1971, the Chinit River Congress. I took the part. There, it was stated that “Vietnam is a friend but with reservations” (or contradictions). This decision meant that Vietnam was not a real ally in the struggle, but also ambiguously not a foe too. We had to apply two lines, one of friendship and the other, of struggle. If Vietnam was a friend then it meant that those who supported Vietnam were friends too. Although they didn’t support armed struggle. To take into consideration what is mentioned above, So Phim was wrong and Ta Mok was wrong too. So Phim was wrong because the decision of the congress declared that Vietnam is the friend with reservations and he still cooperated with them excessively. Ta Mok and Ke Pauk were wrong because they used killing to deal with those who followed Vietnam. This is how Pol Pot tried to resolve things for everybody, expressing the Party line which stood above everybody and everything.
Why were the decisions taken at this congress left hidden from ordinary Party members? This was because of the following:
- The fear that a leaking of knowledge of the PKK’s existence could damage or break up the relationship with the FUNK and Sihanouk.
- The problems discussed and decisions made on Vietnam. Who and what was Vietnam regarding the struggle of the Khmer Communists? The further decisions on the Party line could not be taken without resolving the origin of this question.
Taken from Khieu Samphan’s Reflections on Cambodian History.
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I’ve got a better picture of the Congress. Will scan and upload it soon.
I’ve tidied up the text. I guess he is referring (Mok and Pauk) to the selective killing of Khmer Vietminh returnees, who filtered back into Cambodia from Hanoi.
Probably, I never thought that Khieu Samphan referred to Hanoi returnees, but it makes sense in this contest too.
I got this picture from one French movie I recently watched, Kampuchea chronique rouge-amer.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=745X6ABG
Here’s some articles from archive of Phnom Penh Post that I downloaded from their website, when I had the subscription. I sorted them out, in Anlong Veng folder articles concerning the last days of Khmer Rouge movement I renamed them so they can be easily read in the order as the situation changed. Hope you will find it interesting, Pineapple.
Here’s also link of web archive, they got some interesting documents too.
http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/
Did my message about PPP archive articles got through?
Yeah, and thanks a lot. It’s just the spam control settings blocked them.
RE Samphan: I believe he is referring to the Khmer Viet Minh. It was at this time that cadres who had spent years in Hanoi began filtering back into the country in order to take part in the struggle after the rightist coup d’etat. Through 1972-73, many of them would flee, and try and get back to Hanoi, when made subject to a campaign of killing by the burgeoning security apparatus of the Communist Party. These survivors would later return, following the tracks left by Russian tanks, when Vietnam invaded DK in December 1978. The decision to kill the returnees will have been partly based on fears of Vietnam attempting to control the movement against Lon Nol, what with the Vietnamese and their cool attitude to aiding armed struggle before the coup, and earlier attempts to discredit the Pol Pot group from within the Party. I think in 1965, cadres in Hanoi were given copies of Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder to read and study, their Vietnamese mentors casting their Cambodia-based comrades as adventurist fools and ultra-leftists. I believe a short-lived organisation named P-16 was also set up within the Vietnamese Party, to inculcate cadres with the favoured (Vietnamese) political line, when it became clear that having to wage armed struggle was an increasingly likely reality. Those trained within this organisation were to take command of the movement on their return to Cambodia. But I think this attempt to prepare cadres loyal to Vietnamese objectives in Indochina was half-arsed. Whatever happened in Hanoi, back in Cambodia it appears the Pol Pot group were having none of that!
Not a whole lot of information on those emigres, about their life in Hanoi, their activities, connections, expectations.
Pineapple and Tong: for what it is worth, my own thought about what Khieu Samphan likely means is different. In 1971, the revolutionary army fought alongside the VPA to defeat the Republican army’s Chenla II operation. Ke Pauk and Mok were the key commanders involved. In the ebb and flow of battle over several weeks, local villagers were seen to give food and a little rear guard support to the Vietnamese troops who were fighting for Samdech Euv (Sihanouk) –such was the power of the mutually reinforcing propaganda themes of that era. At least dozens of those ‘pro-Vietnamese’ civilians were murdered afterwards, in late November and December 1971, and Pauk is blamed. Samphan heard about the stoked up demos against ‘returnees’ that began a year or so later but he almost certainly did not know about any highly secret security service assassinations undertaken at this time. ( Duch seems to comfirm that they started a year later and historically, they are linked to the Paris negotiations of late 1972 and the bombings of 1973.). I think Samphan is saying only that Ke Pauk and Ta Mok paid no attention to this nuanced party political line concerning fraternal friendship combined with insistence upon the historical positioning of the CPK revolutionary struggle as a separate ‘struggle.’ To put this in a slightly different way, he might be suggesting that the two ignored the first prong of the political line and were wrong to rely on violence as their principal tool for promoting the desired independent struggle.
