Barely five months after the fall of Saigon, it marked the parting of the ways.
Le Duan returned home in a cold fury, having refused to issue a joint communiqué and, in what one Chinese official called ‘an extraordinary gesture for a fraternal Party leader’, cancelled the customary return banquet for his hosts. In October he travelled to Moscow, where the Russians promised three billion dollars for Vietnam’s five-year plan. Beijing and Hanoi were slowly moving towards a collision course in which Pol’s Cambodia would play the starring role.
It did not seem like that at the time. To Pol and his colleagues, their first year in power had begun rather well. The alliance with China was solidly in place. After his stay in Beijing, Pol had paid a secret five-day visit to North Korea, where President Kim Il Sung had promised to send aid experts to help with agricultural and hydroelectric projects. Through China’s good offices, relations with Thailand had stabilised. Talks between provincial officials on the border during the summer were followed by a visit by Ieng Sary to Bangkok, which led to the setting up of a permanent liaison office near Poipet. Such incidents as did occur were the result of fishing disputes or the work of the Khmer Serei and other exile groups, and after the Cambodians had mined the land border, even that irritant diminished. Overtures were made to Laos, which sent its Foreign Minister, Phoune Sipraseuth, to Phnom Penh to discuss the possibility of using the Cambodian port of Kompong Som. Even with Vietnam, relations were correct. There were minor incidents in the North-East, where Vietnamese units which had been guarding the Ho Chi Minh Trail delayed their departure longer than the Cambodians would have wished. But by the following spring Pol felt able to report that the situation on all the country’s borders had ‘very
greatly eased
’.
Pol stayed on in China to have a medical check-up after the rest of the delegation had left. As well as malaria, he was plagued by gastric ailments. So it was not until mid-July that he flew back to Phnom Penh to begin work on the nuts and bolts of putting the new administration together.
The first task was to restructure the army.
On July 22, Pol addressed a unification rally, attended by 3,000 soldiers, followed by a military parade at a stadium near the former French Embassy Flanked by the seven Zone secretaries — Koy Thuon, Mok, Ney Sarann, Ruos Nhim, So Phim, Vorn Vet and Chou Chet (in charge of a new Western Zone) — he announced the formal incorporation of their forces into a national Revolutionary Army, headed by Son Sen, Chief of the General Staff. They had dared to wage ‘a struggle completely different from that of revolutions elsewhere in the world’, he declared. Now that they had won, their main task was to ensure security in the capital and to guard against espionage and internal saboteurs.
It was all just a little bit too late. If the CPK Military Committee, which Pol headed, had been able to impose its authority on the forces of the Zone commanders a year or two earlier, many of the problems which followed might have been avoided. But Pol, unlike Mao, had never led his men into battle. He was a political, not a military strategist. Even Mao had taken ten years to unite the People’s Liberation Army, which then fought for twelve more years before achieving victory In Cambodia, victory had come far faster. As a result, the CPK, in appearance, at least, seemed to be united, but the army, from which its power derived, was not. In Phnom Penh, the different sectors of the city were guarded by units which, while nominally under unified command, continued to answer to divisional commanders from different Zones. Pol never succeeded in creating a military force which was loyal to him personally and, in the end, that would prove his undoing.
The matter of forming a new government was also troublesome.
In theory the GRUNC, headed by Penn Nouth, continued to govern Cambodia. But Nouth himself and his Foreign Minister, Sarin Chhak, were still in Beijing. Two other ministers —
Hou Yuon
(Interior) and Norodom Phurissara (Justice) — had been rusticated just before the fall of Phnom Penh. Phurissara had been sent to reform himself through manual labour in a remote village in Preah Vihear, near the border with Thailand. Hou Yuon, who was now seen as excessively liberal, sat out the first weeks of ‘liberation’ in a deserted camp near Oudong. After being allowed to spend a day visiting Phnom Penh at the end of May, he was put aboard a river steamer for Stung Trang, on the Mekong. There he was held with two other Party miscreants — Ping Sây and another former Cercle Marxiste member, Chhorn Hay — under a loose form of house arrest.
