creatures, with no flesh and with wide vacant eyes, stumbled out of the forests and the mountains into which the Khmer Rouge had coralled them . . . In many cases they
were so badly starved that their bodies were consuming themselves . . . The lassitude of death had taken over.’ Yet it was not just captive villagers who suffered. Men and women who had served the Khmer Rouge cause all their adult lives were in no better state.
Only the movement’s leaders and their senior aides ate well.
In the makeshift camps on the border, Laurence Picq wrote in her diary, the rank and file subsisted on one daily bowl of watery soup made from the chopped-up stems of banana trees. But the top cadres were as ‘
fat and sleek
as otters’, dining on fish and fresh vegetables and rice. Photographs from the period show Pol and Ieng Sary looking stuffed.
Towards the end of the year, as relief supplies from the Red Cross and the UN began to reach the area, conditions improved. Peasants in ox-carts, loaded with sacks of rice, and long lines of porters made their way across the border passes. Chinese aid also started flowing in, not just arms and ammunition, but mosquito nets, water-bottles, uniforms, sugar and salt, packed biscuits, quinine and antibiotics.
Politically, two other events occurred to strengthen the Khmers Rouges’ position. In November 1979 the UN General Assembly voted to seat the delegation of Democratic Kampuchea and exclude the Vietnamese-backed regime in Phnom Penh. The following month, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. To the West, this was the ultimate proof that the rulers in the Kremlin were committed to a policy of global expansionism. It redoubled non-communist South-East Asia’s support for Thailand, which was seen as the next target in this new game of Russian roulette, and sealed a Faustian pact between the US, China and the Khmers Rouges to do whatever was necessary to make Vietnam’s burden in Cambodia intolerable.
That winter’s dry-season offensive failed to dislodge the Khmers Rouges from the border. New area commanders had been named — So Hong at Kla’ngop, Sok Pheap in Malay; Nikân in Sampou Loun; Phi Phuon in Kamrieng; and Y Chhean in Pailin. Thanks to China, their troops were now adequately armed, and each battalion had a signals unit. In the interior, as well, guerrilla activity was increasing and the military structure was being rebuilt. In January 1980, Son Sen transferred the Eastern Front HQ from the Chinit river, where he had spent the first year after the Vietnamese invasion, to Paet Um, an old Issarak base at the junction of the borders of Cambodia, Thailand and Laos. Ke Pauk headed a new Northern Front, with its HQ in Kompong Thom. Mok, at Mount Aural, retained command of the South-West. More significantly, young Khmer villagers began leaving their homes to join the maquis. By the middle of 1980, the Khmers Rouges claimed to have 40,000 troops in the field. Not all were well-trained. But neither were the Vietnamese.
Although their troop strength in Cambodia would soon reach 180,000, many were from regional units.
As the resistance expanded, so did Office 131. Wooden huts were erected to accommodate bureaux handling military planning, foreign policy, economics, health, information and social affairs, with a staff of more than a hundred and a large open assembly hall for seminars and meetings. A monitoring group provided Pol with daily summaries of broadcasts from foreign radio stations and translations from Thai and Western newspapers. He himself lived higher up the mountain, in an area that was off-limits to all except the
montagnard
bodyguards, protected by yet another minefield and a ditch full of sharpened bamboo stakes, patrolled day and night by a special security battalion.
Office 131 was the Khmer Rouge nerve centre. But it was not the seat of government of Democratic Kampuchea. That lay two hundred miles to the north-east, at a border camp called 808. Henry Kamm of the
New York Times
was taken there early in 1980. He found himself, he wrote, in a
looking-glass world
:
[On] a table, decorated with flowers and greenery, placed under a handsome, thatched vaulted roof, hot coffee . . . was served with shy smiles by young Khmer Rouge soldiers . . . A courteous young man speaking flawless French collected our passports to issue us visas. Mine was returned bearing the only visa in longhand I have ever received. . .
