The Others

 CHAPTER 17 

The Others

ALL THROUGH the war diplomats and journalists at Phnom Penh dinners and cocktail parties spoke of "les autres" only in the vaguest terms. They were thought of as shadowy, insubstantial, inconsequential, wrathful most, inhabiting that unknown, fearsome world "out there," where the bombs that rattled the windows and shook the glasses actually fell. It was not until well into the war that the idea that the Khmer Rouge could in any way differ from, actually be independent of, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong was entertained.

Such ignorance was fostered and exploited by Washington and by the American embassy. The intention was at first to establish that it was a wholly North Vietnamese army that Lon Nol's gallant men were fighting and later to explain why a settlement was impossible. The Khmer Rouge leadership was said to be unknown and divided, and three of its supposed leaders were pronounced dead—"ghosts"—in Washington; there was no one with whom Kissinger could talk.

It is true that there are fewer written sources on the origins of Cambodian Communism than on Vietnamese or Lao, that its beginnings are confused, and that since there had been no American embassy in Phnom Penh between 1965 and 1969, American knowledge of opposition in the countryside was sketchy. Moreover after May 1970, the CIA found it harder to place agents among the Khmer Rouge than among the Viet Cong. Nonetheless, for those who cared to inquire, there was evident enough. The cable traffic between the embassy and Washington shows that from the start of the war there was no justification for Nixon and Kissinger to claim, as they did, that the Cambodians were North Vietnamese puppets with invisible leadership and unknowable aims.

All Indochinese Communism originates from Vietnam. The Indochinese Communist Party, formed in 1930, originally consisted entirely of Vietnamese cadres. They followed Comintern policy of the period and envisaged the replacement of French Indochina by a socialist federation of the three countries. One Communist document of 1934, for example, stated: "there is no place for considering a Cambodian revolution on its own. There can only be an Indochina revolution."

In 1941 the Indochinese Communist Party went underground. The struggle against the French and Japanese was led by a new united front, the Viet Minh, which was dominated by the Party. The Viet Minh was active in all three countries of Indochina recruiting Laotians and Khmers. It was not very successful in Cambodia; many of those Khmers who did join came from the anti-French Khmer Issarak ("Free Khmer") guerrillas. By the end of the decade the Viet Minh was still the only important anticolonial force in Indochina, and it was overwhelmingly Vietnamese.

In 1951 the Vietnamese dissolved the Indochinese Communist Party into national components. In Hanoi the Lao Dong (Workers') Party was constituted, and in Cambodia the Revolutionary Cambodian People's Party was formed under a Central Committee of figures tied to the Viet Minh. This party later encouraged the formation of a legal political party, the Pracheachon group, under the terms of reconciliation imposed by the 1954 Geneva Accords. The Khmer Communist Party itself remained a clandestine ally of the Lao Dong Party and the People's Revolutionary Party in Laos. It was much weaker than either of them  Today the Vietnamese leadership claims that 1951 marked the end of all ideas of an Indochina Federation; the Cambodian Communists maintain that the Vietnamese never abandoned the dream. Evidence can be found to support either position, but at the very least it is clear that the Vietnamese, then and subsequently, saw the revolutionary struggle in Indochina first in terms of Vietnamese national interests and only secondly in terms of proletarian internationalism.

Today the Vietnamese leadership claims that 1951 marked the end of all ideas of an Indochina Federation; the Cambodian Communists maintain that the Vietnamese never abandoned the dream. Evidence can be found to support either position, but at the very least it is clear that the Vietnamese, then and subsequently, saw the revolutionary struggle in Indochina first in terms of Vietnamese national interests and only secondly in terms of proletarian internationalism.

In 1954 the North Vietnamese accepted the terms of the Geneva Agreement, which required the Cambodian Communists to integrate with Sihanouk’s political structure. They endorsed Cambodian neutrality, and the Viet Minh were withdrawn to Hanoi. The bulk of those Cambodians who had already chosen Communism went with them—estimates of just how many this involved vary between two thousand and four thousand, the lower number probably being closer to the truth.

Geneva marked a historic split among Khmer Communists. Those who were taken to Hanoi remained there, growing older, more pro-Vietnamese and more remote from their country. But a few hundred Khmer Communist guerrillas disobeyed Hanoi and stayed in the maquis after 1954. They saw Geneva as an outright betrayal of the Cambodian revolution. Twenty-three years later, the Communist Prime Minister of Cambodia complained that “this revolutionary struggle of our people and the booty that was subsequently captured, dissolved into thin air through the Geneva Agreements.” The trouble in those days, he said, was that Cambodians did not know which direction to follow and “which forces to rely on.” Evidently Hanoi was not a reliable force and, in order to distance the Khmer Rouge from their Vietnamese origins, the Party’s history was rewritten and its founding dated in 1960, not 1951.

The Party did not prosper in the fifties and sixties; the maquis scratched out a thankless existence in the jungles and hills of the northeast and the Cardamom mountains of the southwest. Hanoi’s policy throughout the period was to cooperate with Sihanouk, and the Vietnamese Communists gave very little aid to their Cambodian comrades. At the same time the Prince’s success in winning independence and maintaining reasonable standards of living deprived the Party of both a national and an internal base.

Before its history was rewritten, Party leaders defined 1954–67 as the "period of political struggle" that preceded their taking up arms. The rigors of that struggle depended very much on the unpredictable nature of Sihanouk's current political activities. In 1955 and 1958 the Prachachon group fought in the elections though it was severely harassed. The revised version of the Party's history drastically shortens the political struggle period and declares that in 1960 "we then took up the task of mobilizing the masses to fight against imperialism . . . to achieve true independence." The countryside was given the leading place in the revolution.