*
Of the eight
remaining cabinet posts, half existed only on paper. Khieu Samphân was no more responsible for Defence than the Western Zone Secretary, Chou Chet, was for Religious Affairs. They were ghost portfolios, announced in January 1975, four months before victory, to make it appear that the Khmers Rouges had a viable government-in-waiting.
The first step towards installing a new order was taken in August, when three additional vice-premiers were appointed: Vorn Vet (Transport and Industry); Ieng Sary (Foreign Affairs) and Son Sen (Defence). But then the process stalled. There was too much uncertainty over the future role of Prince Sihanouk, whiling away his days at the palatial home Kim Il Sung had built for him in Pyongyang, awaiting the call to return; over the choice of Prime Minister; and over domestic policy, which had been left in abeyance during the summer while the Standing Committee concentrated on relations with China and Vietnam.
Pol spent August travelling in the South-West and the Eastern Zone to see for himself how the rural areas were coping with the flood of urban deportees. Then, in mid-September, he convened a Central Committee plenum in Phnom Penh, at which he laid out in detail his vision of Cambodia’s future:
We must fix
quotas for [agricultural] production and for the distribution of the resultant capital at all levels — the villages, the districts, the regions and the zones . . . Part should go . . . to the people for their food and to exchange with the State for medicines and other articles of prime necessity. Part should go to the State, to be used to improve the people’s living standards, for defence and for national construction . . . Later, [when] cooperatives have been established everywhere . . . they will take on the task of building schools, dispensaries and workshops . . . The districts can keep a little capital, but not much, just enough to coordinate the labour force. The regions can have a bit more, to build hospitals of some size, to buy medicines, and to undertake agricultural research and maintain a corps of technicians . . .
[To] develop public health [we should] both use traditional medicine [and] buy modern medicines abroad in exchange for [exports of] rice and rubber . . . [We must] eradicate malaria . . . There are other illnesses, too, to fight, like leprosy, tuberculosis and goitre. For each illness, we must work out a strategy.
We must set up creches and kindergartens to free the energies of our women . . . We must think of the development of education and culture.
The State must provide schools, exercise books and pencils. Don’t forget that later on we will need more advanced technology. But scientific and technical education must obey the general principle that technicians and scientists must temper themselves first in the movement of the masses.
The basic production quota, Pol announced, to be applied throughout the country, was
three tons
of paddy, or unmilled rice, per hectare.
*
On paper this was not totally unreasonable, at least as a long-term goal. Sihanouk himself had proposed a target of
two tons
per hectare, and experimental farms had had no difficulty in reaching 3 or 4 tons. But in a country where historically yields had averaged just over one ton of paddy per hectare, among the lowest in Asia, it was still a tall order. Moreover, to achieve it would require massive use of chemical fertiliser, which was exactly what Cambodia did not have: instead, Pol proposed using ‘animal manure, alluvial soils, earth from anthills, bat guano and so on’, which while ecologically sound was incapable of producing the yields he demanded. In that contradiction lay one of the major causes of the vicious circle of repression, famine and more repression that would eventually bring the regime down.
Another equally fateful decision was taken by the delegates that month: not to use money.
A year earlier, at Meakk, the Central Committee had agreed that the new currency, printed in China, should be issued as soon as possible after the fall of Phnom Penh. In January 1975, Ping Sây had travelled with a delegation bringing wooden crates full of the new banknotes down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Shortly afterwards he and Hou Yuon attended a meeting of the National Bank Preparatory Committee, chaired by Khieu Samphân, at B-20, a camp near Pol’s old headquarters on the Chinit river.
In May
, the work conference at the Silver Pagoda which approved the new strategic line of advancing directly to communism, decided that the riel should be put progressively into circulation, with appropriate measures to guarantee its value, in order, as Pol put it, ‘to demonstrate to the people the reality of our state power’.
