When the War Was Over (12 page)

The Khmer Rouge movement would eventually draw its leaders and members from all three groups, but only after the First Indochina War ended in 1954 and after each group had quarreled and created divisions within divisions. Some of the more infamous Khmer Rouge leaders came out of Phnom Penh and the Sisowath alumni group, including a large number of the men and women who ran the government of Democratic Kampuchea. One place to begin understanding the Khmer Rouge, their contradictions, and complexities is Phnom Penh after World War II.

The Democrat Party largely recruited students from the Sisowath School, the school for children of the native elite, but a few students from the poly-technical and craft schools also joined the movement. Among the latter was a young man who seemed at this point to be simply trying to survive Cambodia's education system. Saloth Sar—later to take the
nom de guerre
Pol Pot—was barely passing his courses at a provincial college when the Japanese arrived in Phnom Penh. Born of a landowning family in northern Kompong Thom province, his parents were comfortable but not part of the educated urban elite. By his own account, Sar studied for six years at a pagoda school in Phnom Penh until at the age of eleven he failed the examinations for elementary certification and was forced to return to the family farm.

His academic career over the next decade was marked by this same determined plodding and the same regular setbacks. Sar spent most of the years of Japanese occupation studying at a French-style secondary school in Kompong Cham province; he had failed to win entrance to a true lycée. Finally, in 1944, at the age of nineteen, he completed the equivalent of his high school education and moved to Phnom Penh, where he enrolled in a technical school and studied carpentry under the watch of his brother and guardian, Loth Suong, a low-ranking bureaucrat in the protocol section of the royal palace. Years later that brother said Sar had been a kind, pleasant, and unremarkable young man during the period; studious, serious, not a troublemaker, and not political.

What his record does suggest is that Sar was a striving, ambitious young man who at an early age decided, consciously or not, to play a greater role in his country's life than his farming father had. Despite the formidable obstacles of his rural background and his less than obvious academic talents, Sar stuck out his coursework at whatever academic institution gave him a space. His background might have propelled him toward the original Buddhist Institute group, but once in Phnom Penh he gravitated toward and eventually made it into the periphery of the elite Sisowath alumni group that was to overshadow the Buddhists in the years ahead.

Sar entered the technical school in Phnom Penh at a time of tremendous political euphoria and change. All the questions that would dominate Cambodian history over the next three decades were being raised for the first time by many of the men and women who would determine the answers.

The debate began immediately after World War II, when the French allowed Cambodians to set up the Democrat Party and other parliamentary parties and contest elections for a “constituent” assembly. The French hoped to head off demands for independence in Cambodia and blunt the armed revolt growing in the countryside without giving up control. The Democrats were one of three political parties formed, all headed by a prince, in an obvious admission that Cambodians were still wedded to the old feudal and royal ways.

Prince Youthevong created the moderate Democratic Party, which brought together former partisans of Son Ngoc Thanh, members of the Sisowath alumni group, and other Cambodians with democratic and even socialist ideas. This was the party that attracted students like Sar and the far more privileged students at the Sisowath School.

It proved to be the party of the moment. In the September 1946 elections the Democratic Party won a sweeping victory and made up the first cabinet.

The Democratic Party tried to squeeze every advantage out of its new role as leader of the constituent assembly. The cabinet set to work reforming the country's archaic royal institutions and shaping the skeleton of a constitutional government for a modern Cambodia. The cabinet also made it clear that this government must be independent as well. But rather than wage war for independence, the cabinet appealed to what was considered the rational side of the French, the awareness that France could not hold on to Cambodia forever, especially with war raging in neighboring Vietnam. They accented the choice the French had—handing over independence to them, the intelligentsia, the professionals, the elite of Cambodia, or eventually losing it in a bloody war to rabble-rousers fighting in the jungle. The
cabinet's finance minister, Son Sann, expressed the party's polite appeal to France in 1947: “We ask you to understand our profound aspirations [for independence] and assist us in realizing them. . . .”

