The Eyes of the Pineapple

This, readers (and there are quite a few), will be the last post until we’re into the new year, and so far I think I’ve got enough encouragement to carry on with this small project, or historical hobby, in my spare time. I think it was a reviewer of Ben Kiernan’s comprehensive world study of genocide, Blood and Soil, who remarked that given his grim area of specialism, when attempting to strike up intelligent conversation with an interested member of the opposite sex, he would be deemed a sicko at parties. Alas, I’m not a party person, whether it be the Indochinese Communist Party, Vietnam Workers’ Party, or the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Nor do I possess Kiernan’s experitise or own a jacket with leather elbow patches that academics of a certain age seem to like wearing. I’m in a relationship with a member of the opposite sex, but feel unsure as to whether or not she’s been recently feigning interest … Err, in this blog of course. So, The Eyes of the Pineapple is sort of like a bad tribute band, playing covers in a less than lively pub. The previous incarnation of this site, which lasted for nearly a year, wasn’t so ’successful’ (dare I use that word even now?) for I misunderstood the more appropriate use of the blog format (bloody young ‘uns having to point this out to me elsewhere); hence my earlier indecision over whether to carry on as a blog, or create a small ‘conventional’ website instead. Let’s face it, the content found here is very niche indeed, but over the last three months, my thus far eleven posts are actually being read by people. Or they’re just watching the videos. But, that is not to mention the many comments that have been left here, meaning some rather good discussion has been had on the themes touched upon in the various postings. Which is also good for the reason that I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about Khmer Communist ambitions regarding modernity.

So there will be future posts; or to be charitable, reheated dishes of history written by other people.

In a pre-emptive action, to prevent the possibility of any more stuffed mailbags blocking the doors of Pineapple HQ, here’s a little explanation of this blog’s address: Padevat.

Some quotes from Serge Thion’s revised paper presented at a 1981 seminar held at Chiangmai, Thailand, where learned beards and leather elbow patches held sway on the possible reasons for why things went pear-shaped in Kampuchea. Called The Cambodian Idea of Revolution:

In pre-colonial Cambodia, as in most traditional polities, the concept of revolution as the replacement of a ruling social stratum by another, was non-existent. But if we take the word in its old European usage, i.e. the violent replacement of a ruler, or a dynasty, by another one, then revolutions did occur. Slight or slow social changes may have followed them, but the distribution of social power remained basically the same.

In Cambodia, there are two sources of the idea of revolution, namely the French school syllabus and the international Communist movement. The two are not unrelated.

Yes, I hear you mutter, but what’s that got to do with those people, you know, nutters dressed in black pyjamas? Well, not only were they armed with Russian or Chinese-made Kalashnikov assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, they had a peculiar take (fully understood or otherwise) on Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s contribution of voluntarism to revolutionary thinking of the Marxist sort. On how to go about making a twentieth-century socialist revolution on social terrain far removed from what a transition to ’socialism’ could be deemed as being feasible by a bloke with a big beard and a drink problem who lived in the nineteenth-century. Something which, in part, suggests the origins of people like Salot Sar’s political thinking, is their superimposing what is quoted below onto the 1917 Bolshevik revolutionary model, or its later Asian ‘Maoist’ variant, but minus any critiques of it formed by other competing revolutionary currents coming from the working class movements of Europe — the left communists, ‘workerists,’ anarchists of the syndicalist variety etc. Methinks there has been too much use of the suffixes ism and ist there. The mark of a pseud. The Bolshevist (sorry) model, historically unreceptive in central and western parts of Europe being particularly attractive to colonial ‘national liberation’ leaders, in parts of the world where it has proved to be a path to some form of modern change, with also unpleasant results.

The French were very slow in establishing an original educational system in Cambodia. The first French school, in the 1880s “catered chiefly for Chinese and Vietnamese children.” In 1905 probably no more than 500 Khmer children were attending protectorate schools. A Lycee was not established in Phnom Penh until the 1930s, but a handful of young aristocrats, like Sihanouk, generally was sent to Saigon or Hanoi to attend a lycee. Under the centralized French educational system, all pupils, whether in Phnom Penh or any French town, were expected to master the same knowledge. History was taught with no adaptation to local conditions, so that future citizens and colonial subjects alike would identify with French history and with French political values. Since 1870, in the republican education system, the 1789 revolution has appeared as a central event, not only in French, but in world history. It is hailed as the destruction of an archevil ancien regime and the first victory of a universal bourgeosie, representative of the whole population. Every nation is supposed to go through such a redeeming experience. The most subversive ideas, figures and groups are carefully erased from the official picture, so as to make this troubled period more an object of reverence than a source of inspiration.

