Pol explained
the tactics they should use by means of traditional imagery which the peasant soldiers could easily grasp. He told them to fight like ‘a lake of floating water-hyacinths’, which meant entangling the enemy in a mesh of small guerrilla groups in the same way as aquatic plants entangle and pull down a swimmer; or as ‘multiplying snails’, whereby two — or three-man groups would creep up on an enemy section, each taking a single Vietnamese soldier as its target, and then melt back
into the jungle.
‘If we carry out
guerrilla warfare,’ he maintained, ‘we can never be defeated’:
We must use the tactics of mobility and rapid attack, firing one or two shots and then disappearing before the enemy can locate us . . . We should attack from the flanks, avoiding engagement when their forces are strong. Occupying terrain is of no importance. What matters is preserving our strength . . . so that we can hit them at their weak spots.
As if to offset the regime’s new-found caution, its propaganda became increasingly shrill. ‘The
Vietnamese stink
to high heaven,’
Tung Padevat
told its readers. ‘They are so degraded that they are despised as nothing, for [they] think only of carrying around a begging bowl . . . beseeching charity from all and sundry.’ It was a poor argument against an enemy which was even then methodically preparing the Khmers Rouges’ downfall.
While Pol was talking to Deng Xiaoping in Beijing, Le Duc Tho was meeting Heng Samrin, Pen Sovann and the other Khmer exiles at Thu Duc, a former US police camp in the suburbs of Ho Chi Minh City. He told them that Vietnam planned a full-scale invasion of Cambodia at the beginning of the coming dry season and that the newly formed Khmer resistance would fight alongside their Vietnamese ‘brothers-in-arms’. In the meantime the exiles were to set up an umbrella organisation, the Khmer National United Front for National Salvation (KNUFNS), capable of assuming power when the Pol Pot regime fell. History was repeating itself. For the third time in as many decades, the leaders in Hanoi were building a clandestine Cambodian resistance movement to further Vietnamese interests.
In that same month of September 1978, the Vietnamese Premier, Pham Van Dong, set out on a hastily arranged regional tour to try to build diplomatic cover for the coming attack on Cambodia. He proposed a Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation with the non-communist South-East Asian states and solemnly assured each of his interlocutors that Hanoi had no expansionist ambitions. In Kuala Lumpur, he even laid a wreath to Malay soldiers who had died fighting the communist insurgency. But the treaty proposal was politely rejected. It was too much, too suddenly, too late.
Vietnam’s efforts to woo the United States fared no better. In October President Carter decided that the China relationship took priority and normalisation with Vietnam would be put on hold.
Three weeks later Le Duan, accompanied by Pham Van Dong and a phalanx of VWP Politburo members, flew to Moscow, where they were given an unusually cordial reception by the Soviet leadership. Duan and Leonid Brezhnev signed a Friendship Treaty which provided, among other things, for the two countries to take ‘appropriate and effective steps to safeguard
[their] security’ if either were attacked. The immediate purpose was to deter China from escalating its conflict with Vietnam. The ‘international reactionaries’, gloated the Vietnamese Party journal,
Tap Chi Cong San,
would now face ‘heavy retaliation’ should they recklessly attack a Soviet ally.
Cambodia was hardly discussed. The Vietnamese leaders told their Soviet counterparts merely that they expected the Khmer resistance to ‘use the forthcoming dry season to make powerful attacks on the Phnom Penh regime’ and that they did not believe China would be in a position to send troops to its aid.
Two days after the treaty was signed in Moscow, Deng Xiaoping set out in Pham Van Dong’s footsteps to visit Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. He found his hosts already half-convinced that a Vietnam which was now part and parcel of the Soviet bloc was a potential danger to the whole region. The battle to contain Hanoi, Deng told them, would be fought out in Cambodia. ‘There is a possibility that Phnom Penh will fall,’ he added. ‘That would not be the end of the war, but the beginning.’ The Vietnamese would invade Cambodia in force, but they would be unable to consolidate their gains and a long resistance struggle would follow. When that happened, he went on, China ‘will not stand idly by. We will take appropriate measures.’
