As loyal foot-soldiers, defending the Khmer nation, the ‘new’ Khmers Rouges wished to divest themselves of the nightmarish memories associated with communist rule. Pol had finally taken to heart Hua’s warning that a guerrilla war was unwinnable without popular support. From 1981 onwards, his overriding goal was to win back the support of the countryside that he had squandered during his years in power. To achieve that, he explained, it was necessary to wage armed struggle but ‘not to accumulate military successes. We [are] fighting . . . to build our forces politically and weaken those of the enemy.’ The aim, a Khmer Rouge officer recalled, was ‘to win the hearts and minds of the villagers in order to bring them to the side of Democratic Kampuchea’. In many areas the policy succeeded. A year later a Vietnamese officer complained: ‘
In certain places
where we have no permanent military presence . . . the Khmer local authorities are two-faced. One face smiles at us, the other smiles at the Khmers Rouges.’
There was a second reason for the dissolution of the Party. The bulk of Democratic Kampuchea’s diplomatic support at the United Nations and elsewhere came from capitalist countries — notably the United States and its allies — while the supply lines which kept the Khmers Rouges alive passed through pro-Western Thailand. Most of the communist world except China was hostile to the Khmer Rouge cause. And even China, in Pol’s view, was already by 1981 well on the capitalist road. ‘One day China will have a capitalist system,’ he told In Sopheap. ‘That’s not a criticism. But we must take it into account. It’s no good trying to comfort ourselves because their system still contains crumbs of socialism.’ The point he wished to make, Sopheap concluded, was that ‘we must adapt our policy in the light of the dominant trend in the world’. If Democratic Kampuchea retained a communist system, it would be out of step with its main allies. A few years later, Pol put it more succinctly: ‘
We chose communism
because we wanted to restore our nation. We helped the Vietnamese, who were communist. But now the communists are fighting us. So we have to turn to the West and follow their way.’
At one level, the decision, and Pol’s explanation for it, provided confirmation, were any needed, that the veneer of Marxism-Leninism which had cloaked Cambodian radicalism had only ever been skin-deep.
Disbanding the Party meant changing a label, little else.
It also reflected the perpetual Khmer tendency to take things to extremes. Almost three years earlier, Deng Xiaoping had recommended that in the interests of the united front, the Khmers Rouges should ‘not put the Communist Party in the foreground’ but emphasise patriotism, nationalism and democracy instead. Pol took that literally. If the Communist Party had become a hindrance, better to get rid of it altogether.
In documents destined for a wider audience and in his speeches at political seminars, he was less explicit. ‘The method has changed, but the spirit remains the same,’ he told one meeting. The movement’s ‘ideals’ had not altered, merely ‘to a certain extent, the form of the struggle’. The ambiguity inherent in such lapidary formulae was deliberate. Apart from Pol’s natural preference for obliquity, he could not expect men who had spent all their adult lives fighting for socialism to change their ideas overnight. Instead, each person was left to work out for himself exactly what the movement’s ‘spirit’ and ‘ideals’ now consisted of.
The changes were real. The goal of communism was abandoned.
Offenders were re-educated
rather than killed. The ban on individual possessions was lifted. Collective eating ended. Families lived together normally again. Young people chose their own marriage partners. Social restrictions were eased. In many ways even more striking — because it marked a break not only from previous Khmer Rouge practice but from the conduct of the military under Lon Nol, under Sihanouk and every other regime in Khmer history — captured Phnom Penh government soldiers were no longer executed. Instead they were invited to choose between joining the guerrillas or being freed and allowed to return home. ‘Each person you kill has a family,’ Pol explained. ‘Each family will bear a grievance . . . That way you increase the number of our enemies, and we will have fewer friends.’
In most other respects, however, the Khmers Rouges remained as before.
Despite promises, soon after the Vietnamese invasion, to ‘
draw lessons
from past mistakes’, Pol never admitted responsibility for the 1.5 million deaths under his rule, nor did he repudiate the policies that had caused them. Once, in a moment of honesty, he admitted that the movement had been immature, ‘
drunk with victory
and incompetent’ and had shown itself not up to the task of running the whole country.
