Pol Pot (22 page)

The Democrats could find no adequate response to this policy. On the one hand, the left wing of the party would have liked, as Sâr had suggested, to take a stronger anti-American line. But Son Ngoc Thanh and his supporters were pro-American. Moreover, the US administration was sympathetic to the Democrats’ republican aims. The result was a flawed compromise: American imperialism was held to be bad, American democracy, good.

Similar confusion reigned in the party’s domestic programme. Vannsak and his colleagues could denounce the royal government’s corruption and insinuate that the palace was a wellspring of venality. But open opposition to the Throne was impossible because the law forbade it. The best they could do was to plead for a constitutional monarchy and, by means of Buddhist allegories, to trash Sihanouk’s image as a providential figure guiding the country’s destiny.

Despite their incoherence, the Democrats remained the favourites to sweep the board at the elections. In February 1955, Sihanouk called a referendum on the pretext of seeking approval of his ‘Royal Crusade’. It was intended to provide a springboard to kick off his campaign, and it was shamelessly cooked. Voters were told: ‘If you love the King, [choose a] white ballot. If you don’t love the King, a black ballot.’ Of those voting, 99.8 per cent chose white ballots. But the turnout was disappointingly low. At the end of that month, when the Democrats held a weekend rally in a Buddhist

in southern Phnom Penh, Sihanouk went secretly to a nearby villa to listen to the proceedings, which were carried over loudspeakers. On hearing the enthusiastic reception accorded to the speakers, he wept with rage.

Three days later, on Wednesday, March 21955, Radio Phnom Penh broadcast a statement which the King had recorded on a dictaphone that morning. Not even his parents had been told what he was to say. It was the announcement of his

abdication

:

My enemies work against Me ceaselessly . . . Certain of our students, who love injustice . . . are determined to serve the Democrats and Son Ngoc Thanh . . . The educated, the highly-placed and the rich . . . spend their time throwing up obstacles [to My work] for the sake of their own interests and ambitions. All this has completely discouraged Me and prevents Me continuing to reign . . . If I remain on the Throne, I will be unable to work in your interests, My poor and humble subjects . . . Freed from My golden cage in the Royal Palace, I offer My life and My strength to My people . . . For though I leave the Throne, I shall not shirk My duty to serve.

In the words of an official chronicler, ‘tears flowed from people’s eyes . . . and their hearts refused to believe’. But Sihanouk was unmoved. Two days later his father, Suramarit, was enthroned in his place. Freed from the constraints of kingship, Sihanouk could throw himself into the political arena and fight for power like anyone else — except that, unlike his opponents, he retained what one observer called ‘a quasi-mystical eminence that transcends polities’, which made it, in this respect at least, a rather one-sided contest.

It was, as Keng Vannsak acknowledged, a stroke of genius.

The elections, due in April, were postponed until the autumn to give Sihanouk time to organise a new political formation, the Sangkum Reastr Niyum, which meant literally the ‘People’s Community’, though by homonymy it also implied ‘Socialist’, a deliberate play on words to undercut his left-wing rivals. Conservative politicians from Lon Nol to Dap Chhuon dissolved their own political parties and flocked to the Prince’s standard. So did some of the older Democrats, like the Economics Minister, Son Sann, and Sim Var, who had worked on

in the 1930s. But the mainstream of the Democratic Party held firm, as did its base of support — the civil servants, Buddhist monks, teachers and secondary-school students. The Sangkum had no policies other than supporting Sihanouk and projected no clear image. To its opponents it was a dog’s breakfast of a party, made up of’ideological bric-à-brac’. For all the Prince’s efforts, the Sangkum, in the judgement of the French Ambassador, Pierre Gorce, was ‘by no means assured of success’.

Sihanouk himself evidently reached the same conclusion. Around the end of July, he asked the Indian charge d’affaires, Sir Dhirendra Mitra, to sound out Keng Vannsak on the possibility of the Democrats and the Sangkum joining together to form a government of national union. Vannsak convened his Executive Committee, which saw the offer as a sign of weakness and rejected it, confident in its own strength.

