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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.
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Great bit of film. Where is the venue, is it Pochentong?
I have this image of the KR party cadre being a combination of stupidly incompetent and a bunch of Luddites, so to see that they’ve managed to get together some nice red boxes to sit behind and microphones is an eye opener.
The Congress was held at the Pochentong airport, yes. Incompetent they indeed were, with their disastrous mismanagement of the economy, but that new economy was meant to be a rapidly industrialising one. Their aims are still largely misunderstood, and the Luddite image is an incorrect one given the context. Also, the Luddite’s aims, although very different to those of Southeast Asian mutant Leninists, are still misunderstood. One influence on finding a rural path to Cambodia’s industrial development (although by non-revolutionary and reformist measures to foster an indigenous capitalism) can be found in Khieu Samphan’s 1959 doctoral thesis. Before the devastation of war and the warped lessons of Maoist voluntarism were learned. From ragtag rebels in the forest to capturing state power within five years was also indeed a great leap.
They certainly left some good carpenters to serve Angkar, maybe even Pol Pot contributed some labor to build those tribunes, himself, a certified carpenter wouldn’t be that difficult! Ha-ha! Plus we can’t the the quality under the red cloth. It wouldn’t be that difficult task anyways. Laurence Picq mentioned that she had to take part in making banners while working in Ministry of Foreign Affairs and there were a few more accounts which I have trouble to recall. So Angkar definitely had some qualified trades working for them. The population of Phnom Penh was around 20-30 thousand which is not too small. Maybe actually more, there’s no list yet, at list which I know of factories which kept running in that period.
Yes yes, Salot Sar wasn’t much of an intellectual compared to some of his contemporaries. He spent time at a Phnom Penh vocational college doing carpentry, but his impeccable family connections eventually got him one of those prized scholarships for Paris study. Of course, informal political study and marginal activity on the fringes of the French Communist Party proved more interesting than his radio engineering degree which he never finished. I remember a funny anecdote about one of his Khmer student pals asking a girl from a rich French family if he could take her out on a date, but upon discovering that he wanted to take her to a socialist youth festival in the DDR, was given the elbow. While in Europe he also volunteered to spend a summer helping in the socialist construction of Yugoslavia, perhaps to the chagrin of the French Stalinists. It’s been noted that maybe he drew inspiration from the efforts of the independent-minded Yugoslavs and their ‘working elan’ to build new infrastructure.
I’m going to transfer the text into a new document, before converting it to PDF format. Clean it up, and make the file smaller and easier to download. Also, on the subject of infrastructure development and ‘socialism’ have you heard about Michael Vickery’s unpublished working paper, presented at a seminar at Monash University back in 1980, Tong? He applied the Marxian Asiatic Mode of Production model to Angkor. Sounds fascinating. Of course he would apply that model to Democratic Kampuchea for his book Cambodia 1975-82. I wonder if it would be worth contacting him, to ask for a copy of this paper in the near future.
There’s a 400+ page work of Vickery on Economics and Society of pre-Angkor Cambodia. I had this book in mind but I didn’t see it in the libraries in PP. It’s not for sale anywhere on internet as far as I know, too. I think I’ve heard about that paper but I would probably have no luck trying to get it, taking my “success” in DCC. If you can you can try to contact him, and if you do mention the above mentioned work. Maybe he’s got a few copies from the publisher. I’m going to write you an email, so let me know if you received it.
I wander how he was like a carpenter, Khmers despise physical labor so it’s hard to guess whether he ever practiced carpentering ever since. There were no workers in CPK, I’m not aware of anybody, I wrote in my Russian blog that professional workers always get good money, compare to the rest, in Cambodia now, they would get around 300 a month or even more, which is 6 times over the garment worker salary, so I hardly convinced that workers were motivated to take part in illegal Communist party activity. Actually it seems to me CPK as some elitist Phnom Penh club, I reread the beginning of How Pol Pot came to power and there were some interesting family connections, unfortunately I left the book in Cambodia, it was in too bad condition, so I don’t have my notes to point it out. Just some, Poc Deuskomar was relative to last Lord Governor of Battambong and nephew of Thiounns. Mey Pho was cousin of Khieu sisters.
Of course the Khmer working class was very small and scattered. Most real proletarians in the country were Vietnamese, and who had migrated into the country to work in the towns and on the rubber plantations etc, like they had regarding the tin mines of Laos. The CPK had to build a relationship between those from elite urban backgrounds and the peasants. The CPK in the maquis would get help in their links with those old Khmer Issarak veterans and their supporters who remained in the Cambodian countryside after the First Indochina War, and who didn’t take up Sihanouk’s offer of an amnesty and enter the dangerous mainstream political scene as the Pracheachon.
By the way, here is Laura Summer’s comment on your post about the Third CPK Congress.
