When the War Was Over (17 page)

None too pleased with the Geneva outcome and worried that they would suffer further setbacks, the Vietnamese communists reached a decision that would haunt them for the next three decades. In order to protect the Cambodian communist movement from Sihanouk, and to mold it in their own image, the Vietnamese split it in two. Son Ngoc Minh, the top leader, and some 1,000 Cambodian fighters went into exile in North Vietnam, most smuggled in from Cambodia with the returning Vietminh troops, who were required to leave Cambodia under the terms of the Geneva Accords. Some of these Cambodians were ordered to leave their country by their Khmer Issarak or Vietminh commanders, others volunteered. Ieng Lim, one of those young Cambodian soldiers, recalled being asked by the Vietnamese if he wanted to go to North Vietnam “for an education.” He said yes with no idea how long his education would last.

The Vietnamese dressed the Cambodians in Vietnamese uniforms and then scattered one Cambodian with every ten Vietnamese as they stood at dockside in southern Vietnam for inspection by the International Control Commission set up by the Geneva Conference. Lim said the Cambodians were told not to say a word if asked whether they were going north against their will. Everyone kept quiet, and the Cambodians were boarded on a Polish ship for the voyage to North Vietnam. Lim was told he could return home in two years. He had to stay for sixteen years. He studied Vietnamese, learned a technical skill, and then joined the North Vietnamese army, in which he trained new recruits and won a posting at the military academy in Song Tay. In such a fashion, over half the members of Cambodia's fragile communist movement were scattered throughout North Vietnam, neither building their own revolutionary army nor helping those who had remained behind in Cambodia.

Among those who remained in Cambodia was Saloth Sar. He must have earned some degree of respect from the Vietnamese, for he was one of twenty Cambodians selected for secret political work inside the country. He was smuggled back into Phnom Penh at war's end in 1954, disguised as an aide-de-camp of a Vietnamese officer. But neither he nor the others who stayed in Cambodia were equipped to defend themselves from the wrath of Sihanouk. The amputation of the communist movement in 1955 with 1,000 in Cambodia and 1,000 in North Vietnam created a political schism that burst open with a foul vengeance twenty years later.

Most Cambodians believed the war was over. Cambodia was independent; all foreign troops—the French colonial army and the Vietminh-agreed to leave under the Geneva Accords. Free elections were promised in 1955. Under instructions from Hanoi, the Cambodian communists regrouped in Phnom Penh to set an entirely different course for their movement.

Phnom Penh was virgin territory for most of the communists. They had never had a base in the capital; many were strangers to the city. Their political leader Son Ngoc Minh took up residence in Hanoi and became a titular figurehead. The second in command, Sieu Heng, the military leader for the communist Khmer Issaraks, was given control over the movement and put in charge of the countryside. Tou Samouth, the propagandist and third in ranking, took charge of the party in the capital and the provincial towns. These two men led no more than 1,000 Cambodians who could be considered followers, or sympathizers of the communist movement. It was a small, vulnerable group.

The communists adopted a three-prong strategy in the capital, similar to that of the Vietnamese communists in Saigon, who were also weak in that city. It was a cross between café politics and union organizing. The communists set up a legitimate political party to contest the 1955 elections; it was named the Pracheachon (“People's”) Group. Known leftist intellectuals and politicians within the movement operated openly in the Pracheachon. Others, like Saloth Sar, took up occupations as teachers, writers, and journalists in order to keep their party affiliation secret and hide their assignment to recruit new members and build cells among the students, workers, and intellectuals of Phnom Penh. A third group of secret communists was assigned the task of working within the Sihanouk regime itself.

There was no more talk of war. The Cambodian communists and their sympathizers had one hope—to begin building a movement that could take advantage of the 1955 elections and find more recruits for their cause through their other organizing efforts. Under the Geneva agreement, they were forbidden to carry arms and ordered to cease subversive activities. And the communists could hardly consider an armed confrontation with Sihanouk despite the Geneva Accords. Sihanouk controlled the army and police force.

There was also the larger question facing the communists: What would they fight for? Not independence or democracy. France was no longer the colonial master, and elections were in the offing. Their platform became modernization, socialism, neutrality, and anti-Americanism, a platform Sihanouk made his own all too quickly.

That the communists survived this period was somewhat miraculous; less determined men and women would have given up as Sihanouk proved to be a master politician and a ruthless enemy of the left. Phnom Penh was his city and he knew his opposition well. The old Democratic Party had been revived by an infusion of new, sophisticated faces, including Thiounn Mumm, one of the brothers from Paris. That party had won elections in 1946, 1947, and 1951 but since then many of its original leaders had been coopted by Sihanouk. However, if its group combined forces with the new leftist Pracheachon Party for the 1955 election, the king would face a formidable threat to his rule. This was one of Saloth Sar's assignments from Tou Samut and he succeeded in setting up a de facto alliance. In response, Sihanouk stepped down from the throne, abdicating in favor of his father, whom he appointed king. Now, as Prince Norodom Sihanouk, he was free to run in the elections. It was a master stroke.

Sihanouk set up his own political party—the Sangkum Party, or Subjects Socialist Party—and, using his considerable charm and promises of patronage,
convinced most of the rightists and centrists to abolish their small parties and join the Sangkum. Only the leftists and the rightist supporters of Son Ngoc Thanh remained to compete with the prince. Sihanouk was in no mood to share power, especially not with these groups who claimed, rightly, that they had fought longer and harder for independence. The opposition also said the Geneva Conference, not Sihanouk's negotiations with the French, had conferred independence on Cambodia. They campaigned against the American military aid Sihanouk had accepted in May 1955 and the threat the Americans posed in neighboring Vietnam.