Non Suon
, the former Pracheachon leader, was appointed National Bank Chairman with a brief to get the new system up and running.
That summer
, posters showing the new bills were sent to the provinces along with supplies of notes pending final approval from Phnom Penh. In August, Suon was succeeded by a young regional commander from the Northern Zone, Pich Chheang, who had married Pol’s former cook, Moeun. Chheang started a training programme for sixty peasant youths, who were to run the bank’s branches in the regions and, as a trial
run, at the beginning of September, allowed the new currency to circulate in his home area, Region 41 of the Northern Zone, north-west of Kompong Cham.
By then, however, a number of influential CPK leaders were questioning the wisdom of these moves. Pol’s aide, Phi Phuon, remembered informal meetings of the Standing Committee at the Silver Pagoda in late August where Mok, in particular, spoke out against the use of money:
Mok favoured
a barter system. He said some regions were rich in rice, others had different products: the answer was a system of exchange. He also said if there were no money, it would remove the problem of corruption and curtail the activities of enemy agents. ‘When a wound is not yet healed,’ he said, ‘you shouldn’t push a stick into it. You must leave it alone, otherwise it will get worse.’ So Phim and Koy Thuon supported him. They agreed with his views.
Pol, too, found Mok’s arguments convincing. Beyond practical considerations — the regime’s ‘lack of experience’, as he put it, a reference to the difficulty of turning semi-literate young men with politically correct, poor peasant origins into capable bank tellers — there were more important ideological reasons. The question of whether or not to use money, he told the Central Committee, concerned the essence of the Khmer Rouge state:
The State
is an organism whose purpose is to maintain the power of one class by exercising dictatorship over others in all domains . . . But the State is also an instrument that creates a privileged social stratum which, as it develops, becomes cut off from the proletariat and from labour. This has happened, for example, in the Soviet Union . . . and [to some extent] in [North] Korea and in China. In conformity with Marxist-Leninist principles, it is necessary to . . . reduce progressively this defect which is the State until it is extinguished completely, giving place to [a system of] self-management of factories by the proletariat and of agriculture by the peasants. The privileged upper stratum will then disappear altogether.
Up to now, the fact we do not use money has greatly reduced private property and thus has promoted the overall trend towards the collective. If we start using money again, it will bring back sentiments of private property and drive the individual away from the collective. Money is an instrument which creates privilege and power. Those who possess it can use it to bribe cadres . . . [and] to undermine our system. If we allow sentiments of private property to develop, little by little people’s thoughts will turn only to ways of amassing private property . . . If we take that route, then in one year, or 10 or 20 years, what will become of our Cambodian society which up to now is so clean?
Money constitutes a danger, both now and in the future. We must not be in a hurry to use it . . . We need to think more deeply about this matter.
On
September 19
, the conference resolved not to issue the new currency, a decision confirmed at the CPK’s Fourth Congress four months later. The supplies of currency which had already been distributed were gathered up and put in storage in Phnom Penh.
The other major theme of the September plenum was the need to improve rural living standards. Manufacturing industry was to concentrate on turning out light industrial goods for daily use — bicycles, clothing, mosquito nets, fishing lines, cigarettes and lighter flints — and simple agricultural machinery. Commerce, in the absence of money, would be limited to barter between co-operatives and the state. Koy Thuon, who had championed this system, was given responsibility for making it work and he and Khieu Samphân drew up a notional price-scale to be used in barter transactions. How well it functioned is another matter. Thiounn Mumm, who had just arrived in Phnom Penh from Beijing, was horrified:
I found myself
in the Ministry of Industry, working under Vorn Vet. What did I see? First of all, there was no administration. The cadres sat outside under a tree. When someone arrived, they’d ask him: ‘What d’you need? You need oil? Go and get it from such-and-such a factory.’ And they’d give him a voucher. They didn’t even keep a copy. Sometimes the man would get to the factory only to be told there wasn’t any oil. No one knew. No accounts were kept!