The Red Flag: A History of Communism (88 page)

The Derg, officially, was still pursuing ‘Ethiopian socialism’, but this looked much more like Marxism-Leninism, and the land reform was welcomed by the student Marxists. From September 1975 the Derg began to formulate a Marxist-Leninist doctrine, and sought to create a more formal alliance with the Marxist parties. But Ethiopian Marxism was divided between the more Stalinist, modernizing Marxism of the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement (MEISON), largely consisting of ethnic southerners, and the more decentralized Marxism of the ‘Maoist’ Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), with a largely northern membership. It is no surprise that Mengistu ultimately allied with the MEISON. Partly as a result, serious conflicts broke out, within both the Derg and the Marxist movement. The regime sought to suppress the EPRP, and it went underground and began a guerrilla campaign, leading to a vicious ‘red terror’ which lasted for about a year from early 1977. The violence was extreme, and at times spilled into the streets – most notably the massacres that followed the EPRP’s attempts to disrupt the 1977 May Day rallies in Addis Ababa.

Mengistu’s extremism intensified separatist movements – the Marxist Eritreans, the Maoist-inspired Tigreans and rebels in other regions – and he also came under serious threat from within the Derg. He was further weakened when the United States, which under Kissinger’s
realpolitik
had continued to fund the regime despite the Derg’s violence, began to reduce aid under the new Carter administration and support Ethiopia’s enemy, the formally Marxist regime of Somalia. Meanwhile, the Soviets, who had been supporting Somalia, began to move closer to Ethiopia. The Somalis, sensing weakness now American support was being withdrawn, invaded the Ethiopian Ogaden. However, the war, far from undermining the Derg, only served to consolidate the regime, much as World War II had reinvigorated Stalin’s rule. Mengistu was able to present himself as a defender of the nation, and, in an even more striking echo of the Stalinist past, he began to associate himself with the Ethiopian Orthodox church to bring the nation together against the foreigner. In other respects too he adopted the ideology of High Stalinism. He was committed to using force to preserve the multi-ethnic hierarchical Ethiopian state, in which Amharas controlled other ethnicities, and to further signal the debt, he increasingly adopted a monarchical style and was to be seen sitting on a gilded armchair-cum-throne covered with red velvet to watch his military parades.
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By 1978, Mengistu, with Soviet and Cuban military aid and the support of the southern peasants who manned his army, had won the Ogaden war. His internal enemies had been crushed, and the separatist insurgents were being contained. He responded to victory by resuming his transformation of the economy, setting high targets for agriculture and building up industry, following a Stalinist strategy. The result was peasant passive resistance and soil erosion, contributing, together with the Tigrean war and drought, to a devastating famine in 1984.
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Having neglected the disaster, the regime was goaded into action by international outrage (helped by the televised ‘Live Aid’ charity rock concert), but its solutions caused even more traumas. It decided to relocate the peasants, in a coercive programme of villagization that further increased support for the guerrilla insurgencies now threatening the regime.

Mengistu was one of Stalin’s most faithful disciples, and the world was yet again reminded of the devastating effects of this violent form of politics. Again, the hatreds created by a crumbling
ancien régime
had given rise to an angry and destructive modernizing Prometheus. But even Mengistu’s cruelty was put in the shade when, a few weeks after the Derg launched its campaign of rural transformation, another Communist regime of extraordinary violence came to power. In April 1975, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (known as the ‘Khmer Rouge’) occupied Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge championed a variety of Communism very different to the pro-urban Afro-Stalinism of Ethiopia. This was a Maoist Marxism – one that used peasants rather than an urban vanguard to pursue goals of modernity and national greatness. The Khmer Rouge was to take Cambodia (or Kampuchea as they called it) into a world more nightmarish even than that of the Cultural Revolution, one pursued with a single-minded violence that ended up destroying the modernity it was trying to create.

In 1971, a French student of Cambodian Buddhism, François Bizot, then touring the Cambodian countryside, was captured by Khmer Rouge guerrillas who were fighting a guerrilla war against the American-backed regime of Lon Nol. Suspected of being an American spy, Bizot was imprisoned in a camp, and his fascinating and subtle memoir of his captivity includes a gripping account of conversations with his captor, ‘Comrade Duch’, the former mathematics teacher who was later to become the head of the notorious torture chamber, the Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison.
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Despite the circumstances, Bizot and Duch established a strange rapport, and engaged in an extraordinary debate about Kampuchean Communism. Bizot, an enthusiast for traditional Cambodian culture, challenged Duch with a powerful critique of what he saw as the Khmer Rouge’s modernizing Promethean impulse – namely its subservience to Western ideas, its contempt for ‘backward’ peasants, and its willingness to sacrifice ordinary people on the altar of national greatness: ‘If you destroy these structures of peasant society, if you impose a new rational model, don’t you risk humiliating them even more than your enemies do?’ he asked. Duch, however, refused to accept that the peasantry would resist modernity, and insisted that they would welcome the Khmer Rouge’s programme:

