When the War Was Over (18 page)

In all of Asia, the man or group that won such an honor, whether the communists in Vietnam, the Congress Party in India, or the monarchy of Thailand that prevented European colonization, enjoyed a mantle of legitimacy that covered any number of sins. In post—World War II Asia, independence had been the premier issue. To challenge a country's “liberator” was to court disaster.

The Cambodian communists believed they had been robbed of a revolution. While their Vietnamese comrades from Paris, people like Nguyen Khac Vien, returned from their studies to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh's “national liberation struggle,” the Cambodians studying in Paris came back
to a political monstrosity, in their terms—an independent Cambodia ruled by a “democratic” god-king. Worse, the god-king called himself a socialist and enjoyed the friendship of the communist states of Asia.

And at this stage Sihanouk knew exactly how to capitalize on all of his advantages. The Americans and French gave him the military and economic aid he needed, and the country enjoyed a small spurt of prosperity. He coveted and protected his unique position among the peasants as the anointed god-king. He selected city politicians to represent rural constituencies and made sure they never became leaders in the eyes of the peasants. Through public relations he convinced a large portion of the Cambodian population and much of the world that Cambodia was becoming a charming, neutralist paradise.

In this ebullient beginning of independent Cambodia, Sihanouk put his royal stamp on everything. The monarchy remained one of the pillars of the country in the constitution. The royal palace remained the center of society: Prince Sihanouk with his wife, Princess Monique, were at the pinnacle, not the king and queen, Sihanouk's father and mother. And Sihanouk heavily subsidized the symbols of the throne—the royal ballet corps, the royal palace and court, the royal museum and antiquities, the heavy royal hand at every turn. The prince enjoyed a status that would have been the envy of his immediate royal predecessors—total control over the country without the domineering protection of a foreign power.

Revolutionary spirit among the communists was severely tested in this period, as the party history later acknowledged. Even before they realized that their own leader had secretly defected to Sihanouk, believing there was nothing left to fight for, the young communists in the city were hard-pressed to find their own issues and the safety to promote them. They adopted a classic “united front” policy, strongly urged by Hanoi, to recruit new sympathizers with a broad leftist political campaign that would also nudge Sihanouk to adopt leftist policies. But Sihanouk made it a habit to know the talents and inclinations of the bourgeoisie in the capital. He barred known leftists from teaching in the state-run schools that he made the centerpiece of modern Cambodia.

Sihanouk sensed that the leftists' one remaining field for converts was the country's idealistic youth. He not only barred the left from teaching at state schools in the country, but he sought to kill their influence abroad. He continued his earlier practice of canceling government scholarships on political grounds. And in a 1957 speech opening a new Cambodian student hostel in Paris, the prince warned the students not to adopt provocative “foreign propaganda
and ideologies,” specifically the Western concept of communism. He reminded them of their duties “as the elite . . . to respect the national ideal” of the Cambodian people, the Buddhist faith, and the king—the three pillars of the country's constitution and his rule.

Although he allowed the semblance of a free press, Sihanouk retained the right to punish authors of what he considered seditious material. One of the first arrested was Saloth Sar's brother, who was jailed for a short while simply for writing an article questioning why Sihanouk accepted American military aid. (The young communists may have known the money was to be used by Sihanouk's police force to harass the scattered leftists.)

Yet the Phnom Penh branch of the communist movement pushed on with their “political struggle.” They opened their own private lycée, named Kampucheabutr, “Child of Cambodia.” Saloth Sar and later his friend Ieng Sary taught at Kampucheabutr. Students were attracted to the leftists' cause, and workers were willing to listen to their speeches. During this otherwise bleak period the young leaders began to develop organizing skills and ingenious methods for survival that proved crucial later on. From 1955 until 1959 they tried to organize the workers in the few Phnom Penh factories, realizing fully that Sihanouk's economic policies were directed against creating a modern urban proletariat that might create unrest. They achieved a few temporary successes. In 1956, workers at the city's power and water utilities and at the privately owned British-American tobacco factory simultaneously threatened to strike for better wages and job protection. Sihanouk suspected communists were behind the strike and quashed it.

Through a spokesman the prince declared: “Cambodia has never had strikes; the government has no intention to permit any now.” The first recorded labor unrest in independent Cambodia ended by strikers backing down after the government refused to grant workers the right to organize.

The communists were more successful organizing the railway workers. They were led by Keo Meas, the talented secret head of the city's communist committee. Unfortunately, Meas, as one of the public members of Pracheachon, ran in the 1958 elections as one of that party's few candidates for a national assembly seat. Sihanouk followed his normal practice of stuffing the ballot box and harassing the voters and Keo Meas lost. Having made himself especially vulnerable to the police, he soon after went underground to avoid certain arrest. He ended up in Vietnam and his flight meant the loss of a rare experienced leader. Meas had fought in the First Indochina War and had built up good communist contacts in the city. He did not return for nearly twenty years, his status greatly diminished. His successor as head of
the city's communists and liaison to the countryside was Saloth Sar. Ieng Sary had returned to Phnom Penh the year before, in 1957, and the two were poised to exert their influence over Phnom Penh's leftists.

Tou Samouth, the leader in charge of all communist activities in the cities and towns, was in and out of Phnom Penh and also visited Vietnam. The gap grew between communists in the city and the crumbling movement in the countryside. And with the Pracheachon strategy failing, the communists in the city began narrowing their approach. The respectable, legal political party method of influencing the country proved too dangerous. Now, after 1958, they organized through their clandestine movement and newspapers, and they infiltrated their own leftists into Sihanouk's government.

