8
POL POT’S
SAVAGE UTOPIA,
1975–79

It is a sad irony of history that it took Pol Pot’s savage ‘utopia’—or rather dystopia—to put Cambodia on the current world map. Prior to the establishment of Democratic Kampuchea (DK), Cambodia was for most westerners (if they knew of it at all) an exotic backwater that was home to the fabulous ruins of Angkor. It was ‘the gentle land’ of smiling peasants and lissom dancers ruled by an eccentric prince, a stereotype that was shattered by Lon Nol’s hopeless war and the brutal fanaticism of Democratic Kampuchea.

A byword for horror

Today, Cambodia is a byword for horror, and the ubiquitous motorbike taxi drivers in Phnom Penh often assume that tourists come to visit the killing fields outside the city. Behind the conflicting stereotypes, Cambodia is a country inhabited by ordinary human beings who do the things people everywhere do, albeit in particularly Khmer ways. One is entitled to ask why western visitors to Bali or Java rarely wonder at the massive slaughter that befell those islands in 1965–66, yet define Cambodia by the killing fields. Yet, unfair as the stereotypical image is, we cannot avoid the horror of the Pol Pot years. According to the CIA, the population of Cambodia stood at around 7.3 million in 1975, with other estimates of up to 8 million. Around 1.7 million of these people were to die during the brief period of DK, up to quarter of a million of them murdered as real or imagined enemies of the paranoid regime. The rest perished due to malnutrition and overwork, lack of medical care and sometimes despair and heartbreak.

When Phnom Penh fell to the Khmers Rouges, Cambodian society and economy had been traumatised by five years of war. Any regime, no matter what its ideological complexion, would have faced enormous challenges of reconstruction but the victorious Khmers Rouges only worsened the suffering of the people through a murderous combination of dogmatic quackery, ignorance, ineptitude and deliberate cruelty. In the end, their revolution failed miserably and almost destroyed the country in the process. There were no democratic mechanisms to allow for the correction of the policies of the rulers, despite their arrogation of the word ‘Democratic’ in the country’s new name. That the suffering of the Cambodian people only ended in 1979 with their liberation by their traditional enemies from Vietnam is another irony of history, albeit a happier one.

Prince Sihanouk was the first head of state of the new regime, but the Khmers Rouges made clear to him that he was to be a mere figurehead. His alliance with them had been very much a marriage of convenience between old adversaries. Perhaps he believed that his old friend Zhou Enlai would ensure he would at least share power with the Khmers Rouges, but if so he was mistaken. After his return to Phnom Penh in September 1975 following a goodwill mission to twenty countries, Sihanouk was effectively a prisoner in the royal palace, and in April 1976 the Khmers Rouges forced him to retire and appointed Khieu Samphan as the new head of state. Many of Sihanouk’s family died during the DK years and what perhaps saved him from the same fate was his high international profile and his friendship with the Chinese leaders, plus the possibility that he might be useful for the regime in future. He spent much of his time under house arrest, reading and growing vegetables in his palace, terrified of the irrational violence of his Khmers Rouges ‘friends’. He had supped with the devil and now he had the time and the solitude to ponder the wisdom of what he had done. Whether he did so at the time is a matter for debate, for his continuing alliance with Pol Pot after the downfall of DK points to a character ruled by egotism and visceral emotion.

The forced evacuation of the cities

Eyewitness accounts agree that the people of Phnom Penh were awash with conflicting emotions when their city fell to the Khmers Rouges on 17 April. As the Cambodian memoirist Haing Ngor points out, most city-dwellers had a friend or relative on the other side. Many believed that Prince Sihanouk was the supreme commander of the guerrillas and that he would save them from harm, but stories of infernal atrocities had also made them apprehensive. Some residents welcomed the guerrillas with food and drink, but most stood in doorways and by windows to see what would happen. No one seems to have been prepared for the sudden mass evacuation of the city’s population.

The heavily armed guerrillas, filing through the streets in black peasant garb or rudimentary khakis, were serious and disciplined in contrast to the lackadaisical and demoralised Lon Nol soldiers. Some accepted the food offered them but most padded past in grim silence on their rubber sandals. Most of them were dark-skinned back-country Khmers and many were young adolescents and children, some as young as ten years old toting AK47s almost as big as themselves. Some spontaneously broke into shy country smiles when pressed with kind words to accept food or drink, but most smouldered with rage against the city and its denizens. The French author François Bizot (himself a former prisoner of the robotic Khmers Rouges executioner Ta Duch) wrote that beyond the French Embassy gate there raged ‘a violence so terrible and explosive that I felt totally disheartened’. Haing Ngor felt there was ‘something excessive in their anger’ and mused darkly that ‘something had happened to these people in their years in the forests’. Indeed it had. Although it is not easy to see these young guerrillas as victims, given the horrors of the regime they served, they had been moulded by what the French writer Serge Thion has called ‘the most savage onslaught ever launched against a peasantry’. Part of the price of the civil war and the American bombing was the brutalisation of the young and the destruction of family ties. These young people were part of an immense tragedy that began when the 1970 coup dragged their country over the edge of an abyss.

