One day he took me out to eat. When we got to the market, he told me to order anything I liked. I ordered duck. When I finished eating it, he asked me, “Was it good?” And I said, “Yes, very good,” His face darkened and he levelled a finger at me. “You ought to be ashamed sitting here eating such good food when most people who work ten tines harder than you have nothing at all.” A few days later, he took me out to eat again and again he told me I could order whatever I liked. When I hesitated, he said, “How about some Vietnanese spring rolls,” and ordered some for me. When I had cleaned my plate, he asked if they were good. They were, of course, but I didn’t want to say so. Instead, I said, “No, not so good.” At that he quietly exploded, again levelling his finger. “How can you eat so well and not appreciate it? What do you think an ordinary peasant would say about food like this?”

From a sincere, respected and admired political activist of the left, trying his best under Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s undemocratic Sangkum, to Democratic Kampuchean minister and Pol Pot front man currently charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Khieu Samphan’s 1959 doctoral thesis. Before the 1975 bid to realise a grand vision of national revival, within the framework of a ‘peculiar’ interpretation of the Leninist paradigm. Download by right-clicking here. Translated by Laura J Summers and published in 1979.

A theoretical and empirical critique of Cambodia’s Economy and Industrial Development would have to take into account the author’s circumspection in the form of unstated or understated political implications. Such a critique will not be attempted here. It seems more important to fix this extraordinary document into the political context to which it belongs in order to demonstrate that recent historical choices made by Kampuchea’s ruling classes were by no means the only ones available to them, and that in rejecting and temporizing with the developmental option, the Sihanouk regime made a fundamental political mistake: it lefts its critics and opponents with only radical alternatives.

With many thanks to Tong Reasathea for doing the hard work in getting the copy together, and of course to Dr. Summers for allowing it to be made available at this site.

Though sensitive and proud Pol Potists would perhaps be loath to admit it to themselves, when it comes to a modernising influence on Cambodian politics, lets look at this, the beginning of the chapter The Nature of the Cambodian Revolution, taken from Michael Vickery’s important 1984 book Cambodia 1975-1982, dismissed by lazy people as “denial” literature. Serving as a brief outline, and maybe a point for discussion, the below doesn’t show what is developed further by Vickery in that chapter, but suggests for the Khmer Rouge a by no means cast-iron synthesis of quasi-Marxist economic theory, Leninist ideology and the general influence that one man’s earlier political activity had on Cambodian nationalism among intellectuals:

Once upon a time, before the revolution in Cambodia, a European journalist visited the Phnom Penh office of an opposition newspaper which was believed to be the legal organ of an illegal guerilla organization, in order to enquire about the organization, its leaders, and its aims.

His first question, about the leaders behind the newspaper and its organization, met with an evasive answer, and it seemed much easier to draw out his informants on the aims of the group, of which some of the salient points were: to lead the Khmer people to wake up, be aware, know their own and their country’s value, to dare to face their own and their country’s problems, to dare to work for the good of the country and the people.

They claimed to have created an army to fight to serve the people and the nation without accepting any foreign advisers or organizers.

They were developing the people — old and young, men and women — to serve the nation without thinking of their personal interest or rank.

They boasted of using the national language for all purposes, and of having developed new vocabularies for fields, such as diplomacy and military affairs, in which French had formerly dominated.

Other elements of their program were the suppression of physical, moral, or vocal oppression of one person by another; the suppression of all superstitious beliefs; the suppression of unemployment; the elimination of unused land and equipment; and the suppression of such moral evils as gambling, drinking, drugs, fighting, banditry, and rape.

They also gave much importance to the defense of the national interest through teaching people true Khmer history and inculcating mutual trust among Khmer, so that they would dare to fight, relying only on themselves.

The name of their organization was Angka …

This interview did not take place in the late 1960s or early 1970s between a “new left” journalist and a front man for the Pol Pot Communists. This journalist was Dr. Peter Schmid of Weltwoche and Der Spiegel, the Cambodian newspaper was Khmer Thmei (“New Khmer”), and the interview was published in November 1954. This paper was able to start publication as a result of the democratic measures imposed on Sihanouk’s Cambodia by the Geneva acords against the objections of the king and his conservative coterie; and it was the political and intellectual heir of another newspaper, Khmer Kraok (“Khmer Arise”), which published from January to March 1952 and was then closed down following the mysterious disappearance of the man whose mouthpiece it was believed to be.

That man, about whom Dr. Schmid was having some difficulty in getting information, was Son Ngoc Thanh, and the full title of his Angka (“Organization”) was Angkar tasu prochang ananikomniyum (“Organization to combat colonialism”), formerly Angkar prachea cholna (Organization of the people’s movement”).