From then on, certainly, more left-wingers trickled out of Phnom Penh, Battambang and other towns into the traditional refuge of opposition that the hills and forests have afforded throughout Cambodian history. After Sihanouk forced the Prachachon group underground, the number of exiles grew faster—even when he also moved leftward and renounced American aid. It was now that the real core of the Khmer Rouge began to form in the countryside, and it was from these recruits that the movement took, and retains, its leaders. They were, from the start, an extraordinaryily close-knit community, bound by class by intellectual training,by the ordeal of opposition, even by marriage.

For almost all of them, socialist commitment had begun in Paris in the 1950s, when study at a French university or technical college was considered de rigueur for middle-class Cambodians, and young people of all backgrounds and political views avidly sought scholarships.

The Khmer Students' Association in Paris was dominated by the left. It made good use of the freedom France afforded to form students' views in ways that were unacceptable at home. There were limits to development, however, and these were set by the French Communist Party, an organization difficult to rival for dogmatic orthodoxy, which taught hatred of the bourgeoisie and uncritical admiration of Stalinism, including the collectivization of agriculture.

The intellectual and political voyages of the future Khmer Rouge leaders were so similar that only a few need be charted here. Saloth Sar (who would emerge after the war as Prime Minister and Party Secretary with the pseudonym Pol Pot) was born in Kompong Thom in 1928. By his own account he was a peasant child, worked the fields himself, and spent six years in a Buddhist pagoda. After attending the Collège Technique in Phnom Penh he went to Paris in 1949 to study radio electronics. He failed his examinations three times; this, he has said, was because of his greater interest in revolutionary work. After his return to Phnom Penh he taught history and geography in a private school, joined the Prachachon and became well known as a left-wing journalist. By 1962 he had apparently risen in the underground Communist Party to the post of Deputy General Secretary. He fled to the hills in 1963 when, like others, he interpreted an invitation from Sihanouk to thirty-four left-wingers and "subversives" to enter the government as a feint, a prelude to repression.

With him went Leng Sary, who was born in South Vietnam in 1930 and was educated in Cambodia and Paris, where he studied first commerce and then politics. In France, he too was active in student politics, traveled widely, and then became President of the Khmer Students' Association. He returned to Phnom Penh in 1957 and worked as a schoolteacher until 1963. His wife, Khieu Thirith, was also a left-wing student in France, and after 1963 she followed her husband into the maquis—undoubtedly becoming the only Cambodian revolutionary to have a diploma in Shake-spearena studies. Her sister, Khieu Ponnary, another activist, was the wife of Saloth Sar.

Son Sen, born in 1930, went to France to train as a teacher in 1950 Five years later, he lost his Cambodian government scholarship for sponsoring a meeting of left-wing Khmer students but was nonetheless able to return to Phnom Penh and teach. In 1958 he joined Sihanouk's party, the Sangkum, and became a director of curriculum at Phnom Penh's National Pedagogical Institute, but by 1962 Sihanouk was accusing him of stirring up left-wing demonstrations, and he too fled the capital in 1963.

Some leftists remained in Phnom Penh after 1963. Among them was Hu Nim, who had returned from France in 1957 to work as a customs and treasury official. He too joined Sihanouk's Sangkum and held a number of government posts, becoming Secretary of State for Commerce in 1962. His dissertation, "Les Services Economique au Cambodge," is one of the texts that help to explain the evolution of Cambodian revolutionary doctrine. It is a detailed Maoist analysis of the peasantry and attempts to show that although land ownership was broken up, it was becoming concentrated in fewer peasant hands. At the same time, he argued, the gradual "feeble development" of capitalism in Cambodia prevented technological advance and encouraged the exploitation of the poorest peasants, who were burdened with debt.

Hu Nim's work holds some interest today, but more extraordinary—in view of what happened after the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975—is the thesis of Khieu Samphan, the Khmer Rouge commander in chief during the war and the head of state afterward. He was the son of a minor civil servant from Svay Rieng; Khieu Samphan's widowed mother made a meager living selling vegetables. He won a scholarship to France in 1954. He became Secretary General of the Students' Association, but he is remembered by his contemporaries as an immensely studious, serious young man who devoted all his time to his work and to his politics, none to socializing.

His thesis, "Cambodia's Economy and Industrial Development," was completed at the University of Paris in 1959. It argues that the strength of Cambodia lay in the villages, where 90 percent of the people lived, that the cities were parasitical, and that integration into the world economy retarded the country's development. It was essential that Cambodian industry be developed. But this could be done only if agriculture were developed first and this, in turn, depended on very different terms of trade from those that were now in effect, and a transfer of the population out of the towns into productive work, first in the fields and then in industry.

Industry in the late fifties provided only 10 percent of GNP and it was, as he argued, geared much more closely to the needs of the international market than to those of Cambodia; it was an extension of Western capitalism. At the same time, agriculture was atrophying in a precapitalist phase. In the last sixty years the state of feudalism had hardly been affected, the merchant economy barely altered; indeed, "integration" with capitalist economies encouraged landlordism. Public investment—such as the railway—financed by France had only helped in the penetration of French industrial products, not the development of Khmer industry.

It was true that most Khmer peasants, unlike the Vietnamese, owned between two and seven hectares of land, their own equipment and animals. But, he claimed, since they often had no working capital and had to rely on moneylenders, who charged rates of up to 300 percent, the independence conferred by land ownership alone was illusory. Moreover, the situation was actually deteriorating, because landlords were spending more of their income on imported goods and were demanding rent in cash, not in kind. Peasants, therefore, had to sell their produce, the mercantile class increased, and the rent was dissipated into the foreign-exchange markets instead of remaining at least in the area, if not in the hands, of the producer. The multiplier effect was thus lost. He argued that "without this considerable leakage, development of the country might well proceed at least as rapidly as that of European countries."