For many guerrillas, this was their first sight of a big city and they must have been as apprehensive of the city-dwellers as the latter were of them. For these farm boys (and girls), Phnom Penh was a strange foreign place, where they might witness marvels beyond their wildest imaginings: white-skinned westerners, running water, electricity, women with high heels and make-up, whitegoods and televisions, brick buildings, iced drinks and sweet pastries, people wearing glasses, children wearing shoes, the royal palace. Haing Ngor recalls a young guerrilla marvelling at the ‘fresh’ water in a toilet. Phnom Penh was also a kind of Sodom on the Mekong, a place of ill repute that the Khmers Rouges cadres had long warned them against. These child and adolescent soldiers, uprooted from their families, impressionable and unschooled, were the praetorian guard of the new regime, harsh and fanatical, yet pliable in the hands of the leadership they knew only as angkar, ‘the organisation’. A book written from their point of view would make fascinating reading, but is unlikely to appear for most of them were illiterate.

Haing Ngor was about to operate on a badly wounded Lon Nol soldier when a guerrilla burst through the hospital door. ‘He was, at most, twelve years old,’ the doctor recalls, and like most of the other guerrillas he encountered the boy’s face bore a fierce and angry expression. In a voice that had not yet broken, he screamed at the hospital staff to leave at once, emphasising the words with jabs of his rifle. The staff complied, leaving the soldier to die on the operating table. Outside in the streets all was chaos, with Khmers Rouges soldiers yelling at the people to get out of the city, occasionally punctuating their words with bursts of AK47 fire into the sky. Some said that the evacuation would be only for a few hours, because the Americans were going to bomb the city, yet it took hours to move even a few city blocks in the crush. Finally, the orders came that everyone must make their way to their home village, that there would be no exceptions. Some guerrillas chanted slogans against the ‘US imperialists’ and the Lon Nol government, or hailed their own victory, their words full of exaggerated hatred or praise. A mit neary—woman comrade—endlessly harangued the crowd: ‘The wheel of history is turning . . . If you use your hands to try to stop the wheel, they will be caught in the spokes.’ She had evidently learned the speech by rote, and the expelled population would hear it from many other mouths in the coming days and weeks.

The entire city population, up to three million strong, was on the move: children, pregnant women, the well fed and half-starved, the old and infirm, rich and poor, long-time city-dwellers and refugees alike. Most walked, some shoved motor scooters or even cars through the throng, while others pushed handcarts piled high with ill-assorted possessions: television sets, boxes bulging with personal effects, pots and pans, and the proverbial trash and treasure. Some carried bags crammed with Lon Nol currency, only to discard it when they learned there would be no money in the new society. Dr Haing Ngor’s ‘exodus of the sick and crippled’ flowed from the hospitals: wounded soldiers on crutches, wobbly old women and even a man with both legs amputated, whose relatives pushed his hospital bed with the intravenous drip bag still attached. The French priest François Ponchaud estimates the hospital population of the city at ‘liberation’ at up to 20 000. Many patients, along with the very young and very old, would perish in the exodus. Some civilians tried to turn back when they reached the suburbs but the Khmers Rouges shot recalcitrants on the spot as a warning. The engineer Pin Yathay recorded the fate of one young man who went back to get something from his house: a guerrilla stood 14 metres from the boy’s corpse, ‘smoke still wafting lazily from his AK47’. The evacuation was relentless, and when Haing Ngor returned a few days later with a guerrilla escort to pick up some medicines, Phnom Penh was already a ghost city. Official DK sources admit that between 2000 and 3000 people died during the evacuation, but the total was certainly much higher.

The mass expulsion was an atrocious act, but the deportation of populations has a long history across many civilisations. The Romans scattered the Jews from Palestine in the Diaspora of 70 AD. Ferdinand and Isabella deported the Sephardic Jews from Spain in 1492 and the last of the Muslim Moriscos followed them in 1614. Stalin expelled the Crimean Tartars, the Volga Germans and the Chechens to Siberia during World War II, and after 1945 some 14 million Germans were driven westwards from their homes in Central and Eastern Europe. The mass transfer of Muslim and Hindu populations marked the end of the British Raj in India in 1947 and more recently Bosnia was ‘ethnically cleansed’ by murder and expulsion. All of these cases depended on the mobilisation of hatred which targeted a clearly identifiable ethnic or at least religious ‘other’. What is singular about the Cambodian experience is that Khmers expelled Khmers. In the mental universe of the guerrillas, medieval prejudices jostled with half-baked corruptions of Marxism and the city-dwellers had become, as a group, the ‘class enemy’. The urban-dwellers, so the Khmers Rouges leaders told them, were in league with the US imperialists and thus collectively responsible for the sufferings of the peasantry. For the guerrillas, Phnom Penh was more malignant than the ‘Great Wen’ (boil or carbuncle) of 19th century London was to any English peasant or bucolic reactionary, and was to be drained of its ‘tainted’ people. The north-west town of Battambang, its population swollen to over quarter of a million by refugees, suffered the same fate as the capital.