To the extent that Son Ngoc Thanh is known at all to the non-specialist, it is probably as a World War II collaborator of the Japanese and from about 1958 to 1970 as a putative collaborator of the CIA, and then during the Cambodian war of 1970-75 as a collaborator — and short-term prime minister — of the Lon Nol government. Even less well known is that he was the first important modern Khmer nationalist, an intellectual leader in the development of modern Khmer-language journalism (1936-42), organizer of the first modern anti-French political movement (1942), and a leader in the effort to modernize and democratize Cambodian society. During his years of nationalist and anti-colonialist activity, his enemies considered him on the left of the political spectrum. He was qualified by the French as Vietminh, and at one time by Sihanouk and Lon Nol as “certainly Communist …. allied with the Viet Minh,” and “working with Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse Tung.”

Implicated in an anti-French demonstration in 1942 he fled to Japan, returning in 1945 to become minister of foreign affairs, then prime minister, of a Japanese-sponsored independent Cambodian government. When the French returned later in that year, he was arrested and taken to France, but was eventually released and returned to Cambodia in 1951 to resume political activity. His principal effort was directed toward the achievement of full independence, and he went about it in a way which cast aspersions on Sihanouk and the Cambodian political elite as being too opportunistic and uninterested in resisting the French. In March 1952 Son Ngoc Thanh and a collaborator, Ea Sichau, disappeared in Siemreap province and were reported by Khmer Kraok as having been captured by a band of Issaraks who were not known to be operating in that area.

That was of course to cover those of his collaborators in Phnom Penh against a charge of abetting illegal activity, for in fact Thanh and Sichau went on to the Dangrek foothills to establish a “liberated zone” and work for true independence and revolution. Over the next two years Thanh was joined by numerous patriotic middle-class youth attracted by his high ideals and anti-colonial patriotism. There in the forest they established self-sufficient communities where they farmed, engaged in military training, and occasionally sallied forth to attack the Cambodian armed forces of Lon Nol. They also tried to bring modern ideas to the peasants among whom they lived and to unify and reorganize the various Issarak groups scattered around the country.

In retrospect they had little lasting success, but they were undoubtedly a catalyst which pushed both Sihanouk and the French toward independence. They also attracted international attention and in November 1954 Nehru stopped at Siemreap to meet Son Ngoc Than, who in Asia was of interest as a combative nationalist both non-Communist and honest. The interview with Dr. Schmid was a direct result of the publicity attendant on Nehru’s visit.

Son Ngoc Thanh’s movement eventually fell apart. Full independence in 1953 and the new democracy imposed by Geneva in 1954 took much of the meaning away from his activity. Most of his young men returned to Phnom Penh, went on to higher education, and became teachers, bankers, or businessmen, while Thanh himself returned to southern Vietnam where eventually, working for the interests of the local Khmer, he became deeply involved in the American side of the Indochina War.

It is obvious that the aims and principles enunciated by the Khmer Thmei representative in 1954 bear many resemblances to principles held by the Democratic Kampuchea forces, particularly as they were interpreted by the Pol Pot faction. Sihanouk, to be sure, has already said that the DK leaders used to be Thanhists, which for him is ipso facto a negative assessment since Thanh was anti-Sihanouk. Sihanouk’s allegation, even if entirely untrue, is not very significant, since in a way nearly all currents of Cambodian nationalism, left or right, go back to or touch on the activities of Son Ngoc Thanh, and as “Thanhists” at various times one could lump together such disparate figures as Thiounn Mum, Penn Nouth, and Nhiek Tioulong (although not Lon Nol, so far as I know). The putative former “Thanhism” of the leaders is only interesting to the extent that some of their significant principles, aims, and policies can be seen to derive from or closely resemble the non-Marxist or marginal Marxist principles, aims, and policies of Thanh’s political movements; and it is particularly interesting to examine such features now when the DK group has failed in its larger goals, has turned to anti-Vietnamese chauvinism as a raison d’etre, and seem willing, even eager, to enter into whatever wild schemes the CIA may be cooking up. Pol Pot, since 1978, has nearly duplicated the shifts of Son Ngoc Thanh — from genuine revolutionary of the left to ultra-nationalist to intriguer in exile eager for support from whatever quarter it might come.

Yes, the old Khmer Rouge adage also being the name of this blog too. But, with reading this again, and moving slightly away from the main theme of this very good book — the political use of terror — the below quotes are interesting in their challenging of the silly primitivist myth about the Khmer Communists. But it also reveals the knots they tied themselves up into, over what has been misinterpreted as the above and vulgarised into truth. That would be, more accurately, their moral tendency of social levelling, along with the Maoist-inspired attempt at dissolving intellectual-physical disparities and urban-rural contradictions: the store placed in an individual’s mental reconfigurability through manual labour. As well as the inward-looking and suspicious anti-foreign positions of the Pol Pot group, which had a lot to do with already-present nationalist sentiments (which can be present no matter the political colouration), and importantly the development of relations between Communists in the region during the First and Second Indochina Wars. Sensitivity over such issues as betrayal by “comrades”, which we won’t go into detail here today.

