Pol Pot (9 page)

In practice, the Vietnamese tried to do both.

First they recruited a former Buddhist lay preacher, calling himself Son Ngoc Minh, to serve as President of a newly-formed Cambodian People’s Liberation Committee (CPLC) in Battambang. Minh had been born in a Khmer district of southern Vietnam of mixed Khmer-Vietnamese parentage, which meant he was the nearest the Vietnamese had to an authentic Khmer revolutionary. According to French intelligence, his real name was Pham Van Hua. The

was intended to capitalise on the popularity of Sihanouk’s banished rival, Son Ngoc Thanh, then still languishing in exile in France. Minh spent most of the first two years escorting arms convoys and groups of Overseas Vietnamese recruits through Cambodia to communist-controlled areas in southern Vietnam. But in 1948, the Vietnamese decided that the time had come to try to give the nascent Cambodian movement greater substance. The country was divided into four geographical zones. Minh was placed in charge of the South-West. Dap Chhuon, an army deserter who led an 800-man Issarak band in Battambang province, was assigned to the North-West. Keo Moni, an Issarak chief from Prey Veng province, assisted by another Buddhist preacher, Tou Samouth, had responsibility for the South-East. The North-East, a sparsely populated

region where the French presence was tenuous, was for the time being spared Viet Minh attentions.

Attempts were made throughout the areas of Cambodia under guerrilla control to set up an embryonic revolutionary administration — complete with a tax system, land survey, economic and judicial departments, revolutionary tribunals and even a public works service — and on May 15 1948, Son Ngoc Minh sent birthday greetings to Ho Chi Minh on behalf of a purported ‘revolutionary provisional government’. But in practice most of the new structures existed only on paper.

The artificial nature of the Vietnamese communist implant in Cambodia, coupled with historical animosities, made it a virtual certainty that relations between the ICP and its Issarak protégés would be uneasy when not openly hostile.

In the ‘liberated districts’, Khmer leaders, including Son Ngoc Minh himself, could do nothing without the approval of Vietnamese political commissars. A French intelligence officer wrote perceptively: ‘The initial Viet Minh plan seems to have been genuinely to transfer control to the [Cambodians] as they acquired the necessary political maturity . . . [However] as their authority steadily grows, [the Cambodian leaders] have more and more difficulty in tolerating Vietnamese [supervision] . . . One can expect that clashes [between them] will increase.’ They did. Already in 1945 and 1946, Khmers had slaughtered Vietnamese living in Khmer-speaking districts of Cochin-China. Now incidents began to occur within Cambodia itself. In 1948, Khmer villagers in districts of Takeo province, bordering Vietnam, attacked Viet Minh units, and a massacre of Vietnamese settlers occurred near Phnom Penh. Shortly afterwards a Khmer Issarak commander in south-eastern Cambodia, Puth Chhay, launched an anti-Vietnamese pogrom which so angered the Viet Minh leadership that they despatched a punitive expedition against him. It returned empty-handed.

This resurgence of ancestral hatreds was partly triggered by what Khmers perceived as the condescension of their new revolutionary allies. But it also reflected the mixture of contemporary and historical motives at work on the Vietnamese side: at first internationalist rhetoric was used to justify policies devised for purely national military ends, and then, once the decision had been taken to treat Indochina as a single battlefield, the ICP’s long-standing desire to evangelise the Khmers, echoing the ‘civilising mission’ of the nineteenth-century Vietnamese emperor Minh Mang, had surreptitiously taken over. Almost unconsciously, Hanoi’s programme in Cambodia mutated from a strategic initiative into an ideological crusade. Like the Vietnamese Catholic missionaries who had struggled for two hundred years to convert Cambodians to Christianity, ICP emissaries were

determined to build a Cambodian revolutionary movement from nothing, regardless of cost or the suitability of the terrain. They would have little more success.

