When the War Was Over (15 page)

Those are the words of Chou Ta-Kuan, a Chinese traveler to the kingdom in the late thirteenth century. He described the system of punishment. People accused of serious crimes were buried alive in ditches dug outside the capital's west gates. Lesser crimes were punished by cutting off toes, fingers, and arms. And, in the Chinese view, the Khmer had unusual ideas about what constituted a serious offense. “Debauchery and gambling are not forbidden,” he wrote. But a husband could torture the lover of his adulterous wife by squeezing the lover's feet in a vise until the lover gave away all of his wealth.

The decline of the Angkor Empire 100 years later did not temper this violence; people only added pessimism to their character. As their neighboring states of Vietnam and Siam grew in stature and appetite for Khmer territory, the Khmer people became convinced that their culture would or should disappear. Some saw this as inevitable while others were prepared to use any and all measures, regardless of their violence, to prevent it.

In retrospect, a particular curse seemed to haunt the Khmer. The sources of their violence were seemingly never purged, only covered over and allowed to fester under a growing dependence on magic and superstition. During the Cambodian War from 1970 to 1975 the most popular Cambodian movies were historical plots about Angkor kings who decapitated foes and practiced the occult. During that war the famous Khmer gentleness was a sign less of tranquillity than of passivity. The outer world was becoming unmanageable, and Khmers retreated to an inner world of spirits and animism, an exotic realm where spells and amulets provided solace against incomprehensible catastrophes. When the reality of international politics and war intervened, the reaction was violent. When the victorious revolutionaries of Pol Pot arrived, the city people of Phnom Penh said they were very “black” people; and these “black” people chose as their victims the “jade white” citizens of the city.

When the Vietminh launched their war in 1946 to prevent the French from recolonizing Vietnam, Cambodians were already fighting the French in their own country. Their greatest strength was in western Cambodia, where the noncommunist Khmer Issaraks were headquartered and their rear base of safety was Thailand. At the time Thailand was ruled by the liberal anticolonialist regime of Pridi Phanomyong. Pridi had strong and open desires to rid Southeast Asia of all European colonialists, and he allowed Bangkok to become a haven for independence fighters from Laos, Burma, Vietnam, and Indonesia as well as Cambodia.

It was a crucial base for the nationalist Issaraks. From Thailand the Issaraks might outflank the French if the Vietminh continued to fight from the east. In Bangkok the Issaraks could coordinate with other independence fighters. They could buy food and arms and exchange intelligence. Bangkok became more attractive in 1946 when Pridi was forced to hand back the northwest provinces to Cambodia under pressure from the French and from the international community as the price for Thailand's entry into the United Nations: Thailand was no longer seen as a colonizer itself in Cambodia.

But in November 1947 a rightist military coup d'état overthrew the Pridi government and forced the Cambodian independence groups back into their own country. The coup changed the character of Cambodia's war for independence and the Second Indochina War that followed. Without Thai support the Khmer Issarak had only one source of aid—the communist Vietminh. Neither the United States nor Great Britain would help. Many of the Issaraks
refused to work with the communists, refused to join in a united front with them against the French, and this led to the permanent split in Cambodia between communist and non-communist independence movements.

The Vietnamese communists originally tried to build a united front by joining the Khmer Issarak to the fledgling Khmer communist movement under Vietnamese control. By the time of the right-wing coup in Thailand the Vietnamese had begun grooming several Cambodians to become leaders of a Cambodian communist movement within the Indochinese Communist Party. Once these Cambodian communists were properly trained and organized, they would call for and create a broad Cambodian front to fight the French.

But the situation in Vietnam forced the Cambodian communists to move quickly. Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese communists decided their party had to go underground in 1945. The Indochinese Communist Party was officially dissolved so that it would appear as if the Vietminh united front, not the communists, was directing the resistance war against the French in Vietnam.

To enhance nationalist credentials, the Vietnamese decided that each of the three Indochinese countries should have its own party and not be grouped together in one regional body. The Lao and Khmer communists would have their own organizations if not full-fledged parties and thereby broaden their appeal within their countries.

To that end, the Vietnamese communists organized the “First National Congress of Khmer Resistance” on April 17, 1950, in the jungles of southwestern Cambodia. Over 200 delegates attended, including some 100 monks. But there were only forty Cambodian members of the ICP at the time and they could not create an entirely separate party. Instead, they laid plans to form a communist Front Issarak Association led by the former monk Tou Samut, who had joined the underground Indochinese Communist Party in 1946. Son Ngoc Minh stood behind Tou Samut as the most senior Cambodian communist. The communists used the Issarak name in hopes of uniting all Issarak groups under their banner and in 1951 Son Ngoc Minh would proclaim an embryonic Issarak government.

While the communists did have limited success drawing together disparate Issarak groups under the communist banner, they also added to the general confusion. The word “Issarak” had implied non-communist. Moreover, Son Ngoc Minh had chosen a
nom
de guerre
that consciously aped the name of the non-communist nationalist leader Son Ngoc Thanh. The confusion multiplied. Who was the original leader of the independence movement
who fled to Japan and joined the Japanese fascists? Which group was the original Issarak movement and which was led by the communists?

