Pol Pot (7 page)

The first half of the 1940s was a period of jarring change in Cambodia, both for the Khmer population and for its French rulers.

The outbreak of the Second World War in Europe and France’s defeat by Germany meant that from July 1940, Cambodia was administered by Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist regime in Vichy, under the tutelage of Germany’s ally, Japan. The following winter Thailand, sensing French weakness, invaded the border provinces of Battambang, Sisophon and Siem Reap. The imperial Japanese government imposed an armistice on the belligerents and, after negotiations in Tokyo in the spring, awarded most of the disputed area to the Thais. Cambodia was allowed to retain only Siem Reap town and the Angkorian temples. A month later, King Monivong, then sixty-five, humiliated by the loss of territory, died at the hill resort of Bokor, with Sâr’s sister, Roeung, at his bedside. Among the hundreds of potential successors, the Pétainist Governor-General, Admiral Jean Decoux, chose eighteen-year-old Norodom Sihanouk, then attending

secondary school in Saigon where his favourite subjects were said to be philosophy and music.

It must have seemed a clever manoeuvre — an artsy, teenage monarch who would be putty in French hands. But Sihanouk’s accession in April 1941 brought a change of generation and, with time, a change in political style beyond anything the colonial authorities could have imagined.

The French defeat brought other changes, too. In the last years of the Third Republic, political and social life in France had been a gay, decadent cocktail of corruption, incompetence, joie de vivre, prostitution,

crooked lawyers and dishonest politicians. Vichy’s political credo — ‘Travail, Famille, Patrie’, or TFP, lampooned by its detractors as ‘Travaux Forces en Perpetuité’

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— was moralistic and puritanical. At the older-established French schools in Indochina, genuflexions to Vichy’s ‘National Revolution’ were perfunctory at best. But at the new college at Kompong Cham, where the staff had been recruited after the Vichy regime took office, commitment to Pétainist values was a professional requirement.

Instead of reciting the catechism each morning, Sâr and his schoolmates now sang:

Marshal, here we are!

Saviour of France, before you,

Your boys swear to serve you,

And follow in your path.

There was also a blasphemous prayer — which would not have been lost on Sâr after his time at the Ecole Miche — entreating the aged marshal: ‘Our Father, Which Art Our Leader, Glorious Be Thy Name . . . Deliver Us From Evil.’ The Pétainist anthem, with its exaltation of order, unity, and labour, stuck in the boys’ minds well enough for Khieu Samphân, more than fifty years later, to start singing it when the subject of the war years came up in conversation. There were other aspects of Pétainism, too, which seemed to find unconscious echoes among the Cambodian communists many decades after. Youths were enrolled in mobile labour brigades,

or

in Khmer; officials who womanised or got drunk risked dismissal; the peasantry were romanticised as the incarnation of the nation’s vital forces; and city life was decried as inherently depraved.

The weakening of French authority and the growing clout of Japan did not escape the notice of the young men who ran

From 1940, the newspaper acquired a pronounced anti-colonial (and anti-Vietnamese)

slant, denouncing Annamite domination of the civil service and criticising France’s failure to educate Cambodians to the same level. Its founder, Son Ngoc Thanh, and his fellow intellectuals saw Japan as a lever to prise Cambodia from France’s grip; Japan saw them as a ginger group, keeping the French off balance.

These conflicting ambitions provided the embryonic nationalist movement with its first martyrs. On July 18 1942, the French authorities arrested two monks suspected of subversive activities. They omitted to obtain the prior approval of the Buddhist hierarchy, as law and custom required. Two days later, Pach Chhoeun, the editor of

led some two thousand demonstrators — including hundreds of saffron-robed monks holding yellow parasols — to protest to the French

A riot ensued, in which ‘the police used their batons, and the monks hit back with their umbrellas.’ Pach Chhoeun, Bunchan Mol and the other alleged ringleaders were arrested, sentenced to life imprisonment and transported to the French prison island of Poulo Condor, off the southern coast of Vietnam. Son Ngoc Thanh fled to Thailand and thence to Japan, where he remained until 1945.

