9
PAINFUL TRANSITION:
THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC
OF KAMPUCHEA
It is now over a quarter of a century since the demise of Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea, during which time the country has undergone a number of painful transitions. Cambodia today is still desperately poor and underdeveloped and although it has clawed its way back from barbarism, dark shadows still linger and huge problems beset the Khmer people. Some of these are new. Others seem timeless and have a sense of déjà vu, not the least of which is official corruption and authoritarian government. Cambodia is also a divided society and one of the greatest sources of discord concerns attitudes towards the Vietnamese invasion/liberation that began on Christmas Day 1978. To many Khmers, the 7 January holiday commemorates the anniversary of their country’s liberation from Pol Pot’s tyranny and the rebirth of the nation. To others, it is a day of infamy marking the beginning of over a decade of foreign occupation.
Cambodia has lived through two regimes since Pol Pot. Immediately after the Vietnamese invasion, the leaders of the Hanoi-backed National Salvation Front declared the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) on a broad platform put forward at Snoul on the eastern border in December 1978. This regime (renamed the State of Cambodia in 1989) lasted until the Paris Peace Agreement of 1991, when the warring factions in Cambodian politics, helped by international diplomatic initiatives and the end of the Cold War, decided on a course of national reconciliation and democratisation that resulted two years later in the reconstitution of the Kingdom of Cambodia.
The PRK failed in its avowed socialist objectives and its noncommunist successor has yet to live up to the democratic hopes of its domestic and international sponsors. Although the Kingdom of Cambodia holds regular elections, like the old Sihanouk and Lon Nol regimes it is an authoritarian state ruled by a strongman—the ex-Khmer Rouge guerrilla Hun Sen, who first rose to prominence under the PRK, abandoning its socialist principles along the way. Given the catastrophes of the recent past, and the country’s longer history of authoritarian rule, it was unlikely that Cambodia could make a painless transition to democracy, with respect for human rights, the rule of law and social justice. It was also unlikely that the PRK could introduce successful socialist measures in a country traumatised by Pol Pot’s bloody version of socialism and in the face of the patent indifference and even hostility of the people.
Whether Cambodia will be able to overcome its entrenched problems of underdevelopment and authoritarianism remains to be seen. Today, around 50 per cent of Cambodia’s budget comes from overseas aid, corruption is rife even at the highest levels of government and the civil service, poverty and landlessness are increasing, serious social evils fester, there is an HIV/AIDS pandemic, and the country is facing a burgeoning ecological crisis. For all their faults, however, the post-DK regimes have done much to rebuild a shattered society, and the Pol Pot years are a receding nightmare for older Cambodians and a bogeyman story for their children.
The PRK’s manifesto
Cambodia’s deliverance from its modern Dark Age began on 2 December 1978, when a 44-year-old former Khmers Rouges Eastern Zone commander stood up to read a manifesto to his Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP) comrades at a captured rubber plantation near Snoul on the Vietnamese border. The speaker, Heng Samrin, had fled over the border earlier that year and had become the leader of the Solidarity Front for National Salvation, created under the auspices of the Vietnamese communists. He promised to liberate Cambodia from those he described as tyrants who had reduced the people to neo-slavery. He swore to rebuild Cambodia as ‘a truly peaceful, independent, democratic, neutral, and non-aligned country . . .’. Once the Khmers Rouges had been defeated there would be national elections and a new constitution. The people would have the Right to vote and to live, work and travel where they wished within the country.
The new regime would be avowedly socialist but there would be a mixed economy, with rural cooperatives established only with the full consent of the peasants, and there would be an eight-hour working day. Banks, currency and trade would be re-established. Family life and religion would be respected and the state would provide its citizens with proper health care, and education at all levels. There would be support for war victims, the elderly and the numerous orphans. Finally, Heng Samrin held out the hope of national reconciliation, promising that the new state would be lenient with former Pol Pot supporters who had genuinely reformed.
Given the state of the country at the time, it was as ambitious and lofty a declaration as any in human history and it was sincerely meant. It would also prove far more difficult to implement than its authors imagined. The PRK did try to keep its promises but, as American writer Evan Gottesman has said, the hints of pluralism in Heng Samrin’s speech were subsumed within ‘the sort of inclusion espoused throughout the communist world’. Although the French priest François Ponchaud had coined the term ‘Year Zero’ to describe Cambodia at the inception of DK in April 1975, in another sense it is more fitting to apply it to the country in early 1979, when normal society had collapsed and the country was on the verge of extinction. The new leaders proclaimed a new revolution, but as Gottesman eloquently puts it: ‘there was nothing to overturn, just an emptiness to fill’.
