During the winter Pol travelled back to the Chinit river base to confer with Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary, who had arrived from Beijing. While he was there, twenty-five Khmer Rouge battalions stealthily took up position around Oudong, the former capital, north-west of Phnom Penh. The assault force included two all-women battalions, the only ones in the communist army. They had an unhappy record, for, as one cadre explained, ‘the moment it was known they were there, they attracted the enemy like magnets.’ By the time the war ended, they had each lost 60 per cent dead.
Oudong was attacked at 3 a.m. on Sunday, March 3 1974. By morning, most of the defenders had been driven back to a narrow perimeter centred on a temple south-east of the town. After a three-week siege, the redoubt fell and several thousand government soldiers and civilian refugees were massacred. It was said afterwards that many ‘turned their [guns] on their own families’ — the eternal camp-followers of Cambodian military campaigns — ‘before killing themselves to avoid capture and torture’. The population of the town, some 20,000 people, was rounded up and marched to the forest of Palhel, an uninhabited area to the east of Chrok Sdêch, where Mok had a military base, before being resettled in co-operatives in the Special Zone and the South-West. Officials and uniformed soldiers were separated from the rest, led away and killed.
The resistance did not have everything its own way. South-Western Zone troops laid siege to Kampot but were beaten back. Government forces eventually recaptured what was left of Oudong, now an empty wasteland of razed buildings and burnt earth. Some 40,000 villagers in the Northern Zone, driven to desperation by the harshness of the regime imposed by Ke Pauk and Koy Thuon, took advantage of a thrust by government troops to flee the ‘liberated areas’ en masse and take refuge in the town of Kompong Thom. Their accounts of the brutality of Khmer Rouge cadres, of forced labour, hunger and executions, foreshadowed the regime that would descend on the whole country little more than a year later. For a few weeks, republican forces fought with renewed vigour. But then the grim images of life on the other side were rationalised away as refugees’ exaggerations and quietly forgotten.
At the end of March
, Pol left Chrok Sdêch to visit the battlefield at Kampot before travelling on to Kep, which had been captured six months before. It is an area of pristine, white-sand beaches and limpid turquoise water, formerly the summer playground of the Cambodian elite. Now it was totally deserted. To mark the victory at Oudong, Pol knotted a
krama
around his waist and, like Mao signalling the start of the Cultural Revolution by swimming across the Yangtse, plunged into the sea. His
montagnard
bodyguards had never seen the ocean before and waded in
uneasily after him, holding their AK-47S above their heads. It was the month of his forty-ninth birthday. The vice around Phnom Penh was slowly tightening.
The war remained Pol’s chief concern in 1974, but it was not the only one. Although theoretically Cambodia was still in the midst of what Marxists termed a national democratic revolution’ — which required the broadest possible united front to overthrow the right-wing government and install a progressive regime — Pol’s mind was beginning to turn to the next stage, the ‘socialist revolution’, whose purpose was to transform root and branch the nature of Cambodian society. Collectivisation and the elimination of private commerce were already under way. Now, he decided, the time had come to start speaking openly of socialism as Angkar’s political goal, to launch a secret campaign to oppose the influence of Sihanouk and to sharpen the ‘consciousness and revolutionary stand’ of every Party member in preparation for the day when the new policies could be put into effect nationwide.
In September, Pol summoned the Central Committee to the village of Meakk, in Prek Kok commune, eight miles south of the old Northern Zone base at Dângkda, for its annual plenum. There, at his urging, the assembled CPK leaders took three crucial decisions, which together helped to define the nature of the Khmer Rouge system over the next four years.
The first concerned the population of the towns.
As early as 1971, Pol and others had been struck by the speed with which the urban centres in the ‘liberated zones’, given half a chance, reverted to their bad old, capitalist ways. In March that year, Pol’s former companion at Krâbao, Yun Soeun, had been dismayed to discover during a visit to Kratie:
The town market
was even more crowded than before liberation . . . It was full of people at every hour of the day and night . . . There were Khmers, Chinese and Vietnamese merchants, buying and selling. People came on bicycles, on motorbikes and up the river by motor-boat. At the port, boats were coming and going all the time. There were drinking shops, brothels and gambling dens, and many cases of robbery . . .
