of the deportees had reached the countryside empty-handed, Khieu Samphân explained, adding with evident satisfaction, ‘The few belongings [they] were able to carry with them will be worn out or used up within two or
three years.’ Indeed, it had been to limit the amount they could carry with them that people had been ordered to leave at such short notice in the first place. But in all public pronouncements, these strategic aims were passed over in silence.
Thus the new regime began with a lie, and lying would remain one of its defining characteristics. After April 1975, nothing the Cambodian leaders said could ever be taken at face value. They lied to hide unpleasant truths; they lied because they could not be bothered to remember what had really happened; they lied by mistake, by accident, out of laziness, or for no discernible reason at all. The lie became an instrument of rule, enveloping policy in a miasma of uncertainty, secrecy and dissimulation.
But in the case of the evacuation, behind the lies stood a truth. It was not, as many deportees alleged afterwards, the first step in a process deliberately designed to exterminate an entire class, whether town-dwellers in general or intellectuals in particular. Some Khmer Rouge soldiers and grass-roots cadres interpreted it that way in their dealings with individual deportees, and in a society where power and powerlessness are traditionally viewed as reflecting merit or the lack of it in a previous life, and therefore ineluctable, they had the latitude to do so. But it was never CPK policy. Pol’s aim was to plunge the country into an inferno of revolutionary change where, certainly, old ideas and those who refused to abandon them would perish in the flames, but from which Cambodia itself would emerge, strengthened and purified, as a paragon of communist virtue.
The goal was not to destroy but to transmute. The evacuation, Pol wrote later, was ‘an
extraordinary measure
. . . that one does not find in the revolution of any other country’. It was the nub of the Party’s political and economic strategy, which was then being elaborated at a series of Standing Committee meetings held first in the railway station and, subsequently, at the former republican Finance Ministry, a sprawling complex of office buildings a couple of hundred yards to the south, where Pol moved his headquarters in early May.
When the full leadership met at the Silver Pagoda soon afterwards to discuss the new guidelines, they decided to give absolute priority to raising farm production. ‘
Agriculture is the key
both to nation-building and to national defence,’ Pol declared. ‘We must take the measure of this problem. Understanding it properly will show us the road to follow and enable us to make quick progress.’ It was agreed that the overall goal should be to attain 70 to 80 per cent farm mechanisation in five to ten years; and to build on that foundation a modern industrial base in fifteen to twenty years.
To achieve this the new Cambodia would rely essentially on its own resources.
Foreign assistance was not completely ruled out, but it was seen as intrinsically pernicious. Already as a student in Paris, Pol had written that ‘[he] who seeks aid from France will have to pay tribute to France’. Sihanouk’s experience with the Americans had confirmed that belief. ‘If we go out and
beg for help
we would certainly obtain some,’ he told the Standing Committee, ‘but this would affect our political line.’ He was equally wary of foreign imports, which, he argued, risked blunting the country’s drive for autonomous development: ‘Imported iron would not provide mastery. Buying from others would conflict with our own strategic plans . . . If we . . . [take that route], there’s no way of knowing when we shall have our own industry.’
There was also the matter of face. After the communist victory, Western aid organisations in Thailand waited in vain for authorisation to fly in relief supplies following the end of the US airlift of rice. ‘We had to . . .
preserve our independence
and our dignity without asking for help from any other country,’ Ieng Sary explained. In fact, substantial food aid did come in from China, but it was never publicly acknowledged. The meagre rations provided to the deportees during the exodus from the towns and their first months in the rural areas came mainly from strategic stockpiles which the Khmers Rouges themselves had established in the ‘liberated areas’ in 1974 and from what remained of the US supplies provided to Lon Nol.
The case for autarky had been made by Khieu Samphân in his doctoral thesis presented at the Sorbonne in 1959. ‘International integration,’ he had written, ‘is the root cause of the under-development of the Khmer economy.’ Foreign aid made the country dependent on world markets, over which Cambodia had no control because they were dominated by foreign interests. Foreign trade drove local entrepreneurs out of business by flooding the market with cheap imports. Autarky, or ‘self-conscious autonomous development’, as Samphân preferred to call it, was therefore an objective necessity. To bring that about, it was necessary to restrict free trade and to redefine the relationship between the individual and the state:
Individuals are grouped
in nations with whose prosperity they are closely associated [and they] cannot separate their fate from that of the nation to which they belong . . .
The fundamental fact which economists ought to take into consideration is therefore not the individual but the nation
[emphasis in the original].
The greater the reduction in the number of individuals engaged in general social organisation, the larger will be the number of people who can contribute to production and the faster the nation will acquire wealth . . .
A rational ordering of society must therefore strive to restrict unproductive activity so as to employ the maximum number of people in production.
Among the ‘unproductive activities’ Samphân identified were commerce and the government bureaucracy.
Hou Yuon, as a doctoral student in France, had put forward similar ideas. But it would be wrong to see in those early writings a
blueprint
for the economic system that the Khmers Rouges introduced in Cambodia in 1975. Both men stressed the role of technology, which was marginal to Pol’s vision, and Samphân even argued that Cambodia needed a form of ‘autonomous national capitalism’. Yuon insisted on gradualism in developing collective practices. None the less, their theses provided the stuff of debate among Cambodian radicals in the 1950s and 1960s, and many of the key concepts of the Khmer Rouge experiment – economic primacy for the nation rather than the individual; a conscious decision to turn inward and sever foreign relations; and a radical restructuring of society to maximise agricultural production – can be traced back to the discussions that took place at that time. Such a programme would entail ‘a step backwards’, Samphân acknowledged, but it was the only way to build the nation’s productive forces for the future.
