Pol Pot (28 page)

was also closed. The pretext was that it had reprinted an eighteenth-century Khmer poem which urged court functionaries not to mistreat people.

So ended the communists’ first and last attempt to operate legally in Sihanouk’s Cambodia. On the Prince’s instructions, the Military Tribunal condemned Non Suon and his companions to death. No Pracheachon candidate stood in the 1962 elections and to all intents and purposes the group ceased to exist. But there was still a left-wing presence in parliament. Bluff, outspoken Hou Yuon and Hu Nim, the former Treasury Director,

both won re-election and Khieu Samphân became an MP for the first time and soon afterwards a cabinet minister.

In July 1962 the Left suffered another body-blow when the Communist Party Secretary, Tou Samouth, was arrested and killed. He had been living, disguised as a labourer, in the southern part of Phnom Penh. One day he left home to buy medicine at the market for his sick child. The security police were waiting. They allegedly took him to a house belonging to the Defence Minister, Lon Nol, where he was tortured but refused to talk; then he was killed and buried on a piece of wasteland in the Stung Meancheay district of the city.

It was never convincingly established

who betrayed

Samouth. But it was a setback to the Party’s urban networks scarcely less damaging than Sieu Heng’s defection had been to its rural organisations.

It also opened the way for Saloth Sâr to become Party leader.

Here, too, fate played its part. Normally Nuon Chea, as Tou Samouth’s deputy, should have become acting Secretary. But a year earlier Nuon had fallen under a cloud. The Vietnamese communists’ Work Committee in Phnom Penh, headed by Hay So, had given him a substantial sum of money — 10,000 Vietnamese dong — to purchase a house. The transaction, which was supposed to be secret, had been approved by Hay So’s deputy. But word leaked out and rumours started circulating that Nuon had obtained the money improperly. There was muttering about his loyalty, and the fact that he was related by marriage to the defector Sieu Heng. According to the Vietnamese, who worked with him closely at this time, he became depressed and for much of the next year, withdrew from Party work. Sâr, as the third-ranking member of the leadership, became Samouth’s

deputy. As a result, when Samouth disappeared, Sâr, rather than Nuon, became acting leader in his place.

Samouth’s murder raised the question of whether the leadership should leave the capital for the safety of the countryside.

Sâr argued

against it. An election would have to be held to elect a new Party leader, and he was well aware that his chances of success in Phnom Penh were far better than in an unfamiliar rural area, where the influence of resistance veterans like So Phim was preponderant.

Over the next six months, the situation appeared to stabilise, and in February 1963, while Sihanouk was on a visit to China, it was announced that the sentences on Non Suon and his companions had been commuted to life imprisonment. At the end of that month, the Party convened its Second Congress.

The meeting

was held in the apartment of a Sino-Khmer sympathiser, in the centre of Phnom Penh just west of the Central Market, and lasted a single

day.

*

According to Ieng Sary, only seventeen or eighteen people attended, fewer than in 1960. Sâr was elected Secretary of a new four-man Standing Committee; Nuon Chea remained Deputy Secretary; and Sary and So Phim became full members.

Four new

Central Committee members were also appointed: Mok, a former monk from Takeo, who had become Mang’s deputy in the South-West; Ruos Nhim from the North-West; Vorn Vet from Phnom Penh; and Son Sen. Keo Meas and the mysterious ‘Ray Thorn’ (almost certainly Non Suon) were dropped. The Party’s name was changed — it now became the Kampuchean

Workers’ Party

, which put it on the same level as the Workers’ Party in Vietnam — and its programme was modified to pay lip-service (in Cambodian conditions it could hardly have been more than that) to the November 1960 Moscow Declaration, which reaffirmed the validity of the parliamentary road to socialism.

The Congress was held not a moment too soon.

Throughout the winter of 1962, student agitation had been growing. In February, a banal protest over the right of schoolchildren to cycle along footpaths in Siem Reap degenerated into rioting after it was learnt that one young demonstrator had died in police custody. Two officers were beaten to death in revenge. Faced with the fury of the mob, the police and provincial militia fled and took refuge in the forest. For three days, from February 24 to 26, Siem Reap was in the hands of the students. Police headquarters were ransacked, filing cabinets emptied and their contents burned. Next day the Minister of Education arrived to negotiate with student leaders. He and his officials were taken hostage and paraded through the streets before a jeering crowd.

When Sihanouk returned from Beijing on March 1, he was beside himself with rage. Over the next forty-eight hours he publicly berated the Prime Minister, Prince Kantol, for incompetence, dismissed the government, announced the dissolution of the Sangkum and of parliament and ordered new elections. He then asked Keng Vannsak, at the time Dean of the Literature Faculty of Phnom Penh University — who had visited Siem Reap shortly before the rioting occurred and whom he suspected of fomenting the unrest there — to become Prime Minister. Vannsak politely declined. In a show of force, troops were sent to occupy the radio station and other key installations.

Two days later, on March 4, with political tensions at their peak, Sihanouk published a list of thirty-four known and suspected leftists drawn

up by the security police,

*

and after treating them as ‘cowards, hypocrites, saboteurs, subversive agents and traitors’, demanded that they form a new government (reserving for himself, however, the right to name the Police, Interior and Defence ministers), ‘in order to show the country what they are capable of. On March 7, he summoned the entire group to a meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office, where each of those present was asked to put in writing whether or not he agreed to form a government. To no one’s surprise, they all wrote that Sihanouk himself was the only man capable of guiding the country forward.

Two of the thirty-four failed to appear. Chou Chet, who had been released from prison three weeks earlier, had already left for the maquis. Saloth Sâr went into hiding as soon as the list was published.

By mid-March, the storm had passed and Sihanouk’s imprecations against parliament, the government and the Sangkum were quietly forgotten. It was, one Western Ambassador grumbled, ‘a crisis Cambodia could have done without’. Yet there was method in the Prince’s madness. After spending three weeks in China, singing the praises of a foreign communist state, he had given Cambodians a trenchant reminder that communism had no place in his own kingdom. From now on, each new opening to communism abroad would be matched by increased repression at home. The

thirty-four named leftists

found police guards posted outside their houses. The schools where many of them taught, Chamraon Vichea, Kampuj’bot and Sotoân Prychea In, were placed under surveillance, and several left-wing newspaper editors imprisoned for ‘causing trouble and disorder’.

The clamp-down on the communists that spring was the signal for the withdrawal to the countryside that had been in the air since 1960. To Sâr, with the leadership election over, there was no longer any reason to delay. For the first time in his political career, the veil of anonymity that cloaked his activities had been rent, leaving him suddenly exposed. It was not an experience he enjoyed.

Ieng Sary

took a different view. He claimed later to have argued that the possibilities for legal and semi-legal activities were not yet exhausted and that to abandon Phnom Penh was premature, but Nuon Chea — whose name had not appeared among the thirty-four, and whose cover was apparently

intact — had insisted that those in the Party leadership whose identities had become known should not continue clandestine work lest they inadvertently expose others. Moreover, he told Sary, a spell in the maquis would help to get rid of his ‘petty bourgeois Parisian attitudes’ and develop a ‘proletarian spirit’. Reluctantly, Sary acquiesced.

Sâr set out first, on March 31, with a guide provided by Hay So’s successor, a South Vietnamese communist named Sau Kouy. Two weeks later, on April 13, Sary followed. He left Phnom Penh at ten o’clock at night, he recalled, hidden under sacks of charcoal in the back of an ancient lorry. ‘Every time we stopped at a checkpoint, the driver got out and gave the soldiers money to let us through without a search. For once I was glad Cambodia was corrupt.’ Next day they arrived at the commune of Snuol, on the border of Kratie and Kompong Cham. From there, he walked for a day through the jungle to an encampment of the South Vietnamese communists, the Viet Cong, concealed in thick forest just across the Cambodian border. Son Sen followed the same route a day later.

The communist leaders were rational men. The decision to re-base in the countryside marked the same kind of tactical retreat that the Chinese Politburo had made in abandoning Shanghai in 1933 and the Vietnamese when they left Hanoi in 1946.