No worries Dr. Summers. Thanks for the illuminating information, and for visiting this blog. It’s only an amateur interest, so I’m sure you could pick many holes in what has been posted here. I would be glad of any criticism and input. I have to admit with an apology that several months back I posted up a downloadable copy of your translation of Khieu Samphan’s doctoral thesis, and so will take it down if you so wish. I realise I am breaking the law. I thought it would be useful for even a general reader to understand some other influence, aside from Maoism, on the reasoning behind the Khmer Communists’ infrastructural program.
Is this really Laura Summers? I really liked the historical dictionary Tong pointed to a while ago, co-edited with Justin Corfield. I hope it is not rude of me to ask Dr. Summers this, but how have you managed (and not just professionally) to handle the lazy accusations of you being a Khmer Rouge apologist over the years?
It is indeed Laura Summers.
Well, all I can say to both Dr. Summers and to the Pineapple is that I downloaded that translation and used it in my undergraduate dissertation to great effect. I think freedom of information and documentation is intrinsic to the discipline of history, and the spread of knowledge in such a way is necessarily a good thing. Legality ? morality. I would like to extend my thanks to both Dr. Summers and the Pineapple, even if this blog is ‘an amateur interest’ (which recent developments seem to contradict eh Pineapple?!), I honestly think you have done a great job in living up to the monicker of the site, “Resource on a Disaster”
Thank Tong Reasathea, for doing the hard work in actually scanning the copy.
Well, I would like it to to put up more things on site, but am concerned about getting hammered for copyright infringement. It’s good to know that people can make use of what is posted here though, even though it is limited for the time being.
I would like to scan the Khieu Samphan books for more revealing passages. I don’t actually have enough time for the studies. And interesting enough, idle time in Cambodia I did not use very efficiently.
Khieu Samphan very sleek type, he doesn’t want to write about interesting things, he makes an impression that everything was very very nice. Like with the above mentioned where he actually want to say that Pol Pot liked Sao Phim! We can almost see him lovingly dispatching commandos to kill Sao Phim when he came close to PP to have a talk with the brother number one. And Ke Pauk was eventually alienated from Pol Pot, up to the point when he wanted to meet him he had to pay some amount in baht. He didn’t pay, it seems.
It would be nice Pineapple, to have some kind of system where everybody knows who has what.
Yes. For the time being I’m concentrating on getting the Pol Pot speech sorted out, and after that statements of the FUNK in 1970 (Sihanouk, Samphan et al), translated into English and published in Peking Review. I’ve recently ordered Margaret Slocomb’s book on the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. Read it? I’ve got a couple of journal articles by her in PDF somewhere, will seek them out. One is on the K-5 Plan, and the other is about a peasant rebellion against Khmer Rouge rule at Chikreng. Will share when I find them.