Cambodians, in their immense majority, were simply not interested in the Vietnamese communists’ message — in part because they

Vietnamese. The history of conflict between the two peoples was merely the visible part

their antagonism. Cambodians assert their identity by means of dichotomies: they

in opposition to what they

Cambodia as a nation exists in opposition to Vietnam (and, to a lesser extent, Thailand). That does not prevent relationships at the level of individuals, but between Cambodians and Vietnamese such personal contacts must take place against the background of an overwhelming, pejorative, nationalist discourse.

The other great problem confronting Vietnam’s communist missionaries — like their Catholic predecessors — was that they were trying to cross Asia’s deepest cultural divide. Marxism-Leninism, revised and sinified by Mao, flowed effortlessly across China’s southern border into Vietnamese minds, informed by the same Confucian culture. It was all but powerless to penetrate the Indianate world of Theravada Buddhism that moulds the mental universe of Cambodia and Laos.

The Vietnamese leaders themselves were aware of these difficulties. ‘[It is] imperative that nothing be done which might lead our Laotian and Cambodian brothers to think mistakenly that the Vietnamese have come as invaders,’ the Defence Ministry cautioned. Hoang Van Hoan, a veteran ICP Central Committee member whom Ho Chi Minh had put in charge of North Vietnam’s foreign relations, complained that too many cadres ‘apply the revolutionary model used in Vietnam without taking into account the cultural and social differences of western Indochina . . . As a result of such blunders, many Lao and Khmers mistrust them.’ He added, in a telling comment, that it was ‘necessary to think of the Cambodian and Lao revolutions in terms of benefits for those two peoples, and not just [of advantages] for Vietnam’. Other leaders criticised the ‘arrogance’ of Vietnamese cadres. To make matters worse, Hanoi’s efforts to export its revolution were bedevilled by internal rivalries and conflicting chains of command. It is true that at the time the Vietnamese communists were fighting for their own survival. None the less, their programme for Cambodia was chaotic.

As the 1940s drew to a close, even the little that had been achieved was compromised when Dap Chhuon defected with his forces to Sihanouk, followed by several other Khmer Issarak leaders. French intelligence estimated that, in the entire country, the Viet Minh and their

allies controlled a Khmer population of only 25,000. Out of an estimated 3,000 guerrilla troops in the country, barely 20 per cent were Khmer — and most of those were Khmer Krom, recruited from Khmer-speaking districts of southern Vietnam, not from Cambodia itself. The rest were Vietnamese. The Cambodian revolution was not yet even a sideshow.

In these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that Sâr and his schoolmates knew little of Issarak and Viet Minh activities. News of the rebels was censored in the Cambodian press, and such incidents as did occur were on so small a scale that even politically engaged students like Ieng Sary and Mey Mann ignored them. Sâr, at that time, was the reverse of engaged. According to Ping Sây, he never discussed politics while at Sisowath and, unlike Sây himself and others of their age, he had no contact with the Democratic Party. Apart from his somewhat juvenile admiration for the exiled Son Ngoc Thanh, it seems that the subject simply did not interest him.

In the summer

of 1948, he, Sây and their friend Lon Non sat the

the exam which determined admission to the upper classes of the lycée. Sây passed. Sâr and Non failed. Non’s parents were wealthy enough to send him to France to continue his education. Sâr went to the Technical School at Russey Keo, in the northern suburbs of Phnom Penh.

It cannot have been a happy move. The place itself was depressing — two long dormitory huts and a collection of barrack-like workshops that looked as though they dated from the industrial revolution. For a young man who had been on track for the

and the possibility of a university education, it must have been a dreadful come-down. His former classmate Khieu Samphân remembered:

‘Most students

used to look disdainfully at the boys at the Technical School. No one wanted to be seen with them.’ They had a reputation as toughies. When the ‘apprentices’, as they were mockingly called, played football against other schools, the match invariably degenerated into a brawl and they would bring out the brass knuckles they had made in their metalwork classes.

But Sâr had no choice. Without a

the Technical School was the only way forward for a Cambodian youth who wished to continue his education. And there did turn out to be a silver lining. The previous year the government had introduced bursaries allowing the three best students at Russey Keo to pursue their studies at French engineering schools. This year there were to be five such scholarships.