In the mid-1970s this hermetic approach to development did not seem nearly as outlandish as it would in the internet-linked, globalised world of thirty years later.
A group of Western social scientists, asked in 1976 to draw up a ‘blueprint for the future of Thailand’, proposed a programme with more than a passing resemblance to the radical measures then under way next door: relocation of the surplus urban population to the countryside; confiscation of unproductive wealth from the rich; and increased investment in agriculture. David Chandler, the doyen of Western historians of Cambodia, wrote the same year that ‘autarky
makes sense
’. Joel Charny, an American aid expert who headed Oxfam’s operations in South-East Asia, declared that Pol’s rural development plans – digging irrigation canals, clearing new land for rice and mixing biofertilisers, with minimal use of fossil fuels and virtually no imports — ‘
were they found
in a consultant’s report, would win the approval of a wide cross-section of the [Western] development community’.
None of these authors was remotely left-wing. All were acutely aware that the conventional development strategies of the 1950s and ‘60s had failed Cambodia – Sihanouk’s emphasis on prestige projects and turnkey industrial plants had been, in the words of his French adviser, Charles Meyer, practically an
object lesson
in how not to go about it — and they were willing to look with a new eye at radically different approaches.
The strategy mapped out by the CPK Standing Committee in May 1975, however, posed an insuperable problem for even the most sympathetic foreign observer. It was not so much a matter of its content, even though this was far more extreme and unrelenting than anything Khieu Samphân and Hou Yuon had envisaged. The problem lay in the way it was to be implemented — ‘
not irrational
or Utopian’, as a French specialist put it, just ‘cruel and inhuman’.
What Pol and his colleagues approved that spring was a slave state, the first in modern times.
The term is emotive and requires definition. Stalin, Hitler and a plethora of Third World despots enslaved their peoples metaphorically by depriving them of basic rights and freedoms. Pol enslaved the Cambodian people literally, by incarcerating them within a social and political structure, a ‘prison without walls’, as refugees would later call it, where they were required to execute without payment whatever work was assigned to them for as long as the cadres ordered it, failing which they risked punishment ranging from the withholding of rations to death. Food and clothing were, in theory, provided by the state. But there were no wages. In the Soviet Union during the period of ‘War Communism’ in the early 1920s, in the Yan’an period in China a decade later, or even in contemporary North Korea, workers were paid at least a pittance. No matter how paltry the sum, it meant they had some measure of choice, even if it amounted to no more than whether to buy a packet of cigarettes or a tablet of soap once a month. There was a minuscule space for the exercise of free will. In Khmer Rouge Cambodia, there was none — which marks a qualitative difference that only those who have experienced it can comprehend. Not only were there no wages, there were no markets. With time, as the system grew more rigid, even barter was discouraged. Like true slaves, the inhabitants of Pol’s Cambodia were deprived of all control over their own destinies — unable to decide what to eat, when to sleep, where to live or even whom to marry.
The Khmer Rouge leaders, Pol first and foremost, would have objected to that description. And it is true that, in some of his speeches, he called on local cadres ‘
boldly to encourage
democracy’. But by that he meant merely that ‘the masses’ should be urged to give the regime active support, rather than ‘simply performing their tasks like machines’. It is also true that the way the new system was interpreted varied hugely from zone to zone, region to region and even village to village. In some areas, cadres were lenient; in others, harsh. But in both cases the people — the slaves — had no say in the matter. They merely endured whatever degree of leniency or harshness the ‘upper levels’ decided to mete out.
Why did the Cambodian communists institute such a system?
The motive was not revenge against a particular class or group, for even though the vindictiveness of individual cadres affected the way the policy was applied, the stratification of society under the Khmer Rouge was theoretically fluid.
From 1975 onwards, all those living in rural co-operatives, in other words, virtually the entire population, were reclassified into three groups: full-rights members, candidates and depositees. The first, usually poor and lower-middle peasants, were entitled to full rations; to hold political posts in the co-operative; to join the army and to apply for Party membership. Candidates were next in line for rations and could hold low-level administrative positions. Depositees were ‘
last on the distribution lists, first on the execution lists, and had no political rights
’. Initially the first two categories consisted exclusively of ‘base people’, who had lived in the ‘liberated areas’ before the communist victory, while urban deportees, or ‘new people’, all became depositees. Previous status also played a part, and in many cases former rich peasants were lumped together with the ‘new people’ in the lowest category. But the latter could in theory become candidates, and they in turn could become full-rights members, if they showed appropriate zeal for the revolutionary cause.
In practice, the new tripartite division was introduced unevenly — in some areas it was already in force in 1975, elsewhere not until 1977 or later — and the basic dichotomy remained between ‘base’ and ‘new’ people. The difference in status between these two groups was immense, especially in the first year of Khmer Rouge rule. The ‘base people’ could grow their own food to supplement communal rations and, if they offended against revolutionary discipline, were often let off lightly or given the benefit of the doubt. ‘New people’, by contrast, were always suspected of the worst. Pol himself urged local cadres to tread a careful line between, on the one hand, ‘treating everyone indiscriminately, without reference to the positions, principles and viewpoint of the Party’, and on the other, ‘treating all new people as enemies’. But that was asking too much of the poorly educated peasants who made up the village administrations. In many areas ‘new people’ continued to be viewed, as they had been during the exodus, as ‘prisoners of war’. Unsurprisingly, most concluded that the system was deliberately designed to exterminate them, leaving the ‘base people’ as the country’s sole class. In fact that was never the intention. What occurred was rather a dysfunction of the Khmer Rouge polity, one of many that prevented Pol’s vision of the future ever being carried out and which were intrinsic to it, for they stemmed from a fundamental incompatibility between the vision and Cambodian reality.