Pracheachon
journalist, to create a CPK network in the North-East, that the first Khmer communists entered the province. In January 1965, local Viet Cong officials introduced Vy and his companion, Man, to
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representatives from Ratanakiri’s three districts, telling
them, as one participant remembered: ‘These men are Khmers . . . From now on you have your own leadership. You should follow them.’
By the time Ieng Sary arrived, two and a half years later, district Party committees had been set up and a Zone Headquarters, Office 102, established near the hamlet of Kang Lêng in dense forest about seven miles south of the district centre of Anduong Meas. A second encampment was built later about half a mile away, on the bank of the Toek Chrâp stream, for use as the Central Committee HQ. Like its precursor in Tay Ninh, it was referred to as ‘Office 100’. Between the two lay a third cluster of thatched huts which served as a reception centre for couriers and visiting cadres from other parts of the country. Sary, as Zone Secretary, took direct responsibility for Ratanakiri; Son Sen, who became Deputy Secretary, was put in charge of Stung Treng, and Ney Sarann of Mondulkiri.
Sâr himself
stayed on in the south until early November 1967, delayed first by the preparations for the uprising and then by the talks with Nguyen Van Linh. The journey from Tay Ninh took more than a month. In the final stages he had to be carried, prostrate from malaria, in a hammock, slung from a bamboo shoulder-pole between two bearers.
With him came Pâng, the youth who had run the printing press at Office 100 and now headed the Messenger Unit; two other Khmer assistants; and a group of
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bodyguards. After crossing the San river — one of the principal affluents of the Mekong which bisects north-eastern Cambodia, flowing in a long westerly arc from its source in the central highlands of Vietnam — they had made for a Viet Cong medical facility, ‘Hospital No. 5’, on the border close to Mount Ngork, where quinine was available.
Malaria was
, and still is, endemic in the jungles of Indochina. Khieu Samphân recalled marching in Indian file through the forest with a guerrilla escort and watching the man in front of him ‘jerking about uncontrollably as he walked as though he had the palsy’. Hu Nim lost most of his hair after a malarial attack. In 1968, Mang, the South-Western Zone leader, died from it. A senior Viet Cong official remembered malaria being a worse problem than the Americans: ‘For each of my years in the jungle, I spent approximately two months in the hospital, battling the high fevers and general debility of the disease . . . We lost more people to malaria than we did to the enemy.’
Sâr recovered and a few weeks later was carried on a litter to Office 102, where he remained until his own headquarters, Office 100, was ready. But for the rest of his life he would suffer
relapses
. The following summer, Khieu Ponnary arrived to join him, accompanied by her sister, Thirith, and Son Sen’s wife, Yun Yat.
In the North-East
, for the first time since they had left for the maquis,
the CPK leaders were truly their own masters. The new Office 100 was a wholly Cambodian outfit, with a Khmer cook and a ‘doctor’, Dam, who had been a medical student before dropping out to join the revolution. Like other bases in the area, it was equipped with primitive but lethal defences:
It was surrounded by dozens of pit-falls, containing sharpened bamboos and spears. Along the paths we suspended traps from the trees. We had no mines in those days. But the guards patrolled in five-man groups with bows and poisoned arrows. We had guns, old-fashioned Enfields from the First World War; a few Kalashnikovs, but very few; and muzzle-loaders that the local tribesmen used for hunting.
Sâr travelled little during this period. He had time to plan and think, free from outside influence, in an area of Cambodia where the government’s writ did not run. The population at large — a prey to the exactions of rapacious officials, sent from faraway Phnom Penh, and to what one diplomat called the ‘overweening superiority complex’ of lowland Cambodians — had no love of Sihanouk’s regime. To Sâr, the
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even more than the Khmer peasantry, were Rousseau’s ‘noble savages’ — simple, pure, fanatically loyal, unsullied by the decadence of Cambodian life. Ieng Sary, too, remembered them as ‘men who would give their lives for you without a thought . . . With a Khmer soldier you never knew how he’d react. But a Jarai would make sure I was safe no matter what it cost.’