In this situation, Sâr’s arrival was not entirely welcome. Nghet Chhopininto, another final-year student, recalled: ‘He was regarded as an intruder. If he got better marks than we did, he would get a bursary and we wouldn’t. We didn’t ostracise him — but he was a rival.’ Chhopininto was so keen to go abroad that he made himself a wooden book-stand so that he could revise his lessons in the dormitory under his mosquito net at night. He and Sâr both did carpentry, which was regarded as the easiest subject. The woodwork teacher, a Vietnamese, was ‘a charming man, who always gave everyone good marks’. Whether for that reason, or because Sâr had decided that now he really did need to work, he and Chhopininto both obtained their

in the summer of 1949 and each was awarded one of the coveted scholarships.

*

In the end it had been easier than they had thought, for there were only twenty final-year students at Russey Keo; not all of them passed their exams, and of those who did, not all wished to go abroad. The same was true at Sisowath and at the Public Works School which Mey Mann attended. Under the protectorate, the French had so neglected higher education in Cambodia that in the late 1940s, fewer than a hundred students a year left secondary school with the requisite qualifications. The problem, whatever Chhopininto may have thought, was not so much a paucity of scholarships as of candidates. That was especially true in the technical field, where even the humblest posts were filled by Vietnamese because of the lack of trained Cambodians. To the Democratic Party leader, Chhnean Vâm, and his colleagues, remedying this state of affairs was an essential part of the struggle for independence.

Even with those caveats, Sâr had become part of a minuscule élite. Although the numbers were rising, fewer than 250 Cambodians had been trained abroad since the beginning of the century, including those sent by their families without government support.

On the eve

of their departure, King Sihanouk granted the new bursars an audience amid the opulence and glitter of the palace’s Khemarin Hall. At the age of twenty-six, he was only two or three years older than they were, but already had four wives and eight children. Sâr and the others stood in line, self-conscious in their new suits and ties, waiting to be presented by a palace official, who handed the young King an envelope for each of them. It contained 500 piastres (equivalent to about 30 US dollars), an appreciable sum in those days, enough for a student to live on for a

month. Mey Mann, who was there, too, remembered feeling ‘very happy and proud. For all of us, it was a unique opportunity. Very few young people in Cambodia had the chance to travel like us.’

Many of those present that evening would later become influential figures on the Cambodian Left. Some were destined to have exemplary governmental careers. Chau Seng, an ethnic Khmer from Ieng Sary’s home district of Travinh, across the border in Vietnam, became Sihanouk’s Cabinet Director and, later, Minister of Education. Toch Phoeun would head the Public Works Department. Phuong Ton would go on to be Rector of the Royal University.

Others were agreeable but uninspiring youths, for whom even their closest friends could not imagine much of a future. Sâr was one of these. The only thing that distinguished him from the others was that his upbringing had been more eclectic than theirs. Like them, his childhood had been steeped in the legends and superstitions of the countryside and in the moral suasion of the

But, unlike most of his peers, he had gone on to a Buddhist novitiate; to catechism at a Roman Catholic primary school; adolescence in Phnom Penh amid the royal harem; a middle school imbued with the values of Vichy France; the Lycée Sisowath, where he had been surrounded by some of the most gifted young minds in the country; and finally, Russey Keo, among student carpenters and boilermakers, tinsmiths and lathe-workers. One might call it a motley training for life or, if one wished to be kind, a variegated education.

However, it gave Sâr one great advantage. He was able to communicate naturally with people of all sorts and conditions, establishing an instinctive rapport that invariably made them want to like him. In this, he was helped immensely by what Mey Mann called ‘Sâr’s famous smile’. Many years later, Mann still wondered about the smile. ‘He never said very much,’ he remembered. ‘He just had that smile of his. He liked to joke, he had a slightly mischievous way about him. And there was never the least hint of what he would become after.’

Sâr’s smile was too open to be enigmatic, too striking to be merely a mannerism. One of Sihanouk’s advisers, a Frenchman of left-wing views named Charles Meyer, wrote that the Khmer smile — ‘that