a loyal member of the Sangkum until the end of [my] life’. But Lon Nol’s departure changed little: the repression did not let up. In October, Nim, too, slipped away. His home was under round-the-clock police surveillance, but on the night of his disappearance there was a torrential downpour. An official inquiry found later that the surveillance team had taken refuge with a neighbour to get out of the rain. Soon afterwards Phouk Chhay, the head of the left-wing General Association of Khmer Students (AGEK), was arrested and sentenced to death, subsequently commuted to life imprisonment, and the Association banned. The same week, Nim’s brother-in-law died in unexplained circumstances while in police custody and a left-wing entrepreneur, Van Tip Sovann, who owned the
Pracheachon’s
printing press and other front businesses, was tortured to death at the Central Commissariat. A visiting Australian historian wrote that people spoke ‘with a mixture of repugnance, fear and gallows humour’ about the expeditive methods of Sihanouk’s security services. The trickle of intellectuals who had been making their way to the maquis since 1965 became a stream. They went, he noted, not just because they were afraid for their lives but out of a growing conviction that radical left-wing change was inevitable.
The twelve months that had passed since the CPK’s Third Plenum had not been easy for Sâr either. The rebellion in the North-West and the subsequent flight of Khieu Samphân and the others had proved his strategy correct: legal, parliamentary struggle was impossible; the use of armed force against Sihanouk was now the only recourse. Nevertheless, Sâr had to acknowledge that he had failed to move quickly enough to take advantage of the peasant resentment that had built up in Battambang and as a result the rebellion had had to be called off because communist networks in the rest of the country were not yet ready to follow.
Some time in the late spring of 1967, probably at the beginning of June, the four Standing Committee members, Sâr, Nuon Chea, So Phim and Ieng Sary, met at Office 100 and agreed that a fresh attempt should be made
to launch a general uprising, this time on a nation-wide basis, the following winter. Sary was appointed North-Eastern Zone Secretary and despatched to Ratanakiri to organise the new Central Committee HQ. That autumn, after four years on the Vietnamese border, Office 100 was finally dissolved. Some of its staff were transferred to other zones, others to the new base in the north. Soon afterwards Sâr wrote to the Chinese Party Central Committee:
We have reached
an important turning point. We have mastered how to undertake the revolution in our country . . . Our past experiences, notably . . . in using political violence and, in part, armed violence, from the end of 1966 to the middle of 1967 have convinced us that organisationally and ideologically our people are ready . . . to launch a true people’s war. We are now exerting leadership [to that end] in the country as a whole.
The letter went on to lavish fulsome praise on the Cultural Revolution, which, as Sâr put it, ‘we have studied, are studying and are determined to go on studying continuously and without let-up’, and on Mao, its architect, ‘the great, guiding star who brings unceasing victories’.
Like all communications between the Cambodian Party and Beijing at this time, the message was transmitted through the Vietnamese, who opened and read it before delivering it to the Chinese Embassy in Hanoi. Not surprisingly, it set off alarm bells. That the Cambodians should eulogise China’s leader in so slavish a fashion must have stuck in Vietnamese gullets, but they knew that in 1967 such phrases were an unavoidable part of Mao’s cult. That the peasants of the North-West should rebel against local oppression was also understandable. But that the Cambodians should tell the Chinese they were about to launch a ‘people’s war’ was a totally different matter.
Hanoi despatched two of its top political and military leaders in the south — Nguyen Van Linh who, as Hay-So, had headed the Vietnamese communists’ Work Commitee in Phnom Penh; and General Tran Nam Trung — to try to dissuade Sâr from his project for a general uprising. After ten days, they departed without reaching agreement.
It is hard to see how it could have been otherwise. If the choice is to wage or not to wage war, there is no middle way.
All the Vietnamese could do was to refuse to help. They did. Cambodian requests for weapons were systematically rejected, and when Sâr asked the VWP Central Committee to allow the Khmer ‘regroupees’ in Vietnam to return to Cambodia to join the struggle, the message went unanswered. But there was a point beyond which the Vietnamese felt unable to oppose their Cambodian allies. By 1968, each side needed the
other and both knew it. Sâr might speak privately, in terms strikingly similar to those employed by Sihanouk, of using China as a counterweight to Vietnamese domination. Le Duan might bridle at what he and the rest of the Hanoi leadership saw as Khmer bloody-mindedness. But the Cambodians knew they were condemned by geography to look to the Vietnamese for support; and the Vietnamese relied on Cambodian cooperation to keep open their supply lines at the southern end of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and to provide cover for the Viet Cong hospitals, sanctuaries and command posts — including the COSVN headquarters itself, concealed in a rubber plantation at Memot — along the entire length of the Cambodian side of the border. In the late 1960s, Khmers and Vietnamese were uneasy bedfellows, but bedfellows all the same.
Ratanakiri was a prime example of this forced cohabitation.
With the two neighbouring provinces of Mondulkiri and Stung Treng, it occupied almost a quarter of Cambodia’s total land area but contained less than 2 per cent of the population, fewer than 100,000 people. Almost all were from tribal minorities — Brao, Jarai, Kachâk, Krâvet, Krüng, Lamban, Lao, Rhade, Stieng, Tampuon — whose natural affinities were not with lowland Cambodians but with their fellow
montagnards
in Laos and Vietnam.
These
Khmer loeu
(Highland Khmer), as they were called, wore loin-cloths, practised slash-and-burn agriculture, worshipped their own gods and spoke their own tribal languages. They had nothing in common with the Buddhist, rice-eating Khmers and saw little benefit from their presence. In the entire region, until the late 1950s, the Cambodian government had built three primary schools and the same number of medical clinics to serve an area the size of Denmark. Only when signs of tribal unrest and strategic concerns about security on the frontier with Vietnam began to concentrate minds in Phnom Penh were the first timid efforts made to bring development to the area.
By then the Vietnamese communists had been active in Ratanakiri for more than a decade, building support networks to shield their bases along the border. But no Khmer revolutionary had yet penetrated the region. A handful of minority cadres, like the Lao veteran, Thang Si — who attended the 1960 Party Congress — were in contact with the leadership in Phnom Penh. It was not until the end of 1964, when Sâr despatched a young man named Vy, a former