crossing of a river
. If I can get you to the other side, you can go on by yourselves.’
Succour came from an unexpected quarter.
The previous year, at about the time Y Chhean was preparing to talk to Nhek Bunchhay, FUNCINPEC had held a party congress at which Prince Ranariddh threatened to withdraw from the government unless his party was given a bigger share of power. Shortly afterwards, senior FUNCINPEC leaders met secretly in Kompong Som and decided to try to build a political alliance with three other small parties — one of which was led by Sam Sary’s son, Rainsy — and, more importantly, a military alliance with the Khmers Rouges.
This was less far-fetched than it might sound. Ranariddh’s forces and the Khmers Rouges had been allies against the Phnom Penh government in the 1980s. What had been done once could be done again. However, news of the Kompong Som meeting reached Hun Sen, who warned Ranariddh that splitting the coalition would carry a high political price. To show that he meant business, in March 1997 he sent a group of bodyguards to break up an anti-government demonstration by members of Sam Rainsy’s party. They used hand-grenades — a method that successive Cambodian governments have favoured for dealing with political
opponents since leu Koeuss’s assassination in 1950. Four were thrown into the crowd, killing fifteen people and wounding scores of others. Meanwhile Ranariddh’s efforts to put out feelers to the Khmers Rouges got off to a bad start when a helicopter carrying a FUNCINPEC negotiating team landed in the mountains above Anlong Veng, ostensibly for talks within the framework of the government campaign to promote defections, and the entire delegation was detained. It was later claimed that the Khmer Rouge commander who had authorised the landing had omitted to inform Pol Pot, who, suspecting betrayal, had sent in his own troops. The envoys were held in ‘tiger cages’, free-standing iron cells used as military prisons in the jungle. By the time they were freed five months later, only four of the fifteen were still alive.
The two incidents illustrated the climate of extreme tension that had developed. To Hun Sen, all means were good to prevent a FUNCINPEC-Khmer Rouge alliance and, in the process, to humble Ranariddh. Pol wanted a deal with FUNCINPEC but feared that by negotiating he would encourage other leaders to follow Ieng Sary’s lead and seek a separate accommodation with Hun Sen. Only Ranariddh himself seemed oblivious to the dangers. His insouciance would cost him dear.
On
May 16 1997
, a FUNCINPEC emissary travelled from Bangkok to meet Pol’s secretary, Tep Khunnal, at the border. Agreement was reached in principle for Khieu Samphân’s National Solidarity Party to join FUNCINPEC in a united front. On June 1, Samphân and Ranariddh met over lunch at the house of a Thai general in Prasa, twenty miles north of the border in Surin province, and confirmed the accord. Samphân said later that after this meeting, ‘I began to believe that what I had been waiting for was finally happening — the parliamentary road was becoming a reality’.
At this point the Prince made a serious misjudgement. Without consulting Samphân, FUNCINPEC announced that, as part of the agreement, Pol Pot, Mok and Son Sen would go into exile. The aim was to present the accord to Cambodians not as an electoral manoeuvre but as a statesmanlike effort to end the insurgency by bringing Khmer Rouge ‘moderates’ into the fold while banishing those viewed as hardliners. Indeed, Ranariddh was angling for something even better than banishment. With his blessing, Nhek Bunchhay had been negotiating with the US military attaché in Bangkok. As he explained,
the plan was to seize
Pol Pot and bring him to our base at Tatum, which is on the Thai-Cambodian border about twelve miles west of Anlong Veng. The US would send a helicopter from a naval ship in the Gulf of Thailand and fly him back to the ship. A unit of my troops actually set out from Tatum, but to reach the area where Pol Pot was, they had to travel through Thai territory
and as soon as they crossed the border Thai units pushed them back. I had arranged things with the Thai military on the border and they were prepared to cooperate. But then a senior commander — one of Chaovalit’s men — arrived from Bangkok by helicopter and vetoed the idea. So they wouldn’t let our troops come across. But it was close: we nearly succeeded.
