When the War Was Over (41 page)

As the people were moved about, the party eliminated some members who had been accepted during wartime but were now considered unfitting because of their “bourgeois” background. It had already closed itself to new members in preparation for this cleansing. At the same time the newly unified Khmer Rouge army was purged of soldiers and officers from the wrong class background. When the party met for its third congress in January, both institutions would be ready to tackle the second revolution—total class warfare.

The first stage of the revolution, the period of war communism, was coming to a close. In Phnom Penh a national security system, or secret police force, was being established to take over the duties of determining class enemies or foreign spies and marking them for elimination. The army was informed by November that the soldiers had fulfilled their police obligations and could now return to their primary duties of defending the borders and assisting in national reconstruction.

. . . the effectiveness of terror depends almost entirely on the degree of social atomization—an outrageously pale, academic word for the horror it implies. Every kind of organized opposition must disappear before the full force of terror can be let loose.

Hannah Arendt
On Violence,
1969

I am so tired my chest burns. I am frightened by everything I see around me. My vision is blurred. But I will bear the suffering in order to meet you, my wife. In this cycle of incarnation you have the karma of suffering. We both have the karma of suffering . . . I have to say goodbye to you now, quickly, because my tears are falling too much.

 

 

In the fall of 1975, Prince Norodom Sihanouk left his palatial home in Beijing and began his journey home to revolutionary Cambodia. His route was circuitous and hesitant. From Beijing he made a short stopover in Phnom Penh to perform burial rights for his mother, Queen Kossamak, and then left immediately to undertake a diplomatic mission in the service of the Khmer Rouge. He had seen enough to guess what lay ahead for Cambodia.

Sihanouk flew to New York, where he attended the 1975 United Nations General Assembly, following in the footsteps of Ieng Sary, who had arrived earlier as Cambodia's new foreign minister. Sihanouk performed well. He knowingly repeated the lies Sary had told the UN, that the evacuation had been carried out “without bloodshed,” that the refugee reports of wholesale executions of former military officers were unfounded, that the revolution was “self-reliant,” in no need of aid from abroad.

His mission fulfilled, Sihanouk departed New York and announced he would make an eleven-country tour to places like Albania, Somalia, and the Yemen Arab Republic before returning to Cambodia. The Cambodians who had served Sihanouk in Beijing during his war years in exile decided to quit. Privately, the prince had warned them of the dangers they would face and they defected to France. In Paris they contradicted everything the prince had said at the UN about the Khmer Rouge. They said the new revolutionaries had thrown out the liberal program promised during the war and they feared the refugee stories were true. And they were afraid to go back to Phnom Penh.

Sihanouk did not answer them and continued on his journey. But news of Sihanouk's decision to return inspired other overseas Cambodians, who said that if the prince could return so could they. Hundreds of Cambodian intellectuals and activists, even military officers training in the United States, accepted the prince's official rosy version of the revolution and went home—many to an awful fate of arrest, torture, and death.

The revolution did not wait for Sihanouk. Before he finally returned, the united front government he allegedly headed met in Phnom Penh for the last time and on December 14, 1975, adopted a new constitution that acknowledged what had in fact become the law of the land since April 17. It was the front's third (and last) national congress. Its new constitution for the land abolished the monarchy and “reactionary” religion. Sihanouk was now a commoner, and his faith, the faith of his ancestors and his nation, was forbidden. The prince was to play no role in the new government.

All property became “collectively owned”; farms, factories, homes, offices, small fishing craft, tools, and cars were the property of the state. Citizens were divided into three categories: workers, peasants, and soldiers. No others existed. According to the constitution, all they were to do was to work and to defend the country. The system of justice was given cursory treatment; there were to be “peoples courts,” which were not defined, and there was a blunt warning that anyone “threatening the popular state” could look forward to the “severest form of punishment.”

The government was described as a collective. A state presidium, headed by a chairman and including a first and a second vice-chairman, matched the three-member leadership system used by cooperatives. The composition of the Cambodian revolutionary army merited an article of its own. Equality of the sexes was upheld in the constitution, polygamy and polyandry were banned. But above all else, this constitution spoke about work and production. The new national coat of arms was composed of irrigation terraces and
factories. Culture was defined as “serving the tasks of defending and building Cambodia into a great and prosperous country.” Every worker “has his subsistence fully secure,” the constitution said, and unemployment was outlawed in the country renamed Democratic Kampuchea. (Kampuchea is the Khmer name for Cambodia.)

There was also no mention of freedom. “The worker, laborer and peasant are the master of the factories, the hands and means of production,” but their only right was the right to work.

