Pol Pot (41 page)

Friends remembered

that in later life she loved to surround herself with children and that their presence seemed to make her behave more normally. She must have known that Sâr, too, had wanted children, but had buried his longing deep within himself.

However, the

trigger

for the episode that began on the Ho Chi Minh Trail was obviously more recent. ‘Something must have happened to her in Vietnam or China,’ Moeun speculated later. Sâr himself provided a clue to what it may have been.

During the talks

in Hanoi in December 1969, he wrote, ‘The Vietnamese delegation . . . could neither bridle its violent hostility . . . nor control its fury . . . The [Cambodian] delegates [felt] they could easily resort to assassination . . . The atmosphere . . . was so tense that some members of the delegation, who were rot used to such tests, were greatly shaken.’ The description is overblown, but it may have reflected what Ponnary, who was present, had felt. Her schizophrenia was in a sense merely a clinical manifestation of a wider, national paranoia, whose focus was Vietnam but which would progressively invade every aspect of Cambodian life. Her madness had nothing 1:0 do with Sâr and still less with Khmer Rouge policies which had not even been formulated, let alone applied, at the time her mind began to crumble. Rather it was a metaphor — a tragic, personal metaphor — for the fate which was awaiting the country as a whole.

Sâr spent the next two months at his old headquarters at K-5, three days’ march south of the border. He had brought with him radio transceivers powered by hand-cranked generators, which meant that, for the first time since the Ratanakiri base had been established, he could communicate by morse with Hanoi and with the Chinese Party’s International Liaison Department in Beijing. Three Khmer ‘regroupees’, who had been trained as radio technicians during their exile in Vietnam, served as operators. They were among the first of some

1,500 exiles

who made the journey home that year. Kit Mân, one of the few women in the group, who had been trained as a doctor in Vietnam, left Hanoi in early April, a few days after Sâr’s own departure:

Before leaving

we were given two weeks’ training. They made us carry a heavy rucksack and climb a hill, then come back down, then climb it once more, over and over again. Then we set out, 60 or 100 of us, escorted by Vietnamese guides . . . The journey took three months. But there were resting places in the jungle along the trail, maintained by the Vietnamese, where they had hammocks for us to sleep in . . . In the regions the Americans were bombing, we marched at night with little pocket lights.

Sâr’s aide, Pâng, set up a reception post at a village on the Lao border, from which the returnees were directed to destinations further south. Mân was sent to Kratie, which had been occupied by the Viet Cong in May. The Northern Zone Secretary, Koy Thuon, had established his headquarters in the forest of Speu on the banks of a tributary of the Chinit river, which rises in the hill-country of Preah Vihear and describes a long southwesterly arc before emptying itself into one of the affluents of the Great Lake. There, with two other Vietnamese-trained doctors and a group of nurses, Mân set up a primitive hospital for the use of the Party leadership.

Other groups followed over the next twelve months. Most were assigned to the Eastern Zone, where they occupied middle-level posts in the emerging Khmer Rouge regional and district administrations.

At the end of July,

Sâr himself

set out for the south, accompanied by Ponnary, Tiv Ol, the dandified young secondary-school teacher from Prey Veng who had joined them in Ratanakiri two years earlier, and by seventy

bodyguards.

On the eve

of their departure, Sâr called the leaders of the group together. ‘Now we are going down to the plains,’ he told them. ‘Today, we will all change our names. I will no longer be Pouk. From now on I will call myself

Pol

.’ He then gave the others their new aliases, which he had chosen himself. His Jarai assistant, Phi Phuon, who was with him that day, received the name Cheam. It was a rite of passage, opening the way from one existence to another. Khmer men took new ‘names-in-religion’ when they became monks; Khmers Rouges did so when they took on new responsibilities. Son Sen had changed his name in 1969, when he was appointed Chief of Staff, responsible for the revolutionary guard units. Formerly he had been Kham, ‘the Biter’; now he was Khieu (‘Blue’).

