When the War Was Over (19 page)

As the year 1960 approached, the Cambodian communists faced near extinction in the countryside and narrowed opportunities in the city. Sihanouk was a valued ally of the Vietnamese and Chinese communists and an adept manipulator of the communists in his own country. That year the Cambodian communists concentrated their efforts on organizing a party congress, a goal they had for some time but one that took on a new urgency since their movement seemed to be drifting into political oblivion. The congress was to include representatives from the rural and urban areas, uniting the disparate areas and creating a full-fledged Marxist-Leninist party for Cambodia for the first time.

This was no isolated phenomenon. It echoed and most likely was directed by earlier decisions by the Vietnamese communists in Hanoi and in Laos. In plenary meetings of the Vietnamese Workers Party central committee held in January and May 1959, Hanoi finally acquiesced to demands from the communists in southern Vietnam to move from political to armed struggle against the Diem regime. The northern communists approved using “revolutionary violence to oppose counterrevolutionary violence” by Diem against the southerners, and “to resort to armed struggle combined with political struggle.” The northerners began building the Ho Chi Minh trail to the south and sending down supplies and men.

In Laos a similar decision was reached whereby the Pathet Lao, led by the Lao communists, began to engage in open armed struggle and abandon the purely political fight within a collapsing coalition government. The Lao had formed their own party at a first congress in 1955, the People's Party of Laos, which was announced only to its still secret members on March 22, 1955. By 1960 their army and its base in two provinces bordering on North Vietnam, guaranteed by the Geneva Accords, were crucial to securing the Ho Chi Minh trail to South Vietnam as well as pursuing Lao communist goals of defeating the American allies in their own country. The Cambodian communists were in no position to advocate an armed battle against Sihanouk. They needed first to form a party with the remnants of their communist movement.

The acceleration of the revolutionary movements in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia was undoubtedly directed by Hanoi. In the next decade the North Vietnamese hoped to triumph throughout Vietnam, a goal which they believed required an Indochina-wide strategy. But Cambodia's place in these plans proved to be one of Hanoi's enduring problems.

Sihanouk, meanwhile, made bolder plans to solidify his power and solve his communist problem at home. His father, the king, had died, and Sihanouk wanted to create a new life position for himself as a princely head of state. In the process, he felt he had to silence the left. By now the combined circulation of
L'Observateur
and the three leftist Khmer-language papers—
Pracheachon,
Mittapheap
(“Fraternity”), and
Ekapheap
(“Solidarity”) —was some 10,000 copies. Sihanouk opened up a campaign of intimidation against their popular journalists. On July 13, 1960, the police attacked Khieu Samphan in broad daylight. Ten men stopped him, dragged him off his bicycle, and beat him up. They then photographed him and circulated the pictures around Phnom Penh.

Samphan and other leftists were secretly arrested, their newspapers shut down. Their staff members were either imprisoned or interrogated. Sihanouk privately claimed he had prevented a coup d'état planned by the communists, an allegation without apparent foundation. The prince clearly wanted to rob the left of its base within the intelligentsia, but it is a mystery why he felt he had to go to such extremes. Samphan was held without charge in jail for two months until September 21, 1960, when he was released again without explanation. One week later the First Party Congress of the Cambodian communists was convened in empty railcars warehoused at Phnom Penh's main rail station.

The communists meeting in the railcars in September 1960 may have considered their situation nearly desperate, but they had attracted a strong if still small following in their five years organizing in the capital from 1955 to 1960. They had the skeleton for a communist party and, later, an army. Their strongest appeal was to students, whom they reached as teachers or writers, a common beginning for communist movements worldwide. They taught in private and government schools, published in their own newspapers, and presented Cambodia's youth with a compelling message to do away with the stifling feudal life of Phnom Penh and agitate for a modern robust democracy.

One of the students who heeded their call was an orphan from the provinces, a young man named Bu Phat. He typified the sort of student communist who filled the ranks of the early Khmer Rouge movement and later became twisted by the war and revolution. He rose to become a provincial officer and bureaucrat, then an executioner, and finally a victim. When
the communists were founding the party in 1960, Phat was already a communist in the making without knowing it.

Phat was born in 1938, the youngest of seven children raised on a farm in Takeo province. His parents died when he was quite young; his rearing was supervised by his eldest sister and eldest brother. They sent him to study at provincial schools until he was sixteen years old and began Buddhist studies at a monastery. It was still the custom for young boys to spend some time in monasteries with no intention of becoming a monk, particularly boys raised in the countryside.

He did well in the monastery, mastering the curriculum (which was taught largely by rote), the ritual, and the discipline and accepting the austerity of the training. In one year Phat received a first degree, and in 1955, at the age of seventeen, he moved to Phnom Penh to study for the next degree at a monastery in the capital. He lived with his eldest brother, who was a paratrooper in Sihanouk's army.

Phat excelled at the new monastery, but the move to the city, his first view of Phnom Penh and life beyond the rice fields and villages, made him restless. He decided to return to secular studies and enrolled in a new private lycée, the Kampucheabutr. The academic requirements were not as stiff as at the more prestigious government schools, and tuition was low. Unknown to Phat, the school was also the home of Cambodia's young communists.

