When the War Was Over (52 page)

The party faithful were asked to believe these fantastic charges against one of their foremost leaders and they did. The momentum of violence was so deeply rooted in the party's makeup that not even the zone secretaries could see the obvious import of the Koy Thuon example: that the Center could turn against any and all of them.

With the precedent of the old Northern Zone purge firmly established with the execution of Koy Thuon, the Center proceeded with the second zone purge—of the Northwestern Zone. This time the Center used the western and southwestern cadre, circumventing the informal defense pact between the northwestern and eastern leaders. The Center also left the Northwestern Zone leader Nhim Ros in place, for the moment.

The Center was in the midst of another investigation of the party, with a different set of criteria for loyalty and treason. The first signs of these and other changes can be charted through the records at Tuol Sleng. In 1976 the people executed were members of the old society: 164 factory workers, 112 people from the population at large, 61 students, 35 professors, 20 doctors and nurses, 49 engineers, 55 bureaucrats of the old regime, 209 soldiers of the old regime, and 47 students and dignitaries from overseas. Of the over 750 executions recorded that year at Tuol Sleng, no more than twelve were communist party members. It was the year when the Bophanas of Cambodia were tortured and murdered.

The year 1977 was a turning point, following the change in party directives. The number of recorded executions of party officials jumped to forty-four and the number of those imprisoned to sixty-one. Some 142 workers were killed—the category with the highest number of executions. This purge reflected the party's decision to move ahead with industrialization and consequently to examine the “loyalty” records of the workers, and to murder the proletariat in whose names the revolution was waged.

The next largest category of victims was eighty-two dignitaries and students returning from overseas—a mixed group of sympathizers and members of the old society. In 1977 another sixty-four professors were killed. The next largest category is communist party officials, with sixty-one imprisoned that year. There were far fewer former students, bureaucrats, engineers, doctors, or soldiers executed that year. Those who had survived the earlier purges had made an accommodation, largely by hiding their old identities.

By 1978 the categories had again changed. Now communist officials headed the list of Tuol Sleng victims—107 killed that year.

One can also measure the swiftness with which directives of the party hierarchy were followed through the Tuol Sleng execution lists. A few months after the party decided to home in on a new list of suspects, they appeared at the incarceration center. As the party decided to break yet one more promise or alliance, those who lost power as a result eventually found themselves at Tuol Sleng in chains.

The records also show the constant xenophobia of the Khmer Rouge who routinely killed foreigners discovered in the country. Tuol Sleng records that Thais captured in Kompong Som were slaughtered at the Center in May 1976. About the same time Indian and Pakistani merchants and students were murdered there. In 1978 some American, Australian, English, and New Zealand sailors were captured on the Gulf of Siam or nearby offshore islands and hauled up to Tuol Sleng and murdered. Foreigners were always suspect. That was a constant.

The tally of victims, while still incomplete, shows the increasing reliance of the regime on Tuol Sleng. Duch and his executioners were required to explain the failures of the revolution. In 1976 some 2,000 prisoners were brought to the prison complex. In 1977 over 6,000 were imprisoned. And in 1978 an estimated 12,000 people were brought there.

While the execution lists chart the increase in party members brought to Tuol Sleng, only a reading of the confessions extracted from the victims gives a hint of the party's new obsessions. After the party ordered the sea change in the revolution at the 1976 meetings, the Tuol Sleng torturers began interrogating prisoners about their attitudes toward Vietnam. The party's top leaders selected this most sensitive issue to gauge the loyalty of party members and ferret out “enemies” hidden within the party.

The party shaped the Vietnamese problem by questioning the founding date of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. It was not an innocuous question. In the party's only official history, printed during the war in 1973, the founding date was listed as September 30,1951. But nothing ever happened on that date. It was an amalgam, a political compromise reached to unite all factions of the party behind the war effort.

By 1976 the Center was anxious to give Cambodian communists full credit for the success of the war and revolution, and do away with the compromise founding date that accorded Vietnam a major role in building Cambodia's communist movement. The Center wanted to deny any debt to the Vietnamese, any links to the old Indochinese Communist Party, and decided to purify history by marking 1960 as the founding year of the party and transforming Hanoi from benefactor to threat.

The compromise over the founding date and its implicit agreement to disagree over the party's roots was broken as easily as all the other alliances crafted during the war, when the party needed the support of all factions and Vietnam. Now, in peace, the Center wanted to challenge Vietnam, reassert the superiority of the Cambodian revolution, and “cleanse” the party of all things Vietnamese.

The targets of suspicion were no longer the new people. Instead, the Cambodians who had helped build the revolution were quickly becoming its victims. Cambodia's revolution thereafter became the tale of a party turning against its own people—and of thousands more slaughtered in the insanity.

Duch simultaneously set up investigations into the two new categories of suspects—intellectuals in and near the party, and Cambodians deemed too loyal to the Vietnamese communists. There appears to have been at least one deadline for Duch. His search for communists associated with the Vietnamese stepped up shortly before the party's anniversary, September 30, 1976. Cambodia's closest ally, China, had been pressuring Pol Pot to take off his mask of secrecy and acknowledge publicly that Cambodia was run by a communist party.

Then on September 9, 1976, Mao Zedong died. Pol Pot, as prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea, delivered the eulogy over the official radio on September 18. The nine-day delay was not explained; however, the text of Pol Pot's statement contains a clue. For the first time Pol Pot said that Angka's ideology was based on Marxist-Leninism, the closest the Khmer Rouge had come to date to a public admission they were communists, but not the forthright statement their foreign friends had requested.

