To the former town-dwellers, adjusting to life in the countryside was even more traumatic than Phnom Penh was for the intellectuals. For both, it was a double blow Physically they were deprived of the creature comforts they had taken for granted throughout their lives. Psychologically they were enslaved, confined within a political and ideological strait-jacket that grew steadily tighter. The deportees were at one end of the Party’s scale of concerns, the intellectuals at the other. But its approach to both was the same.
The physical change was so overwhelming for the ‘new people’ that at first it drowned out every other consideration. Many were terrified. ‘We had the impression,’ one wrote, ‘of having been abandoned in the middle of a hostile land.’ They arrived in villages ‘that seemed frozen in time’, where people still suffered from yaws, dropsy and other diseases which were supposed to have been eradicated from Cambodia decades before. Like the intellectuals, the deportees had to learn everything from the bottom up — to build primitive wooden huts; to plough; to plant vegetables and rice — usually in conditions far harsher than the returned students endured. Like the peasants, they used potash extracted from the cinders of wood fires as a substitute for soap. In the flooded rice-paddies, they wrapped cloths between their legs as protection against minuscule leeches which could enter the penis, the anus or the vagina, causing excruciating pain until, days later, they detached themselves and were flushed out.
That first year
, in most areas — except for parts of the North-West and western Kompong Chhnang, where the distribution system collapsed under the weight of the population increase — food supplies, while meagre, were enough to ward off starvation. Women stopped menstruating, as they did even in Phnom Penh where food was more plentiful; some suffered prolapsed uteruses, and nursing mothers had no milk. Malaria was rife. By the following spring, local cadres were reporting 40 per cent of the population incapacitated by fever. None the less, the deportees foraged for snails and lizards, crabs and spiders, and wild vegetables in the jungle, and bartered for food with the ‘base people’ what remained of the gold and jewellery they had managed to bring with them from the towns. Like the French, who survived the Second World War as well as they did in part because they were close to the soil, urban Khmers were at heart less removed from peasant life than they sometimes tried to pretend, and it stood them in good stead.
In retrospect, one of the most astonishing aspects of the Khmer Rouge period is that so many academics and professional people were able to ‘use the hoe as a long pen and the rice-field as their paper’, as the cadres liked to say, keeping themselves and their families precariously alive. The exceptions were the ‘Chinese’, the Sino-Cambodian businessmen who had no rural roots. They died in larger numbers.
Within this overall context, local variations were extreme. Even in the North-West, where conditions were generally worst, there were villages where the ‘new people’ had as much rice as they could eat — ‘
too much
’, one man remembered. At the same moment, in
Pursat
, thirty miles to the south, others were so desperate for food that cannibalism was rife and a third of the deportees died before the year was out. Local leaders looked after their own: what happened in the next district, the next village, was not their concern. It made a mockery of central directives, as Pol was well aware. ‘It’s impossible to solve problems when walking on a
narrow path
,’ he complained to the Central Committee. But feudalistic, patron-client relationships were too deeply rooted in Cambodian culture for even the Khmers Rouges to change. ‘There was no established rule for the whole country,’ the former government engineer Pin Yathay concluded. ‘Discipline varied at the whim of each village chief There were ‘good’ villages in the worst regions, and ‘bad’ villages in the best.
Hunger was a weapon in the countryside no less than in the re-education camps. Lenin’s dictum, ‘He who does not work, does not eat’, was applied in the Cambodian co-operatives with a literalness the Russians had never dreamed of. In a bad area, a day’s work earned one bowl of watery rice soup; those too ill to work got nothing. Illness itself was often equated with opposition to the regime, or at least a lack of ‘revolutionary consciousness’ which was considered almost as bad, and the rural clinics, where untrained nurses doled out traditional medicines, were no more than charnel-houses.
But hunger, compounded by non-existent health care, was a double-edged sword.
