Pol Pot (68 page)

Elizabeth Becker of the

who saw him two years later, also found him

‘not what I expected

. . . His gestures and manner were polished . . . Not once, during a violent [diatribe], did he raise his voice or slam his fist on the arm of the chair. At most he nodded his head slightly, or flicked his dainty wrist for emphasis.’ When he spoke to Khmer audiences, he usually carried a fan, emblematic of the monkhood.

The formation of the new government marked the end of one phase of the Cambodian revolution — the ‘national revolution’, when the Khmers Rouges had been allied with more moderate groups — and the beginning of another, the ‘socialist revolution’. The goal now was to make a leap — ‘an extremely marvellous, extremely wonderful, prodigious leap’ — into full communism.

This was not what Zhou Enlai had advised. It was not what Mao’s successors, Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping, thought best for Democratic Kampuchea. But realism has never been the strongpoint of Khmer politics. Sihanouk spent his life insisting that his country was not ‘minuscule’. Lon Nol dreamed impossible dreams of restoring a Mon-Khmer Empire.

Belief in Angkor as the eternal reference point of Cambodia’s glory and the imperative need to deny that it was a small, poor country that had to accommodate powerful neighbours were not Pol Pot’s inventions: they were rooted in the Cambodian psyche. Self-absorption and self-aggrandisement mutated into self-deception. In Pol’s case, the almost supernatural ease with which the Americans had been forced to flee Cambodia exacerbated the problem. The fact that the US had been bent on getting out of Indochina whatever the cost, and that Sihanouk and Lon Nol, during their years in power, had so crushed all domestic opposition that by the time the Khmers Rouges arrived no moderate alternative remained, was ignored.

‘In the entire world,’

Pol proclaimed in July 1975, ‘no country, no people and no army has been able to drive the imperialists out to the last man and score total victory over them. Nobody!’ Not only was this wholly untrue — the Vietnamese, whose help Pol categorically denied receiving, had achieved a victory a hundred times more impressive — but it bespoke a degree of hubris that was riding for a fall.

To Pol, Democratic Kampuchea was an

island of purity

‘amid the confusion of the present-day world’, ‘a precious model for humanity’ whose revolutionary virtue exceeded that of all previous revolutionary states, including China:

The standard of the [Bolshevik] revolution of November 7, 1917, was raised very high, but Khrushchev pulled it down. The standard of Mao’s [Chinese] revolution of 1949 stands high until now, but it has faded and is wavering:

it is no longer firm. The standard of the [Cambodian] revolution of April 17 1975, raised by Comrade Pol Pot, is brilliant red, full of determination, wonderfully firm and wonderfully clear-sighted. The whole world admires us, sings our praises and learns from us.

Another Central Committee study document asserted: ‘

Not using money

, prohibiting markets, using a supply system to meet people’s needs . . . the world never thought of such policies before. This new line has successfully resolved the . . . contradiction between town and country, an intractable problem that mankind has been wrestling with for centuries.’ A Khmer Rouge song portrayed Democratic Kampuchea as ‘a place of pilgrimage’. If Cambodians could defeat imperialism, Radio Phnom Penh declared, ‘all people, including the American people, will certainly achieve victory’.

Underpinning this vision of a new global revolution was the idea that the other Marxist-Leninist parties in the region were poised to follow Cambodia’s lead. This was not, at the time, far-fetched. In the mid-1970s, the West was being battered by the effects of the oil shock and world communism was at its apogee. Thirty-two nations, more than ever before or since, were ruled by Marxist or pro-Marxist regimes. Singapore’s tough-minded Prime Minister, Lee Kwan Yew, remembered: ‘The communists were on the ascendant, and the tide looked like flowing over the rest of South-East Asia’.

Over the next two years, Pol and Ieng Sary courted communist leaders from Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, and officials of the East Timor Liberation Front. Several parties, including the Indonesians, sent groups for military training in Democratic Kampuchea. The Thais, in whom Pol placed particular hope, were permitted to build bases along the two countries’ common border. When, in October 1976, the Thai army seized power in a bloody, right-wing coup, sending hundreds of Thai students fleeing to join the communist insurgency, the Cambodians were not alone in thinking that another domino was about to fall. A leading American specialist wrote that the Thai revolutionaries had

‘growing capability

. . . To a great extent the future of Thailand now rests in their hands.’ With hindsight, such a judgement seems absurd. But to many Thai intellectuals, as well as Western scholars, that was how it looked at the time.

