The Eyes of the Pineapple

That’s right, what you’ve all been waiting for. The rubbish English translation of Long Live the Seventeenth Anniversary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea! Pol Pot’s tedious but revealing 1977 speech in the Stalinist vulgate, will up on the site soon. Scanning, scanning and yet more scanning has made me square-eyed. After some copyright issues have been resolved, then some interesting studies and working papers should be up too.

Much has been sympathetically written about a capital city under siege. A situation created by an American military exit strategy from Indochina and a ‘bomb panacea’ which only helped to enlarge a rural insurgency from a few hundred ragtag rebels into an army sixty thousand strong, and which saw the Republican government become totally dependent on outside aid. But aside from the facile image of a happy and Gentle Land about to be ruined by raging primitivist barbarians, and the destruction of not only traditional society but an imported American popular culture absorbed and interpreted by urban Cambodian youth …

Who were these urban folk whose soft hands might have put their lives in jeopardy a generation before anyone had heard of Pol Pot?

Scholar Michael Vickery answers this question in the opening chapter of his book Cambodia 1975-1982

Although certain journalistic accounts vividly described the shelling of Phnom Penh, particularly during the last year of the war, those incidents, bad as they were for their victims, cannot compare with the artillery and air attacks on the countryside, some of which as early as 1971 were clearly visible just across the river from Phnom Penh where they served as an amusing fireworks display for city people on an afternoon promenade or sipping drinks on their balconies.

These were the people – spoiled, pretentious, contentious, status-conscious at worst, or at best simply soft, intriguing, addicted to city comforts and despising peasant life — who faced the communist exodus order on 17 April 1975. For them the mere fact of leaving an urban existence with its foreign orientation and unrealistic expectations to return to the land would have been a horror, and a horror compounded by their position on the receiving end of orders issued by illiterate peasants. On the whole they cared little or nothing for the problems of the other half of their countrymen, and would have been quite content to have all the rural rebels bombed away by American planes. Even having seen the damage done to the country during the war they seem to exclude it from their thoughts, almost never mention it unless asked, and then seem astonished that anyone would take interest in what happened in the rural areas before they arrived there in 1975.

There were two sides, but when it comes to analysis, it has been two sides of the same coin. The Communists, while stretching their history-pushing voluntarism to breaking point were ‘wrong’ in superimposing a vulgar Marxist schema upon Cambodian society, so as to make their own bloody but victorious peasant-based revolution the transitional stage towards ‘socialism.’ Their outside critics were ‘wrong’ for being so ignorant as to assume that Cambodian society had or could have had dominant traditions of liberal or social democracy, and the modern ‘freedoms’ afforded by it as seen in a western context, and along with a high culture absorbed by the better-educated elite or a short skirt and a pair of white go-go boots, were swept away when the Khmer Rouge won power. These things had never really been understood or experienced by most Khmer people in the first place. It would be worthwhile, however, to know just how urban Cambodia operated, who and what urban people actually were, and before the war too, to understand why the poor peasants indulged in a bit of schadenfreude from April 1975, for these urban people were in the main those who were seen to be on the wrong side of that war and were, rightly or wrongly, brought down a peg or two in the years after it.

The rigid apostolic line of Marxism-Leninism, with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution's addition of Lin Biao and Jiang Qing.

The Khmer Communists as I understand it, gained some interpretation of Communism, or rather its Bolshevised version, particularly its Asian variant called Maoism. Over the years there has been the view that the Cambodian Revolution was ‘Maoism writ large,’ and that its most extreme aspects, particularly a Communist refocusing on challenging the differences between the urban and rural, and the idea that the entire past should be jettisoned and society should start again from scratch, came from China’s Cultural Revolution. It wasn’t as destructive as that which happened in Cambodia, but it operated on the same basic principles, and Mao’s errors have not only been repeated by Pol Pot in Democratic Kampuchea, but also in the Peruvian highlands controlled by Sendero Luminoso, and in present-day Bengal and Nepal, or gives food for thought if the contemporary Naxalite gains continue. This to me seems to be an oversimplification, when not taking into account not only the specifics of Khmer society and politics at the time of the Cultural Revolution, but actually assessing what happened during the Pol Pot regime, when Maoism, or a vulgarised version of it, was supposed to have been writ large. And to do this it would be worthwhile to know what actually happened in China during that turbulent period, and judge between the two for congruency.