First Sihanouk, who remained head of state, tried to ban the Pracheachon from contesting the elections and allowed it only after “strong prodding” from the Indian chairman of the International Control Commission for Indochina set up under the Geneva Accords. Boxed in on that side, he postponed the elections until September and turned to his military to harass his opponents. During the campaign, twenty members of the Pracheachon were arrested and jailed along with three of their candidates. At least two were killed in the countryside. The Democratic Party was also targeted: one candidate jailed, one leader fired upon by the police. Thiounn Mumm fled the country during the campaign and went into exile in France for the next sixteen years. Sihanouk's Sangkum captured every seat, thanks in part to the police but largely because of the prince's popularity. The Pracheachon's greatest accomplishment was to fill the police dossiers with names of all the leftists who had exposed themselves in the election.

That was the first round. Sihanouk was not gracious in victory. He struck back at the communists fiercely, unwilling to allow them any role in his country. He did so not only to preserve his total control but also out of fear that they were subservient to the Vietnamese communists and, therefore, a foothold for future Vietnamese expansion. Luck was with the prince. Sieu Heng, the man in overall control of the communists, defected to the prince and agreed to become a secret agent for him. Heng later said he defected because he saw no point in continuing a communist struggle once independence had been won. During Heng's last years as general secretary of the movement, he informed on the communists in the countryside who were under his direct supervision, providing information that allowed Sihanouk's military chief, Lon Nol, secretly to destroy communist cells throughout the country. By the time Heng openly left the party and rallied to Sihanouk in 1959, nearly 90 percent of the rural cadre, or staff, had been lost. Some had been murdered by Sihanouk's police, others quit in fear of their lives, others disappeared.

The rural stronghold of the communists collapsed under Sihanouk's pressure. There remained isolated groups of peasants loyal to the communist cause but no organization to keep them together, much less expand their membership. Sihanouk's psychological warfare added to the fear in the countryside. He never openly proclaimed a war against the Cambodian communists, never made a public display of defections or purges. He fought them in the shadows. His soldiers and police murdered communists without acknowledgments and certainly without benefit of a trial. Sihanouk distanced himself from his own witch hunt, avoiding the appearance of ruthlessness. Blood debts accumulated, but silently. The violence was submerged as Sihanouk set about to rule the country as a democratically endorsed supreme monarch.

Now the Cambodian communist movement had to succeed in Phnom Penh or wither away. And it was in the city that Saloth Sar was able to rise above his comrades. He had made his mark by acting as liaison between the Pracheachon Party and the Democratic Party during the first election. He is remembered for helping write statutes and draft constitutions for the Pracheachon, a skill learned certainly in Paris. He had changed since his earlier years in Phnom Penh as a technical college student; Sar now had the confidence and the polish of a young demagogue, and he performed well. He was also newly married to Khieu Ponnary, a respected intellectual in bourgeois circles.

The Pracheachon Party weathered its defeat at the polls, and, with Sar's help, the communists concentrated on their aboveground newspapers, finding their message had an appeal among the young. Sihanouk's Sangkum leaders were largely older conservatives; the communists knew that if Sihanouk had not stuffed ballot boxes and harassed their candidates they could have won a number of seats in the new assembly. So did Sihanouk, and he moved quickly to co-opt the issues and appeal of the left.

He undertook a sophisticated campaign to isolate the communists in the city and win over their natural allies in international affairs. Sihanouk used the time-honored weapon of questioning whether Phnom Penh's leftists were patriotic Cambodians or really “friends of the Vietminh who came to trouble our international security.” Then he disarmed foreign communist powers by offering them recognition and friendship in accordance with his neutralist foreign policy. He refused to join the American-dominated Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) and supported, instead, the five principles of coexistence announced at the Bandung Conference of Afro-Asian Nations in 1955, where he was one of the acknowledged leaders.

The city's leftists privately took credit for steering Sihanouk toward a neutralist stance, but when they congratulated him publicly Sihanouk dismissed their praise. Through editorials in his newspapers, Sihanouk asked if the reason for Pracheachon's applause in favor of neutrality was the “foreign support” behind the group. And when Sihanouk praised communist countries he made sure his audience understood that the “goodwill” of nations like China and the Soviet Union was not to be confused with the “bad faith” of local Cambodian communists.

His refusal to join SEATO was rewarded with praise from North Vietnam and China's decision to give its first foreign aid grant to Cambodia in 1956. The American reaction was extreme. America's allies—South Vietnam and Thailand—imposed a temporary economic embargo against Cambodia, warning Sihanouk against a stronger neutralist position. But Sihanouk refused to allow his country to become even a minor actor in another Indochina war.

Sihanouk held elections to retain power, unlike Ngo Dinh Diem, who had refused to allow countrywide elections after 1954 because he believed Ho Chi Minh would win. The North Vietnamese, with China's concurrence, accepted Sihanouk's neutralist stance as tactically important for their cause. Cambodia's neutrality helped the communist powers of Asia which feared any increase in American military presence in the region, but it also helped push the local Cambodian communists toward political oblivion, which was Sihanouk's goal.

Sihanouk was uncanny. As each situation had warranted, he had willingly collaborated with the Vichy French, the Japanese fascists, and then the French colonialists again. Now he was a leader of third world nationalism because that was the path to saving his power and his country. The former collaborator was now celebrated in his own country and the world as the symbol of modern Cambodian independence.