When the War Was Over (21 page)

There were hundreds of young men like Phat filling out the thin ranks of the party as it settled into life in the countryside. Many were recruited by older brothers, uncles, or cousins whom they admired. Others joined in reaction against the repression at the hands of Sihanouk and Lon Nol. It was in the maquis that the commitment of these young men, and some young women, was tested and strengthened by dodging security police, navigating trails by night, avoiding temptations of the spirit and body, and learning the art of “mobilizing the peasantry.”

From his new outpost in Vietnam, Saloth Sar began to feel his movement's isolation both within the country and without. The growing American
involvement in South Vietnam was drawing all attention to that war. His communist allies considered Sihanouk's help crucial. In May 1963, the Chinese leader Liu Shao Ch'i visited Cambodia to endorse his friend Prince Sihanouk and to affirm the friendship between their countries. Hanoi recognized Cambodia's rights over islands claimed by South Vietnam in the Gulf of Siam. Both Asian communist countries courted Sihanouk to check American expansion of the war through Cambodia.

The standoff between the left and Sihanouk was taking place during the last crisis of the Diem regime in South Vietnam. And the communist states of North Vietnam and China were more concerned with keeping Sihanouk a friend than supporting a Cambodian communist challenge to his rule. About the time that Saloth Sar, Ieng Sary, and the other communists fled to the countryside, the Buddhists were demonstrating in South Vietnam. Not long after the Cambodian communists settled in their countryside redoubt in Vietnam, Diem was murdered in Saigon.

Sihanouk immediately renounced all U.S. aid projects and turned to China and other communist nations for military aid, to replace the American military assistance Sihanouk now considered too dangerous. Soon Chinese, Russian, and Czech weapons arrived in Cambodia—for Sihanouk, not the Cambodian communists. Saloth Sar and the communists were denied any military aid at this juncture and were encouraged to suspend any plans for revolution even though it was clear Sihanouk planned to try to rid his country of the “Khmer Rouge,” a term the prince coined for the indigenous Cambodian communists. Saloth Sar and the party were being pushed on to the periphery of the Second Indochina War. The Cambodian communists feared their Chinese and Vietnamese communist allies were betraying the communist cause in Cambodia, abandoning the Cambodian revolution to save the Vietnamese.

At the same time, the rightist challenge was building with each move Sihanouk made to shore up his neutralist position. While the Chinese and Vietnamese communists rewarded Sihanouk for keeping his neutralist stance and staying out of the American camp, they unwittingly helped undermine his position at home. The right saw Sihanouk as a friend of communist nations. And without a vocal left in Phnom Penh, the prince had nothing to hold the right in check. It proved his undoing.

During the first three years in the countryside, the communists' movements and attempts at organizing the peasants had little effect on the politics
of Phnom Penh. What mattered was their absence as Sihanouk played out the last acts of his “socialist experiment.”

The prince was losing his touch. The right forced Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn to resign from Sihanouk's cabinet in mid-1963. They stayed on in Phnom Penh, retaining their seats in the national assembly along with Hu Nim, the third person through whom the communists were trying to keep an eye on the government. Nim had lost his position as joint editor of the Sangkum Party's official newspaper. The three sat on the sidelines and watched as Sihanouk was forced to turn to avowed conservatives for help in carrying out his “Khmer socialism.”

The prince clung to policies the right despised: nationalization of key business sectors, protection of home industries against foreign competition, neutrality, cutting off American aid, and ensuring basic education and health for all citizens at government cost. The leftists who had helped shape the climate for those measures were now silent or missing and the right worked to undercut the prince.

When the communists sat down later to record this period in a sketchy history of their party, the leaders took credit for pushing Sihanouk into this bind, for forcing the “contradictions” of the moment. They claimed to have “waged the nationalist struggle movement” that forced Sihanouk to “refuse the American imperialists' poisonous aid in 1963 . . . [and] to break diplomatic relations with the American imperialists.” In fact, the Cambodian communists increasingly took to the sidelines away from Phnom Penh to wait for the dam to burst and to build a base among the peasants, who were being ignored in this drama.

As has been the case throughout Cambodian history, affairs outside the national borders helped fuel a collapse within. By refusing American aid to stave off U.S. intervention, Sihanouk forfeited the money that had balanced his budget for years. He reduced the military budget to cover his losses, making the military more nervous. The rightists responded by pushing through a program to lower the prices paid peasants for their rice. Thus, they could sell the rice abroad at the same higher price and increase profits for the national treasury. The government did raise needed funds from this action but at the price of peasant dissatisfaction. Soon the farmers reacted in traditional fashion by withholding their harvests; some refused to grow more rice than needed for their families.

It was 1966, time for the national assembly elections, and Sihanouk was nearly paralyzed by the external and internal enemies working against him.
The year before he had hosted an “Indochina People's Conference” in Phnom Penh, inviting the southern Vietnamese National Liberation Front, the North Vietnamese government, and the communist Pathet Lao as the sole participants. The right had not been pleased. Now Sihanouk decided against an open confrontation and, for the first time, declared he would not select the Sangkum Party's official slate of candidates.

For the first time in independent Cambodia's history, anyone could run for the assembly. It turned out to be the most expensive race in Cambodian history. The rich, conservative candidates bought votes and won overwhelmingly. The chief exceptions were the clandestine communist Khieu Samphan and his associates Hou Youn and Hu Nim. They won elections from their rural districts with handsome majorities despite police harassment.

