Those who know me in real life are aware of my liking of Soviet film from the 1950s and 50s, made during the Khrushchevskaya ottepel. And so, keeping with the theme of an obscure former Soviet Republic, to the bottom left is the opening scene of Andrei Konchalovksy’s 1965 film adaptation of Chingiz Aitmatov’s novel The First Teacher. Basically, a goofy and Bolshevised Red Army soldier, demobilised after the Communist victory in the Russian Civil War, and with his habit of enthusiastically repeating revolutionary maxims, spends a lot of the time getting the piss taken out of him by Kyrgyz villagers who view what he says as being irrelevant to their lives. A few years before he made Pervyy uchitel, Konchalvosky, while uncredited in helping with the writing, once played a bit part in his friend Andrei Tarkovsky’s war film Ivan’s Childhood (he very briefly played a geeky bespectacled soldier trying to win the affections of an army nurse, with her also being pursued by a lecherous captain).

He is perhaps most well-known in the ‘West,’ though, for such things as his taking on of Akira Kurosawa’s screenplay for the 1985 film Runaway Train, with two escaped convicts trapped on the out of control locomotive, hurtling through the wastes of Alaska. And, not to mention, the seminal Sylvester Stallone buddy cop flick Tango & Cash.

In my absence, however, I think any members of the admittedly small audience who visit here regularly will be in safe, capable hands, considering there are two new authors for this blog, who will no doubt keep you entertained while I’m away until the end of March. I should have some more filler posted up by then. I’m sure you can hardly contain yourselves at the thought.

The above picture, as terribly upsetting as it is, with the innocent newborn child incapable of comprehending, nor perhaps being instinctively aware of the mortal danger in which its mother finds herself, is just one of the many mugshots taken for the files of the Democratic Kampuchean security service, the Santebal. After having a sack removed from her head, and with a single tear drop running down the right side of her face, her picture was taken at the Tuol Sleng unit of the code-named Office S-21, the Communist regime’s premier political prison. The woman has been identified as Chan Kim Srung, wife of a DK minister Puk Suvann. The photograph was taken on May 14, 1978. To my knowledge, both mother and child were “smashed;” the Khmer Communist term for killing the enemies (Khmang) of Angkar. Although I do not know what charges of counter-revolutionary activity the mother, and child for that matter, were guilty of. As well as the name Santebal, at times this CPK security force with its police within police within the Party, its powers of arrest stretching to every rank, and every cadre, even military commanders and central committee members (apart from those who directed it), Ben Kiernan has noted that is was also reffered to as Santesok, and Nokorbal. In his words “a secretive organisation indeed.” When the tank spearhead of the 120,000 strong Vietnamese invasion force reached Phnom Penh on the 7 Janaury 1979, the fleeing DK government had hastily left the capital for the west of the country and Thai border only hours before their enemy’s arrival. There wasn’t enough time for functionaries to carry away or destroy documents and other items of officialdom before their falling into Vietnamese hands, the S-21 prisoner files of the Santebal being among them.

Three days later, and while the Vietnamese army was still pushing the disarrayed Pol Pot forces further westward, the pre-planned PRK government was put in place in Phnom Penh, bringing to power remnants of that older wing of the Cambodian Communist movement whose differences with the younger generation had developed from disagreements on tactical matters to fully-heated confrontations during the Cambodian Civil War. As well as those belonging to non-Communist Khmer Rouge opposition groups, and apolitical technocrats of the old pre-war intelligentsia, at the core of the national salvation front handed important government portfolios were, in the main, those old Khmer Vietnminh who had fled to Hanoi after 1954 until the foundation of the FUNK in 1970. Only to flee again, during a bloody internal purge campaign against them, carried out by the Pol Pot group who had had control of the Khmer Party apparatus in the rural maquis since the early 1960s. The aforementioned political prison was transformed into a museum for the purposes of, perhaps cynically, legitimising the new government and as a reminder to the Cambodian people of what they had been saved from. The best-known of these Khmer Vietnminh returnees (to distinguish them from the Khmer Krahom or Khmer Rouge who had always remained in Cambodia), until his fall in 1981, was prime minister Pen Sovan. Others included the minister for defence Chan Si, interior minister Khang Sarin, economic planning minister Chea Soth, public finance minister Chan Phin and industry minister Keo Chanda; all Communists who had spent more than twenty years in North Vietnam. Military leadership in the country included two Chiefs of Staff, Soy Keo and Lim Nay, both of whom were educated at Hanoi’s military academy. The decorative posts of the new regime were handed to Khmer Rouge Eastern Zone defectors, with Heng Samrin as president, and perhaps most well-known generally to readers was Hun Sen, as prime minister following Sovan. While he is the current prime minister (or strong man) of post-Communist Cambodia, he started his political life more humbly, as a battalion-level commissar in the Khmer Rouge liberation army. Active in the area of Kompong Cham, including the ferocious battle to take the town from Lon Nol forces in 1973, he also lost an eye during fighting in the final assault on Phnom Penh in April 1975. Like other lower-echelon Khmer Communist Party members who hadn’t been arrested and killed like their superiors, he went to the Vietnamese side when the central government, in the hands of the Pol Potists with their failing economic development plan, were attempting to carry out a purification drive targeting “traitors” and wreckers, encompassing all the regional administrations of DK.