The turmoil unleashed in China from August 1966 did cast its influence over Communists in other parts of Asia, but to what extent did this violent whirlpool in the current of the Chinese Revolution affect Cambodia’s own nearly a decade later? We know that with an economic recession in the 1960s, and with over a million ‘educated’ youth in the country, there grew an atmosphere of discontent regarding problems such as unemployment, concerns about Sihanouk’s repressive rule, the escalation of the war in Vietnam, and which all touched in some way a milieu of radical educationalists active in Phnom Penh. Those to the left of Cambodia’s political spectrum were sympathetic towards events in China, and it would cause some unrest involving not only Cambodian youths but also students from the city’s Chinese community, but then nothing like the Red Guard violence seen on the streets of China’s cities. Not least because of the specific social conditions and government polices of the ruling Communist Party, that over the years had created something of a bulging dam, its waters finally released in a massive flood after August 22. With the passing of the Regulation of Strictly Restraining from Sending Out Police to Oppress the Revolutionary Student Movement, the cracks widened, and the dam finally gave way. The exciting and ‘revolutionary’ noise transmitted from China, was absorbed by people living beyond the borders of the People’s Republic, and attempts at imitation would be made even if the actual situation in China wasn’t fully understood. The contextual deployment of its ideas meant the adding of a superficial layer of radicalism upon differing social and political conditions. A matter of appearance, an olive green army uniform and a little red book, but little more than repeating revolutionary maxims, some Lin Biaoised rote learning in the High Stalinist vulgate, and perhaps a little fisticuffs as well. This happened in urban Cambodia too but as we shall see, there were some very serious and local political problems unrelated to the Sixteen Points. So, some background is needed on the urban situation regarding Phnom Penh leftists who were largely supportive of the Cultural Revolution, and inspired by some of its ideas, particularly the idea of mass democracy, and who would join Pol Pot in the maquis in the wake of the still little-known Samlaut Rebellion. A series of explosive events which fed a burgeoning late-1960s Khmer Rouge insurgency with fleeing educated radicals and angry peasants.

Educationalists and those intellectuals outside the mainstream politics of the National Assembly, particularly those possessing a French or Soviet education, would include those who not only supported Sihanouk’s ‘neutral’ foreign policy, the NLF struggle in South Vietnam, but also the Cultural Revolution. The Rectors of Cambodia’s two main universities (Keat Chhorn, from Kompong Cham, and Phuong Ton, from Phnom Penh’s Royal University) were examples of influential intellectuals on the side of the left. As Red Guard radicalism reached its peak, unrest too was evident particularly in Cambodia’s private schools, two-thirds of which were Chinese. The Chinese Embassy on Mao Zedong Boulevard would be a source of bombastic pronouncements and inflammatory leaflets. Youths and students stormed the head office of the rightist Sim Var’s newspaper Khmer Ekreach, trashed the place and tore down a portrait of the Prince. An interesting historical footnote concerns a 1967 telegram sent by the Peking branch of the Cambodian-Chinese Friendship Association to its counterpart in Phnom Penh, which cast aspersions about Prince Norodom Sihanouk and his conservative coterie. The outbreak of rural violence seen in the large-scale Samlaut Rebellion in southern Battambang in April 1967 (a baptism of fire for the Khmer Rouge) would be officially declared over in June, but the Sangkum’s increased hostility towards Cambodia’s leftists would ensure a flow of urban radicals from the towns and into the rural areas. There they would come into contact with a burgeoning and ragtag insurgency, loosely coordinated by the enfeebled shell of a clandestine political organisation familiar to many of them, but now renamed the Communist Party of Kampuchea, and which Salot Sar (Pol Pot from 1969) was now the unseen, unheard of leader. Even the name of the Organisation would be, at times, unclear to a lot of them. In the wake of the rebellion, many peasant families had returned to their villages, but still maintained contact with, and offered support to, about 1500 peasant rebels who had become Khmer Rouge converts.

The Prince would accuse radicals in the capital, including those who had been most receptive to the politics of the Cultural Revolution, of being behind it. With the suspicion that the Chinese had been sponsoring attacks against his undemocratic rule, this nearly caused a breakdown in diplomatic relations between the two countries. Sihanouk was heavy-handed in his response. He suspended the activities of the Friendship Association, the national student union led by a Phouk Chhay, stopped the running of all private newspapers, and booted out from the National Assembly two leftist ministers; So Nem, of Public Health (and also president of the offending Association) and Chau Seng, minister for the National Economy. Sihanouk also had Phuong Ton arrested, and while also being rector of the Royal university, was also an associate of Marxist National Assembly deputy, Hou Youn, and the prominent teacher and activist on the left-wing of the old Democrat Party, Keng Vannsak. Phuong would later join the rebels. The Marxist Hu Nim, another deputy in the National Assembly, and like Hou Youn, a future high-level Khmer Rouge leader in the wartime front organisation, the FUNK, and the short-lived Communist government from April 1975, was also a vice president of the Association. It was Hu Nim, along with not only Hou Youn, but another Marxist deputy named Khieu Samphan, who Sihanouk would accuse of being behind the rebellion at Samlaut, placing him under increased police surveillance. The Prince would make a visit to Hu Him’s electorate on 30 September, at Chrey Vien, Kompong Cham province, to face the local inhabitants who had put together a petition which protested the suspension of the Cambodian-Chinese Friendship Association:

At present I find that China has made a serious change because she has given up peaceful co-existence and the five principles. China has changed her policy since the Cultural Revolution. There have been a number of Khmer who aid China. Phouk Chhay is the fiercest amongst this small handful of people who aid China. The most dissolute and dishonest is Hu Nim.