Two years later, Pol wrote subsequently, nothing had changed. The merchants ‘did not want to work with us . . . At first, it wasn’t our intention to ban them. But . . . they cheated us all the time . . . In Kratie . . . we could not control the population because the traders . . . controlled the distribution of goods . . . They were arrogant, and did not want to subordinate themselves to us.’ The only answer, he concluded, was ‘to send them to work in the fields’. Otherwise, ‘if the result of so many sacrifices was
that the capitalists remain in control, what was the point of the revolution?’ Kratie was evacuated in the second half of 1973. At about the same time, Khmer Rouge forces attacking Kompong Cham drove 15,000 town-dwellers from their homes and forced them to accompany them back into the ‘liberated zones’. Some died of hunger and from bombings along the way, but most were resettled in villages where, as one peasant put it, ‘they lived a normal life’. Finally, in March 1974, came the evacuation of Oudong. According to Pol’s aide, Phi Phuon:
It worked well
in the sense that there weren’t any big problems [for us] in resettling the evacuees from Oudong in the countryside and, on their side, the town-dwellers didn’t cause any special difficulties either. It was a radical solution designed to foil any attempt by the enemy to destabilise our forces — and at the same time it was an internal measure, because for our cadres, if they were living close together with the urban population, there was a risk that they would be politically and ideologically corrupted. They might be influenced by the new urban environment . . . If the town-dwellers were evacuated, that risk was avoided. You must understand that the final goal was the liberation of Phnom Penh, and to that end we had to sharpen our political and ideological stance. Was it so our cadres would avoid ‘the sugar-coated bullets of the bourgeoisie?’ Yes!
There were other, less clearly defined reasons, too.
All through history
, peasant revolutions have been characterised by resentment of the cities. Not just in Asia but in early-twentieth-century Europe, men like the Bulgarian Agrarian Party leader, Aleksandr Stamboliski, ‘hated the town and both its categories of inhabitant, bourgeois and industrial workers alike’. Populists in Serbia, in Poland and Russia held similar views. The CPK did not put it in quite those terms. But the wellsprings of its action — the peasant resentments which, in a primitive agricultural society like that of Cambodia, provided the only possible motor for revolution — were exactly the same. The town-dwellers were to return to the land to reforge themselves, to reconnect with their Khmer roots. It was a trial, a rite of passage, from which they were expected to emerge strengthened, purified of the filth that came from city life.
Whatever the precise mix of arguments, the outcome was a unanimous decision that Phnom Penh and all other Cambodian towns should be evacuated as soon as they were ‘liberated’ and the population sent off to start a new life in the villages.
The second issue before the Committee concerned money.
A year earlier, shortly after Sihanouk’s visit to the maquis, it had been agreed that a
new currency
should be printed for use in the ‘liberated zones’. The previous December, Ieng Sary had brought sample notes from
Beijing for Pol’s approval. Thereafter, the use of government currency had been gradually phased out in the communist-controlled areas and replaced temporarily by a barter system with a view to introducing the new, revolutionary money by the end of 1974. The Central Committee did not call into question the principle of these decisions, but decided that the new currency should be put into circulation only after the whole country had been brought under communist control.
The third and, in many ways, the most difficult problem had to do with Party unity.
Since 1968, when the infant Cambodian communist movement had officially launched its armed struggle, the different groups and patronage networks that made up the CPK had made a real effort to come together. But it did not last. Five years later, cracks were appearing in the façade of Party brotherhood. In the Northern Zone, the military commander, Ke Pauk, a former Issarak, was constantly at odds with the Zone Secretary, Koy Thuon, who came from an intellectual background. There were similar, though more muted strains between Ruos Nhim in the North-West and his military commander, Kong Sophal. But Pauk and Sophal enjoyed Pol’s favour; their civilian counterparts did not.
