When the War Was Over (20 page)

Finally, the party had to choose its “line,” the encapsulation of its goals and methods. They chose: “Independence, national sovereignty, and self-reliance” and “revolutionary violence.” It was a mixture of Vietnamese and Chinese influence as filtered through the Vietnamese. The latter course of revolutionary violence or terrorism against the establishment was the same as that adopted by the communists in South Vietnam to combat Diem's serious and effective police action against them. Sihanouk's harassment of the Cambodian communists had been mild by comparison, but nearly as effective.

“Revolutionary violence” was not implemented at the start. The Cambodians knew unarmed political struggle had been disastrous for them in the countryside, where they now wanted to recruit thousands of peasants. But they were so poorly equipped that it took them one year simply to find enough weapons to organize small secret self-defense units to guard their leaders. And those units were often armed with nothing other than knives and clubs. Ultimately Sihanouk learned of movement within the left, but he did no more than step up police surveillance.

Calling the congress and proclaiming the establishment of an independent Marxist-Leninist party was dangerous and crucial for Cambodia's communists. Although the move had Hanoi's approval, it led to a deeper division within Cambodia's communist movement. Nearly 1,000 Cambodians remained in North Vietnam undergoing communist training there, including Son Ngoc Minh whom Hanoi continued to treat as the leader of the Cambodian communists. There were now two potentially competitive, hostile groups of Cambodian communists: those in Hanoi under direct Vietnamese supervision, and those in Cambodia who just had proclaimed themselves an independent party.

This division was apparent only to the leaders of the two groups. To young recruits like Phat there was but one “progressive movement,” the movement led by the intellectuals in Phnom Penh. And the loyalty of men and women like Phat would determine which of these groups triumphed.

Phat was released from jail before the end of 1960 along with the other newspaper workers. He found work as a day construction laborer, but, fearing
arrest again by the secret police, he went into hiding in the monks' quarters of a Phnom Penh pagoda. As during the First Indochina War, Buddhists offered sanctuaries for people on the run, protecting them from the police and asking few questions. Hiding with the monks, Phat turned his hand to writing once again and wrote what he described as “progressive” analyses of a Khmer folktale, “Hang Youn,” and a modern romance,
Rose
of Pailin.
His friends from the newspaper brought him money and later rented him a house where he was to continue what he now realized was propaganda work.

When Sihanouk allowed the
Pracheachon
to reopen, in 1961, Phat resurfaced and wrote articles for the paper. It was a short reprieve, however. The paper folded after one issue and Phat was ordered underground again. He accepted the order and entered forever the world of his progressive friends. While he was ensconced in his second safe house one of his friends asked him if he wanted to become a communist. Phat remembered the conversation vividly. “He asked me: ‘Friend, would you like to join the party?' At that time I did not yet know there was a party. [The friend] explained the party to me and I asked to join.”

Phat wrote out his autobiography, as required, and was accepted as a candidate for the party. At a third safe house, behind the Old Monk's Hospital in Phnom Penh, he became a member of the Communist Party of Cambodia on April 28, 1962, a date he would remember better than his own birthday. The induction ceremony was spare. Phat was certified by party sponsors and took the party oaths.

He was enrolled in a party school near the Monk's Hospital, where, in his own words, he became a disciple of the party. He employed the word for a religious disciple in describing his devotion to and position in the party. He transferred to the party the loyalty and the respect for ritual and authority he had learned in the monastery. Phat also met his party's future leader at the school; Saloth Sar taught a number of the courses. Phat did well in Sar's classes and most others. He completed his studies satisfactorily and was prepared for party work.

Phat was one of a large class of new party members brought in during the first years following the 1960 party congress. Once they had their own party, the Cambodian communists intensified their search for recruits and launched a major drive to induct new members. The days were over when it was uncertain what party a Cambodian communist could join. The communists not only focused on building party membership but actively trained their new members, at the party school Phat attended and generally by performing party tasks.