Beyond the imagination of mankind
The Australian communist Darryl Bullen, who flew up to Phnom Penh from Ho Chi Minh City shortly after the liberation from Pol Pot, described ‘a pock-marked landscape’ with ‘gaping craters, the size of buses’ scattered to the horizon, ‘the . . . legacy of saturation bombing by B-52s’. The journalist John Pilger landed on the ‘beaconless runway’ at Pochentong airport some months later, and described ‘a pyramid of rusting cars’ on the edge of a forest, ‘like objects in a mirage’. The cities were still virtually deserted, he wrote, and the hustle and bustle of Asia stopped at the PRK’s borders. Although Pilger is often (sometimes very unfairly) criticised for exaggeration, he was right when, struggling to find words to describe what he saw, he quoted the correspondent of The Times at the liberation of Belsen, who had written, ‘It is my duty to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind’ and added, ‘That is how I and others felt in the summer of 1979’ in Cambodia.
The enormity of what Cambodia had suffered is beyond the imagination of most of us. A staggering 30 per cent of the population had died since Lon Nol’s coup in March 1970 sent the country down the road to disaster. A country already devastated by war had been reduced to the extremes of destitution, its citizens pauperised and almost all the infrastructure of civilised society destroyed. There was no currency or banks, no markets or public transport, and the country’s roads and railways were badly damaged. There was no postal system, no telephones or telegraphs, no clean water supplies or sanitation services, hardly any electricity and no schools or hospitals. There were virtually no consumer goods. The people were in rags. There were virtually no professionals or skilled workers; as one historian of the period records, ‘Only 15 per cent of the nation’s intellectuals, doctors, engineers, educators, et cetera, remained in Cambodia by 7 January 1979’. The others were either dead or had fled. Of the 450 doctors in Cambodia before 1975, only one tenth remained. There had been around 1600 agricultural experts in the early 1970s, but this number had dwindled to only 200, including ten graduates, of whom one was a veterinary surgeon. The latter had his work cut out, for of an estimated two and a half million draught animals before the war and revolution, less than 800 000 had survived, most of them weakened or sick.
All was chaos, a kind of debilitated anarchy. The Vietnamese general Bui Tin observed ‘hundreds of thousands of gaunt and diseased people, dazed as if they were returning from hell, [who] wandered shoeless along dusty roads . . . reduced to a state where they did not speak or smile any more’. Earlier, a Yugoslav television crew who had been granted access to Democratic Kampuchea observed that only Pol Pot smiled in that land of sorrow. Several hundred thousand people fled the country, but 400 000 people returned to chance their luck, joining the throngs who trekked from their places of exile to their old homes. Fear was their constant companion after living so long with death at their heels. Even at the end of Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea, there had been a final round of slaughter in some districts, with the Khmers Rouges forcing families to volunteer their strongest members, ostensibly for labour but in reality for execution. As historian Margaret Slocomb explains, ‘Like roads and bridges, and a ripe harvest, human assets had to be destroyed to spite the conquerors.’ One suspects it was also to prevent them from joining the invaders, arms in hand, to wreak vengeance on their tormentors.
Normal social life had also collapsed. Often, the old familial relationships had broken down, leaving people without safety networks in a society devoid of social welfare of any kind. There were many more females than males in the general population but significantly, the imbalance was not present in the under-16 age group. The children, however, had suffered greatly. Helen Ester, who went to Cambodia on behalf of the Australian Council for Overseas Aid in 1980, reported that 70 per cent of the children in a new Phnom Penh orphanage she visited were illiterate because education had ceased under Pol Pot. Of the 20 000 teachers before Pol Pot, less than 7000 remained and they had not practised their profession since the inception of DK. Ester wrote, ‘I feel almost more shock at the past neglect of Kampuchean children than at the outright atrocities. The children suffered forced separation from nurturing and the love of their parents and relatives and the criminal neglect of their learning development.’ Perhaps Cambodia’s tragedy is summed up in Ester’s report of an orphan who sang of ‘how her mother and father died, of how her father’s throat was cut and he died in a pool of blood’. It was, said the orphanage staff, the child’s way of coping with the horror.
Cambodia was on the brink of famine when Vietnam invaded. The retreating Khmers Rouges soldiers took a quarter of the rice crop with them and burned down granaries and even destroyed the crops in the fields. Still more rice rotted on the ground as people deserted the DK’s prison-villages, some for the nearest frontier, others for their old homes. In the midst of the chaos, much of the next rice crop was not planted. There was also a shortage of basic agricultural implements, seed, draught animals and means of transportation. Fish teemed in the rivers and in the Great Lake, but there were virtually no nets or boats to catch them. Although some food aid came from Vietnam and Eastern bloc countries, augmented by smaller amounts from some Western charities, it was not enough to stave off disaster. After living to see the end of DK, between 325 000 and 625 000 people died within the first year of liberation, many from starvation. By way of comparison, this alone is a disaster almost on the scale of the Irish famine of the mid-19th century.
Pragmatic policies of the new government
The new government, the Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Council, was established in Phnom Penh on 8 January 1979, under the presidency of Heng Samrin. It was basically a coalition, with Heng Samrin and Hun Sen representing the former Khmers Rouges who had broken with Pol Pot, and another group of former ‘Khmer Viet Minh’, such as Pen Sovann and Keo Chendra. The latter group had spent most of the time since 1954 in exile in Hanoi, although some had returned to fight Lon Nol during the early 1970s, only to flee Cambodia again to escape Pol Pot’s assassins. There were also a number of non-socialist technocrats who wished to help rebuild their country.