But usually
the most he would say was that ‘the line was too far to the left’ and that he had placed too much trust in those around him: ‘They made a mess of everything . . . They were the real traitors.’
The basic strategy — to win power by forging an alliance of intellectuals and poor peasants — was unaltered. If he now eschewed political violence, it was not because he thought it morally wrong but because, at a time when the first priority was to build popular support, it was inopportune.
In the Khmer Rouge guerrilla camps, whether at the border or in the interior, the military hierarchy continued to impose a totalitarian regime of unparalleled severity. The same methods that had been used in the past to indoctrinate Party members — isolation from the outside world; rigid compartmentalisation between units; restrictions on movement; the use of hunger as a punishment and food as an incentive; the subordination of the individual to the collective; and the renunciation of personal advantage — were now applied to the training of an army imbued, as Khieu Samphân put it, with ‘razor-sharp patriotism’ and ‘an absolute determination to make any sacrifice for the nation’.
Even in its new, more moderate guise, the movement remained the personal despotism of one man, whose views could not be challenged and whose hold over his followers was undiminished by defeat. It was less awful than before, but the change was relative: in place of terror, Pol ruled by fear.
The negotiations to form a coalition government dragged on for nine more months. Periodically, China knocked heads together, insisting that the new arrangements, whatever form they took, ‘must not weaken the anti-Vietnamese forces who are fighting on the front line’ (in other words, the Khmers Rouges), and threatening to block arms deliveries to the other two movements if they refused to compromise. Finally, in Kuala Lumpur on June 22 1982, the three parties announced the formation of the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea with Sihanouk as Head of State, Son Sann, Prime Minister, and Khieu Samphân, Vice-Premier with responsibility for foreign affairs — which, in a government without domestic jurisdiction, was the only post that mattered.
The creation of the CGDK, as it was known, brought a number of changes.
Ieng Sary was sidelined, publicly at first but also gradually in the movement’s private councils. His last major appearance had been at the UN General Assembly in the autumn of 1981. In December, he lost his post on the Standing Committee, which ceased to exist when the Party was dissolved. Thereafter, being neither a member of the Military Directorate nor of the new coalition government, he had no official role. He claimed later that he had been excluded because he advocated a political settlement to end the conflict rather than a purely military solution, but like many of his statements that appears to have been untrue. He was probably pushed aside because Sihanouk detested him, and because his name was too closely linked abroad with the horrors perpetrated during the Khmers Rouges’ years in power. He continued to participate in leadership meetings, but his influence waned.
Base 808, the former Khmer Rouge seat of government, was closed, and over the next two years, most of the civilian ministers who had worked there, including Thiounn Mumm and his brother, Chum, went into exile in China or France. Sary himself moved to the Thai village of Tamoun, near Soy Dao, the ‘Mountain of Stars’, twenty miles north of Chanthaburi, where he was in charge of an ultra-secret base called
D-25
, which now replaced the old facilities at Kamrieng as a permanent transshipment point for all Chinese military aid sent through Thailand to the Khmers Rouges.
Sihanouk, meanwhile, after three years waiting in the wings, returned to centre stage in his new role as Head of State.
Thailand and the other non-communist South-East Asian states welcomed it as a first step towards a negotiated end to the conflict. China had mixed feelings. Sihanouk was not as easy to deal with as he had been in the early 1970s. Having allied himself once with the Khmers Rouges, only to be marginalised after their victory, he was not going to be burned a second time. His interests coincided with those of the Khmers Rouges to the extent that both wished to force Vietnam to withdraw its troops from Cambodia. But it was clear to Beijing that the moment a political settlement loomed, they would have very different agendas.
At this stage, moreover, China did not want peace. Nor did the United States.