That rural debt existed in Cambodia and constituted, in some areas at least, a serious burden on the peasantry, is not a matter of dispute. But other studies of the countryside do not demonstrate that landlordism was the overriding problem that Khieu Samphan asserted. It was, however, true that as family land passed through generations plots became smaller and smaller, especially along the fertile banks of the rivers and the Great Lake. In one crowded village along the Mekong, 83 percent of the farming land was divided into six thousand holdings that averaged only one quarter of a hectare each.

Now in the fifties, Khieu Samphan asserted, precapitalist stagnation was being deepened by the flow of American aid. The import of cars, refrigerators, radios, created a wasteful service or commercial class in the cities. Very few people in Phnom Penh were even registered to work, and of those who were registered 85.43 percent were engaged in unproductive labor—as waiters, maids, cyclo drivers, civil servants. The bureaucracy was too large, in part because the slow growth of industry meant that the civil service provided the only work the middle classes considered suitable.

At the same time, he argued, in terms similar to those used by Sihanouk himself in the middle sixties, the nature of American aid and the presence of the large American mission helped nourish “the desire of a particular part of Khmer society to imitate the American way of life.” The country's economy was becoming increasingly geared to satisfy the needs of foreigners and of those rich Khmers who sought to mimic them. Luxury goods (candies, perfumes, cognac, silk, raincoats, porcelain) were bought by only 10 percent of the population but made up 49 percent of the value of all imports. Products consumed by the masses (cotton, tools, fire works, household goods) constituted only 4 percent of all imports.

Khieu Samphan argued that the provincial towns were more parasitical than Phnom Penh and concluded that if Cambodian society were to be reorganized (and corruption checked), then people must be transferred into productive work. The only way was to alter the country's present links with the outside world. But he did not recommend severing all ties and developing a siege economy; he agreed that isolation would cause national bankruptcy. He believed that foreign trade must be abandoned, but exploited, in order to accelerate domestic transformation. "We would hope to profit from a century's accumulation of technical innovation in developed countries," he wrote. American aid, designed to shore up traditional relationships, would be forsworn, but French aid, which was less conservative, could continue. At the same time, the government should nationalize trade in such basic commodities as rice, corn and rubber. This would enable it to control most of the country's foreign exchange, limit illegal and wasteful imports and use export earnings to bolster the industrial sector. Banking should also be controlled by the state (though foreign banks would not be expelled), interest rates should be lowered to make capital accessible to peasants, artisans and small industrialists; credit for nonessentials like alcohol and soft drinks would be limited. The government should give priority to developing the country's electrical system, and must encourage the production of chemicals, bricks, bicycles, textiles, soap, food and pharmaceuticals. Everything must be done to divert resources into investment, and the state must set the example in fighting waste. All prestige projects must be cut out of the budget—no "magnificent exteriors and sumptuous decorations" were needed. Surplus bureaucrats and others rendered unemployed by the projections would be transferred into productive work.

Once the economy was protected against the worst of external influences, the structural reform of the countryside, which was essential to the creation of a strong industrial base, could begin. Rents should be reduced, moneylending suppressed. Peasants must be encouraged to form cooperatives. This should not be too difficult, for it is “not unusual to see our peasants organizing themselves into teams of several families to help each other with transplanting and harvesting, all the while singing well-known songs. The task at hand is to generalize this practice in a systematic way. With cooperatives, new lands could be opened up. . . . Agricultural development will stimulate industrial expansion and is at the same time dependent upon it.” He understood that not all peasants would immediately realize the value of such doctrines and that intensive political education was necessary. But, Khieu Samphan wrote—in terms which were forsaken when the experiment was eventually begun in the seventies—“Peasants must be treated with patience and understanding.” None of his proposed structural changes would be imposed by force. They could occur only if the government could persuade the people to adopt them and could “ally itself with a broad democracy and enjoy general support from the masses of the population.” The methods this twenty-eight-year-old Marxist prescribed in 1959 for the transformation of his country were essentially moderate.

After Paris, Khieu Samphan returned to Phnom Penh and founded a biweekly paper, L'Observateur, a well-produced journal in which he rehearsed his ideas for economic change and rural development, wrote sympathetically of all the socialist countries and frequently attacked (in Sihanouk's own words wherever possible) the corruption of civil servants and their lack of interest in the problems of the people. He felt that there should be far more contact between administrators in Phnom Penh and the peasantry. “To learn from the people,” he wrote, “is to perfect one’s knowledge, to verify the theory learned at school by the experience of life. It is to learn to really love the people.”

It was a philosophy that he himself practiced, but that immediately brought him to the attention of Sihanouk’s aggressive Ministry of Security. In 1960 he was called in for interrogation, and one day in August that year plain-clothes police thugs set upon him in the street, stripped him naked, photographed him and pushed him, unclothed, on his way. That is not the sort of humiliation that men forgive or forget, but despite the assault upon him, Khieu Samphan and other leftists, like Hou Yuon, Hu Nim and Chau Seng, still took a moderate line toward Sihanouk. In 1962, when Sihanouk was trying to preempt left-wing opposition by his own move left, Khieu Samphan joined the Sangkum and won a seat in Parliament. Sihanouk made him Secretary of State for Commerce. He was immensely popular among the poor in Phnom Penh, for even as a minister he lived unpretentiously, shunning the “cognac and concubine circuit.” His mother continued selling vegetables. He had no large car and drove around on a motorcycle. He lost his job when he refused to accept the bribe of a Mercedes in exchange for issuing a trading license.