Although apologists for DK defend the expulsion as a necessary precaution against possible US bombing and mass starvation, it is clear that the decision was made on ideological grounds some months beforehand and in secret. Even bearing hindsight in mind, it was extremely unlikely at the time that the United States would bomb the city. The US Congress had put an end to the American bombing almost two years earlier and the war-weary American people had no stomach for a fresh war in Asia. Feeding the bloated urban populations did present a real problem, but the Vietnamese communists managed to feed the people of Saigon without recourse to draconian measures when that city fell a fortnight later. Undoubtedly, there was a compelling case for the orderly, humane and voluntary repatriation of the refugees to their home villages, but none of these caveats apply to what happened after 17 August 1975.

Building ‘utopia’ from day one of the revolution

There were two interrelated immediate reasons for the expulsions. The first was the relative weakness of the Khmers Rouges forces, which had been only just strong enough to defeat Lon Nol’s army. The second was the fear that the cities would act as reservoirs of counterrevolution. It did not matter that over half the urban population were civilian refugees from the countryside, or that most city-dwellers welcomed the end of hostilities and favoured national reconciliation. For the high command of the secretive angkar, it was a case of ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’—logic that they shared with both Sihanouk and Lon Nol, for whom dissent meant treason. Underlying the immediate practical necessity of evacuation (as the Khmers Rouges saw it) was an ideological imperative. The Khmers Rouges leadership was determined to begin the total transformation of Cambodian society on the day that Phnom Penh and Battambang fell and this was predicated on the dispersal of the old urban populations. Even before the end of the war, the Khmers Rouges had begun its radical experiments in the so-called liberated zones under its control. The ideological basis for the expulsions is clear from Pol Pot’s orders, summed up by a Khmers Rouges regimental political commissar quoted by the historian Ben Kiernan:

Immediately upon liberation on 17 April 1975, there was a Special Centre Assembly for Cabinet Ministers and all Zone and Region Secretaries. Eight points were made at the Assembly, by Pol Pot:

1. Evacuate people from all towns.

2. Abolish all markets.

3. Abolish Lon Nol regime currency, and withhold the revolutionary currency that had been printed.

4. Defrock all Buddhist monks, and put them to work growing rice.

5. Execute all leaders of the Lon Nol regime beginning with the top leaders.

6. Establish high-level cooperatives throughout the country with communal eating.

7. Expel the entire Vietnamese minority population.

8. Dispatch troops to the borders, particularly the Vietnamese border.

Here, we have the nub of Pol Pot’s plan for the sweeping transformation of Cambodian society. The construction of ‘utopia’ would begin from the first day of the revolution on the ruins of the old society. The towns were seen as parasitic growths and hotbeds of spies, foreign ideologies and capitalism. The urban populations, henceforth known as ‘new people’, would join the ‘old people’ in productive labour on collective farms in the countryside and their labour would provide the wealth to build the future paradise. There would be no freedom of movement and no freedom to choose one’s occupation. Families would be split up. There would be no singing or dancing save to glorify the regime, and even the music of the new regime sounded discordant to Khmer ears.

The people would be denied spiritual sustenance. The Khmers are an intensely religious people and their religion has often served as a consolation for the hardships of life, but Pol Pot would have none of it. Monks were defrocked and put to work and their orders closed. The regime would not tolerate any other source of authority that might undermine its own. The January 1976 Constitution of DK granted freedom of worship, but cancelled it with the qualification ‘except for reactionary religion’. The entire country would be sealed off from the ‘contaminating’ influences of the outside world. There was to be no respite after the rigours of war, no chance for the people to heal their wounds and mourn their dead. There would be no time for love, no reconciliation after a fratricidal war that had pitted brother against brother and sister against sister. The new people would submit or perish. There would only be a life of unremitting toil in the paddy fields and, in what was really the socialisation of poverty, the entire population would be levelled to the position of the poorest and least educated member of society. The country, as David Chandler has put it, would become one huge ‘prison farm’.

Partly this was an act of revenge, but the regime saw it as necessary for the rebuilding of Cambodian society according to a utopian blueprint dreamed up in the remote jungles, based on a romanticisation of the primitive communism of the hill peoples among whom Pol Pot and his comrades had lived. The dream formed the basis for the regime’s Four-Year Plan of 1976, which foresaw the rapid development of light industry, followed by heavy industry, regardless of the lack of skilled labour, raw materials, infrastructure and professional expertise. Cambodia would catch up and overtake the capitalist West by an act of will, and Cambodians would regain their true stature as the people who had built Angkor, dreamed Pol Pot. The foreign exchange needed for this plan would be earned by increasing Cambodia’s agrarian exports. Cambodia would, in a gigantic act of Maoist-style ‘voluntarism’, acquire the wealth with which to industrialise the country and build a glorious future. That future justified whatever hardships the people might suffer.

Although Pol Pot claimed that his revolution had no foreign models, and he kept the existence of the Communist Party a secret until a marathon radio speech in September 1977, one of his models was Stalin’s Russia, where ‘primitive socialist accumulation’ was based on the violent expropriation of the peasantry and slave labour. The extreme voluntarism—the belief that human beings can overcome all obstacles by sheer willpower alone—mirrored the ideology of Maoist China, which had produced the absurd Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s that ended in the catastrophic famine of the early 1960s. To this, we might add Stalin’s idea of socialism in one country, Mao’s doctrine of self-reliance, and Kim Il Sung’s Juche dogma, all of which preached autarchy, or the virtue of countries going it alone economically and socially.

