The period from mid-1976 to the late autumn of 1977 saw Pol’s experiment in Utopian socialism reach its zenith, creating the conditions for its collapse.
All that year, the firestorm of terror with its epicentre at S-21 billowed out across the country, reducing to ashes thousands of Party cadres and hundreds of thousands of ‘new’ and ‘old’ peasants. In a broadcast on Radio Phnom Penh, Pol surmised that ‘between 1 and 2 per cent of the population’ was irredeemably hostile and ‘must be dealt with as we would any enemy’ — not a reassuring thought for people who had seen how the Khmers Rouges had treated their enemies two years earlier, at the end of the civil war. By August 1977, according to the CPK’s own figures, four to five thousand Party members had been liquidated as ‘bad elements’ and ‘enemy agents’.
The movement began in the Northern Zone and Siem Reap, where every ‘string’ reaching out from Koy Thuon and his associates was meticulously dismantled and replaced by forces loyal to Ke Pauk, who had Pol’s
confidence. When there were signs of resistance, Mok’s troops were sent in from the South-West to help the new leadership establish itself. That set a pattern of intervention which would repeat itself whenever Pol sought to move against an incumbent Party network that he regarded as disloyal.
Soon afterwards
Ieng Sary’s wife, Thirith, the Minister of Social Affairs, led a delegation to the North-West. She came back shocked by what she had seen. Conditions in the area were indeed bad: with almost a million extra mouths to feed as a result of the influx of new people’, they could hardly be otherwise. But Thirith’s conclusion was calculated to stoke the regime’s paranoia. ‘Conditions there were very queer,’ she said later. ‘The people had no homes and they were all very ill.’ The cadres pretended to follow Party policy, but in fact they undermined it by forcing people to work in appalling conditions. The only possible explanation was that ‘agents had got into our ranks’. A report in such terms was — and was intended to be — music to Pol’s ears. It confirmed his worst suspicions.
‘Hidden enemies
seek to deprive the people of food,’ he told the Central Committee in December 1976. ‘They [distort] our instructions and mistreat the people . . . forcing them to work whether they are sick or healthy.’ For some months he took no action while Mok sent trusted village cadres and their families from the South-West to settle in the area, ostensibly as ordinary peasants but in reality to pave the way for a purge. Finally, in June troops from the Western Zone and the South-West followed. They began by systematically smashing the existing cadre networks at district and village level, executing the incumbents and replacing them with South-Western officials. Then, over the following six months, higher-level leaders were targeted. By the end of the year, the leaders of five of the Zone’s seven regions, standing committee members from the other two and at least thirty more ranking officials were despatched to S-21 to make their confessions and be killed.
Other Zones were not spared either. During the summer, the Eastern Zone Party Congress asserted that, there too,
‘lackeys
of the Vietnamese’ were ‘trying to starve the people and make them suffer, so that they lose confidence in the Party’. In the first half of the year, it said smugly, ‘hundreds of these traitors have been swept away’. In the Western Zone, where at that stage only minor purges had occurred, Nuon Chea told senior cadres that the first priority was ‘revolutionary vigilance’; economic development came second.
Pol wanted to have his cake and eat it.
He wanted a clean, pure, absolute Party, from which all doubtful elements had been expunged, and, at the same time, to unite the whole population for the coming struggle with Vietnam. He wanted everyone to be well-fed, to work reasonable hours and to have three, four, or even five
days off each month, so that they would be ‘sharp and keen’, yet at the same time he insisted that the three-tons-per-hectare target be met, no matter what the cost.
To the cadres who had to administer his policies, the choice was clear. Terrorised themselves, they responded by terrorising the population under their control. In a state which held that human will-power was capable of any feat, failure was equated with sabotage. If the choice were between improving the people’s livelihood — as Pol urged — and, in consequence, failing to meet Party targets; or achieving those targets — as Pol also urged — at the expense of living standards, most officials preferred the latter. Since the introduction of communal eating and the ban on foraging, most people lived badly anyway. When there were so few carrots, all that was left was the stick.
From late 1976 onwards, and especially from mid-1977, Cambodia slipped back into the barbarism of its antique past.