With regard to the ideological sources of Democratic Kampuchean policies, with the modern aims of the Khmer Communists, we’ve already gone over in previous posts and related discussion their warped and extreme ‘Maoist’ tendency. How years before they won power two Maoist strains; one moderate but with the violent primary aim of creating a political base among Cambodia’s poor peasants; and one more radical even if just in its rhetoric among the left-leaning educationalists active in the country’s capital; eventually came together with two waves of radicals escaping police repression, coalescing in the jungle. Part of the path leading out of the political impasse created by the old favoured line of the Vietnamese Communists and their KPRP associates, the former viewing Cambodia not as a place for socialist revolution, but of geopolitical significance in a war against the United States. And the opportunistic theft by the Sangkum of socialist clothes to cover over Sihanouk’s conservative policies. Mention has already been given to the Khmer Communist interpretation of thought reform and the attempt after April 1975 to not just narrow but obliterate the division between intellectual (in a Cambodian context) and worker (read peasant); of overturning the pre-war urban and rural economic systems, utilising this tendency in mobilising the population, willingly or otherwise, and changing it morally with their participation in creating new infrastructure. Before Communist-rule a thin layer of self-regarding outsider intellectuals, rejected by the traditional political system, then came into contact with the mass of the peasantry, acting as a substitution for a vanguard working class. Although the real proletariat in the Cambodian siltation instead of being cultivated were seen as just another decadent formation occurring in the hated towns. There was this idea of those coming from the exploiting classes, but without power, in a way committing suicide, shedding their old class background to be then absorbed by the peasantry they had assumed leadership of. So background rather than economic status became very important. The backgrounds of those differing from the revolutionary agent (the peasants) seen as a possible, and feared, bridgehead for the re-establishment of the old order, and which saw the cultural or physical liquidation in the DK years of what Angkar viewed as non-poor peasant. Promoting poor peasant cadre with the ‘correct’ background regardless of ability in the tasks given them and so on. This post is on the use of terror, its political antecedents from elsewhere and the local context within which it was used by the DK government to safeguard the above. Although the ready use of terror could be argued on a wider level, and indeed it was, given inexperienced poor peasant cadre and their intolerance regarding real or perceived resistance on the part of the population to carry out government policy, this post is concerned with that terror which was turned turned inward on the Communist Party itself.

There seems among people, even now when a certain ideology has been thoroughly discredited, that there is the inclination to say “I told you so.” Well, told me what exactly? If there is to be some disagreement on or criticism of the political bases of certain people’s beliefs, then surely it would be good to not be so lazy and actually understand what these politics are. However, admittedly when it comes to the Khmer Communists, it can be a pain in the arse. Somewhere, and somehow, they managed to gain some interpretation of Communism, or rather its Bolshevised version, including its Asian variant emitted from China. Those who aren’t lazy will recognise that there is no almost natural inevitability to the patterns of behaviour displayed by the ruling groups of whichever regimes that have cropped up throughout the world in the last century, as significant parts or pawns of the once international Communist movement. People of various political stripes have over the years pointed to the Marxist current in the old and dusty Russian social democrat movement unfortunately converging with a distinct political culture, originating in the privileged place that a small, backwater principality of the lands of Rus once had among its Mongol-Tatar rulers, and then transmitted by the rule of the Romanov dynasty until their liquidation by the modernisers. And that people, specifically Communists, the world over have underestimated the negative effects of this perhaps incompatible mix of modernity and this something which is not very nice and centuries-old. There has been much argument over the view that Russia seems to be insurmountably trapped within herself, imprisoned by her history, even today in an on-going dialectical deadlock between dark European forest and wild Asian steppe. Despotism over the years, no matter the political colouration, is as much a Russian cliche as is pickled vegetables and drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis. The haughtiness, intolerance and terror familiar elsewhere, but expressed in a Cambodian context does not necessarily follow back in a linear fashion to a very Muscovite way of thinking and behaving. A synthesis of some approximation of Marxism-Leninism and nationalism merged in the environment of post-colonial Cambodia, and the geopolitical considerations of another set of Communists regarding a devastating war which came to engulf the whole region of Indochina. It was very toxic, and it all went a bit pear-shaped yes, but if you’ve only ever read, in the words of another author here, a few misery memoirs, or seen a crap film made in 1984 almost made worse by Mike Oldfield, then some understanding on the Communism ’stuff’ is perhaps lacking. Hopefully you’ll find what follows informative as well as enjoyable, and I say that with my tongue in my cheek, given the subject matter. It’s all about how Vietnamese Communist policy made a few enemies among the Khmers. We’ve all come across the bamboozlers, those who litter their language with plenty of the suffixes ist and ism. There are a few ists and isms used here, but if I can take the time to read a bit about the concepts these words identify in a short-hand manner, then you bloody well can to. Good. So we’ll begin.

The archetypical example of Communist against Communist terror is Stalin’s Soviet Union. In fact the short-arsed Georgian with elevator shoes and a chip on his shoulder pioneered it. We all know that during the Yezhovshchina, until it was that particular police chief’s turn to be tortured and made to eat a bullet, many people were booked for long stays at the Moscow headquarters of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the Lubyanka. We know that during their visits, accident prone guests trapped their fingers after abruptly closing doors, broke bones while slipping down wettened steps, and lost teeth after tripping over their shoe laces, smashing their faces against walls. Their concerned hosts liked them to chat for hours on end while their injuries were being attended to. But a man puffing on his pipe down the road had already decided beforehand the words which would be put into their mouths. In December of that year 1937, in which the high tide of terror was washing over the Soviet Union’s polity and wider society, an obedient audience was assembled at Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, where Stalin, who while not being the greatest of orators, made a speech which followed on from the earlier 1936 pronouncement of the Soviet Union’s constitution and the formal ending of man’s exploitation of man. The constitution had been put together by fallen Communist Nikolai Bukharin, who at that time was languishing in a prison cell, at the pleasure of that man who, at various moments throughout his life, would be known as the Leader of the World Proletariat, the Father of the Peoples, and of course not forgetting, the Coryphaeus of Science.

