When the War Was Over (13 page)

It was a heady atmosphere for young Cambodians concerned with winning independence for their country. They arrived in Paris still believing in a democratic system, but they were considered radical because they questioned the role of a monarch in an independent Cambodia. Their transformation from strident Democrats to militant Marxists was facilitated by the French communists, according to Ieng Sary, who claims that no one less than Maurice Thorez, the PCF's longtime secretary-general, gave the Cambodians his blessing to organize a communist study circle.

The circle represented a milestone in the failed history of the Cambodian left. Previously, the chief avenue to communism for a Phnom Penh student was through the thick jungles to the far-off Vietminh fighting on the eastern border. There was no sustained communist organizing in Phnom Penh, and certainly there were no leading Cambodian communist figures headquartered in their capital. In their own country, they would have had to abandon the student milieu and accept Vietnamese tutelage in hostile guerrilla territory to study communism, a step few Phnom Penh students took in those days.

In Paris, they learned from French and Vietnamese organizers, in a city with a working class, with intellectuals versed in Marxist literature, and with an open communist party that demonstrated for better salaries for the industrial workers and contested in elections. The PCF had adopted the “peaceful” road to socialism through elections, not armed battle, and in their early years so would the Khmer Rouge. Crucially, the French communist instructors for these Cambodians opposed the French war in Indochina, the only political party in France that did.

Ieng Sary and Saloth Sar became close friends. The two men became especially friendly with Thiounn Prasith, a younger brother of Mumm, and the least academically inclined of the four Thiounn brothers. Sary was the most outgoing of the group, a young man with a bright face and easy smile then, headstrong and prone to quick decisions and great bursts of enthusiasm. Saloth Sar was quiet, more calculating. His features and personality were more refined. He had a quiet confidence that beckoned followers. Their friend Prasith, already fluent in French, was a nervous personality, confident, but with the burden of being the youngest brother in an impressive family, not a rival to either Sary or Sar.

They congregated at 28 rue St. André des Arts, in the Latin Quarter, at an apartment where Ieng Sary, Mumm, Prasith, and Ok Sakun, another student, lived at various times. Shortly a young woman arrived to take her place among them, a strong-willed Cambodian beauty named Khieu Thirith. She was the daughter of a respected judge. A maverick, she had been one of the first girls to study at the Sisowath School and had won high marks in the French curriculum. She also attracted the attention of a number of young men, but to the surprise of her classmates she had fallen in love with Ieng Sary. She was considered his superior in social standing, intellectual prowess, and charm. But Thirith remembers it differently. She saw in Sary a born leader, a man who appreciated her idiosyncrasies and approved of her politics. For she, too, had taken up the nationalist cause. In fact, she says she
chose to major in English literature at the Sorbonne as a protest against French colonialism. It was in that pursuit that she joined Sary in Paris, as his fiancée. They had become engaged just before he departed for Paris.

The wedding Thirith arranged upon her arrival in Paris was a setpiece of the era, a pastiche of old bourgeois Phnom Penh and of student politics before it became revolutionary. The couple rented a ballroom for the occasion and invited everyone they knew. In attendance were the Cambodian representative to Paris (his wife was one of Thirith's close friends), all the Cambodian students, and the Marxists Sary knew, students from colonized nations like Vietnam, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Everyone was asked to contribute 200 francs to pay for the gala, and most did. Thirith even convinced Prasith, a chef of some talent, to prepare the food. It was the last happy affair Thirith remembered when all of her Cambodian friends could gather without arguments. “There were no divisions then among the Cambodians,” she said. “We were all united.”

The marriage is of more than passing interest. It not only united two heady political activists, it also brought together Thirith's eldest sister, Khieu Ponnary, and Sary's friend Saloth Sar. Ponnary had traveled to Paris with her sister intent on earning teaching credentials. She was a meticulous student, more elegant than beautiful, and possessed of a powerful mind. Ponnary met Saloth Sar at the Marxist study sessions her sister persuaded her to attend. There is no suggestion of a great love between Saloth Sar and Ponnary, yet it was more than a marriage of friendly convenience. Already convinced that they were embarking on a serious vocation, Sary and Saloth Sar, as other revolutionaries before and after them, needed spouses they could trust, who would have no reason to betray them. Now the two young activists were tied by blood as well as politics.

