Pol Pot (44 page)

There, in May 1972, Pol summoned another meeting of the Central Committee, at which he spoke of his impressions during his journey and the conclusions he had drawn.

The burden

of his message was that the revolution was going too slowly. The decision adopted at the Third Congress, nine months before, to ‘start sweeping away the socio-cultural traits of the old regime . . . the traits of feudalism, reaction and imperialism’, had remained a dead letter, he said. At his urging, the Committee issued an ‘urgent directive’ calling on the Party to strengthen its ‘proletarian stance’ and to intensify the struggle against ‘the various oppressive classes . . . [who] want to conserve their rights under our new regime’. The participants also approved plans for the collectivisation of agriculture and the suppression of private trade as soon as the situation permitted.

It was a turning point.

The Khmer Rouge army by then numbered 35,000 men, backed by an estimated 100,000 guerrillas, more than enough to hold their own against Lon Nol’s increasingly demoralised troops even if the Vietnamese did one day withdraw. They had sufficient weaponry. The five million dollars in cash which China provided each year for buying arms from government forces was supplemented by income from sales of rubber produced at the former French-owned plantations in the Eastern Zone, now under communist control — which was exported with the connivance of corrupt officials in Phnom Penh. At the same time, Chinese weaponry flowed

down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, enlarged a year earlier by Chinese engineering teams and equipped with a flexible petroleum pipeline which reached as far south as the Laotian border. Throughout the ‘liberated zones’, a stable administration was in place. A third of the population, more than two million people, was living under communist control.

The time had come to move on to the next stage. The social revolution was about to begin.

For the first two

years after Sihanouk’s overthrow, Khmer Rouge policy in the countryside had been remarkable mainly for its moderation. Within weeks of the coup, district-level CPK cadres, presenting themselves not as communists but as representatives of the FUNK, and often, in the Eastern Zone, accompanied by Vietnamese, began organising commune and village-level elections throughout the ‘liberated areas’. All the candidates were local peasants, most supported the FUNK because they wanted Sihanouk to return, and, with rare exceptions, none had any connection with the Communist Party.

In one sense this was making a virtue out of necessity. The CPK barely had enough cadres to head the district administrations, let alone appoint them to commune — and village-level posts. Accordingly, the

continued to function normally; religious festivals and holy days were observed as before; families continued to farm individually and to buy and sell at local markets. In some areas, the peasants were encouraged to form small-scale credit co-operatives and mutual aid teams at harvest time. One or two evenings a month, a village assembly was held, with much singing of revolutionary songs and exhortations to support the resistance.

But if expediency played a part — the Khmers Rouges went easy on the villagers because the only way to win support was to improve their lives — there was also a powerful streak of idealism, a desire to ‘be together with the people and serve the people’, comparable to the early days of the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions. ‘The [Khmers Rouges] would sometimes

pick fruit

,’ a government official in Siem Reap recalled, ‘then they would leave payment at the foot of the tree. The local [people] would think they were very fair.’ Ith Sarin, a Khmer Rouge defector with every reason to show his former comrades in an unflattering light, reported that in the Special Zone:

If a peasant

is sick, the Khmer Rouge will often go to the house to give an injection or leave medicine, even at night or during a storm. In ploughing, transplanting, harvesting or threshing seasons, each office will send out its cadres to help . . . These kinds of psychological activities were really successful and deeply affected the people . . . The farming people of the base areas who knew nothing of socialist revolution quickly began to support Angkar because of its sentiments of openness and friendliness.

Certainly the new system was more puritanical than Cambodians were used to. Extramarital affairs were frowned on, gambling was banned and alcohol discouraged. But, at the same time, theft was stamped out and corruption, the besetting sin of government in the past, even at village level, was virtually eliminated.

For those who were prepared to co-operate, the regime was comparatively benign. Probably the most galling restriction was on individual movements: a peasant who wished to travel outside his commune had to obtain an official pass. But that was presented as a matter of wartime security.