The Democratic Party also appealed to Issarak groups to give up their armed battle against France and change the country through legal means. The party was making headway when in 1947 its leader, Prince Youthevong, died at thirty-four. The French, at the suggestion of King Sihanouk, replaced him as head of government with another prince who was a conservative like Sihanouk and who disapproved of much of the Democratic Party. The new leader replaced most of the ministers with conservatives and turned the assembly into a rubber stamp for King Sihanouk.

But the Democratic Party was not to be denied. It kept winning elections and had a lasting effect on the country. A few years later, Sihanouk used the party's rhetoric and ideas to win freedom from the French and stake his claim as the country's father of independence. And the party stimulated the youth in the capital; its programs for a constitution and its talk of a new, modern government for Cambodia had an enormous influence on young people. The students at the Sisowath School had been courted by and converted to the Democratic Party. They had been sought out for their idealism, their energy, and their pedigrees and in the knowledge that these teenagers were in line to become the leaders of the next generation, the generation of promise that would make Cambodia independent.

And young leaders were coming to the fore. As early as 1946 the students formed a group called Liberation of Cambodia from French Colonialism. It was headed by a young man named Ieng Sary. He was an odd figure on campus at the Sisowath School. He was Kampuchea Krom—a Khmer born in southern Vietnam. Sary spoke Khmer with a Vietnamese accent and was clearly not born to the same elite families as his peers, but he had worked hard at becoming as Cambodian as they. He had changed his given name from Kim Trang to the more Khmer-sounding Ieng Sary, and he altered his birth certificate to become younger and meet age requirements to transfer from his school in southern Vietnam to a provincial school in Cambodia. He proved himself there and soon transferred to the Sisowath School, where he was a scholarship student. He excelled in mathematics and passed his first baccalaureate exams with high marks. And he plunged into politics.

Dynamic, clever, and affable, Sary was won over by the politics of the Democratic Party. He was not alone. Um Sim, who would become ambassador to the United States under Lon Nol, and Keng Vannsak, soon to become a major figure in the Democratic Party, often joined Sary and others
in long debates at the Sisowath School. It was the perfect setting for these future leaders. Designed in French colonial administrative style, the buildings sat in rowhouse fashion around a courtyard. All were cooled by colonnaded verandas. And the lycée was built in the heart of the city, in the shadow of the Wat Phnom and directly behind the National Museum. It was obviously the school for children of the native elite, historically the pool from which protest emerged in colonized nations.

Student leaders usually gathered in the dining hall, on the first floor of the dormitory for boarders. The political debates over those long cafeteria tables yielded a series of demonstrations at the school that spilled into the political mainstream by calling for a national strike in support of the Democratic Party's call for immediate independence from France, a call rejected by King Sihanouk. These were the first student-led protests in Phnom Penh's history.

The strike was headed by Sary. It may have seemed less than momentous at the time, but the strike had a strong impact on its young leader. Sary felt himself at the center of national politics. King Sihanouk had denounced the strike and said the students should be supporting his steady negotiations with the French. At the same time, Sihanouk was making it clear he had no intention of sharing power with the national assembly, especially after Youthevong's death. That token exercise in self-rule was failing.

Disillusioned, several of the students started asking questions about the Vietminh guerrillas they had heard were fighting for independence in Vietnam. They also pursued higher education through a system of scholarships for study in France instituted by the Democrats. Frustrated by the political obstacles in Phnom Penh, Ieng Sary applied for and won a scholarship to study in Paris. Such scholarships were rare; the program administered through the Office of Cambodian Students had begun only in 1947 with thirty-one scholarships. It is likely that Sary called upon the good offices of men he knew through the Democratic Party to pull strings and ensure a place in a French university. In 1950 he flew to Europe from Saigon. He left the small world of Phnom Penh student politics for the exotic boulevards of Paris, where he cemented a friendship with another Cambodian.