Although avowedly socialist and revolutionary, the new government took a pragmatic approach to the country’s economic affairs. Priority was given to getting basic services operating and encouraging food production, and to defence and foreign affairs. (As we shall see, the Khmers Rouges remained an irritant militarily and the new regime was isolated internationally.) All taxes on crops were waived for the first few years of the new regime. Vietnamese engineers and technicians re-started electricity and water supply plants, and as factory workers returned to their old workplaces there was a modest revival of industrial production, though this was hampered by a lack of spare parts, skilled labour and general infrastructure. The retreating Khmers Rouges had also sabotaged the few plants they had kept in production. In the first months, trade was carried on by barter, with cans of rice acting as units of exchange. As markets slowly revived, Vietnamese dong and Thai baht were used as currency until Cambodian riels could be printed.
In the countryside, the government allowed private farming but made some tentative steps towards collectivisation by organising peasants into krom samakki, or production solidarity groups, and by setting up a number of model villages in which work was done on a cooperative basis. However, as Belgian writer Viviane Frings has recorded, ‘What emerged in fact after the anarchy of the first few months of 1979, was a reappearance of private ownership of the means of production, in accordance with the preferences of the peasants.’ The PRK, despite its avowedly socialist principles, was never more than half-hearted about collectivisation. There were a number of practical factors involved here, including a lack of dedicated cadres and a dearth of state assistance to collective farms or cooperatives. The underlying reason, however, was that the government was afraid to push its program because, although non-coercive in the main, it smacked of the DK years, when the population was forced into collective forms of life and work. ‘The Pol Pot experiment had alienated the people of all social strata from both socialist theory and practice’, writes Margaret Slocomb, so ‘If the revolution was to survive, the state had to secure the consent and full cooperation of the masses.’ This would have been difficult even if DK had never existed, for as the anthropologist May Ebihara wrote in her classic 1968 study of traditional Cambodian rural society, ‘A striking feature of Khmer village life is the lack of indigenous, traditional, organized associations, clubs, factions, or other groups that are formed on non-kin principles’. In the end, as Slocomb argues, the lukewarm socialism of the PRK failed, and where the regime was successful it was ‘at the expense of its ideological principles’.
The PRK: an international outcast
The PRK years were marked by gruelling poverty, with the new regime and its Vietnamese sponsor attempting to rebuild a society almost from scratch. What was a daunting task was made much harder by the enforced international isolation of the PRK at the hands of ASEAN, China and the United States. Once again, Cambodians were suffering as a result of international political decisions beyond their control. The very countries that had conspired to drag Cambodia to its ruin were now set on blocking its recovery. Once again, Khmers were the victims of the Cold War and of age-old patterns of East Asian Realpolitik that preceded it. It was a case, as Oxfam’s Eva Myslwiec argued, of ‘punishing the poor’ for offences they had never committed, regardless of disputes about the legitimacy of the Heng Samrin government. However, it must be acknowledged that the PRK regime contributed to Cambodia’s isolation by its secretive and closed nature.
The rising big power in the East Asian region at this time was the People’s Republic of China, itself an international pariah until it was brought in from the cold by the American President Richard Nixon in 1972. Although ostensibly Marxist internationalists, the Chinese leaders operated within a paradigm of international relations inherited from China’s imperial past, when the Southeast Asian states were tributaries of the ‘Middle Kingdom’. China had befriended Pol Pot partly out of ideological affinity; China was itself in the last throes of Mao Zedong’s ultra-left Cultural Revolution when Pol Pot came to power. However, Chinese support continued after the death of Mao in 1976 and the subsequent downfall of the ‘Gang of Four’ ultra-leftists and their replacement with Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatists, which suggests that China’s Cambodia policy was driven primarily by perceived national self-interest rather than ideology. Central to this was China’s growing animosity towards Vietnam, which it feared as a pro-Soviet expansionist usurper of its own ‘rightful’ sphere of influence in Southeast Asia. Relations between the Chinese and Vietnamese communists, once proverbially ‘as close as lips and teeth’, had rapidly deteriorated after 1975 and, as Australian specialist in international law Gary Klintworth puts it, had ‘reverted to the kind of hostile dynamic the two countries had often shared over the previous two millennia’.
For these reasons, China had encouraged Pol Pot’s belligerence towards Vietnam. DK would act as a counterweight to Vietnamese power in Indochina and serve as a buffer against its possible expansion into the rest of the region. It is unclear whether the Chinese wanted Pol Pot to goad the Vietnamese into a full-scale invasion, but they took full advantage of the opportunities the invasion provided to turn Cambodia into a military quagmire, to isolate Vietnam internationally and weaken it economically. The Chinese never had any intention of committing ‘volunteers’ as Pol Pot had hoped; they were content to cause Vietnam the maximum aggravation with the least damage to themselves. In the process, they helped create what looked like an intractable problem until Vietnamese troop withdrawals (completed in 1989) and the end of the Cold War created the opportunity for a negotiated solution.
