When the War Was Over (22 page)

Twenty-two years after Ho Chi Minh had marched triumphantly into Hanoi declaring victory for the Vietminh's August Revolution, Cambodia's own armed communist revolt had begun.

News of Samlaut reached Saloth Sar and other senior party leaders after they had visited Hanoi and Beijing and then moved their headquarters to Cambodian territory in the far northeast. Once again, the Cambodian communists felt they had underestimated the revolutionary potential of the country, but this time the party existed and this time its leaders were prepared to move to the next stage, armed struggle against Sihanouk.

The three members remaining in Phnom Penh were endangered. On April 22, Sihanouk had publicly condemned Samphan, Youn, and Nim for fomenting the Samlaut rebellion and had threatened to bring them before a military tribune. Two nights later, Samphan and Youn disappeared from the city, hidden in farmers' carts driven out of Phnom Penh in the dusk-hour traffic. Nim stayed on until September, keeping a quiet watch on the government, until the party decided he, too, was in danger and he too disappeared into the jungle.

Lon Nol later claimed the three had been killed and so added the glamour of martyrdom to their impeccable reputations among the bourgeoisie. When they resurfaced as leaders of the Khmer Rouge, they were known as “the Three Ghosts”; they had become part of the modern mythology.

The party had to mobilize, and quickly. Phat was part of the initial group that moved headquarters away from the vulnerable eastern countryside to the inaccessible hills of the northeast. As an aide-de-camp he had acted as courier carrying messages between headquarters and Phnom Penh. In July he had escorted Saloth Sar to Ratanakiri province. From these mountain forests, the communists initiated a revolution that had no support from their foreign allies and at first little support from the peasants they hoped to liberate.

To have stayed on the plains would have risked arrest by Sihanouk. The prince became determined to punish the peasants who had rebelled. The prince's contradictory policies were bringing him to a point of no return. As he allowed the Vietnamese communists to use the Sihanoukville seaport, he offered large bounties for the severed heads of Cambodian communists or rebels. He offered larger sums for each rebel village burned to the ground. He ordered mobilization of the army and air force to hunt down and attack all rural areas considered rebellious.

Planes that had been received from the Chinese were used to bomb suspected rebel villages. Chinese guns turned over to Lon Nol by the Vietnamese for use in the port and the eastern sanctuaries were used now to shoot communists the Vietnamese had recruited twenty years earlier to make revolution in Cambodia. “Enemy” heads were stuck on poles. Sihanouk's war against
Cambodian communism would occupy the prince until the day, three years later, when his government threw him out in a rightist coup d'état.

Saloth Sar and his party decided they had little choice but to prepare for war if they wanted to continue calling themselves revolutionaries. If not they, then others, like the rightist followers of Son Ngoc Thanh, who now was funded by the CIA, would step into the void and arm the peasants. The communists decided to call for armed revolution even if their allies cautioned restraint. And Sar well knew that his party would have to fight alone. Two years earlier, in 1965, he had made a secret journey to Hanoi and Beijing to sound out his allies and present himself as the secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. But his presence was kept entirely secret, and he was encouraged to wait for the proper moment for a revolution, until the Cambodian revolution would not upset those in Vietnam and Laos. China and Vietnam at the same time were assiduously courting Sihanouk. The Soviet Union, at the height of its “peaceful coexistence” policy during which it was discouraging armed revolution, was not considered even a potential patron. The major benefit of the trip, in the view of Ieng Thirith, had been that Beijing was informed there was an independent Cambodian Communist Party, and not merely a Cambodian branch of the Indochinese Communist Party.

It is likely that events in China in 1967 played a role in the Cambodian decision to declare open war on Sihanouk. In August of 1967 the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution took charge of the foreign ministry and adopted the slogan “Revolution is always right” to guide China's foreign policy. One historian believes that “perhaps discreetly, [the Cambodian communists] were supported and encouraged by the persons then running China's foreign policy.”

If that was the case, the support was short-lived. After Zhou Enlai regained control of Chinese foreign policy he reiterated Beijing's full support for Sihanouk. After smoothing over problems created between the Red Guard and Sihanouk, Zhou demonstrated China's good faith by reviving military aid to the prince. By January 1968, a new consignment of weaponry arrived in Cambodia from Beijing: jet fighters, bombers, transportation planes, heavy and light artillery, and small arms and ammunition.

Now the Khmer Rouge had to devise a strategy for war and devise a theory to support it. After the Samlaut rebellion the party supposed the peasantry would continue to fight the
ramassage
whether or not there was a communist party to lead them. The peasants, they wrote, were “like dry straw in the rice fields—which need only a spark to set it on fire.”

As Saloth Sar and the central committee moved farther and farther away from the capital, from the eastern plains to the forlorn hills of the northeast,
they were abandoning not only the culture and society that had bred their notions of revolution, but many of the ideas themselves. In the physical and political isolation, the Khmer Rouge replaced their old inherited revolutionary notions with a new policy largely based on confusion and necessity. The confusion became more and more obvious as the communists had to react to the rapidly changing situation of war. They had to throw out the old ideas—“international communism” had been of no help when they needed their allies—since concentrating on the Indochina-wide war, mostly the Vietnam War, had made them weak and cautious in their own country.

And they had next to no theory to replace the old ideas. The answer was to glorify their miserable straits, make a virtue of necessity, to make “purity,” or absolute loyalty, the major consideration in an atmosphere they considered rife with traitors, and friends who might betray their movement. Thus, in their isolation, Sar and the party emphasized the nobility of fighting on meager resources, the purity of “self-sufficiency.” Being pure became Sar's chief idea. It was an angry concept that easily fostered cruelty when that narrow idea of revolution nourished in the mountains was enlarged to include the whole nation.

The hidden jungles of Ratanakiri province were ideal for those ideas. The terrain was nearly impassable. The thick malaria-infested jungles were feared by the people of the plains and considered unspeakably hostile by Khmer of the cities. Life in the hills had changed little since the famous French naturalist Henri Mouhot first explored the region 100 years earlier. In his diary he described the primitive, almost prehistoric state of the hills:

Even though a number of the Cambodian communists had spent their childhoods in rural villages, they were as unprepared for life in the hills as the French had been. But like the French naturalists, the communists felt the horrible conditions were more than made up for by the kindness of the tribal people who lived there. These were the Khmer Leou, Khmer of the highlands. Mohout said of them:

Saloth Sar rediscovered these “noble savages.” They joined his revolt against the “king,” Prince Sihanouk, as easily as they had followed all the other Khmer rebels throughout history who had sought refuge and soldiers in their hills. During the dynastic disputes of the Angkor era the Khmer Leou had taken sides with the princes out of favor, hoping to end the raids made by lowland Khmer to enslave the hill people. The ancestors of the dark-skinned Khmer Leou were among the slaves named “dog,” “cat,” and “detestable.” When the rebel Prince Si Votha launched his uprising against the French and Sihanouk's grandfather—King Norodom—in the late nineteenth century, he had enlisted the Khmer Leou.

For Sar and the party, the people and the hills reflected their own problems and were at one with them in fighting a common enemy. Moreover, the poverty of these people appealed to Sar's vision of himself as a liberation leader. These people, he later wrote, were “like beasts under an extremely cruel regime of exploitation. . . . [they] had known only humiliations and contempts [sic].” There was no ambiguity here as in the plains, where Sihanouk was still revered. Sar went to the hills for safety and ended up adopting for his cause the hill people who needed revolution. When his troops won the war eight years later, witnesses remarked on the high proportion of dark-skinned tribals fighting in his ranks. Sihanouk, even later, blamed these “savages” for the cruelty of the Cambodian Communist Party, a classic case of the long-standing royal prejudice against the tribespeople who themselves became the victims, not the perpetrators, of Khmer Rouge violence, when the Khmer Rouge later lashed out against minorities.

Now, in 1967, the Cambodian communists depended on the goodwill of the hill people, and for once, these allies responded generously, never betraying them, guiding them through the forests and protecting them from Sihanouk's attacks on their headquarters. Phat helped set up camp and was made deputy chairman of the office in charge of “secret writing” and the “printing press.” The young student recruit was now an indispensable bureaucrat and propagandist for the party. Without hesitation he had gradually tied his life to the communist movement. When the party now demanded utter
loyalty, pure unquestioning loyalty, Phat acquiesced as he might have if he had stayed in the monastery and taken the vows of the priesthood.

Phat labored at central committee headquarters while the communists who remained in the plains began the arduous task of building an army and finding weapons for its soldiers. The party organized its recruits into “support bases,” remote areas it considered secure and where the population, if not entirely friendly to the communists, nonetheless did not cooperate with the government soldiers. Beyond these rear support bases were the “guerrilla bases.” The communists stationed these fledgling fighting forces near enough to towns to serve as operational bases for attacks but far enough away for easy retreats. Finally, the communists designated large swaths of the countryside as “guerrilla zones”—the territory where rebels openly clashed with government soldiers.

A number of these designated zones were cut off from party headquarters. The central committee supposedly overseeing the small-scale war had no idea how battles or “uprisings” were faring, how many soldiers had been recruited to their side, or where their strength among the peasantry lay. As the communists later admitted: “No zone could come directly to the aid of another, since they were far apart. Our leading body was dispersed; it was in the northwest, southwest, east, northeast, and in Phnom Penh, places very far from each other. All contact involved at least a month's delay, since it meant a trip on foot or by elephant, and it was constantly necessary to evade the enemy to avoid ambush. In a month, the situation would be greatly changed, and the monthly report would no longer correspond to the new situation by the time it reached headquarters of the Central Committee at Ratanakiri. . . . Each area had to rely on itself and correctly apply the political line of the party.”

In January 1968 the communists launched their first self-described offensive of the war. It was small and its “success” modest. They claimed to have captured four to ten enemy guns in January, another four or five guns in March. By the end of this first “dry-season offensive” of the Khmer Rouge revolution, the communists in Ratanakiri had ten guns to protect Saloth Sar and central committee members in the northeast, who included Ieng Sary and Son Sen.