In the Eastern Zone, where Vietnamese influence had traditionally been strongest, the problems were of a different order. Men like Chan Chakrey, a flamboyant ex-monk who became commander of the Khmer Rouge 170th Division, made no secret of their preference for a less extreme communist system, one more tolerant of human failings. That was true, too, of the former Pracheachon leader Non Suon, who watched with dismay as members of his group were relegated to minor posts in the new CPK hierarchy. The conflict, dormant since the mid-1960s, between the ‘thatched huts’ and ‘brick houses’ — the former Issaraks with their roots in the ‘nine years’ war’ from 1945 to 1954, and the urban-educated radicals like Pol and Ieng Sary — came to the fore again. Adding to the tension, Hou Yuon, who never minced words, had begun openly to criticise certain CC decisions, often giving voice to what others felt but dared not say. In 1974, Yuon accused the Standing Committee of cheating the peasantry by refusing to honour IOUs issued for requisitioned rice. He told Pol and Nuon Chea that the co-operative system, of which he was nominally in charge, was being imposed too fast and allegedly warned: ‘If you go on like this, I give your regime three years. Then it will collapse.’
*
Yuon was a jovial, open
man, ‘a good leader . . . popular among his comrades and the population at large’. His loyalty to the cause, and his friendship with Pol, dating from their Paris days, saved him from real trouble. None the less, he was sent to do
penance
planting vegetables at an isolated base called K-6 in the Chinit river headquarters area and thereafter remained under a political cloud.
Matters came
to a head in the South-Western Zone where there had been a long-standing feud between Mok, the Zone Secretary, and the Koh Kong leader, Prasith.
Ostensibly it was over ‘revolutionary morality’: Prasith and another senior Zone official, Chou Chet, were both notorious skirt-chasers. Mok was a puritan. Chou Chet made his peace with the Zone Secretary. Prasith did not. But there were also deeper issues. Prasith, who had joined the Central Committee in 1960, had been passed over eight years later when Mok had been appointed Zone chief. Since that time Prasith, who had a strong following among the peasantry in the Thai border area, had manoeuvred against Mok to maintain his independence. To what was essentially a struggle for power were then added political differences. Prasith was a moderate in Khmer Rouge terms — ‘a gentle, simple, methodical man, a good organiser . . . who mixed easily with the people’, as Phi Phuon described him. He ran Koh Kong on more liberal lines than other South-Western Zone regions: private trade was permitted until the beginning of 1974 and villagers were allowed to travel back and forth across the border with Thailand. Mok, by contrast, like Ke Pauk in the North, enforced Standing Committee directives on collectivisation and the suppression of private property with the utmost vigour.
Early in 1974
, Mok went to Pol, claiming that Prasith had been in contact with In Tam, whom Lon Nol had put in charge of a programme to encourage Khmer Rouge cadres and their troops to defect. The allegation was almost certainly untrue, as were Mok’s other claims — that Prasith, an ethnic Thai, was working for the Bangkok government and the CIA.
The latter charge was less outlandish than it might seem. From the late 1950s on, Sihanouk had claimed constantly in speeches and radio broadcasts, sometimes with good reason, that the CIA was working for his downfall, to the point where, to many Khmers, the Agency’s name had become just a synonym for ‘enemy’.
Mok, in particular
, saw CIA agents everywhere.
*
In 1971, he had been convinced that the French archaeologist François Bizot was working for the CIA and had tried to convince Pol and Vorn Vet of his guilt. When Pol had ordered Bizot’s release, Mok flew into
a fury: ‘This fucking Frenchman is CIA,’ he yelled at Vorn and Bizot’s jailer, Deuch. ‘The upper brothers want him freed. But we, who work at the grass-roots, see things better. It’s out of the question to let him go.’ At Vorn’s insistence, Bizot was liberated.
Prasith
was not. Nor apparently was he given any opportunity to state his case. Instead, with Pol’s agreement, Mok’s troops took him into the forest and killed him. His death was followed in April by a purge of ethnic Thai cadres in Koh Kong who were suspected, by virtue of their nationality, of being in sympathy with him.
Prasith was not the first CPK cadre to be liquidated. Mok had already eliminated a number of lower-ranking officials. Others in the East and the North-West had been killed in local power struggles. Some of the Hanoi returnees had also been executed, though most were still in detention camps, ostensibly undergoing ‘re-education’.