This emphasis on expanding party membership proved important. The communists' ability to recruit actively in the capital was curtailed not long after Phat was inducted. Events inside and beyond Cambodia had begun to tear apart Sihanouk's strategy and as a result alter that of the communists as well. The year began with Sihanouk's police capturing fourteen Pracheachon Group members in Kompong Cham province and finding documents outlining communist organizing tactics. The next month, in February, Sihanouk ordered an anti-left campaign within his Sangkum Party. But he turned around and, later that spring, personally endorsed the city's three leading leftist intellectuals as Sangkum candidates for the upcoming national assembly elections—Khieu Samphan, Hu Nim, and Hou Youn.

Afterward, Sihanouk appointed Samphan as his secretary of state for commerce and Hou Youn his secretary of state for planning, putting two suspected communists in charge of the most sensitive economic posts in the government. The drama of this
mise-en-scène
is pure Sihanouk. On the one hand he was trying to co-opt two of his most errant subjects; on the other, he wished to use these talented economists to pull his country out of its long-standing problems and, perhaps, to interpret Cambodia's needs to the communist countries offering aid. If they proved unacceptable, the prince could make them scapegoats for the problems they were told to solve.

In his investiture speech at the October 1962 convention of the new cabinet, Sihanouk outlined an economic strategy similar to that proposed by Samphan in his doctoral thesis. The prince had decided to experiment with these leftist proposals while at the same time he demonstrated that he would brook no overt leftist opposition. He sentenced the fourteen Pracheachon members arrested earlier to life imprisonment for “threatening the country's independence.” That move convinced the communists that they should disband their legal front, the Pracheachon Party. Only the two intellectuals in Sihanouk's cabinet and Hu Nim in the assembly remained aboveground.

Within this tense shadow play it was Khieu Samphan who was the enigma, rather than Sihanouk. The prince was applying his refined tactics of neutralizing the opposition with charm, fanfare, and co-optation of the left's most respected figures. What is difficult to understand is why Samphan, who had written supple and convincing treatises on the weakness of Cambodia's economy, would embrace a project of adapting his ideas to solve Sihanouk's problems while he was dedicated to overthrowing the government. He was both brilliant and honest, a man who made a fetish of refusing any gift that might be construed as a bribe. At the same time he seems
naive, and perhaps too willing to follow whoever was in control and willing to implement his ideas.

In any case, Samphan took his cabinet work seriously. He campaigned against financing public spending by deficit, saying it would create higher inflation. He argued instead for investing government capital in productive enterprises. In a detailed proposal, he recommended a policy of austerity combined with increased taxes on luxury items, along with reforms to cushion the impact this would have on the poorer strata of the country. Private businesses opposed him, and the cabinet was divided. Nonetheless, some of the reforms were enacted, and the next year the right wing lobbied to abolish Samphan's program.

While Samphan was proving he could work for Sihanouk and push through proposals the World Bank would consider prudent, the communists suffered a severe setback. The party leader, Tou Samouth, disappeared mysteriously and was presumed kidnapped and murdered. He had returned from a secret trip to Hanoi in early 1962, and the party feared his movements had been detected by Sihanouk's police. The communists held a special congress to elect a new leader after Samouth's assassination. Their choice was Saloth Sar. Ieng Sary moved into the Central Committee. Saloth Sar had faithfully and successfully carried out the urban struggle the Vietnamese had recommended in 1954 and, for all appearances, seemed loyal to the Vietnamese, whom he had known briefly in the last days of jungle warfare. Unlike Nuon Chea, second to Samouth and presumed next in line, Saloth Sar had eagerly accepted leadership responsibilities. He proved extremely ambitious. The plodding vocational student had matured into a handsome, solid politician. He exhibited a cool, refined confidence in the midst of increasing turbulence, and he was a talented administrator of all the details of a subversive movement. He was especially adept at maintaining secrecy and was capable of enhancing routine assignments with an aura of mystery and prestige—as Phat discovered.

Phat was released from his long, boring months in hiding shortly after Saloth Sar was made party chief. Comrades had visited him regularly to keep up his spirits, and they promised him an important assignment in due course. Finally one evening he was told to go at once to a pagoda in Phnom Penh and wait for a car with a certain license plate.

