When the War Was Over (14 page)

Ieng Sary and his wife remained behind in the apartment on rue St. André des Arts, surviving on money sent by Thirith's mother, which allowed Thirith to complete her degree at the Sorbonne in English literature. Sary dropped his studies for the revolution. With Thiounn Mumm he attended communist youth festivals in Europe and, in Paris, recruited more Cambodians to join the Marxist Circle. Mumm, immune to pressures from Phnom Penh, took up permanent residence in Paris, married a French woman, and became the father figure to a growing number of Cambodian students who joined the study circle and later became public leaders of the Khmer Rouge—Khieu Samphan, Son Sen, and Hou Youn.

The writings left by two of those students—Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn—are representative of the refinement of Cambodian leftist politics during this later French period. Both men wrote doctoral theses for the University of Paris that attacked Cambodia's economic structure and offered alternatives that would both modernize the country and, they argued, produce a more equitable distribution of wealth as well as strengthen the country's independence. Hou Youn concentrated on agriculture and the peasants, Khieu Samphan on industrialization.

Despite later attempts to describe the work of Khieu Samphan in particular as the blueprint of the 1975 revolution in Cambodia, these theses are remarkable for their moderate, scholastic tone. They would become the model for the socialist experiment Sihanouk attempted in the sixties. Both men tried to construct a realistic picture of the country's economy, something no other Cambodian scholar had done. Their solutions seem directed at the sympathies and self-interest of the governing class far more than would-be guerrilla fighters.

Hou Youn wrote his “The Cambodian Peasantry and Their Prospects for Modernization” in 1955. He argued that Cambodia was not cursed by a corps of large landholders who squeezed the peasants through rents, as in many other Asian peasant societies, but that it faced other peculiarly Khmer problems. Nearly all Cambodian farmers owned some land, but in such small plots that they were unable to draw a reasonable livelihood from their labor. They were chained by indebtedness: Taxes, introduced by the French, were prohibitive; prices paid the farmers by merchants were low and did not represent market value; without money, peasants were unable to improve their yield by buying fertilizer or modern equipment; simply to make ends meet, the farmers had to borrow money at exorbitant rates and then borrow more to pay back original debts. “At every point the peasant needs money—to pay debts, pay taxes, buy seed, rent land, farm equipment and stock. . . . he always finds moneylenders,” Hou Youn wrote.

“Parcelization” of the countryside into minuscule plots and the resulting peasant indebtedness helped explain why Cambodia had one of the lowest yields per acre in the region. The government under the French colonial administration had not undertaken the public works projects the peasants needed, especially the irrigation systems vital to Cambodian agriculture. Indebted farmers fell deeper in arrears and resorted to putting family members into bondage, selling off pieces of their land, borrowing ever greater sums. Hou Youn calculated that 80 percent of Cambodia's rural population could be considered poor peasants, farmers who owned only one hectare of land and little equipment and were regularly forced to rent extra land, equipment, or livestock to cultivate crops that would never earn the profit necessary to break their cycle of poverty.

He argued for government intervention. To allow the peasants to become solvent the government had to offer a “truly popular credit system, in the interest of the peasant masses who are the real creators of the nation's wealth.” Freed of the constant worries from their debts, the peasants would begin to improve their yield, especially, Hou Youn wrote, if the government equipped and modernized the rural areas, tried to develop a rational organization of labor within a complete plan for national production.

Khieu Samphan's thesis, “Cambodia's Economy and Industrial Development,” was completed four years later, in 1959. It can be read as the proposal for an overall view of Cambodia's national production that reflects Hou Youn's ideas. Hou Youn's thesis is listed in Khieu Samphan's short bibliography;
Samphan's scheme for modernizing and industrializing Cambodia appears to build on Hou Youn's work.

“Cambodia can industrialize because it has no vicious circle of poverty which cannot be broken by conscientious human effort,” Khieu Samphan wrote with conviction. Using sophisticated analyses of the country's industrial capacity, he proved from a different standpoint the truth of Hou Youn's earlier contention that eliminating peasant indebtedness was the key to the country's revival. He integrated agricultural modernization into his scheme for industrial development. He argued forcefully against allowing the needs of foreign governments and foreign companies to dictate through their superior wealth how Cambodia would modernize; it was an early charge against multinational corporations and their effect on third world countries. Samphan did not advocate an end to foreign investment, only a greater control over all of Cambodian trade and commerce. He wanted the government to create a state monopoly on trade in all major commodities and to control banking and price mechanisms. The aim was the accumulation and control over major new capital that would be invested in Cambodia's fledgling modernization programs, not invested in foreign banks. Samphan argued this would enhance national self-sufficiency, lead to higher rates of productive employment, and ensure an improvement in everyone's standard of living—goals he took as natural aspirations of the country.

