Pol Pot (60 page)

on the Vietnamese side, could not openly rebuff such an overture. Yet it underlined that in the Cambodian view, future ties between Phnom Penh and Hanoi should be bilateral, between equal, sovereign nations, rather than part of a larger grouping of all three Indochinese states as the Vietnamese would have preferred. The visit, like all Pol’s activities in 1975, was secret. There was no announcement, no communiqué, no way for anyone outside the two Party leaderships to know what had transpired. But the talks were evidently successful in reducing political tensions.

Pol offered

ritual thanks for Vietnamese aid, ‘without [which] we could not have achieved victory’, and though he could not bring himself to utter the term ‘special relationship’, he did say, masking his feelings behind his eternal smile, that ‘the great friendly solidarity among the parties and peoples of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos . . . is the determining factor in all [our] victories to date as well as a decisive factor in [our] victories to come.’

At the beginning of August Le Duan paid a return visit to Phnom Penh, which the Vietnamese Party newspaper,

characterised as ‘

cordial

’, and a few days later Nguyen Van Linh informed Nuon Chea that Vietnamese units had evacuated Wai Island and were preparing to release six hundred Cambodian soldiers they had taken prisoner. Subsequent exchanges of messages included ringing declarations of ‘militant solidarity’ and ‘indestructible friendship’. Liaison offices were established in the border provinces and armed clashes all but ceased.

True, the

repatriation

of Vietnamese families from Cambodia continued: from April to December 1975, an estimated 150,000 Vietnamese returned to Vietnam, while thousands of Cambodian refugees, who had fled the Khmer Rouge advance, were sent back the other way. None the less, as the year ended, the Vietnamese Politburo concluded that relations were ‘slowly improving’ and that, despite strains, the alliance was intact.

This was a fatal error. As the Vietnamese Foreign Minister, Nguyen Co Thach, subsequently acknowledged, ‘In 1975 Vietnam evaluated the situation in Cambodia incorrectly’. Khieu Samphân said later that Pol was simply

playing for time

.

A week after the talks in Hanoi,

Pol flew

to Beijing. Again the visit was secret. This time he was accompanied by Ieng Sary, Ney Sarann and Siet Chhê. Symbolically the highpoint of his stay was a meeting with Mao, which took place beside the Chairman’s private swimming pool, at his home near the Forbidden City, on the afternoon of June 21. The Chinese leader was old and ill; he had to be helped to his feet, and on bad days even his secretary-companion, Zhang Yufeng, who had learnt to lip-read, had difficulty understanding what he said. But Mao’s mind was as nimble as

ever. The Cambodian communists intrigued him. This, therefore, was a good day, or would have been had he not insisted on trying to convey some of his thoughts in English, a language he had been trying and failing to learn for the previous forty years. Whether Pol felt intimidated in Mao’s presence, or whether his interpreter was overwhelmed by the challenge of rendering into Khmer Mao’s elliptical reasoning, the Chinese transcript shows that he said nothing of substance. Mao, on the other hand, had a lot to say. He began by declaring his approval of the Cambodian revolution:

You have a lot of experience. It’s better than ours. We don’t have the right to criticise you . . . Basically you are right. Have you made mistakes or not? I don’t know. Certainly you have. So rectify yourselves; do

The road is tortuous . . . Now our situation [in China] is exactly as Lenin predicted — a capitalist country with no capitalists . . . Salaries are not equal. We have a slogan of equality — but we don’t carry it out. How many years will it take to change that? Until we become communist? Even under communism, there will still be a struggle between what is advanced and what is backward. So this matter is not clear. [Emphasis in original]

On close reading, it was strangely ambivalent. Mao’s repeated references to criticism and mistakes, at a meeting with a friendly delegation, were unusual. Moreover, the last sentence seemed to throw doubt on whether the perfect egalitarianism Pol advocated, however desirable, could ever in practice be realised: ‘this matter is not clear’.