The ‘Umbrella Revolt’, as it became known, was the first major anti-French demonstration for almost thirty years and served as a long-term catalyst for the growth of Khmer nationalism. But it had little immediate impact on youngsters of Sâr’s generation. They knew of it — indeed, Sâr himself was almost certainly in Phnom Penh the day it occurred, though it appears he did not witness the event — but even a socially aware student like Keng Vannsak failed to grasp the implications. Among the few who did take note was Ieng Sary, then at school in Prey Veng, near the Vietnamese border. When the news reached the town, he remembered, ‘everyone talked about it. It gave me for the first time an understanding of the word, “nation”.’ Sary was a few months older than the others and had led a much less sheltered life. Born Kim Trang, he was the son of a village notable in a Khmer-speaking district of southern Vietnam. While he was still a small child, the family fell on hard times. His mother managed to send him to elementary school, but at the age of fourteen he was put to work selling ferry tickets at Neak Luong, the main crossing point on the Mekong, forty miles south of Phnom Penh. A year later, with the help of an elder brother, who had secured a job in the provincial governor’s office, he moved to Prey Veng, where an elderly

or lay Buddhist leader, named Ieng, adopted him as his son.

Not even Sary, however, used to read

Among the students at the Lycée Sisowath, only the oldest, like Mey Mann, four years Vannsak’s senior, had begun to take a real interest in politics. For the rest, as Sâr’s

friend and contemporary, Ping Sây, put it: ‘We were simply too young. In Europe, when you are twenty, you are an adult. But in Cambodia in those days, people of that age had no idea of what was going on in the world. We matured much later.’

At the college Preah Sihanouk

at Kompong Cham, as at the Ecole Miche, Sâr was a mediocre student. Whether this was because he had difficulty keeping up, or because schoolwork did not interest him, is unclear. Either way, he was not academically inclined. He could perhaps be described as a modest all-rounder. Khieu Samphân, who was in the class below him, remembered him playing the violin, enthusiastically but ‘not very well’, in the school orchestra. Later he took up the

a traditional Cambodian stringed instrument similar to a zither. A love of music and romantic French poetry — Verlaine was one

his favourites — remained with him into old age. He liked football and showed a certain flair for the game: one of his friends at the time spoke admiringly, fifty years later, of the ‘scissors kick’ which Sâr perfected, sending the ball backwards over his head. He was also a member of the school basketball team and a stagehand with the amateur theatrical troupe.

Halfway through his second year at the college, the political situation changed abruptly in a way that even the most inattentive teenager could not fail to notice.

For almost a year, Japan had been losing ground in South-East Asia. By early 1945 it faced the prospect of a massive Allied counter-attack. Tokyo revised its strategy. The priority became to secure the loyalty of the former colonial peoples by playing on their nationalist sentiments. On the evening of March 9, Japanese army units, which, with Vichy’s agreement, had been stationed in Indochina since 1941, launched a

French officials in all three territories were placed under arrest and French civilians interned. The operation did not go entirely smoothly: there were numerous instances of Cambodians helping Frenchmen to escape and, in northern Vietnam, communist guerrillas harassed Japanese outposts. But French rule collapsed overnight, and three days later, under Japan’s prodding, Sihanouk proclaimed Cambodian independence on the grounds that France was ‘no longer in a position to offer its protection’. For Ieng Sary, in his first year at the Lycée Sisowath, as for millions of Cambodians, the unthinkable had happened:

For the first time I saw a Frenchman tied and bound. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Those people were untouchable, they were so high up they were like gods. And this man had his arms tied behind him. It was on the

[the

open ground beside the palace], where the Japanese had dug trenches . . . I watched as he was marched off . . . I was horrified — and fascinated. It made a very deep impression on me.

Mey Mann, too, remembered discussing the event with his classmates. ‘We saw that a yellow race — the Japanese — had got the better of the white colonialists, the French. That awakened something in us. It made us start thinking.’

