rarely moved
outside, even to go to nearby villages. But he held lengthy debriefings with
the cadres and intellectuals who were now arriving in Ratanakiri in ever-increasing numbers from other parts of the country, and Ponnary travelled extensively on his behalf, reporting back on conditions in the different areas she visited.
It would be wrong to read too much into this hermetic existence. At a time when the US and South Vietnam were stepping up cross-border bombing and raids by special forces, there were both security and policy reasons for Sâr to remain under deep cover. Nevertheless, it reflected a pattern which would continue for the next thirty years. As he concentrated power in his own hands, reality was kept at one remove, not grasped directly but through the eyes of others — as though to maintain a screen, filtering out inconvenient facts, between the leader and the nation that he sought to transform. It was a style of leadership that sat perfectly with Sâr’s reclusiveness, his indirection, his penchant for concealing his intentions. It already contained the seeds of the high tragedy that would follow.
As 1968 drew to a close, rebel activity was reported from at least twelve of Cambodia’s nineteen provinces. In Ratanakiri,
Sâr took over
Ieng Sary’s responsibilities as North-Eastern Zone Secretary so that Sary could spend more time in the two districts where the insurgency was strongest, Anduong Meas and Bokeo. The government’s intelligence services estimated that, in the country as a whole, there were about 1,500 rebels, supported by several times that number of unarmed villagers. The core of the insurgent force was composed of armed peasants from former Khmer Viet Minh strongholds led by old-style Issaraks like Ruos Nhim, Mok, Ke Pauk and So Phim, who had acquired their military skills in the war against the French. Only in the North-East were ‘intellectuals’ like Sâr, Ieng Sary and their followers directly in charge.
This duality reflected the Party’s origins. The mismatch between the indigenous, largely uneducated, rural movement, fostered by the Vietnamese, and the citified elite that had been superimposed upon it, made up of schoolteachers, students and civil servants, had been papered over in the 1950s when urban cadres assured the organisation’s survival and the rural networks were shattered or went into hibernation. Tou Samouth had been a leader whom both the Issaraks and the ‘returned students’ could accept. But when Sâr took over two years later, the consensus frayed. In Hanoi in 1965, he told Le Duan that ‘the
problem of unity
within the Party is the most difficult thing we have to deal with’. With hindsight he was franker: ‘From 1961 to 1967,’he said, ‘there were
separatist tendencies
. . . The Party was split.’
Other Khmer Rouge accounts bear that out. Ruos Nhim, Ney Sarann and Ke Pauk had little time for the returned students. So Phim was quoted
as saying disparagingly: ‘Those intellectuals only have [posh] city homes and theory’.
Phim was a quintessential warlord. At the Second Congress in 1963, he shocked even Mok, hardly the gentlest of men, whom he had been asked to propose for election to the Central Committee. ‘He was blind drunk,’ Mok remembered. ‘I saw it and I thought — with a leader like that, it’s not proper. [Phim] could really drink! [Afterwards], we went to study [Party documents] together. He didn’t know his arse from his tit!’ Phim’s wild ways continued. In 1968, Doeun, a young student from Kompong Cham, later to become head of the Central Committee’s General Office, encountered him for the first time ‘drinking wine . . . and in a black mood’. The rebellion in the Eastern Zone was going badly and Phim was depressed. ‘He was outrageous. When he spoke . . . everyone was afraid. No one dared go near him . . . I tried to cheer him up, hoping that it would make him behave better . . . because he was one of the Party’s top leaders and I didn’t want people to look down on him.’ That year, Phim had a row with his deputy, Phuong, which ended with both men drawing their pistols. He was a womaniser and an autocrat: when others offended him, he threatened to have them shot.
Mok, surprisingly, given his subsequent reputation for brutality, appears to have been the most understanding of the group. ‘He was a peasant,’ Khieu Samphân said later. ‘He never spoke about theory and ideology, things like that. But he was broad-minded: he realised we [intellectuals] weren’t used to the life in the countryside and he tried to make things easier for us.’