Phat's life changed instantly. Neither the monastery nor the paratrooper barracks had yielded many friends. The city of some 300,000 people was large by his standards, its ways sometimes brusque. But in this new school Phat found friends, sophisticated city students, including a best friend who regularly invited Phat to his home. This classmate was the son of Nop Bophan, a secret communist who was assassinated by Sihanouk's police three years later. Phat fondly remembered the gatherings at Bophan's home, especially lazy games of kick shuttlecock in the evenings played with bright young men who turned out to be writers and editors at the
Pracheachon
newspaper. Phat felt as if he had found a new family, a group of young men who treated him with “esteem” and “closeness.” Within one year Phat was working at the
Pracheachon.

First Phat hawked the newspapers around the city. Then he made his own contributions, pieces written in the Cambodian folk style known as
ayay,
which in loose translation means “talking blues.” His
ayay
were well received, and he began writing poetry for the paper as well. He expanded his circle of friends and became a regular visitor at the two other Khmer-language communist papers.

When Khieu Samphan opened
L'Observateur
Phat joined that paper and ran away from his brother's home in the middle of the night never to return. He wanted to devote all of his time to his “progressive” friends and their papers. Phat still had no idea they were communists or that there was a small communist movement in his country. His friends called themselves “progressives,” and he welcomed the attention they paid him. In the hierarchical world of Phnom Penh, where pedigrees, diplomas, and royal patronage were essential for social mobility and active involvement, Phat found himself among energetic, intelligent people who preferred to worry about saving the common people rather than plot how to win a high position.

Phat lived in the office of
L'Observateur
, sleeping there at night and working with Samphan during the day. His first months of work passed with little incident and then, in 1960, the police arrested and imprisoned the workers of the communist papers. Phat ended up in jail. He was still behind bars when the party was founded at its first congress in Phnom Penh's railway cars.

The very existence of Phat within their movement was proof, if they had wanted it, that the Cambodian communists could expand and find foot soldiers for their soon-to-be-born party. Such calculations were surely uppermost in the minds of Cambodia's communist leaders when they met, undetected, for three days and held their party's founding congress. Twenty-one representatives from the far-flung and fragmented movement adopted party statutes and elected a central committee. Tou Samouth was chosen as its head and named party secretary. He was the only member of the triumvirate Cambodian communist leadership of the First Indochina War attending the meeting. Son Ngoc Minh was still in Hanoi, where the Vietnamese continued to accord him the title of leader of Cambodia's communists; Sieu Heng had defected. Nuon Chea, originally recruited by the Thai Communist Party while studying in Bangkok, was elected to the second position, Saloth Sar to the third. But he was the only Paris Marxist Circle member at the top of the new party organization. Ieng Sary was not even on the Central Committee.

Still, the French-returned communists were beginning to be integrated into the leadership. In the nine years that had passed since the Khmer communists held their meeting to elect leaders for the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party, the Cambodians had ceased to be a carbon copy of the old Vietnamese ICP. The old ICP strongholds in the countryside were dormant, many of them victims of Sihanouk's attacks and Heng's defection, while the hitherto weak Phnom Penh branch was gathering new recruits
like Phat and becoming the center of communism in the country. In fact distinctions between those recruited by the French, Thai, or Vietnamese parties were disappearing. They were now Cambodian communists. And much of the communists' activities in the capital had been directed by Saloth Sar and Ieng Sary. Their semiclandestine work, in contrast to the legal, open activities of the Pracheachon people, had achieved some success.

The congress named the party the Workers Party of Kampuchea. (Later, in 1971, the name was changed to the Communist Party of Kampuchea.) As required, the party congress wrote and approved the Cambodian communists' view of their country's political and economic situation, why they believed Cambodia needed a revolution, and how they planned to achieve one. The analysis employed by the Cambodians was entirely in line with Hanoi's view of the Indochina-wide situation even when it did not apply strictly to Cambodia. The Cambodians showed no signs of dissatisfaction with Vietnam in these initial party documents.

They agreed with Hanoi that the United States was the primary enemy; France had been replaced by the United States since the Geneva Convention. The Cambodian communists wrote that their country was a “satellite of imperialism, in particular U.S. imperialism . . . neither independent nor free.”

The Cambodian communists admitted that, to the unwitting, their country might appear to be an independent, neutral nation. But its essence was the contrary. “In actuality the economy was entirely dominated by imperialism. It was the same for culture. The society and life-style were under imperialist influence, especially within the ruling circles.”

Rather than examine the implications of the elite's attraction to and dependence on Western images, the congress simply stretched the notion of independence to the extreme—a habit the Cambodian communists never abandoned. And rather than realistically question how long Sihanouk could walk his tightrope of neutrality as war developed in Vietnam, the communists bowed to the orthodoxy of the moment and labeled Sihanouk a puppet—an absurd label.

But the Cambodians knew the war was expanding. Two weeks before their September 1960 meeting, the Vietnamese in Hanoi made official their decision to fight in the south, “to liberate the south from the rule of the American imperialists and their henchmen.” Three months later the National Liberation Front was established to that end. The Cambodians wrote a program to include themselves in that “life-or-death” struggle.

The Cambodians' loyalty to Vietnamese and Chinese orthodoxy was better served when describing the second enemy, the feudal landowners. Since
85 percent of Cambodians were peasants, the communists figured they should be the chief target for recruitment. And the peasants' chief enemy, they said, was the moneylenders.

Two of the communists' leading intellectuals—Hou Youn and Hu Nim—would publish investigations into the plight of the peasantry in 1964 and 1965 respectively that demonstrated how landholding patterns, Sihanouk's economic programs, and the moneylenders had worsened the lives of many of the country's peasants in the independence period.