For those perceived to be hostile it was a different story.

Opposing

the revolution, whether in word or deed, usually meant death. In most cases, the offender was summoned to the district headquarters and never returned. Less commonly, exemplary punishment was meted out. In the autumn of 1970, a village whose inhabitants had rebelled and killed three district cadres was encircled by Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge soldiers, and the families of the three alleged ringleaders, twenty-four people in all, including children and infants, were publicly beaten to death. A year later,

mass graves

containing more than 180 bodies were found near Kompong Thom. But these were the

exceptions

. Until the end of 1971, Khmer Rouge jails held few prisoners, and in the villages arrests of suspected spies and ‘enemies’ were still a rarity. Even the US Defense Intelligence Agency acknowledged that ‘On the whole [Khmer communist cadres] have attempted to avoid acts which might alienate the population, and the behaviour of Vietnamese communist soldiers has generally been exemplary . . .’

After the Central Committee meeting in May 1972, all that began to change.

That spring, Cham Muslims in Vorn Vet’s Special Zone were ordered to stop wearing Islamic dress — colourful clothing for women and white tunics with baggy cotton trousers for men — and to adopt the same black peasant garb as the poorest Khmer villagers. Upswept hairstyles and the wearing of jewellery, characteristic of Cham women, were also forbidden. The Chams were singled out because they are culturally distinct: they live together in their own villages; they have their own mosques; they marry among themselves and they keep to their own ways. But the primary motivation was not racist. Soon afterwards similar prohibitions were extended to the population as a whole. The Chams were merely the earliest victims of a general policy aimed at the cultural, social and economic levelling of all Cambodians, regardless of race or creed.

By the summer the same principle was applied to land ownership and certain private possessions. Richer peasants were divested of part of their

land-holdings, which were given to poorer families, so that, by the end of the year, each family had exactly the same acreage. In some provinces, like Kampot, the quota was set at five hectares; in others, where population pressure was greater, it might be as little as one hectare. Unlike the land reform in China, which was based on the number of mouths to feed, in Cambodia the benchmark was uniformity. In any given village, each family was treated identically. At the same time the revolutionary administration requisitioned or taxed out of existence all private motor transport.

The result, and the intention, was that no one had anything different from anyone else.

The poorest and lower-middle peasants, whom the CPK regarded as the strongest supporters of the regime, did well out of these arrangements. They had no motor-cycles to lose and they were given extra land. But even for richer families, the reform was relatively mild. Everyone continued to farm individually, or at most in mutual-aid groups of four or five families; they grew enough to feed themselves; they retained ownership of livestock and poultry, and while restrictions were imposed on the slaughter of cattle, other animals could be killed and sold at market. Co-operative stores were set up to sell household necessities, including cloth, kerosene and medicines, imported from Vietnam, thereby eliminating the Sino-Khmer merchants who had kept a stranglehold on village commerce. In some areas, pressure was put on wealthy families to sell their household furniture, another mark of difference, for poor peasants possessed no furniture and slept on a mat on the floor. Ostentatious weddings, traditionally an occasion for finery, expensive gifts and extravagance even in the poorest communities, were at first discouraged and then stopped altogether, on the grounds that all energies should be devoted to the war and young people who wished to marry should wait until it ended. The sale of bottled beer and cigarettes, previously smuggled into the countryside from Phnom Penh, was likewise halted because only the richer peasants could afford them. After 1972 only locally made palm wine and roll-your-own tobacco were available.

None the less, a schoolteacher who left the Special Zone in January 1973 and defected to the government — therefore in principle not a sympathetic witness — felt able to write that ‘the local people [see] they have a fairly easy life and no one is oppressing them . . . They are grateful, they are happy, they are enjoying themselves.’ That may have been a partial view, based on experience in a single area. However, it is clear that in much of the countryside, the new regime won acceptance with little difficulty, for the good and simple reason that, for the poorer peasants, who made up half the rural population, the first years of Khmer Rouge rule were better than what had gone before and for most of the other half not markedly worse.