Pol — or Pol Pot, as he would later call himself, following the custom of adding an euphonic monosyllable, in the same way that Vorn made his name Vorn Vet and the eldest of the Thiounn brothers was called Thiounn Thioeunn — never explained why he had chosen his new name. However, the Pols were royal slaves, the remnants of an aboriginal people, ‘noble savages’ in Rousseau’s terms, and it is tempting to see in the soubriquet a sardonic reference to Sâr’s alliance with Sihanouk which made

him, metaphorically, the ‘slave of the King’. It may also have harked back to his use of Khmer Daeum (Old Khmer) as a pseudonym while a student in Paris, for the Pols were Khmers Daeum; one of his fellow students at that time had used an even more explicit pen-name, Khmer Neak Ngear (Khmer hereditary slave) to sign an attack on the monarchy. Whatever the reason, for the next decade Sâr would be known as Pol.

The journey south was slow and, apart from sporadic American bombing, uneventful. The transmogrified Pol Pot and his escort reached their initial destination, a temporary camp on the border of Kratie and Kompong Thom about thirty miles north-east of Koy Thuon’s headquarters, towards the end of September. There he convened an enlarged meeting of the CPK Standing Committee. No record of who took part has survived. Khieu Samphân had reached the area a few days earlier and was told that he was being given responsibility for liaison with Sihanouk, but he did not attend the leadership discussions. Although Pol himself claimed later that it was ‘a full meeting of the Central Committee’, evidently to underline its importance, it appears that the only senior Party figures present were himself, Nuon Chea and So Phim.

The resolution

they issued set out for the first time the principle of ‘independence-mastery’, which was to be the Party’s watchword for the next nine years. Like many Khmer Rouge terms, the word was a neologism derived from Pali, the language of the Buddhist monks. It proclaimed the Cambodian communists’ right to determine their own strategy, free from outside interference — a message hammered home by reference to the ‘betrayal’ of the Khmer revolution by the Vietnamese at the Geneva Conference of 1954:

The Cambodian Party has traced its own revolutionary path . . . We must not permit other powerful states to decide the destiny of our nation, our people and our revolution. At present [these states] still nurture this ancient longing . . . [In the past] we held our destiny firmly in our own hands, and then we allowed others to resolve it in our place. We must never allow this historical error to be repeated . . . Aid from abroad, even if healthy and unconditional . . . can never play a decisive role, either in the short term or the long term . . . We must always hold firmly to the stance of independence-mastery, rely on our own forces and endure difficulties and suffering. On that basis, whether we accept or do not accept aid will depend on whether or not we think it is necessary, on whether we find it useful or harmful, and also on the manner in which that aid is to be used.

This was the theoretical text on which the independence of the Cambodian Communist Party was to be based. The time had not yet come to give it practical effect. For all their fine words, the Cambodians knew

they still needed Vietnamese support. But Hanoi was not wrong in seeing it as a fundamental shift in the CPK’s position.

The meeting also approved the sending of Ieng Sary to Hanoi and Beijing as ‘Special Representative of the Interior’ charged with foreign policy matters, a formulation which, to non-initiates like Sihanouk, continued to disguise the reality of communist power.

While Pol was laying down the principles of future Khmer Rouge policy in the jungles of Kompong Thom, Lon Nol ploughed relentlessly on with his plans for a republic of the Cambodian middle classes. That summer Sihanouk and eighteen of his closest supporters were sentenced to death in absentia. Two months later, on October 9, a grand ceremony was held in front of the Royal Palace, at which Lon Nol, Sirik Matak and In Tam, the President of the National Assembly, resplendent in white dress uniform, worn with a silk

the traditional divided skirt used on great occasions, presided over the abolition of the thousand-year-old monarchy. To mark the advent of the Khmer Republic, as Cambodia was now to be called, a 101-gun salute was fired. On the

fifteenth salvo

, the cannon exploded, killing one of the gun crew. The news was around the city like wildfire. The

the nation’s guardian deities, were warning of fell times ahead.

IN THE FIRST

half of the 1970s, the Khmers Rouges fought not one war but four.