With apologies to fellow commentators above, it seems to me that there are a couple of important historical issues to flag up about this “congress” and about khieu Samphan’s role in it. Ben Kiernan (How Pol Pot Came to Power, 1985, pp 329-329) mentions that no documents from it appear to have survived. He then relates what he has learned from his interview sources who relate a variety of things that do not add up to a very conclusive picture, either about who was there or what was decided. It is even unclear whether it was a genuine communist party “congress” because a congress, as a communist party institution, is a five-yearly meeting of a party’s central committee. Kiernan notes that party histories initially overlook this “congress” but it is identified as the “Third” afterthat. He then goes on to discuss the idea that it was at this meeting (or Congress) that the CPK might have decided (or its Standing Committee meeting afterwards) that Vietnam was an “enemy” or even an “acute enemy.” This theme has persisted in scholarly discussions ever since. What Khieu Samphan writes about this meeting (or Congress) is therefore very important for making some sense of the party’s efforts to assume political leadership of the National United Front of Kampuchea (led by Sihanouk and formed with the backing of the Chinese, Lao and Vietnamese parties) and of the communist revolution. There is really little real evidence of conflict with So Phim at this time (even though he is obliged to work closely with Vietnamese forces heavily concentrated in his zone and even though he has close relatives among the returnees) and the Ta Mok/Ke Pauk team who were taking the lead in terms of raising Cambodian military forces (and who fought side by side with Vietnamese forces in defeating the Republic’s Chenla II operation) were clearly subordinate to Son Sen in this period. Khieu Samphan’s version or understanding of the party’s political line in July 1971 has to be taken more seriously that the opinions, ideas and speculations of some those informing Kiernan. Between 1971-1973, Khieu Samphan (and Hou Yuon, as he liked to spell his name in those days) and others were reportedly in dispute with other CPK and FUNK leaders about the Paris negotiations. It was because Cambodia did not join those negotiations that the USAF launched its round-the-clock saturation bombing campaign in 1973. So, exactly what happened, or was decided at this Party Congress, appears to have led some to think it was necessary to continue to extend co-operation with the revolutionary partners (especially as the war was becoming very bloody indeed) while others apparently felt that the signing of the Paris agreements and the imminent withdrawal of the Vietnamese forces meant it was time to break free of the Indochinese People’s Conference (1970) framework. As of May 1972, the CPK had 42 independent military units (called battalions), still theoretically under Joint PVA-FAPLN Command, and according to an authoritative study by Tim Carney, based on US intelligence (which i have no reason to question on this issue). One obvious reading of history, then, is to assume that Samphan is reporting fairly accurately what was formally agreed but that a revisionist history had to be prepared in 1974 to make it clear that the opporunistic grabbing of military autonomy in 1973 was linked to an allegedly prior party decision about Vietnam being the “No. 1 enemy” taken in 1971.
Incidentally, Khieu Samphan was not a member of the party in 1967 when he disappeared to the bush. His candidacy officially ended in 1971 when he became a full member of the CPK and when he became a candidate member of the central committee. This is pure speculation on my part but my suspicion is that there were two Congresses on the Chinit River in July 1971–a FUNK congress following by a party congress. Samphan seems to have become a full member of the CPK central committee in 1976. He was never a member of the party’s standing committee to the best of my knowledge.
Thanks for the considered response Laura. It makes it clear when talking about revising party history, and the needs of the CPK and their fight within wider Indochina objectives regarding the Vietnamese and the United States. And also when the Khmer Hanoi returnees were made vulnerable after the withdrawal of the Vietnamese forces as a pre-condition for the peace negotiations and the assertion of autonomy by the revolutionary army. Please, can you offer your opinion on another earlier meeting, after urban-based radicals had fled the capital in during the 1967 Samlaut Rebellion. Serge Thion has noted that this earlier meeting was separate to the CPK, called the Union of People’s Struggle Movement, and occurred in the maquis in May 1970. But that it only lasted for one session. It was never heard of again. Was this an act of autonomy on the part of the Communist newcomers, before any differences were ‘ironed out’ with the Pol Pot supporters? Or was it Sihanoukist? I’m also aware that Khmer Rumdoh does not necessarily mean pro-Sihanouk, for the Vietnamese-organised fighters in the east of the country also used this.
Pol Pot’s position reflects famous Trotsky’s “no war and no peace” stand before signing the Treaty of Brest Litovsk on the “Vietnamese question”. Nuon Chea mentioned that they made Pol Pot a secretary because he knew how to work with people, he always found some compromises, on the other side it was difficult to read what he had on his mind.
Also need to be taken into consideration the usual Khmer ambiguous position, they would never tell what’s they’re keeping in mind and slight critique of Vietnamese party line probably meant a lot to the Party. They could not speak clear, but they could “imply things” in the usual Pol Pot style.