Sihanouk was growing in confidence. He feared a backlash neither from his extralegal harassment of communists in Cambodia nor from his burgeoning friendships with foreign communist countries. He saw little choice in accepting the latter course. Diem was proving to be an enemy, encouraging small border conflicts which Sihanouk saw as part of the American design to embroil Cambodia in the building war climate in South Vietnam. Sihanouk sharpened his anti-imperialist stance and lashed out against American attempts to dominate the world, even though he continued to accept American aid to finance his military and balance his budget.

It was this difficult position that earned Sihanouk the international reputation of being “quixotic” and “emotional”; he was called “the prince on a tightrope.” It also robbed the Cambodian communists of a public criticism of Sihanouk. They, too, were walking a peculiar tightrope. What was imperialist about a Sihanouk who accorded
de jure
recognition to the People's Republic of China and signed a trade agreement with North Vietnam? The communists would later claim that they were responsible for pushing Sihanouk to this position, but there is little evidence to support it.

Two of the communists' most talented supporters were inserted into Sihanouk's cabinet in this period—Hou Youn, who had written the 1955 analysis of the Cambodian peasantry, and Hu Nim, who later wrote a wellreasoned doctoral thesis about the adverse effects of the Sihanouk government's policies on the livelihood of the Cambodian peasantry. They became members of Sihanouk's party, and while in the government they gave the communists reports on the regime. But they became the whipping boys for rightists' complaints against Sihanouk, perhaps the role Sihanouk had expected them to play, and within two years they were booted out of the government as part of Sihanouk's first major public campaign against Cambodian leftists.

The silent war between Sihanouk and the communists entered a new, more dangerous stage. The opening shot was fired on the evening of October 9, 1959, when the editor of the communist front newspaper
Pracheachon
was assaulted. He died two days later. Sihanouk officially condemned the assassination, but his minister of information, Long Boret, used the occasion to criticize another unnamed leftist newspaper for “using” the assassination to throw doubts on the Sihanouk government. In fact, as the American embassy in Phnom Penh reported privately to Washington at the time, the “plausible” story was that General Lon Nol, in charge of the police and army, had ordered the murder after Sihanouk had told him the newspaper was causing too much trouble.

Now the cycle of government murder and repression that had plagued the rural communists was unleashed on those in the city. But in Phnom Penh such a secret war could not be waged in the shadows. Here the adversaries knew each other well. In Phnom Penh the communists could count on the liberal intelligentsia and growing bourgeoisie to attempt to uphold civil rights and protest random violence.

The communist leader who appealed most eloquently to such instincts for fair play was Khieu Samphan, recently returned from Paris and the editor of a new French-language newspaper in the city called
L'Observateur,
the journal Boret had attacked without naming it. Samphan made an immediate impact on the French-speaking elite of the city, particularly the students. He wrote in a modern journalistic fashion about subjects ignored in the other papers, which specialized in fawning articles about Sihanouk. Samphan conducted sociological inquiries into the underside of the city, exposing the misery of the unemployed, alcoholics, bread hawkers, and child laborers “who wore the faces of old people and who were deprived of the joy of youth.”

When the
Pracheachon
editor was attacked, Samphan had written an editorial echoing the still official communist line linking their idea of modern democracy with Buddhism: “That the editor of a legally constituted, government-sanctioned newspaper could be struck down like a dog in the street is to be sure an example of barbarous conduct without precedent in a Buddhist country such as ours.”

There was no attack against Sihanouk. That would have landed Samphan and the newspaper in the courts if not in jail. Sihanouk assumed Samphan was a communist, and he said of him and his presumed communist backers, “Their classic technique consists, if you will forgive the image, of kissing me on the cheek while kicking me on the tibia. . . .”

L'Observateur
was not only communist-funded, it was the organ of the communists returned from France who were proving the strongest survivors in Phnom Penh. Ieng Thirith, the wife of Ieng Sary, paid most of the newspaper's operating expenses out of her salary from two teaching jobs. In this period, Thirith said, she and other wives had to work long hours to support their families and the party while their husbands, many blackballed from well-paying jobs, devoted their time to organizing.

“I stopped my political activities so I could teach at a government school. My sister [Saloth Sar's wife] and I, both of us, were teachers in government lycées. Since we had to live, I had to have a job.”

It was the period of Sihanouk's dramatic expansion of government schools, and there were few teachers with Thirith's and Ponnary's credentials. Thirith's degree in English from the Sorbonne was especially valuable. Her lycée director asked her to work double time, and she accepted. The party needed the money.

When Sihanouk attempted to coopt Thirith, and through her perhaps her husband, by offering her a position in the government, she refused, on orders of the party. She was expected to earn the money for the newspaper and other activities. It was a burden of honor she never forgot. “I could work as many extra hours as I wanted [at the lycée], so I earned much money—so much money I could have built a villa or bought a car but I didn't.”

The communists at first approached the Soviets for funds. “We asked to borrow the money from the Soviet ambassador in Phnom Penh,” Thirith said. “It was only 10,000 riel but he refused.” In 1959 the Cambodians had no contact with the Chinese. The communists in Phnom Penh felt they had been let down once more by their fraternal international comrades.

It was that same year their leader Sieu Heng publicly rallied to Sihanouk, a betrayal they had not expected. Previously the communists' problems in the countryside seemed centered around Sihanouk's popularity and his police. Sihanouk was seen by the peasants not only as a
deva-raj
but as the leading patriot; his police were efficient. After the open defection of Heng, who was in charge of the countryside, another seed of mistrust was planted within the small ranks.

Communists around the countryside were periodically arrested and jailed even though they, too, adhered to a policy of political struggle, not armed opposition to Sihanouk, and abided by laws of the land. Yet according to the party some 90 percent of their followers in the countryside became victims of the police, fear of the police, or malaise. It was possible for an outsider to travel through the countryside and agree with Sihanouk's
assessment that peace and tranquillity reigned in Cambodia as in few other modern periods.