The Chairman’s mind was harking back to the infancy of his own revolution when the Chinese communists in Jiangxi in the 1930s — just like the Khmers Rouges, forty years later — had burned down villages, displaced populations, terrorised rich peasants and executed Party dissidents under the slogan, ‘

Better to kill

a hundred innocent people than let one truly guilty person go free’. That period had ended with the Long March, when Mao developed the doctrine of rectification to provide a subtler means of dealing with intra-Party disputes. Now he was urging the Cambodians likewise to ‘do rectification!’, implying that the time had come for them, too, to abandon their early extremism. This message was woven between the lines of everything Mao said that day. By using snatches of English, by referring to Pol’s Cambodia as ‘a socialist

by citing Huxley, Kant, and the fourth-century Buddhist missionary Kumârajîva,

*

and finally by offering to

give Pol ‘30 books written by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin’ to study, Mao sought to convey the idea that the Cambodian leaders should open their minds and place their revolution in the context of the wider world.

How much of this any of them understood — indeed, how much survived the translation — is another matter. The one idea that clearly did resonate, because afterwards Pol frequently repeated it, was Mao’s injunction to his visitors not to copy indiscriminately the experience of China or any other country, but ‘to create your own experience yourselves’.

Notwithstanding Mao’s reservations about the system Pol wished to build — reservations shared by Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping — China had already decided to give his regime all-out support. For China, as for Cambodia, the key factor was Vietnam. There was a near-perfect symmetry to the three countries’ relations. China was to Vietnam as Vietnam was to Cambodia — a vast and powerful neighbour, which threatened hegemony. Both had made huge sacrifices, in men and money, to help their allies’ revolutions, only to have them bridle against their suzerainty. Relations between Hanoi and Beijing had begun to cool in the late 1960s. By 1975, the Chinese leaders saw Vietnam as a Soviet bridgehead in Asia, which Moscow would try to use to spread its influence throughout the region. The Laotian communists were too weak, and historically too close to Hanoi, to act independently. That left Cambodia as the one country on Vietnam’s western flank which might be expected to resist the expansion of Vietnamese, and hence of Soviet, power.

In the end it was

far more than ideological affinity, which brought China and Cambodia together.

That is not to downplay the importance of the beliefs they shared: the primacy of men over machines; the exaltation of the human will (in China) and ‘revolutionary consciousness’ (in Cambodia); the pre-eminence of ideology over learning (being ‘red’ rather than ‘expert’); the strategy of using the countryside to surround the city and the need to eliminate the differences between them; the concern to bridge the gulf between mental and manual labour; and the view that revisionism, in the shape of bourgeois thought, grew spontaneously within the communist movement itself.

Mao was

entranced

by Pol’s boldness in emptying the cities. That autumn he asked Le Duan whether Vietnam could do the same. When the Vietnamese leader shook his head, Mao paused for a moment and then agreed: ‘

No. We couldn

’t do it either.’

At the end of his long life, the Chairman was lucid enough to realise that the new world the Cambodians dreamed of would prove to be a mirage. China had tried that route already. It too had considered doing without money, but rejected the idea as impractical. The temporary closing

of schools and universities during the Cultural Revolution had brought as many problems as it had solved. Even Mao himself now accepted that the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s — a Utopian mass movement which was intended to allow China to overtake Britain and America in economic output and proceed directly to communism, but instead resulted in 20 million deaths from starvation — had been a disaster. Yet when later a frail Zhou Enlai, in hospital suffering from cancer, tried to caution Khieu Samphân that the road to socialism was long and Cambodia should not repeat China’s errors, he drew only a

non-committal smile

.

From then on, the two Parties rarely discussed ideological matters, and when they did they

failed to agree

.

The relationship was pragmatic. China offered Cambodia large-scale economic aid, technical training, military supplies and a market for its meagre exports; Cambodia provided a secure forward base for China’s strategy to contain Vietnam. The

had been established within days of Phnom Penh’s fall when, on April 19, Ieng Sary had flown from Hanoi to Beijing to ask that military supplies henceforth be channelled through the port of Kompong Som, rather than through Vietnam.