During the same time, Communists like Ieng Sary, Saloth Sar, and Son Sen were taking a much harder line, denouncing Sihanouk (privately) as the principal enemy of the Cambodian people and the revolution. These were the men who fled the city in 1963, while Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim stayed.

The divergence of views was subsequently rationalized by the Khmer Rouge in the long official history published in 1977. Since Sihanouk had made membership in their front, the Pracheachon group, extremely hazardous, the Party “assigned us to act separately. Some were asked to work in the open in the guise of representatives of Parliament or functionaries in the administration. . . . Some were asked to operate openly in various other mass organizations or to be journalists. All this was aimed at inciting the masses.” The Party was working in the cities and in the countryside with the rural areas as the main base. “The cities could not be used as a base area. . . . The enemy was everywhere; the Parliament, the Court, the jails, the police and the military were there. The enemy networks were too close, and the class composition in the cities was too complex, too varied.” The basic role of the Party was to educate the peasantry, “to feel class indignation. This was the key, the basic question in our victory.”

Despite this explanation, a split between the two groups became evident after the Communist victory in 1975. Most of those who emerged in the important leadership positions were men and women who had taken the hard anti-Sihanouk position early and had joined the maquis in 1963.

In 1966, Sihanouk for the first time allowed an open slate of candidates from his party for election to the Assembly. A right-wing legislature was returned, and it chose Lon Nol as the new Prime Minister, whereupon Sihanouk formed a “counter government” of the left—it included Hou Yuon, Hu Nim and Khieu Samphan. They did not long remain members of the loyal opposition. The next year peasants revolted in Battambang province, an event that has since been seen as a turning point of the Cambodian revolution.

Sihanouk put the blame for the insurrection on Chinese agents acting in the flush of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The clandestine Party was aligned with Peking—Saloth Sar and other leaders of the maquis had secretly visited China in 1965—but the revolt seems to have been spontaneous. Its causes included long-standing resentment against usurious Chinese middlemen and a crude attempt by local authorities to drive peasants off their land to make way for a sugar refinery. The outbreak took the Party by surprise, and Pol Pot (Saloth Sar) later said that it could not be backed, because such isolated, premature revolts would be crushed by the government.

That is what did happen. Sihanouk's reaction was inhumane as well as tactically foolish. He ordered Lon Nol to liquidate the rioters. The deed was done bloodily: villages were razed and peasants were clubbed to death. Hundreds fled to the maquis, forever embittered. In Phnom Penh, Sihanouk suppressed the Chinese-Cambodian Friendship Association and publicly accused Khieu Samphan, Hu Nim, Hou Yuon and other leftists of having inspired the uprising. Fearful of his revenge, they separately joined their comrades who had fled in 1963.

It says something of the nature of political debate in the kingdom at the time of their disappearance that it was believed by many—including United States intelligence officials—that Sihanouk had had the three men put to death. It was these three the American embassy called the “Three Ghosts” when their names appeared in the ranks of the government in exile that Sihanouk formed in 1970 after his overthrow.

The Khmer Rouge later described the period between the Battambang revolt and the 1970 coup as "the civil war." It was now, according to the Party, that the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea was formed. The Party afterward made much of its victories in those years; in fact although the Communists exploited peasant grievances—such as the low price of paddy—those victories were not impressive. The Communists executed several village chiefs. Sihanouk pursued them relentlessly. He broadcast continuous tirades against "les Khmers Rouges" (it was he who had so christened them), and his army and police attacked them ferociously. Khmer Rouge prisoners often had their stomachs slit and were then hung in trees to die slowly; others were flung into ravines. One authority notes, 'Enemy villages were razed and the villagers were beaten to death by peasants conscripted by the army specifically for the task.'

But it was not only, not even principally, repression that explains the failure of Cambodian Communism before 1970. Apart from Battambang and the northeast, where the government tried to bring the self-assertive Khmer Loeu hill people under control, discontent was not sufficient to thrust large numbers of peasants into the rigors of rebellion. Living standards in much of the country were certainly low; malaria was prevalent.

in many areas, infant mortality was high, but 90 percent of the peasants owned some land and the burdens of rural debt of which Khieu Samphan, Hu Nim and others complained were not insupportable. By 1970, Marxist teachers had been scarcely more successful in proselytizing than Christian missionaries had been in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time of the coup the Khmer Rouge was still tiny. By its own account it had 4,000 regular troops and 50,000 guerrillas, but those figures are almost certainly exaggerated. Captured documents show that the regulars were grouped into companies. Such small-scale organization suggests that they were scattered and not nearly as numerous as 4,000. One Vietnamese leader later claimed that the Khmer Rouge numbered only a few hundred in 1970. Their impact had been minimal. The pagoda remained the center of cultural and political life in almost every Cambodian village; the seasons of the year were celebrated with the rituals of church and monarchy. The class anger that the Khmer Rouge sought to arouse was softened by the personality of the Prince.

Sihanouk's first impulse after his overthrow was to retire to his house at Mougins in the South of France. Under pressure from Chou En-lai, whom he considered an old friend, and of North Vietnam's Premier Pham Van Dong, and from whatever motives—petulant revenge, injured vanity, nationalist zeal—within days he sacrificed the independence and the chance for unilateral action that a waiting period in France might have afforded him. He agreed to an alliance with his enemies. His broadcast of March 23—an appeal for the country to rise against Lon Nol under the banner of his own new National United Front of Kampuchea—was immediately welcomed in a statement from Hanoi signed by Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim.