The Chinese were perhaps surprised by the ease with which General Bui Tin’s army overran Cambodia, however. In February 1979, both in order to teach Vietnam a lesson and to lessen Bui Tin’s pressure on Pol Pot’s guerrillas, China launched a massive invasion of Vietnam’s northern provinces, capturing control of the border town of Lang Son before withdrawing a month later. Many of the world’s governments welcomed the Chinese action. The People’s Republic of Kampuchea was widely regarded around the world as a Vietnamese puppet and many international jurists believed that the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia was an infringement of international law and the principle of national sovereignty. Be that as it may, an immediate consequence of the Chinese military operation was that Pol Pot’s troops stormed out of their jungle hideouts and massacred undefended Cambodian villagers in revenge. The many governments that shared China’s obsession with punishing Vietnam overlooked such bloody ‘facts on the ground’. For Cambodian villagers in this period, the Vietnamese army was the only bulwark against the return of Pol Pot’s murderous zealots, but for many of the world’s leaders, the Khmers were pawns on the international chessboard. While the principle of national sovereignty should not be dismissed lightly, there were unusually compelling reasons for the Vietnamese invasion. In any case, behind the lofty talk of principles on all sides, there lurked more narrowly pragmatic and self-serving agendas.
China’s Indochina policy won support in the United States and the non-communist countries of Southeast Asia. These countries had enjoyed warmer relations with China since Nixon’s 1972 visit and these thawed further with the cessation of Chinese support for communist guerrilla insurgency in Thailand. The United States was still smarting from its crushing defeat in Vietnam and was determined to isolate and punish the Vietnamese communists: Washington did not recognise the Vietnamese government until 1995, after 20 years of diplomatic and economic embargo. The non-communist countries making up the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN)—Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia in particular—were also frightened of what they saw as Vietnam’s hegemonic intentions in the region; this was still the era of the domino theory. As a result, Thailand gave sanctuary to Pol Pot’s guerrillas, allowing them to operate with impunity from bases in refugee camps inside its border. This was done with the full support of China and the United States.
In June 1982, the Khmers Rouges were joined by Sihanouk’s royalist FUNCINPEC party (after its French initials) and Son Sann’s republican Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF) in an unlikely Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK), which was immediately recognised by China, the United States and the ASEAN countries (with Lee Kwan Yew’s Singapore particularly zealous in its support). Militarily, Pol Pot’s forces, estimated to number 200 000 in 1979 and stabilising thereafter at around 35 000, dominated this coalition. FUNCINPEC and the KPNLF never managed to muster effective fighting forces. According to the United Nations, the total number of people under CGDK control in the refugee camps was slightly more than 260 000 in 1987. There is evidence that many people under Khmers Rouges control in particular would have left if they could. Because the PRK was widely regarded as Vietnam’s puppet, the CGDK gained widespread diplomatic recognition, with the Khmer Rouge Khieu Samphan occupying Cambodia’s ambassadorial seat at the United Nations General Assembly. In contrast, only 11 countries recognised the Heng Samrin government, and only one of them, India, was outside of the Soviet bloc.
Early attempts to end or at least scale down the conflict proved fruitless. In 1980, Thailand flatly rejected a Vietnamese proposal for a demilitarised zone along the Cambodian border and the following year the Soviet bloc boycotted a UN-sponsored international conference on Kampuchea, along with an ASEAN proposal for the UN to disarm all of the Cambodian factions, in combination with withdrawal of all Vietnamese troops and free elections. In 1983, China blocked a proposal by the Non-Aligned Summit for a round-table conference of all the parties to the dispute. Three years later, Austria offered to chair direct talks between the parties, but the proposal failed due to Chinese opposition. International events, however, allowed in the end for the relatively speedy resolution of the conflict, but for the best part of a decade it was intractable.
For the vast majority of Cambodians, who lived under PRK control, the results of these international intrigues were painful in the extreme. During the 1979 famine, for instance, the country was denied the economic and humanitarian aid it so desperately needed and although conditions improved in subsequent years with better harvests, Cambodia remained one of the world’s poorest countries. Oxfam’s Eva Myslwiec was forthright in her criticism: ‘Seven million Kampucheans are being denied the Right to development and many are suffering directly because of the decisions taken by China, ASEAN and Western nations.’ The PRK was ineligible for any of the assistance normally available for other Third World countries, many of which were ruled by governments much more corrupt and brutal than the PRK or Vietnam. The PRK was cut off from assistance from the UN Development Programme, the Asian Development Bank, the IMF and the World Bank, with only a trickle of humanitarian aid from UNICEF and the International Red Cross, whose rules did not preclude them from operating in disputed territories. ‘Kampuchea,’ pointed out the Oxfam patron Sir Robert Jackson, ‘remains in the unique position of being the only developing country in the world—and it is almost certainly the country most in need—that is prevented from receiving any of the normal development and other assistance provided by the UN system.’
