Pol Pot (85 page)

That was not quite true. Pol was well aware of the popular mood. His own private secretary, Keo Yann, told him he felt that the struggle was over and he intended to stay and farm in Pailin. Pol allowed him to do so, a reaction that would have been unthinkable a few years before. But he did not change his mind about fighting. It was a decision that puzzled many of those around him. ‘He ought to have known that resuming armed struggle wouldn’t work,’ Long Nârin said later. ‘I don’t know why he did it. But he did.’

The next problem was how to reimpose wartime discipline. Pol’s answer was that everyone should once again take the poorest peasants as their model, as they had in the early 1970s. The old slogan of ‘independence-mastery’ was revived, and red flags, bearing a sickle but no hammer, were flown in Khmer Rouge villages. The aim of ‘peasantisation’, as it was called, was to bolster military morale. ‘If the soldiers saw that the villagers in the rear areas were getting rich by selling logs to Thailand, while they were risking their lives,’ a cadre explained, ‘they would lose heart. The rear had to support the front. It couldn’t be left loose.’

Tightening discipline in the rear, however, meant stopping cross-border trade. To that end, in the autumn of 1994, Pol issued a directive, signed with his personal code, ‘99’, ordering the confiscation of privately owned means of transport. Initially, ox-carts and lorries were targeted, because they could be used to take logs across the border. But soon afterwards private cars and motor-bikes were seized, too, and stored in makeshift entrepôts. In some areas, the new rules were enforced more strictly, in others less. On the

surface, they were accepted. ‘What could people do?’ a cadre asked. ‘They didn’t have guns.’ But throughout the Khmer Rouge areas, there was deep-seated, sullen, peasant anger. The population had not wanted to resume fighting in the first place. Now, the first glimmer of prosperity after twenty years of privation had been brutally snuffed out. ‘The ox-carts were the peasants’ life,’ Long Nârin remembered. ‘And Pol Pot took them away.’

After the fall of Phnom Chhat, Pol moved to Anlong Veng. When that base, too, was overrun during the spring of 1994, he retreated to

Kbal Ansoang

, on the crest of the Dangrek Mountains, abutting the Thai border, eight miles further north.

It was an idyllic setting. Pol’s house stood on the edge of a cliff, a thousand feet above a perfectly flat plain that stretched away to the horizon in the south. It was built of brick, with ceramic tiles and bathroom fittings from Thailand; there was a terrace, where he sat in the evenings, with an iron balustrade, shaded by creepers, and orchids growing in coconut shells, hanging from the trees; and below, blasted out of the rock, a basement sealed with iron doors, where documents and weapons were stored. The interior was furnished simply with heavy tropical wood armchairs, in the French colonial style, and a chaise-longue made from rattan and bamboo.

Nearby stood a traditional Khmer wooden house for Tep Khunnal, a young engineer with a doctorate from Toulouse who had taken Keo Yann’s place as Pol’s secretary. Slightly further away were other dwellings: for Khieu Samphân, for Thiounn Thioeunn, the apolitical aristocrat who, alone of the Thiounn brothers, had remained faithful to the Khmer Rouge cause, and for four intellectuals — Chan Yourann, In Sopheap, Kor Bunheng and Mak Ben — who had been among the leaders of the shortlived Cambodian National Union Party, formed for the elections. In July 1994 Pol had appointed them ministers in a fictive ‘government’ of the Khmer Rouge territories, which no one ever recognised and whose existence was quickly forgotten.

Just beyond the outer perimeter, protected by a minefield, stood an open-air meeting hall, with dormitories for visiting cadres. Pol conducted political seminars less often than in the past, but when he did so he was as convincing as ever. One participant remembered:

Every time

we returned from a seminar, we felt full of gratitude and loyalty towards Pol Pot . . . He made a tremendous impression, especially on those who came for the first time. They always wanted to come back and study more . . . As a teacher, he was brilliant. He has a sense of humour and he’s warm-hearted towards you . . . He gives you confidence in yourself . . . He always left us feeling illuminated by his explanations and his vision . . . Even

the other leaders felt he was the heart and soul of the movement . . . [We] worried that one day he would die and there would be no one to replace him.