By December 1967, plans for the uprising were complete. As before, it was to start in the North-West, in the area around Samlaut. But this time, instead of remaining confined to southern Battambang, it would spread in stages to the rest of the country. That month Nuon Chea met Vorn Vet, the South-West Zone Secretary, Mang, and Kong Sophal at a safe house in Phnom Penh, and gave them their final instructions.
‘I rushed back,’ Sophal recounted, ‘and told everyone that we would start the rebellion in all the villages on the same day and they must start preparing their weapons.’ Word spread quickly. Khieu Samphân, in his forest hideout, noticed an
unusual excitement
among the young peasants guarding him and puzzled over what it might mean:
Then one day one of the cadres came to see me and said: ‘Now it’s decided: we are going to take up arms. You are to come with us’ . . . So, just like that, we set off through the forest . . . Some of them belonged to the [government’s] provincial guard, which had Enfields. They had ‘borrowed’ these guns on the pretext of going hunting . . . and they now used them to attack government arms depots.
At night, we slept in the jungle with a piece of plastic cloth suspended
between the trees above our hammock as protection against rain. Even that was only for the cadres. The peasants made themselves a covering of straw or a lattice of leaves. Each group consisted of between 10 and 20 men, and there were several groups in our part of the forest. [At first] we ate rice. Each night, the men would go back to their villages and bring back food which their families had left for them at the edge of the forest . . . They also had a dog, which caught turtles and big lizards. I saw them tickle fish with their bare hands in the streams . . . But after a certain time, the villages were sealed off [by government soldiers] and we couldn’t get supplies any more. Then we ate roots and tubers that the men found in the forest.
The uprising was launched on January 18 1968 with a dawn raid on an army post at Bay Damran, twelve miles south of Battambang. This feat would later be celebrated as marking the start of the revolutionary war. In fact the operation had been betrayed by an informer and the rebels, led by Sophal himself, were driven off with two men killed. But they were able to seize a number of weapons and, in other villages, three policemen were caught in ambushes and killed. A week later another group of rebels attacked a guard post at Thvak, shooting dead several defenders and seizing fifty rifles. The same month, the first incident occurred in Ratanakiri, when a group of Jarai tribesmen with two muskets and a rifle ambushed a military transport on a jungle track in Bokeo. On February 25, Mang’s followers launched co-ordinated attacks in five provinces in the South-West. By nightfall they had seized several dozen rifles, two machine-guns and cases of ammunition, destroyed bridges and burned official buildings. Over the next few weeks they acquired another two hundred guns. In early March, the North — where Son Sen’s former student, Koy Thuon, had become Zone Secretary, with Ke Pauk as his deputy — and the Eastern Zone, under So Phim, followed suit. In the country as a whole, more than 10,000 villagers left their homes to join the rebels.
Like most revolutions it started on a very small scale, with a handful of determined men patiently building support, rifle by rifle and one villager at a time. But Sihanouk was not deceived by the insurgency’s modest beginnings. He found it more and more difficult to maintain the fiction that the troubles were remote-controlled by Cambodia’s enemies abroad and began for the first time to speak of the risk of all-out civil war.
The rebels did not have things all their own way, however.
The leadership had been able to co-ordinate the launching of the uprising. But it took a month for a message, hand-carried by courier on foot or elephant-back, to get from one Zone HQ to another and still longer to Ratanakiri. Once the rebellion was under way, a centralised chain of command became impossible. Each Zone fended for itself.
At the end of January, Sihanouk brought back Lon Nol, who had been in semi-disgrace since his resignation as Premier eight months earlier. That signalled the resumption of the scorched-earth tactics that had been used the previous spring. The air force was called in to bomb and strafe rebel-held areas; efforts were made to interdict food supplies; and people living in isolated hamlets were resettled in fortified villages. Diplomats reported that the army acted ‘without restraint and at times with great brutality’. At the beginning of April, after artillery and aerial bombardment, government soldiers overran the North-Western Zone HQ on Mount Veay Chap. Part of the guerrilla force, accompanied by more than 4,000 civilians, fled south towards the Cardamom Mountains. The rest scattered. By the autumn, some two hundred guerrillas had regrouped at Mount Damrey, near Pailin, but soon found themselves ‘in a critical situation, with only wild roots and papaya to eat’.