That decision marked a turning point.

Since the spring, the police had been putting pressure on the anti-Sangkum parties, harassing their candidates and threatening their supporters.

Already in June, the

newspaper had been banned and its editor, Chi Kim An, jailed for three months for

è

An arrest warrant was issued for Sâr’s brother, Saloth Chhay, who was editing another left-wing journal,

He took refuge with their sibling, Suong, whose status as a palace official meant that the police were unable to intervene. But after a week-long stand-off King Suramarit ruled that Chhay must give himself up.

Five weeks before the vote, massive intimidation began. Keng Vannsak recalled:

The

evil genius

behind the repression was Sam Sary — a bestial man. As an investigating magistrate in the 1940s, he had beaten suspects to death with his own hands. Then he went to study in France. In 1955, he joined the Sangkum and became Sihanouk’s closest aide . . . After Sihanouk decided to use strong-arm tactics, Sary handed out money and arms to hired ruffians to come and break up our meetings . . . Kou Roun, who was then police chief, sent men with gongs and drums, mounted on bicycle carts, to drown out the speeches . . . We could do nothing. It was a provocation. If we’d reacted, the police would have had an excuse to intervene and we’d have fallen into the trap.

The Pracheachon suffered even more severely. In the provinces, several of its candidates were shot dead by unknown assailants, and more than twenty others were arrested. When polling day finally arrived, it was able to field candidates in only thirty-five of the ninety-one constituencies.

The Democrats maintained their full list, which included Mey Mann and Ping Sây, both of whom had been party activists in the 1940s, and two other former members of the Cercle Marxiste, Toch Phoeun and Mey Phat. But at the height of the campaign Thiounn Mumm disappeared. It later transpired that his mother, warned privately by the Queen to get her son out of harm’s way, had bundled him on to a plane to Paris. On the eve of polling day, Sunday September 10, Keng Vannsak was arrested after a bystander was shot dead at one of his rallies. The gunman accused the Democratic Party leader of having hired him to assassinate a right-wing opponent. In court, the man retracted. Vannsak remained in prison. A month later he sent a grovelling letter to Sihanouk, promising never again to engage in politics, which secured his immediate release and the dropping of all charges.

When the results of the voting were announced, the Sangkum had swept the field. Not one Democrat or Pracheachon candidate had been elected.

The outcome was not due solely to electoral fraud. Sihanouk was

revered in the countryside. But intimidation was the key. ‘The Cambodians are not brave when faced by firmness on the part of the authorities,’ the British charge d’affaires noted. Vannsak was blunter: ‘The Khmers have been

slaves for centuries

. In the face of authority, they bow down. Those who use violence know that — they know how the people react.’

Most left-wing voters stayed at home. If they did pluck up the courage to go to the polling stations, the conditions they found there were such as to discourage the boldest among them. First they had to run a gauntlet of police and soldiers. Then they were handed coloured voting slips, representing the different parties, one of which had to be placed in an urn under the watchful gaze of local officials. If that were not enough, the count was falsified. ‘The heads of the voting stations were all the Prince’s people,’

Sâr recalled

. ‘So they put all the votes indiscriminately as being for the Sangkum.’ In some constituencies, when it was found that Sihanouk’s candidate had finished second, the voting slips were destroyed and the winner murdered. Officials in an electoral district of eastern Cambodia, known for years as a Viet Minh stronghold, solemnly reported that the Pracheachon candidate did not receive a single vote. Even with such flagrant gerrymandering, three Pracheachon candidates were reported to have won more than a third of the vote in their respective constituencies, and in the four southern provinces of Kampot, Takeo, Prey Veng and Svay Rieng, the group averaged 16 per cent. In an incautious moment two years later, Sihanouk acknowledged that in fact thirty-six electoral districts had voted ‘red or pink’, in other words, Pracheachon or Democrat, in 1955. Officially, at the time, none was admitted to have done so. The Democrats were said to have obtained 12 par cent of the vote nationally, the Pracheachon, 4 per cent.

