When the War Was Over (40 page)

After the
Mayaguez,
the Khmer Rouge returned to the business of establishing themselves and their revolution. The national army was formed, the zones were drawn into their postwar configuration, and the city was prepared for the establishment of the bureaucracy—ministries and party organizations—and industries. It was too soon to replace Sihanouk with Pol Pot, according to party calculations. But some of the front ministry figures were replaced in August with party leaders. Ieng Sary was named minister of foreign affairs, replacing Sarin Chhak, Cambodia's top expert on Khmer-Vietnam relations and a man notably more wary of the Vietnamese than even Ieng Sary, a Kampuchea Krom. Son Sen, a Marxist Circle member who had returned to Phnom Penh from Paris after the Geneva Agreements, was
named the new minister of defense. Sary and Sen were both members of the standing committee. They moved into crucial roles before the old front government was formally dissolved to ensure that the true face of revolutionary Democratic Kampuchea was presented to the world and protected from it.

Sary filled the foreign ministry with the Paris crowd; in no other area would the French circle have greater influence. Thiounn Prasith, Sary's closest friend from those days, became his top aide. Other intellectuals like Ok Sakun and Keat Chhon found a home and some protection in the ministry when the party began its purge of intellectuals. Far more did not. Many diplomats who worked for the Khmer Rouge during the war were not given jobs after 1975 but sent to special labor camps near the city. They were joined by intellectuals who had supported the Khmer Rouge overseas and had returned to Cambodia to help the revolution after 1975. As intellectuals they faced either death or “protection” in these special camps. As bare as this camp life was, it proved to be as safe as any spot in Cambodia during the coming months of the second revolution.

Sary had been preparing for the job he now held most of his adult life. He had argued and developed the Khmer Rouge perspective on foreign affairs and international communism since Paris, when he had attended the round of communist youth festivals in Europe, met with communist representatives from far-flung countries, and listened to their concepts of national and world revolution. Then he had gone back home and helped make the Cambodian revolution alongside Pol Pot. Sary began learning the ways and personalities of the party, arguing with his brother-in-law about what direction the movement should take but accepting the duties he was assigned from building up the party in Phnom Penh in the early sixties to working as liaison for the party with Vietnam and China. During the war, Sary had spent the most time with foreign allies, traveling to Beijing and Hanoi, acting as “liaison” with Sihanouk, making sure the prince did not step out of bounds, and recruiting intellectuals within the various fronts to become secret Party members.

Now he would address the United Nations and the world as foreign minister of Democratic Kampuchea. He became identified with the xenophobia of Cambodia, refusing offers of aid and asserting Cambodia's complete nonalignment. Sary was the one man Pol Pot trusted to put forward the true face of revolutionary Cambodia to the outside world but apparently not to command troops or take charge of major domestic duties that would give him a base to challenge Pol Pot's power. Several former members of the Marxist Circle in Paris later remembered that Pol Pot had warned them how Ieng Sary was too independent-minded, sometimes even refusing to
take orders from the top. It is said he was the only man who could dare tell Pol Pot when his forays outside produced unwanted news. Sary regularly traveled with Prasith, who acted as aide-de-camp and translator, a job he also performed for Pol Pot when at home. Pol Pot rarely saw foreigners without Sary and Prasith in his entourage. When foreign affairs became more important in the later years of the revolution, Sary was deputized to create and carry out a plan to help save the country.

Son Sen at the defense ministry was directly in charge of defending Democratic Kampuchea. His appointment was as predetermined as Sary's to the foreign ministry, even though Sen had less experience in his field. He was an accomplished pedagogue, a philosophy graduate from the Sorbonne who had returned to Phnom Penh in 1955 to teach as well as to build the revolution. Sen had won an appointment at the Buddhist Institute and the Sisowath School before becoming director of curriculum at the National Institute of Pedagogy. It was during his tenure that the student demonstrations erupted in 1963, and Sihanouk had blamed Sen for the disturbances. Sen later said that he, unfortunately, could not take credit for mobilizing the students, but Sihanouk put his name down on the infamous List of Thirty-four. Sen fled the city with the other communists.