That became increasingly necessary as police surveillance in the towns intensified and the numbers of left-wing teachers fleeing to the countryside grew. It was enough for a teacher to be seen attending a picnic with his pupils, to fail to put in an appearance at a ceremony where Sihanouk was present, or to criticise the misdeeds of a long-dead monarch in a classical literature class, to be listed as a subversive. In the three months from November 1967 to February 1968, more than thirty teachers quit their posts. Most of them made their way to Mok’s HQ near Mount Aural, though a few reached the Central Committee base in Ratanakiri. They were as unprepared for what lay in store as were their rural ‘hosts’ to receive them:
I had been told
that Mok’s base was very well-organised, just like the Chinese revolutionary bases during the civil war
[one aspiring young radical remembered]
. There was even supposed to be electric lighting, decent lodging for cadres, offices with typewriters . . . I couldn’t wait to get there . . . What did I find? Khieu Samphân, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim were almost unrecognisable: Nim had lost most of his hair . . . Hou Yuon, who used to be so well-built, was as thin as a nail . . . Another comrade lay beside them,
shivering and groaning with fever, and talking deliriously to himself in French . . . The bodyguards were asleep on a bed nearby, under which were stocked provisions of dried elephant meat. They all had skin diseases and kept scratching themselves as they lay on top of our one, very tasteless, source of protein. When I saw all that, ‘I became as light as cotton and my liver flew out of my body’.
As the rebellion continued, the two groups were forced to come to terms with each other. In Sâr’s vision of the future, it was imperative that they should. But to weld two such disparate forces into a single political grouping required exceptional pressures. In 1968 and 1969, the waging of a ‘people’s war’ against a more powerful adversary, the repression that rained down impartially on the Party’s urban and rural networks alike, the belief that communism was the wave of the future and that an egalitarian victory would soon be shared by all, created the necessary conditions. For the first time, a truly national revolutionary movement was coming into being. Yet the graft remained imperfect — an unavoidable but unnatural alliance which Sâr and his companions would devote extraordinary ingenuity to justifying and maintaining.
The onset of armed struggle, prefigured by the Samlaut rebellion, coincided with a sharp deterioration in Cambodia’s relations with China, which until then Sihanouk had viewed as his country’s most loyal friend. Not that the Prince had any illusions about the nature of Beijing’s interest in the region. But, much like Kim Il Sung in North Korea, with whom he had developed an improbable but enduring friendship, he had seen China as a trump card, to be used to counter US ambitions and extract aid from the Soviet Union and its allies. The relationship helped to keep domestic radicals in check and provided a barrier against the Vietnamese, communist or otherwise.
In the spring of 1967, with the Cultural Revolution at its height and the discourse of Chinese foreign policy rising to a shriek, this carefully-thought-out strategy began to fall apart. Chinese aid experts waved Mao’s ‘Little Red Book’ and proselytised their Khmer co-workers, while their Embassy in Phnom Penh sent strident letters to Khmer newspapers berating them for failing to understand ‘the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’.
There were limits to the agitation: the powers-that-be in Beijing had decreed that Mao’s works should not be translated into Khmer. But French-language versions were freely available; young Cambodians began sporting Mao badges; and the police reported that groups of students, emulating the Red Guards, had put up wall posters critical of the regime.
More disturbing, there were signs that the Sino-Khmer community, some 400,000 strong, which until then had remained largely apolitical, devoting itself to mercantile concerns, was beginning to respond to the propaganda barrage from Beijing calling for ‘revolutionary patriotism’ and ‘loyalty to the [Chinese] motherland’.
In public, Sihanouk sought at first to minimise the problem, arguing that ‘errors’ and ‘excesses’ committed by individual Chinese in no way reflected the views of the Chinese government. The wearing of Mao badges was banned, and schools operated by the Chinese community, which had been teaching ‘Mao Zedong Thought’, were threatened with closure unless they reverted to the government-approved curriculum. But as the year wore on, the Prince’s mistrust of Beijing’s intentions deepened. The French Ambassador reported in June that, after having long denied any connection with the internal unrest, the government was now beginning to suspect that the Chinese were ‘colluding with the Khmers Rouges and . . . trying to capitalise on the movement they have launched’.