The object was not to end the war against Vietnam, but to prolong it. Deng had told the Japanese Prime Minister, Masayoshi Ohira, early on in the conflict: ‘It is wise for China to force the Vietnamese to stay in Cambodia because that way they will suffer more and more.’ His Vice-Foreign Minister, Han Nianlong, urged that nothing be done ‘to lighten [the Russians’] burden’. Only when that burden became intolerable and Moscow could no longer bear the cost of supporting Vietnam, he said, would a political solution become possible. Nor did the Chinese have any illusions about how long this would take. In the summer of 1983, they told Sihanouk that the guerrillas would need to go on fighting ‘for another four or five years’. The implication — that peace talks might begin in 1987 or 1988 — would prove remarkably accurate.
The US administration was less frank, and less than truthful. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Adviser, acknowledged: ‘I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot . . . Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.’ It was not very brave.
At the UN General Assembly, the Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, and his aides ostentatiously walked out when the Khmer Rouge delegate stood up to speak. But while they held their noses in public, they worked
overtime in private to canvass diplomatic support to enable the Khmers Rouges to keep their UN seat. China could never have persuaded right-wing African countries like Kenya and Malawi to vote for Pol Pot, still less to receive a Khmer Rouge Ambassador. The United States could and did. ‘All you [Americans] had to do was to let Pol Pot die,’ Prince Sihanouk said later. ‘[In 1979] Pol Pot was dying, but you brought him back to life . . . and sent him into battle to kill and kill and kill . . . But now you say the Khmers Rouges are unacceptable.
What hypocrisy
! What hypocrisy!’ For America, as for China, the aim was to
make
Vietnam bleed and through Vietnam’s pain to weaken its patron, Russia. The ‘proxy war’ Brzezinski had spoken of had finally become a reality, and it was partly of America’s making.
There was a clear if unwritten division of labour. China provided a billion dollars’ worth of military aid to the Khmers Rouges over the course of the decade. The US kept the coalition afloat politically, and along with Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, gave more limited help, totalling about 215 million dollars in all, to the two non-communist military forces — the 5,000-strong Sihanoukist National Army and 9,000 men belonging to Son Sann’s National Front for the Liberation of the Khmer People. Neither group was very effective, but they created the illusion that it was not just the Khmers Rouges doing the fighting.
In practice, even after the CGDK had been established, there was little military co-ordination on the ground. The Khmers Rouges stood by and did nothing when Son Sann’s forces were attacked. The latter refused any contact with the Sihanoukists. But the overall strength of the resistance was growing. In 1983, guerrilla attacks increased and in many areas con trolled by the Heng Samrin government the security situation deteriorated.
That year
Pol travelled to Bangkok for a medical check-up. He was found to have Hodgkin’s disease, a cancerous condition which attacks the lymphatic system. The Thai army doctors who examined him warned that he would need prolonged treatment, and it was decided that he should go to China once the military situation permitted. That looked like being quite soon. The Khmers Rouges were continuing to make gains — in two spectacular incidents the following spring, a Vietnamese army fuel depot was destroyed near Battambang and the town of Siem Reap was attacked — and towards the middle of 1984, Pol felt confident enough to move Office 131 to a new base, higher up in the mountains, several miles inside Cambodian territory, near a stream known locally as O’Suosadey, the ‘Good-day River’.
Nevertheless, the discovery that he had cancer gave him pause.
The six months he spent at O’Suosadey were a time of personal and political reflection. He would soon be sixty. He had no family. Khieu Ponnary was living with her mother, her sister, Thirith, and Ieng Sary at the transshipment base at Soy Dao. Her condition had worsened. Chinese specialists had examined her but had concluded that her schizophrenia was so advanced that nothing further could be done.
In the summer of 1984 Pol decided that he wanted to remarry and have children.
For a man who, throughout his political career, had preached the renunciation of family ties, and who, even now, urged his soldiers to delay marrying until victory had been achieved ‘lest they think of their wives and families to the detriment of the struggle’, it was an extraordinary departure. Whatever it said about social policy, or about the leadership’s double standards, it confirmed that the ideological rigour of the past was rapidly disappearing.