The Communists' instant approach to the man who had for years been abusing, threatening, killing them, was not surprising. Their relations with him were understandably strained and continually deteriorated, but for the moment they used Sihanouk in two ways. His task in Peking was to lead a diplomatic offensive designed to isolate the Lon Nol government and attract international support to his own Royal Government of National Union (which was announced after the United States invasion had made reconciliation impossible). At home his persona was employed to win precisely that mass support which the rhetoric of revolution had failed to engender. In Sihanouk the Khmer Rouge at last had a national and international identity and appeal.

It was not only they who turned to him. In Cambodia, feudal chiefs, village leaders and their people, and in Paris, leftists and neutralists all flocked to the Prince. In appearance both the Front and his new government were genuine coalitions. The government was based in Peking, and the Prime Minister was Penn Nouth, an old left-of-center politician who had served Sihanouk devotedly as Premier in the past. Increasingly, however, power came to lie not in Peking but in the “liberated” area of Cambodia itself, first with the North Vietnamese and then with the Front. And as the Front expanded so the Party secretly increased its control over it. Sihanouk's request to be allowed to leave Peking for Cambodia was denied by the Khmer Rouge. His popularity in the countryside was valuable, but it was also threatening, an asset to be diminished even while it was exploited.

Their past history had taught the Khmer Rouge that their new comrades in arms, the North Vietnamese, were hardly more reliable than their new leader. (Hanoi's principal supporter, Moscow, recognized Lon Nol and maintained a mission in Phnom Penh until late 1973 leaving some diplomats there until the very end of the war.) The North Vietnamese might have finally embraced the cause of Khmer Communism, but there was no reason to expect that they intended it to serve any interests save their own. Hanoi had now two principal concerns. The first was to rebuild its lines of communication, and the second was, for the first time, actually to encourage the growth of a Khmer resistance movement, which could later relieve Vietnamese divisions from the defense of these lines and the sanctuaries against attack by Lon Nol forces.

The first aim was fairly easily achieved. One new route was by water. Arms, ammunition and food were floated by raft and sampan down the Mekong from southern Laos to the Khong Falls, carried round the torrent by porter and then taken by truck and cart to the town of Kratie, which the North Vietnamese had emptied of its population after they captured it on May 5, 1970. The town now served as an administrative headquarters. From there some equipment was moved by night along hunting trails and cycle tracks east toward Vietnam and whichever of the new shifting base areas required it. The rest, destined for the southern Delta of South Vietnam, was circled by sampan, bicycle, truck, porter, in a counterclockwise direction around Phnom Penh through the foothills of the Cardamom mountains and finally into the fertile lands of rice and river of the Mekong Delta.

These and other lines of communication became important targets of the B-52s, the American and Vietnamese tactical aircraft, the helicopter gunships, the South Vietnamese ground troops and many of the Cambodian battalions. They were harassed and cut, but they were never broken. The principal effect of the American invasion on North Vietnamese logistics had been to extend the lines of communication, not to destroy them.

The construction of an effective Khmer Rouge took longer and undoubtedly presented the North Vietnamese with a dilemma. Although for the first time they needed a Khmer Communist movement, they had every reason to fear that the stronger the force became the more independent of Hanoi it might be. Nonetheless, the process began right away, and although there was no agreement in Washington on the nature of the Khmer Rouge there was never any basis for the pretense that its emergence could be neither foreseen nor monitored. Many of the incidents cited below are from Embassy reports of the time. They show how much more was known about the new movement and, in particular, about its relations with the Vietnamese than Kissinger and other officials claimed.

There appear to have been three stages to the Khmer Rouge wartime progress. Until mid-1971 they were allied with the Sihanoukists (known as Khmer Rumdo, or "Khmer Liberators") and, under North Vietnamese supervision, simply took over those areas of the countryside abandoned by the Lon Nol government. They did not at that time implement political programs. During the second stage, between summer 1971 and early 1973, the growing Khmer Rouge started to break away from Hanoi's control and to discard the totem of Sihanouk and his supporters; collectivist measures were begun. Then, from the time of the Paris Peace Agreement in January 1973 onward, the Khmer Rouge were largely on their own; they depended on North Vietnamese logistics but had no guaranteed aid from any foreign power and were free to launch their own military initiatives. It was in this third period that they embarked on the radical transformation of the country, which climaxed in their victory and the evacuation of Phnom Penh in April 1975.

CIA reports suggest that in the early months of the war both the North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge were concerned to behave in an exemplary fashion toward the local people. For their part, the North Vietnamese were anxious to dispel traditional peasant dislike and the fear that fighting for them meant fighting for the hegemony of Hanoi in Indochina. They were, they told villagers, the personal emissaries of the Prince, and they carried recordings of his speeches from Peking to prove it. A 1971 Agency report stressed that in Takeo province the Khmer Rouge take great care not to antagonize the peasantry. They help them with the harvesting, offer to pay a reasonable sum for the supplies they

In Kompong Speu province, the station in Phnom Penh reported, "By maintaining tight discipline and carefully avoiding actions which might antagonize the local population the VC/NVA have been able to convey the impression that they have the true interests of the peasants in mind." Such claims were especially persuasive in areas the South Vietnamese had already crossed. For example, the village of Chebal Monn [sic], outside the town of Kompong Speu, had been pillaged by the ARVN in June and July 1970. When the North Vietnamese won control of it in September, they reminded the villagers that they had never had to worry about South Vietnamese looting before Sihanouk's removal and promised to help them defend themselves in the future. The Agency reported that they were careful to use the village chief to recruit and persuade. He "was not and probably is not now a communist [but] like many peasants in the area was merely dissatisfied with the inability of the Cambodian Government to protect them." Communist efforts, according to the station, had already won at least a hundred recruits in this one village alone.