Attempts to ‘re-educate’ alleged offenders, never widespread under Khmer Rouge rule, were abandoned altogether, both at national level, in Phnom Penh, and in the countryside. The Standing Committee’s decision a year earlier to vest the
‘authority to smash’
in the Zone leadership and above was quietly forgotten. In theory, district secretaries approved executions, but in practice death was meted out at commune or village level. The ‘Forest in the West’, as the execution ground was often called, became the punishment of first resort.
What happened at S-21, which was subject to central control, was abominable enough. When the senior interrogator,
Pon
, reproached his underlings for excessive violence, he had to explain that what he meant was ‘beating prisoners to death, cutting open their arms, their backs and their penises.’
Inmates
were drained of their blood for use in the city’s hospitals. ‘They used a pump,’ one guard remembered. ‘They went on until there was no blood left in them and they could scarcely breathe. You could just hear this wheezing sound, and see the whites of their eyes rolling as if they’d had a fit. When they were through, the corpses were thrown into a pit.’
The medieval savagery of the jails in the countryside, where there were no constraints of any kind on the interrogators’ actions, made even such horrors seem tame. Haing Ngor was taken to one such prison in the North-Western Zone after being caught foraging for food:
We stopped
at a collection of buildings I had never seen before, at a clearing back in the woods . . . Some wrinkled black objects hung from the eaves of the roof but I was too far away to see what they were . . . In the
afternoon, the guards brought [in] a new prisoner, a pregnant woman. As they walked past I heard her saying that her husband wasn’t a [former Lon Nol] soldier . . . Later [an] interrogator walked down the row of trees, holding a sharp knife . . . He spoke to the pregnant woman and she answered. [Then] he cut the clothes off her body, slit her stomach and took the baby out. I turned away but there was no escaping the sound of her agony, the screams that slowly subsided into whimpers and after far too long lapsed into the merciful silence of death. The killer walked calmly past me holding the foetus by its neck . . . He tied a string around [it], and hung it from the eaves with the others, which were dried and black and shrunken.
Khmer Rouge peasant cadres, like the Issaraks before them, used
kun krak,
or ‘smoke-children’, as magic talismans. They extracted prisoners’ gallbladders for medicine. They ate the livers of those they killed. Denise Alfonso, a Franco-Vietnamese woman who lived in a co-operative near Battambang, saw a young man die in this way. In a housewifely touch, she noted that ‘the human liver, cooking on the stove, made little jerks like frying pancakes’.
The leadership in Phnom Penh knew of such practices. They were mentioned in telegrams to Son Sen from officials in the provinces. There is no reason to think that Pol and other Standing Committee members approved. But nor did they do anything to stop them. The ‘seething class hatred’ of the peasants, however hideous the forms it might take, had to be assumed and embraced. It was the same attitude that had led Pol to glory in the bloodshed of the war — a perverted machismo which, behind his gentle smile, took pride in ruthlessness. S-21 was viewed in the same way. Neither Pol himself nor Nuon Chea ever went there. But to each it was an essential instrument of the revolutionary state. Pol himself decided on the most important arrests, sometimes in consultation with Khieu Samphân. Ieng Sary’s Foreign Ministry served as an
antechamber
to the prison, where provincial cadres would be brought, ostensibly to be ‘trained as ambassadors’ before being taken off to their deaths.
The generalisation of violence, the intensification of ideological pressures and the development of a psychological climate in which virtually the entire population lived in constant fear, meant that, by 1977, the regime’s natural supporters were growing disillusioned. Not only had the Khmers Rouges failed to win over the ‘new people’, they had lost the goodwill of the old. In many areas, even the poorest peasants, in whose name the revolution had been launched, felt they had been cheated. Instead of the three meals a day they had been promised, there was watery rice soup. Police reports quoted hostile slogans: ‘Serve the socialist revolution and eat rice mixed with morning glory. Serve the communist regime
and eat morning glory alone!’ Despite the risks, the numbers attempting to flee to Thailand and Vietnam steadily increased.
By the spring of 1977, the Vietnamese leaders realised they had a problem on their hands.