In April, the leaders of the ‘Umbrella Revolt’ returned. Sihanouk, on Japanese advice, appointed Son Ngoc Thanh Foreign Minister and subsequently Premier. Bunchan Mol became a government adviser, aided by his nephew, Thiounn Mumm, then a nineteen-year-old student at the University of Hanoi.

Mumm, like Keng Vannsak, was ferociously intelligent. His family’s wealth and connections meant that he was brought up with the children of the French elite, which made him realise at an early age that he would have to make a choice between the values of his French playmates and loyalty to his fellow Khmers. Like his three brothers, Mumm took it for granted that Cambodians were equal, if not superior, to the French. By the age of fourteen he had concluded that the root of his countrymen’s backwardness was their lack of education, a view he would hold for the rest of his life. He later became the first Cambodian to attend the Polytechnique, the most prestigious of the French

equivalent to getting a First at Oxford or

at Harvard — an achievement designed, he said afterwards, ‘to show Cambodians that it could be done’. But in 1945, Mumm’s concern was how to run the country’s secondary schools — of which there were still only two, the Lycée Sisowath and the Collège Preah Sihanouk at Kompong Cham — after their French teaching staff had been interned. Supported by Bunchan Mol and Ea Sichau, another of Thanh’s student aides, he argued that the government should appoint Khmer university students who had returned from Hanoi to fill the vacant posts, rather than bringing in better qualified Vietnamese professors, as the Education Ministry wished. After a furious argument at the Cabinet Office, during which Mumm slapped the Minister’s face, the young firebrand had his way.

At Kompong Cham, Sâr and his classmates had other priorities. Immediately after the coup, the

school was closed

for an extended New Year vacation. Khieu Samphân, Sâr and a dozen or so others decided to take the college theatre troupe on a provincial tour in order to raise money to visit the temples at Angkor Wat:

We performed comic sketches

in small towns around Kompong Cham like Chi He and Snuol. I played a girl dancer. Sâr’s job was

to raise and lower the curtain. When we had enough money, we rented a charcoal-powered bus and set off. It was 180 miles to Siem Reap, and it took us two weeks to get there and another two weeks to get back. Every couple of miles a tyre would burst, and each time that happened, we would all clap and shout for joy! Because that meant we could get out and explore the villages. The village girls always received us warmly because, for them, college boys like us were really something else! Sometimes we spent the night at a peasant’s house, but more often we slept under the bus. We spent three days in Siem Reap. It was tiny then — just a few Chinese shops and nothing else. One night we put on a performance, to earn some money for the trip back. But most of the time we spent going round the temples. Angkor thrilled us. It took our breath away.

For all Cambodians, Angkor was, and remains, the pre-eminent symbol of the country’s past greatness. As one of the country’s elder statesmen, Penn Nouth, put it: ‘Cambodian civilisation attained its high point about the twelfth century . . . But after five centuries

glory, the Khmer Empire succumbed, and ended by crumbling away . . . It is this lesson of history which we do not wish to forget.’ Angkor was both a benchmark and a burden — the proof of what Cambodians could achieve and a constant reminder of their failure to attain such heights again. When Samphân was about ten years old, his teacher at primary school told his class about the glories of Angkorian civilisation.

‘I can still remember it,’

he said, ‘and how terribly disappointed I felt when he told us that after the thirteenth century, Angkor had collapsed. One must never underestimate the effect of these centuries of decline on our national subconscious. It is why young Cambodians still ask themselves, almost instinctively, whether Cambodia as a nation can survive.’

The early summer of 1945 was played out to the wailing of air-raid sirens. In February an American Flying Fortress dropped bombs on the Japanese military headquarters in Phnom Penh. They missed their target and fell near the Royal Palace, killing hundreds of Cambodian civilians. Kompong Cham was not attacked, but at each alert the students gathered for roll-call in an arboretum near the school to await the all-clear. In May, the authorities gave up, and everyone was sent home early for the summer holidays. Sâr