Four days later

, on April 23, the Deputy Director of the Chinese Communist Party’s International Liaison Department, Shen Chien, at the head of a small fact-finding team, had accompanied Sary to Phnom Penh on the first flight to Cambodia since the end of the civil war. To underline the importance of the mission, Pol himself had gone to the airport to greet them. In June, following his encounter with Mao, Pol had a series of meetings with Deng Xiaoping in Beijing and Shanghai to discuss Cambodia’s aid requirements.

Deng told him

that military assistance would be provided free, and that — in the words of the final accord, signed the following February — ‘it will be up to the Cambodian government to decide how the [Chinese] military equipment and supplies are allocated and used. China will not interfere, nor impose any condition, nor demand any privilege.’ The list was long, and included:

Complete equipment for three artillery regiments, including a total of 108 pieces of 85-mm, 122-mm and 130-mm ordnance and 13,000 shells.

Complete equipment for two anti-aircraft regiments and an anti-aircraft battalion, including 150 pieces of 100-mm, 57-mm and double-barrelled 37-mm cannon.

Complete equipment for a signals regiment.

Complete equipment for a pontoon battalion.

Equipment for a tank regiment, including 72 light tanks and 32 amphibious tanks.

Equipment for a radar battalion, including 20 sets of search-and-guide radar.

30 fighter aircraft and six trainers.

15 bombers and three trainers.

12 high-speed torpedo boats, 10 escort ships, 4 anti-submarine vessels, with corresponding armament; 4 landing craft, one 80-ton minesweeper and one 300-ton tanker.

It was to be delivered by sea over a three-year period ending in 1978. In addition, China undertook to repair and refurbish US equipment seized from Lon Nol’s army, including sixty more aircraft; to furnish 50,000 complete sets of infantrymen’s equipment; to build a new military airport at Kompong Chhnang, fifty miles north of Phnom Penh, a naval base at Ream, near Kompong Som, a munitions depot and a communications workshop; and to enlarge an existing weapons repair works. All this was on top of 10,000 tons of military equipment, including 100 120-mm artillery pieces and 1,300 military vehicles, the delivery of which had been held over from 1975 following Ieng Sary’s request that transport via Vietnam be discontinued.

The quantities of economic assistance pledged were equally impressive. Pol asked that priority be given to restoring road and rail links, especially from Phnom Penh to Battambang and to Kompong Som, and that China provide barges for river transport. Next came the reconstruction of war-damaged factories processing export commodities: rubber, tropical hardwoods and fish products. By the end of the year agreement had also been reached on building, or more often, rebuilding, twenty-nine industrial enterprises, including the oil refinery destroyed by US bombers during the

affair; textile mills; glass and tyre factories; a paper mill; fertiliser and pharmaceutical plants; a phosphate mine and a cement works.

In addition,

more than three hundred

Chinese army officers and technicians and a larger number of civilians were sent to Cambodia to conduct training programmes, while nearly six hundred Khmer trainees went to China.

The true financial cost of these measures is difficult to establish. In September, diplomatic sources in Beijing reported that the Chinese commitment exceeded a billion US dollars (equivalent to 3.4 billion dollars in today’s money). If anything, that is probably on the low side. The Chinese government later revealed that economic assistance alone to Cambodia in 1975 totalled more than

300 million

dollars, and that, like the military aid, it was provided in the form of grants. The one-billion-dollar figure had begun circulating a few days before Le Duan arrived in Beijing to seek Chinese help for the post-war reconstruction of Vietnam. It was almost certainly leaked to underscore China’s refusal to give further aid to Hanoi.

Explaining that decision, Mao baldly told the Vietnamese leader: ‘Today you are not the poorest under heaven. We are. We have a population of 800 million.’ Deng Xiaoping then berated Le Duan for anti-Chinese statements in the Vietnamese media and treated him to a lengthy disquisition on Mao’s ‘Three Worlds’ theory, which held that the Soviet Union and the United States were both hegemonist powers, each as bad as the other.