No less striking
was Pol’s choice of a go-between: the Eastern Zone Commander, Son Sen. At the end of 1978, after the murder of Malcolm Caldwell, it had been rumoured that Sen’s days were numbered. Now he was back in favour. He sent to O’Suosadey two young women from one of the all-female transport battalions which carried military supplies from the border to Khmer Rouge units in the interior. One of them, a tall, well-built peasant girl named Meas, Pol decided he liked. She was twenty-two years old. Soon afterwards she joined his household as a cook.
Then, in December 1984, the Vietnamese launched the biggest dry season offensive for six years. In a matter of weeks, every Khmer Rouge base was overrun and much of the infrastructure built by the forces fighting for Son Sann and Sihanouk was destroyed as well. O’ Suosadey was abandoned and, for a second time, Pol was forced to flee into Thailand.
For the remainder of the decade, he did not set foot on Cambodian soil.
His new headquarters
, K-18, was on a rubber plantation a few miles outside Trat. The land was paid for by the Cambodians, using money provided by China, but registered in the name of a Thai general. It was guarded by the same Thai Special Forces unit, 838, that had helped protect Office 131. The Thai army also arranged the purchase of two other properties, half an hour’s drive to the north along the road from Trat to Chanthaburi: B-50, where Pol lived; and ‘House 20’, a larger complex, with two brick houses and a number of wooden bungalows for visitors, which served as residence and offices for Khieu Samphân. The geography held the clue. Pol was preparing his succession.
One of Samphân’s aides
recalled:
Khieu Samphân looked after diplomatic work . . . . But at K-18, Son Sen was in charge . . . [There was an idea in the air] that Sen would become the top leader of Democratic Kampuchea, while Samphân would be responsible for government matters. It was just a feeling, but there were lots of little signs. For instance, when Nuon Chea needed money, he had to get it from Son Sen. On practical questions, even though Nuon was the Number Two in the leadership, it wasn’t he who decided. The work system, all the mechanisms that Pol established at K-18 — they were all built around Son Sen. And Pol himself? He gave me the clear impression that he was withdrawing.
It was a very gradual withdrawal. Pol kept a house at K-18, where he stayed when he held political seminars with cadres from the interior. He still took all the major decisions. But he no longer micromanaged Khmer Rouge policy as he had in the past.
The new arrangements received their public consecration in September 1985, when it was announced that, ‘having reached his 60th birthday, the mandatory age for retirement’, Pol was stepping down as Commander-in-Chief in favour of Son Sen, but would continue to work in an advisory capacity. Khieu Samphân was confirmed as President of the Khmers Rouges’ civilian wing, now rebaptised the ‘Party of Democratic Kampuchea’, a paper organisation which served as the vehicle for the movement’s participation in the coalition government.
Like the dissolution of the Communist Party, the news of Pol’s retirement was widely disbelieved. Sihanouk called it ‘a farce’. And it was certainly true that, like Deng Xiaoping in China, Pol continued to be the movement’s ultimate authority, even without any official position. Nevertheless the change was more than cosmetic. The nature of the struggle was evolving. For the last five years, it had been essentially military. During the months Pol spent at O’Suosadey, he became convinced that the emphasis would soon shift back to politics and that the time had come for new men to take the fore. His personal circumstances had also changed. During the summer,
he and Meas
married. They held no wedding ceremony. But at a reception at K-18, attended by Nuon Chea, Son Sen, Samphân and two or three others, where the couple toasted each other with orange juice, he gave a hint of his own new priorities. ‘I want you to be a good mother,’ he told her. The following spring, their daughter was born. Pol named her Sitha, after the heroine of the Khmer religious epic, the Reamker. Some time afterwards he left for China, where he remained for almost a year, undergoing cancer treatment at a military hospital in Beijing followed by a prolonged convalescence.
* * *
By the mid-1980s, the strategy of Beijing and Washington — to hurt Vietnam in order to hurt Moscow — was beginning to pay off. The cost of strategic rivalry with NATO, military tension with China and the never-ending war in Afghanistan was more than the flagging Soviet economy could stand. When, in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, one of his first priorities was to cut back on Moscow’s overseas commitments. Vietnam was one of these. Hanoi might continue to claim that the situation in Cambodia was ‘irreversible’, but the boast sounded increasingly hollow. The question was not whether peace negotiations would begin, but when.