At this meeting, Sihanouk advised Hu Nim to disappear, referring to the other deputies, Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn, who fearing for their lives had already slipped out of the capital and gone underground, joining the growing rebel movement in the countryside. His threats would become more explicit on 5 October of the same year, when at a press conference Sihanouk again addressed Hu Nim and his associate Phouk Chhay:

In front of the people I told [them] I would prepare two files … I warned them that if they did not go to China, and if they continued their [activities], I would produce these files and they would have to face the military tribunal.

Hu Nim disappeared into the maquis on the 9 October, and he too, like Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn, were believed to have been killed by Sihanouk’s police. Sihanouk and Lon Nol knew very well they were still alive and in hiding in the countryside, but these three would be known as the “Three Ghosts,” when they reappeared, this time with Sihanouk onside, as elite politics in Cambodia shifted, and the founding of the FUNK organisation in Peking saw the exiled Prince in 1970s wartime opposition to Lon Nol’s US-backed Khmer Republic. Soon after Nim’s disappearance, Sihanouk had Phouk Chhay arrested and condemned to death, but the sentence was later commuted to a prison term, which he served at Kiriom. In May 1970, he would be released by Lon Nol along with 486 political prisoners. He too, would join the rebels in the maquis, along with the likes of Nong Suon and Chou Chet, and found a place as a central committee member of the FUNK. Around the same time as Chhay, sacked National Assembly deputy So Nem was arrested, but I am unsure as to his fate. The other sacked minister, Chau Seng, fled into Paris exile. Speaking of Seng on 27 January 1968, Sihanouk said he should prepare to flee, because if he did not and the political situation changed, meaning Sihanouk himself took flight, Chau Seng would not last a day. Exact numbers are unavailable, and not all disappearances were reported by the police or official press, but from October 1967 to November 1969 the official total of those assumed to have fled to the maquis numbered around 80. It would be safe to assume many more went unnoticed. Civil servants, teachers, their students and family members, fled to join the Khmer Rouge rebels, forming the conclusion that, aside from a fear of assassination or being arrested on fake charges, only to be imprisoned or killed anyway, with the rebellion seen at Samlaut and the continuance of fighting in its wake against the armed forces of Lon Nol, revolution seemed to be in the air.

With a flow of radicals into the maquis of rural Cambodia, it would be safe to suggest that there was a coalescing between these newcomers and those who, in other terms not related to the Cultural Revolution, formed a more moderate Maoist tendency led by Pol Pot, with the CPK’s armed struggle line, and who had left for the countryside and been in hiding since 1963, and although being aware of them, were not centrally involved with the turn of events as they unfolded in the capital (sketched above). Although the three National Assembly deputies, their associates and those in their sphere of influence, had a shared past with the Pol Pot group (student days in Paris and French Communist Party membership or marginal support), there was a real divergence in the Khmer Communist movement. There was never a general two-pronged strategy whereby radicals would remain in Phnom Penh, eyeing up ministerial portfolios, while another group moved out to the forests in order to ferment rural rebellion. It would be foolish to suggest this. But it becomes quite difficult to know to what degree the Cultural Revolution’s ideas, absorbed by the urban-based radicals would become an influence on the Pol Pot group when the former’s trajectories would cause them to meet their old friends in the maquis. There, in the maquis, there would be a “rectification of errors,” when the tiny Communist Party apparatus controlled by Pol Pot supporters would iron out differences with the newly arrived, and formulate a general line. But there is one event which seems to suggest a certain amount of autonomy was maintained by the ultra-Maoist newcomers, and their own political positions, at least for a small while, and this involves the curious case of a May 1970 Congress, separate to the CPK, revealing an organisation named the Union of People’s Struggle Movement. It can’t have lasted for very long, however, because it was never heard of again. But although the ultra-Maoist tendency represented by the radicals who fled from Phnom Penh did come into contact with and, as I said, coalesce with the Pol Pot group, and that some of them would later form the Democratic Kampuchean leadership, the survival of Khieu Samphan throughout the war and regime which followed, suggests that although being robust in their own positions, they could be counted upon when needed and that the Pol Pot line would be most dominant. How this reliability was ensured is open to guesswork, but given the rough treatment of a different set of arrivals, representative of an older Khmer Communist tendency connected to the Vietnamese in Hanoi, and Khmer Rouge practice in the years after they won power, we might assume a little forceful persuasion was used.