Those politics were being sharpened in the rarefied Parisian air. The young men were affiliated with the PCF and ICP, but already they showed an unpredictable side guided by their sense of the particular problems facing Cambodia. In 1950 at the height of the Stalinist, and hence French Communist Party, attacks against Marshal Tito, Sar traveled to Yugoslavia. He stayed only one month, as a student volunteer on a brigade that was building the highway from Zagreb to Belgrade. He expressed his sympathy for a small communist country attempting to chart a separate course in spite of protests from its far more powerful communist neighbor. Cambodians instinctively understood the predicament.

(Twenty-seven years later, when he was known as Pol Pot, Sar would exalt this monthlong excursion by inviting a Yugoslav delegation to become
the first Europeans to visit and film his revolutionary experiment and by giving them the first rendition of his political biography.)

Some French leftists also disagreed with the Soviet contention that Tito was guilty of “petit bourgeois nationalism,” of “anti-Sovietism” because Tito refused to acknowledge that the Soviet Union had the ultimate say over Yugoslavia. A few French intellectuals made pilgrimages to Yugoslavia and praised Tito on their return for building socialism “with a courage and maturity of spirit perhaps unique in the world.” These words encouraged Saloth Sar, and he and his friends openly and continuously disputed the theoretical basis for Soviet disdain of Tito. “We only disagreed with [the French Communist Party] on the question of limited sovereignty,” Thirith recalled thirty years later, referring to the Soviet theory that a nation's sovereignty is limited to the larger communist good, as defined by the Soviet Union, which controls the international communist movement.

In the early fifties this was a small point among the Indochinese students in Paris who were joining the ranks of Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries. The Cambodians worked closely and comfortably with the Vietnamese students; their common fight against the French colonialists and their choice of political paths obliterated any differences they had. Thirith counted Vietnamese among the group's closest allies. She remembered the intellectual Nguyen Khac Vien as a personal friend. “He came quite often to our apartment [on rue St. André], and played with the baby. . . . We were on good terms, and friendly terms with him and the other Vietnamese in Paris.”

In fact the Cambodian Marxists were seen by other Cambodian students at the time as too close to the Vietnamese; some questioned how these Cambodian Marxists could claim to be solid nationalists and work so intimately with the traditional enemy, the Vietnamese.

But historic, regional enmity was not on the minds of the Cambodian Marxists. They preferred to follow the agenda set by the French Communist Party: Stalinism, anti-Americanism, and anticolonialism. While Saloth Sar was in Paris the French Communist Party was in lockstep with the last vestiges of Stalinism. The French communists tried two heroes of the party for political crimes in a mini-Stalinist purge to show Stalin they also were cleansing their party ranks. The 1952 trials of André Marty and Charles Tillon, both veterans of the Spanish Civil War and well known to the party's rank and file, were pale imitations of the Stalinist show trials carried out in Eastern European parties; fortunately, the French communists did not even entertain the idea of murdering those found “guilty,” and simply expelled them. But the effect of this pure Stalinism on the Cambodians was in evidence
years later when Saloth Sar's purges reflected the imprint of the Stalinist past.

Anticolonialism was, of course, a major key to the attraction that communism exerted on these Cambodians. It could not have passed their notice that a young Vietnamese, Ho Chi Minh, had played a large role in convincing the French communists to adopt that position. It was the anti-Americanism that was fresh to the Cambodians and that clearly made a mark on Sar's politics. A broad spectrum of French opinion feared an “Americanized Europe,” threatening French culture, security, politics—the independence of a distinct French nation. The French left raised an alarm over the prospect of Western rearmament under the United States, warning that this was a bellicose move, possibly connected to an American plan to launch a preventive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. It went so far as to warn that French soldiers would become “mercenaries” of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The French left translated its campaign against the United States into a “national independence struggle.” Those were the words of the Cambodians and other peoples preparing to fight French colonialism once they returned home.