Not all Washington agencies were oblivious of the fact that the new war was creating an enemy where none had previously existed. On January 9, 1971, the Defense Intelligence Agency noted in the Far East summary of its secret Intelligence Bulletin, "Unless the Government is able to reassert its influence and maintain some semblance of control over the rural sector, the communist infrastructure will probably continue to grow." In a detailed ten-page Intelligence Appraisal entitled "Communist Infrastructure in Cambodia," the Agency commented a few months later:

"The Vietnamese communists have been successful in establishing an indigenous infrastructure to support their military and logistic efforts and in creating a rudimentary, functioning political apparatus staffed by Khmer in more than half of Cambodia’s 19 provinces." They now controlled 65 percent of the land and 35 percent of the people and they numbered between 35,000 and 50,000—with up to 10,000 soldiers.

The troops were organized, as in Vietnam, in three tiers—a main force, a local force and a guerrilla militia with units at the national, regional, provincial, district, village and hamlet levels. From company level up, the commander of each unit was flanked by a political commissioner who exercised undisputed authority over the combatants. By summer 1971 the village and hamlet guerrillas were already almost totally Khmer. The Vietnamese still provided the logistics and almost all of the military muscle, but local leaders were being developed. So were tensions between the two allies.

After the coup Hanoi dispatched down the Trail the two thousand or more Cambodian Communists it had been preparing since 1954 for just such a moment as this. Their task was to take control of the fledgling movement. They were at first given command of new battalions and entrusted with the training of recruits. But unlike Eastern Europe after the Second World War—when those Communists who had spent the war comfortably in Moscow virtually eliminated those who had fought at home—the “Hanoi-Khmers” never achieved important leadership positions in Cambodia. Indeed it appears that the indigenous maquis, led by men like Saloth Sar and Son Sen, regarded them from the start as Vietnamese agents intent on suppressing Cambodian independence.

As early as June 1970, the CIA station chief was reporting that relations between the North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge were not always easy. Apparently there were, for example, clashes in Kratie province over whether Ho's or Sihanouk's portrait should be more prominently displayed. During an assault on the town of Kompong Thom in September 1970, Khmer Rouge soldiers were said by the CIA to have fired on Vietnamese troops from behind.

Reports from the province of Takeo described how the Khmer Rouge were organizing a new civil administration in which the Viet Cong were allowed only an advisory role. The Khmers were also forbidding Vietnamese to form their own political infrastructure among those few Vietnamese who had chosen to remain in Takeo. Nor would they allow them to collect taxes. William Colby, the former CIA Director, recalls that reports of actual fighting between the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese Communists in Takeo began to come through in 1971.

In summer 1972 an Agency report described an anti-Vietnamese demonstration organized by the Khmer Rouge in Kompong Cham. Villagers marched around, brandishing machetes and shouting, “We do not fear to die from bombs dropped from airplanes,” and “We all agree to die together in order to get the VC/NVA out of Cambodia.” A few months later another report asserted that villagers and Khmer Rouge alike had been complaining of the way in which the Vietnamese Communists based themselves in villages in an effort to evade airstrikes. Such attempts were not always successful. The report noted that 75 percent of the houses in one village had been destroyed; the surviving villagers had expelled the North Vietnamese. Racial hatred was obvious and clashes between the two Communist armies were increasing. ‘In some instances VC/NVA food and ammunition supplies were confiscated by the K.C. [Khmer Communists] and the VC/NVA managers of the supply sites were arrested . . . the expropriation of weapons and supplies continued at an alarming rate and had become a major problem for COSVN. As a protective measure, COSVN units were advised to travel in large groups. When challenged at K.C. checkpoints they were not to react against the K.C. but were to await the liaison teams who would then take the necessary actions to effect their release.’

The CIA also reported from the start how Lon Nol’s troops collaborated with the enemy. (They were encouraged by the fact that Lon Nol’s main source of foreign exchange—after Washington—was rubber bought from the Communists and resold abroad.) One agency report of September 22, 1970, noted that in one district of Kampot the major in charge of government troops realized he was no match for the Communists and agreed to keep his men in their quarters. The Communists were allowed free run of the countryside and, in return, no attacks were made on the barracks themselves.

The Khmer Rouge later claimed that 80 percent of their arms and ammunition was either captured from or bought from the Lon Nol side. This is a very great exaggeration; what is certainly true is that the North Vietnamese very carefully rationed the amount of material they entrusted to the army they were creating—this became one of the principal sources of contention between the allies. And it is also true that a considerable proportion of the cornucopia that poured through the hands of United States Generals Mataxis and Cleland ended up on the other side.

The fullest account of wartime life under the Khmer Rouge comes to us from Ith Sarin, a left-wing primary-school inspector, who left Phnom Penh to spend nine months in the bush as a candidate for Party membership in 1972. This was during the second stage of the Khmer Rouge development when the Front was purging the Sihanoukists. They were maturing as a fighting force, asserting independence of the North Vietnamese and beginning to embark on the radical transformation of the areas they controlled.

Ith Sarin left Phnom Penh disillusioned by the failure of the Lon Nol "revolution" and the corruption and the incompetence of the Lon Nol government. But his experiences of the Khmer Rouge were such that he never became a full Party member; he returned to the capital to write his book, Regrets for the Khmer Soul. It was intended to convince the population of the dangers of the Khmer Rouge and encourage the replacement of Lon Nol’s government by one that could accept and defeat the Communists’ challenge. After a few days, the police apparently decided his book was pro-Communist, and it was banned for a time. With this history in mind, the book provides a useful, indeed unique account. At the time almost no foreign journalists paid any attention to it; the only long piece written about it was by Elizabeth Becker, a stringer for the Washington Post. The U.S. Embassy, however, did realize its importance; a political officer, Timothy Carney, filed several long reports to Washington on its significance.

