Pol Pot (66 page)

On September 9, the Prince returned to Phnom Penh, to be greeted by

saffron-robed monks — among the last not to have been defrocked — chanting victory psalms; black-clad Khmer Rouge girls scattering flowers at his feet; a carefully selected crowd of revolutionary soldiers and workers, and representatives of Angkar, led by Khieu Samphân. It was a moment to savour and Pol himself came to watch, hidden behind the pack of welcoming officials. Sihanouk did not see him and was never told that he had been there.

For the next three weeks, he was treated royally. On Ieng Sary’s instructions, Long Nârin, now a Foreign Ministry official, had spent the whole of August with a group of workmen cleaning up the Royal Palace for the Prince and his suite, a bizarre assembly of relatives and hangers-on, which included his mother-in-law, the notoriously corrupt Madame Pomme; his aunt, Princess Mom; one of his daughters, Sorya Roeungsy, and her family; his aide-de-camp and chief of protocol; and three ladies-in-waiting for Princess Monique. Essential supplies, like foie gras and truffles, had been sent ahead of him from Beijing, and fine wines were obtained from the Central Committee commissariat, which had been set up behind Wat Langka as a repository for foodstuffs, porcelain, jewellery and other valuables recovered from the houses of the wealthy after the evacuation. Chhorn Hay, the former Cercle Marxiste member who had been doing penance at Stung Trang with Ping Sây and Hou Yuon, was summoned back to serve as Sihanouk’s Khmer Rouge major-domo; and a Chinese doctor and nurse, sent from Beijing, were permanently on hand should he or any of his entourage fall ill. The Prince was entranced that several of his Khmer Rouge minders used the special court vocabulary to address him. He was less pleased to discover that the soldiers had appropriated gold ceremonial chains from the Throne Room to use as leashes for their dogs. But he still felt able to say that they were ‘very polite and obliging’. He was allowed to carry out funeral ceremonies in the Silver Pagoda for his mother, Queen Kossamak, who had died in China in April. Khieu Samphân took him to visit a textile factory and on a boat trip along the Tonle Sap, and afterwards, with other leaders (though never Pol or Nuon Chea), joined him for banquets at the palace, where they assured him that he and Princess Monique would be able to travel back and forth to Beijing and Pyongyang as often as they wished and that their two sons could continue their education abroad. The Khmers Rouges, Sihanouk conceded, were ‘behaving like gentlemen’. Life might be tolerable after all.

This ‘strange idyll’, as he later called it, was of short duration.

In October the Prince addressed the United Nations General Assembly. Third-world delegates gave him a standing ovation for his anti-American rhetoric and defence of the Khmer Rouge regime. The following month he started a six-week-long tour of Africa, the Middle East and Europe,

from which he returned via Paris in December. While there, he had a meeting with Cambodian students. By this time the atmosphere was already beginning to sour. Shortly after his UN speech, a former aide had given Western newspapers a lurid description of life in revolutionary Phnom Penh, said to be based on the confidences of members of his suite. Khieu Samphân had responded by sending Sihanouk what the Prince later called a letter ‘of rare insolence’, warning that ‘by choosing a wrong road, you have nothing to gain and everything to lose’. Yet in his address to the students, he took care

to say nothing

which might show reservations about Khmer Rouge rule. This duplicity would have terrible consequences for the young men and women who drank in his words.

The Prince was more truthful with the members of his entourage, whom he warned to choose carefully between remaining in exile and accompanying him back to Phnom Penh. In the end, more than half preferred to stay abroad. In another ominous development, the communist leaders began omitting the adjective ‘Royal’ from the GRUNC, referring merely to the ‘Government of National Unity of Cambodia’. They neglected to inform Sihanouk that a new constitution had been drafted, changing the country’s name, abolishing the monarchy, omitting most basic rights and freedoms and setting out procedures for a simulacrum of parliamentary elections, or that all the country’s ambassadors were being recalled, ostensibly for ten days’ ‘training’ but actually to be replaced.