But never mind imported French colonial arrogance or Russian inspiration. Nor Mao’s blank sheet of paper upon which ‘the most beautiful pictures’ can be painted; what about the local meaning of the word ‘revolution’?

Even before World War II, the very word “revolution” existed in political language, although I am not able to say when it first crept into Cambodia usage. The Khmer word padiwat is derived, as is its Thai equivalent, from Pali pattivattam. The Dictionary of the Pali Language, by R.C. Childers (London, fourth printing, 1909) shows that pati means “towards, back in return, against” and vattam means “going on, continuance, succession,” also “a circle, region, realm,” as in samsaravattam, “revolution or realm of transmigrations.” The general meaning of “moving against,” implying also a circular motion, was then an apt translation, in several Southeast Asian languages, of the Latin “revolution.” It can safely be assumed that this Pali word was first introduced into modern political speech in countries other than Cambodia. Thailand, with the birth of an indigenous CP in the thirties, is a most likely place. The 1932 coup which established both military power and constitutional monarchy was also a padiwat, and many military coups since then have been named padiwat.

So, there you have it.

Lastly, on my list of gifts I want from Father Christmas this year, is the personal account of life under the DK regime, written by an ethnic Chinese Cambodian ‘old-society’ engineer named Ping Ling. It’s called Cambodia: 1,360 Days! Apparently never published, it’s limited to a few copies in manuscript form. If one can’t arrive by reindeer, or FC’s little helpers can’t steal a copy from someone’s bookshelf or storage box, then I’d be willing to part with a considerable amount of cash for it. Thanks in advance. It would be a big improvement on last year. As well as smellies, I received twenty Lambert & Butler.

Above scanned picture taken from the Kampuchean Communist Party journal Tung Padevat (Revolutionary Flags).

The below photograph might be of interest to a few in light of the previous post. A portrait of guerilla leader Son Ngoc Minh, carried in a procession of party (KPRP) militants in 1952. I offer my apologies to those who use small monitors, with that annoying scrolling you have to do, left and right.

Taken from the brochure which, being economical with the truth, publicised the face of that dead letter “united front” against the Khmer Republic, and which the highly secretive Angkar (Communist Party of Kampuchea) hid behind. With mildly amusing acronyms used from the French language, the FUNK (Front Uni National du Kampuchea), and its accompanying GRUNK (Gouvernement Royal d’Union Nationale du Kampuchea) government, which to prove was not a government in exile, achieved a propaganda coup when Prince Norodom Sihanouk, his wife Monique, an entourage which of course a prince needed, and a Chinese film crew in tow, made the bumpy journey down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in order to tour the liberated areas of Cambodia in February and March 1973. Areas of the country from which seemingly fearless Khmer Rouge rebels battled with the army of B-52 sustained rightists based in Phnom Penh. The liberated areas, or zones, were places in which the shrinking Republic’s effective administrative control had been withdrawn, and increasingly coercive and radical changes were occurring under the Khmer Communists, who enjoyed most influence within the front, the Sihanoukists pretty much elbowed out of the way. But the man, or an image of the man himself, was very important for these mutant Leninists in motivating the peasants to fight. Click to enlarge.

Wearing black peasant garb, checked krama and with their Chinese military caps resting on the table, from the left closest to the map we have Ieng Sary and then Hou Yuon. On the other side of the table, from the top we have Pol Pot (keeping in the distance), Hu Nim and Khieu Samphan. Lastly, at the end of the table sits Sihanouk.

Nice, a reheated dish of forever-gone “Communism.”

Back in the month of June, soon after I had arrived back from my last trip to Moscow, I received a copy of the first issue of 20th Century Communism, a new history journal, the title of which explains quite clearly the content. I like it. The opening of the editorial foreword: “Communism was one of the defining political movements of the twentieth century. Viewed from different perspectives, it was at once a utopia, an ideology, a system of government, an apparatus of terror and an international political movement stretching to almost every corner of the globe. ‘All roads’ led there, it’s advocates proclaimed; ‘history’ was on its side. While enduring traces remain, and these include significant states and parties, as an international movement of unparalleled scope and cohesiveness, it is communism itself which has now passed into history.”

The theme for this particular issue is the phenomenon of the leader cult, to avoid the language of 1956. Across nations, Communist Parties whether in power or not, and with local differences, practising a kind of behaviour originating in the Soviet experience before Stalin’s ascension was complete.