The Khmer Rouge guest-house was the very latest in jungle luxury. It was clearly modelled on the sumptuous hunting lodges to which French planters of the past invited guests for weekend shoots . . . [There were] four guest bungalows and paths linking them to the bath-houses, toilets, dining pavilion, meeting lodge and communications shack. Local materials had been tastefully used . . . Soldiers swept the entire camp daily to keep the falling leaves from cluttering. In front of each bungalow, our attentive hosts had placed trays of glasses, a thermos of hot water, a packet of Chinese tea and packs of American cigarettes . . . Vases of bamboo . . . were filled with fresh flowers . . . The plates of fruit brought from Bangkok were renewed each day . . . The best Thai beer, Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch, American soft drinks and Thai bottled water were served.
At a time when many Cambodians were still close to starvation, Kamm found the display nauseating. That was not a thought that would have occurred to his hosts, Khieu Samphân and Ieng Sary To them, 808 was the smiling, new public face of Democratic Kampuchea. Reporters were told it was the CPK Central Committee’s headquarters. Pol himself went there to give interviews to favoured foreigners. The private face — Office 131 — was secret. In the first years not even Chinese journalists were told of its existence.
The Khmers Rouges purpose in arranging Kamm’s visit, and many others like it at that time, was to persuade public opinion abroad that they had changed, to counter the atrocity stories filling Western newspapers and to make it easier for Western governments to continue upholding Democratic Kampuchea’s right to be represented at the UN and in other international bodies. To that end, Pol and his colleagues were prepared to go a long way in publicly denying everything that their movement had once stood for. ‘
Our main duty
is not to . . . build socialism,’ Samphân declared, ‘[but] to drive all the Vietnamese forces out of Cambodia and to defend our nation, our people, our race.’ Ieng Sary, a few months later, was even blunter, telling Kamm: ‘We are abandoning the socialist revolution.’ At the time most journalists covering the region, and most governments, assumed this was simply a ploy, just another of the endless tissue of lies and deceit which Pol and his colleagues had spun throughout their years in power.
They were wrong. Change was truly in the air. It was not what the regime pretended, nor could it have been. Sihanouk had told Deng Xiaoping, when the latter tried to persuade him that the Khmers Rouges now respected human rights: ‘Vice-Premier, I am not able to believe you. Tigers don’t change into kittens.’ But the ultra-radical ideology that had underpinned the Khmer Rouge revolution, and which for years had seemed its
raison d’être,
was being quietly jettisoned, as though it had never been important, with hardly a backward glance.
The new-look Khmers Rouges shed their black peasant garb. The troops now wore jungle green, courtesy of their Chinese allies; the cadres, white shirts and dark trousers. Pol did the same until he discovered the attractions of safari suits, which were made to measure for him in Bangkok. He liked pastel colours, especially pale blue. Ministers affected business attire, rather than high-collared Mao jackets, when travelling abroad. Laurence Picq remembered putting on a short-sleeved pink blouse for the first time in July 1979. ‘I felt indecent,’ she wrote. ‘It was like wearing a disguise. We weren’t ourselves any more.’ The young men and women recruited that winter to work at Office 131 were chosen, not on the basis of class, as would have been the case in the past, but ability. They had to have some secondary education and were made to take an exam in Khmer, French and English — skills which, one of them observed, ‘would have got us killed before’. In October, Pol gave orders that there should be
no more executions
and, for the most part, these stopped. Ieng Sary told closed Party seminars that there had to be ‘a
new beginning
’.
The refashioning of Khmer Rouge social behaviour was accompanied by a reorganisation of the movement’s political institutions.
In September 1979 Khieu Samphân announced the creation of a new united front body, memorable mainly for the clumsiness of its name, the Patriotic Democratic Front of Grand National Union of Kampuchea (known by its French initials as FGUNDPK). More significantly, three months later, Samphân took over the Prime Ministership, ostensibly to allow Pol to concentrate on his role as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces but in fact to try to give the Khmers Rouges a more acceptable public image. It was the opening gambit in a long-drawn-out political game.
That autumn, Pol had belatedly come round to accepting Deng Xiaoping’s suggestion that Sihanouk should be made Head of State. But the Prince, infuriated by Chinese entreaties that he co-operate with ‘those people who killed my children and grandchildren’, was sulking in Pyongyang. For another year, neither side blinked. But in February 1981, after a further Vietnamese dry-season offensive had failed to crush Khmer Rouge resistance, Sihanouk took the bait.