In a fair fight, the two left-wing parties might well have gained enough seats to form a government. At the very least, the Sangkum would have faced substantial parliamentary opposition. Instead Cambodia became, in every material respect, a single-party state, led by a narcissistic, whimsical, charming and utterly ruthless autocrat who was beholden to no one but himself. When a French correspondent suggested that there might be ‘reservations about certain aspects of the voting’, the International Control Commission promptly ruled that it had been ‘correct’ and foreign embassies in Phnom Penh, led by the French and the Americans, conscientiously closing their eyes to the irregularities, vied with each other in heaping praise on the ex-King for his electoral triumph.

The blatant manipulation of the polls, following Sihanouk’s

against the Democrats three years earlier, extinguished any hope that the

Left might take power by parliamentary means.

‘Taking part in elections

is just for propaganda,’ Sâr concluded. ‘An election is a power struggle. The one who has power in his hands is the one who controls the outcome.’

Over the next few months, many Democratic Party leaders either abandoned politics altogether — like Keng Vannsak and Thiounn Mumm — or joined the Sangkum. The Cambodian communists hesitated. Logically, in such circumstances, the next step for a revolutionary party would have been to renew the armed struggle. But in Cambodia, the movement was too weak and its Vietnamese allies too preoccupied with their own domestic concerns for that to be an option. As long as the Pracheachon and the Democrats had a chance of forming a government, the Vietnamese had supported them. But once Sihanouk emerged victorious and it became clear that he was the man they would have to deal with, the pragmatists in Hanoi changed tack.

Even before the elections, the Viet Minh had treated Cambodia with kid gloves. Since the Geneva accords, far fewer communist-provoked incidents had been reported there than in Laos or South Vietnam. The French concluded that there was more to this than met the eye. An informer had told the SDECE, the French counterpart of the CIA and MI6, that the godfather of Cambodian communism, Nguyen Thanh Son, had reached a secret agreement with Sihanouk at the time of the Viet Minh withdrawal, under which limited numbers of Viet Minh cadres would be allowed to operate clandestinely in certain parts of Cambodia, notably the border regions, to promote the struggle in South Vietnam, in return for assurances that the Vietnamese communists would not interfere in Cambodia’s internal affairs.

The agreement, detailed in an intelligence report dated September 16 1954, has never been officially confirmed. But for the next sixteen years, the trade-off it described was followed to the letter.

By the time of the elections, moreover, Sihanouk’s regime looked much more attractive to the communist powers of Asia than had been the case a year before. In contrast to US client states like Thailand and the Philippines, Cambodia had refused to join Washington’s military arm in the region, the South-East Asian Treaty Organization, SEATO. That spring, at a summit in Bandung, Sihanouk had become one of the five founder members of the Non-Aligned Movement, along with Zhou Enlai, Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, Indonesia’s President Sukarno and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Vietnamese soon concluded that they had everything to lose and nothing to gain by undermining his regime. On that basis, towards the end of 1955, they issued

new instructions

to the Khmer Party:

The goal is to . . . cooperate with and to support Sihanouk’s government, which is following a policy of peace and neutrality, and to struggle to push it still farther down that road in order to strengthen and develop national independence. At the same time the [Cambodian Party] should fight against the meddling of American imperialism and its invasion [of the region]; and it must struggle to eliminate or correct the negative aspects of the [Sihanouk] government which run counter to the people’s interests.

The directive reiterated that armed struggle was over. In its place the Cambodians should carry out ‘political struggle, accompanied by other forms of legal, semi-legal, illegal, overt, semi-overt and secret struggle’.

It was hardly the kind of programme to mobilise enthusiasm for revolutionary change. Apart from opposition to the US, it offered no clear policy direction. It was ambiguous and difficult to grasp; and it unashamedly sacrificed the Cambodian Party’s interests to those of Vietnam. None the less, this was the policy the Khmer communists were stuck with for the next ten years. Neither their leaders nor, still less, Sâr and the returned students, had any say in the matter.