What would have been, and later was, a hell on earth for town-dwellers was not a huge change for those who had always lived that way In the 1970s, large parts of the Cambodian countryside remained mired in autarchic poverty beyond the imagining of the educated elite. The American historian Michael Vickery recalled visiting an area in the north-west near the Angkorian site of Banteay Chhmar, where, along the roadside, ‘

wild-looking boys

[were] carrying [home for supper] dead lizards strung on sticks like freshly caught fish . . . The people seemed strangely hostile [and] . . . we heard mutterings that they did not like city people, because their arrival usually meant trouble.’ The villagers ate forest tubers; there was no rice because of a three-year drought. They made their own silk, but refused to sell or exchange it because ‘there was nothing they wanted to buy.’ That was in 1962.

Forty years later

, long after the Khmer Rouge regime had come and gone, another American visited a village in the hinterland of Kompong Thom. ‘They live completely apart,’ he reported. ‘No one has a radio or a motorbike. Everything they need they make for themselves; nothing comes in from outside.’ Some time afterwards, two of the villagers came to Phnom Penh to visit him. ‘To try to put them at ease,’ he said, ‘I took them to eat at a stall in the market, the simplest place I could think of. They had no idea how to behave. They weren’t comfortable. They didn’t know how to sit on a chair. Everything in Phnom Penh was strange and they hated it.’

The overriding, if unstated, objective of Khmer Rouge policy from 1972 on was to refashion the whole of Cambodian society in the image of this authentic, autochthonous peasantry, unsullied by the outside world.

But there was another purpose, too, both Khmer and communist, underlying the Party’s emphasis on social and economic levelling to force everyone into the same poor-peasant mould: the eternal Buddhist goal of demolishing the individual, but this time in new garb — not as a path to

(‘nothingness’), but to remove what was seen as the biggest obstacle to the establishment of a collectivised state: the innate and essential egoism which characterises Khmer behaviour. Whatever shortcomings attach to such cultural generalisations, that was the way Cambodians saw themselves. Sihanouk called individualism ‘a

national failing

’. Ith Sarin came back from nine months in the Special Zone convinced that it was ‘the

fundament

of the Khmer personality’ and therefore communist policies could not succeed.

Years later

, a prominent Khmer businessman argued that the reason there are few Cambodian restaurants in Paris but innumerable Khmer taxi-drivers and pharmacists is that the latter occupations are suitable for a single man or a couple; to start a restaurant, several Khmer families have to pool

their resources and the venture inevitably founders amid recriminations and jealousy.

The

organisation of life

in Khmer villages reinforces that perception. Where Vietnamese and Chinese villagers live cheek by jowl, animating a communal existence by means of countless associations and benevolent institutions, each Khmer family is an island, living on its own land, united only by membership of the

and a shared belief in Buddhism. If Khmer Rouge attempts to set up village associations failed, it was precisely because of the absence of a

co-operative tradition

in Cambodia.

Pol and Nuon Chea preferred to close their eyes to all that, emphasising instead the rare occasions when Khmer villagers did work together — at harvest time, for instance, or to help a neighbour build a new house. But they were also aware that Angkor, the timeless symbol of Cambodia’s glory and the inspiration of their own future regime, had been built not by free Khmers but by slaves. A Western diplomat, reflecting on Sihanouk’s political difficulties, had written in the 1960s: ‘Khmers, born individualists, predisposed to egocentrism, require a unifying bond to bring them together and the use of effective force to maintain their unity.’ In his mind, the Throne was the bond and the ‘effective force’, the Sangkum. Ten years later, Pol and his colleagues reached the same conclusion. But now the bond was revolutionary consciousness and the ‘effective force’, Party coercion, which, as time went on, emulating Vietnam’s experience, relied increasingly on terror.