A man who sometimes referred to himself as “Little Pinya,” and who had expended an enormous amount of energy in slagging off Boris Pasternak for the crime of writing Doctor Zhivago (despite having never read it), made a long-winded speech in which through a partial appraisal of the Soviet experience, he and his colleagues were officially let off the hook. The terms glasnost and perestroika were not new to Communist’s vocabularies in the 1980s, the former term used during the Khrushchevskaya ottepel. What came about in the 1980s perhaps wouldn’t have happened in quite the same way if Pinya, the ambiguous little fat man, hadn’t got the ball rolling. Maybe some greatly needed restructuring, but with little openness. The remains of a huge and repressive command and control apparatus, its connected bureaucracy having some pretensions to socialism, or with a capital S if you want to keep things within context. Although, aside from some very good and sort-of honest motion pictures created during this period (mid-1950s – 60s), outward expressions of openness could never supplant the Party’s ingrained practices; of offering some nice new flavours of socialist chocolate, but carrying a public health warning of not to get ideas above one’s station.

Well, back on topic for the purposes of this blog (what they are, I haven’t quite figured out yet) … The Communist Party (or pseudo-party) of Kampuchea , which neither sought nor received recognition from the Russians after 1975, of course was among the last of the Communist Parties to have gotten into power in the 20th century. The lines were never clearly marked, with their incongruent, toxic, mutant mishmash of the Maoist-inspired store placed in the reform of the individual; along with a Stalinist quality of viewing suspicious people as non-redeemable and thus lost to the building of “socialism,” after which, when conditions ripen (subject to Party postponement of course) a new type of person will emerge. If you chop wood the chips will fly … To make an omelette you’ve got to break some eggs … With the Khmer Communist’s habit for secrecy, their late revealing of themselves, at least partially to an outside world after the prompting of the Chinese government, and the short time the regime was actually around for, meant a leader cult didn’t develop thoroughly along a familiar pattern in Kampuchea. It was still in embryonic form, and despite portraits and busts drawn, painted and sculpted for this sort of purpose, it might be fair to say that Pol would have felt uneasy about the whole thing, given his preference for self-effacement. Mind you, at some point during the four-year comprehensive development plan, his mild face was looking down upon peasants and quasi-peasants in the communal dining halls of the country’s cooperatives; places where, in the spirit of Babeauf, everyone was exactly five feet six inches tall while eating their rice gruel. A situation which revealed for the first time to one of his brothers, living and working in the countryside, that the quiet, affable and softly-spoken mediocrity many had previously known was heading the new government.

Pointing to the bête noire of the Khmer Communists, the Vietnamese, in reading about Ho Chi Minh elsewhere, at one time in a state of apparent awe, he personally asked Stalin to autograph a copy of Soviet Union magazine. Having done so and with characteristic paranoia, the Vozhd later succeeded in having the signed publication on the Land of Socialism confiscated. Having picked my copy of the journal up again, and although not directly in relation to Cambodian Communism, there is a small mention of it in Sophie Quinn Judge’s article on Ho Chi Minh and Vietnamese Communism: and in relation to that, China. I’ve probably got my facts and geography wrong, but nevertheless I’ve been interested in the acts of popular violence carried out by a confident peasantry in the first quarter of the twentieth century, surrounding a ‘Nanyang’ committee in southern China (of which there was a Cochinchina-Cambodia branch). There were some other violent episodes against landlords in this region orchestrated by a secretive group of Communists, only known among peasants as the zuzhi, or the “organisation” or something. Has a faint echo in the later Khmer Rouge (or Khmer Krahom for you smart arses) and their hiding behind their own revolutionary organisation, or angkar padevat. To explain a little more on the former, an apparent influence on Vietnamese Communism were traditions of peasant rebellion, both anarchist and Communist in southern China spreading outwards, and of which had Vietnamese involvement in the late 1920s and early 30s. There was this Nanyang committee attached to the Chinese Communist Party, which accepted the Comintern class against class strategy of militancy and gave an organisational face to the rebelliousness. Such militancy flourished once again in the region during the 1960s whirlwind of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, although under different circumstances and for different ends.