A Stalinist regime
These facts should not blind us to PRK’s Stalinist nature, whatever the democratic and pluralistic reforms Heng Samrin had pledged at Snoul. An Amnesty International (AI) report published in 1987 criticised the regime for unfair trials, the detention without trial of political prisoners, torture during interrogation, and holding prisoners in cramped and unsanitary conditions. The report stressed that people were liable to be labelled ‘traitors to the revolution’ for ‘crimes’ such as holding private meetings, distributing leaflets, refusing to accept government posts and criticising the administration. The report attacked the regime for its treatment of political prisoners in the T3 detention centre at Phnom Penh and at a ‘reform centre’ at Trapeang Phlong in Kompong Cham province. Prime Minister Hun Sen did not respond to a letter from Amnesty International raising these concerns. During the first three years of the regime, security was almost entirely in the hands of Vietnamese secret police, because former members of Pol Pot’s hated nokorbal (security service) were not allowed to serve the new government. The Vietnamese left a distinctly Stalinist stamp on those they trained. AI was also critical of the CGDK for abuse of human rights in the camps under its control.
Perhaps the PRK’s greatest abuse of human rights began in 1982–83, when the regime launched the ambitious K5 Plan in the preparation for the huge 1984–85 dry season offensive against the Khmers Rouges. Under the K5 blueprint, the regime moved to seal off the border with Thailand with a great line of forts, ditches and dikes, walls, fences and minefields. Although Khmer People’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (KPRAF) personnel and Vietnamese soldiers worked on the fortifications, the regime also conscripted some 50 000 civilian labourers. Indifferent food and poor sanitation, combined with heavy manual work, cost the lives of thousands of these civilians. By way of comparison, the loss of life was much greater than on the construction of the French pleasure centre at Bokor during the 1920s, which had been deservedly condemned for its inhumanity. K5 and the following offensive could be rated a military success, but it was deeply unpopular and cost the PRK a great deal of support among those it claimed to serve. However, we should not forget that it was the continuing support for Pol Pot by China, the West and ASEAN (and in particular Thailand) that necessitated the fortifications in the first place.
Nor was there anything new about the PRK’s methods. As Michael Vickery has pointed out, ‘For the rural 80–90 per cent of the Cambodian people, arbitrary justice, sudden violent death, [and] political oppression . . . were common facts of life long before the war and revolution of the 1970s.’ The French had subjected the peasants to onerous taxation and brutally repressed them when they protested in 1916, and Sihanouk and Lon Nol had drowned the Samlaut rebellion in blood. Oppression is still part of the lives of the Khmer peasantry.
The eclipse of the ‘Khmer Viet Minh’ veterans
In general, however, the PRK was nowhere near as repressive as its DK predecessor, and nor was it guilty of deliberate mass murder. Nor was the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party swept by the bloody purges that had bled DK. For all that, however, it was a rigid Marxist-Leninist party modelled on the Vietnamese party and, more distantly, on the Communist Party of the USSR. Two curious incidents underline the party’s Stalinist organisational methods and the domination of Hanoi over it during this period: the sacking of Prime Minister Pen Sovann in late 1981, and the death of his successor, Chan Si, in Moscow in 1984. Both men were former ‘Khmer Viet Minh’ and while more committed to socialist policies than the Hun Sen-Heng Samrin wing of the KPRP, they were also more nationalist-minded and inclined to be critical of the Vietnamese. This was ironic, given the fact that they had trained in Vietnam during their long exile after 1954.
Pen Sovann from all accounts was a sincere and competent albeit prickly man, an idealist who had devoted his life to the communist cause. One day, he simply disappeared from public view. This Khmer prime minister was incarcerated in a Vietnamese prison for a number of years and thereafter placed under house arrest in Hanoi. In total, he was deprived of his liberty and exiled to a foreign land for ten years without charge or trial. When Khmer civil servants asked why his portrait had disappeared from office walls, they were told not to ask, with dark hints of the consequences of persisting. The Vietnamese initially told Kong Korm, the PRK ambassador to Hanoi, that the prime minister was ill. Pen Sovann had become a ‘non-person’ in a nightmare that might have been dreamed up by Franz Kafka. When he pushed for explanations for his arrest, none were forthcoming; privately he was only told that he was well aware of why he was being punished. There would be interrogation, but no trial. The words of the historian David Burman about the fate of European heretics under the Inquisition also fit Pen Sovann’s case perfectly:
The prisoner . . . was kept in ignorance of the reasons behind his arrest and imprisonment . . . There was no precise charge, and therefore little possibility of making a plausible defence . . . He was required to confess to a crime that he attempted desperately to imagine . . .