The year had begun with renewed border clashes, the first for many months. In February, Hanoi sent a Vice-Foreign Minister, Hoang Van Loi, on a secret visit to Phnom Penh. He offered co-operation in repatriating Cambodian refugees fleeing the Khmer Rouge regime — a singularly cynical move when the Vietnamese were well aware that anyone sent back would immediately be killed — and invited the Cambodian leaders to attend an Indochinese summit with Vietnam and Laos. The proposal was immediately rejected. Pol concluded that his tough stance was paying off. The Standing Committee agreed that henceforward national defence rather than the economy should be the Party’s first priority.
In March and April, clashes continued, provoking an angry exchange of diplomatic notes. By this time Hanoi had belatedly realised that the Cambodians were undertaking a sweeping anti-Vietnamese purge. Then, on April 30, the second anniversary of the liberation of Saigon, Cambodian units, backed by artillery, crossed into Vietnam in force, slaughtering hundreds of local inhabitants and razing their villages. In the words of the official Vietnamese record: ‘Most barbarous crimes were committed. Women were raped, then disembowelled, [and] children cut in two. Pagodas and schools were burnt down.’
There is no reason to doubt the truth of this account. There had been similar atrocities earlier in the year on the frontier with Thailand, where sporadic fighting had resumed after a coup the previous October had brought a right-wing military government to power. If the Khmers Rouges butchered Cambodian women and children they would hardly treat their ancient enemies, the Vietnamese and the Thais, any better. But it was not quite the unprovoked carnage that Vietnamese propaganda reported. Internal CPK military telegrams, believable to the extent that they were never intended to be made public, listed fifteen clashes allegedly provoked by the Vietnamese from April 1 to 29 on the southern part of the border. That month, in a speech marking the anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh, Pol denounced ‘the land-swallowing Y[uon] and their running dogs’, using the traditional pejorative epithet to describe the Vietnamese. Not long afterwards he told the Thai communist leader, Khamtan, that Vietnamese expansionism was ‘totally different from that in Eastern Europe. There the Soviet Union dominates everyone. But at least the subject peoples still exist.’
Ill-founded or not, Cambodian fears were real. After two years in which both sides had tried to avoid a collision — the Cambodians because they wanted time to make their regime stronger, the Vietnamese because they expected to achieve their ends by political means — all their ancient hatreds abruptly reignited. For centuries, Cambodians had equated powerlessness with periods of Vietnamese control, and empowerment or ‘independence-mastery’, as the Khmer Rouge termed it, with times when Vietnamese were slaughtered. Now that once again conciliation had failed, the only choice, in Pol’s view, was what one long-time American Vietnam-watcher aptly called ‘the
bristly dog gambit’
:
Cambodia’s hostile, if not aggressive, behaviour towards Vietnam and Thailand is not entirely irrational. Cambodia has tried various means [over the centuries] to fend off its enemies. Nothing has worked well. What is left is . . . seemingly irrational behaviour . . . The rule, as it is for a small dog surrounded by bigger, stronger dogs, is to bristle, assuming an aggressive posture and appearing so fearfully troublesome, so indifferent to consequences, as to convince others to leave well alone. [The gambit] may not work, but it holds as much promise to the Cambodians as any other.
Hanoi’s response came in stages. First, the Vietnamese air force carried out bombing raids on Cambodian border positions. Then, on May 12, it proclaimed a 200-mile exclusive economic zone along the Vietnamese coast. Since the Cambodians had refused to make concessions over the sea border, the Vietnamese presented them with a fait accompli. Finally, four weeks later, the Vietnamese Party Central Committee wrote to its Cambodian counterpart, calling for high-level talks to end these ‘bloody incidents’. The Cambodians proposed instead a cooling-off period and mutual troop withdrawals. There the political negotiations stalled. But cross-border shelling continued from both sides, and tens of thousands of civilians were evacuated from the frontier areas in anticipation of worse troubles to come.
At this point, other interests began to come into play.
Cambodia’s situation was straightforward: it relied on China, which saw it as a barrier to the spread of Vietnamese power.