If, among the population at large, levelling was imposed from above, among the Khmers Rouges themselves
*
the methods of choice were ‘criticism and self-criticism’, manual labour, and the study —
riensouth,
’learning by heart and reciting’ — of Communist Party texts.
Criticism and self-criticism took place at so-called ‘lifestyle meetings’, held in small groups, usually twice a week but in some units every evening. Members of each section met together — kitchen staff, for instance; or guards; or cadres who worked together in the same bureau — under the leadership of an older member, and each in turn would publicly confess his errors in thought and deed since the previous session. Khieu Samphân called them ‘a daily accounting of revolutionary activities’. At the jungle prison where he was held in 1971, the French archaeologist François Bizot watched his warders go through the nightly ritual:
‘
Comrades
’, began the older man who was leading the séance, ‘let us all give account of the day that has passed, to correct our faults [and] purge ourselves of the sins that are holding back our beloved Revolution.’
Then the first one spoke: ‘For myself’, he said, ‘I was supposed today to replace the rod where we hang the washing to dry, behind the northern hut, but I didn’t. I was lazy . . .’ The older man said nothing, and pointed to the next one. ‘I fell asleep after the meal’, this man said, ‘and I forgot to check whether the prisoners’ urine pots had been emptied properly . . .’
When they had all spoken, they went on to the next stage . . . One of the youngest ones raised his hand . . . ‘This afternoon,’ he began, ‘I happened to go into the dormitory, and I saw Comrade Miet hiding something in his bedding . . .’ With a gesture of his head, the older man sent someone to search the hammock. He ran back, holding a notebook. Young Miet burst into tears.
Bizot never did learn what the notebook contained. It was probably nothing culpable. But that was not the point. The aim of these ‘introspection meetings’, as they were also called, was to make the participants look into their own souls and strip away everything that was personal and private until their individuality was leached out, their innermost thoughts exposed before their peers and existence outside the group made meaningless. Mutual surveillance and denunciation were a key part of the process, which required a climate of perpetual vigilance and suspicion. Like monks at confession, opening their hearts to God, the young Khmers Rouges ‘gave themselves to the Party’, becoming one with a revolution which, in theory at least, replaced all other relationships.
Bizot, who was in Cambodia to study Khmer Buddhism, was struck by the paradox. ‘The
Party theoreticians
,’ he wrote later, ‘had substituted
Angkar
(“the Organisation”) for the
Dhamma,
the primordial Being who [in Buddhism] personifies the notion of “Instruction”.’
In place of
the monk’s ten vows of abstinence
(sila),
the Khmers Rouges had ‘Twelve commandments’ (also called
sila).
Like the ‘Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention’, which Mao issued to the Chinese Red Army after 1927, and the ‘Twelve Points’ used by the Vietnamese communists, these enjoined the cadres ‘not to touch even a single pepper or can of rice belonging to the people’, to ‘act properly towards women’, and ‘to be modest and simple’. But there were also significant differences. Mao’s injunction to his troops ‘not to ill-treat captives’ was absent from the Cambodian list. Instead the Khmers Rouges were urged to ‘have burning rage towards the enemy’, ‘not to depend on foreigners’, ‘not to be individualistic’ and to ‘follow the traditions of the people’. Angkar was absolute and impersonal, as Buddhism was, Bizot wrote, and it demanded the same unconditional determination,
refusing ‘to take into account the human aspect of things, as though it were dealing solely with matters of the spirit’.
These were not parallels that the CPK leaders willingly acknowledged, but unconsciously they resonated in the minds of their followers. To youthful Khmer Rouge devotees, echoes of the novitiate placed the new communist teaching in a familiar setting.
Criticism, self-criticism and ‘introspection’ were not only for the young and malleable. All Khmer Rouge cadres, at whatever level, were required to take part. At Pol’s headquarters on the Chinit river, Central Committee meetings always started with a week-long session of ‘criticism and self-criticism’, led by Pol himself or Nuon Chea. Only afterwards would they get down to the real business at hand. ‘We all had to go through it,’ Khieu Samphçn remembered. ‘You had to examine your own thinking, and analyse your failings and your strongpoints.’ Only members of the Standing Committee — which in practice meant Pol and Nuon — were exempt.