The new rightist assembly put Lon Nol in power as prime minister, and Sihanouk's royal rival, Prince Sirik Matak, won the second position. Lon Nol had maintained the reputation of a critical but trustworthy military chief for Sihanouk; Matak, however, was considered a very close friend of the Americans and the real threat to Sihanouk.

Sihanouk was still head of state and nominally in charge. But he was racing for time. He set up a “shadow” cabinet of loyalists and moved to shore up what he considered his best advantage—his friendship with the Vietnamese communists. The prince yielded to Hanoi's pressure and gave the Vietnamese communists rights of passage to Sihanoukville, the deep-sea port he had built on the Gulf of Siam to prevent the Americans from blockading his country through South Vietnam, which controlled the Mekong River and Phnom Penh's riverport. The Vietnamese communists were allowed to ship arms to Sihanoukville and truck them overland to eastern Cambodia. By 1967 the North Vietnamese already were preparing for the Tet Offensive the following year; if the promised “uprising” succeeded, Sihanouk's worries about an American intervention would be over. The communists would win and the war would end.

The prince put his military chief, Lon Nol, in charge of overseeing the North Vietnamese transport of arms from Sihanoukville to South Vietnam. Lon Nol skimmed off great amounts of the arms, reportedly with Vietnamese approval, as a price for cooperation. He apparently reaped more weapons than he was receiving from China. Privately, Lon Nol feared the Vietnamese communists planned to take over Cambodia once they had won in the south, and he wanted his soldiers well armed in the event.

Lon Nol's cabinet worked just as diligently to scrap Sihanouk's domestic program. The year before, nearly two-thirds of the country's rice exports had escaped the government's heavy taxing through illegal sales, largely to the Vietnamese communists, as Lon Nol well knew, since his police had reported these sales to him. Lon Nol curtailed the essential rice sales to the Vietnamese communists not only to make money for the budget but to loosen communist ties to Cambodia.

Then the government altered the rice collection system. Peasants who withheld grain would be forced at gunpoint to sell the rice to the government at lowered official prices. To make sure his orders were followed, Lon Nol replaced provincial officials appointed by Sihanouk with his own men. The new collection system was called
ramassage du paddy
.

He did not foresee the violent reaction from the peasantry against this policy. Battambang province, then the rice bowl of the country, was the prime target of the
ramassage
campaign. Lon Nol had been the province's governor during the First Indochina War and knew its history with the left and the nationalists. He ordered the soldiers to guarantee that peasants in Battambang sold to the government and not to the Vietnamese communist dealers. The peasants balked; the Vietnamese were paying double the official rate. Overnight, pamphlets appeared in Battambang that read as if they had been written by the communists. They urged the peasants to oppose Lon Nol's soldiers; some even called for the overthrow of the regime.

Finally the problem apparent in the communists' 1960 party platform, their failure to find immediate and crucial issues to inflame the peasants, was on the verge of being solved. In most areas the problems of the Cambodian peasantry called for reforms, not revolution, as the intellectuals Khieu Samphan, Hu Nim, and Hou Youn had demonstrated in their research papers. And Sihanouk had attempted to implement reforms, establishing a government cooperative system to extend cheap credit to farmers. But like the prince's other socialist inventions, the cooperative failed in the hands of incompetent and corrupt bureaucrats.

The selection of Battambang for the main
ramassage
campaign was fortuitous for the communists. This was the one province where the generalities about the Cambodian peasants did not apply. Here was a province in which the peasants were at the mercy of large landholders. After the temporary Thai occupation had ended after World War II, Battambang had been repopulated by newcomers, large landowners who had bought up massive tracts of land and farmed them with tenant laborers who paid half of their crops in “rent.”
The next wave of settlers were Khmer Krom, ethnic Cambodians who had fled the war in South Vietnam and had settled by the thousands in Battambang, where they competed with the established peasantry for land and work. The people of Battambang were often at one another's throats.

In fact, the communist party of Saloth Sar and Nuon Chea was not responsible for the first series of pamphlets; they were the handiwork of the local communist organization, which was led and staffed almost entirely by veterans of the First Indochina War who had been left behind to keep the movement alive. Saloth Sar had urged caution, but the local communists as well as the local peasants saw no virtue in patience. Together they moved ahead, violently.

Soldiers were sent in force to collect the grain. There were small, spontaneous outbursts. Some soldiers were attacked. In Phnom Penh, Khieu Samphan seized the issue to organize a demonstration to pressure the Lon Nol government to put an end to
ramassage
and to resign for its mistakes. It was a bold move, and Samphan expected retaliation. It came from an unexpected quarter. Sihanouk, who had fallen into a malaise, struck out angrily at Samphan, accusing him, Hou Youn, and Hu Nim of masterminding the Battambang disturbances.

In an earlier period the three would have resigned under public criticism from the prince. Now they decided to stay put and test Sihanouk's credibility, and they won. They kept their seats while the two members of the national assembly directly responsible for administering affairs in Battambang were forced out. Sihanouk's crumbling power base had been exposed by the left and the right in a single mistaken move. Moreover, by ineptly attacking the left, Sihanouk prevented them from helping him stay in power. His subsequent loud cries that the left had ruined him sounded hollow.

The real explosion came soon. In the early morning of April 2, 1967, two soldiers collecting rice were murdered at Samlaut in Battambang province. The villagers responsible for the killings boldly stole the weapons off the soldiers' corpses and returned to the same spot that afternoon brandishing more arms and waving sophisticated banners opposing the Lon Nol government and U.S. imperialism. They were joined by other peasants, and when the crowd reached 200 they marched on a youth agricultural settlement nearby and burned it to the ground. Unmolested, they continued their protest and attacked the provincial guard post.