To Lee Kwan Yew in Singapore and Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir, Deng’s analysis was persuasive. The Thai Premier, General Kriangsak, was warier. Thailand would be in the front line if conflict broke out in Cambodia. It would be able to support the Khmers Rouges only if it were sure of having China’s backing. Deng assured him that that was the case and, by way of encouragement, indicated that China would reduce its support for the Thai Communist Party and persuade the Khmers Rouges to do the same.
While Deng was in South-East Asia, another top Chinese leader, the regime’s security chief, Wang Dongxing, flew to Phnom Penh. Apart from demonstrating Chinese support, his mission was to appraise Pol’s plans for resistance and to give whatever advice seemed necessary.
It was not the easiest of tasks. Hu Yaobang, the future Chinese Party Chairman, who accompanied Wang’s delegation, found the atmosphere unreal. Throughout the deserted city, beds were being taken from empty houses to equip extra hospital wards for the wounded. Factory workers were receiving military training. Officials were digging trenches. But neither Pol nor anyone else seemed to have any clear idea of what they would do when the Vietnamese came.
In his speech
at the welcoming banquet, the Cambodian leader had planned to say: ‘The government of Democratic Kampuchea and the CPK know that they can count on the help of the fraternal Chinese army if the need arises.’ But the Chinese objected and the offending paragraph was deleted. Instead, Wang warned sombrely
that the Vietnamese aggressors
‘may run wild
for a time’, meaning that the Cambodians would probably be unable to stem their advance. At that point there was a power cut in the hall and all the lights went out.
In private Wang urged the CPK leaders to begin readying the population psychologically for the coming struggle, to distribute arms to the peasants and to prepare arms caches and stocks of rice. None of his recommendations was implemented.
One reason for this was that a new round of purges had begun, targeting the very men who would normally have been responsible for planning the resistance to Vietnam.
On November
I and 2 1978, the CPK had held its Fifth Congress. The meeting was unusually brief — normally CPK congresses, including the preliminary meetings, lasted several weeks — and its main, if not its only function seems to have been to elect a new leadership. Mok, who now headed both the North-Western and the South-Western Zones, became the third-ranking leader, behind Pol and Nuon Chea, with the rank of Second Deputy Secretary, responsible for Agriculture and Rural Affairs. He was also appointed Vice-Chairman of the Party’s Military Commission. Ieng Sary ranked fourth, and Vorn Vet, who was in charge of military supplies to the Eastern Front, fifth. Son Sen, who now finally moved up from being a candidate to a full member of the Standing Committee, was in sixth place; and Kong Sophal, the new Chief of the Army Logistics Department, seventh.
Next morning troops burst into the room where Mok, Sophal and Vorn Vet were meeting. ‘Mok was shitting in his pants,’ Ieng Sary recounted gleefully ‘He thought it was all over.’ In the event, Vorn Vet and Kong Sophal were arrested and taken to Tuol Sleng. The reasons remain a mystery. It requires a peculiarly devious mentality to promote a man to the summit of power one day in order to arrest him the next, above all at a moment when the country was about to embark on a life-and-death struggle for survival. Kong Sophal may have fallen under suspicion because of his association with Ruos Nhim when he was military commander in the North-West. Vorn Vet’s arrest is inexplicable. Like Pang and Siet Chhê, he had been one of Pol’s favourites.
The ‘sickness in the Party’ of which Pol had spoken two years earlier had become a sickly suspiciousness, a paranoid mistrust, infecting leadership at every level. The more desperate Cambodia’s plight, the more the poison spread.
The regime’s days were numbered, not only because of the war with Vietnam, but because the body politic had rotted from within. The microbes, ‘the ugly microbes’, as Pol had called them, were not, as he
believed, the result of some political gangrene, blighting a healthy organism. They were the very essence of the system he had built.
For the next few weeks, the regime existed in a state of limbo.
At the end of November, the Chinese Party Central Committee confirmed Deng’s decision not to send troops to Cambodia, but decided instead to entrust the Chinese People’s Liberation Army with a punitive operation across Vietnam’s northern border. The Russians, Deng argued, would not risk a world war to defend their Vietnamese ally, regardless of the security clause in their new Friendship Treaty. But there was a possibility they might launch a tit-for-tat attack into Xinjiang. Three hundred thousand people were accordingly evacuated from Kashgar and other sensitive areas on the Soviet border with Chinese Central Asia.