All the momentum was appropriated by the left. For them, the Korean War was a clear act of American aggression. Pablo Picasso painted
Massacre
en Corée.
In the spring of 1952, André Stil wrote a series of articles in the PCF newspaper
L'Humanité,
charging the Americans with waging biological warfare against the Koreans, and he was arrested.

Those years in France from September 1949 until December 1952 were Saloth Sar's only lengthy sojourn outside Cambodia—his only other travels would come years later, short trips to China, North Vietnam, and North Korea. The years in France established a mind-set in Sar that would never alter significantly. Sartre might change his mind in 1956 about the Soviets with the suppression in Hungary, but by then Sar was struggling to keep the communist movement alive in Cambodia and was scarcely concerned about the geopolitics that had pulled him into the revolution.

During his Paris years Saloth Sar made the crucial first step toward leading the Cambodian communist movement. He broke into the circle of the left elite of his country, more easily abroad than at home, and he staked out a role as a tactician if not a future leader. He had become known in Paris and in Phnom Penh among members of the Democratic Party. He was one of the contributors to a Khmer-language review called the
Cambodian Student
which attacked Sihanouk and his policies.

His article entitled “Monarchy or Democracy?” was published in the magazine in 1952. At first glance it seems a typical piece of writing containing the standard thinking of the French communists of the period. But Sar shows some tactical acumen in his choice of targets—Sihanouk and the monarchy, not French colonialism. The more frequent targets of other leftist articles and manifestos were French colonialism and American imperialism. Saloth Sar had the prescience to focus on Sihanouk and the Cambodian monarchy as a major stumbling block for leftists whether they were fighting in the jungles or plotting in Paris.

The article first condemns the monarchy as a friend of French colonialism and an enemy of the people and the religion of Cambodia. Sar presents democracy, within a communist framework, as the new idea that will bring Cambodia a humane, modern government. At the same time, he tries desperately to say this new idea will accommodate the old traditions of the country, to bridge the modern with the past. “The democratic regime will bring back the Buddhist moralism because our great leader Buddha was the first to have taught [democracy]. Therefore, only a democratic regime can safeguard the profound value of Buddhism.”

Sar knew his audience, and he knew his country had no tradition of democracy and that something had to replace the monarchy. He pretended that religion could fill the void. He also knew the bourgeoisie would be frightened if the left advocated abolition of the monarchy and Buddhism. Hence he made up the fanciful connection between communism and Buddhism. His immediate focus was Sihanouk. He said Sihanouk's strategy was to continue the French war against the Cambodian independence fighters for two years, after which he would petition France for independence and take credit for winning his country's freedom.

His analysis was accurate. He predicted that such a program would not give Cambodia true independence, it would only allow Sihanouk to “shut up the people, to expel those who oppose the politics of the king. Then it will lead to the dissolution of political parties that oppose the interests of the throne because political parties do not keep quiet. Finally, the politics of the king will provoke a civil war that will burn everything—even the pagodas. The monks, the people, the bureaucrats will experience the sadness of the families, the parents, the women and the children will be smashed by tanks, burned by napalm; the harvest will be destroyed.”

The democracy Sar wanted for Cambodia, as he wrote in his article, would be like those produced in France by the 1789 revolution, in Russia by the 1917 revolution led by Lenin and Stalin, and in China by the revolution
under Sun Yat-sen, all revolutions which abolished monarchies. Sihanouk and the monarchy had to go.

Saloth Sar left France in 1953. He had volunteered to go back to Cambodia and investigate for the Marxist Circle what was really going on inside the various communist and non-communist Issarak movements. His scholarship had been suspended by the Cambodian government for political agitation and his failure to pass any of the three examinations in his radio-electricity program. (Sar reportedly spent more time reading French poetry than technical textbooks.) He preferred to return to Cambodia to fight the French rather than continue his communist training in Paris. Ponnary, his fiancée, lost her scholarship at the same time for political activities. The two were married after their return to Phnom Penh.