The Eyes of the Pineapple

Revealing Lon Nol’s departure from reality at the time of the Cambodian Civil War … From William Harben’s memoirs:

I carried “Mad Dog” Bolin’s 9 mm automatic under the seat. In the event that any Khmer Rouge soldiers blocked the road and tried to flag me down, I planned to abandon the car, dive into the bushes and make them keep their distance with a few shots from the 13-shot magazine.

My own section’s reports continued to be censored, which weighed heavily on my conscience. If we had been instructed in writing to conceal the deterioration of the situation we might have felt that we had done our job as well as the limitations of government allowed us, but that was not the case. Furthermore the reports of our embassy in Laos, of which we received some copies, were very frank, particularly in regard to corruption, which we were required to gloss over. Lives were at stake. When the enemy overran certain villages, or military camps, containing women and children, all those found therein were massacred. If the enemy were to overrun Phnom Penh a bloodbath would result. But even I did not suspect the dimensions of the mass murders which later took place. The embassy regarded most journalists as hostile, which was natural, since the truth was unrelievedly unfavorable and very easy to discover. The embassy would not even report Khmer newspaper articles. Unable to report directly and finding it very dangerous to talk to the many journalists steered to me, I refrained from saying anything myself, but recommended that they visit certain people from whom I believed they could get the truth without involving me.

On one occasion I thought a breakthrough was possible. The Marshal issued a presidential decree ordering the arrest of anyone seen buying rabbits in the market. These were enemy agents, said the decree, and would tie timed explosives on the backs of the little beasts, which would hop into the army’s entrenchments and blow them up! Since it had been broadcast on the state radio I knew that it would be circulated all over Washington by the FBIS in unclassified form. To make sure, however, I drafted a SECRET cable reporting the text. My superiors refused to send it. This led to a confirmation of the bureaucratic lesson I had learned in Moscow: the officer who reports an event which could be used to back criticism of a presidential policy will be suspected of political partisanship. If he even brings such reports to the attention of his superiors he runs an unacceptable risk.

And so it was that an emergency high-level mission from Washington was sent to Phnom Penh after a day of spectacular disasters which could not be concealed by any censorship. By then it was too late. One member of the team was a young fellow on the National Security Council who covered Cambodia.

“Why is the situation so much worse than we thought it was?” he asked me at lunch in my villa.

I told him that the ambassador had been discouraged from reporting the truth, “but anyway, there was enough material in the public print for any sensible person back there to realize that this place is going down the tube with its present leadership – like the rabbit bomb decree.”

“The what?” He had never heard of it. Apparently no one in Washington had dared send the item upstairs. The government had concealed the truth from no one but itself.

Seen on this blog before, but you can download the full-size image here. A cover of Swedish magazine Folket i Bild/Kulturfront, this particular issue including coverage of an unofficial friendship delegation that went to Democratic Kampuchea on a fourteen day trip in August 1978. The visitors were even honoured by a dinner hosted by Comrade General Secretary Pol Pot himself. Part of the attempt to gather what limited foreign support (aside from cynical high politics) there was for the regime, given that a war with Vietnam was looming. The magazine was partly founded by Jan Myrdal, seen to the far left of the four delegates gathered in front of Angkor Wat. Gunnar Bergström, who has been seen in the media over the past eighteen months or so, seeking forgiveness for his past naive support for the Khmer Communists, is seen wearing the Chinese military cap.

This is just some more filler, until I get back into the swing of things. Presented below is some film from the Khmer Republic period, from the year 1974 I think. Firstly, it shows government relief given to the refugees from the Khmer Rouge siege of the old Royal capital Oudong. Lon Nol appears after 2:45, hobbling around with his walking stick post-stroke, for the inauguration of the Senate in Phnom Penh. Among others present at this event we see an old Son Ngoc Thanh at 3:33. There is the opening of a refugee camp at Prek Leap, and the commissioning of works by the government’s electrical board. FANK soldiers engage in construction and fighting with Khmer Rouge forces. Of particular interest to me given the secrecy of the Communists, is that which follows the above appears to be FUNK propaganda footage from the liberated zones, and excellent it is too. As for personalities, firstly at 6:50, we have none other than backwater rebel and future DK hangman Chhit Choeun, alias Ta Mok, giving a talk to peasants in what is presumably a ‘relocated’ village. As well as footage and stills of male and female Khmer Rouge troops, we see another scene at 19:48, where in a forest hideout Pol Pot, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan pose for the camera while perhaps pretending to discuss military tactics over a map of Cambodia. We also get to see what looks to be a makeshift meeting hall, complete with a display including the Communist Party of Kampuchea flag and the old three-towered Khmer People’s National Liberation Committee flag of non-ICP Issaraks (later adopted as the DK national flag). And what place such as this wouldn’t be complete without portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. A book of Lenin’s writings also rests neatly on a desk. Lastly we see another meeting of villagers addressed by Communist Party cadres. I’m curious as to the identity of one of them though, making his appearance at about 23:45, and think perhaps it’s Northern Zone leader Koy Thuon. The Khmer Republic got hold of this footage, but those who mattered in the government probably weren’t cognisant of just who some of these guys really were and the positions they held in the opposing united front government, excluding maybe Samphan.

The above picture, as terribly upsetting as it is, with the innocent 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 Sek Prak. 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.