The car appeared. Phat opened up the door on the passenger side and slid into the seat. There was Saloth Sar at the wheel. The party secretary moved the car back onto the road and proceeded to drive Phat around the city. He questioned Phat repeatedly, asking whether the young communist
was sure he wanted to join the struggle in the countryside. When Saloth Sar was convinced of Phat's sincerity, he pulled the car into the city's racetrack, where Nuon Chea was waiting for them near a pile of gravel.

Sar left Phat in Chea's hands. Phat remembered that Chea “stiffened my spirit” and then gave him instructions for the next leg of his journey. In the early morning a Vietnamese courier would escort him out of the city and into the jungles. At this stage the Cambodian and Vietnamese communists were working in tandem. Phat followed the Vietnamese across the country and into South Vietnam, where he was assigned to the Khmer-language radio department. He was therefore out of the country at the next turning point in the party's history.

Sihanouk was preoccupied in 1963 with the war in South Vietnam and the American buildup there. Then, without warning, in early 1963 student riots broke out in the northwestern Cambodian city of Siem Reap—the first of their kind. The demonstrations were sparked by local grievances, allegations of police brutality and corruption, but they grew into an attack on Sihanouk himself. Students destroyed pictures of the prince, and in the melee that followed several students and one policeman died. Other students in Phnom Penh and provincial capitals called for sympathy strikes to honor the fallen Siem Reap students. Sihanouk responded by asking his entire government to resign. It was a turning point—these were not students polluted by college exercises but high-school-age Cambodians who found Sihanouk and his regime overbearing. Sihanouk was losing the student constituency throughout the country.

The communists also were caught unaware. They had switched their strategy, theoretically, from the bourgeoisie—that is, the students—to the peasantry. They had tied their hopes to the Indochina-wide struggle against the United States and fallen behind events inside Cambodia. Now the communists feared they had underestimated the revolutionary potential in their own country. They suspected that the student action had been coordinated by rightist politicians who opposed Sihanouk because he was anti-American, and supposedly pro-communist. The Cambodian communists saw little choice: They either moved in or abdicated leadership.

In fact, it appears that the demonstrations were spontaneous, orchestrated by neither left nor right. But Sihanouk blamed the communist intellectuals for the strikes and shortly after told the first graduating class of Cambodia's Royal Faculty of Medicine: “We know that several [students] fell victim to political propaganda overseas, forgetting the reason they were
sent abroad and only dreaming of sowing trouble in their country, which they no longer know or have forgotten.”

The prince wrongly blamed in particular Son Sen, a clandestine communist and a colleague of Saloth Sar's from their Paris days, and the director of a Phnom Penh pedagogy institute. The other leader he held responsible for the Siem Reap riots was Keng Vannsak, of the old Democratic Party. Sen denied any role in the disturbances. But Sihanouk chose to use the crisis to force a confrontation pitting the left against him and his Sangkum Party.

Sihanouk asked whether this crisis had been provoked because the public preferred the left to his own Sangkum Party. Therefore, he suggested that the left create its own cabinet. He drew up a list of thirty-four men he said should be part of such a cabinet. In fact, this “List of Thirty-four” was a compilation of Sihanouk's critics on the left and right. Moreover, it included names of members of the central committee of the clandestine communist party, among them Saloth Sar and Ieng Sary. This list and challenge to form a cabinet came only three months after the party secretary, Tou Samouth, disappeared, presumably assassinated, and the communists interpreted the confrontation as a prelude to either arrest or murder. They believed Sihanouk and his police must have discovered the names of the party's leaders and planned to eliminate them as they had eliminated Samouth.

Saloth Sar and the party decided their days of safely organizing in the capital were over. Quietly, 90 percent of the party's central committee slipped away from Phnom Penh and disappeared to Vietnam to make plans for the struggle to survive and prevail. They first moved toward the Cambodia-Vietnam border, where contact and cooperation with the Vietnamese communists would be easier. Phat had also moved to their “Office 100,” as the base was known, transferred there with a group of Khmer Krom communists from South Vietnam, and assigned propaganda work in the villages. Now he went to work for the central committee.