He publicly announced at this event that the foundations for Socialism had been laid, so the building upon them, until the completion of paradise on earth could be continued with confidence that the Soviet people were heading in the right direction. And importantly, but not expressed, was the unwritten, unspoken clause that paradise could be shrewdly postponed. Indefinitely. Despite pummelling imagined enemies into submission, it was far better for the sake of legitimacy, and in the hope that one day it might all work out, to offer the fruits of an authoritarian state collectivism one blood-spattered piece at a time, than announce that communism was up next folks. A mistake Nikita Khruschev came perilously close to making some twenty years later. Although Khmer Communist development of Cambodia didn’t follow the Soviet example, another Comrade Secretary General, Pol Pot’s own speech some forty years after Stalin’s, in which he was apparently a better speaker, but used lousy material, revealed the 1930s Soviet schema of societal evolution. This could be said to have been one big analytical error, regarding not only Cambodia’s history but peasant reality. While not being a Marxist myself, I could make an uneducated guess that Marxists would disagree with the CPK presenting the old Stalinist five-phase mode as a way of explaining Cambodian history; a vulgar and rigid typology that either distorted or ignored the specific structures of Khmer society by forcing what was left into a general model which in practice proved to be of dubious utility. Eschewing the grandualist approach favoured by the orthodox Vietnamese, their cooperative system, a form of rural collectivisation based originally on the peasant village, and which was to be placed under increasingly centralised government control, was to act as the seedbed for Cambodia’s rapid regeneration, to make real some grand vision of national revival, a path to the country’s industrialisation within the framework of a half-baked Leninist ideology. The subjective will of their pseudo-Communist Party would overcome the objective material conditions of the country in their own ‘great leap forward,’ from which socialism could bud and finally bloom. The DK leaders, with their mechanical view of human nature, sincerely believed it would work. But we all know the result of the CPKs bid to build a modern industrialised country and significant regional power by the 1990s, was of course the creation of a slave state where all, from favoured to despised, eventually worked for only meagre rations, but with the occasional weekend off. As has been said already about the Maoist tendency of the Khmer Communists, of reshaping individual consciousness towards a collective ideal through manual work, self-reflection and criticism, this was also coupled with the use of terror that followed a Stalinist pattern. Aside from those who would be lost to the revolution anyway, expending themselves through manual work in the vast effort to build new infrastructure, a significant minority were irredeemable, were seen as a threat, and had to be dealt with in a rather Stalinist fashion. This meant false charges, arrest, torture, confession and disposal. However, there were genuine fears of an enemy or enemy agents infiltrating the Cambodian Revolution and diverting it from within, away from the path of success, towards a Cambodian approximation of ‘real existing socialism,’ and had it survived similar in some ways to either Enver Hoxha’s Albania or Kim-Il Sung’s North Korea. Apart form the cynical use of counter-revolutionary charges for the elimination of political rivals, who were these opponents of Angkar, and who were these dastardly wreckers and saboteurs working for?

Enter the Vietnamese. Relations between themselves and the younger generation of Khmer Communists who had never been members of the ICP, and who Pol Pot (forsaking chronology here, as Saloth Sar didn’t adopt this pseudonym until 1969) would emerge leader, were troubled to say the least. The context in which this animosity would play out and eventually reach the level of war is partly rooted in a particular development of the Third International and the difficulty of its application upon the terrain of post-World War II Indochina: particularly Cambodia’s independence and Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s Sangkum government, as well as the arrival of US imperialism with its awesome military might. But firstly we need to go back a little farther. Once upon a time, in the era of the Comintern, or rather at the beginning of the 1930s, when internationally, organised working class movements mistakenly believed the Bolsheviks held the key to unlocking socialism, and eagerly scrambled for recognition from Moscow, there floated about ideas on how to spread Bolshevist revolution across the world. Many know, even if generally, that given the isolation of the Russian Revolution, stark necessity called for the development of the ‘Stalinist’ theoretical concept of Socialism in One Country. Following on from Lenin’s earlier contribution to making real ‘Marxist’ change on unfamiliar social terrain, in short, the changes that would have occured under capitalism anyway, but under revolutionary control, would be forced through with supposedly careful attention given to its direction within a national framework. That’s what ‘Building Socialism’ means. But the Soviet Union wasn’t all on its own. There was the federation idea. That countries in close proximity to one another, containing organised working classes would, after having made Bolshevist revolutions with vanguard Parties, in unison form federated unions, until, in theory there would eventually be a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of the World.