Yet, on another level, DK was unique. As Philip Short has pointed out in his magisterial study of Pol Pot, some semblance of ‘normal life’ was possible in Stalin’s USSR or in Nazi Germany, whereas in DK it was impossible. There was no private life nor any respite from the incessant demands of the state and its black clad minions.

Pol Pot believed Cambodia’s transformation would be so swift that there would be no need for ‘transitional’ mechanisms such as money and markets. Private property was abolished overnight. Eating was socialised, both on moral grounds and to ensure collection of the maximum surpluses of agricultural commodities for sale overseas. As a result, towards the end of the regime there was often almost nothing on the communal tables to eat, but it was a crime for individuals to supplement their meagre rations with ‘wild food’ from the forests as Khmers had always done in times of privation. A Khmer woman told the Australian communist journalist Darryl Bullen soon after the liberation from Pol Pot that members of her commune were forbidden to eat from the wild sugar palms, coconut trees and wild bananas, even though they were starving. Although food was comparatively plentiful during the first year of the new regime, supplies rapidly dwindled afterwards. Chronic malnutrition coupled with overwork and medical neglect carried off hundreds of thousands to the grave. In some places, the people resembled the walking skeletons, the so-called Musselmen of Hitler’s concentration camps, or the Zeks of Stalin’s Gulag.

How many people perished during DK?

The Khmers Rouges soldiers and cadres would sing, apparently without irony, their national anthem, which began: ‘Bright red blood which covers the fields and plains/Of Kampuchea, our motherland!’ Given that many of their victims were dispatched in the fields with a blow to the back of the head or neck with an ox cart axle, the words take on a grim meaning unintended by their writer.

The degree of hardship and terror differed from region to region and from time to time in the same regions. The Khmers Rouges had replaced the old provinces with seven large zones and these were further broken down into 32 smaller administrative regions. Some of these, such as the North Eastern and Eastern zones, were comparatively well run (sometimes local administrations were almost ‘benign’ comments the Australian author Margaret Slocomb, a long-time resident of Phnom Penh and author of a book on the post Pol Pot People’s Republic of Kampuchea). Local administrators differed: some were cruel thugs, such as Ta Mok (known as The Butcher) and the other commanders of the North Western and Western zones, who were notorious for their brutal incompetence. Others were merely ignorant and incompetent, whereas survivors remember others for their kindness. Members of the Muslim Cham minority suffered terribly, with their numbers dropping by 36 per cent during DK, ‘a proportion sharply higher than the losses sustained by the rest of the population’ Milton Osborne tells us. On the other hand, the 2.5 to 3 million ‘old people’ who had lived in Khmer Rougescontrolled zones before 1975 were generally treated better than the 4 to 5 million ‘new people’ who fell into Pol Pot’s hands after the fall of Phnom Penh. Overall, however, life was hard and became worse as the years wore on.

The exact death toll during DK will probably never be known, although 1.7 million is a reasonable estimate. One problem is that after 1979, the incoming People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) government sought to legitimate itself by exaggerating the number of dead, which they routinely put at 3 million. The Vietnamese also blurred the political nature of the Pol Pot regime and spoke of an ‘Asian Auschwitz’ when in fact the closest parallel with DK is not Nazi Germany but Stalinist Russia or Maoist China. Another problem is that there was no way of keeping accurate population statistics during the five years of war that preceded Pol Pot, so calculating the exact number of people in Cambodia as of 17 April 1975 is difficult. Millions of people were displaced from the countryside between 1970 and 1975 and although there is no precise record of the number of war-related deaths these were colossal, probably in the high hundreds of thousands, many of them a result of the maniacal US bombing. (A Finnish Commission of Inquiry estimated that the war cost 600 000 lives, while the writer Eva Myslwiec considers one million to be likely.)

The population at the time of the Khmers Rouges takeover in 1975 was 7.3 million according to the CIA, 7.1 million according to the UN, although the last complete census was taken in 1962. In fact, it may have been as high as 8 million as all the statistics are a bit rubbery. Perhaps as many as 200 000 people fled or were expelled immediately after the DK victory. (The overwhelming bulk of the Vietnamese minority was deported across the eastern border, and perhaps 50 000 people fled to Thailand.) Six years later, after the fall of DK, the total population had decreased by around one million: PRK census figures put the population at 6.7 million in 1981, although the CIA believes that it was around 6.3 million to 6.4 million. This is a decrease of around 20 to 25 per cent, despite the steep increase in the birth rate after the liberation from Pol Pot and the return of around 400 000 refugees after 1980.

It is clear that we are looking at a demographic catastrophe. Given that the birth rate between 1965 and 1970 was 2.8 per cent, Cambodia’s population should have risen to around 9 million by 1980 had there been no war and no DK. The Finnish Commission concluded that Cambodia’s population fell by 30 per cent in the decade after 1970 and estimates of a net loss of around 1.7 million people during the DK years ring true. How many were executed is a moot point: the Finnish Commission calculated up to 150 000 murdered, Chandler suggests 200 000 and PRK figures were much higher. If Chandler is correct, the Khmers Rouges executed just under three per cent of the country’s population. By way of comparison, the equivalent figures for hypothetical holocausts in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom at the beginning of the 21st century would be 600 000, 8 850 000 and 1 800 000 executed respectively. Similar death rates from all causes as in DK would be astronomical.