Now we need to look at the Cultural Revolution itself, what actually happened to Chinese society during it, and the Cambodian Revolution which followed nearly a decade after its most turbulent and radical period. There is the view that the Khmer Rouge were at least as antagonistic towards their cultural heritage as the Chinese, probably more so: hence the entire concept of Year Zero. That in both countries, the Party declared all preceding culture reactionary and attempted to physically and intellectually eliminate it. For a take on this concept see this older blog post. There is the also the view that although the Khmer Communists did try to exploit the old Angkor period as evidence that the Khmers were capable of economic miracles, in doing so they entirely altered its real historical significance, and that when they seized power the Cultural Revolution is clearly reflected in their slash’n'burn attitude to all the ‘Olds,’ from religion to the traditional family structure. The Khmer Rouge attacks against traditional institutions were local in character, not imported by the Chinese and then followed as if off a blueprint. In Cambodia, the attacks against minority groups, for example, weren’t due to placing special attention as such, but as part of the general aim of insulating all people from rival and alternative value systems which Angkar deemed incongruent with their own goal of building a pure, socialist Khmer. In the main, and in the war, they had their simple ‘uniform’ in more ways than one: black peasant clothes, or pyjamas, with the red-checked scarf/sarong krama worn as some kind of revolutionary insignia, and lastly sandals cut from car tyres. In the liberated areas they had a punishment, usually carried out against women, for deviating from this dress code. If defiant in wearing bright-coloured clothes, whether they be sarongs or dresses, or jewellery, and excessive ornamentation, or had elaborate hairstyles, they would be forced to have a bob haircut (admittedly a style from Maoist China yes), and be given the uniform. If they persisted in their resistance to the imposed norms, they would have their clothes painted black and be forced to wear them as a kind of humiliation. But this wasn’t just directed at minority groups whose cultures demanded they follow particular codes of dress.

I must emphasise the urban character of the Cultural Revolution. The shock troops of the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards, and whose fighting would be both against the existing structures of the state and – with the general emergence of two coalitions of factions vis-à-vis who and to what extent the state should be attacked and restructured – also between themselves, were mainly urban Chinese youth: middle school and university students and industrial workers. Not rural people. Their big battles, both physical and political, were fought in the cities not the villages and fields. The Khmer Communists came to power when it was on wane after pretty much a decade. It can’t have been a high point of influence for the Khmers. Not after Chinese rapprochement with the United States. The same country which had unleashed upon rural Cambodia up to 1973, and the upon the Khmer Rouge liberation army, one of the most brutal onslaughts in modern warfare. With keeping in mind what happened above, regarding two Khmer Communist tendencies coalescing in the maquis, then as for Chinese influence, Pol Pot visited the PRC in 1965, when the Cultural Revolution was yet to begin, and perhaps a lasting influence on him instead, was the Socialist Education Movement occurring at that time, the lacklustre impact of which would partly help contribute to bringing about the great tumult the following year, with the drive to reassert the Chairman’s leading position in the Party. There was also, in September 1965, the publication of Lin Biao’s pamphlet Long Live the Victory of People’s War!, which galvanised Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries throughout the developing world.

The violence and turmoil created by the Red Guards reached its peak early on, and in its next violent phase, by the late 60s, the next actors on the scene were not the peasantry, but the army. Whatever you may think of this ‘revolution’ I personally don’t think it was akin to some sort of superstructural sweeping brush, but a ‘bottom-up’ purge, instigated for cynical reasons by Mao and his pals, but difficult for them to control once momentum got going and millions of people who had spent years frustrated by the negative effects of government social labelling and campaign politics aimed at intimidating people into acting in ways they disliked, and an inability to express themselves politically in a meaningful way, exploded in a manner which couldn’t be predicted so easily. There was the sending of urban people to the countryside to engage with, at times, heavy agricultural labour, but not under the supervision of the peasantry, as in Cambodia. The send-downs weren’t something created during this period but had been going on for years before it, and the manner and purpose of these was different to the decision by the Khmers to empty the cities and towns, and their populations sent en masse to the countryside. In China the send-downs could be anything up to a few months to permanently, but they supplied the countryside with technical and administrative knowledge and personnel who, either enthusiastically or grudgingly, would help among other things to supervise the peasantry for the state. The opposite happened in Cambodia, in general, where people from urban areas were viewed and encouraged to be viewed as decadent, corrupted and forced to work under people with an educational level far below some of them. The Cultural Revolution did benefit rural Chinese, in that both the cities and these send downs who came from them furnished a revival of modernisation programs which transformed some areas and living standards did actually rise for peasants with the development of agricultural industries, and the new educational and skills/training opportunities that went hand in hand with that. While the creation of industry was in my opinion always the wider aim of the Khmer Communists, the cities from 1975 were for the time being left out of the pressing matter of increasing agricultural output. This was to be the base on which to build that future industry. The Khmer Rouge would come to disregard, but not always, old-society technology, technical knowledge and skills. They placed great emphasis on working elan, that is, the steering of a huge amount of unskilled human labour in matters of building new infrastructure in an ad hoc fashion, by trial and error. And as far as I am aware, the Chinese Communists, even when having a rural focus, never had a policy to force all people down to the social and material level of a poor peasant as a pre-condition for putting into place a program intended, as silly as it may seem, to rapidly bring modernity. And lastly, the elite leaders of the Cultural Revolution, the ultra-Maoists in the CCP, would set up their power base in that most modern of Chinese coastal cities, Shanghai. One of the original Sixteen Points called for the attack of the existing structures of the state and a seizure of power by proletarian revolutionaries, not peasants. And this would be attempted in places like Shanghai. The old guard of the CCP did have an aversion to such literal signs of bourgeois decadence as neon lights, and which littered that city when the peasant troops recruited on the North China Plain rolled into China’s urban areas to help secure the victory of 1949. The CCP was initially focused on the cultivation of China’s minuscule proletariat and expanding it further, following a Soviet (of Stalinist) model of urban-led industrial development. A change of direction would later occur after their so-called Transition to Socialism period, with the distinctly Maoist Great Leap. But somewhere like Shanghai, or even just any city, becoming a centre of political radicalism is something that would perhaps make a rigidly trained Khmer Rouge cadre feel at the least uncomfortable, at the most disgusted.