So where did they want to go with this “peculiar” policy of theirs? Well, of course that would be a future society built in such a way that an end would be brought to all social inequalities and contradictions, by rationally dissolving all differences into one single and universal subject position from which all people would identify. Or without the waffle: communism. And the path leading there was a closely interlocked process which involved the participation of non-workers and peasants in manual labour: unskilled human labour power the most plentiful resource available; their mentality changed through it, as already mentioned, in the country-wide (forced) cooperative system where most of the population was gathered; production through them, by way of working elan, was to be raised allowing the economy to further develop; capital input except for human was to be kept at a minimum, with exceptions about to be seen, helping to reinforce an attitude of self-reliance, eventually allowing all contradictions to be removed. That it went horribly wrong needs little mention; through a doctrinaire quasi-Leninist radicalism oriented toward the poorest of the poor, some could be redeemed, others lost to this process, which saw the rapid building of vast infrastructural works intended to act as the foundations for a future industrialised socialist state, built by the 1990s. So under the leadership of these modernisers, then, by a prodigious jump, a so-called backward Third World country, its backwardness made much worse by the awesome air strike power wielded by the military of an advanced country of the First World, would enter the transitional stage. There was much work to do, even though with tongue firmly placed in cheek it was once made known to a grateful Cambodia that “thanks to Angkar, every day is a holiday.”

One quote, with regard to the polarisation of town and country:

For the KR cities were the culmination of all evil, the focus of ‘foreign’ influences. People who had lived in cities had been exposed to and corrupted by these ‘foreign’ influences, thus forming a threat to the CPK’s [Communist Party of Kampuchea's] aims. Evacuation and integration into the co-operative system not only neutralised this threat, but effectively brought these people under KR control. The anti-urban sentiment of the KR was at least, if not influenced by, the peasantry. Towns belonged to the ruling class, to strangers. They meant extortion of surplus in all its multiformed ways and undesired interference with peasant life. KR fear and hatred of ‘foreignness’ sometimes took on fetishist forms, such as the destruction of furniture, TV sets and other electrical appliances, the burning of books and leaving cars to rust. ‘Foreign’ food and drinks were not to be had anymore, at least not by the ordinary people. [Laurence] Picq, French wife of a high Democratic Kampuchean official who returned to Cambodia from China in 1975 and worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs till the fall of the Pol Pot regime, mentions many instances of the KR’ anti-foreign, anti-urban attitude. At a certain moment, e.g., she is forbidden to practice acupuncture anymore, which she had learned in China and had put to good use in Phnom Penh a number of times. As a foreign practice it is an affront to Kampuchean pride. Kampuchea, she is told, can do everything better than others elsewhere. The abolishment of money might be defended as rational in the light of the KR’ autarkic development policy and their wish to control. But even foreign exchange was sometimes thrown away or destroyed by KR cadres. Slavko Stanic, one of the Yugoslav journalists who visited Democratic Kampuchea in 1978 remarked on this

‘irrational radicalism and (….) strange kind of ‘puritanicalism’ in the Kampuchean revolution. In the midst of shortage of essential consumer goods and raw materials, ‘frozen’ capital lies unused and left to decay (….) Unopened iron safes still lie in ruins of the former National Bank in Phnom Penh (….) Our hosts assured us that so far no one had even attempted to check on their contents, because the watchword is for the new society to be built by means of newly earned resources.’

Modern technology and technological expertise were not despised per se, just most, if not all, that had been associated with the old pre-revolutionary society was to be cast aside. By levelling society down to the position of the most trusted social group of the Pol Potists — the poor and lower middle peasants — and who had been the most exploited in the old society and in whose name change was to be carried out. For their benefit would a new, just, abundant and modern Khmer society rapidly emerge. From scratch, and through a controlled process, this was to sprout out from a cooperative system that had developed from the KR’ own brand of “war communism.” Or to put it another way, the increasingly strict consumption-forgoing communalisation of agriculture that had taken place in parts of the country from the early 1970s, all for the war effort of the KR-FUNK. Its origins found in spotted attempts at altering social relations in the so-called liberated zones of Cambodia where the Communists had effective control during the war. Particularly in northern and southern areas of the country, where political and social change by fiat provided examples in embryo of what would be attempted country-wide after April 17. But the devastated countryside ravaged by heavy bombing, and where the cooperatives were situated, was not adequate enough to receive the urban evacuees, driven there at war’s end by black-clad soldiers.