Vietnamese Communists residing in the French artificial creation of Indochina, which had imposed some form of unity among the three nationalities this entity comprised, were viewed by Moscow to be in an ideal situation which called for this line of action. To steal words from Gareth Porter, after the Bolshevik victory a change occurred, in form rather than substance, where the Russian people now constituted a historically progressive force when it came to the subject peoples of the old Russian Empire. Instead of being oppressive exploiters, which of course in some respects they still were … The Vietnamese, unlike the Russians, however, weren’t imposing some spin on old imperialist patterns, but yet without power, were wanting to win independence from an Empire. But to Moscow, the role of a ‘progressive’ historical force the Vietnamese could play, but not so easily, was with regard to the cultivation of Communist movements in Laos and Cambodia. The 1978 DK Black Paper offers the fanciful claim that from the very beginning, Vietnamese Communists were eyeing up domination of Indochina, when the problem of the French presence had been solved. It mentions the founding of the Indochinese Communist Party in February 1930, and that its very name is proof of Vietnamese intentions towards the other peoples of the region, particularly themselves. It is true that the political considerations of the Vietnamese, no matter who has been in power, have been decided by sheer geography. The country when not in partition, is a thin ribbon of land with an extremely vulnerable western border, so political developments occurring in countries on the other side of this border have been of great concern. But not necessarily just regarding the now outdated viability of Bolshevist revolutions under Vietnamese leadership. What the Black Paper neglects to mention is that the Indochinese Communist Party, was formed from three squabbling communist organisations competing for recognition from Moscow. Ho Chi Minh acted as mediator at a meeting of these groups in Hong Kong, when it was decided that a party would be formed, but named the Vietnam Communist Party. With their own survival to consider, at that time under severe French repression, the Vietnamese Communists were reluctant to take responsibility for their neighbours, and the name was only changed at Moscow’s urging, with the aforementioned federation idea in mind. The Vietnamese interpretation of this idea, however, was over the years very different, and although there was the local development of the idea among Vietnamese Communists and of an Indochinese Federation, it always remained an idealised vision only, when the three countries finally free from foreign domination, would actually enter the stage of socialist revolution and a transformation of the region modelled of the Soviet Union. The Vietnamese, when considering the cultivation of Communist movements in the other two countries, always worked (and again, to steal words from Gareth Porter) within a shifting calculus: on how best to strategically oppose powerful foreign foes (mentioned above): firstly the French, then the Americans. And secondly, how they viewed the feasibility of Marxist-Leninist revolution in these two countries. Being ‘orthodox’ Communists, and given the slow and inadequate economic and social development in Cambodia particularly, this happening independent of Vietnamese influence was viewed with pessimism.

Earlier, mention was given to the older wing of Cambodian Communists, those Khmers who had been involved with the Vietminh during the Resistance War as it encompassed all three countries of Indochina, and who had been members of various Issarak bands until their exposure to socialist ideas and recruitment into the ICP. Cooperation with Khmer Issaraks against the French army had proven to be a useful way of getting around the problem of actually organising a Communist movement in the country, given their lukewarm attitude to such a task, with not only what they viewed as the poor level of political consciousness and sophistication expressed by much of the Cambodian populace, but the obstacle of traditional anti-Vietnamese sentiments and prejudices. From tiny educated elite to mass peasant, this was made worse by French colonialism’s use of Vietnamese workers and mandarins. These were encouraged to migrate into the country either to work the rubber plantations or in the towns, or if they had some formal education to occupy the lower levels of the civil service. The conflict, however, had seen all three countries of Indochina become a single battleground against the French, and eventual tentative steps had been made at organisation with the Vietnamese in control of separate but dependent Parties in Laos and Cambodia. The latter was manned by Issarak veterans who had joined the ICP and could replace those non-Communist Issarak leaders who both before and certainly after the country gained independence refused to cooperate any further with them. The Cambodian organisation was from 1951 known as the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party, and it is this organisation which would be a scene of struggle between two different generations of Communists, and two political lines, against the backdrop of the Sangkum, with its fake democracy, fierce political intolerance and attempts to protect that independence won at Geneva in 1954, from the meddling of the leading powers and their proxies, of either the old Capitalist and Communist world blocs, vying for influence in the region. Readers may be aware of the ruthless smashing, during the Sangkum years by Sihanouk’s police, of the Cambodian Communist movement, whether it be the KPRP, or the People’s Group (Pracheachon). A legal but connected organisation which was set up to contest the ‘free’ and not to mention fair elections imposed by the Geneva Accords in 1955, represented under an increasingly tattered banner those war veterans who did not leave for Hanoi in 1954, when a Communist regroupment zone, like that negotiated in Vietnam and Laos, was denied the Khmer resistance, leaving ICP-oriented fighters with the choice to give up or leave the country all together. As it became clear that Hanoi was not going to support an armed Communist movement in the country, many took advantage of a government amnesty to form the above organisation, and enter the mainstream political scene. What greeted them was rather unpleasant. The Pracheachon would actually contest two elections, in 1955 and 58. Sihanouk received 82% and 98% respectively of the public vote, formidable confirmation of not only his government’s, but personal popularity. However, for example, according to Kiernan government harassment meant the Pracheachon could only field five candidates for the 58 elections. By the time for casting votes approached, only one solitary candidate remained, the other four withdrawing after police pressure and a ban on public meetings. Barely tolerated, members still amazingly continued to operate, but after the murder of Nop Bophann, editor of the group’s newspaper (also named Pracheachon), shot outside his office, activity became restricted to handing out leaflets and holding secret forest meetings in Takeo, Battambang and Kompong Cham.