The slight, bespectacled man was put in charge of military tasks, even though Pol Pot had doubts about his courage and conviction. Son Sen, after all, had stayed behind in Paris when Pol Pot had joined the maquis in the last months of the war against France. Sen approached his new responsibilities like a scholar and studied in detail the wars he considered most relevant: those of Napoleon, particularly the siege of Moscow, and the wars of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He wanted to learn how the Russians broke the French imperialists, how the Austrian empire was undermined. There was no study of guerrilla wars or Asian campaigns; Sen was a model of a French-educated colonial who found inspiration in European precedents. Yet during the more than ten years of jungle fighting, Sen had mounted an amazingly successful guerrilla war. There were few traditional military campaigns during the five-year war; victory was largely due to guerrilla actions, and Sen was given a good measure of the credit for leading the stunning final offensive on April 17, 1975.

His appointment to the defense ministry was natural even though there were zone secretaries with more years of military experience. But with Sen in charge, Pol Pot had fewer immediate fears of misplaced loyalty. In the years ahead Sen's specialties would prove limited. He knew Cambodian military affairs like the back of his hand, and he had studied European campaigns.
But he was not as accomplished a student of the Vietnamese military as the zone commanders who were supposed to be his subordinates. As disagreements grew, Son Sen used his chief advantage against the Zone chiefs. Pol Pot had given him direct authority over the national security police, the Party's secret police, who were charged with arresting the “traitors” within the Party.

The rest of the wartime front government remained as it was, with Sihanouk in Beijing still acting as the titular head even though he admitted he did not know what was going on in Cambodia. But the party was preparing for the second stage, a full change of leaders in the next months. The city was cleaned, new cadre moved in, and ministries and bureaucracies staffed. The Khmer Rouge were obsessive accountants and wrote voluminous if inadequate reports and documents.

Even though a large number of the cadre appointed to cooperative and industry leadership committees were functional illiterates, they were required to file reports on all matters: names and ages of their cooperative members, number of births and deaths, amount of production, size of stocks of everything from pencils to spades. Eventually the cooperatives were required to send reports every ten days to the central administration in Phnom Penh. The reports were doctored to meet the Center's expectations and filed. The Center, reading these falsely optimistic reports, would then ask even more of the cooperatives. When the bubble burst, as it did inevitably when shortfalls and failures became obvious, the Center would point to these pieces of paper and infer that only a disloyal member of the revolution would subvert the revolution. An illusory harvest of a hundred tons of rice became a capital crime.

The party also moved its headquarters to Phnom Penh by July 1975, and Deputy Secretary Nuon Chea was put in charge of all of the party's organizations, including its new political training school, its youth league, and the “reeducation” of returned intellectuals. He also joined Pol Pot in overseeing Son Sen's work as the chief of the national security police. Chea, the constant number two in the party under Pol Pot, had not been part of the Paris circle. He came from Battambang in the northwest and was educated in Thailand, at a high school and university in Bangkok. He was first inducted into the Thai Communist Party before joining the Vietnamese Indochinese Communist Party. As such he was one of the oldest veterans of the Cambodian communist movement, and Pol Pot entrusted him with the sensitive and crucial party-building responsibilities in Democratic Kampuchea. Pol Pot may have put his Paris associates in charge of a majority of government
ministries but the more important party positions remained in the hands of communists from all backgrounds.

