Philip Short gives an indication of the possible effects of this military ‘rule of thumb’ you’ve alluded to: That combat units can only sustain a certain amount of losses until irreversible psychological damage of the combatants is done. In his Anatomy, he gives brief mention to the experiences of two all-female Khmer Rouge battalions which suffered sixty percent losses. How many troops make up a battalion, 400-600? I suppose it depends on the size of an army, but they must have seen some serious fighting. Utterly horrific. And as you say, the failed 1973 KR offensive on the capital, which apart from being launched in the wet season, was halted by the intense bombing which blew many to smithereens, not just at the fronts, but the rear.

The rural devastation from carpet bombing speeded up the process of the KR imposing a model of strict communalisaton in peasant villages, transforming them into ‘cooperatives.’ But the leadership, apart from at times losing control of bodily functions in the nether regions, upon hearing the roar of B-52 bombers approaching their hideouts to create a moonscape of the surrounding land, largely didn’t suffer what the young peasant conscripts had to go through. Their extreme tendencies had other origins. And I guess this is where trying to sort out their intellectual, ideological influences becomes important. As well as from having to survive the police repression of the Sangkum, and suspicion of and resentment towards the Vietnamese.

In the final Thayer interviews with Pol Pot – the same one in which he’s happy enough to admit to having Son Sen shot – he explicitly denied being responsible for Tou Samouth’s death. I think in this case he was probably telling the truth. Samouth, given his long ICP connections, would surely have been of more use alive at this point.

The bombing is vitally important in the evolution of the KR societal model, yet it’s downplayed surprisingly often – no doubt for political reasons. A few western commentators had the presence of mind to suggest this at the time (without going as far as Chomsky and blaming most of the ‘excess deaths’ in 1970-79 on it). I don’t know whether you’ve read Shawcross’s Sideshow, which first came out in 1979, but he stresses the likely impact of the bombing on infrastructure and rural communities (as well as its psychological effects on the KR troops, especially those thrown into the 1973 attack on the capital, who would have been forced to advance under fearsome carpet-bombing).

Ah, yes, Tou Samouth.

Whatever happened to him? His disappearance, and likely murder in 1962, was probably the work of Sihanouk’s security police. It’s been speculated that he was offed by people associated with the young French-educated upstarts, allowing Sar to move up in the Party. I’m not so sure about this however. As has been discussed elsewhere here, Sihanouk was stamping down hard on political opposition. And it was in 1963 that the Party organisation decided to leave for the maquis, with another wave occurring in 1967 when, aside from a fear of assassination or being screwed over by a Military Tribunal or similar on fake charges, only to be imprisoned or killed anyway, rural rebellion against Lon Nol’s heavy-handedness seemed to suggest to some that revolution was in the air.

As for the venue of the 1977 Party Congress, I’m not exactly sure, but think it was held at the Pochentong airfield.

With regard to the class analysis of the Khmer Communists, then you’ve hit the nail on the head when you talk about land ownership. Their vulgar schema to explain some materially determined stages, logically passing by way of revolutions from one to the next, with ‘communism’ as the culmination (which all countries, no matter their history or societies are fated to pass) didn’t adequately explain why most peasants in Cambodia, except for the very poorest, owned at least some of the land on which they lived and worked. It wasn’t landlordism (or a placing of that into some European feudal context and being irrelevant anyway), which was a problem for them, but heavy indebtedness, taxation and usury, the main source of which was the towns. Even their stage of capitalism before the transition to their own constructive ‘socialist’ stage was flawed, as although some principle industries in the country were undergoing the requisite changes, by way of foreign importation, this did not affect most of the peasant population in a thorough manner. A proletariat did exist, but was very small and scattered. The most developed of them, as a working class, weren’t Khmer, but in fact Vietnamese, brought in to work the rubber plantations. And if politically motivated weren’t supporting the Khmers, but the North Vietnamese or NLF. So for a ‘Marxist-Leninist’ organisation searching for a phantom working class, then their constituency was pretty much thin on the ground. Turning to the peasantry was the only route available for change, and the Maoist influence must have been particularly attractive to them, but even that was oversimplified, the result being the removal of the working class component completely. There developed a belief that class consciousness, a ‘correct’ one by way of mobilisation of the population and the steering of it by the Party, could be forged no matter the economic status of the individual. Even the Cambodian elite didn’t behave like a bourgeoisie, in fact weren’t one — their urban bases were merely a drain on the countryside. The towns didn’t create wealth, but consumed it. By the late 1960s there was a proto-capitalist elite squeezing as much surplus from the countryside as was possible, behaving like they had always done. If not using this for luxury consumption, then much was not reinvested for further capitalist development but spent on Paris real estate or other such things. There was not yet a full shift of corresponding patterns of behaviour at the top, and at the bottom was a small group of uninfluencial Communists thinking of ways in which they could convince a mass of labouring people that they were suffering a form of oppression that had not yet reached them.

Before I go, on the subject of land ownership among the peasants, the American bombing which devastated the Cambodian countryside destroyed the conditions that had sustained this set-up among many of them, making it much easier for the KR (as well as being oriented to the poorest) to influence their placing into the forced cooperative system, and which would be later used to try and thrust the country into the modern world.

Where was the congress held? I assume the superb Khmer-Modernist setting was one of Vann Molyvann’s buildings – the best thing to emerge from the Sangkum era, surely (especially the startling 1964 Olympic Stadium, which provided the KR with a handy setting to spray bits of the Khmer Republic functionaries around in 1975).

Back to more conventional ideological discussions: I think patterns of land ownership in Cambodia were always a problem for its homegrown communist thinkers when considering questions of class. That eighty-five per cent of the peasantry, for the most part, owned at least some land, if not a great deal of it. Hence the fact that Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan stressed the issue of peasant debt, rather than land ownership, in their analyses….it must have initially been rather mortifying to these idealistic young thinkers when they realised that not only was the Cambodian situation vastly different to the orthodox class analyses they’d been presented with, back in France and in Tou Samouth’s Class Struggle for Beginners classes, but that it wasn’t even that similar to the situation in Vietnam.

On the other hand, it seems as if the initial confusion may have been rapidly overcome with a sense of liberation, a growing confidence that the unique conditions of Cambodia, and of Khmer history, could achieve something no other communist regime had managed in history in a vastly compressed timescale. This was, of course, where all the problems started.

Even Nuon Chea doesn’t look very convinced in that piece of film.