Saloth Sar had arrived the year before. Considering his plodding academic record, Sar also had to have gained his scholarship through influence; it was a way of life in Phnom Penh. Simply traveling to France for higher studies put Sar in the category of a pioneer, even though he was to study in a technical school. Previously, Cambodians received higher education at French universities in Hanoi. There were none in Phnom Penh. But the
Japanese occupation and later the Vietminh war made Hanoi unreliable, and in the late forties Cambodians in small numbers began joining other colonials who trekked to Paris to earn degrees and learn politics. To have found their way to Paris, without the benefit of a solid elite background, gave Saloth Sar and Ieng Sary a sense of being “chosen,” of being part of a vanguard—an attitude they never abandoned.

The dangers presented by sending rebellious, ambitious students to the one European country where the majority of workers voted with the communist party became obvious almost from the start. By the time Saloth Sar arrived in Paris, some Cambodian students had already dabbled in Marxist politics and laid the foundations for what would become a Cambodian Marxist Circle in Paris. A leading figure in the group was Thiounn Mumm, who had arrived in 1946. He was attractive in every sense of the word—the scion of one of Cambodia's more aristocratic families, unquestionably brilliant, handsome, and possessed of worldly manners that could ease the discomfort of a newly arrived Cambodian in Paris. He would become the first Cambodian to graduate from the elite Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.

Then and throughout the tumultuous history of the Khmer Rouge, Mumm and his three brothers provided the patina of elegance and respectability for the Cambodian communist movement. The Thiounn family name alone ensured that. Their family came into prominence in the nineteenth century, when the French forced King Norodom—Sihanouk's grandfather—to accept the nomination of a bureaucrat named Thiounn as the Lok Veang, “minister of the palace.” It was a hereditary position equivalent to prime minister, promising Thiounn and his progeny a strong base for power. Lok Veang Thiounn took advantage of his position and in the normal corrupt fashion of the Khmer court became a very wealthy man, but apparently at the price of his standing with Norodom. A rivalry developed, the exact source of which became buried in layers of royal gossip. As a result his son was kept at a distance in the palace by Norodom's successors.

The rivalry endured. Lok Veang's grandsons, the Thiounn brothers, were among the most privileged young men in Phnom Penh and they were not intimidated by their contemporary King Sihanouk. Although they could easily have slipped into the lives of the indulgent rich, pampered by their platoon of servants in one of the largest family compounds just off the rue d'Argent in Phnom Penh, the boys chose a different path. By the time of the Japanese occupation, the brothers had become openly identified with the nationalists—first with Son Ngoc Thanh's followers, later with the Democratic Party.

Their social standing gave them the confidence to confront Sihanouk or anyone else. A Thiounn brother dared criticize Sihanouk on a 1946 trip to Paris for untoward behavior that dishonored Cambodia. Sihanouk chose to view the Thiounn brothers as men avenging their sister's good name, not as serious politicians bent on pushing Cambodia toward a different political system. “The powerful Thiounn family never forgave my refusal to marry their daughter,” he claimed coyly.

Whatever their complex motivations, the Thiounn brothers forcefully shaped the destiny of Cambodia when they befriended the young Saloth Sar and Ieng Sary and brought them into the Marxist Circle. Saloth Sar was enrolled at the Ecole Française de Radio-électricité; Ieng Sary was studying for his second-level baccalaureate.

They arrived in Paris when the political climate was vibrant and French intellectuals were shaping the themes that dominated postwar attitudes. From 1949 to 1950, when the two young Cambodians began their studies, the French Communist Party (PCF) was rupturing over the revelations that millions were imprisoned in Stalin's labor camps in the Soviet Union. French faith in the Soviet experiment was being questioned because of Stalin's heavy-handed attacks on Tito and Yugoslavia's independent policies.

This disillusionment with Soviet politics was replaced, however, with the first burst of anti-Americanism, which lasted through the Vietnam War. The Korean War of 1951, the American Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe, and the continued American monopoly of the nuclear bomb combined to create an American menace in the eyes of many French leftists. Some saw the Marshall Plan as an attempt to imprison France under American political and cultural domination. Others pointed to the new Soviet “peace movement” as a welcome antidote to American soldiers fighting in Korea and American bombs threatening peace in post-war Europe. When the French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre made his dramatic switch to support of the Soviet Union in 1952, he started a major movement.