At the same time, however, he declared himself committed to helping those peasants who were willing to shoulder their responsibilities: ‘My duty is to lead each of them back to a life of simple pleasures; what more can anyone want from life than a bicycle, a watch and a transistor radio?’
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Duch went on to condemn Bizot for hypocrisy, for forgetting that France had created a nation through bloody revolution, just as the
massive ancient Cambodian temples of Angkor Wat had involved massive sacrifice:

Bizot was shocked by Duch’s callousness, but his feelings were complex:

Bizot may or may not have been right in his view of Duch’s motivations, and in his conviction that Duch was the victim of inhumane bosses. But his record of Duch’s views helps us to understand why leaders of the Khmer Rouge such as Duch were prepared to organize such violence. Duch’s language – and especially his praise for the achievements of the ancient Angkor civilization – was more explicitly nationalistic than most Communists’, and clearly war and Cambodian nationalism are central to any explanation of these events. But his words echo those we have seen in Stalin’s and Mao’s Radical voluntaristic thinking – that national greatness and economic success could only be achieved if the people became self-sacrificing heroes, whilst the unheroic or the unreliable had to be eliminated. But the Khmer Rouge were Maoist rather than Stalinist in believing in the virtues of the peasantry, at least in the
abstract; they did not have the contempt for their culture or the admiration for the urban that Stalinists did. Even so, ‘Communist State No. 1’, as they called their regime, went even further than Mao in valorizing the Radical over the modernizing side of the Promethean synthesis and in their efforts to mobilize the nation as a peasant guerrilla army at a time of war. The Khmer Rouge also used the enormous resentments of the countryside towards the cities. The consequence was murder and destruction on a massive scale.

The Khmer Rouge’s leader Saloth Sâr (better known by his pseudonym ‘Pol Pot’) arrived at his extremist version of Marxism in the course of a life that was in some respects similar to that of other Asian Communist leaders. He came from a prosperous peasant background (like several other Communist bosses in the developing world); he went abroad as a student, where he encountered Communism, and then returned to a land beset by anti-colonial and post-colonial guerrilla wars. But his outlook was also forged by the peculiar ethnic and social hierarchies of his home-land. Cambodia was a particularly agrarian part of the French Indochinese empire, and the native Buddhist Khmers were largely peasants. The French saw the Khmers as less developed than the Confucian Vietnamese, who filled many of the administrative posts in the country, and Cambodian nationalists became increasingly resentful of their lowly status amongst the dominant Vietnamese and Chinese. As a child in the 1930s, Pol Pot himself had close connections with the more traditional aspects of Cambodian culture: he spent some months as a novice in a Buddhist monastery, where he was given a highly disciplinarian and traditional education. His family also had links with the royal household: Pol’s cousin Meak was a member of the royal ballet and became the King’s consort, and Pol himself spent some time in the palace. We do not know what he thought of the court at the time, but his later denunciations of the monarchy and its decadence became very harsh.
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And if he was not aware of it before, he would have understood Cambodians’ place in the ethnic pecking order when he went to a French school in Phnom Penh, a city dominated by French, Vietnamese and Chinese. All this may be one reason why he came to believe that Cambodia’s status could only be raised by eliminating its traditional culture.

Pol Pot reached adulthood at a time of nationalist ferment, when the French had reimposed control after World War II but tolerated a constitutional monarchy under Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Even though he was a mediocre student, Pol managed to secure a scholarship in 1949 to study in France at the Radio-Electricity Institute in Paris, but he had little interest in the subject. Much more compelling to him were French history and nationalist politics, and Rousseau was one of his favourite authors. However, at a time when the Communist party had so much influence in France, it was no surprise that he should move into the Communist orbit.

Pol attended Marxist discussion groups, and became a member of the French Communist Party. A contemporary recalls that he had a particular admiration for Stalin’s idea of the secretive, vanguard party, and for Stalin himself; indeed he hung a portrait on his wall.
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When he returned to Cambodia at the beginning of 1953, the Vietnamese Communists had extended the anti-French guerrilla struggle across the border, and controlled about a sixth of Cambodian territory. Pol joined the Indochinese Communist Party, founded by the Vietnamese, and joined a guerrilla band for a time, although he probably did not actually fight. Shortly after the French granted independence to Cambodia later that year, he returned to Phnom Penh and became a secret Communist activist whilst working as a teacher. He was popular, and one of his students remembers his mild and personable style: