When the War Was Over (29 page)

They were all wrong. The book was filled with precious information about the Khmer Rouge, their problems with the Vietnamese, and their approach to revolution. The life Ith Sarin described in the enemy zone was difficult and spartan but not unpleasant. The school inspector understood immediately that Khmer communists controlled the front, and he described them as “very tough and strong in nature,” enforcing their will with an “iron discipline” while maintaining a “modest and simple” demeanor with the peasantry. The communists “worked together with the people . . . to serve the people,” Sarin wrote, helping farmers build dams, dikes, ponds, and houses. He said the communists understood and exploited the peasantry's deep dissatisfaction with the corruption, arrogance, cruelty, and incompetence of the Phnom Penh government—the stiff taxes and the earlier
ramassage
campaigns of Lon Nol's army. “These kinds of psychological activities were really successful and deeply affected the people more than the instruction in theory did. The farming people of the base areas who knew nothing of socialist revolution quickly began to love and support Angka because of its sentiments of openness and friendliness.”

The Cambodian party called itself Angka, “Organization,” in the established tradition of the Indochinese Communist Party and the South Vietnamese communists, who used the term organization in order to woo the peasants to their political ideas without revealing they were communists. The individual, Sarin wrote, had to submit entirely to the rule of Angka. And Angka was credited with nearly mystic omnipotency; its word was law and any attempt to break it was always discovered.

Sarin wrote down an often-heard saying that would become familiar after the Khmer Rouge victory: “Angka has as many eyes as a pineapple and cannot make mistakes.”

It was this demand for total control that frightened Sarin. He said any problem or mistake was always blamed on the individual, never the Organization or its policies. Communist-style criticism/self-criticism sessions to discuss problems never found fault with the rules of Angka, only with the poor peasant who couldn't follow them. Yet Sarin does not describe open dissatisfaction among the peasants except among some older people who had figured out that Sihanouk was not the real leader. They had told him: “The people are cold and need the warmth of the prince [Sihanouk] to save their lives.”

Sarin gives the impression that the peasants largely appreciated the material advantages of life with the Khmer Rouge. They were no longer treated like coolies. Everyone regardless of rank performed manual chores in the belief this would transform them into workers. Everyone ate the same humble meals, dressed alike, and worked impossibly long hours. Besides addressing the political task of transforming the people and leadership into a rural proletariat, the rules trained the people and cadre for what lay ahead. Sarin heard stories of cadre rushing to the bedside of a sick peasant at night, in the midst of monsoon gales, to administer medicine and comfort. He noted the absence of corruption, the strict observance of rules against theft, rape, drunkenness, and gambling.

Sarin's book also offered clues to what lay ahead. He had not only uncovered the role of the Cambodian Communist Party, he had the names of its top leaders: Saloth Sar, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, and Khieu Samphan. He said Sihanouk had no importance inside the movement and that the Cambodians were weaning themselves from the Vietnamese communists, with whom there was little love lost. Sarin quoted Hou Youn at a rally and in a conversation afterward in which Hou Youn said that relations between the Vietnamese and Cambodian communists had “improved” largely because the Cambodians “had gotten away from the influences” of the North Vietnamese and Vietcong. Now the Khmer communists were “independent, in charge of things, self-sufficient,” Youn said. Moreover, he said the Angka had contingency plans for dealing with the Vietnamese should they get out of hand again.

Because of this reference to problems between the Vietnamese and Khmer communists, foreigners of various political persuasions discredited the book. They all believed the communist side was a unified block. Most, however, simply ignored it. Sihanouk still fascinated journalists and diplomats, despite his increasing irrelevance.

This was all to the advantage of the Cambodian communists. Let Sihanouk draw the publicity while they prepared for the second stage of taking
over the war. The U.S.-Vietnamese negotiations that would lead to the Paris Peace Accords of January 27, 1973, were under way. The Cambodian communists had refused to take part in any discussion of a cease-fire, and they knew that when an agreement was reached they would be left very much to their own devices. The party decided it was time to publish the party's first official history.

The publication of a party history is an extraordinary event in any communist movement. The history is the equivalent of scriptures: It asserts the leaders' claim on the future by proving a true understanding of the past and asserting the moral authority to publish the lessons that must guide the movement. Normally such histories are written when a party is at a crossroad, preparing for a new situation that calls for new policies, a time when the leadership feels it has settled disagreements and forged a single policy that has coalesced behind one figure or doctrine. Lenin, Mao, Stalin, and Tito all issued histories or resolutions regarding their parties' histories at crucial moments when they were asserting command and preparing to lead their parties through new eras.

In the latter part of 1972 the Cambodian communists, and Saloth Sar, were at the brink of their armed revolution. The history they wrote represented at least a temporary compromise over the seething question of the role of the Vietnamese communists. The history was written with one voice as purges began within the party, perhaps to achieve this unity. In this account of Cambodian history, the communists take credit for steering Sihanouk toward his anti-American neutralist stances, calling it an outgrowth of their sophisticated strategy to bore within his government while organizing the intelligentsia and workers during their underground period in Phnom Penh. Without saying so, they were comparing themselves favorably to the South Vietnamese communists, who had failed in that regard with Diem. The preceding decade, before Saloth Sar was in charge, was described as a disaster. The communists did not care to dwell on the leadership of Sieu Heng and his betrayal.

After Sar has taken over, the history becomes defiantly optimistic. The party takes particular pride in deciding to launch an outright revolution in 1968, asserting that this put them in a perfect position to take advantage of the 1970 coup. This decision went against their Vietnamese and Chinese communist allies, but that is not mentioned. At this stage, the party wanted a united front within their organization and with their allies.

Then “lessons” are drawn in a pedantic section that are at the heart of the document. Ith Sarin had repeated many of these “lessons” in his book,
describing them as communist sayings or principles. The party said that while peasants were greatly oppressed they still did not have the proper “working class nature . . . but a special farmers agricultural nature.” The remedy was to imbue these people “to the maximum degree” with a working-class spirit according to Marxist-Leninist ideology. Sarin had recorded a party slogan to that effect: “Study from the people in order to be like the people . . . [but] don't let the people lead you by the nose either.”

Class analysis, class composition, the requirement to have a proper working-class attitude, bedeviled these Cambodians as it did most other communists who tried to graft political theories derived from industrial Europe onto agricultural Asia. The party worried about the middle class and the intellectuals in its ranks who retained the “nature of their origins.” It stated the communist goal of having a majority-working-class composition in its ranks. The party later tried to enforce this goal as a “policy” and ran head-on into the “special farmers” nature of the peasants, who could not adopt a “workers” personality overnight, and the equally specific nature of the middle class, who likewise were unable to act like peasants when ordered to do so.

The Cambodians accepted the Leninist notion that with proper education anyone anywhere can become a proletarian in a proletarian-type revolution, and they took this precept literally, as they did most communist doctrines. The revolution can be made in any country as long as it has correct party leadership; the rest is education. And education is party doctrine.

The cadre were told in this history to convert ideological doctrine into a “burning” force that would lend them the daring to fight the enemy to final victory. To accomplish this, to defeat U.S. imperialism, of which Lon Nol was a lackey, the party had to build “absolute internal unity.” There could be no dissent in the ranks. There was a stern warning directed at intellectuals who might have been tempted to consult theories expounded in other books; these were “empty theories,” not proved by practice in Cambodia, theories that might contradict those actions that the party was now plotting. The party history supplanted other communist writing. Know-nothingism and anti-intellectualism dominated the Khmer Rouge at an earlier stage than in most other communist revolutionary wars.

The crucial section discussing both the aid and the example of foreign communists is ambivalent, not openly resentful. Besides help and instructions from foreigners, the Cambodians had reaped “bad results” by following foreign example and advice. “. . . In the one hand, it made us completely ignorant; on the other hand, it hindered and even sometimes destroyed the revolutionary movement and progress. . . . In this case, it is better to learn nothing from foreign experience.”

However, the Khmer Rouge devised a compromise over the party's birth date that seemed to satisfy those within the movement who preferred strong ties to the Vietnamese and those who greatly distrusted the Vietnamese. They chose September 30, the
day
the actual First Party Congress was called in 1060, but the
year
1951, which was when the Cambodians had formed a separate organization within the Vietnamese Indochinese Communist Party.

Keo Meas, a veteran Cambodian communist who first joined the ICP, put together the materials that went into the party history published in 1972. He later explained that the September 30, 1951, date was a compromise, that was the “spirit” behind it, a chance to join together the people like himself who had originally joined the Indochinese Communist Party and the people who had been recruited after 1060. Keo Meas said that although the Cambodian communist movement had originated out of the ICP, there was no party “for the entire long period from 1951 until 1959, early 1960, the party never held a congress to set up a full-fledged center, had never passed statutes, and had never had a strategic and tactical political line.”

Ultimately that compromise date satisfied neither side. The 1972 history was preparing the party for an abrupt break with the Vietnamese immediately following the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, and the leaders did not want to frighten those members strongly associated with the earlier period of Vietnamese dominance. The language of the party's history was soothing toward the Vietnamese, not combative. The party was also preparing its people for a break with the Sihanoukists, the “third force which was the obstacle . . . [that had split Cambodia's] political forces in three or four directions.”

If there was any doubt about the party's assertion of total power, the history concluded with an invocation to the highest authority, the party which has become more powerful than the sum of its human parts. “We must love the party, adore it, and serve it sincerely with no reservations or preconditions, to repay the efforts with which the party has educated us to be unreserved revolutionaries and communists. Nothing is more precious and honorable than to belong with the party's ranks, and nothing is better than to be a communist.”

Shortly before the history was circulated in the party, pamphlets were printed and issued under the united front's imprint in Beijing that showed photographs of the Khmer Rouge leadership inside Cambodia. These pamphlets were meant to dispel the “odious and vile slanders by U.S. imperialist propaganda machinery” that the resistance did not recognize Sihanouk as its leader. Dedicated to Sihanouk, its thirty-seven pages of photographs presented to the world the faces of the unknown Cambodian communist hierarchy. First and most prominent were the Three Ghosts—Khieu Samphan,
Hou Youn, and Hu Nim. They live up to their legends: handsome, fit men who stand out from the peasant-soldiers as self-confident intellectuals and leaders. They are depicted as Renaissance men in the jungle, crossing swamps, sharing simple meals, gathered in meetings, relaxing on hammocks, seemingly always in command.

These are followed by a short portrait gallery of the real party leaders, although they are not identified as such. The first photograph is of Saloth Sar seated in a bamboo grove next to Nuon Chea. Sar's hands are locked comfortably around his knees. The sun, filtered through the trees, falls as a spotlight on his full cheeks and coarsely barbered haircut, giving him an innocuous look, like a country bumpkin. His demeanor is the same in the two other group shots, in which he appears with an unrecognizably thin Ieng Sary, a grim-faced Koy Thuon, and again Nuon Chea. They are the ranking members of the party central committee, although the caption does not give this fact away, only their titles in the front.

They show their rank by the clothing and backdrops they chose for the photographs. No smart black pajamas or checkered scarves flung around their necks like the Three Ghosts; they wear ill-fitting, drab shirts and trousers that suggest an austere jungle life. They stand and sit in undistinguished scrub jungle, the miserable mosquito-infested forests that one recognizes immediately to be the true home of the guerrilla. There are no dashing shots of these men cavorting through marshes wearing berets, laughing with their comrade soldiers as are the Three Ghosts. The real leaders are alone. Their faces are weary, glum, and serious even when a smile is coaxed from their lips. Of them all, Saloth Sar has the least memorable face, the least assertive stance. Even in front of the camera he hides.