Arrogant self-regard and the “correctness” and “clear-sightedness” of the CPK leadership was perhaps the manifestation of frustrations that had built up over the years but intensified during the war; their increasingly strained relations with the condescending sell-out Vietnamese Communists and their competing objectives. In this I refer you to the intense 1973 aerial bombing campaign which over a period of eight months transformed the central plain region of Cambodia into a smoking, pockmarked void. Following the Paris Agreements, much of the US air strike power concentrated in the region was reserved for the country next door. Who could blame the peasants for their hatred of the towns, places that had protected people dependent on those foreigners who had sent the planes? But when the brutal conflict had run its course the country’s entire urban sector was placed, along with the Lon Nol government and military, into the enemy camp, whether genuine urbanites, elitist, poor or rural refugees who were peasants themselves. And contrary to official written propaganda, the country’s small working class was sent to the fields with everyone else. Having hid like cowards in the towns, places surrounded and throttled during the war, these proletarians weren’t Angkar-approved. But the new authorities needed some of them to be recalled from their rural rebirth. Ordered to teach and train a new generation of pure Khmer peasant children how to operate the machines they had earned their livings with for years before.

As for their intellectual and assumed leaders vis-à-vis the Vietnamese, something happened akin to when a timid and quiet person, in an attempt to assert himself, suddenly bursts open with pent up, unexpressed emotion. But among their own also, there was the problem posed by the unadulterated quality of their ideas, never adequately challenged and forced to be rethought, moderated or diluted through debate with other outside and oppositional positions. Such things had been decided by physical force, later turned inwards on themselves.

But also, on the subject of partial autarky:

One gets the impression that the centre’s policy was strongly against obtaining machines and such from other countries. even their use was foresworn. This is intriguing for many official Democratic Kampuchea publications contain pictures depicting the use of machines of all types, including steamrollers, tractors and factories in operation. Most of the visitors to Cambodia mention seeing various types of machines being used, including dredgers and tractors, observations confirmed by refugee reports. Refugees and visitors also report how car and other engines had been rebuilt to be used for water pumps and rice husking machines. New factories were set up and in the course of 1977 and in 1978 production was resumed in some that had been closed due to war damage. There are testimonies of people who worked in factories all through the Democratic Kampuchea period. The Democratic Kampuchean authorities, in an October 1975 broadcast, called on the peasants to “use modern and scientific methods and technology.”

Besides the enormous amount of aid being given by China and North Korea, Democratic Kampuchea was also slowly and carefully putting out economic feelers to the outside world. Since August 1975 it had traded dried fish with Thailand for engine parts and corrugated iron, according to Ragos-Espinas, although official trading was only resumed in August 1976. In January 1976 Ieng Sari visited Belgrade, where the Yugoslavs promised him tractors and mechanical equipment worth $3 million, which were sent a year later. Stanic mentions seeing them during his 1978 visit. In October and November delegations were sent to Albania, Rumania and again to Yugoslavia. The Albanians exchanged tractors for rubber, coconuts and wood. At the same time the Reng Fung company was opened in Hong Kong to organize trade with non-socialist countries. In the last three months of 1976 $1 million worth of spare car parts and motor pumps were imported. In October 400 tons of DDT were imported from the USA through this company. Democratic Kampuchea also accepted anti-malaria equipment from a Quaker organization, the American Friends Service Committee, and bought 2 million francs worth of anti-malaria equipment from France. In the last three months of 1977 Reng Fung Co. bought $3 million worth of goods mainly from France, England and the USA. In March and April, Sari visited Malaysia, where he is said to have asked the Malaysian government to help Cambodia locate European outlets for its rubber. In that same year imports of industrial goods, materials for processing agricultural goods, spare parts for cars and machines and film equipment, totalled $19 million, whilst exports valued $680,000. This included rice, black pepper, kapok, dried fish and rubber. In the summer of 1977 four Thai concerns were officially given permission to trade with Cambodia.

The below two pieces of official DK film footage represent, of course, the polished ideal image of happy reconstruction, of Democratic Kampuchea “moving forward.” Not the actual situation in much of DK, of an irrational waste of old-society skills and expertise, costly (as in labour-intensive) building projects through trial and error, shortages of materials and cadre incompetency. Of political-ideological considerations overriding more practicable solutions to the problems of building their new society. Where they wanted to go was different to what was actually the case in their distorted Pharaonic endeavours. Personally, however, I do not believe that such things presented to the outside world were part of an elaborate con-trick, to fool others in both the old Capitalist and Communist world blocs, but then instead, to sneakily travel along a path toward a “primitive” agrarian communism. Or some other such similar rubbish. After all, as well as uniform rice paddies with a canal running down the centre, a factory complete with smoke stacks is seen in the background of Democratic Kampuchea’s national emblem. But, with that said, the Khmer Rouge were not concerned about what the people inside DK felt for the present reality; the ideal, never fully disclosed to them (this coarse material to be reshaped) would later work itself out. And in making their omelette quite a few eggs needed to be broken.