In the South-West, where Mok — the ‘skinny, bony ex-monk from Takeo’, as one fellow townsman remembered him — took over as acting Zone Secretary after Mang’s death, the insurgency settled into a pattern of hit-and-run attacks. In the North and East, where the rebellion had begun later, the government pre-empted weapons seizures by withdrawing police posts that were judged vulnerable and disarming village militias. As a result, it was not until July that So Phim’s Eastern Zone detachments — which in theory should have been among the strongest in the country — were able to obtain a stock of rifles. The situation in Siem Reap and Sâr’s native province of Kompong Thom was scarcely more encouraging. ‘In the East . . . our bases were destroyed and our people killed or driven away,’ Sâr wrote later. ‘In the North . . . we experienced considerable difficulties.’
Only in the vast, uninhabited expanse of the North-East were the insurgents able to hold substantial swathes of territory.
In Ratanakiri, thousands of
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villagers were moved from their homes along the San river to the security of the high mountains, where they built new ‘strategic hamlets’ out of reach of government troops. By the autumn, according to Ieng Sary, the Zone Secretary, the rebels occupied thirty-one of the province’s thirty-five communes, and
Sihanouk himself
admitted that in areas of the province bordering Vietnam ‘we are no longer in control’. The insurgents’ cause was aided by the callousness of the provincial military governor and the barbarity of the Second Parachute Regiment which was sent to quell the unrest. As at Samlaut, a year earlier, bounties were offered for each rebel head brought in, ‘but officers soon learnt to demand a rifle as well as a head, because the soldiers started killing ordinary tribesmen to get heads for a reward’, Sihanouk himself set the tone by telling a mass rally in Bokeo in February that ‘traitors’ would be
treated with ‘extreme harshness’. Three months later he announced at Stung Treng that he had personally ordered ‘several dozen
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taken before a firing squad and shot, bringing to ‘around 200 the number who have been exterminated’. ‘I do not care if I am sent to hell,’ he cried defiantly, ‘I will submit the relevant documents to the Devil himself The result, the French Ambassador noted, was ‘a vicious cycle of reprisals and counter-reprisals’, more likely to ‘harden the Khmers Rouges’ attitude than to make them submit’. The severed heads of captured rebels were displayed in district centres and photographs published in the Khmer-language press.
An Eastern Zone
Khmer Rouge cadre was disembowelled by government soldiers. In Kompong Cham, townspeople spoke of mass executions of leftists; and in a particularly ghastly incident near Phnom Penh, troops took two children, alleged to be communist messengers, and sawed off their heads with jagged fronds from a palm tree.
As the bloodshed continued, the Buddhist hierarchy showed growing misgivings. So did other establishment figures who could hardly be accused of communist sympathies. When two right-wing deputies, Sim Var and Douc Rasy, protested at the army’s conduct, Sihanouk warned that he would ‘send them into the next world without even troubling to lift their parliamentary immunity’.
By the summer of 1968, the government’s ‘search-and-destroy’ operations in Ratanakiri were coming dangerously close both to Office 100 and to a military camp further south, known as K-I, where Son Sen had started training revolutionary guard units to form the nucleus of the future Khmer Rouge army. It was decided that the entire leadership should move thirty miles to the north, into the mountainous area known as the Naga’s Tail, where the frontiers of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam meet. The new base, near the village of Nay, inhabited by Kachâk tribesmen, was given the codename K-5. It was three days’ march from K-12, a Viet Cong transit base on the Laotian border at the southern end of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and about six miles from the border with Vietnam.
At K-5
, Sâr began to emerge more and more not just as first among equals in a collective leadership, but as
the
Cambodian Party chief. The living arrangements told the story. At Office 100 in Tay Ninh, everyone had shared and shared alike. At Office 100 in Kang Lêng, Sâr and Ponnary had their quarters in the same camp as Vy’s deputy, Man, and other local cadres. At K-5, Sâr had an entirely separate encampment, with his own personal staff and guards, to which no outsider was allowed access unless an escort was sent out to fetch him. As at Kang Léng, Sâr