Enemies of the people

The new regime showed its brutal colours from the first days of the revolution. Pol Pot had stipulated in his 17 April speech to the Khmers Rouges assembly that there would be no mercy for the cadres of the defeated regime. Foreign embassies were not respected as places of sanctuary: even the gates of the Soviet legation were blown in with a bazooka. Prince Sirik Matak was taken from the French Embassy and executed. Displaying exemplary courage, ‘nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it’. One of the most harrowing passages of François Bizot’s autobiographical book, The Gate, concerns the fate of Madame Long Boret (wife of the Republic’s penultimate prime minister) and her infant son, whom Bizot and a gendarme were forced to turn away from the embassy gates. Thirty years on, Bizot’s anguish still burns as he recalls her desperate pleas to them to save her child.

The arm of revenge reached right down the hierarchy of the defeated regime. On the day of the evacuation, Haing Ngor narrowly escaped induction into a ‘recruitment centre’ set up by the Khmers Rouges on the outskirts of the city to lure unwary Lon Nol soldiers. The centre was full of former soldiers and officers, some of whom waved to their fellows if they saw them on the road, inviting them in to share what they saw as their good luck. They were loaded onto trucks, driven into the country, and shot. Afterwards, it would be the turn of the intellectuals and professional employees, even of skilled manual workers supposedly ‘tainted’ by the city. Later, the Khmers Rouges leader Thiounn Mumm lured overseas Khmers back home by promising them a role in the reconstruction of their country, only to have them executed when they stepped back on Cambodian soil.

Intellectuals and ‘book learning’ were treated with particular contempt in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, although one also senses the fear that the new regime had of them. The wearing of spectacles was sufficient to brand one as an intellectual and therefore an enemy of the people, and the consequences were often lethal. The relentless animosity towards intellectuals and experts was fundamentally self-defeating, but a hallmark of a regime in which ignorance was a virtue. Haing Ngor records one of many interminable harangues delivered by Khmers Rouges cadres to the ‘new people’ when they reached the countryside:

‘We don’t need the technology of the capitalists,’ he [the cadre] went on. ‘Under our new system, we don’t need to send our young people to school. Our school is the farm.

The land is our paper. The plow [sic] is our pen. We will “write” by plowing [sic]. We don’t need to give exams or award certificates. Knowing how to farm and knowing how to dig canals—those are our certificates . . . We don’t need doctors anymore. They are not necessary. If someone needs to have their intestines removed, I will do it’. He made a cutting motion with an imaginary knife across his stomach. ‘It is easy. There is no need to learn how to do it by going to school.’

Shortly afterwards, the anguished doctor was forced to watch as two young Khmers Rouges ‘doctors’ incompetently administered a lethal injection of thiamine to a sick baby. ‘The country was ruled by the ignorant,’ Haing Ngor laments. Three examples could serve as symbols of the officially sponsored ignorance of the DK years: the conversion of the National Library at Phnom Penh into a pigsty, the transformation of the state archives building into a dwelling place for the top cadres’ servants, and the closure of the state agricultural college and its conversion into a Khmers Rouges ammunition dump. In the end, this contempt for academic learning and technical expertise was to cause the regime to commit monumental blunders and contribute to its downfall. The engineer and memoirist Pin Yathay records trucks being cut up and turned into ploughs, canals dug in which the water would have to flow uphill, dams built without spillways and farming practices that would make an agronomist wince. Contempt for medical knowledge was to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people struck down by overwork and illness in an infernal calculus that saw them as expendable.

Again, there are parallels here with the Stalin and Mao regimes. Stalin’s GPU massacred 14 000 Polish officers, professionals and intellectuals at Katyn Wood in 1941 and earlier tried and executed countless Soviet experts as ‘saboteurs’. Mao launched the Hundred Flowers campaign that ‘lured the snakes from their holes’, as he puts it, in 1950s China and followed this up with the massive persecution of intellectuals during the so-called Cultural Revolution. Contempt for experts was also a cornerstone of the Maoist ideology of self-reliance.

The Khmers Rouges leadership

Paradoxically, those who presided over DK were a close-knit band of well-educated men and women, related by ties of blood and marriage.

Hu Nim, Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan, the ‘Three Ghosts’ who had fled Sihanouk’s White Terror back in 1967, had Paris PhDs and Brother Number One, as Pol Pot was known, had studied in Paris and worked as a teacher in the Cambodian capital before he slipped away to the jungles. Brother Number Three, Ieng Sary, a scholar with an aptitude for mathematics, had also studied in Paris, as had another Khmers Rouges leader, Son Sen, who became director of studies of the National Teaching Institute at Phnom Penh after his return from France in the 1950s. Pol Pot’s first wife, Khieu Ponnary (whose sister was married to Ieng Sary), was the first Cambodian woman to earn her baccalaureate and she had attended literary soirées with Sihanouk and the top French officials in Phnom Penh. Many of the Khmers Rouges leaders were from comfortable backgrounds and had never done manual labour, although Pol Pot claimed to have been a rubber worker when ‘elected’ to the DK National Assembly in March 1976 and other leaders claimed to have been peasants. Thiounn Mumm and his brother Prasith were grandchildren of Thiounn, an immensely rich and powerful civil servant under the French. Pol Pot, whose real name was Saloth Sar, came from a well-off farming family with palace connections—indeed his sister, Sarouen, was King Monivong’s favourite concubine, and the king had died in her arms at his Bokor estate back in 1941. Pol Pot had studied radio mechanics in Paris in the 1950s, and while there he had mixed in anti-colonialist circles and joined the Communist Party of France (CPF).

When Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were in Paris, the CPF was the largest single party in France and although it was one of the largest communist parties outside of the Soviet bloc, it had a reputation for slavishly following the Moscow line. As a result, the young men absorbed a solid dose of the Stalinist ideology that was to form the bedrock of their ideas. The features of this were always apparent: dogmatism; narrow-mindedness; contempt for democracy; a belief in the infallibility of the party line and the party leader; and a deterministic view of history that saw the final triumph of communism as inevitable, and that justified the most brutal means as necessary in achieving the utopian end. To this were later added specifically Maoist elements, the idea of self-reliance in particular, which held that Third World revolutionaries should scorn western technology and expertise, rely on their own strength and learn from the people. While there is much to be said for respecting the people, the downside is the worship of ignorance. Pol Pot also turned to the idea of the peasants as the revolutionary class as a result of Maoist dogma. The working class, such as it was in Cambodia, was to get short shrift at his hands and whereas Marx had sneered at ‘the idiocy of rural life’ Pol Pot took the Maoist idea of surrounding the cities from the countryside a stage further and emptied them of their people. In his mental universe, the poor peasantry were to be the locomotive of Cambodian history and all the urban classes were considered reactionary. The evacuation was an integral part of a great levelling that he saw as necessary before Cambodia could become great.

While in Paris, the young revolutionary must also have become aware of the Stalinist purges and show trials of Old Bolsheviks during the 1930s. He must also have learned shortly after his return to Cambodia of Khrushchev’s 1956 ‘secret speech’ that retrospectively denounced these crimes. However, given his own later methods, Pol Pot must have agreed with Mao’s rejection of the speech as revisionist. For hard-line Stalinists like Pol Pot, the victims of the trials were forever condemned as spies and wreckers, and the lesson was that one must remain forever vigilant against such elements in one’s own party. On the evidence, Pol Pot did not murder party secretary Tou Samouth, as Ben Kiernan claimed, but he most certainly did turn on ‘Khmer-Viet Minh’ who had returned from Hanoi from at least 1973. Moreover, in August 1975, in the worst traditions of Stalinism, the veteran leftist Hou Yuon was murdered, most likely on Pol Pot’s orders. Hou Yuon had opposed the evacuation of the cities even at the 17 April assembly where Pol Pot roughed out his immediate program, and four months later he made a public speech denouncing the expulsions, calling on the party to show mercy to the people. It was a brave, humane and alas futile gesture for which he was executed and his body thrown into the Mekong. If this was the fate of a high-ranking party leader who dared voice dissent, there could be no freedom of speech for any other subject of DK.

Hou Yuon’s fate presaged a later, much larger hunt for spies within the party that resembled the witch-burning frenzies and the hunt for heretics by the Inquisition in Europe. In 1977, following torture, Hu Nim ‘confessed’ to having been an agent of the CIA, although like the Old Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin before him during the Moscow trials, he left clues to posterity attesting to his innocence. He confessed to serving the CIA by ‘presenting my activities as those of a “progressive”, whereas my true essence was reactionary’. The admission was worthless, obtained as it was by repeated whippings and ‘stuffings’ with water, but we should not see everything he wrote in Tuol Sleng prison as the invention of DK’s inquisitors. Reading between the lines, we can see Hu Nim as a revolutionary who had grown disillusioned with the trajectory of the movement to which he had dedicated his life. Most likely there were many other loyal party members who despaired at a dream gone sour, their doubts regarded as treachery by a party leadership ever more deeply steeped in blood.

Hu Nim hinted that he had grown tired of the ongoing terror, that he wanted the people to live normal lives in a stable and prosperous country at peace with its socialist neighbour Vietnam. He recorded the opinions of the other dissident party leaders that the state ought not rely on sheer muscle power, but should mechanise and accept foreign aid. Furthermore, he reported that other socialist countries, even North Korea, had currency, so why not Cambodia? Pol Pot, he hinted, did not want a ‘system of plenty’, but one in which the people were worked long hours for the benefit of the state.

Taken together, these beliefs were heresy in the Cambodian dystopia. The confession reveals that Hu Nim and others like him supported an alternative platform: a gentler and more gradual road to socialism. He was tortured and murdered for his pains. However, as the Australian scholar Ben Kiernan has pointed out, Hu Nim was a talkative person who was used to winning arguments. Although on the surface he appears to have submitted to the arguments of Brother Number 1, in the court of history he had the final word.

In the final years of the DK regime, fear and paranoia burned out of control within the party, with tens of thousands of members arrested and executed, many after torture in the notorious S21 establishment set up at Tuol Sleng in the Phnom Penh suburbs under a former teacher called Duch (François Bizot’s former captor). Duch’s meticulous records show that around 20 000 unfortunates were tortured and executed at Tuol Sleng and that the interrogations did not stop until the Vietnamese soldiers were almost in the city’s suburbs. There were only eight survivors, three adults and five children.