And as the postwar revolution ensued, Nuon Chea was the sole top party figure who appeared to be untouched by a sweep of purges. Paris-educated leaders were among the first to be purged or lost in the reshuffling. Notably absent from the lists of new appointments was the name of Hou Youn, one of the original “Three Ghosts,” whose reputation had added respectability to the Khmer Rouge during the war. Youn had “disappeared.” Later, the Khmer Rouge claimed he had died in the final battle for Phnom Penh. In fact, he was executed in 1975. Youn had been known for his independence, and as the chief expert on agriculture in Cambodia his moderate views were unwelcome in the radical revolutionary design for Cambodia. He had worked too hard devising a sensible rural strategy not to stand up and oppose the oppressive cooperative scheme of the party. His murder presaged more purges of dissidents in the party.

Hu Nim, another of the Three Ghosts, stayed on as titular minister of information. He, too, had little power and was never promoted to the central committee. He had some protection from the Chinese and was allowed to perform nominal chores, but he was spied upon by suspicious colleagues.

Only Khieu Samphan, the most famous of the Three Ghosts, continued to rise. He behaved for the Khmer Rouge as he had for Sihanouk. Whatever job was given him he accepted and performed to the best of his ability, apparently accepting the strategy and the consequences. He had been an effective cabinet minister for Sihanouk; he was just so as the nominal head of state for Pol Pot.

While the party was establishing itself and its program in Phnom Penh, the army and the members of the old wartime cooperatives were settling nearly three million people in the countryside. By May they had all been assigned lodging in cooperatives, in time for planting. Some of these settlements were as crowded and poor as refugee camps. Others were nearly model villages. In some zones these “new people,” evicted from the Lon Nol areas, were welcomed with hospitality by the “old people” who had lived in Khmer Rouge areas during the war. In other zones the “new people” were met with bitter animosity and little food. In some zones former Lon Nol soldiers were sequestered in separate villages; in others they were shot on the spot. And everywhere the “old people” or “base people” were overwhelmed with the prospect of incorporating the city people into their village cooperatives.

The Center leadership had presumed too much about the cooperatives. Perhaps they had been lulled into believing the evacuation would go smoothly because the cooperative leaders during the war had written exaggerated reports of food, health, and sanitation conditions in fear they would offend Angka.

The old people had been told to prepare for the new people as early as March 1975, after the preliminary evacuation and resettlement plans were approved at the Second Congress of the United Front inside Cambodia in February of that year. There was little time to draw up final plans for the evacuation, much less figure out how to feed and resettle the millions. No one knew how many people would declare Kompong Cham their home province, or Battambang or Takeo. The zone armies were charged with shepherding the new people, forcibly, to home villages or to the army's own zone for new people who were without provincial birthplaces. The armies also had to maintain “security” and purge those people declared enemies from the old regime—sorting them out and murdering them along the way or in cooperatives.

Only layers of skillful subterfuge hid the immediate prospect of anarchy which the party feared. Only the armies of the zones prevented the revolution from splintering—a testimony to the loyalty of all zones behind the revolution at the start. The army dutifully oversaw the various stages of the evacuations and the executions of thousands of “enemies.”

It was up to the old people to initiate the new people into the rigors and rites of revolutionary Cambodia. Some of the old people must have been surprised and disappointed when they learned of the resettlement plans. It meant more of the same. Normally the difficult, austere measures of war are moderated if not abandoned in peace. Even if there are no material gains at the end of war, there is at least the prospect of family reunions, celebrations, and a return to the leisurely life of peace. Instead, the old people were told they would have the added burden of countless new members in their cooperatives. They would have to divide their meager food stocks with strangers, find them places to sleep, and teach them how to farm. There seemed to be too few rewards for the old people who had fought and sacrificed for the Khmer Rouge.

The party bought off these old people by allowing them to establish a Vietnamese-inspired status system within the cooperatives that gave the new people few rights, few provisions, and a lot of work. The party also allowed them to deport large numbers of new people when, after the initial
evacuation, the old people complained of overcrowding. Strong zone secretaries like So Phim and Ta Mok interpreted policies as they saw fit, and soon there was less uniformity in postwar rural Cambodia than in the days of fighting. Large numbers of new people wandered around the country looking for a cooperative to take them in; others were deported when cooperatives decided they were unwanted.