Pol Pot (121 page)

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In the case of the visit to Sisophon by the Thai Foreign Minister, Chatichai Choonhavan, in November 1975, this was literally true. Pol personally inspected the bedroom slippers, soap and bath-towels sent from Phnom Penh for the occasion. Hun Sen, who eventually succeeded him as Cambodian Prime Minister, showed the same tendency to concentrate all power in his own hands. In the 1990s, speeches by Chea Sim — then the second most powerful man in the kingdom — were vetted and where necessary corrected in Hun Sen’s own hand before they were delivered.

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Koy Thuon’s removal from the position of Northern Zone Secretary in May 1975 and his appointment as Commerce Minister, a less powerful post, suggests that Pol already distrusted him. His philandering may have been one reason; he may also have been blamed for the debacle in Kompong Thom in 1974, when 40,000 ‘base people’ fled the ‘liberated areas’ to take refuge with Lon Nol’s forces. In later years it became the rule that whenever a provincial official was suspected of disloyalty, Pol’s first step was to detach him from his local power base and bring him to Phnom Penh to work in one of the ministries.

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The persistence of Vietnamese feeling over this issue was shown a few years later, when one of Hanoi’s first moves, once it had installed a more accommodating Cambodian government, was to change the date of the Party’s foundation back to 1951.

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One aspect of this Byzantine affair remains to be elucidated. In late September or early October, the journal

published an article marking the anniversary which — in violation of the Standing Committee decision in March — took 1951 as the year of the Party’s foundation. Shortly afterwards

appeared, containing a text of Pol’s speech at the October 11 meeting, in which he not only affirmed 1960 as the Party’s birth date, but explained: ‘We must arrange the history of the Party into something clean and perfect in accordance with our stance of independence-mastery.’ The conventional explanation that the discrepancy reflected a power struggle between Pol and Keo Meas is plainly wrong. As we now know, Pol had complete control over the content of both journals, and neither Keo Meas (who had been under surveillance ever since his return from Hanoi, fifteen months earlier) nor anyone else could have used them to criticise his leadership.

With hindsight there seem two possibilities. Either it was a simple mistake: the staff of

unaware of the change of date, prepared a routine article on the anniversary which Pol or Nuon Chea approved unread. Or it was a deliberate attempt to persuade the Vietnamese, who had access to

but not to the restricted ‘Five Flags’ edition of

that it was business as usual in Phnom Penh.

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There is a crucial distinction between ‘strings’ and factions. Even in orthodox Marxist-Leninist parties, true factional activity is relatively rare. The 1957 ‘anti-Party Group’ in the Soviet Union and the ‘Gang of Four’ in China are exceptions that prove the rule. From the 1930s, in Stalin’s case, and the 1940s, in Mao’s, no serious factional challenge was ever mounted to their power. To both men, ‘factionalism’ was a convenient label to damn those of their followers whose devotion appeared to be flagging. In Democratic Kampuchea, Pol never used even the label, and though sometimes he sought to portray purge victims as having engaged in factional activity, in reality Cambodian communist politics was played out on feudal lines. Individual leaders attracted retinues of followers and jockeyed for personal advantage, but they did not join together to form cliques. It was each man for himself, which made Pol’s task far easier.

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It has often been claimed, on the basis of statements by both Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge sources, that So Phim attempted to rebel against Pol Pot with Vietnam’s support and that it was the failure of his efforts which finally persuaded Hanoi that only a full-scale Vietnamese invasion would bring down the regime. There is no evidence for this. Phim, like Ruos Nhim, may have had reservations about Pol’s domestic policies. He may also have doubted the wisdom of an aggressive military posture against Vietnam. But he was no more pro-Vietnamese than Pol himself. Vietnam’s lack of contact with Phim — and, at that time, with other Eastern Zone cadres — is amply demonstrated by the fact that, four months after his suicide, the Vietnamese leaders believed he was still alive.

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Pich Chheang and his wife, Moeun, were unable to remember when the visit took place and the Chinese archives on the subject are sealed. The evidence for a late September dating is that the anniversary of the founding of the CPK appears to have been celebrated ten days earlier than usual, on September 19, yet when Pol’s speech was broadcast, more than a week later, Radio Phnom Penh claimed that he had spoken on September 27. According to Pich Chheang, Pol’s visit lasted about a week and was spent mainly in talks with Deng, who by this time, in fact if not yet in name, had eclipsed Hua Guofeng as China’s paramount leader.

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Ieng Sary was more deeply implicated in the events in New York than the Chinese realised. Sihanouk wrote later that the final straw which made him defect was a message from Beijing, shortly after his speech to the Security Council, advising him that Sary would lead the Cambodian Delegation to the UN General Assembly and proposing that he stay on as his deputy. Sihanouk by this stage loathed Sary with a consuming, visceral hatred. That such an ‘execrated, despised individual’ should try to take precedence over him, Sihanouk wrote, was ‘an offence which my dignity could not tolerate’. It was exactly the same kind of problem that had triggered Sihanouk’s resignation as Khmer Rouge Head of State almost three years earlier. Then, too, Sary had been responsible.

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More importantly in the long term, it strengthened Deng’s hand in his struggle for power with Hua and other leaders who wanted to stick more closely to Mao’s ideological legacy. The unsatisfactory performance of the Chinese army, which suffered 20,000 dead and wounded, enabled him to remove hundreds of leftist officers and to undertake the first fundamental reform of military policy since the 1940s.

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication Page

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Note on Pronunciation

Map

Acknowledgements

Prologue

1 Sâr

2 City of Light

3 Initiation to the Maquis

4 Cambodian Realities

5 Germinal

6 The Sudden Death of Reason

7 Fires of Purgation

8 Men in Black

9 Future Perfect

10 Model for the World

11 Stalin’s Microbes

12 Utopia Disbound

Afterword

Dramatis Personae

Notes and Sources

Index

Footnotes

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