There will probably never be a final verdict on the pharaonic labours the Khmers Rouges undertook. All that can be said for certain is that their irrigation system was an improvement on that which had existed in Sihanouk’s day.
Why, then, at a time when the number of people working on the land was larger than ever before, was there so little rice that, in less than four years, a million Cambodians died of malnutrition or related diseases?
This is one of the central mysteries of the Khmer Rouge period. The generally accepted explanation — that famine ensued because huge quantities of rice were exported to China to pay for arms shipments — was concocted by Vietnamese propagandists for their own political purposes and replayed unthinkingly by Western academics. It is wrong. China — along with Vietnam itself, France, the United States and Thailand — shared the moral responsibility for the tragedy that enveloped Cambodia. But rice exports, whether to China or elsewhere, were not a material factor. Ieng Sary acknowledged at the time that, contrary to the regime’s hopes, there was no exportable grain surplus in 1975 or 1976. The following year, some tens of thousands of tons of rice were sold to Madagascar, Senegal and Singapore, a fraction of the annual exports of 200 to 400,000 tons during the Sihanouk period. In 1978, Cambodia hoped to export between 100 and 150,000 tons of rice to China, but the contract was never fulfilled. Apart from rubber, wood and ingredients for traditional medicines, no other natural produce was exported either. Singapore offered to buy processed fish from the Tonle Sap, but the deal fell through after the Cambodians pleaded ‘problems with logistics’.
The truth lay elsewhere.
The root of the problem was that the co-operatives produced less than the regime and most outside observers believed. This was, in part, because the younger and stronger men and women spent much of the year in mobile brigades building irrigation works rather than tending their fields — with the result that, even if the rural population as a whole had increased (by the addition of urban deportees), the effective manpower had diminished. China experienced a similar shortfall and an even more terrible famine in the late 1950s, when part of the rural population was diverted to running backyard iron furnaces. But more important was the lack of motivation. Even under intense pressure, slaves work less well than free men. Again the Chinese experience is salient. When, in 1980, Deng Xiaoping introduced what was termed the ‘household responsibility system’, allowing peasant smallholders the responsibilities and rewards of growing their own produce instead of working collectively, China’s grain harvest shot up by 40 per cent. In Cambodia, the peasants endured a reverse transition from total free enterprise to a system without incentives of any kind. Overseers may have been able to enforce a daily quota for moving earth, but they could not control the quality of transplanting, the application of fertiliser, the depth of ploughing or any of the thousand-and-one other things that determine the final yield. During the Khmer Rouge years, probably
between a third and a half
of the population was sick, hungry or both, and in no state to work hard. The rest, while physically capable, had every reason to do only the minimum their guards would let them get away with.
How much the co-operatives really harvested in Democratic Kampuchea is uncertain. No reliable statistics were kept. Some specialists have guessed around 60 per cent of the pre-1970 crop, or 1.5 million tons of rice a year, others somewhat more, but they may all have been too optimistic. What is sure is that many rural cadres, fearing punishment if they admitted low yields, claimed to have fulfilled or over-fulfilled the three-tons-per-hectare target and, on that basis, the state assessed its levies to supply the army and administration, and to rebuild the strategic reserves which had been run down in 1975. The inevitable result was that rice poured out of the countryside into state granaries in the towns, leaving starvation rations for perhaps 40 per cent of the rural population.
To Pol, the rural penury was incomprehensible.
In all his public statements, he set out a Utopian vision of uninterrupted progress. In Democratic Kampuchea, everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. He spoke of ‘outstanding successes’ in eradicating illiteracy and malaria and ‘solving the agricultural problem’; of an educational system where children, adults and old people ‘study full-time day and night’; of rural clinics, staffed by devoted nurses, with twenty beds for every hundred families; a guaranteed food supply for every citizen of 312 kilograms of rice a year; and even, humourlessly, of the progress of ‘a seething mass movement to collect and produce natural fertiliser’.
It was the ideal, not the reality. Yet Pol certainly believed that, under his leadership, Cambodia was heading towards those goals. How, then, was it possible that, as he acknowledged at a closed meeting of Party leaders at the end of 1976, serious food shortages existed in three-quarters of the country’s communes? If ‘political consciousness’ was the key, if human will-power, rightly harnessed, could accomplish anything, such failures should not happen. ‘This is our fault,’ he told them. ‘The problem stems from personal factors within the Party . . . [Our] revolutionary stance and consciousness are not yet strong . . . The line must seep in everywhere until it is effective.’
The notion that the line might be wrong, that Kampuchea’s ‘model for the world’ might be fatally flawed, that ends and means, ideology and practice, were in such total opposition that the system would eventually implode, that radicalisation, far from being the answer, was making every problem worse, was not even considered. The solution, Pol determined, was to be still more thorough and intransigent. ‘There are people in charge,’ he declared, ‘who question the stance of independence-mastery and self-reliance . . . This is a shortcoming . . . If we solve . . . this problem everywhere, we will be able to advance.’
The stage was being set for a witch-hunt. The next act of the Cambodian tragedy was about to commence.
11
Stalin’s Microbes
ON SUNDAY, FEBRUARY
25 1976, a series of explosions ripped through the centre of Siem Reap, blowing up a munitions depot. Two days later, the Standing Committee announced that American aircraft had made two bombing runs over the town, five hours apart, killing fifteen people and destroying a number of buildings. Protest meetings were held in Phnom Penh and elsewhere. In March, the Swedish Ambassador, Kaj Bjork, was taken with other visiting envoys to inspect the damage. Mr Bjork prudently declared that he was not sufficiently versed in military matters to know whether what he was being shown was a recent bomb crater.
His caution proved justified. Years later, Ieng Sary acknowledged that there had been no bombing. ‘There was an uprising,’ he said. ‘The bomb craters were old. They dated from the war.’
Ever since the Khmer Rouge victory the previous April, there had been isolated minor revolts. At Koh Kong, in the Western Zone, a dissident Khmer Rouge regional chief had gathered a force of three hundred men and was carrying out small-scale attacks from bases along the Thai border. Pol’s one-time commander, Prince Chantarainsey, held out for a time in his old fiefdom in the mountains of Kompong Speu until he was killed in an ambush near Kirirom. More serious were a spate of village rebellions by Cham Muslims protesting against Khmer Rouge insistence that they abandon their religion and culture, notably in the district of Krauchhmar, on the Mekong in the Eastern Zone. But none of this went beyond the low-level insurgency that had plagued all Cambodian governments, including Sihanouk’s, during their first years in power.
Siem Reap was different. Pol suspected that highly placed army officers might have been involved. Above all he was uneasy because it proved impossible to establish who was responsible. Two weeks later, the regional secretary,
Soth
, told the Standing Committee: ‘We still cannot find the root of [this] event.’
Other untoward developments soon followed.
At the end
of March, Hu Nim informed Pol of a scandal involving Koy Thuon, the former Northern Zone Secretary who was now Minister of
Commerce. Thuon, like his friend the disgraced Tiv Ol, liked women. In the early 1970s, he had established a revolutionary arts troupe to provide young female companions for the pleasures of his bed. After the Khmers Rouges took power, Thuon arranged for one of his ex-girlfriends to be married off to a cadre named Long. This was afterwards said to be a manoeuvre to detach Long from another girl, whom Thuon himself now fancied. The young man was furious and, in revenge, spread stories about the Minister’s conduct. When Koy Thuon learnt of this, he had Long killed.
To Pol, this raised serious questions. Thuon’s behaviour went against everything the revolution stood for.
*
Siem Reap was in the Zone he used to head and Soth was a long-time associate. Could Thuon have been implicated in the Siem Reap ‘event’? On April 8, the Minister was placed under house arrest at K-1, the former Bank Buildings where Pol had made his headquarters. Another Northern Zone veteran, Doeun, the Director of the Central Committee’s General Office, was appointed to act in his place. Soon
evidence emerged
that Doeun had been privy to Thuon’s activities and might have covered up for him. In the hothouse world of Democratic Kampuchea, it began to look as if there were a Northern Zone conspiracy to overthrow the regime.
Six days before Koy Thuon’s arrest, another puzzling event occurred.
At about 4 a.m
. on April 2, a grenade exploded outside the Royal Palace. Because Sihanouk’s bedroom had air-conditioning, he heard nothing. But the explosion woke the palace staff. Khieu Samphân told Long Nârin and the Prince’s major-domo, Chhorn Hay, that it had been an assassination attempt. What he did not say was that, under torture, the soldier who allegedly threw the grenade claimed to have acted on the orders of two officers of the 170th division, which was garrisoned just north of the palace. They were arrested on April 12 and implicated, in turn, the former division commander — the flamboyant ex-monk Chan Chakrey — and another Eastern Zone leader, Chhouk, who headed Region 24 on Cambodia’s southern border with Vietnam.
Pol had had doubts about Chakrey for some time. The previous autumn he had brought him to Phnom Penh to work in the General Staff Office
in order to deprive him of command responsibilities. After the grenade incident, he was sidelined completely.
In May 1976, Cambodian and Vietnamese negotiators held talks in Phnom Penh to try to reach agreement on delineating their common border. The meetings were intended to pave the way for a summit in Hanoi to sign a border treaty.
But the atmosphere had changed since the last summit between the two countries nine months earlier.
The Cambodian leaders were still determined to avoid provoking Vietnam. Nuon Chea told the Standing Committee that spring that the guiding principle remained ‘to prevent the situation getting bigger’. In the North-East, the Zone Secretary, Ney Sarann, instructed local troop commanders ‘to solve the problem politically, not by bloodshed’. But the Cambodians also made clear that there were limits beyond which they would not be pushed around. ‘Kampuchea will never allow any imperialist, small or large, near or far, to invade its territory,’ Khieu Samphân declared in a speech on the first anniversary of Cambodia’s ‘liberation’. When the text of his remarks was read out at a celebratory meeting in Paris a week later, the Vietnamese representative conspicuously refused to applaud. The reference to an imperialism that was ‘small’ and ‘near’ was too blatant to ignore. More ominous — though the Vietnamese would not learn of it for another year — was the Standing Committee’s decision in March to declare that the CPK had been founded in 1960 and not, as Vietnam insisted, in 1951.
This was not the arcane matter it might seem. If the CPK dated its foundation to 1951, it acknowledged Vietnamese paternity: the PRPK, which Nguyen Thanh Son had midwived that year, was entirely a Vietnamese creation. If the founding Congress occurred in 1960, it was an authentic Cambodian Party, created by Khmers without Vietnamese participation. Pol was right, both historically and politically: 1960
was
the Party’s birth date. But for the Cambodians to repudiate in this way the Vietnamese father figure was a bone in Hanoi’s throat.
*
The border talks failed and the summit was postponed.
In public
, the Cambodians redoubled their protestations of friendship. In private, confidence nosedived. Even before the meetings, the Standing Committee had been worrying about the possibility of an assassination attempt if the
summit were to take place — a preposterous idea, but one which reflected the paranoia that had gripped the Cambodian leadership. Now they started asking themselves how much longer they should continue with what felt more and more like a strategy of appeasement.
Ostensibly the problem concerned the sea border. The Cambodians were willing to accord
de jure
recognition of Vietnam’s ownership of the offshore islands, a concession which Sihanouk had always refused. But Vietnam also sought changes to the maritime border itself, giving it an additional 130 square miles of seabed off the coast of Kampot. It later emerged that they thought the area might contain oil.
But there were
no valid grounds for the claim, and when the Vietnamese negotiators persisted, the Cambodians concluded that Vietnam was behaving as the neighbourhood bully. ‘What this is really about,’ Ieng Sary declared, ‘is our conception of honour. Do we want to be Vietnam’s lackeys, or not?’
Outwardly relations remained cordial. Friendship delegations exchanged visits. In July 1976, when Vietnam was reunified, the Cambodian leaders sent effusive congratulations. Scheduled air services began between Phnom Penh and Hanoi. Pol himself described the two countries’ friendship as ‘a strategic question and a