The difference is that finally the Catholic Inquisitors would inform their victims of the charges against them—Pen Sovann was never told. His ‘crime’ would appear to have been that he was too independent-minded, a communist ‘heretic’ whose views were coming into conflict with the party line decided by the Politburo in Hanoi. The Vietnamese would no longer tolerate what Gottesman has called the ‘steely autonomy’ of Pen Sovann to advocate policies of economic nationalism and resistance to Vietnamese immigration. The fact that Pen was arrested by the Vietnamese and imprisoned in Vietnam cuts across any theory that he might have fallen victim to an anti-Vietnamese push within the KPRP. On the other hand, perhaps the Vietnamese had already concluded (as they had done in the days of the old Indochinese Communist Party back in the 1930s) that Cambodia was not ripe for socialism, and that idealistic communists such as Pen Sovann had to be removed from office. The truth of the matter awaits the opening of the state archives by some future Vietnamese Gorbachev, although the prospect is a distant one.
Chan Si, who succeeded Pen Sovann as prime minister, was also a competent and well-educated man, albeit considerably more ‘mild mannered and accommodating’ than his predecessor. However, he too demonstrated a capacity for independence of thought, most notably by his refusal to cooperate in the K5 Plan described above. Although he appears to have been in good health, Chan Si was suddenly struck down by a mysterious illness during a trip to Moscow. He was cremated after a full state funeral in Phnom Penh and publicly the regime mourned his loss. Years later, following his release from prison in Vietnam, Pen Sovann told the Cambodia Daily that Chan Si had been murdered on Hun Sen’s orders. The opposition politician Sam Rainsy repeated the charge and Pen Sovann subsequently published a book (in Khmer) detailing his claims. It is difficult to imagine how Pen Sovann could have known the details of Chan Si’s death as he was in prison at Hanoi at the time, and unless fresh evidence emerges the official explanation of his death will have to stand.
Chan Si’s death was certainly fortuitous for the party pragmatists and former Khmers Rouges, however. By 1985, power had fallen largely into the hands of the Hun Sen wing of the KPRP, and their pragmatic policies prevailed over the Khmer Viet Minh’s socialism. The remaining Khmer Viet Minh cadres were eased from their positions and replaced with former Khmers Rouges who Pen Sovann in particular had previously excluded. As Margaret Slocomb has observed, Chan Si’s death ‘dramatically marked a major turning point in the history of the PRK and in the revolution itself’. The regime introduced a kind of perestroika from 1988 (mirroring the Vietnamese party’s doi moi free market reforms) and the collectivisation project in the countryside was abandoned. In September 1989, just prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall and coincident with the final withdrawal of Vietnamese troops, the PRK changed its name to the more neutral-sounding State of Cambodia (SOC). The KPRP renamed itself as the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and dropped its socialist aims and ideology. It had simply given up on the socialist project in the face of overwhelming domestic and international pressures and the seductions of power. However, by this stage the regime had also demonstrated that it was no longer the mere Vietnamese puppet that its detractors had claimed.
Momentous changes in international relations
These internal ideological shifts mirrored momentous international changes, which in turn impacted on Cambodian politics. The 1979 Vietnamese invasion had coincided with an intensification of the Cold War, which saw US President Ronald Reagan wage an implacable— and successful—struggle against what he saw as the ‘evil empire’ of the USSR. The Soviet Union became bogged down in a hopeless war against US-backed Islamist insurgents in Afghanistan, while at the same time its economy and society stagnated under an increasingly sclerotic bureaucracy and the debilitating strain of the arms race. By the end of the decade the pressures were so great that the Soviet Union began to crack, despite the best efforts of President Mikhail Gorbachev to preserve it by his reformist policies of perestroika and glasnost. The year 1989 saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ‘velvet revolution’ in Czechoslovakia, with the Soviet President refusing to intervene to save the Eastern European communist regimes. Two years later, the Soviet Union itself collapsed and the Cold War was over.
The same period had also seen a gradual thaw in relations between China and the USSR and an increasing willingness by a more pragmatic, post-Maoist Chinese leadership to embrace the capitalist world. The fall of communism in Eastern Europe also jolted them into the realisation that regardless of Stalinist dogma, they could not assume that their own regime was permanent. Finally, with the Cold War over, US (and ASEAN) intransigence towards Vietnam and the PRK/SOC made little sense. This general thaw in international politics provided the opportunity for a negotiated solution to the hitherto intractable problem of Cambodia.
The process was also assisted by the staged withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia, begun in 1982 and completed in 1989. Although the CGDK and its backers initially claimed these were little more than troop rotations, the assertion wore thin in the face of the evidence. It was also increasingly apparent to the outside world that the PRK was no longer a Vietnamese puppet and had established itself as an effective government. This was underlined when, despite widespread fears that the PRK/SOC might not be able to prevent the return of the Khmers Rouges after the Vietnamese withdrawal, the Cambodian army was able to keep them at bay for the best part of four years before the arrival of UN peacekeeping forces. The regime had also boosted food production and re-established the basic infrastructure destroyed during the years of war and revolution.
Increasingly, too, it was difficult to justify support for the embarrassing Pol Pot. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had once tried to sidestep awkward questions about DK’s murderous history by claiming that there were both good Khmers Rouges and bad, and the United States maintained the fiction that its support for the CGDK did not mean support for Pol Pot. But such claims were untenable and increasingly unacceptable to world opinion. In 1986 the Australian Foreign Minister Bill Hayden said what many others were thinking when he called publicly for the trial of the Khmers Rouges leaders by an international tribunal. Any close ideological affinity the Chinese had once shared with Pol Pot was finished, with Beijing’s new leadership turning their backs on the violent ultra-leftism of Mao’s time in favour of market reforms and integration into the world economy.