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Cambodian society became then, to put it mildly, a hostile place for Communists, and Hanoi’s increasingly cosy geopolitical relationship with Sihanouk would help create a fracture within the Khmer Party, the consequences of which the Vietnamese would reap years later. Those younger upstarts who need little introduction, the Paris-educated Khmers with no ICP lineage, had to put up with the ill-effects of a political line which had its origins in the post-Stalin Soviet Union, the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, with the new General Secretary Khrushchev’s emphasis on peaceful paths to socialism. Pushed by the Vietnamese, and locally applied by a Khmer Party still under the leadership of the likes of old ICP members Sieu Heng and Tou Samouth, created in a situation of harassment, treachery (on the part of Heng), arrests, beatings, public denunciations, assassinations and ‘disappearances,’ only confusion, demoralisation and despair. Basically, while the Vietnamese encouraged Khmer Communists to be united with the Prince in matters of national independence, while peacefully challenging his domestic polices, Sihanouk’s police were jailing and killing the left. The Prince had been shrewd enough early on to see that Communism was in the ascendant in the region, and so his friendly foreign policy was skilfully designed to ensure independence for him and his conservative coterie, meaning that external friendliness was matched by ruthless internal repression. The Khmer Communists were making steps towards violent confrontation with Sihanouk by 1963, while Sihanouk, more and more viewed as an effective bulwark against the threat of US influence, was getting closer to Hanoi and Peking, wanting to keep his next door neighbour sweet, while also using China to check any potentially worrying future Vietnamese Communist policy. It wasn’t until the clandestine Phnom Penh ‘meeting at the railway station’ in 1960, the ninth Congress of the enfeebled shell of a KPRP – and which would be seen in DK historiography as the founding Congress of the Communist Party of Kampuchea – which would see the younger Khmers gain a foothold in the Party hierarchy. It wouldn’t be until 1966, without at-first Vietnamese knowledge, that this unorthodox name change would occur, signifying an evolutionary jump in political terms, on the part of the Pol Pot group’s ambitions. Of amusing interest perhaps, given its barefaced cheek in dishonest twattery, is that in the 1980s, and with the DK government then in borderland exile and coalition with former enemies but with a shared, backward chauvinism; and at a time when the CPK dissolved itself and gave up on the Communist project; its former members would explain to those who wanted to listen that the CPK had been formed in 1960 for the sole purpose of fighting the Vietnamese! This example is just one of the sillier statements made by the Pol Potists, the reasoning of which originates in this nasty struggle for control and direction of the Cambodian Communist movement. Into the early 1960s the Pol Pot group, while viewing the Khrushchevesque line as not only unworkable in Cambodia but revisionist (ooh, a nasty insult among Communists), had developed its own political line, and tried to argue the case for its adoption by the Khmer Party, until a stroke of luck allowed Sar to move up in the organisation; indeed he became its General Secretary, after Samouth had gone missing, presumed dead, or rather murdered by Sihanouk’s police in 1962. The line went a little something like this: Cambodia was not independent, wore what they called “semi-colonial” chains, that the traditional political system along with its compradore capitalist class needed to be overthrown, and to do this all efforts be made to mobilise the peasantry for armed struggle. The Khmer Party’s central committee decision to leave for the maquis in 1963, which followed this already mentioned period of intense repression, would see them for years sit it out in the jungle, inexperienced, and without much influence or guns. Although hundreds of radicals, including KPRP or Pracheachon members and their sympathisers simply disappeared in order to escape imprisonment or assassination, the above at first meant three young men associated by higher study and Marxist discussion circles in Paris, named Saloth Sar, an unassuming school teacher from Takeo, Ieng Sary, an economics professor from Phnom Penh, and Son Sen, who had been principal of the capital’s teacher training college, left for the countryside. This shift in strategy for bringing socialism to Cambodia hadn’t reckoned with the on-going need of Hanoi to keep things cosy with the Sangkum; considering urgent Vietnamese Communist objectives in an escalating Second Indochina War which would see the large-scale build up of US military power and the introduction of American combat units south of the partition.

Regarding the Pol Pot line, not much is known about how the class analysis of these Khmer Communists developed in discussions during the 1960s. Their politics, described in Leninist terms, had its public unveiling in 1977, with the 1930s Soviet mode described earlier. The economic planning of DK reveals the influence of both Khieu Samphan and Hou Yuon’s doctoral analyses, viewing agriculture as a path to industrial development, as well as the mention given to a particular class cleavage, the problem of landlordism among the peasants. But, with saying this, 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 those Vietnamese mentioned earlier, and if politically motivated these proles 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 the kind of change they desired, 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, once in power, 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 really a proper one — their urban bases were merely a drain on the countryside. The towns didn’t create wealth, but consumed it. By the 1960s there was, using a more appropriate term, 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.

On the night of August 9-10, a group of students and government functionaries assembled outside the palace in Phnom Penh, backed by a crowd of monks. Seven pro-Thanh activists then forced their way into the palace: Mam Koun, Neth Laing Say, Kim An Dore, Hem Savang, Mey Pho, Mao Sarouth, and Thach Sary. Most of the men were low-level clerks; Sary, for example, was a secretary to Kubota, the Japanese consul – the degree of Japanese responsibility for events remains uncertain – while Mey Pho was a palace official, perhaps the group’s ‘inside man’.

Sihanouk was, however, absent: his mother had received some advance notice of events, and the King had safely hidden himself in a nearby pagoda. While the ‘coup’ was decidedly small in scale, there was some excited waving of pistols, and Sihanouk’s personal secretary Nong Kimny was wounded. By 3 a.m. the conspirators had rounded up the entire cabinet, with the exception of Thanh and Sisowath Monireth, and made clear their demands. The key point was the introduction of a ‘progressive government’, as opposed to the usual mixture of minor princes and dusty francophil civil servants: ‘Progressive’, in this context, meant Thanhist and nationalist.

Despite the favour shown to them by the conspirators, the wound sustained by Kimny alarmed Thanh and Monireth, and they ordered the release of the captive cabinet members; Monireth and the Queen Mother then negotiated personally with the group. It seemed, however, an exciting moment for Cambodian self-determination; Keng Vannsak, in an interview, described a group of students waiting up all night for news of the ‘coup’. By the morning of the 10th, Sihanouk had agreed to appoint Thanh as Prime Minister, fulfilling one of the demonstrators’ main demands.