There is no reason to believe that Pol ever got wind of the plot. But the talk of enforced exile evidently troubled him. On June 7, the Khmer Rouge radio formally denied that any negotiations had ever taken place. Two days later, Sihanouk issued a statement, ruling out pardons for Pol Pot and Mok but not for Son Sen. The latter was still in disgrace for his part in the loss of Pailin and Malay. His position had not been helped by the defection of two of his brothers, Nikân and Son Chhum, the former Khmer Rouge Ambassador to North Korea. The combination of events reawakened in Pol’s mind his old suspicions about Sen’s loyalty. Sihanouk’s remarks — making it appear that Sen was in a different category to the others — were the final straw.
At about midnight
Pol summoned his division commander, Saroeun, informed him that Son Sen and his wife were traitors and pronounced the fateful words which over the years had signalled the liquidation of so many of his associates: ‘I would like you to take care of it.’ In the early hours of the morning, In Sopheap heard the sound of distant gunfire. Son Sen, Yun Yat, and thirteen other family members and aides, including a five-year-old grandchild, were shot to death in the ‘Middle Houses’ by Saroeun’s troops.
Pol later told
an interviewer that he had given orders Only for Son Sen and his wife to be killed’, as though those killings were acceptable; the others, he said, were ‘a mistake’.
It was a murder too far. Khieu Samphân dutifully endorsed it.
Nuon Chea
kept silent. But Mok felt that if Son Sen could be killed, no one was safe.
On June 11, he rallied his troops at the district centre of Anlong Veng, telling them that Pol Pot had betrayed their movement and that his tyranny must end. Twenty-four hours later, the vanguard of Mok’s forces reached Kbal Ansoang. They met virtually no resistance. That afternoon Pol, his wife, eleven-year-old daughter and another child left on foot with twenty bodyguards along a dirt track leading eastward along the crest of the mountains towards the ancient temple complex of Preah Vihear. Pol was in no state to walk and the bodyguards had to carry him on their backs. In Sopheap remembered their flight as ‘a total shambles. It wasn’t organised—it was chaos.’
They were tracked by Thai air-force L-19 spotter planes. Two or three days later, probably on June 15, several of the bodyguards were detained by
Thai troops when they crossed the border to get water. They were found to be carrying rucksacks containing several hundred thousand dollars in cash. When Pol himself was eventually located, he was being carried in a hammock, slung from a bamboo pole. In Sopheap remembered that next morning he met Saroeun’s deputy, San. ‘Elder Brother,’ San said to him, ‘Our movement is finished now, isn’t it?’ Sopheap could not bring himself to answer, but they both knew he was right.
In the event, the death throes of the Khmers Rouges dragged on for almost two more years. Pol was placed under house arrest in a small cottage near the ‘Middle Houses’ where Son Sen had died. Khieu Samphân, Nuon Chea and the ‘ministers’ in Pol’s imaginary government rallied to Mok’s support. The talks with Ranariddh continued and on July 3, Khunnal and Bunchhay initialled an agreement, which the Prince and Khieu Samphân were to sign three days later, formally integrating what was left of the movement into Ranariddh’s new united front.
But it was not to be. On July 5 1997, Hun Sen staged a military coup, summarily executing dozens of FUNCINPEC officials, including two ministers, arresting hundreds of others and driving Ranariddh into exile. His action nullified the Paris peace accords and destroyed what remained of the UN’s multi-billion-dollar effort to impose ‘democracy’ on Cambodia. The West looked away in embarrassment and accepted the fait accompli.
At the end of July Pol and the three Khmer Rouge commanders who had remained loyal to him, Saroeun, San and Khon, were brought before a mass meeting near the Thai border crossing at Sang’nam, half a mile from the ‘Middle Houses’, at which the movement’s new leadership solemnly proclaimed its attachment to liberal democratic values and vilified Pol for all the horrors committed during his time in power. The American journalist Nate Thayer, who was invited to film the proceedings as proof of the Khmers Rouges’ change of heart, found the atmosphere very odd:
[He sat] in a simple wooden chair, grasping a long bamboo cane and a rattan fan . . . an anguished old man, frail eyes struggling to focus on no one, watching his life’s vision crumble in utter, final defeat . . . Pol Pot seemed often close to tears, [while] the three [detained] commanders, in contrast . . . had menacing, almost arrogant expressions, staring coldly and directly in the eyes of . . . the speakers and members of the crowd. They showed no fear . . . The crowds, though robotic, appeared to be both entertained and awestruck by the event, [but many of] those who had overthrown Pol
Pot [were] deferential . . . [They] spoke in almost gentle, respectful terms about their deposed leader. . . [When he left], some people bowed . . . as if to royalty.
