The Eyes of the Pineapple

There are some milestones for Khmer Communism history nerds. For example, there is the cashing in by the maquisards, on the large peasant rebellion which erupted at Samlaut against Lon Nol forces on April 2 1967, the most serious violent expression of popular discontent since the anti-French rebellion in the 1880s. There is the forming of the FUNK after the March 18 rightist coup d’etat in 1970, whereafter in Peking exile the deposed despot Prince Norodom Sihanouk hurriedly created an oppositional front to combat those in the same grubby elite who had overthrown him. It provided international stature to a little-known insurgency led by inexperienced Maoist pretenders, who would come to wield influence previously thought to be beyond their wildest dreams. There is that Congress of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, held on September 30 1977, which publicly unveiled before the whole world (not that the whole world was really interested) that a Marxist-Leninist government was in power in Cambodia. The long-winded, boring speech made by Pol Pot at this event, which David Chandler has called the “locus classicus” of Khmer Communist historical analysis. Piss-poor in its Marxism and downright dishonest regarding the at times pathetic condition of their (Khmer Rouge) movement. But DK historiography required something consistent and importantly pure, to explain to people the ongoing praxis of their revolution which had for the time being gotten rid of most schools, and all universities and the public use of libraries until their rapidly built infrastructure would allow a brand new, Angkar-approved intellectual and cultural life to flourish as a result of this transitional shift to a mechanically understood version of socialism.

And then there is the Black Paper (Livre Noir), published by the DK government in September 1978, although I don’t know the exact date. Aside from revising the region’s far-flung past so as to fit it into a chauvinist mindset, it was the Khmer side of the story, about the causes of the more recent enmity felt between themselves and the Vietnamese Communists. Indeed, it was a fraught relationship with a generational gap. It involved not only the clichés of traditional inter-ethnic prejudice and chauvinism, but there was much upset over condescension on the part of the Vietnamese and the resentment felt by the Khmers due to, among other things, the uncomradely withholding of access to much-needed political-military resources. And of course, there were disagreements over geopolitical, then competing wartime objectives — all of which fed into the Pol Potists’ attempt, both before and after they won power, to retrospectively cleanse the history of the Khmer Communist movement of any Vietnamese involvement, reshaping it as a pure Khmer creation. A recent post on this blog has mentioned the Black Paper and its content briefly, and in my opinion inadequately, but presented here is the whole thing, albeit in the French language. There have been several editions of this document, as can be noted from the cover of an English-language translation shown in the older blog post. In fact, there is a September 1978 Phnom Penh edition (scanned and presented here); an incomplete Paris edition of the above with revised content published in January 1979; and lastly the English-language version Black Paper: Facts and Evidences of the Acts of Aggression and Annexation of Vietnam Against Kampuchea. The latter was published in September 1978, although I’m not sure who did the translating. It was made available in the United States through the Group of Kampuchean Residents in America (G. K. Ram). Again, I’m not entirely sure, but this group may have used radical publisher Liberator Press to print off the translated copies. As they did with the English version of Pol Pot’s speech at the 1977 Congress of the CPK.