A few days ago I had a nerdy online argument (as you do) over the nature of Khmer Communist aims, as understood by the Pol Pot group, and what was supposed to have happened in Democratic Kampuchea under their leadership. Not that it means much, but I believe that despite seeming absurdities and an overriding irrationalism and utopian tendency (think Louis Marie Babeauf with black pyjamas), they were indeed modernisers, using a peculiar interpretation of the Leninist paradigm. Now, he took this to be a defence of them, when it is merely an understanding of what they claimed to be, and tried to put into practice, perhaps shedding better light on how and why they failed. But, apart from my opponent accusing me of being a “left-wing David Irving,” (and upon reading that I nearly spat my tea out laughing), and just to point out here I am not “left-wing” in a Marxist-Leninist sense, nor do I have an academic reputation to tarnish, he also came out with the tired and lazy trope of the Khmer Rouge being some kind of backward revivalists, to quote “they wanted to re-establish the old Khmer Empire.” And if they didn’t, then “why did they have the Angkor temple on their flag and not a hammer and sickle or star? You really are a card.” At that point I thought that perhaps my opponent is actually a 14-year old who has a glib and superficial understanding of the “politics” he espouses. Say, for example, his supporting of Cuba. While it is always worthy to note this former Soviet pawn and potential launchpad for medium-range nuclear missiles has had a more favourable development for its population’s needs than some other countries of the Caribbean, this lonely enclave of sun kissed Stalinism-lite is going nowhere fast with its tired attempt at a transition from our presently grim mode of production, and sooner or later it’s gonna be saying hello to neo-liberalism. Fingers crossed this transition won’t be as brutal as that which happened in the former Soviet Union. That said, and to put things plainly, politically I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. Maybe with a penchant for attacking the mere artifice of things, my opponent’s got some old and outdated revolutionary imagery and symbolism safely co-opted by capitalism minus its political content littering his bedroom, or perhaps even Tipp-Exed on his school bag, amongst the dirty clothes including commercial rock band hoodies that his mum picks up on a weekly basis because he can’t be arsed putting them in the washing machine himself. Well, regarding this niche blog about a misunderstood group of people who erected one of the most awful regimes in the name of socialism, what is it that the young ‘uns say these days? “Pwned!” or something. Communists (with a capital C) like flags. Pretty red ones. Including the Khmer Rouge, who, apart from developing their own extreme political mindset by soaking up other strong local influences which owe nothing to Marxism or Leninism for that matter, as a political movement they largely kept their ‘Communism’ secret for years, causing all sorts of after the fact confusion.

So, for the benefit of keyboard warrior numpties and anyone else who might be interested, here is a concise post on pretty red flags.

The above flag belongs to the Communist Party of Kampuchea (like, so kewl, with a hammer and sickle). Also known as Angkar or Angkar Padevat (the Organisation, or Revolutionary Organisation). This Party and its politics actually evolved from a proto-Bolshevist organisation formed with the guidance of the Vietminh during the First Indochina War. Set up in 1951, it was called the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party. A separate but dependant organisation connected to the Indochinese Communist Party. I say proto-Bolshevist because the Vietnamese Communists didn’t intend this Party to be a Communist Party in the real sense, because orthodox (or Stalinist) precepts decided against it, Communist Parties by definition being aimed at an organised working class membership. A silly thing to suggest for a society so thoroughly peasant as Cambodia’s. By the 1960s a new generation of Khmer Communists would come to control this organisation, with no ICP tradition, and who developed their own Maoist-like political line. It was in September 1966 that the organisation would have its name changed to the CPK, when Salot Sar and his chums in the maquis were twiddling their thumbs thinking of ways in which to kick-start a rural insurgency and overthrow the repressive Sangkum. To their surprise and good fortune, long built-up social pressures exploded in March and April 1967 with the spontaneous Samlaut Rebellion, seeing thousands of peasants leaving their villages for the forests, the aftermath of which would see a considerable number join the maquisards. And, in 1967 around about the same time there was also the stirring of hill tribe minorities in Ratanakiri (with the help of the CPK), to resist an attempt by a state plantation to take their land. By 1968 the (still inadequate) Khmer Rouge insurgency had begun, with hundreds of ragtag and ill-equipped militants fighting Lon Nol forces, loosely coordinated by the CPK. Although I would prefer to call the CPK a pseudo-Communist Party. The organisation had next to no working class membership, and as far as I am aware did not use democratic centralism that much, particularly in later years. Mind you, on a side note, Bolshevism these days could be deemed an anachronism, considering it is 2010, not 1910. The dustbin of history springs to mind. There’ll be no revenge of the dinosaurs.

