When the War Was Over (16 page)

Within one decade after his return from Paris, Saloth Sar joined other Cambodian communists to finally create a party in Phnom Penh and join it with the surviving activists in all parts of the countryside. And they did it on their own, with little help from the Vietnamese. By founding this nationwide party the communists fulfilled the necessary prerequisite for challenging the rule of Prince Sihanouk and later Lon Nol.

How this was accomplished is crucial to understanding how the Khmer Rouge ruled once they were in power. Much of this history is hidden; the Cambodian communists waited until 1967 to initiate armed insurrection in their country, and they only joined the Indochina-wide war in 1970. They spent most of the preceding years in obscurity, building their party in secret, forming allegiances among themselves and with their communist allies in China and Vietnam, and reacting to the violent twists and turns of the war exploding around them.

The Khmer Rouge see this period as one of repeated betrayals, by those whom they trusted as well as those whom they feared. They felt they were held back by foreign communists and underestimated by their fellow Khmer, including Sihanouk, who tried to eliminate them with his police. When they finally seized power the Khmer Rouge set about to prove to these people and to themselves that they had been worthy of better treatment. They set out to prove that, despite others' judgments, they were the best communists in Asia.

Their years of obscurity seemed a mirror image of their country's history: the small, underestimated Cambodian communist party in the small,
neglected country of Cambodia would find an exalted place in revolutionary lore.

Saloth Sar arrived in Phnom Penh a member of the French Communist Party. His only connection to a Cambodian political party was with the debilitated Democratic Party. Sar immediately sought out the communist Issarak movement so he could take part in the fighting. These were the last months of the war, and the young student had no idea his service to the cause would be so short.

Sar had learned little about the Cambodian resistance while in Paris, despite occasional clandestine meetings. It had been easier to receive news about events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and about Ho Chi Minh's revolution in Vietnam and Mao Zedong's victory in China. Sar arrived in Paris just after Mao's triumph, and by the time he left the Chinese revolution had captured the romantic imagination of the French left. Communist writers had returned to Paris from China with the first glowing reports. Peasants were said to be in charge in China. Reason was said to have replaced coercion through discussion, criticism, and self-criticism. The Chinese revolution seemed a welcome respite from the discouraging saga of the self-centered, despotic Soviet revolution.

On his return home, Saloth Sar visited his brother Loth Suong and told him of his work on the Yugoslav road crew and a secret meeting of Cambodian resistance fighters in Spain. Sar was also full of praise for the Soviet Union. Suong was surprised at the change in his younger brother. When Sar had lived with him in Phnom Penh while studying at the technical college he had done little but study, or so Suong thought. He said of Sar, years later: “He didn't run after girls or drink very much. He worked hard at his studies, he was a good person. . . . He was good as a child, not nasty or vicious.”

Sar spent as little time as possible in Phnom Penh. The situation was distressingly similar to his prediction the year earlier in the article he penned in the Paris student magazine. One month after he returned to the capital, Sar watched as Sihanouk left for France to begin negotiating for Cambodian independence. There was urgency in the air. The Democratic Party proved incapable of stopping the king, although Sar joined others in trying to push the Democrats toward a bold, leftist position to prevent Sihanouk from claiming to be the father of Cambodian independence.

It was the vacuum Sar had most feared. The non-communist Issaraks spoke only of removing the French colonialists. The communist-led Issarak
Front wanted to remove the French and American imperialists and found a Cambodian “People's Democracy,” but it would be under Vietnamese direction. The front spoke of the unity of the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao freedom fighters and, in secret, of the creation of a federation among the three nations. There was no history in the region of such a federal system, certainly not one where power was shared equally. The good news was that Sihanouk was criticized by the front for his feudalism and dependence on the French.

The Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions were on Sar's mind when he made contact with the communists in eastern Cambodia. Another of his brothers made the initial introductions, and Sar transferred his French Communist Party membership to membership in a cell of the underground Indochinese Communist Party. It was a cell made of ten Cambodians and ten Vietnamese.

The young boulevard politician had a rude introduction to revolutionary politics. He was appointed a member of a production unit and given what he considered coolie duties. His sister-in-law, Khieu Thirith, Ieng Sary's wife, said Saloth Sar resented being treated like a raw peasant recruit, especially since his leaders were Vietnamese, not Cambodians. “It was a very sad experience,” she said. “The Vietminh put all the students from Paris in the background. They gave them kitchen chores, to carry excrement. Saloth Sar had to carry excrement for the Vietnamese. There was no political work.”

The Vietnamese remember otherwise, saying Sar was taught how “to work with the masses at the base, to build up the Issarak committees at the village level, member by member.”

Cambodians who had not gone to Paris, and had not seen themselves as leading a separate, independent Cambodian revolution, were less concerned about Vietnamese domination. Vorn Veth, a young student leader of a 1952 provincial demonstration, also became a leader of the Khmer Rouge movement. He wrote that he had been pleased at first to work with the Vietnamese. “I was happy with their propaganda that they had come to help. In every place there were Vietnamese filling important roles; as for us Khmers, we just helped them. I was not interested in any of this, because they talked of international consciousness, about Khmer-Vietnamese consciousness, and I considered it reasonable.”

In all likelihood the Vietnamese treated Saloth Sar no better or worse than other Cambodians, who, on the whole, grew more loyal to the Vietminh as a result of their wartime experience, since no other outsiders were supporting their war. And the significance of such nationalistic questions as
who should control the Cambodian communist movement paled in comparison to the dilemma posed by King Norodom Sihanouk. While Saloth Sar was fighting in the jungle, Sihanouk devised a campaign he called the “Royal Crusade for Independence” which cut the ground out from under the communists.