The first was waged by the United States, using heavy bombers which flew in from Guam. Their targets were Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge troop concentrations, but the bombs fell massively and above all on the civilian population. Bill Harben, a disaffected political officer at the US Embassy in Phnom Penh, made a simple experiment. He took a cardboard cutout delineating the ‘box’, half a mile wide by two miles long, that represented the area of devastation from a B-52 bomb-load, and placed it on a large-scale map. In much of central and eastern Cambodia, he discovered, there was nowhere the box could be placed which did not include hamlets or villages.

The second war, not always well co-ordinated with the first, was waged by Lon Nol’s forces on the ground. There was a third war, sometimes latent sometimes overt, between the Cambodian and the Vietnamese communists. And finally there was a struggle for influence, which never quite spilled over into open warfare but teetered on the brink, between Sihanouk in Beijing and the resistance leaders inside Cambodia.

The air war was by far the most dramatic.

B-52 raids resumed on July 27 1970 after the Pentagon realised that the ‘limited incursion’ during the spring had resolved nothing. They were directed at targets throughout the Eastern Zone and later in much of the rest of Cambodia as well — necessarily so, since the incursion had spread the Viet Cong over a much larger area. Truong Nhu Tang, the Viet Cong Justice Minister, wrote later:

Nothing the guerrillas

had to endure compared with the stark terrorisation of the B-52 bombardments . . . It was as if an enormous scythe had swept through the jungle, felling the giant teak and

trees like grass in its way, shredding them into billions of shattered splinters . . . It was not just that things were destroyed; in some awesome way, they had ceased to exist . . . There would simply be nothing there, in an unrecognisable landscape gouged by immense craters. . .

The first few times I experienced a B-52 attack it seemed, as I strained to press myself into the bunker floor, that I had been caught in the Apocalypse . . . The concussive

came closer and closer . . . Then, as the cataclysm walked in on us, everyone hugged the earth, some screaming quietly, others struggling to suppress attacks of violent involuntary trembling. Around us the ground began to heave spasmodically, and we were engulfed in a monstrous roar . . . The terror was complete. One lost control of bodily functions as the mind screamed incomprehensible orders to get out.

On one occasion a Soviet delegation was visiting our ministry when a particularly short-notice warning came through. When it was over, no one had been hurt, but the entire delegation had sustained considerable damage to its dignity — uncontrollable trembling and wet pants the all-too-obvious signs of inner convulsions. The visitors could have spared themselves their feelings of embarrassment; each of their hosts was a veteran of the same symptoms. . .

Sooner or later, though, the shock of the bombardments wore off, giving way to a sense of abject fatalism. The veterans would no longer scrabble at the bunker floors, convulsed with fear. Instead people just resigned themselves . . . The B-52S somehow put life in order . . . It was a lesson that remained with me, as it did with many others.

The United States dropped three times more bombs on Indochina during the Vietnam War than were used by all the participants in the whole of the Second World War; on Cambodia the total was three times the total tonnage dropped on Japan, atom bombs included. Party cadres, committed to the cause, might rationalise the dread inspired by the B-52S. The peasants lapsed into blind terror. ‘Their minds just froze up and [they] would wander around mute and not talk for three or four days,’ one young villager remembered. ‘Their brains were completely disoriented . . . They couldn’t even hold down a meal.’

The effect was twofold. Hundreds of thousands of villagers fled to the cities, where they eked out a precarious existence on the edge of starvation. The population of Phnom Penh, which had been 650,000 at the time of the coup, exceeded a million at the end of the year and would reach 2.5 million by 1975. Provincial towns still in government hands, like Battambang, Kompong Thom and Siem Reap, swelled to bursting point.

Hundreds of thousands of others fled in the opposite direction, into the forests, the eternal refuge of Khmer peasants in times of war and desolation. By the end of 1970, US intelligence estimated that more than a million people were in areas controlled by the Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese and the Khmers Rouges, whose grip now extended to more than half the country’s territory.