Well, here above we have the national flag of Democratic Kampuchea, the image of a three-towered temple on a red background my online opponent thought was the Party’s flag and somehow proof of Khmer Rouge non-Communist aims. But this flag is actually older than DK and goes back to the First Indochina War, when the region became a single battleground against the colonialist French, and the Vietminh attempted to organise collaborative efforts with homegrown and diverse Cambodian nationalist guerilla bands, known collectively as the Khmer Issarak. The above flag belongs to the Khmer People’s Liberation Committee, formed with about 800 fighters in February 1948, and this motley bunch of Thai-sponsored nationalists, leftist sympathisers and venal, apolitical bandits handy at the task of killing people, had some contact with both leftists and nationalists of the Vietminh. It was headed by, among others, a charismatic but ruthless warlord named Dap Chhuon, believed to be in possession of supernatural powers, and whose own little ‘army’ provided most of the fighting muscle. Issarak fighters in their dealings with the Vietnamese and already paid-up sympathisers among the Khmers, would have exposure to socialist ideas and join the Vietnamese-dominated Indochinese Communist Party. A development which would cause a leadership split over these nationalist/socialist differences. But another problem was a switching of sides and a significant chunk of the Committees’ fighting capability removed. Amnesty for Issarak commanders and troops was offered, a deal involving them being allowed to remain as adminstrators of (albeit in a pro-government manner) the areas they had previously controlled as rebels. Chhoun left the forest and prostrated himself before a young King Norodom Sihanouk dressed in French military uniform, at Angkor Wat in October 1949, along with his followers including a large group of female retainers (a perk of the job I suppose). Afterwards, he was appointed governor of Siemreap and Kompong Thom, and what could be considered semi-autonomous regions which he ruled almost as his own fiefdom.

The above flag, with its five-towered temple design, belongs to another Issarak group, formed in April 1950 as a result of the differences already briefly mentioned. Named the United Issarak Front, this was based in the eastern part of the country, and would be subject to heavy Vietminh involvement. Headed by a former Buddhist monk by the name of Pham Van Hua, also known as Achar Mean, and lastly by his socialist pseudonym Son Ngoc Minh, this organisation, with the help of thousands of Vietnminh guerillas would come to control a rather large part of Cambodia during the war, including the creation of a provisional and alternative government in the areas they controlled. The end of the conflict, however, would see the territorial gains come to Sweet FA when less than favourable terms agreed at the Geneva Conference of 1954, would see Cambodia be allowed full independence, and the hope of a Communist regroupment zone, or partition like that which happened in Vietnam, dashed. These Khmer ICP card-carriers, unless giving up and returning to their old lives had nowhere to go except North Vietnam, with many slipping out of the country. It is this flag which would be revived firstly by the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation of 1978, a political and military front cobbled together in order to prepare for taking power when the Khmer Rouge problem in Phnom Penh had been solved once and for all. And then it was to be the national flag of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, the successor to the Pol Pot regime. Indeed those old Khmer Vietminh, or Khmer Hanoi, would follow the tracks left by Russian tanks when the massive Vietnamese invasion force toppled the DK government. But a few years earlier these veterans of the First Indochina War had tried to enmesh themselves in the CPK apparatus during the Cambodian Civil War, filtering back into the country. Those younger upstarts, the Pol Pot group, who had control of the Party, were having none of that. They carried out a campaign of murder which saw those emigres who had waited for years in Hanoi, being trained as cadre by the Vietnamese Communists to take command of the Cambodian movement, leg it back over the border. If they were lucky.