At this point, Thanh made a curious decision: he ordered the arrest of the leading ‘coup’ conspirators. All were jailed, although several were to escape from prison within a short time. Moreover, although Thanh was able to appoint some allies in government posts, notably his old nationalist colleague Pach Chheoun, and began to make overtures in the direction of greater cooperation between Vietnam and Cambodia, much of the administration remained the same.

Within a matter of weeks, events were to turn against Thanh. The French and British colluded with Defence Minister Khim Tit and Monireth, and with the likely acquiescence of Sihanouk (who, as at so many crucial points in Cambodian history, managed to absent himself from the capital) arranged for the Prime Minister to be bundled unceremoniously into a car and driven off to face French justice. Cambodia was, once more, very firmly within the grasp of France.

While the 1945 ‘coup’ was in some ways an amateurish and small-scale event, in this respect it only reflected the small scale of Khmer political activity at the time. Its ultimate significance was much greater, however. This was the first time that nationalist demonstrations had taken on an actively modernist character, previous events (such as the 1942 ‘Umbrella War’) having centred on more traditional expressions of Khmer identity. Beyond this, it created a complex series of betrayals at the heart of the developing political system. Central to these was the betrayal of forward-thinking nationalist Khmers, stitched up by those who believed the French colonialist rhetoric of ‘civilisation’, or were simply determined to hang on to their priveleges. Thanh, in particular, was considered to have betrayed the activists who had placed such trust in his ability to stand up to the traditionalists, while simultaneously earning Sihanouk’s lasting hatred for associating with the plot: as long as Sihanouk remained in power, Thanh and his particular brand of nationalism would never be able to re-establish a foothold in the country. Monireth, passed over as King by the French for his independent-mindedness, would similarly prove a disappointment to those who saw him as an agent of change, and himself likely betrayed Thanh by colluding with the French. And outside storing up resentments for the future, the ‘coup’ was an important step in the radicalisation of sections of the small educated class. Some of those involved in the ‘coup’ reappeared in the Khmer Republic years: Sary joined the armed forces, drifted towards a right-wing brand of nationalism, and (by then a FANK brigadier-general) was to be executed after the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh in 1975, while Kim An Dore also became a Lon Nol associate. The others, however, surfaced in the Issarak movement and some, such as Mey Pho, were among the first wave of Khmers to become members of the Indochinese Communist Party: Neth Laing Say was killed in action as a leftist insurgent in the late 1940s. And although his degree of involvement remains unproven, French intelligence sources believed that the radical Khmer Krom Achar, Mean – later to adopt the name Son Ngoc Minh – had been present among the many monastic supporters of the ‘coup’.

Norodom Chantarangsey, displaying a startling resemblance to Sihanouk.

Another new post from another new author. As the Democratic Kampuchea side of things is already well covered here, I’m hoping to add some information on  the margins – the political context, the Sangkum, what came before and what developed afterwards, in an effort to look at the forces in opposition to which Democratic Kampuchea took shape; first, one of the stranger social connections of Saloth Sar.

The role of traditional elites, as opposed to a mercantile class or the bourgeoisie – in Cambodia’s case, princes and monks – in the development of a nation’s political consciousness is a complex one: in Indochina, such figures were not only present at the outset, but often played a part in events for many years. In Cambodia, the formation of the Democratic Party under Prince Sisowath Yuthevong, a member of the same Parti Communiste that was later to influence Saloth Sar and his Paris associates, is a case in point, as was its subsequent drift leftwards under another princely secretary-general. The more strident brand of middle-class nationalism represented by Son Ngoc Thanh was marginalised, and even repressed, for some time under a variety of traditionally paternalistic interpretations of politics. However, even the royal family could throw up its own political outcasts, of a sort, perhaps the most interesting and dynamic of whom was Norodom Chantarangsey.

Chantarangsey (or Chantaraingsey, Chantarangsy or Chantarangsei, depending on your preferred transliteration) was a descendant of King Norodom through Prince Chantalekha, and therefore well-connected in Cambodian terms. In the period before independence he was associated with Son Ngoc Thanh, and like Thanh chose to collaborate with the Japanese occupiers in the hope of ridding the country of the French: while Thanh spent much of the war in Tokyo masquerading as a Burmese army captain called Chayo (“Captain Hurrah”), Chantarangsey joined the “Greenshirts” militia set up under the Japanese authorities and rapidly developed a taste for military life. At the war’s end he absconded to Thailand and linked up with Poc Khun and other independence-minded Khmers who the Thai government were happy to support, possibly in the hope of destabilising the border provinces. Over the next few years Chantarangsey developed into what Kiernan called a “comprador warlord”, controlling a large and (by Issarak standards) fairly organised group of guerrillas occupying large areas of rural Kompong Speu in a partial accommodation with the French, though also carrying out a half-flirtation with Thanh and Issarak umbrella group the KNLC.

At this stage, Chantarangsey was still viewed in some quarters as a potential channel for modernising, and even socialist, ideas. Saloth Chhay, the older brother of Sar, maintained contacts with him and recommended him to his younger brother. According to Ros Chantrabot, Chantarangsey was cultivated by a Viet Minh commissar, Nguyen Thanh Sonh, who attempted to introduce him both to marxist-leninist thought and Ho Chi Minh’s vision of an Indochinese federation; Sonh seems to have viewed Chantarangsey as a Cambodian version of the Laotian ‘Red Prince’, Souphanouvong. While it’s interesting to imagine what might have happened if the Khmer revolution had proceeded, under Viet Minh direction, in the relatively gradualist manner seen in Laos, this reckoned without Sihanouk, Lon Nol and Chantarangsey himself, who was enough of a pure nationalist to back away from Vietnamese help. After Geneva, Sonh suggested that Chantarangsey join the ‘regroupees’ working on the Cambodian revolution from outside the borders, but he refused. So, while Son Ngoc Minh’s United Issarak Front associates boarded a Polish ship taking them into exile in Hanoi, Chantarangsey returned to Cambodia and threw in his lot with his relative Sihanouk’s new government.