Sarin noted that the Party was not referred to in the “liberated areas.” In order to preserve the idea of a National Front, the Party’s very existence was still secret; government of the liberated areas was ascribed to the Angka, or “Organization.” The country was divided into five geographical regions with another for the capital, Phnom Penh. The Chairman, or Secretary of each region was a long-standing member of the Khmer Rouge. Each region was divided into functional sector, district, township (khum) and village or hamlet (phum) committees, whose ultimate orders came from the Party’s Central Committee. In 1970, the committees had been filled with Sihanoukists; by 1972 there were some committee members who “still believed they were making the revolution simply in order to hand authority back to Sihanouk,” but most of them were being replaced. Each committee was now run by a political comissar, who had to ensure that party instructions on production, recruitment and population control were carried out.

The concept of what Khieu Samphan had called, in his thesis, "mutual aid groups" was being implemented; the lowest level of government was an interfamily group of about twelve to fifteen members headed by a chairman chosen by the hamlet chief. These groups were responsible for organizing agricultural production; as in China and in North Vietnam, this revolution began in agriculture. But in Cambodia there was scarcely any reform stage; collectivization began as early as 1971.

Ith Sarin found ample evidence of tensions between the Khmer Rouge and the North Vietnamese. He quoted Hou Yuon as saying that the Party "has foreseen all in preparing for danger from the VC/NVA." He thought the Khmer Rouge "seems to have control over all activities in its zones. The VC/NVA are far from being the masters."

He described how the war had already hardened as well as strengthened the movement. There were still very few experienced cadres and rigorous political education was emphasized. “They educated and trained youth and their cadre to become socialists and to become communists by means of a series of increasingly tougher standards.” Liquor, gambling, adultery and feudal terms of address were eliminated, personal characteristics were to be replaced by a collective spirit. A cadre who became irritated easily was accused of having “thick individual traits.” Everyone was required to observe his comrades and criticize them in order to help them become socialists. Ith Sarin considered this was “a step in ‘taming’ a man to become a ‘machine’ contrary to natural evolution.” Everyone had to hand himself over to the Angka to be built. “One must trust completely in the Angka, because the Organization has as many eyes as a ‘pineapple’ and cannot make mistakes.”

Ith Sarin warned that it would be almost impossible to come to terms with these new cadres. One of the other lessons they were taught was “mortal hate for the Republican government of Phnom Penh.” The party accused the government of being “the valet of American imperialists, of being puppets, of being reactionary, of corruption.” Administrators were taught to “have burning rage toward the enemy.” They were enjoined to “awaken in order to make the revolution by oneself; do not depend on others or foreigners or let anyone replace one.”

At the same time, Ith Sarin understood some of the reasons for the appeal of the Khmer Rouge. Cadres were taught to respect "the ways of the people," to be modest and forsweard authoritarianism. (These were ideas that Khieu Samphan had expressed in his newspaper L'Observateur in the early sixties.) Now, according to Ith Sarin, the Khmer Rouge advised "study from the people in order to be like the people." He recorded that "if a peasant is sick the Khmer Rouge will often go to the house to give an injection or leave medicine even at night or during a storm." The cadre had to help bring in the harvest and, as a result, "the farming people of the base areas quickly began to love and support the Angka because of its sentiments of openness and friendliness."

But he noted also that peasants, like cadres, had to monitor each other's activities "in order to educate each other in the way which communists call 'construction.'" Political sessions were held to exhort greater production, and dramas were enacted to whip up rage against the Lon Nol "puppets" and their American "masters." By the end of 1972 he considered that the movement had become genuinely totalitarian, but he believed the peasants "remain passive, very attached to their habits." and customs. The new collective life being imposed upon them frightens them. Most keep secret their attachment to Sihanouk and his regime.

It was clear to Ith Sarin that although they had removed the Prince's followers from positions of influence, the Khmer Rouge considered conservative, superstitious monarchism the greatest threat to them. By the end of 1972, cadres started to attack the Prince personally. Ith Sarin heard some maintain that even though Sihanouk was now leading the liberation movement from Peking, he was still the symbol of comprador feudalism. Ith Sarin wrote that the Prince’s popularity at home and abroad was being siphoned through the Front and into the Khmer Communist Party. “The Central Committee of the Khmer Communist Party pulled Sihanouk into their trap by means of Peking. Having got him in hand, the Khmer Rouge got ready to squeeze him dry.”

Sihanouk lived well in Peking. He was given a large old embassy as a residence, and the Chinese built him a heated swimming pool. He retained some of his bon vivant habits and enjoyed entertaining, particularly journalists he had liked in Phnom Penh. His table was one of the best in town, often laden with gooseberries and guinea fowl “from my good friend Kim Il Sung,” the leader of North Korea. He had nine chefs “because I am a gourmet. They prepare me Cambodian food, French food, Chinese food, anything you want.”

The display had some purpose. Sihanouk was anxious to convince the world that he really did dominate the Front, and that the Khmer Rouge recognized his authority as Head of State. Any journalist who cabled him to solicit his views on a particular subject would get an instant and characteristically expressive reply. Every day his aides hurried around to the Agence France Presse office with the latest "plis urgents" and "dépêches immédiates" from the Prince.