Now, I’ve only skimmed over the differences, rivalries and other ‘stuff’ which helps explain this rather complicated set of affairs. I haven’t mentioned the connections and crossing over of ICP members and future DK leaders (such as Nuon Chea) between the two Issarak organisations. I haven’t gone over the legal and sister organisation to the KPRP, known as the Pracheachon, or People’s Group (or as Cambodia’s peasants knew it “the party of the plough”) and which was manned by ICP members and war veterans who didn’t leave for Hanoi. I haven’t gone over the rise of the new generation of Khmer Communists who with two historically developed tendencies, eventually coalesced and became the DK leadership. I haven’t gone over the geopolitical considerations of the Vietnamese Communists regarding the Second Indochina War, and how this messed things up a bit in their wartime collaboration with the Khmers, and ensured that by April 1975, there was a new government in Phnom Penh consisting of people who would be intent on less than cordial relations with their neighbour. I haven’t gone over how some of the Khmer Vietminh returnees in the early 1970s weren’t murdered but did actually find some trusted place in the burgeoning Communist apparatus. Nor have I gone over the relative autonomy of the zones DK was divided into, and the political differences between the Khmer Rouge regarding how they should deal with the Vietnamese. If anything, the above shows simply there has been a need by two distinctive (there were three) Khmer Communist tendencies with a generational gap to express a ‘correct’ historical continuity regarding influence and ownership of the Cambodian Communist movement. After all, the Pol Potists would do a lot of revising when it came to the history of Cambodian Communism, trying to reshape it as a creation purely of their own making, both in and out of power, and the KPLC flag was an obvious choice given the other UIF flag represents that earlier tendency of the Khmer Vietminh, who would be an object of enmity and who would finally come to power in January 1979.

And moving on, to the symbolism of Angkor. This was never an indication let alone proof of Khmer Rouge aims to send the country back to the “dark ages,” “middle ages” or even more stupidly back to the “stone age.” The latter was actually something said by US Air Force General Curtis LeMay during the Vietnamese conflagration, with his unveiled threat to the Communists in Hanoi regarding the capability and willingness to ruin the infrastructure of North Vietnam: “My solution to the problem would be to tell frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we’re going to bomb them into the stone age.” Of course, as war spread, Cambodia’s countryside too would be transformed into a pockmarked moonscape. The Khmer Rouge would come to capture state power while riding on the back of a bomb-saturated American exit strategy. But once they captured state power, they weren’t the first, as seen above, to use the symbolism of Angkor as an intellectual and nationalist rallying point. Something to hold up as an example of past greatness, the apogee of Khmer achievement, a source of pride and a marker of indigenous Khmer identity which differed to and contrasted with, indeed challenged French colonialist arrogance and racism which saw the subjects of this country as merely dark, dumb, untrainable yokels to be exploited. The Khmer Rouge had their work cut out, for revolutions are not just made of ideas, but also resources. But there was never a desire to recreate medieval Cambodia, but rather surpass its achievements. I have witnessed from people a confused and contradictory explanation of Khmer Communism and its Pol Potist tendency. That Pol Pot and his comrades had forsworn any form of Marxism in favour of a purely indigenous primitivist ideology before they took power in Cambodia. And this primitivism is seen in so much of what they did, and in the context of Year Zero, seemed deliberately overexecuted, for as well as resetting the clock to zero, they actually wanted to go further, to reduce society to a pre-civilised state that would have to relearn socialisation beyond the immediate community. And then in the same breath, that Pol Pot was a Cambodian nationalist who wanted to return his country and people to the social balance Cambodia had during the Khmer Empire. That he picked and chose whatever tidbits of revolutionary ideology and philosophy suited his purpose. Firstly, who cannot see that the term Year Zero was merely an analogy, an intellectual nod to the revolutionary calender used by the French from 1793 to 1805? Educated Khmers of a certain age will have known since their childhoods of the French Revolution through their exposure to the old and uniform French school syllabus, which citizens proper and subjects in the colonies alike were taught. And they would have been made to see it as not just a milestone in France’s history, but of the world. An object of reverence and redemption. Yes we can go on about the blank slate policy of the Khmer Rouge, but they were never primivitists who wanted to send the country back to a pre-civilised state but rather under their leadership a prodigious jump into modernity would be attempted. And the utterance of Year Zero was an expression of the DK leaders superimposing the 1917 Bolshevik revolutionary model on the old French one, where in the minds of Cambodia’s schoolchildren, as in France, it was viewed as the destruction of an archevil ancien regime. In 18th century France there would be a replacing of an old elite by the victorious bourgeoisie supposedly representative of the whole population, and in 20th century Cambodia under the Communists they would be put in its place instead as the country caught up with and took part in the world concert of proletarian revolution. As for the latter, how can the Khmer Rouge have used Angkor as a model to somehow recreate the past, by forcing Cambodian society into a pre-civilised state, when Angkorean achievements rediscovered and researched since the 19th century have shown that it was once a great civilisation?