Pol was ‘sentenced’ to life imprisonment. The three commanders were executed.
Three months later, Mok arranged for Thayer to return to interview Pol. It was his first meeting with a foreign journalist for fourteen years.
Thayer found him slowly dying, but ‘chillingly unrepentant’. He had nothing to apologise for, he said. ‘My conscience is clear . . . I’m old and ill . . . My life is over politically and personally . . . The Khmers have a saying about old age, illness and death. Now only death remains, and I don’t know the date. The following spring, Mok presented him to two other journalists, apparently to prove that he was still alive and available as a bargaining chip.
But there was no longer anyone to bargain with. Ranariddh was out of power and Hun Sen was too smart to waste time on a movement which was collapsing anyway. In March, one of Mok’s divisional commanders seized the district centre of Anlong Veng and defected with about a thousand Khmer Rouge troops. Ke Pauk and the former Ambassador to China, Pich Chheang, joined them. Mok himself and the remnants still loyal to him retreated into the mountains. On April 15, as government forces came within artillery range of the ‘Middle Houses’, guards dyed Pol’s hair brown in case they had to flee into Thailand. That night he died peacefully in his sleep. The cause was heart failure.
His body was preserved with ice and formaldehyde so that journalists could come to witness the funeral. Thai forensic specialists took fingerprints, dental photographs and hair samples. An American correspondent wanted to remove one of his teeth, supposedly for purposes of identification. Three days afterwards Pol’s widow and his daughter carried out the Buddhist rites. Then his body was cremated on a pile of rubbish and car tyres. In Sopheap, and many others, found the spectacle ‘sickening, simply disgusting’. Even those, like Ieng Sary, who had broken with Pol, were shocked by the squalor of his end. Yet it was a far, far gentler death than those which Pol had meted out to the million and a half Cambodians who perished under his rule. Mok was blunter. He told a Khmer reporter:
Pol Pot has died
like a ripe papaya [falling from a tree]. No one killed him, no one poisoned him. Now he’s Wnished. He has no power, he has no rights, he is no more than cow shit. Cow shit is more important than him. We can use it for fertiliser.
Thus the Khmer Rouge era ended. In May, the radio station fell silent and the staff fled to a Thai refugee camp. Thiounn Thioeunn and his family, In Sopheap, Chan Yourann and the other ‘ministers’ followed. In October, Tep Khunnal left with Pol’s widow, Meas, for Malay, where they married and started a family. In December, Khieu Samphân and Nuon Chea were allowed to settle under Ieng Sary’s protection in Pailin. Mok was captured in March 1999. He alone of the former leadership refused to surrender, and he alone was imprisoned to await an aleatory trial.
Afterword
ALMOST A CENTURY
ago, a French doctor, struck, like many of his compatriots, by the torpor of the Cambodian population, wondered to himself whether a nation capable of creating the wonders of Angkor ‘might not, after all, one day rediscover the spark that will rekindle the brilliance of its former genius’. Angkor and the grandeur it represents have been both an inspiration and an encumbrance to successive Cambodian governments. The temple complex, the largest and one of the most sumptuous religious edifices in the world, shows what Cambodians were capable of and cruelly underlines their subsequent decline.
National humiliation and the frustration it engenders among an educated elite are an almost infallible recipe for violent revolution. The Chinese, the Koreans, the Russians, the Germans under Hitler, all went down that road. In Cambodia, it produced the Khmers Rouges.
The countries concerned have judged these regimes in very different ways. The Germans repudiated Nazism, holding it to be an aberration, a monstrous perversion of their culture. The Chinese and the Russians have not repudiated Mao or Stalin, any more than they have disowned the First Emperor of Qin or Ivan the Terrible, arguing that, although tyrants, they represented, in times of trial and national renewal, the aspirations of their peoples. Pol Pot, like Hitler, led his country into darkness, Yet he was also, for a time, an authentic spokesman for the yearning felt by many Khmers for the return of their former greatness. The French missionary François Ponchaud called the revolution which Pol launched, ‘an
explosion
of Khmer identity’. A Yugoslav journalist, visiting Democratic Kampuchea in 1978, struggled to express a similar idea when he compared the Cambodian communists’ behaviour to that of ‘a