For me, the similarities with Trotsky and the Cambodian Revolution are only to be found in his disturbing theoretical justifications for the militarisation of labour after the Russian Civil War. It could be said that what happened in Cambodia under Pol Pot, Trotsky could only have dreamed during his militarist phase. He would argue in his 1920 polemic Terrorism and Communism, that it would be nothing other than sentimental to deny that the militarisation of labour was the best way of organising society and building towards the transition to socialism, for other, older modes of production, such as classical slavery and Asian depotism, had seen forced labour play a progressive role. Also, he wrote: “the foundations for the militarisation of labour are those forms of state compulsion without which the replacement of the capitalist economy by the socialist will forever remain an empty sound.” Of course, Democratic Kampuchea never developed beyond the agricultural barter-based economy that originated in the Communists’ own brand of ‘war communism’ established in the liberated areas, to meet the terrible exigencies of their fight against the Khmer Republic and the awesome air strike power wielded by the USAF. Militarised practices were seen as the best way (the only methods they had ever really known when implementing radical change) to rapidly realise their rice production plan, and rolled out countrywide.
Yes, both of your comments are relevant and important, but more needs to be looked at and mulled over to determine with more specificity how the theoretical and material realities came together or were pulled together. Here’s a different comment from Samphan about the conflict with Vietnam and the mobilization and militarization of the peasantry:
“Quite soon after the coup d’etat of 1970, competition emerged between military cadres coming out of the armed struggle of 1968-1970 on the one hand and on the other those trained in North Vietnam….[and according to comments that KS overheard at the time] …the cadres emerging from the interior resistance were capable of organizing military units in the countryside quite rapidly, and because of their work close to the peasants in different villages, and also to capture weapons from the Lon Nol forces, while the cadres coming from Hanoi were looking to receive recognition for their performance/grade in the military scools of North Vietnam, and they wanted to be given command of fully formed and equiped military units. For what it is worth, the view put about by the core leadership was that only the cadres emerging from the class struggle and the national struggle alongside the peasant masses were up to the task of ‘taking in hand their destiny and that of the nation’.”
I’ve parsed this translated comment, as the day job beckons. It’s from pp 123-4 of his L’Histoire Recente du Cambodge et mes Prises de Position (L’Harmattan, 2004).
Thanks for that quote shedding light on the class orientation/professional differences of the resistance forces. Laura, given what is now known about the revolution and the reasons for its rapid degeneration, and despite the agreement that Khmer Rouge voluntarism wouldn’t have succeeded by orthodox standards into a socialist transition, do you think that had the Vietnamese ‘problem’ not become so great, and the internal restructuring of the state into what seemed to be the establishment of a familiar centralised dictatorship hadn’t been too damaging, then their development would have actually been able to go much beyond this liberated zone ‘war communism’? Despite the horrific loss of life, that some degree of industrialisation would have been possible?
No, I don’t. I think the issues of “mastery” or sovereignty loomed too large in the ideological outlook. I think Khieu Samphan succeeds in identifying the core dynamic and the most important internal conflict that the party should have resolved (differently) at the time of this Congress. Ta Mokists would have felt justified in using violence and doing away with the “Vietnamese” influences/expertise/dominance partly because of need to respond to the very fantasical Lon Nol claims of an historic “invasion from the North” by ‘thmil’ (atheists) who threatened “Khmer” survival and identity (from as a sort of Khmeritude of “warrior masculinity”–as Tong might see it–prophetic, evangelical Buddhism and other things. It is too complicated for a blog but you’re on the right trails.
In the longer term, the “militarization” of the state apparatus (which was skeletal we should remember) and the militarized regimentation of the population was too deep and really, too costly, in terms of the steadily reducing levels of mass consumption. If you are quietly comparing DK to the DPRK, don’t. DPRK has been experiencing de-industrialization since its free petroleum supplies dried up–hence one of the economic drivers for nuclear power.
I guess you are referring to Lon Nol’s increasingly absurd Neo-Khmerisme. As for the mention of North Korea, well, yes I have made some comparison with the help of reading the likes of Michael Vickery, but I am aware of the specific differences of culture, politics, time and place, resources both human and material etc which cancel out anything worthwhile in trying to see what DK could have become like. The same with looking at the peasant nature and reliance on outside support for development needs seen in Enver Hoxha’s Albania. And in North Korea’s case the Khmers were aware of that country’s achievements and were perhaps wanting to emulate them, which were impressive before the militarised stagnation, even though the convergence of Stalinism with traditional mores helped to create one of the most awful political systems imaginable.
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