The idea that Democratic Kampuchea was a model for revolutionaries elsewhere had as its corollary the view that the Cambodian revolution was genetically original. Like the chiliastic movements of medieval Europe, each of which was seen as ‘an event of unique importance, different in kind from all other struggles known to history, a cataclysm from which the

world [would] emerge totally transformed and redeemed’, Cambodia was undertaking ‘a revolution

without precedent’

. In Pol’s words:

We do not have

any preconceived model or pattern of any kind for [our] new society . . .

The situation is completely different from other countries. We are not confused, as they are . . . Ours is a new experience and people are observing it. We do not follow any book.

Ieng Sary went further, telling an interviewer in 1977: ‘We want to achieve something that has never occurred before in history.’ To do so, he said, the Khmers Rouges eschewed theories but ‘relied on [revolutionary] consciousness and carried out the struggle in a practical way’.

That raised the question of whether Cambodian ‘communism’, in the fully developed form it assumed after mid-1976, could be considered Marxist-Leninist at all.

‘Certain [foreign] comrades,’

Pol acknowledged, ‘take the view that our Party . . . cannot operate well because it does not understand Marxism-Leninism and the comrades of our Central Committee have never learnt Marxist principles.’ His answer was that the CPK did ‘nurture a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint’, but in its own fashion. To some extent this was true. Party members studied texts on dialectical materialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat and other Marxist concepts. But the Cambodian Party had never been an integral part of the world communist movement — until 1975, its only foreign contacts were with China, Vietnam and Laos — and it took from Marxism only those things which were consonant with its own world-view. Socialism, to Pol, was a means to an end, a way of making Cambodia strong, ‘of defending the country and preserving the Kampuchean race forever’. His ideological soul mates were not Stalin or Mao, but the sixteenth-century Englishman Thomas More, the Hébertistes of the French Revolution and the Utopian socialists of nineteenth-century Russia, whom Lenin had castigated as ‘the carriers of a reactionary petty bourgeois ideology [promoting] stagnation and Asiatic backwardness’. The difference was that Pol had power and could put his ideas into effect.

In the summer of 1976, the Khmers Rouges were at last in a position to strike out on their own.

There was a change of style. Democratic Kampuchea had a new name, a new leader, a new government, a new self-image. The desire to win acceptance from the rest of the world yielded to a sentiment that others would have to accept the regime on its own terms.

The previous spring Pol had insisted that the parliamentary elections be

’carefully prepared . . . so that our enemies cannot criticise us’. He had instructed Hu Nim to organise radio broadcasts of campaign meetings with peasants, workers and soldiers, and interviews with candidates, to prevent the foreign press claiming the procedures were undemocratic. It was a charade. As Pol himself acknowledged, ‘This isn’t a capitalist election; we apply proletarian class dictatorship.’ The only area in the country to have multiple candidates was Phnom Penh, where Sihanouk and Khieu Samphân cast well-publicised votes. Everywhere else there was only one name on the list, and in many, though not all, areas, ‘new people’, having no political rights, were not allowed to take part. When the new parliament convened some weeks later, the fiction continued. Radio Phnom Penh announced that the deputies had met for three days to discuss the composition of the government before solemnly voting it into office. In fact, they met for three hours; there was no discussion and no vote. But the public façade was there to show the outside world the trappings of a proper state. The same was true of most of the public meetings which the Khmers Rouges claimed to have held over the previous two years. The Second FUNK Congress in February 1975; the Special Congress in April, which supposedly created a commission of 1,200 members to elaborate the new constitution; the Third Congress in December which approved that constitution — all existed only on paper. They never met, at least not in the form that was claimed. They were simply press releases, dreamed up to give a semblance of normalcy to a minimalist regime.