In fact, his relationship with the Khmer Rouge was strained from the start, and he did nothing to improve it by his treatment of their representatives in Peking. In mid-1971 Ieng Sary, the Party's principal liaison with the Vietnamese, was transferred from Hanoi to Peking as the "Special Representative of the Interior," with the mission of controlling the Prince. Sihanouk made no attempt to conceal his dislike of him. He considered Ieng Sary, wrongly, an agent of North Vietnam. "We all know what for you the maquis means central Hanoi," he would say. "Why don't you allow people to speak English? After all, your own wife is an English teacher." One of his favorite jokes was to borrow whatever mildly pornographic or risqué films the French embassy might have and invite Ieng Sary to attend a soirée. Ieng Sary could not refuse his Prince's summons, and he would sit stiffly, smiling when Sihanouk smiled, applauding when the Prince applauded, and obviously hating the experience. When he had gone, Sihanouk would roar with laughter with his intimate aides—“Ieng Sary will have to go through terrible self-criticism tomorrow,” he would say.

For his part Ieng Sary tried to split Sihanouk's entourage. He played upon the tensions between his wife, Monique, and other members of the royal family, who still resented the way she had broken up the relationship between Sihanouk and his first wife, Princess Norleak–who came to Peking. Ieng Sary constantly told Monique that the Khmer Rouge had enormous regard for her, giving her to understand that this was because she was a commoner, not a member of the royal family. He also tried to persuade Penn Nouth, Sihanouk's nominal Prime Minister, that the men in the field valued his experience and views very highly.

Although Sihanouk continued to use the foreign press, as he had done in Phnom Penh, to convey his views and moods, his principal contact with the outside world was more discreet—it was through his friend, Étienne Manac'h, the French ambassador to Peking. Manac'h is one of those who emerge with credit from the story of the destruction of Cambodia. The longer the war dragged on, the harder he tried to find a solution to it.

An able career diplomat, Manac'h was also an uncompromising figure. In the early fifties the Communists had expelled him from Czechoslovakia when he made plain his dislike of their brutality. For the rest of his career he was involved exclusively in Asian affairs. He helped negotiate Cambodia's independence in 1953 and subsequently came to know Sihanouk quite well. In 1966, he drafted the famous speech which de Gaulle delivered in Phnom Penh in praise of Indochinese neutrality. The speech infuriated the Johnson administration; Manac'h, however, believed that for Indochina, and particularly for Cambodia, there was no reasonable alternative.

As a result of his views Manac'h was always regarded with some suspicion in Washington even after he became head of the Quai d'Orsay's Asia Department. Nonetheless, in 1968 he played a vital part in setting up the first secret round of talks between the Americans and the North Vietnamese. After he was appointed ambassador to Peking in 1969, his blunt integrity, his knowledge of Asia, above all, perhaps, his understanding of the Indochina war, soon won him the respect not only of the entire diplomatic corps but also of Chou En-lai himself. His views were widely sought.

Manac’h was not only a highly intelligent expert—he cared. He regretted the destruction of Cambodia’s neutrality. And he believed that Sihanouk, for all his faults, was still the best ruler Cambodia had had or was likely to have.

Sihanouk’s own hopes for the future varied enormously according to his mood and to political developments. At times he was certain that the Khmer Rouge would discard, if not kill, him when he had served their purposes. When he was feeling more cheerful he would tell those few aides whom he trusted—and Manac’h—that although the Khmer Rouge might be exploiting him, he was using them as well. His alliance with them was tactical. Cambodia could never be the same again, but he felt that he could better secure its future than the Khmer Rouge. He wanted to return in his own right, not under their control. All he needed was the support of China and of Washington.

In the early years of the war China’s support—and particularly that of Chou En-lai—was very obvious. Ever since 1954 it had been the Chinese policy to support a Cambodia independent of Vietnam, under Sihanouk. After his overthrow the Prince became the first exiled head of state the Chinese allowed to establish himself in Peking. Given their feelings about the other “Chinese government” in Taipei, this was a singular concession. He was accorded the full honors due a national leader, and Chou’s personal commitment was generous. There was the fine residence and the pool, and Chou’s wife accompanied him on trips to seaside resorts. Chou gave him constant audiences, even though Sihanouk could rarely resist bragging about them. Chinese priorities were sharply expressed when Ieng Sary arrived in Peking. The Chinese supported the indigenous marquis against the “Hanoi-Khmers.” Nevertheless, Ieng Sary and his entourage were billeted in the Friendship Hotel, several miles from the center of the city, and, unlike Sihanouk, they had to depend on public transport. Both Sihanouk and Manac'h were convinced from their separate conversations with Chou that the Chinese did wish to see Sihanouk return to lead a neutral Cambodia. Manac'h believed that despite Sihanouk’s mercurial nature and his attacks on Peking during the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese considered him more useful than the Khmer Rouge who might (at least in theory) eventually emerge as pro-Soviet.

Washington was unresponsive. And Manac'h’s cables to the Quai d’Orsay—concerning both Sihanouk’s desire to talk directly with Kissinger and Chou En-lai’s support of the Prince—were never well received when their substance was relayed to the relevant American officials. In the Oval Office as well as in the White House basement, Sihanouk was treated with contempt. Kissinger distrusted Sihanouk just as he did Archbishop Makarios, the independent-minded ruler of Cyprus. He argued that the Prince was yesterday's man, he represented no one but himself, there was no evidence that the Chinese took him seriously. Contempt is self-fulfilling. In the early years of the war the Chinese did make their commitment to Sihanouk clear. Though it is true that real power lay increasingly with the Khmer Rouge on the ground, Sihanouk was nonetheless the leader of the resistance and came to be recognized as such by forty nations. His international stature could have been exploited, at least acknowledged, by the United States. Instead, he was ignored. The result was that eventually, and with apparent reluctance, the Chinese began to transfer their support to the Khmer Rouge. In this way, American policy sustained the growth of Cambodian Communism.