By the late 1980s the ASEAN countries and Thailand in particular had begun to warm towards both Vietnam and the PRK as it became apparent that they had no plans (or capacity) to export revolution to the rest of the region. In short, after the Vietnamese withdrawal and the end of the Cold War, China, the West and ASEAN had little to gain from their continued support of the Pol Pot dominated CGDK, and much more to gain from embracing Hun Sen. On the other side, Gorbachev had everything to gain by moderation and the Vietnamese were preoccupied with rebuilding their own weakened economy and seeking rapprochement with their neighbours.
Prince Sihanouk, whose political antennae were always finely tuned, was also aware of the implications of these changes and began to distance himself from his unsavoury coalition partner, Pol Pot. In fact, Sihanouk had proposed direct talks with the PRK in Paris as early as August 1984, but the plan had failed because of vehement Chinese opposition. The following year the PRK announced its willingness to talk with the coalition, providing that the Khmers Rouges were excluded. Some years later, Sihanouk admitted that DK’s aggression had triggered the Vietnamese invasion and said that Hun Sen was 80 per cent good and 20 per cent bad: ‘he is my son, a bad boy but not so bad!’ Perhaps it had finally dawned on Sihanouk that his alliance with the Khmers Rouges had been a major strategic error, even if he never seems to have considered the ethical problem of consorting with mass murderers over a period of two decades. With the lessening of Cold War tensions and improved relationships between China, the USSR and Vietnam, Sihanouk saw Pol Pot as expendable. In July 1987, Sihanouk proposed talks between all the parties, with no pre-conditions, although the proposal failed because all parties did set conditions.
Two years later, as Gary Klintworth observes, the final withdrawal of Vietnamese troops presented the UN, ASEAN, China and the United States with a fait accompli. At a stroke, it also removed any credibility from Sihanouk’s claims that the PRK/SOC was illegitimate. Now, it served no one’s interests save the Khmers Rouges to continue the conflict and on 23 October 1991, following some skilful diplomacy, all four of the Cambodian factions signed an agreement in Paris that allowed for free elections to be supervised by the United Nations. Pol Pot was unhappy with the arrangement, but his Chinese mentors had effectively abandoned him and he had no option but to go through the motions. From now on, he would be a dangerous nuisance but not a contender for power. From March 1992, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) would oversee the country’s affairs, and the factions would cooperate in the Supreme National Council under Sihanouk’s presidency to ensure the continuation of Cambodian sovereignty.
The loathing and contempt felt by most Cambodians for the Khmers Rouges was underlined by the humiliation of Khieu Samphan when he flew in from Thailand in November 1992 to organise the Khmers Rouges’ election campaign. Although there appears to have been some orchestration of events by Hun Sen, the spontaneous outrage of the people cannot be denied. Khieu Samphan was almost hanged from a ceiling fan in front of French journalists before scurrying ignominiously to the airport under CPP military guard, his bleeding head hastily bandaged in a pair of Y-fronts, jeered at by all who saw him.
A balance sheet of the PRK
Margaret Slocomb has argued that although the PRK failed as a revolutionary socialist regime, it did largely keep faith with the promises made by Heng Samrin at Snoul back in December 1978. The first point is indisputable, but the latter is true only up to a point, for the democracy Heng Samrin promised never eventuated. However, the PRK had rebuilt the country under conditions of great difficulty. There were, once again, schools and hospitals, functioning public transport, banks and currency, some industry and a revitalised agricultural sector. Moreover, even after the final withdrawal of Vietnamese troops in September 1989, the KPRAF soldiers were able to keep the Khmers Rouges at bay for the best part of four years until the arrival of UNTAC troops. In the end, the PRK/SOC leaders had cooperated with other factions and the United Nations to bring peace and security back to the country. While not highly popular, neither was the PRK unpopular, Slocomb argues. As long as it allowed people to piece together their shattered lives without too much interference, they would bow before it. This, after all, has been the pattern of life in Cambodia throughout the centuries, whether the rulers were kings or colonial administrators.
Most Khmers had accepted the PRK and the Vietnamese as the only way to keep Pol Pot out, but this does not mean that they supported the original Marxist-Leninist aims of the government. This is summed up in the words of a Khmer civil servant quoted by the University of Kentucky’s Thomas Clayton, a writer on Cambodian affairs: ‘At that time [January 1979], we were as if submerged under water. Someone came to us and held out a stick for us. We did not think at that time about who was holding the stick. We only knew that we needed to grasp the stick or we would die.’ It is a fair comment.