Samphan advocated strict state control over industrialization and foreign relations and reforms of the economic structure—reforms, though, not radical upheavals. Crucially, the underlying thrust of his proposals, and of Hou Youn's, was the identical classic belief, held by most of the Cambodian bourgeoisie, that their country promised bountiful wealth if only the peasants could properly exploit the land. The corollary tenets were also implicit in Samphan's work: The peasants were held back by the poor working habits that were promoted by the other chief villain—bad leadership. The banker Mey Komphot would have agreed with that analysis, and so would Sihanouk. What none of these intellectuals knew, however, was what the peasants themselves thought, or how they would respond to these methods.

The work and actions of these young Cambodian Marxists were noticed. Serious French intellectuals considered them among the brightest and most innovative thinkers from Cambodia. They quickly became known as the men of promise. In a 1961 essay on Cambodian democracy, written for the prestigious Centre d'Etude des Relations Internationales, there were three scholarly entries listed in the bibliography written by Cambodians, all future
Khmer Rouge leaders: Khieu Samphan, Hou Youn, and a Thiounn brother, Thiounn Thioenn.

Their stature caused Sihanouk great concern and the prince imposed new measures to prevent other Cambodian students from becoming “polluted” by communism in Paris, assigning potential leftists to provincial French universities. But the attraction to the left persisted.

The promising leftist scholars did consider themselves Marxists, not merely students, and they all became involved in politics on their return to Cambodia. They immediately set out to apply the educations they had acquired at French universities and within the Stalinist French Communist Party to the transformation of their country.

In the process they, too, were transformed, in many cases beyond recognition. They were molded, bloodied, and shaped by the French war to remain in Indochina, by Sihanouk's war to eliminate Cambodian communism, by the devious internecine battles among the Asian communists, and by the awesome American war in Indochina.

The first of the Khmer Rouge to leave Paris and return to Cambodia was Saloth Sar. He arrived in January 1953, and became one of the first French-trained Cambodian communists to join the Vietminh at the front in the war for independence against France.

From an early age Cambodian children learn their culture through the telling of Khmer folktales—stories rich with ribald, often black humor, with a taste for sensuality and for great food. The world of these fables is peopled with all-powerful ministers of the king, greedy crocodiles, wise rabbits, and ordinary Cambodians who allow their violent passions to overrule common sense. The stories are endless, episodes piled upon each other in the slapdash fashion of the rural life they reflect, a life ruled by the elements and by the fatalistic faith of Buddhism. These stories, like the lives they celebrate, often end abruptly. There are no apparent moral lessons, and sometimes no point. The full treasury of tales shows how life is filled with the unexpected, how violence is part of experience, and how one should strive to discover a path that will lead to a better life in the next incarnation. Here is one tale, “The Devious Woman.”

This folktale of “The Devious Woman” is ghoulish, belonging to the same general category as those of the Brothers Grimm. But the character of the acts of violence and the fact that the cruelty goes unpunished set the Khmer tale apart. No moral lesson is drawn, at least in a Western sense, only the accurate portrayal of how man's violence toward his fellow man begets more violence.

Obviously a culture that produces such stories is not as single-mindedly gentle as its reputation. These folktales are one clue to the nearly incomprehensible violence unleashed in Cambodia during the war and the Khmer Rouge revolution.

The Angkor-era peasant lived under the shadow of ruthless Cambodian kings who demanded large tithes and corvée labor to build monuments to the gods and the royal vanity. The poor lived on subsistence, the small aristocracy in elaborate abundance. The distinctions between the two were drawn clearly. The peasants who lived a life of labor under the hot tropical sun were called the “big, black people.” The idle rich sheltered in their splendid mansions were described as “white as jade” even though these two classes were of the same race. The elite had long Sanskritized names while, at the opposite end of society, the Cambodians and hill people enslaved by the rich were not even named but given such epithets as “dog,” “cat,” “detestable,” and “stinking.”

The system of justice was often barbaric, as were other royal practices. Those who governed were given to outbreaks of temper. Common Cambodians often armed themselves, so even minor quarrels could lead to bloody confrontations. Superstition and animism were never purged from the religions of the country, and there grew a body of primitive magic that likewise required brutal acts. Amputation of parts of the body—the genitals, organs, or head—was believed to convey power to the executioner. Rival kings were decapitated to show supremacy; there were ritual decapitations of lowly Khmer at the start of large construction projects to ensure their success. Rival claimants to the throne were dispensed with in like fashion. “On the day that a new king is proclaimed, all his brothers are mutilated,” explained one chronicler of the Angkor period. “From one a finger is removed, from another the nose is cut off. Then their maintenance is provided for, each in a separate place and they are never appointed to office.”