For the local cadres, food was an essential means of control, calibrated by the differing treatment of ‘new’ and ‘base’ people. For the ‘base’ people, life was bearable. The plight of the ‘new people’ was a constant reminder to them of their own relative good fortune, which in turn was designed to incite the former to work harder to reforge themselves, in order to progress from being depositees to candidate or full-rights status with a corresponding improvement in rations. That, at least, was the theory. In practice, it rarely worked that way. The Khmer Rouge system was essentially coercive. Yet at the same time there was a genuine shortage. Even with relief rice from China, grain stockpiles after the war were dangerously low. When
’new people’ starved to death that winter, it was not a matter of policy but because the system had failed.
Pol wanted more, not fewer people. He called for a doubling or tripling of the population, to ‘15 or 20 million people within 10 years’, to implement his plans to make Cambodia prosperous and strong. But how was that to be achieved if women were unable to menstruate because of malnutrition? How could the existing population work effectively if it were half-starved? The
leadership recognised
the problem. Standing Committee resolutions at that time, and Pol’s speeches at closed Party meetings, are full of references to the need to ensure an adequate diet, defined as an average of 500 grams of paddy per person per day. ‘The [
most
] important medicine is food,’ he told a conference in the Western Zone. ‘Resolving the food problem is the key.’ Two months later he made the same point again: ‘We must solve the problem of the people’s livelihood and we must solve it rapidly . . . [Otherwise] contradictions [will] spring up among us.’
But the contradictions were already embedded in the policy. In a period of generalised penury, cadres were expected to ensure a healthy minimum diet for all, while maintaining a hierarchy of rations between ‘new’ and ‘base’ people. This meant guaranteeing that those in responsible positions, who lived apart from the masses — co-operative and district leaders, soldiers, militia and certain other privileged groups, such as railway workers, whose loyalty was crucial to the regime — were fed not merely adequately but well, with meat or fish in addition to rice; yet at the same time retaining the use of hunger as a means of discipline, since there was no obvious alternative.
It added up to so many conflicting imperatives that in practice most cadres opted for the simplest solution: they and the ‘base’ people ate well; the ‘new’ people ate badly; hunger remained a punitive weapon; the death toll from malnutrition and related diseases stayed high; and the health and strength of the ‘new’ people continued to decline.
There was a similar dilemma over how hard people should work, and how much ‘cutting-edge violence’ should be used to make them do so.
The Standing Committee had decreed
one free day
in each ten-day week — a system copied from the French Revolution — and up to fifteen days’ holiday a year. ‘
There’s not enough
food for people to work all the time,’ Pol explained. ‘If a person doesn’t rest, he gets ill. It is a strategic objective to increase the strength of the people. Therefore, leisure should be considered fundamental.’ But in practice the weekly day off, when granted, was devoted to political meetings, and the proposed annual holiday was never implemented.
That left the question of daily work quotas.
If they were set too high, those who failed to meet them were punished,
either by being given extra tasks, or less food, or both, frequently leading to illness and death. But if they were lowered, the targets set by the region and the Zone would not be fulfilled. Grass-roots leaders met this challenge in different ways. Some tried to strike a balance — especially in the Eastern and South-Western Zones; in Kratie; and in the more fertile districts of the North-West. Others resorted to terror. The indiscriminate killing of former republican army officers and senior civil servants which had marked the first months of the regime had stopped during the summer. But in the co-operatives, executions of supposed ‘bad elements’ and others who allegedly violated collective discipline continued. A young village militiaman explained:
Those we surprised
at night in the act of saying bad things, we educated, which means that they worked harder than the others. If they repeated the offence, they were killed with a cudgel or a pickaxe. Then they were buried and that was that . . . Children were also killed if they made a lot of mistakes . . . I agreed with the executions . . . Those who made mistakes had to take responsibility for their errors.
Carried out at night and in secret, they inspired a morbid jingle: ‘Angkar kills but does not explain’. But this method too had a drawback: every person who died was one person less to work.