Hatred of Vietnam, glorification of Cambodia

As the purges unfolded, they revealed Pol Pot’s extraordinary hatred of his communist neighbour, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, which he had come to see as his country’s greatest enemy. Although the charge of being in league with the CIA was still routine, suspected enemies were increasingly described as having ‘Vietnamese minds inside Cambodian bodies’. Among the first of these were the old Pracheachon leaders, Non Suon and Keo Meas, who were arrested, tortured and executed in late 1976. The pair’s downfall came as a result of their dating the foundation of the Communist Party to 1951, the year of the formation of the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party, rather than 1960, when Pol Pot rose through the ranks at the Communist Party conference held at the Phnom Penh railway workshops.

The obsession with the Vietnamese ‘threat’ is linked to another central element of Pol Pot’s ideology: an extreme Khmer nationalism that he shared with Lon Nol and which was close to the racist mystical mumbo-jumbo of Keng Vannsak’s ‘Khmer–Mon Institute’ during the Khmer Republic. He once boasted that the people who had built Angkor could do anything, and bragged of his superb leadership, which allegedly resulted from Khmer nationality. This racist chauvinism was to lead Pol Pot down an increasingly irrational and blood-soaked path and to DK’s destruction at the hands of the Vietnamese.

Marxism is an internationalist doctrine, even in its deformed Marxist-Leninist variant, but Pol Pot’s ideology was as nationalist as it was Marxist-Leninist. One can see traces of this even in his formative political years in Paris when he signed an article in a revolutionary magazine under the pseudonym of ‘The Original Khmer’. Although Pol Pot sheltered under the wing of the Vietnamese communists in the jungles of Cambodia’s north-east for many years he resented his subservient position and what he saw as the patronising attitudes of his communist ‘elder brothers’, who insisted that Cambodia had to wait its turn for ‘liberation’ until the United States and its Saigon client had been defeated.

In 1964–65, Pol Pot had travelled to China and Vietnam, and the Vietnamese communist leader Le Duan had ticked him off for his impatient nationalism, telling him to subordinate his own struggle to that of Vietnam. From Pol Pot’s point of view, this advice made little sense: given that Sihanouk’s police were hunting down Cambodian communists in the towns and cities, they had little choice but to flee to the jungles and wage armed struggle. Cambodian nationalism had always had a reactive quality to it, and from the 1930s on it was often at least as much anti-Vietnamese as anti-French, sometimes more so.

Lon Nol had ordered hideous pogroms against the Vietnamese in 1970 and Pol Pot shared the same irrational and mystical Khmer nationalism that led to such racist atrocities. According to the CIA, open fighting broke out between Vietnamese and Cambodian communist units as early as 1973, following the Paris Peace Accords, and there are reports of clashes as early as 1971. Significantly, the last two planks of Pol Pot’s ‘action program’ announced at the 17 April Assembly were to ‘expel the entire Vietnamese population’ (something of which Lon Nol would have heartily approved), and to ‘dispatch troops to the borders, particularly the Vietnamese border’, where fighting broke out shortly afterwards over disputed islands in the Gulf of Siam. Cambodians had had reason for dissatisfaction with the border since the French had drawn up the arbitrary Brevié Line to demarcate it in 1939, but Pol Pot’s actions dramatically weakened the possibility of compromise. More than that, the gesture hints at the paranoia and delusions of grandeur that were to be his undoing. In later years, as famine broke out, this overarching ‘ideological’ antipathy for Vietnam meshed with Pol Pot’s need to divert attention from the results of his regime’s failed ultra-left policies. This bore out Dr Johnson’s celebrated observation that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’.

International dimensions of the
Kampuchea–Vietnam conflict

Pol Pot’s antipathy towards Vietnam also impelled him into an alliance with China, which for its part was delighted to gain an ally against Hanoi, which it saw as an upstart agent of ‘Soviet social imperialism’ on its southern border. The communist world, it should be recalled, had been riven in two by the Sino-Soviet split of 1960, when Mao denounced the leaders of the USSR as revisionists seeking to impose their domination over the rest of the bloc. Pol Pot suspected that the Vietnamese wanted to revive the old federation of Indochina under their hegemony and his suspicions deepened when they signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Lao communist regime in 1977, a move he interpreted as encirclement. After delivering the September 1977 speech in which he announced the existence of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, Pol Pot flew to Beijing for discussions with Hua Guofeng, the successor to Mao and the ‘Gang of Four’. The hostile alignment of the Indochinese states within the communist world was completed in 1978, when Vietnam, suspicious of China’s ambitions in Southeast Asia, signed a 25-year treaty with the USSR.