The importance of this half-admission was underlined just two days later with one public and one secret event. Pol Pot officially resigned as prime minister for reasons, he said, of health and he named the reliable Nuon Chea, second-in-command of the party, as the temporary replacement. Pol Pot was then free to concentrate on the other event of the day—the arrest of Keo Meas, one of the first high-ranking communists brought into Tuol Sleng and the target of the witch hunt against friends of Vietnam.

Keo Meas was a veteran of the First Indochina War, when he joined Vietnam's Indochinese Communist Party. After the Geneva Accords he worked closely with Pol Pot in Phnom Penh and in the late 1960s he was asked to write an acceptable first draft of the history of the Cambodian communist party. In that capacity he gathered testimony from all crucial party figures, including Pol Pot, and knew how the compromise over the party anniversary date was reached. This was why he was arrested and brought to Tuol Sleng over a dozen years later: to explain the compromise in a series of confessions and to take the blame for brokering that compromise to subvert the
party in a plot to disguise the existence of an underground, parallel Cambodian party controlled by Vietnam.

These charges were concocted by an insane imagination but with a clear purpose that became obvious soon afterward. In his first confessions, written before he was tortured into admitting guilt, Keo Meas is on the side of Pol Pot and the group of Cambodians who stayed in Cambodia after 1954. He wrote: “Inside the country the [anniversary] date had been fixed as the 1960 congress . . . if one were to examine and research the matter there had never before been any congress whatsoever held and one would consider this congress to be the first one.”

His confession of September 30, 1976, was entitled: “The Responses of X: The First Time—Talking in Overt Form About the Contradiction in Hanoi over Whether to Fix the Party Foundation Date as 1951 or 1960.” In the confession, Keo Meas gives a clear and sympathetic history of the anniversary date compromise. “It was decided to adopt the 30 of September as the day of the foundation [from the day of the 1960 congress] and as for the year to adopt 1951, that is the year of the creation of the Committee to Mobilize for the Creation of the Party.”

Keo Meas wrote how such a compromise favored no single individual or wing of the party, but joined together the 1951 people and the 1960 people, or those who had gone to Hanoi after the Geneva Accords and those who had stayed in Cambodia. He also wrote down all the reasons why the 1951 congress did not establish the party, only a committee. All of this should have been to Pol Pot's liking but the party was not after an accurate history. The party wanted a plot.

Battered and broken like other victims at Tuol Sleng, Keo Meas eventually relented and wrote that this compromise had not been an honest effort to appease two factions, but a conspiracy to undermine the legitimacy of the Cambodian party. With the Keo Meas confession in hand, Pol Pot and the party hierarchy could proceed with changing the anniversary. Keo Meas was then killed.

Immediately the year of the party anniversary was changed from 195 to 1960. In the September-October 1976 edition of the party's theoretic journal, the lead article celebrated the party's sixteenth anniversary. (The party's September 1976 youth magazine, published before the Keo Meas confession, had celebrated the party's twenty-fifth anniversary.)

Now the party leaders could hold off proclaiming their communist identities, as requested by China, until they had uncovered and liquidated all the
members of this plot of Keo Meas'. In one party document, the leaders said that pressure to openly declare the existence of the party was great, pressure that had come from “friendly [foreign] parties.”

“. . . In September and October [1976] we were on the point of deciding to come out. From then on, however, documents revealed that our enemies were trying to defeat us, using every method at their disposal.”

Secretive by nature and Vietnamese training, Pol Pot probably used the Keo Meas confession that a plot was afoot to buttress his decision to continue hiding behind Angka. One can surmise he and the other Cambodian party leaders did not want to come out in the open and challenge their links to Vietnam until they were convinced China after Mao would continue full support for Cambodia. Envoys from Democratic Kampuchea were active worldwide during this period to shore up Cambodia's position. The intellectual Khieu Samphan, now head of the state presidium, attended the Nonaligned Summit in Colombo the month before, leaving his mark as a diplomat of a nation adamantly opposed to joining a bloc. He did not go along with the Vietnamese and Lao condemnation of ASEAN's proposal for a zone of peace, freedom, and neutrality in Southeast Asia. And he voluntarily went on record in support of independence for East Timor from Indonesia.

At the United Nations General Assembly session in the autumn, Ieng Sary made a similar impression, saying Democratic Kampuchea was a solidly nonaligned nation. He urged the poor majority at the UN to end the control of the rich minority over that body. A women's delegation from Democratic Kampuchea toured the communist countries of Albania, North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos. Vietnam and Cambodia agreed to regular air service between their two countries. In their first year as leaders of Democratic Kampuchea the Khmer Rouge appeared anxious to establish their own individual diplomatic stance, separate from China and Vietnam but not opposed to either. Perhaps the party was also laying its defense against the possibility of Chinese betrayal following Mao's death.

Some have suggested that Pol Pot was engaged in a power struggle or that the party was about to split over the question of ties to Vietnam, but it is hard to imagine who could have dared challenge Pol Pot at this stage. His strongest zone secretary—So Phim of the Eastern Zone—had cooperated fully if reluctantly in the Center's partial purge of the old Northern Zone; the second strongest secretary, Ta Mok in the Southwestern Zone, had completed the second deportation of many “new people” from his zone to the
Northwestern Zone. The standing committee, according to all available evidence, went along with his directives up to that date.
²