Matters came to a head on September 1, when Sihanouk ordered the dissolution of the Khmer-Chinese Friendship Association, which he accused of acting as a Khmer Rouge fifth column to undermine his regime. Three days later, ultra-leftist officials in Beijing fired off a telegram which, in barely veiled terms, denounced the Cambodian government as ‘reactionary’. At that, the Prince’s patience snapped. Cambodia, he said, was facing an ‘ideological invasion, and would take legitimate measures of self-defence’. Chau Seng, who had made public the telegram, was sacked from his post as Economics Minister. All non-government newspapers were banned. The New China News Agency bureau in Phnom Penh was closed, and it was announced that the Cambodian Ambassador in Beijing and all his staff would be brought home.
This last move succeeded in getting the Chinese leadership’s attention.
On September 14, Zhou Enlai made a personal appeal to the Prince to reconsider. After a short interval, he agreed, and to outward appearances, relations slowly returned to normal. But the honeymoon was over. For more than a decade the entente with China had been, in Sihanouk’s words, ‘the cornerstone of Cambodian foreign policy’. Now China had shown itself as fallible a friend as any other.
The crisis provoked a further shift to the right. After September 1967, no left-wing minister would again serve in Sihanouk’s government, nor any left-wing MP sit in parliament. In foreign relations it helped tip the scales in favour of a reconciliation with the Prince’s
bete noire,
the United States. Sihanouk remained convinced that the Americans were doomed to lose the Vietnam War and that his strategy of accumulating political credit with the
communists, the future winners, was therefore correct. However, pressure from the Pentagon for tougher measures to foreclose the Cambodian sanctuaries and the Prince’s own concern at the Viet Cong’s increasingly open use of the border areas demanded a more balanced policy, less obviously favourable to Vietnamese communist interests. In November he invited Jacqueline Kennedy to pay a private visit to Phnom Penh and Angkor as his personal guest. Her stay was a success — Sihanouk’s gloating at her husband’s assassination four years earlier was conveniently forgotten — and in January 1968 another US emissary arrived, a more political figure this time, in the shape of Chester Bowles, special envoy of President Johnson. According to the State Department, they reached an informal agreement to permit US forces to enter the sparsely inhabited border areas of Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri — though not the more densely populated regions further south — in pursuit of Viet Cong guerrillas.
Over the next few months, other factors strengthened this trend towards rapprochement. Sihanouk declared the Khmer Rouge insurgency to be part of a ‘global strategy by Asian communism’ to win control of all of South-East Asia, a view consonant with that held in the US. Even so, he could not resist a jibe at Washington’s simplicity:
America says
it is fighting against communism. Which communism? Chinese communism? If so, Washington [should realise that] the communism it is in the process of destroying — Vietnamese communism — is in no sense inspired by China, but is hostile to Chinese expansionism. It is actually a nationalist barrier between China and the rest of South-East Asia. The truth is that America, by waging war against Vietnam, is playing China’s game. And indirectly, by preventing Vietnam from becoming strong, it is also helping Cambodia.
Paradoxically the opening of peace talks in Paris between the US and the Vietnamese communists strengthened the Prince’s belief in the importance of the American presence. As soon as peace was restored, he argued, a reunified Vietnam would once again turn its energies to subjugating its smaller neighbours. Laos, in his view, was already doomed to become a Vietnamese satellite. The only power that could help Cambodia resist a similar fate was America. Until 1968, Sihanouk had doubted Washington’s ability to play such a role, even if it wished to. But the massive build-up of American forces in South Vietnam persuaded him that the US might after all continue to be a force in the region for longer than he had previously thought.
Reversing course was a delicate exercise. The US, under pressure from its allies, Thailand and South Vietnam, had refused to recognise Cambodia’s existing borders, which to Sihanouk was the
sine qua non
for
normalising relations; and botched B-52 raids along the frontier wiped out Khmer hamlets with such regularity that the Cambodian army concluded they must be deliberate. Equally problematic was the need to conduct the rapprochement in a way which would not anger China, still a major aid donor, or the Viet Cong, which, with Sihanouk’s complicity, continued to receive munitions through the port of Kompong Som and to buy — through corrupt intermediaries, including Lon Nol and the entourage of the Prince’s wife, Monique — most of the surplus Cambodian rice harvest. The amounts of money involved were colossal. The North Vietnamese Premier, Pham Van Dong, told Mao in 1968 that payments for rice and transport fees, financed by the Chinese government, ‘