On December 2, several hundred Khmer exiles gathered near Snuol, in a clearing in a rubber plantation about two miles inside the Cambodian border, to inaugurate the new Vietnamese-backed National Salvation Front, headed by Heng Samrin. Le Duc Tho was on hand for the occasion, as he had been in April 1950 when, in very similar circumstances, Vietnam had created the Khmer National Liberation Committee, led by Son Ngoc Minh.
A week later, two American journalists, Elizabeth Becker of the
Washington Post
and Richard Dudman of the
St Louis Post Despatch,
and a British academic, Malcolm Caldwell, who was sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge cause, became the first non-communist Westerners, other than diplomats, permitted to visit Democratic Kampuchea. Dudman reported that officials were speaking openly of the possibility of having to abandon Phnom Penh.
Yet as each side prepared for war, on the battlefields there was an eerie silence. Radio Phnom Penh continued to broadcast its usual reports on the improvement of life in the co-operatives. At the Foreign Ministry, Laurence Picq recalled, ‘We weren’t worried . . . We thought everything would work out painlessly; there’d be no gunfire, no fighting, no bloodshed.’ Even in the army, only units directly involved in the fighting knew what was going on. The head of the air-force radar repair unit, Kân, on a visit to the border area in late November, was shocked to find defeated Cambodian troops in retreat. ‘Soon afterwards I heard that the Vietnamese had broken through, that our defences weren’t holding,’ he said. ‘But all that was unofficial. Officially we were told nothing.’
On December 22, Pol received Becker and Dudman and gave them his version of the confrontation that was now looming. Vietnam, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were on one side, he declared. On the other
were ‘NATO [and] . . . Kampuchea, South-East Asia and the world’. He also saw Caldwell for what must have been, in the circumstances, an altogether surreal discussion of Khmer Rouge economic policy.
That night
, after they had packed their bags for the following morning’s flight to Beijing, an event occurred which provided the perfect metaphor for the disintegration of the regime.
At around I a.m. Becker was awakened by what she thought was the noise of dustbins being knocked over, followed by a gunshot and the sound of moaning. When she opened her door, she found herself face to face with a young man wearing ‘clothes [that] seemed different [and] . . . a hat like a baseball cap’. He was armed to the teeth. She fled. Dudman, who was also now awake, saw from his window ‘several shadowy figures running back and forth . . . in the dim glow of the streetlights’. At least one was carrying a pistol. The man in the baseball cap then reappeared, fired at Dudman as he stood outside his room, but missed. Afterwards several more shots were heard. Nothing further happened until an hour and a half later, when Pol’s former aide, Phi Phuon, now Head of Security at the Foreign Ministry, arrived with a group of guards and broke down the door. They found Becker and Dudwell unharmed. Caldwell was sprawled on the floor, dead, with bullet wounds in the chest and head. Beside him was the body of a young Khmer — possibly, but not certainly, the man in the baseball cap.
At 4 a.m.,
Ieng Sary was informed. He awoke Pol, who said little, as was his wont, other than to express regret and to give instructions that Thiounn Thioeunn conduct an autopsy and preserve the body to be flown to Beijing.
Later the most outlandish theories were concocted to try to explain what had happened. British intelligence believed that
Pol had ordered
Caldwell’s death. An internal Khmer Rouge inquiry found that one of the guards had been having an unhappy love affair. It suggested he had gone on a shooting spree and then committed suicide. Another guard, under torture at Tuol Sleng, implicated the Defence Minister, Son Sen. Pol himself later told aides he believed that Dudman was the killer. The American was a CIA agent, he said, and had murdered Caldwell to discredit the regime. None of these ‘explanations’ made much sense. But Phi Phuon noticed one troubling detail. Although the dead Cambodian was found with a pistol by his hand, making it look as though he had shot himself in the head, the position of the body was not right. Phi Phuon thought that he had been murdered and someone had tried to mask his death as a suicide.
The likeliest explanation, which, perversely, the regime refused to credit because of its obsession with traitors, was that the attack was the work of a Vietnamese commando unit. No one else had a comparable interest in