As one revolutionary said early in the war, “It was difficult to know who were the real Issaraks, the loyal revolutionaries and who were the bandits and robbers.”

Matters became more confused in 1951 for another reason. That year the Vietnamese officially restored their Communist Party after five years underground, now renamed the Vietnam Workers Party. In Cambodia the party kept the old name, Indochinese Communist Party, maintained the same organization with mixed units and cells of Cambodians and Vietnamese under Vietnamese control, and remained underground.

That same year the Cambodian communists took the first step toward creating their own party and secretly proclaimed the founding of a Khmer People's Revolutionary Party. The Vietnamese communists wrote the statutes for the KPRP and the draft platform, which they sent back to Cambodia for translation into the Khmer language and for approval. The Vietnamese described the KPRP as “not the vanguard party of the working class [the standard definition of a communist party] but the vanguard party of the nation gathering together all the patriotic and progressive elements of the Khmer population.”

Such an organization becomes a bona fide communist party only after taking other final steps—including holding a founding party congress, proclaiming the establishment of a Marxist-Leninist party, and eventually writing a party history. But the Cambodians were unable to take these measures for another nine years. In the interim, the KPRP never attained the status of an independent communist party of Cambodia either in terms of communist doctrine or in practice. Even after 1951, Cambodian communists were inducted into the underground Indochinese Communist Party. Membership in the KPRP did not constitute membership in a proper party. This vague situation not only confused Cambodian communists at the time, it led to thunderous debate decades later when Cambodians were fighting over the roots of their communist party. Did it grow directly out of the Indochinese Communist Party in 1951, and was it therefore subservient to the Vietnamese, or was it properly founded in 1960 by Cambodians far less dependent on Vietnam?

The anti-French war was dominated in the northwest by the non-communist Issarak groups who fought throughout most of the country. They often coordinated their fighting with the communist-led Issaraks, the UIF, adding to the confusion. Some Issaraks were nothing more than bandits; others were among the fiercest independence fighters. It was Cambodia's fate that
no one leader could bring them all together; the non-communist Issaraks did not trust the Vietnamese-dominated Khmer communists.

Since the French fought an Indochina-wide war, it was natural that the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao freedom fighters would join ranks to fight back. And what better teachers of revolt than Ho Chi Minh's communists, whose August Revolution of 1945 swept through Vietnam and was winning battle after battle? But the Vietnamese were more than teachers; they dictated to the Cambodians when and how to start their organizations; where and how to fight. The wars in Cambodia and Laos had to be subordinate to the needs for victory in Vietnam. The Vietnamese predominance behind the scenes was obvious and accounted, in part, for the small numbers fighting with the communist Issarak and Vietminh units. At most, only 5,700 Cambodians fought with the communists against the French.

The total Issarak forces numbered in the tens of thousands, but not under one organization. Some Issarak leaders openly worried about dependence on the Vietnamese communists and its meaning for the future. One conservative Buddhist leader warned: “We must not let our country be invaded by the Vietminh, even though they are patriots in their own country [Vietnam].” There were isolated attacks by Issaraks against the Vietminh, and some were murdered. The Vietminh force at a minimum strength of 3,000 troops was too large to be ignored. Moreover, the Vietminh had moved their southern military command headquarters out of Vietnam into southeastern Cambodia to avoid the French. Even Cambodian communists raised doubts. At the founding conference of the Issarak Association, one delegate remembers forcing the group to vote against considering an Indochinese communist federation under Vietnamese control.

The Vietminh, however, had not given up such an idea. In late 1951 they stated in a party document, “The Vietnamese Party reserves the right to supervise the activities of its brother parties in Cambodia and Laos. . . . Later, however, if conditions permit the three revolutionary parties of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos will be able to unite to form a single party: the Party of the Vietnam-Khmer-Laotian Federation.” However, the Lao formed their separate communist party in 1955, and the Cambodians did not hold a founding congress until 1960. By then, the “brother” parties had changed too much to consider such a proposition.

When Saloth Sar returned to Cambodia from France in 1953 to figure out what was really going on, he was just another student trained abroad
who joined thousands of Cambodians fighting a war for national independence. He became a member of the communist forces but a lowly one. There were already well-established leaders of the Cambodian communist movement, which was led by the ICP. The communists often fought beside the nationalist Khmer Issarak forces and had already formed a front group in hopes of bringing the groups under communist control.

But that never happened. Neither movement had produced a leader who had won the title of father of Cambodian independence. In 1953 the fight for independence was still led by disparate figures, still divided between Issarak and revolutionaries, still divided geographically, and still with little support from activists in the city of Phnom Penh. The war ended one year later at the Geneva Convention of 1954 with the movement just as divided. Prince Sihanouk had stepped into the vacuum, negotiated for independence from the French, and taken upon himself the title of father of independence. He defeated the communists and won over most of the Khmer Issaraks.