In 1994, Pol was nearing seventy. Until the previous year, while K-18 remained open, he had been able to get follow-up treatment for his cancer from Thai doctors in Trat. At Kbal Ansoang, that was not possible.

He also developed

heart trouble. Thiounn Thioeunn diagnosed aortic stenosis, a congestive condition in which the aortic valve no longer functions properly. In the West, such patients are usually given open-heart surgery. But in Pol’s case, Thioeunn said, he had left it too long and it had become inoperable. Already at Trat he had sometimes required an oxygen cylinder in order to breathe. At Kbal Ansoang, he needed oxygen frequently and, the following year, suffered a minor stroke which impaired his vision and left him partly paralysed down his left side.

As his illness worsened,

he spent more time

with his family, especially with his daughter, Sitha, who was then eight years old. He taught her to read and write Khmer and cooked her dishes that she liked. Like old men everywhere, he started to reminisce. In Sopheap remembered days when he would call them to a meeting and spend the afternoon regaling them with stories about his youth in Phnom Penh.

Later he got

Tep Khunnal to read to him extracts in Khmer translation from his biography,

by the American historian David Chandler. Shortly afterwards he began dictating his own version of his life, but the notebooks later disappeared. He drank

whisky

or cognac, when the Thais brought him a bottle, and spent hours listening to traditional Khmer music, which he had loved since learning to play as a child. ‘

He appreciated

the finer points,’ an aide remembered. ‘As he listened, he’d comment on the musicians’ technique.’ He also received newspapers and magazines sent in from Thailand, including, improbably, the French weekly

He told In Sopheap that it interested him because, when the political struggle resumed, the Khmers Rouges, too, would need to publish a glossy magazine promoting their cause. The real reasons are impossible to fathom. In Pol’s youth,

had been widely read in Cambodia for its caricatures of Sihanouk, depicted as Saint-Exupéry’s character, the Little Prince. But one can only wonder what he made of the stories of philandering rock stars and film actresses, the intrigues of European royalty and the skulduggery of French politicians, that filled the magazine’s pages in the 1990s, as he presided from his mountain lair over the dwindling fortunes of the most radical revolutionary movement of modern times. As Ieng Sary once observed, ‘Pol Pot had a very complex character.’

Age had not mellowed him, however, nor given him a moral sense extending beyond his own and his movement’s interests.

In September 1994, the gentle old man who doted on his small daughter ordered the execution of three young backpackers — a Briton, a Frenchman and an Australian — who had been captured by Khmer Rouge forces in an attack on a train during the summer. There was no particular reason to have them killed. However, negotiations with the Royal Government had failed to elicit any offer which made it worth keeping them alive. Pol might have abandoned communism as a goal, but the line of demarcation between friends and enemies, between those who should be preserved and those whose lives had no value, was as absolute as ever.

That winter, the fates began closing in.

Their agent was

Son Sen, the studious, bespectacled military commander who had spent the latter part of his career being alternately suspected by Pol of treason and groomed as his successor.

Son Sen was particularly zealous in applying the ‘peasantisation’ policy. In Samphou Loun, a few miles south of Malay, where he had transferred his headquarters after the battles of the previous spring, communal eating was reimposed and private trade banned. On Sen’s instructions, Mam Nay, Deuch’s former deputy at the Tuol Sleng interrogation centre, established a prison to which recalcitrant peasants were taken for ‘re-education’, a term which soon acquired the same sinister connotation that it had had in the 1970s. Those who refused to mend their ways, about forty in all, were bludgeoned to death. So were a group of traders at Bavel, twenty miles south-west of Battambang, who ran an open-air market in the no-man’s-land between government and Khmer Rouge territory. Son Sen ordered their arrests as spies. Fifty-two people, including women and small children, were executed.

Two of Son Sen’s principal subordinates, Y Chhean at Pailin and Sok Pheap in Malay, disapproved of these methods. In their own areas, they implemented the confiscation policy half-heartedly, and when Sen called meetings of the front commanders, they stayed away. Over the next year, relations between the three men became increasingly strained.