‘Introspection’ and ‘study’ were two sides of the same coin, and much of Pol’s time during the first years at the Chinit river base was taken up with writing training documents on such topics as ‘Class Struggle’, ‘How to Fight Individualism [and] Liberalism’ and ‘Building Proletarian Principles’.
To ‘build’, in Khmer Rouge parlance, meant to refashion a person’s consciousness. Mental training was one means to that end. The other was manual labour. As with many Khmer Rouge practices, this had been copied from China and Vietnam. Manual labour had been made compulsory for Chinese Communist Party cadres at Yan’an in the 1930s. The goal then was essentially practical: self-sufficiency in food in a drought-ridden border region. Even Mao had his vegetable plot. In the early 1950s, the Viet Minh used it to temper new arrivals — as Pol and the others had cause to remember from their days at Krâbao — much as army sergeants in the West put raw recruits to cleaning out latrines. Later Mao made it part of a campaign to bridge the gap between manual and mental labour and, through the Great Leap Forward, to harness the nation’s energies for development. It was in that form that Sihanouk introduced it to Cambodia in the mid-1960s.
All these elements — self-reliance; showing humility; being close to the masses; combining mental and manual labour; mobilising the nation for development — were incorporated into the Khmer Rouge approach.
But to Pol, manual labour had another, more important purpose. It was a means of forging ‘proletarian consciousness’, that immaterial, indefinable quality that, contrary to all Marxist principles, Pol had viewed since the late 1960s as the touchstone of revolutionary virtue. This ‘theory of
proletarianisation’, as it was called, held that through manual labour, anyone, whatever his class origin, could acquire ‘the materialist discipline of the factory worker . . . the idea of respecting the rhythm of discipline, the tempo of work, the rhythm of life’ that characterised the working class. Those considered most apt for this transformation were the poor peasants, the backbone and model of CPK support. Others, including intellectuals, could in theory reforge themselves, but it was inherently more difficult.
Manual labour under the Khmer Rouge had another purpose, too, more far-reaching than in China or Vietnam.
The cadres’ goal was not to become merely ‘close to the people’ but indistinguishable from them — not merely to work but ‘to speak, sleep, walk, stand, sit, eat, smoke, play, laugh . . . like the people’. Eating in a revolutionary manner meant eating meagrely, out of respect for the peasants’ poverty, even if plenty of food were available. Dressing in a revolutionary manner meant that everyone without exception, including Pol himself, should wear black peasant clothes, with a red-and-white checkered
krama
around the neck and sandals cut from car tyres. Men wore Chinese-style peaked caps, and women had their hair severely bobbed. Thiounn Thioeunn’s wife, Mala, remembered that when she and her husband left for the Special Zone in January 1971, the first thing she did, after depositing the family jewellery with her sister in Phnom Penh, was to equip herself with the regulation black trousers and jacket. ‘They told us it was safer like that, because you couldn’t be seen from the air. If you lay on the ground, the spotter planes thought you were a burnt log,’ she recalled. ‘So we all became crow-people.’
By the beginning of 1972, relations with the Vietnamese were going downhill again. Hou Yuon dated the change to the end of the previous year.
The key factor was the increase in the military strength of the Khmers Rouges. With 35,000 men under arms, clashes with Vietnamese units were inevitably more frequent than when there were only a tenth of that number. As the CPK forces grew more confident of their ability to handle the war on their own, pressure increased for the
disbandment
of the remaining Khmer-Vietnamese mixed units and for the Khmers Rumdoh (Liberated Khmers) — the ‘Sihanoukist’ troops trained by the Vietnamese in the early months of the war — to be brought under Khmer Rouge command. Officially, relations were still close, but with an undertone of mistrust. In the summer of 1971, the Vietnamese had proposed a second Indochinese summit as a follow-up to the Canton meeting a year earlier. Pol had refused, seeing it as another attempt by Hanoi to dominate the Lao
and Khmer junior partners’. ‘There was no [open] conflict with Vietnam’, an Eastern Zone official recalled, ‘but [we] were watching each other very closely.’ Non Suon quoted Vorn Vet as saying in the autumn of 1971 that when problems arose with Vietnamese units, ‘avoid using arms if possible . . . Try to use political methods.’