Gorbachev was not the only or even, for Cambodians, the most important new leader to emerge that winter. In Phnom Penh, the Vietnamese appointed Hun Sen, the former Khmer Rouge deputy regimental commander who had been serving as Heng Samrin’s Foreign Minister, to take over as Prime Minister. Hun Sen was then thirty-four years old. He had a glass eye, the result of a wound sustained during the Khmer Rouge offensive against Phnom Penh in April 1975. He was ambitious, capable, devious and, as events would show, extremely ruthless. To Vietnam, he represented the middle ground in a regime which was split on factional lines between ex-Khmer Rouge leaders like Heng Samrin and ex-Issaraks, like Pen Sovann, neither of whom had performed entirely to Hanoi’s satisfaction. In practice, most of Samrin’s power now passed to his younger rival.
By the time Pol returned from China in the summer of 1988, Hun Sen and Sihanouk were already well engaged in a diplomatic minuet around the possibility of direct negotiations. Most of the parties to the dispute — the Sihanoukists, Son Sann’s group, the Phnom Penh authorities and Vietnam — favoured formal peace talks, as did Thailand and the other South-East Asian states. China bowed to the inevitable. Agreement was finally reached on an informal meeting with Hun Sen, ‘en famille’, as Sihanouk put it, at a country hotel at Fère-en-Tardenois, on the edge of the champagne country an hour’s drive east of Paris. The Prince was accompanied by his wife, Monique, and his son, Ranariddh; Hun Sen by two aides. The three days of discussions ended with a banquet, prepared by Sihanouk himself in the kitchens of the hotel’s world-renowned restaurant.
Beyond agreeing on the need for a political solution, little of substance was achieved. But that was not the point. The ice had been broken. A further meeting followed in January 1988, opening the way for talks in Jakarta six months later which brought together for the first time the leaders of all four Cambodian factions: Sihanouk, Hun Sen, Khieu Samphân and Son
Sann. Nearly ten years after the Vietnamese invasion, serious negotiations on a political settlement had finally begun.
From the Khmers Rouges’ standpoint, the process had started too soon.
Their efforts to win
back support in the countryside, which had begun in 1981, had intensified over the previous three years. But Pol estimated that only about 1,000 out of Cambodia’s 7,000 villages supported the Khmer Rouge cause, most of them in remote mountainous or jungle areas where the writ of the Phnom Penh authorities did not run. In reality even that figure may have been too high. His goal was to win over at least a third of the rural population by 1990. This did not mean creating ‘liberated zones’ as in the early 1970s. Now the movement’s tactics were to suborn the village chief, and then to build core groups of supporters, first at the level of the family, later of several families and finally of the whole village. The network so formed operated in clandestinity and had no name. But it guaranteed Khmer Rouge control — which meant that, if a political settlement were followed by elections, such villages would vote for Khmer Rouge candidates. Pol explained the new strategy in a speech at a political seminar that winter:
Suppose there are
100 seats in the Kampuchean National Assembly. It would not be bad if we have 20 [representatives], better than that if we have 30 and even better if we have 40 . . . At the least we will have 10 or 20 or 30 voices there belonging to us . . . [And if we have] representatives in parliament we will inevitably have some representatives in government [and] in the major ministries . . . [That] is the only way in which it will be possible to protect to an important extent the interests of the people.
Later he spoke of the Party of Democratic Kampuchea holding ‘perhaps 15 per cent of ministerial posts’. The goal was to obtain a foothold in power — on the premise that the movement mirrored the interests of the peasantry, who made up 80 per cent of Cambodia’s population, and that the demographic majority they formed would eventually translate into majority political support. ‘The towns will follow the villages,’ Pol declared. ‘Whoever is able to gather the force [of the villages] will be the winner.’
Given time, this strategy had a chance of success. In much of rural Cambodia, a combination of war taxes, military conscription and forced labour was making the Phnom Penh authorities increasingly unpopular.
But time was precisely what the Khmers Rouges did not have.
Pol wanted a negotiated settlement ‘only when the situation on the domestic battlefield is ripe’. If elections took place before the guerrillas had got control of a big enough part of the rural population, it would
be a disaster, he said. ‘This is a big worry. It’s why we must speed up our activities and Khieu Samphân must try to slow down the progress of the negotiations until we have accomplished . . . our objectives.’
But over the next eighteen months, that option disappeared.