The move accelerated the deterioration of relations between DK and Vietnam. DK broke off diplomatic relations with Hanoi in early 1978. There had been sporadic fighting along the border and in December 1977, the Vietnamese decided to teach Pol Pot a lesson by dispatching an invasion force that penetrated deep into eastern Cambodia and routed Khmers Rouges forces. They soon withdrew but took a number of Cambodian villagers with them and, more importantly, there was an increasing stream of Khmers Rouges over the border as Pol Pot’s purges began to spiral out of control and local Khmers Rouges commanders attempted to defend themselves or escape. Pol Pot was suspicious of Eastern Zone cadres such as Sao Phim (a former militant of the old Indochinese Communist Party) and some hundreds of them were tortured and killed at Tuol Sleng prison during this period. Sao Phim himself committed suicide after receiving a sinister summons to travel to the capital for ‘discussions’. Among those who fled to Vietnam in 1977 and 1978 were two men called Heng Samrin and Hun Sen. The latter, a young Khmers Rouges regimental commander, had lost an eye during the war against Lon Nol, and is Cambodia’s premier and ‘strongman’ today. Heng Samrin headed the Vietnamese sponsored National Salvation Front, in effect a government-in-exile formed largely of disaffected former Khmers Rouges. Heng Samrin’s forces participated in the invasion of Cambodia on Christmas Day 1978 and he was president of the PRK between 1979 and Sihanouk’s return in 1991. Today he is honorary president of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party.

The downfall of Democratic Kampuchea

Vietnam and Cambodia were on a collision course, with Pol Pot acting as a proxy in a broader global conflict, much as Lon Nol had acted as a surrogate in a wider war until 1975. Increasingly belligerent and buoyed by an unrealistic sense of power, Pol Pot rejected a Vietnamese offer to submit the border dispute to international arbitration and both sides massed troops at the frontier. Khmers Rouges guerrillas increasingly slipped over the border and raided villages on the Vietnamese side, committing horrible atrocities that were recorded by the journalist Nayan Chanda for Far Eastern Economic Review at the time. It was necessary, claimed the Khmers Rouges, to ‘annihilate’ the Vietnamese on their own territory. What this meant was that ‘In house after house bloated, rotting bodies of men, women and children lay strewn about. Some were beheaded, some had their bellies ripped open, some were missing limbs, others eyes.’ General Tran Van Tra, the commander of the Vietnamese army in the Mekong delta, seethed with rage and another officer who witnessed the massacres was ‘overcome with nausea’ when he recalled them 12 months later, Chanda has written. The raids displaced almost half a million people on the Vietnamese side of the border, and caused around 100 000 hectares of farmland to be temporarily abandoned. While the local Vietnamese army commanders chafed, the Hanoi government continued its fruitless efforts at a negotiated solution. In one memorable speech, Pol Pot boasted that the disparity in size and population between Cambodia and Vietnam was of no consequence, for if every Khmers Rouges soldier killed 30 Vietnamese, they would win the war. He was also banking on Chinese support, but the Chinese were no more inclined to dispatch troops to help him than the Americans had been to protect Lon Nol.

The end came swiftly for the Pol Pot regime. On Christmas Day 1978, an invasion force over 100 000 strong, backed by tanks, artillery and aviation, poured over the border from Vietnam, driving the Khmers Rouges forces before them. Although Pol Pot had always boasted that his army had defeated the Americans, this was false: he had won a civil war against the ramshackle and corrupt Khmer Republic, not its powerful backer. Now the Khmers Rouges guerrillas faced one of the most formidable, battle-hardened armies the world has seen. The Vietnamese had competent generals and superior firepower, and they were not blinded to reality by mystical rhetoric. They also had the advantage of fighting a regime that had long ago forfeited what little support it ever had among the Cambodian people, most of whom welcomed its demise.

Phnom Penh fell to the advancing Vietnamese soldiers on 7 January 1979 and Pol Pot fled before them in a helicopter, with Ieng Sary, Nuon Chea and the other top leaders scurrying away by train towards Battambang. The Khmers Rouges guerrillas were thrown back in disorder to the remote borders with Thailand. They had been smashed and the country liberated, albeit by the Khmers’ traditional enemies from the east. It should have been the end of the Khmers Rouges but,

Pol Pot in 1981. (Courtesy Newspix)

as has been so often the case, Cambodia’s fate was to be decided by forces outside of the country, and the suffering of the people was not yet over. Pol Pot, however, was never to regain power, despite fighting a guerrilla war along the borders for many years.

The old despot died while under house arrest in a Cambodian frontier village in April 1998, a sad, sick old man of 70 years, despised even by the rump of the Khmers Rouges, who cremated his corpse in a makeshift pyre of old rubber sandals and other rubbish. He never expressed remorse for his disastrous policies. The American journalist Nate Thayer, who interviewed Pol Pot shortly before his death, said, ‘The one regret I had in my several encounters with Pol Pot was that he didn’t feel sorry. He felt what he did was justified.’ To the end, this old schoolmaster-turned-guerrilla epitomised what a wiser revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, had meant when he wrote that the ultra-left sectarian saw life as a great school and himself as the teacher. The Cambodian people had failed him, not the other way round. Pol Pot liked to think he was in tune with the ineluctable laws of history, but in the end he failed and turned his country into a bloody shambles. We cannot forecast how much weight future historians will give to the three and a half years of his regime but if the aftermaths of other outbreaks of mass butchery provide any guide, the vivid memories will fade. The Young Turks killed one and a half million Armenians in 1915–16, but Adolf Hitler recognised the human potential for forgetting when he sold his coming Holocaust to wavering generals by asking them ‘who today remembers the extermination of the Armenians?’ Sadly, he was right. Perhaps in the future some other budding mass murderer will ask the same question of Cambodia.