Although the most pressing reason for the Vietnamese invasion was to eliminate the Pol Pot regime as a menace to Vietnam’s own security, it nevertheless did liberate the Cambodian people from an atrocious regime. Although it is possible that the regime might have collapsed under the weight of its own incompetence and the debilitating effects of the purges, it is more likely that the country would have reverted to anarchic barbarism under petty regional despots. One is entitled to be sceptical of the claim of an anti-Vietnamese student, cited by Evan Gottesman, that ‘Really, they [the Vietnamese] came here to kill people and take our property’.
For all their manipulation of Cambodian affairs, the Vietnamese government did its best to provide economic and humanitarian aid that it could scarcely afford. The war in Cambodia cost Hanoi dearly and was deeply unpopular with the Vietnamese people. Up to 50 per cent of Vietnam’s budget was spent on the military during the occupation and this colossal drain turned their own war-damaged country into an economic basket case. Vietnam and the PRK were shunned as international pariahs while Pol Pot’s sinister entourage basked in the sun of international recognition. The tragedy is that it took 13 weary years before the ‘international community’ could agree on a solution to a problem they were largely responsible for creating in the first place.
A final spasm of violence
Despite the diplomatic breakthrough in Paris that ushered in the UNTAC mission, Cambodia’s problems were far from over. The last days of the PRK/SOC regime saw an explosion of political violence against students and other critics of widespread corruption and the lack of human rights in the country. Between 17 and 21 December 1991, Phnom Penh students staged a number of demonstrations against official corruption, during which at least ten people were killed and dozens wounded when security forces opened fire with live ammunition. Armed police also stormed into the Phnom Penh university medical faculty to disperse students who had not been involved in the street demonstrations. One student told the Australian observer Helen Jarvis that, ‘This was a police manifestation [demonstration] not a student manifestation.’ An undisclosed number of students were held without charge or trial or contact with friends or relatives.
Foreign Minister Nor Namhong announced on television that the demonstrations amounted to ‘an armed insurrection with a political aim’ and hinted at Khmers Rouges involvement. There was a plot by ‘armed elements’ to ‘create instability for the government’ and to ‘prevent the implementation of the Paris peace accord’, he fumed. Human rights agencies denied his claims and a special United Nations rapporteur agreed, noting that ‘Reportedly, none of the demonstrators . . . had been equipped with firearms, nor had any of those killed used Molotov cocktails.’ Amnesty International reported that ‘eyewitnesses reported no firing on the police’ and asked the government to release prisoners who were held ‘solely for the peaceful expression of their opinions’. Although Hun Sen vowed to prevent Cambodia from becoming an ‘anarchic’ and ‘lawless country’, his government failed to fully investigate the incidents and took no legal action against members of the security forces for their murderous rampage.
Shortly afterwards, Tea Bun Long, a leading civil servant and scathing critic of corruption, was kidnapped in broad daylight outside his house and murdered on the outskirts of the city. Tea had been especially critical of the role of National Assembly president, the ex-Khmer Rouge Chea Sim. One week later another government critic, a former government minister called Ung Phan, was shot outside his home, but recovered from his wounds after seeking refuge at Hun Sen’s house. Both Tea Bun Long and Ung Phan had been involved in discussions to set up a new political party and indeed Ung Phan had only recently been released from prison for the ‘crime’ of trying to set up such a party. The journalist Nate Thayer, a long-time observer of Cambodian affairs, wrote in Far Eastern Economic Review that ‘Long’s killing was ordered by a powerful faction inside the government which is afraid of losing power in the liberalised political situation brought about by UN intervention . . .’. In March 1992, according to Human Rights Watch, another former political prisoner named Yang Horn was savagely assaulted ‘shortly after being summoned with Ung Phang to an encounter with his former jailers who warned both not to engage in political activity’.
The PRK/SOC, which had done much to rebuild the country after the death and destruction of the Pol Pot years, thus departed from the historical stage with a final shameful blot on its record. Ruthless and astute, Hun Sen was determined to hang on to power despite the changed political circumstances that the UNTAC operation would bring. This final spasm of officially condoned violence presaged episodes of much greater violence that were to come and was in depressing counterpoint to the solemn declarations of the Cambodian political factions to respect democracy and human rights.
In many former Soviet bloc countries, the old ruling communist parties were either eclipsed or reinvented themselves politically and made a genuine commitment to play by the rules of democracy and pluralism. This did not happen in Cambodia. The Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party, rebadged as the Cambodian People’s Party, was determined to maintain its monopoly of power. Evan Gottesman has expressed this succinctly:
No Berlin Wall fell in Cambodia. No Vaclav Havel or Lech Walesa came to power. The regime did not collapse; it negotiated the terms of its survival. Impoverished and isolated, the SOC understood that it needed legitimacy and assistance from the United Nations and the West. This meant complying with the expectations of the international community, when necessary, and protecting power in undemocratic and frequently violent ways, when possible.
Part of the price was the abandonment of the party’s socialist ideology, and therefore its apparent raison d’être. Nor did the party reinvent itself as a social democratic party, with a residual commitment to social justice. From now on its imperatives would be those of power and wealth, devoid of egalitarian concerns, and backed up by its control of the country’s ‘prisons and bodies of armed men’ inherited from the PRK.