In 1953 Sihanouk declared martial law, citing the growing war, and abolished the national assembly experiment, neatly tying the hands of his critics, particularly in the Democratic Party. Then he set off on a well-publicized world tour to convince the French to transfer their powers to him to prevent a communist takeover of Cambodia. Sihanouk argued that he would establish a neutral, independent Cambodia that would forbid any army the use of Cambodian territory to fight a war.

Sihanouk asserted that if Cambodia won its independence “peacefully” there would be no reason for communist insurgents to continue fighting in his country. And the king made it clear that if he controlled an independent Cambodia then he would refuse to fight for or against the Vietminh—an important consideration for the French, who were facing military defeat in Vietnam.

Sihanouk returned from his world tour and went into “exile” in Cambodia's northwestern province of Battambang. He had nearly 30,000 Royal Cambodian troops and police with him, an impressive show of strength. On November 9, 1953, Paris granted Sihanouk his wish. Worn down by the Vietnam War and having only marginal concern about losing Cambodia, France transferred its major powers over to King Sihanouk. This was how he declared himself the father of Cambodian independence.

Immediately there were large desertions from the Issarak movement. Most non-communist Issarak soldiers accepted Sihanouk's independence as legitimate; even some communist soldiers laid down their arms to return to their homes as subjects of independent Cambodia. Far more communists who knew that their war efforts had paved the way for Sihanouk were infuriated and condemned Sihanouk's “independence comedy.”

The Vietminh won their tremendous victory at Dien Bien Phu, forcing the French to negotiate. In late March 1954, two months before the conference which took place in May in Geneva, a combined Khmer Issarak/Vietminh force launched an attack from Vietnam into northeastern Cambodia against the “puppet king,” now charged with being the client of the United States. To their surprise, Sihanouk personally directed a sustained counterattack. That seemingly insignificant battle allowed the king to argue in Geneva that the Khmer communists could not pretend to claim a territorial
base inside Cambodia. And he was correct; the Khmer Issarak communists had followed the Vietminh war strategy that focused first on winning the war in Vietnam and had failed to protect the standing of the Khmer communists in their own country.

Saloth Sar's nightmare prediction had come true. Years later he would argue within the Cambodian communist movement against any linkage of the Cambodian revolution to the larger aims of the Vietnamese revolution. When the Khmer communists arrived at Geneva they saw how astute the comic king had been.

The Geneva Conference was called to bring an end to the conflicts in Korea and Indochina. The Korean War was first on the agenda; the Indochina conflict was taken up in May 1954. Included in those talks were France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and the three Associated States of Indochina—Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The war in Vietnam was of primary concern, but Cambodia proved to be a more difficult question than the communist states had anticipated.

France had given Cambodia major self-governing powers the previous year, and the Geneva Conference completed the process. Cambodia was recognized as an independent nation. This was accomplished without the participation of the Cambodian communists. They were not even seated at Geneva, as were the Vietnamese and Lao communists. By the time the conference ended the Cambodian communists had lost everything.

They had no territory to use as a staging base in their country. They lost the right to bear arms or to participate in the commission set up to study how they, the chief remaining resistance fighters, would be treated. The Lao communists were given two Lao provinces near the Vietnamese border as their own territory, and they were given all the rights denied to the Cambodian communists. The Vietnamese communists, however, lost through compromise much of the territory they had won. They agreed to a “temporary” division of Vietnam. Of all the Indochinese leaders, Sihanouk left Geneva the biggest winner, and he had done nearly nothing to fight French colonialism.

The Geneva disaster for the Cambodian communists was one of a long series of communist betrayals of smaller allies at the conference. The Soviet Union had launched the Koreans into a war to drive the United States from Korea and had then to ask the Chinese to save the situation at a tremendous cost in Chinese lives, including the son of Mao Z edong. China became the “aggressor” state in the Korean War and lost its chance for a UN membership. Exhausted, threatened by a U.S. military campaign to encircle China,
the Chinese agreed to Soviet entreaties to allow the division of Korea. The Chinese agreed to that division and now they would help broker the division of Vietnam to prevent those borders with China from becoming military bases for the United States.

The Vietnamese, facing strong Chinese and milder Soviet advice as well as the American threat to intervene against communism in Indochina, a threat more formidable with the release of American troops from warfare in Korea, agreed to give up southern Vietnam and Cambodia in exchange for North Vietnam and the part of Laos that borders it. That left the Cambodian communists to sacrifice all and gain nothing. After Geneva, entreaties by communists to follow “international proletarianism” would mean little to the Khmer Rouge leadership.

The Khmer communists had nothing. Neither the Russians, the Chinese, nor the Vietnamese were willing to risk helping them. They could either try to survive in Cambodia or accept a Vietnamese program to go into exile in North Vietnam to wait for another Vietnamese-sponsored war of liberation. Like their earlier experiences with the French, the Thai, and the Japanese, Geneva was to the Cambodians an example of why they could not trust foreigners. Their later, highly developed sense of “xenophobia” was not without foundation.

The Soviet Union left Geneva with a better international reputation and better relations with the French. The Chinese and Vietnamese communists got an end to war (for the moment). But the Cambodians failed to secure the minimum guarantee of no U.S. bases in Cambodia. If none were ever established under the Sihanouk regime, it was because the U.S. mishandled Sihanouk, not because of promises made at Geneva.