From mid-1976 onwards, that changed. For all practical purposes the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, to the extent that they had ever existed, fell into disuse. Parliament, which was supposed to hold two sessions a year, never met again. Cabinet meetings ceased. Ministerial portfolios were left vacant. Two years later, only half of the sixteen government posts were still filled. The pretence was over. Power resided where it had always been: in the hands of the CPK Standing Committee and its Secretary, Pol Pot.

There was also a change of substance.

The first stage of the socialist revolution, which had begun in April 1975, had seen the establishment of village-level co-operatives throughout the country In October the Standing Committee agreed to take the process a step further. Several villages were now to be linked in a single cooperative of 500 or 1,000 families, with the eventual goal of forming commune-sized units with twice that many people. At the same time, communal kitchens were organised. In practice, this ‘unity of feeding’, as the Khmers Rouges called it, meant that each family had to surrender its cooking pots and dishes, keeping only a kettle to boil water and a spoon for each family member. In parts of the Northern Zone and the

North-West, the new system took effect from December 1975. Elsewhere, notably in parts of the Eastern Zone, family meals continued until mid-1977. Sometimes neighbouring districts applied the new rules months apart. Villagers forced to eat communally on one side of a highway enviously watched their neighbours on the other side of the road cooking supper outside their huts. Like much in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, it all seemed to depend on the whim of the local cadres.

Communal eating quickly became one of the most detested aspects of life under the Khmers Rouges.

In theory it made things easier for all concerned. ‘They have no need to cook,’ Ieng Sary’s wife, Thirith, enthused. ‘They just do the work and then they come back and eat.’ And some did see it that way. Laurence Picq, at B-1, felt that however disagreeable it might be at a personal level, communal cooking had great practical advantages. Some Sino-Khmer families, at a loss to fend for themselves in the countryside, found it less trouble. But everyone else hated it. The food supply sharply diminished, as the cooks pilfered provisions for their own use or for the village chiefs. The cohesion of the family, already under pressure, was weakened further. Women, in particular, felt it undermined their traditional role. The ‘base people’ lost their privileges: no longer could they get by with the produce of their fruit trees and the vegetable plots beside their houses because now, like everything else, these were communally owned. Their carts and oxen were seized. So were private grain stocks, fish-nets, bicycles and anything else which might set the individual apart from the mass. In many villages, the larger houses — which also often belonged to ‘base people’ — were dismantled to provide wood for the new communal dining halls, and uniform, smaller huts, barely big enough to sleep in, built in their place.

Communal eating, while intended to be the most egalitarian of policies, in practice deepened the divide between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ of the new society. Pol might

inveigh against

‘authoritarianism, mandarinism, show-off-ism, high-rank-ism’ and ‘lording it over the people’, but as the radicalisation drive accelerated, all these phenomena increased.

In the countryside, those with power — the

the soldiers, commune and district officials — ate separately and well. Some had four meals a day and personal cooks to prepare their favourite dishes. Railway workers and certain other privileged groups were given special rations of meat and rice. At the Foreign Ministry, senior officials also benefited from a separate regime. Still more pampered were the ‘elders’, the regional leaders who came to B-1, accompanied by servants and bodyguards, before being sent abroad as Democratic Kampuchea’s first ambassadors. Laurence Picq,

with all the naive innocence of her May 1968 Parisian radicalism, was scandalised by their behaviour:

They all had quantities of suitcases, boxes and trunks . . . [in contrast to] the rest of us, who had had to give up everything we possessed . . . In the kitchen, despite the penury of supplies, the cooks prepared special dishes for them. [Sometimes] they deigned to put in an appearance. But in general . . . they preferred to eat among themselves. They had real feasts, with chicken, sucking pig, wine and sticky rice . . . and each morning, one of their bodyguards would go to collect freshly baked bread, that was made for the foreign diplomats, to bring for their breakfast . . . During the day, [the wives] went rummaging in abandoned houses and came back with fine clothes, silk underwear and bric-à-brac which they said were for the co-operatives. One day I overheard them discussing what they could get for some jewels they had found. It was a strange world . . . These people lived a life apart, in a style beyond anything one could imagine in a country so puritan and poor. Dinners, excursions, parties, liquor — and first choice in whatever plunder was going. Like the conquerors they were, they never went without.