Sihanouk was all too happy to coopt the former Issaraks when it suited him, including Chantarangsey’s old KNLC colleague “Dap” Chhuon, a murderous warlord who claimed to be protected against bullets and sharp objects thanks to his possession of two venerated statues. Resisters who failed to lay down their arms were another matter; Chuuon managed to finally ambush and execute his old rival Kao Tak, while Son Ngoc Thanh’s tiny band of nationalist gunmen was vilified in Sihanouk’s propaganda as the instrument of hostile foreign powers, and pursued mercilessly. Even Chantarangsey found himself rapidly accused of lese-majeste and sent to prison for three years, where (if Chandler’s sources are correct) he passed his time writing romantic novels. Eventually released, the former Issarak reinvented himself as a businessman, making a healthy profit after Sihanouk made him head, under a pseudonym, of the casino that opened in the late 1960s to cater to a growing gambling obssession. He was also rumoured, after funding a school, to have helped the younger brother of his old acquaintance Saloth Chhay into his first teaching post.

It was Lon Nol, however, who was to thrust Chantarangsey back into a form of political life, after the 1970 coup. Engaging him as the commander of a new 13th brigade of the FANK, which Chantarangsey proceeded to raise amongst his old Issarak supporters and their sons, the Marshal sent Chantarangsey  – soon promoted to General – to ‘pacify’ his old fief of Kompong Speu. This he proceeded to do with such apparent effectiveness that his military administration rapidly developed into its own statelet, run in the personalist fashion depressingly familiar to students of the period, but with a Sihanoukesque flair. Chantarangsey gained a certain prominence in the reports of foreign correspondents during the Civil War: this was, in part, as he shared Sihanouk’s gift for the theatrical side of publicity, for grand gestures, and for sloganeering. Sydney Schanberg, in an article published in the New York Times on Christmas Day 1972, reported that Chantarangsey arranged tours for foreign representatives that were “models of public-relations expertise”, featuring a jeep-escorted journey from the capital, elephant rides, welcome speeches by the General himself, an official brigade photographer, and generally a long and alcohol-lubricated lunch – it was doubtless at one of these slightly surreal events that the journalist James Fenton gained the material for his poem “Dead Soldiers”. However, Chantarangsey clearly remembered enough from Sonh’s Viet Minh education sessions, at least in matters of publicity, to intertwine military organisation and populist politics in a way uncommon elsewhere in the Republic. Earlier in 1972 the NYT had reported him railing against “all those people in Phnom Penh who play at politics”, while by the time of Schanberg’s visit, he was able to report that the 13th Brigade had through its labour programmes built 16 clinics, a hospital, roads, reservoirs, and community centres, prominently featuring signs stating “Donation to the economic life from the 13th Brigade to the people”. Chantarangsey had also distributed 1,300 piglets – “I got a pig from the Mister. I am happy now”, commented a rice farmer. Somewhat less charitable treatment of refugees was hinted at by James Fenton, relayed to him by Saloth Chhay, now acting as the General’s aide.

The General was accused of padding his payroll, much as other FANK officers did, to finance his programmes. But he was also stated to have sold his own property to ensure that his men were actually paid properly – a relative rarity in the Republic’s army. While he went about unarmed to inspire ‘confidence’ – Communist forces in the area staying quiet nearby – he made sure that his own brigade was properly armed, partly by buying up weapons from other less paternalistic officers. Eventually he became too strong for Lon Nol to control, matters having come full circle in Kompong Speu.

It was an odd end for someone once put forward as Cambodia’s Souphanouvong, but the careers of such marginal figures are an interesting illustration of the context in which Cambodian politics developed, and how the activity of the traditional elites could impact on them. Unlike most other Republic officials, Chantarangsey did not escape the country, or surrender, when Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, but decided to continue the war. Disappearing into the Cardamoms, parts of his 13th Brigade were still causing trouble for the RAK in 1977. Chantarangsey himself may have been killed in an ambush somewhere along Route 4 early in 1976, but a large number of other accounts exist, appropriately enough for a figure whom the credulous peasantry believed to have supernatural powers.

No film, yet, though I’m sure some is out there somewhere.

Who were Khmer Rouge and what their contribution was (is) to us is an interesting topic to research. I think I’m well equipped as an author, or at least I’ll be trying his best. Hopefully there will be no disappointment. Besides, I have a blog dedicated to the building of a new man utilizing the Cambodian experience of communism, left matters, Buddhism, Traditionalism, healthy living. Here, however, I will contribute exclusively to Cambodian and Khmer Rouge topics as the name of the blog indicates – padewat.info. Information about padewat, and nothing else.

It is not just about all the killing in the name of abrogating multi-formed suffering, besides there were other influences and factors which fed into what happened, and if there had been none of the above, my fascination with Democratic Kampuchea would be the same. What Democratic Kampuchea was, and could have been, is worthy of interest not only because of its genocidal “practices.” On the contrary, to understand the killing, it requires that decent attention be given to the ideological choices made by the Khmer Communists in creating their new polity.