Other factors exacerbated the tension. Pailin and Malay were the main centres for trade in gems and timber with Thailand. The local commanders were unwilling to give up their share of the proceeds. Then, in 1995, Hun Sen and Ranariddh set up a special military committee to make contact with potential Khmer Rouge turncoats. For a long time nothing happened. But in February 1996, a Khmer Rouge commander at Mount Aural defected with his men. Shortly afterwards Y Chhean and Sok Pheap

travelled secretly to Chanthaburi for a meeting with the committee’s vice-chairman, Nhek Bunchhay of FUNCINPEC, and two senior CPP generals. They were told that if they changed sides they and their troops would be granted an amnesty, and they would be allowed to retain command of their areas. This was the same procedure that Sihanouk had employed half a century earlier, when Issarak defectors like Dap Chhuon and Puth Chhay were given commissions in the Royal Army and allowed to keep control of the districts where they had been based. Agreement was reached in principle, but no time limit was set. In the summer Chhean and Pheap attended another secret meeting at Chanthaburi, this time with Ieng Sary. Since the Paris accords, Sary’s eclipse had become total. He gave the plan his blessing.

Matters came to a head in July 1996. Son Sen reported to Pol that Y Chhean was refusing to obey orders. Mok was sent to investigate.

But Mok was not a conciliator. As one of Pol’s aides put it: ‘He went to put out the fire and he made it worse . . . Mok was good at messing things up. He just said what came into his head, cursing and blaming people. He was not a thoughtful man.’ Son Sen then sent troops to put down what the Khmer Rouge radio described as a rebellion by traitors. But by this stage it was hard enough to get the soldiers to fight Hun Sen’s forces; they had no interest in killing each other. The majority mutinied. On August 15 1996, it was announced that Ieng Sary, Y Chhean and Sok Pheap had severed their ties with the Khmers Rouges and formed a new political movement which would co-operate with the government. All the remaining bases along the southern part of the border, from Samlaut to Phnom Chhat, joined them. Sary received an amnesty from the King for ‘a good deed worth the lives of thousands of people’, and thereafter divided his time between Pailin, where he became unofficial satrap, and Phnom Penh. Some four thousand soldiers — nearly half the total Khmer Rouge troop strength — were integrated into the Royal Army.

Ieng Sary’s defection was a body-blow from which the Khmers Rouges never recovered.

By the end of the year they had also lost almost all their bases in the interior, which left them hemmed in to a narrow band of territory spread over a few hundred square miles of jungle along the country’s northern border. ‘We are

like a fish

in a trap,’ Pol told his aides. ‘We cannot last like this for very long.’

The way forward, he concluded, was to make the transition from armed to parliamentary struggle that he had rejected three years earlier. But had he done so then, it would have been from a position of strength: in 1993, the movement was still intact, it had international support and Sihanouk

and Hun Sen both paid lip-service to the idea that the Khmers Rouges should have a role in the nation’s political life. Now it would be from a position of weakness: the movement was outlawed. Its numbers were fast declining and the Thais, sensing the end approaching, had cut back their support. By this time it must have been clear to Pol that his refusal to implement the Paris accords had been a capital error. But whatever thoughts he had on that subject he kept to himself.

Ieng Sary was denounced as a traitor and accused of having embezzled large amounts of Chinese aid. Nuon Chea and Son Sen were blamed for the loss of the southern bases, stripped of their responsibilities and assigned to what were known as the ‘Middle Houses’, an isolated cluster of dwellings half-way down the mountain, not under arrest but out of power. Mok retained his command. But he too was under a cloud. Having decided that the older generation had failed him, Pol now turned to more junior members of his dwindling entourage. At a mass meeting in February 1997, it was announced that two veteran division commanders, Saroeun and San, were to head a ‘Peasant Party’ which would operate in the rural areas, while Khieu Samphân and a group of younger intellectuals would form a ‘National Solidarity Party’ as the movement’s parliamentary face.

It all smacked of desperation. Pol’s health was

rapidly

deteriorating. He needed oxygen every day, and attended meetings with tubes fixed to his nose. In Sopheap remembered him telling them, ‘We are at the