After making several token troop withdrawals from Cambodia in the early 1980s, Vietnam finally pulled out most, if not all, of its forces in September 1989. Two months later the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Empire proceeded to fall apart and relations between Russia and China were normalised. There were even the beginnings of a thaw between China and Vietnam.
In short, the Cold War ended, and with it the rationale for the United States and its allies to continue backing the Khmers Rouges.
For some time President Bush had been ill at ease with such unpleasing bedfellows. Now his Secretary of State, James Baker, announced that America would stop supporting the Coalition Government’s claim to occupy Cambodia’s seat at the UN and start giving humanitarian aid to the authorities in Phnom Penh. Between the lines, the message was clear: the Faustian pact was over. It was left to the French Foreign Minister, Roland Dumas, to spell out the implications. ‘The international community,’ he told Hun Sen and Khieu Samphân in December 1990, ‘cannot indefinitely focus on the fate of Cambodia if the Cambodians themselves do not show the political will to reach a settlement.’ In plain language, the window of opportunity for a peace settlement was about to close.
Pol now faced an impossible dilemma.
If the Khmers Rouges dragged their feet, the negotiations might break down or, worse, Sihanouk and Son Sann might do a deal with Hun Sen on their own. The new Thai Premier, Chatichai Choonhavan, was more interested in business ties with Vietnam than in supporting ousted revolutionaries and hinted that Thailand might halt arms shipments if the Khmers Rouges refused to co-operate. Even China could no longer completely be relied on.
On the other hand, the guerrillas were still far short of the support of the two to three thousand villages Pol had hoped for.
The Gulf War, in the spring of 1991, distracted the West’s attention and provided a few months’ respite. But the day of reckoning came in June, when the leaders of the four Cambodian factions met at the Thai resort of Pattaya to iron out the last remaining problems. For the first time since the peace process had begun, Pol left B-50 to stay near by. If the Khmers Rouges were going to dig in their heels, this was their last opportunity to do so. At each stage of the discussion, Khieu Samphân sought Pol’s agreement. But by then the negotiation had developed a momentum of its own.
To pull back without good reason had become extremely difficult. On June 26, the meeting decided that the Supreme National Council (SNC) — the body in whose name Cambodia would be ruled until a new government was elected — should be established in Phnom Penh, and approved an indefinite ceasefire and an end to foreign military aid.
Pol accepted the deal on offer because, of the two alternatives — fighting on in isolation, without foreign support, probably against the combined forces of Sihanouk, Son Sann and Hun Sen; or trying to make the best of a peace settlement which offered at least the possibility of the Khmers Rouges having a role in mainstream political life — the latter was less bad. At the time he evidently did not realise the extent to which the settlement was flawed. On the crucial issue of how the elections should be conducted, Hun Sen, despite his youth, had outwitted Sihanouk, Son Sann and Khieu Samphân combined, men far older and more experienced than himself. The PRK — or ‘State of Cambodia’, as the Phnom Penh regime now called itself — would not be dissolved, as the resistance wanted, but would remain in place until a new government was formed. As a result, voting would be ‘organised’ by the UN and ‘supervised’ by the SNC, but in practice it would use ‘the existing structures’ of the Phnom Penh administration. Politics is a practical art and Hun Sen a practical person. The agreement gave his government a head start by allowing it to control the mechanics of getting in the vote.
On October 23 1991, the ‘Agreement on a Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodian Conflict’ was signed in Paris, and the UN began gearing up for the biggest and most expensive peace-keeping operation in its history.
Three weeks later
, Prince Sihanouk flew back in triumph to the capital he had fled during the Vietnamese invasion in 1979. He travelled from Beijing aboard a Chinese airliner, escorted by the same senior Chinese diplomat who had come to take him to safety all those years before. As he drove into Phnom Penh, along streets lined with cheering crowds, in a pink Chevrolet convertible — a relic of his former rule, refurbished for the occasion — children cried out excitedly, their eyes shining, ‘The King! The King has returned!’ And for most of the population, after twenty years of civil war, Khmer Rouge despotism and Vietnamese occupation, that was indeed how it seemed. The following morning, Sihanouk and his suite, wearing traditional court dress and reclining on rattan quilts, watched a display of classical Khmer dance in the palace gardens. Among them, seeming slightly ill at ease, was a man who looked exactly like Pol Pot. It was Loth Suong, his elder brother, with whom he had lived as a child. Suong’s wife, Chea Samy, had helped revive the royal dance troupe after her