It is a great video. The French archives really are something else. I also like the film of the July 1975 Khmer Rouge military unification rally , which has been used in television documentaries and the like.
I think the chapter in 1975-82 will probably be the same paper, just revised and tightened up. Thats usually the way things work as far as I am aware. Still, would probably be worth getting in touch with him if you can anyway!
Possibly yes, or at least part of it. I first knew about it from reading a paper by David Chandler called Seeing Red: Perceptions of Cambodian History in Democratic Kampuchea. Vickery is certainly not afraid to take on the other titans of his field, so a pretentious amateur like me asking him for ‘stuff’ is a daunting idea!
Indeed re: Vickery, although that is simply the nature of academia – I believe it should not be taken as criticism but instead as exploration of ideas and models. As far as daunting is concerned, remember that he is just a normal bloke at the end of the day much like you and I, and indeed with at least one common interest! So just make sure your tone is right and the worst that can happen is he wont reply.
As for Seeing Red, I had not come across this before and will seek it out. Currently reading Heder’s Cambodian Communism and the Vietnamese Model, and as for scathing attacks I have not been able to access it yet so could be completely wrong on this but I believe his publication reviewing Kiernan’s Pol Pot Regime was not entirely complimentary….
Seeing Red is included in the book Revolution and its Aftermath in Kampuchea: Eight Essays. I’m not fully cognisant of the beef between them, but I think it might partly have something to do with the nature of the Cambodian Revolution, and also very much to do with the situation the country found itself in during the PRK and UNTAC days, with the isolation and cynical expediency involved. Vickery’s book after Cambodia 1975-82, called Kampuchea: Politics, Economics And Society, is on the PRK. And of course Vickery does not believe genocide occurred in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
As for the Vietnamese vis-a-vis the Cambodian Communist movement, the Khmers owed a lot their training, organisational structure etc to the ICP. Even the Pol Potists who managed to control the movement in later years. The problem of nationalism in a Communist context and it leading to another war is also partly rooted in earlier Vietnamese organisation, aside from the wider geopolitical objectives before and during the Second Indochina War, for their earlier attempts to organise Communist movements in Laos and Cambodia, by creating separate but dependent national Parties, meant that ‘socialism’ (or the Bolshevised version of it) could only be defined within those national boundaries.
Junta, how different the Heder’s book from the Kiernan’s How Pol Pot came to power?
I tried to reread it, but bad quality could not motivate me much. I remember I spent a lot of time thinking about first ICP and Chinese CP cells in Cambodia, trying to catch the atmosphere, etc. I got lost on the Issarak part, I needed to read Bunchan Mol the same time, but really bad quality of book really discouraged me, plus the poor light in our floor did not do its job. I stopped too. There’s another account of Issaraks A history of the Cambodian independence movement, 1863-1955. I’ve just realized its in my library. So for the full account of Issaraks I need 3-5 books to be read the same time.
As for Bun Chan Mol, here is his book in PDF format. Maybe you could translate some interesting passages?
I will. I wanted to have a hard copy for it’s easier to read it this way, but it’s photocopied, not printed. I don’t understand why since there’s a PDF version.
Did I mention that Thiounn brothers are nephews of Bunchan Mol? I will translate some, it’s not that interesting but there’s a reason it’s called The Khmer Mentality, Charit Khmer. In the first chapter he deals with his escape from Phnom Penh, he took the bicycle to Chbar Ampeou and then took the ship toward Prek Kdam, so to make a loop and not to go Thailand by route 5 but bypass it little bit so to escape the French agents. His uncle Puc had a contact with Thais so it was really him who organized the Issaraks, in How Pol Pot came to Power it doesn’t say it clearly, but in Charit Khmer it’s clear that Puc who was the mastermind and without his money and Thai contacts nothing would ever be.
Next chapter in revealing psychological stand off, Bunchan Mol faces his comrade in arms as they try to execute the innocent. He is not brave enough to really intervene, taking more or less bystander position while his comrades torture and kill. There’s some interesting passages that I will translate, where he slams the Khmer mentality, especially following the story of Dap Chhuon, who according to Bunchan Mol, came and begged to be allowed into the movement, by addressing him Preah Tech Preah Kun, an obsolete form by which a commoner would address a feudal master. Dap Chhuon is the worst manifestation of Charit Khmer according to Bunchan Mol, corrupt and power hungry he murders without giving a second thought. We know how Dap Chhuon ended.
Next chapter describes an attack on Siem Reap where three groups were to attack simultaneously but failed. One group got hold of some arms, loaded those arms in the car to shortly realize that nobody can drive it!
This is about the third of the book. There I stopped since I got fresh loads of scans coming from the library and each and every was interesting too, enough to distract me.
Well, you can make a post out of that soon, surely?! It’d be interesting to get this stuff in the English language, and would be a good contribution to this site.
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