By the winter of 1975, if not sooner, the mass of the Cambodian population had become, in the eyes of the leadership, digits on a national balance sheet. It was implicit in the menacing
couplet
which the cadres used when a person was about to be killed: ‘To keep you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss’. A villager remembered it as a time when ‘a person’s worth was measured in how many cubic yards of earth he could move’. Like the oxen they were supposed to emulate, people were a commodity to be fed, watered, housed and worked. When they were executed, their clothes were removed by the soldiers and handed on to others to wear; their corpses were often buried beside fields, in the belief that the rotting flesh would fertilise the soil. Those who died in village clinics were cremated and the bone ash used for phosphate. As in death, so also in birth: when women still menstruated, cadres noted the dates of their periods so that their husbands might be brought to sleep with them at the time they were most likely to be fecund, to swell the population.
While life for those in the co-operatives was physically extremely harsh, the indoctrination to which they were subjected was correspondingly mild.
In part this was a conscious decision. At the end of 1975, the CPK’s existence was still secret. Another year would pass before it would be hinted publicly that the mysterious Angkar might in fact be a communist
organisation. Only a third of the co-operatives then had Party branches — total Party membership for the whole country was probably less than 10,000 — and, as Khieu Samphân had noted, the time was not yet ripe for communist ideas to be disseminated openly among the masses.
There were also practical reasons. In the rural areas the aim was not to demolish personality — that treatment was reserved for intellectuals — but to make the deportees shed their bourgeois outlook and think and act as peasants. The nightly lifestyle meetings concentrated on planting schedules, increasing fertiliser production, the digging of irrigation channels and disciplinary violations. ‘The bourgeoisie . . . have been subordinated to worker-peasant power. They have been forced to carry out manual labour,’ the Party journal,
Tung Padevat,
explained, ‘but their views and their aspirations remain.’ Once they had reforged themselves, the differences between ‘new’ and ‘base’ people would disappear and the next stage could begin, which would be to instil in them the ‘proletarian consciousness’ that alone would permit the modernisation of agriculture and industry which was the regime’s ultimate goal.
In Samphân’s words
:
The workers are the most revolutionary class, because they do not possess property and they work in an organised manner at regular hours. The peasant possesses land on which to grow his crops; he is disorganised and negligent; he works when he feels like it. The worker owns nothing; he earns his living with the strength of his arms. That is how we, too, should be . . . So in this first stage we have a peasant revolution; but later, to advance to communism, we must make a proletarian revolution.
That should not be seen as an affirmation of Marxist orthodoxy: the real flesh-and-blood workers in the factories of Phnom Penh and Battambang were distrusted as much as ever. ‘Proletarian consciousness’ was an ideal, to be achieved through ‘illumination’,
*
not, as Marx had held, the reflection in the social superstructure of a particular pattern of economic organisation — and in any case it was for the future.
For now, the nightly message was ‘to work hard, produce more and love Angkar’, to ‘build and defend the nation’ and to reject the selfish, individualistic values of Western-style capitalism.
It was government by
incantation
. The village leaders knew their lines so well, one man noticed, that ‘every time they spoke they put the punctuation marks exactly where they had been the day before.’ The repetition
was deliberate, the cadres emphasised. It was designed, like a Buddhist sermon, to ‘impregnate’ people’s minds so deeply with a single idea that there would be no room for any other.
Radio Phnom Penh did the same, repeating stereotyped phrases with mantra-like regularity. Pol told the Information Minister, Hu Nim, that the announcers should have clear, strong voices ‘
like the monks
who lead the prayers at a
wat’.
In more prosperous communes, the daily homily was broadcast over loudspeakers. Invariably it was accompanied by a song illustrating the chosen topic — the need for greater efforts in pig-breeding or the digging of irrigation canals — set to a lilting traditional air. Despite the dreariness of the subject matter, the music, one deportee remembered, made it a ‘most effective tool — you started to believe in it’. Like the