I want to single out here the words of the French traditionalist Rene Guenon who said that to be human is a “transitory and contingent modification of being” and Friedrich Engels once wrote that’ “life is the mode of existence of protein bodies.” Democratic Kampuchea was a state where oppression of the individual became the corner stone of its policy. An individual was a mere “contingent modification,” “a fertilizer.” “Death is either the dissolution of the organic body, leaving nothing behind but the chemical constituents that formed its substance… Living means dying.” It makes Democratic Kampuchea very close to some religious sects and its brand of communism akin to some sort of state religion. But a religion without the scriptures! This was so unusual for most of the other Communist-ruled states. An Orwellian reference can be made, for we all know that where there is a Big Brother, so too in the Cambodian context, is the Brother Number One, or bong ti muy. Also to quote Andrei Platonov from his dystopian novel Chevengur: “We might organize some grief. Communism must be caustic, a little bit of poison in the soup is good for the taste”.

Accidentally, the heroes of Chevengur were worried by the same problems as those faced by the Khmer Rouge – on how to build the purest brand of communism. And the former and the latter didn’t know the “classics.” There’s going to be a good comparison article of Platonov’s Chevengur and Democratic Kampuchea.

Even today Democratic Kampuchea stays aside. It’s a unique experience which deserves to be studied. What has attracted David Chandler, Ben Kiernan, Stephen Heder, Michael Vickery and others? Of course it’s much deeper than a remark made by Chandler that “those people were just stupid.” There’s going to be two different worlds between that of a Western professor and an uneducated farmer turned guerilla and revolutionary. You can never know 100 percent, even though you might guess, or you might construct, recreate times and places, all the variables which contribute to the motivations of people.

Here’s some more film footage below, taken from a French documentary on Democratic Kampuchea. I’m unsure as to its content though, regarding the footage used. Identifying what is exactly official government footage and that which was filmed during the visit made by Yugoslav journalists, including Nikola Vitorovic, in 1978. You see, I haven’t been lucky enough to see this film Kampucija 1978. Only little bits of footage here and there used in other films. The tractors seen in the film below are, I think, those shipped to DK by the Yugoslav government in 1977. I like the scene of improvisation, with a rice paddy complete with cattle, against the backdrop of whitewashed modernist buildings about forty-seven seconds into it. A not necessarily backward transformation of the urban. It represents a little the problems, in practice, that were caused by the ideological choices made by the DK government, and what they were wanting to achieve by way of them: the creation of another variant of a relatively modern ‘Socialist’ state. If the regime had survived, it is interesting to speculate on whether the towns would have been repopulated at some point. That isn’t to say they were completely devoid of human activity, as poor peasants who had proved themselves to the tasks of revolution during the war, were brought in to work the various repaired and reopened factories. Such places of course were not only to produce goods, but workers. And as you can see below, the improvisation of modern technology is evident, for American army jeeps have been modified so their engines can act as water pumps.

‘Proletarianisation,’ would be part and parcel of reforging the less-than-favourable section of the population, creating infrastructure for expanded food production in the countryside. Similarly, regarding commodity exchange, or in plain English, stuff like money. Perhaps it would have been recirculated after the bulk of the population’s rural rebirth had coincided with the completion of this new infrastructure, with which to begin the process of industrialisation. After all it wasn’t until 1976 that it was decided to do away with it. And if Democratic Kampuchea had indeed ‘moved forward’ by a substantial distance, then although claiming to be non-aligned, with heavy Chinese influence, this small Communist-ruled state would have been incorporated somewhere into the old Communist world bloc, with its networks of trade, surely? As early as 1972, there was discussion among the Communist Party leadership on the matter of introducing a new currency into the liberated areas, where the money of the Khmer Republic had been withdrawn. Sample notes were printed in China, which were inspected by the Khmer Communists, who after some agreement decided to postpone its introduction until they had defeated the Lon Nol government and won control of the whole country. The notes of this revolutionary currency were indeed circulated in one or two trial areas for a short period after April 1975, before their withdrawal, never to be used again by the Communists, and which these days serve as curious items for collectors.

In practice, the Khmer Communists didn’t copy the Soviet or the Chinese models in a linear fashion, despite borrowing from both, but the government, when not being coy about its very existence and intentions described itself and its policies in Leninist terms, and the development and expansion of their cooperative system, and through which total collectivisation would be attempted, had (in their eyes) accelerated the creation of conditions ripe for the building of socialism, and beyond. I don’t believe their logic, present in the ideological framework they used, would have allowed them to get to that beyond bit, though. That is, full-blown communism. It would have eventually bumped into the brick wall all other ‘transitional’ Socialist states had, at some point, arrived at. And paradise on earth is subject to Party postponement. Look at the spin Brezhnev gave to the reality of stagnation in the USSR. Real existing socialism had ‘matured,’ so much so, that it had begun to stink like a piece of blue cheese. Had the regime survived, then it might have begun to resemble in some ways Enver Hoxha’s Albania, or Kim Il-Sung’s North Korea. Albania had been, in some respects, more peasant than Russia, and like Cambodia, reliant on outside help for its development (despite Khmer claims to the contrary). And Korea was a place where at one point during a period of war, planes were grounded because there were no longer any targets to drop bombs on. An ugly state beyond socialism – or even stagnation for that matter – it might still be, but it was built from ruins. My guesses are uneducated, and what ifs, although interesting for the imagination, still fall squarely on the reality that although supreme confidence meant only success after success, victory after victory could be expected, the Khmer Communist version of a Great Leap landed somewhere quite different, and horrific, for that matter.

Some official DK footage showing the use of modern agricultural equipment. You get to see those Yugoslav tractors again. Thrilling, I know.