But Sâr and his companions were not Chinese or Vietnamese, they were Khmer. Just as Sihanouk always consulted an

oracle

before taking any grave decision, and Cambodia’s agricultural plan was determined, with all the seriousness in the world, on the basis of such astrological portents as the

royal oxen’s

choice of grains after the ploughing of the sacred furrow, so too the Cambodian communists inhabited a mental realm in which the irrational had an accepted place. Outwardly the Cambodian revolution was returning to its roots, to the maquis where the Issarak had fought. Psychologically the transition was more complex. In Khmer thought, the fundamental dichotomy is not between good and evil, as it is in Judaeo-Christian societies, but between

and

village and forest. Subconsciously the centre of gravity of the revolution had shifted from the civilised regions, the towns and settlements, where man dominated nature, to the jungles, the wild places, where dark, unknown forces roamed and, throughout the centuries, sages — the Khmer Daeum of Cambodian antiquity — had repaired to seek spiritual power.

LIFE AT THE

Vietnamese base was dire. Ieng Sary said later that Sâr had sent him a

message

a few days after arriving to tell him not to come, but the letter never reached him. The camp itself was

spartan

: a few peasant huts scattered in the forest, backed up by a system of tunnels and bunkers. It was close to the headquarters of the South Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) in the village of Ta Not, though Sâr and his colleagues were probably at first unaware of the NLF base’s presence. Sunlight could not penetrate the jungle canopy, and Sary remembered that their faces took on a waxy pallor, ‘a jaundiced, sickly look’. Truong Nhu Tang, afterwards Justice Minister in the South Vietnamese Provisional Revolutionary Government, spent several years working in the area:

We lived like hunted animals . . . [Each of us had] two pairs of black trousers and shirts, a couple of pairs of underpants, a mosquito net and a few square yards of light nylon (handy as a raincoat or roof) . . . The rice ration for both leaders and fighters was 20 kilos a month . . . a nutritional intake which left us all in a state of semi-starvation . . . Food was a continual pre-occupation; the lack of protein especially drove us to frenzied efforts at farming or hunting whenever it was feasible . . . I will always remember one chicken feast, where we shared out a single bird among almost 30 of us . . . I think I have never eaten anything quite so delicious . . . Elephants, tigers, wild dogs, monkeys — none of these were strangers to our cookpots . . . Another dietary supplement which I eventually learned to eat was . . . jungle moth . . . With the wings off and barbecued quickly over a flame it wasn’t exactly a tasty morsel, but it wasn’t that bad either . . . But [nothing] alleviated the chronic malnutrition or the tropical diseases that battened on the weakened men.

For the Khmers, these discomforts, which Sâr had already experienced, albeit in milder form, at the old Khmer Viet Minh base at Krâbao, just across the border three or four miles away, were compounded by physical and mental isolation.

For the first few weeks there were only three of them — Sâr, Ieng Sary and Son Sen. As at Krâbao, nine years earlier, they were advised not to leave the camp or to have any contact with nearby Khmer villages. The South

Vietnamese air force was already carrying out bombing raids along the border, and if the base’s location had become known, not only the Khmer encampment but the much more important NLF headquarters would have risked attack. None the less, it was galling. Sâr and his colleagues were no longer naïve young students but the leaders of a national communist party which, in theory, at least, was the equal of Vietnam’s. At Ta Not, they felt treated as outcasts. They could listen to the radio and once a week they had a meeting with their Viet Cong ‘hosts’, who briefed them on current events. That was it.

As the government crackdown in Phnom Penh intensified, the size of the Khmer contingent gradually increased. Keo Meas and his family, who had been in hiding in the Eastern Zone, arrived during the summer. A courier office was established in a Cambodian village about four hours’ walk from the base, enabling Sâr to send out messengers independent of the Vietnamese. But by the end of the year, there were still only six or seven of them. It was a strange, artificial existence, like being inside a pressure cooker. There were explosions over trivial incidents. Keo Meas, in particular, felt excluded by the others, who had been together in Paris. In reality all of them were in limbo.