The country's foreign policy was described as independent, peaceful, nonaligned, and neutral. The constitution warned that Democratic Kampuchea was opposed “to all forms of subversion and aggression from outside, whether military, political, cultural, social, diplomatic, or so-called humanitarian” but stated that it was “full of goodwill” and “firmly determined to maintain close and friendly relations with all countries having common borders with her and with all countries throughout the world, near and far, on the strict basis of mutual respect of sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

The constitution did not describe the government as socialist, much less communist. It was extremely simple and, in that sense and most others, it was true to the system the Khmer Rouge adopted. The national anthem, entitled “Glorious April 17,” came closer to describing the spirit of the new regime:

Sihanouk finally returned at the end of December and on January 3, 1976, promulgated the constitution. It called for an elected “people's assembly,” and on March 20, an “election” was duly held across the country for members of the assembly, who then met for several hours in April. The assembly members were photographed raising their hands to accept unanimously the resignation of the old front government and the request of Prince Sihanouk to retire. A new government was immediately formed. At its head was Pol Pot. Unknown to the outside world, this
nomme de guerre
was used to conceal the identity of Saloth Sar.

Sihanouk, no longer of use to the regime, was put away, under house arrest at the royal palace.

The days of the united front were over. There was no longer any pretense at including people from all strata of the old society in the new revolutionary regime. Angka no longer courted the monks, intellectuals, or members of the royal family whose names had added prestige and respect to their cause and whose labor had been so instrumental at crucial stages of their revolution. Diplomats from other communist countries, particularly in the Soviet bloc, were more shocked by Sihanouk's announced “retirement” and the end of the united front strategy than were non-communist nations. They knew how unorthodox and dangerous it was to spurn so early and with such extreme finality those people who had held the respect and admiration of the population. But the diplomats made no public criticisms.

The Khmer Rouge planned to make their mark by surpassing communist orthodoxy as well as more established political behavior. No other communist country had dared attempt such a complete confiscation of property, much less within a year after victory. In theory, socialist revolutions were planned in discrete phases, to prepare the population for gradually giving up
their old way of life for a new communist order. The Khmer Rouge began their revolution at a stage most communist countries would consider extreme as a goal, much less a starting point.

The Khmer Rouge adapted the most radical economic examples from communist history—the overnight industrial revolutions of Stalin and Mao—as the normal pace for their revolution. And they directed these upheavals through the mysterious Angka. They were still hiding their communist party behind a wall of secrecy. Too impatient to try to win popular support and too cynical, they became tyrants and ruled through terror. Each new directive they issued was accompanied by a new wave of executions and purges to ensure obedience.

Ieng Thirith said the Center never felt it truly controlled the country and that the party felt threatened by scores of enemies trying to rob it of power. First the party blamed the elite of the old society and killed many of them. Then the party launched its version of the socialist revolution, and when the revolution went out of control, the Center began to suspect the men it had appointed as ministers in the government of March 1976. They were arrested and killed. In 1978, the Center went after the powerful zone secretaries and killed many of them. Feeling besieged, the party initiated “class warfare” in a desperate search for “enemies” and purged peasants and party members alike for not coming from an extremely poor, hence proper, class background, or for associating with an ill-defined enemy class bent on sabotaging the revolution. The Center suspected that the United States, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam had agents within the Cambodian communist party. Purge followed purge, but the “enemy” grew ever more elusive, and ever more pervasive in the party's mind.

The Khmer Rouge were living proof that power does not grow out of a gun. The rifles of the Khmer Rouge destroyed the old power, but those same guns could not in the end create a new power base. That requires a degree of popular support and understanding of the new order that the Khmer Rouge never cultivated or won. They ruled, instead, through violence and terror.

Hannah Arendt, student of revolutions, made this observation years before the Khmer Rouge attempted their ultimate revolution: “To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high . . . the end will be the destruction of all power.”

She described how a complete rule by terror would operate and why it would bring about its own cataclysmic failure. The terrorist regime must first destroy all organized opposition. The people must become “atomized,
an outrageously pale, academic word for the horror it implies.” They must be separated from each other and forbidden normal ties and relationships, something the Khmer Rouge achieved with the evacuations and cooperative system. Then, she wrote, the people would have to be policed by spies, ubiquitous informers. The Khmer Rouge established a spy system through their national security police service and within the cooperatives. Children were made to inform on parents, comrades on comrades, neighbor on neighbor, to save themselves.

The result, Arendt said, would be a regime where no one could be trusted, a regime of sabotage and subterfuge. In such an environment, economic progress is doomed because terror produces paralysis in society. Waste, of human lives and human production, is the natural product of terror. Eventually the regime is consumed by the increasingly inward quest for the mysterious enemies robbing it of progress and power. It must finally turn on itself.

Arendt concluded: “. . . terror turns not only against its enemies but against its friends and supporters as well, being afraid of all power, even the power of its friends. The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victims.”

Arendt was writing in philosophical terms, summing up the experience of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union years before the Khmer Rouge captured Cambodia. She foresaw the consequences of a regime that took revolution by terror to its ultimate extreme—economic upheaval, purges, failure, and death. And Arendt pinpointed how such a regime would have to enforce its terror—through atomization.

The effect of the revolution on the people of Cambodia can best be seen through the prism of atomization. That process of breaking down and then isolating society both describes and defines the disease that had infected the Cambodian revolution long before the communist army won in 1975. In their years of obscurity, the Khmer Rouge developed a preoccupation with betrayal that came to be as intense as their appreciation of Cambodia's lost honor. Avenging both became nearly a divine mission. This shaped their choice of an extreme communist ideology and an obsessively secret form for their revolution.