That aside, the DK leadership would cherry pick whatever was useful for their own analysis of Cambodian history, when they superimposed an ill-fitting and vulgar Marxist schema upon it, to explain how their own voluntarism saw the smashing of an old mode of production and with it the culmination of all their efforts in leading Cambodia into the socialist transition stage, that is, using a Marxist-Leninist framework of development in a ‘backward’ country. Although Angkorean slave labour was bemoaned but the wonders built by it applauded, the cliché of Angkor’s greatness was nothing more than a focal point in shaping a new Khmer identity, independent and free from colonial constraints, again the apogee of a distant and more glorious cultural heritage from which inspiration could be derived. It wasn’t a model to be applied, a blueprint to be followed. The French did, then, bring modern ideas, and the use of Angkor as a rallying point has not just been used exclusively by Communists, indeed they were late in taking it up when in opposition to them, for among those fortunate enough to receive an education was the popular wannabe bourgeois Son Ngoc Thanh (and the older Communists would try and capitalise on his name, as seen with the pseudonym of Pham Van Hua). With this education weapons and tools could be fashioned not only to be rid of the French but also used to modernise and democratise Cambodia. Not only was he a pioneer in modern anti-French political organisation, and armed rebellion against the French and Norodom Sihanouk, but Thanh was also a leader in Khmer language journalism and along with it the development of new vocabularies which could replace French in fields where it had previously been used. His 1936 involvement with the first Khmer language and nationalist newspaper Nagaravatta (Angkor Wat) evoked this glorious Khmer past in its very title. In the early years of his Khmer Serei guerilla movement, there was the creation of a ‘liberated zone’ in the Cambodian countryside from where his followers could sally forth with clapped-out guns to do battle with the army of Lon Nol. He would also make illegal radio broadcasts from his jungle base at Phnom Malai, where he called on patriotic educated youth to leave the towns and join his rebellion among the peasants. By the late 1960s the Khmer Rouge would have their own liberated zones, territory where Phnom Penh’s writ no longer ran, and also had in their possession a mobile radio station during the civil war (Liberation Radio of the FUNK), which they used inadequately to pepper the capital with propaganda and menacing warnings to the Khmer Republic elite. Although they were both modernisers, Pol Pot and Thanh’s politics were different, indeed in opposition to one another. But nevertheless, as Michael Vickery has noted in his Cambodia 1975-82, the political shifts and trajectories of the Pol Potists would over the years come to mirror those of Thanh: from being revolutionaries, to irreconcilable nationalists, to venal and desperate intriguers in exile ever on the lookout for foreign support.

Yes, there are interesting parallels which can be seen between the time of Angkor and Democratic Kampuchea, and although the DK leadership will have been aware of them to some extent, they are just coincidences with knobs on. For example, from David Chandler’s Seeing Red: Perceptions of Cambodian History in Democratic Kampuchea, during the reign of King Jayavarman VII (1178-1220) the land was ruled by a more or less invisible directorate (the organisation or Angkar of DK), which dictated the activities of the King’s subjects. During this period of Angkorean history, the population was put to work on large-scale infrastructure projects, in order to produce surpluses for the exclusive use of their invisible rulers, who had mobilised them using a set of ideas held by a chosen few and not fully understood by most (Mayhayana Buddhism, or Communism from 1975), and which had also been used as the justification for destroying pre-existing society and rebuilding it anew. Indeed, society was felt to have died and been reborn at the end of a devastating war. And not just during the rule of this Builder-King, there was the state control of a large and sophisticated irrigation system, built by slave labour, which could allow up to three good rice harvests a year and was central to the success of the old Empire. In the short period of DK, the government used a framework of development partly bequeathed to the Communists by Lenin, and which saw as the first stage of draft industrialisation, the attempt to build a countrywide irrigation system under centralised state control intended for the mass production of rice. And we know the ghastly methods they used to go about completing this vast infrastructural feat. However, Sihanouk during the Sangkum years also toyed with the idea of transforming agricultural practices and better harnessing water power through irrigation, to help rice production in a country which has had some of the poorest yields in the region. But, with a lack of initiative and importantly money, these plans never left the drawing board. It’s easy to see how people can come to make such silly conclusions about the Khmer Rouge, what with the confusing and contradictory statements and boastful rhetoric also spoken from the mouths of Pol Pot front men. Of course, in power, with their own version of a Great Leap, they thought they would be leaping into modernity, but with keeping in mind what I’ve written above, ironically and unintentionally it could be said they made a Great Leap into a backward Asiatic Mode of Production. But that’s for another post…

Lastly, above we have two images, one accurate, the other not so, regarding a flag which has been wrongly attributed to the Khmer Rouge over the years. See this old post here. The ‘Khmer Rouge’ seen in the photos and video weren’t Khmer Rouge at all, but members of a small organisation called the Monatio (National Movement). Not much is known about how this group was created, but it’s generally thought that it was set up by high-level civil servants in the Lon Nol government, as a last-ditch attempt to present themselves as friends to the in-coming Khmer Rouge armies on April 17 1975. Those who took to the streets were students and soldiers, some of them dressing up in Khmer Rouge garb. They seized the city’s radio station and broadcast a pre-recorded message, welcoming the peasant soldiers who were filing into the city from all directions, and proposed a talk on the conditions of surrender. Apparently, the real Khmer Rouge weren’t impressed, broke them up and dispersed them along with the rest of the population, whether genuine urbanite or peasant refugee. The leaders in the higher levels of the civil service were executed.

The version of the Monatio flag at the top with the blue and red diagonally split background is the correct version, seen on the streets that morning. The one below it is the wrong approximation if it, and which has been used lazily by all manner of people, from those who write Wikipedia articles to a news organisation like the BBC.