The short-lived Hai-Lu-Feng soviet movement is in reference to the latter. It followed the Autumn Harvest Uprising led by a certain Mao Tse-tung in September 1927. Apparently a period of violent militancy, with Communists acting behind popular peasant associations such as the zuzhi, already mentioned. Advised the peasants to kill as many landlords as they could get their hands on. Says the soviets were broken up by February 1928 but with regard to this, it doesn’t say much about specific places in Southeast Asia radicals fled to when their movement was destroyed, they themselves pursued by the Kuomintang. People who had been involved in them fled to places beyond China, including Vietnamese students who had attended a school named the Huangpu Military Academy. Chinese cadres also fled southward too, taking their politics with them. There is a clever cloggist named Fernando Galbiati who has written a study on the Hai-Lu-Feng soviet movement. I’ll seek his work out.

With regard to the end of the Cambodian Civil War, or ragtag struggle for “national liberation” for any Marxist-Leninist-Whateverists who may be reading, for years many have still mistakenly associated certain people captured on film during the fall of Phnom Penh, displaying a symbol of distinctive design, with the Khmer Rouge. After a dry-season offensive which began on January 1 1975, finally on a Glorious April 17, their silent armies sullenly marched in Indian File, or rolled, into Cambodia’s capital city, on captured American-made military vehicles. On that morning of defeat for the Khmer Republic, to weary but cheering crowds black-clad soldiers (looking too clean-cut to have been out on the battlefield) confidently made their way through the city’s streets, riding atop trucks and jeeps, waving a flag. A red and blue flag, the colours split equally and diagonally from top right to bottom left. Superimposed upon this background there was what looked to be a white cross. It was not, however, representative of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, itself hiding behind a dead letter united front. It was the banner of another small and not well-known organisation, hatched from a desperate plan cooked up by some inside the Khmer Republic’s top civil service. The Monatio or National Movement (Mouvement National) was a pathetic attempt by members of the country’s soon-to-be defunct elite, to present themselves as friends to a tattered but heavily-armed foe, who were every bit determined that it would be they, and they alone who would dictate the peace.

The reader may be aware of a particular image reproduced here, the shot of an angry-looking young man in black garb, brandishing a pistol and threatening someone out of sight. A Khmer Rouge solider in a bit of a bad mood? Or perhaps he is Hem Keth Dara, the son of Khmer Republic official Hem Keth Sana, although elsewhere he has been identified as a FANK general. Dara, whatever he looked like and whatever daddy really was, led this group of poseurs and manipulated saps, in turn directed from on high by former classmates of some in the GRUNK leadership, and who had found themselves in a bit of a pickle, being on the losing side of a bitter armed conflict. Those among them, included Lon Nol’s younger brother, Lon Non. Lon Nol himself had scarpered by that time, first to Indonesia then onto Hawaii. Not forgetting, of course, after helping himself to a draft for one million US dollars from the country’s National Bank. The bank building would soon be detonated by explosives, a Khmer Rouge cliché and act of iconoclasm. On that fateful day, by early afternoon in the midst of confusion, the stooge Dara and his chums managed to make use of the city’s radio station, seized by them during their antics in the morning. In a pre-recorded message broadcast to its inhabitants, his taped voice announced that the “National Movement” welcomed the incoming troops, proposing that a nice chat should be had on the details of surrender. Then the real Khmer Rouge broke in, unimpressed, announcing: “We are not here to negotiate! We are entering the city by force of arms.”

Ragged and thin KR zonal troops had entered the city from different directions, with school teacher turned military commander Koy Thuon’s forces among them, setting up base at the Hotel Monorom, seen to the right, in the Claude Juvenal photo at the top. There, they organised a committee for the ‘wiping out’ of enemies, to sort out the identification and execution of high-level personnel of the Lon Nol civil and military administrations. On the subject of terror, Thuon would be among the earliest to go during the Communist Party’s centralisation drive (with accompanying internal purges) in the Democratic Kampuchea period. His 1976 departure was from a region of the country which throughout the regime could not provide a surplus of rice for the central government’s development needs. Increased pressure made a difficult task much worse with the second forced migration of labouring people, driven by the KR from the South West (the Pot-Mok powerbase) northwards. He drew the short straw when it came to the Party’s regional secretaryship, the North being one of the least hospitable and undeveloped zones. Back on topic though, Lon Non was not spared; along with the likes of Sirik Matak and Long Boret dying in undecided circumstances, at least some bits of him were probably spattered across a lawn of the smart, exclusive country club, the Circle Sportif. The Monatio students on the streets were broken up and disarmed, these fakers neither seen as friends or much of a threat in acting out this piece of tragicomic relief during the final collapse of the Republic. This small example of folly showing just how out of touch with reality some had become, even beyond the earlier “Third Force” position of finding a not-so bloody settlement to the fighting. The Khmer Rouge after 1973 in particular weren’t going to give up on a sure thing.