By then his political options had narrowed. It had become clear that neither Vietnam nor the Phnom Penh authorities was willing to make a separate deal with him and his attempts to build a credible, non-communist third force had got nowhere. Unless he wished to retire from politics altogether, forfeiting any hope of ever seeing the Cambodian monarchy restored, he had no choice but to come to terms, for the second time in his life, with his hated communist opponents. Accordingly he proposed the creation of a tripartite coalition, composed of the Khmers Rouges; a non-communist resistance group headed by former Prime Minister Son Sann; and his own movement, the United National Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia, known by its French acronym, FUNCINPEC. The offer came with numerous face-saving conditions and, unsurprisingly, when Khieu Samphân met Sihanouk in North Korea in March, they failed to agree. But a dialogue had begun. All those involved understood that, after a suitable interval, it would lead to an accord.
In
August 1981
, Pol travelled to Beijing to meet Deng Xiaoping and Premier Zhao Ziyang. A specially chartered Chinese airliner was sent to Bangkok to collect him. Security was so strict that the half-dozen aides who went with him carried passports in false names.
‘We think you should be flexible,’ Zhao told him at their first meeting. ‘You have to adapt your policy to the twists and turns of the road ahead.’ According to Mey Mak, who was present, Pol bristled. ‘We know we have suffered a defeat,’ he replied. ‘But we still adhere to the stance of independence-mastery. It will be up to our Central Committee to decide what policy we follow.’ Later, at a meeting from which the rest of the delegation was excluded, Deng explained what Zhao had meant. In order
to retain the support of non-communist South-East Asia, he said, the Khmers Rouges’ differences with Sihanouk — in particular, their objections to giving a pledge to disarm after an eventual Vietnamese withdrawal — should be papered over. In return he promised that China would use its influence to ensure that, in the detailed negotiations that would follow, Khmer Rouge interests were protected.
Two weeks later, on September 4 1981, Sihanouk, Son Sann and Khieu Samphân met in Singapore and issued a joint statement announcing their intention to form a coalition government and wage a common struggle ‘for the liberation of Cambodia from the Vietnamese aggressors’.
In December, the Communist Party of Kampuchea announced its self-dissolution. This was not, as was widely assumed, a public relations stunt. Had it been, the movement would have continued to operate in secret, as happened in other countries in similar circumstances. It did not. The CPK became the first and only Party in the history of international communism to terminate its own existence.
The decision, taken by Pol and Nuon Chea, with little discussion beyond the inner circle, caused consternation among the Party rank and file. ‘People were very shocked and disoriented,’ one of Son Sen’s aides recalled. ‘We tried to convince them that, even without a Party, it was still possible to organise. Son Sen told them the main problem was the survival of the Cambodian nation. ‘Do you want to keep the Party and continue to struggle alone?’ he asked them. ‘Or is it better to unite with other national forces?’
One problem was that Party membership conveyed a certain status. To get round that, Pol proposed the creation of a ‘Movement of Nationalists’ to which former full-rights Party members would be given automatic entry. Even if the Party itself no longer existed, he said, there needed to be a mechanism to form ‘progressive elements’. But the nationalist movement never caught on. ‘It was too like a political game,’ one man said. ‘People just lost interest and it folded after a few months.’ In fact, it seems Pol decided that any formal political structure would be counter-productive at that stage and quietly dropped the idea.
In many ways the dissolution of the Party was a very odd move. It removed part of the glue that held the Khmer Rouge movement together. Abroad, it brought no benefit because no outsider believed it had happened.
Yet at home it made sense. No Party meant no Angkar. The ‘new’ Khmer Rouges were now, in theory and to a large extent in practice, a purely military organisation dedicated to fighting the Vietnamese. The movement’s ruling body, the CPK Standing Committee, was replaced by
a Military Directorate comprising Pol, Nuon Chea, Mok, Son Sen and Ke Pauk. The new Khmer Rouge radio station was named the ‘Voice of the National Army of Democratic Kampuchea’. Its broadcasts were a mix of traditional Khmer music and military communiqués. Political propaganda was out; what mattered was the progress of the war.