In 1972, liaison offices were set up at district and regional level, answering to a special bureau at Pol’s headquarters, codenamed D-3, to provide a mechanism to resolve disputes and reduce friction. Then, after a series of allegedly ‘spontaneous’ anti-Vietnamese demonstrations, new regulations were introduced requiring Viet Cong and North Vietnamese units to be billeted well away from Khmer population centres, to give advance notice of troop movements, and to produce passes, signed by both the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge commands, whenever they travelled through Khmer Rouge territory. An internal Eastern Zone directive justified the new restrictions but acknowledged that the fault was not all on one side:
Some Vietnamese [soldiers] have no papers, and don’t want to submit to our checkpoints for fear they will be arrested or have their guns confiscated. So they threaten our sentries . . . They behave aggressively because they are frightened [and] they think our sentries are interfering with their freedom of movement . . . [But] the real problem is that there is too much coming and going [which] gives . . . the enemy an opportunity to infiltrate the liberated zones. . .
If two or more Vietnamese soldiers wish to pass [a checkpoint], so long as one has a Khmer
laissez-passer
all should be allowed to go through. They should not be obstructed or arrested . . . The Khmer pass must be printed in bold characters; handwritten or typewritten passes are not valid . . . Glued to the back of the Cambodian paper, there should be a pass from the Vietnamese Command which must specify the exact number of weapons the unit is carrying.
NB: It must be noted that one reason for the continuous, successive, and more and more numerous incidents which are chipping away at Khmer-Vietnamese solidarity in a number of localities is that our side keeps making mischief by stealing the Vietnamese troops’ rifles and ammunition.
By the beginning
of 1972, Vietnamese main-force divisions had started pulling out of Cambodia. It was later claimed that they had been forced to withdraw and that their expulsion had been decided by the CPK at the highest level. This was untrue. They left of their own accord — indeed, according to Vietnamese documents, over the Cambodian leadership’s objections — because they were needed for the offensive against Saigon and because, in Hanoi’s judgement, the Khmers Rouges could now cope on their own.
Their departure should have eased the strains. It did not.
Over the next two years, the CPK imposed ever tighter controls on Vietnamese troops who sought sanctuary in Cambodian territory; on the amount of food the ‘Vietnamese friends’ could purchase from Khmer villages; and, eventually, on Vietnamese civilian refugees living in the border areas who, ‘to protect the Cambodian revolution’ — in other words, to deprive the Viet Cong of a support base among sympathetic compatriots living on Cambodian soil — were ordered to return to their homes in South Vietnam. The directives were worded with care. ‘We must not resolve these problems by violence, but by lawful means’, one typical CPK document declared. ‘We must be calm, just and patient.’ Vietnamese settlers were to be allowed to harvest the rice they had planted (but not to use this as an excuse for delaying their departure unreasonably) and attempts to confiscate their belongings or to force them to sell their livestock were forbidden. None the less the sense was clear: the Khmers Rouges, now the dominant military force in the ‘liberated zones’, were
reasserting sovereignty
over their own territory.
In the same vein, the Khmer Viet Minh ‘regroupees’ who had returned via the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1970 and 1971 were increasingly viewed as a potential Vietnamese fifth column. ‘[They] have lost their national character,’ Pol wrote. ‘They’ve been spoiled, and some have political problems.’ Khmer Rouge cadres were scandalised by the returnees’ enthusiasm for taking new Cambodian wives when they already had families in Vietnam and began speaking of them disparagingly as ‘Khmers in conical hats’, an allusion to the headgear worn by Vietnamese peasants. From early 1972 some of the Hanoi Khmers were discreetly removed from sensitive positions, especially in the Special Zone and the South-West, to be given lower-ranking posts or sent to ‘reforge themselves’ through manual labour. Although there was no general purge — transfers were made on a case-by-case basis — it prompted a number of defections by former Khmer Viet Minh, who either crossed the lines to join the government side or made their way back to Hanoi, thereby reinforcing the CPK leaders’ doubts about the group’s reliability.