By the end of the year, every political indicator pointed the same way: Cambodia’s institutions were being turned upside down to bring them into line with the realities of Khmer Rouge rule, and Sihanouk, the prime symbol of the society that the revolution had overthrown, would have no influence at all in the new system that was emerging. Yet on

December 31

, after a farewell meeting with Deng Xiaoping, he boarded a Chinese Boeing 707 and flew back to Phnom Penh, accompanied, this time, by a much-reduced suite. The atmosphere at the airport confirmed all his misgivings: no monks, no red carpet, no girls strewing petals at his feet, but instead a sombre crowd, chanting slogans glorifying Angkar and the revolutionary army. ‘It was Kafkaesque’, Sihanouk reflected afterwards. ‘The smile frozen on my face must have looked ridiculous.’

Why, then, did he go back?

At one level, he owed it to the Chinese and to Kim Il Sung, who had supported him in the dark days and were entitled to be repaid in kind. Had he chosen exile, he could have lived in France — but at the risk of the same ignoble comparisons with Bao Dai that had haunted him at the time of the coup, five years before. That was not how Sihanouk wished history to remember him. He claimed later that he felt a visceral need to be among

his people in their hour of trial. But he also understood intuitively that he had to remain in Cambodia if he were to have any hope of ever regaining power. It was a gamble, and a courageous one, and in the end it would pay off. But not until he had endured a multitude of tribulations.

For the moment, the Prince went through the motions expected of him by his new masters. On January 5 1976 he chaired a cabinet meeting which promulgated the new constitution of the country that would henceforth be known as Democratic Kampuchea, a name which carefully avoided the words ‘Khmer’ and ‘Republic’, associated with Lon Nol. Kampuchea, the indigenous pronunciation, was preferred to the Westernised Cambodia, and the adjective ‘democratic’ harked back to the ‘new democracy’ in vogue during Pol’s political apprenticeship in the early 1950s. Democracy was a word Pol liked. He spoke of a ‘democratic’, not a ‘socialist’ revolution, arguing that ‘it wasn’t socialism that mattered, but rather the social results’.

The Khmer Rouge constitution was a radical manifesto, not a legal document, and as such very different from the constitutions of other Asian communist states. After proclaiming baldly that ‘every Cambodian has full rights to the material, spiritual and cultural aspects of life’ (except ‘reactionary religions’, which were banned), it asserted state ownership of the means of production, the equality of men and women, the mastery of the workers and peasants over their factories and fields, and the right and obligation of every Cambodian to work. ‘Worklessness,’ it warned, ‘is absolutely non-existent in Democratic Kampuchea.’ State power was to be embodied in a three-man Presidium which, it was expected, Sihanouk would head.

His other main function was to host receptions for Phnom Penh’s minuscule diplomatic corps, made up of the Chinese Ambassador, Sun Hao, as doyen, followed, in order of arrival, by the envoys of North Vietnam, North Korea, South Vietnam, Albania, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Laos and, later, Egypt, Romania and Burma.

This was a delicate task, for Phnom Penh soon acquired a deserved reputation in foreign chancelleries as the world’s one real hardship post. Apart from the Chinese, who were allowed to retain their old Embassy in the southern part of Phnom Penh, the other countries were assigned living and working quarters on Boulevard Monivong, not far from the railway station. The side roads were barricaded off, and the diplomats were not permitted to walk more than 300 yards up and down the street without an escort and official permission. Initially, food was delivered three times a week from a state farm where, unbeknown to them, their former colleagues, Cambodian diplomats who had returned from abroad, laboured to reforge themselves. Conditions eased a little in the spring of 1976, when

a diplomatic store, the first and only shop in Democratic Kampuchea, was opened near by, stocking wines, spirits and some consumer goods as well as basic foodstuffs. But embassies were not allowed to employ Cambodian staff, which meant the diplomats had to cook, wash and clean for themselves. They were not allowed cars. They were not allowed to visit the Foreign Ministry — their rare meetings with Cambodian leaders took place at guest-houses in the city — and the one-way telephone system which operated meant that the Ministry could call them but they were not allowed to call out.

In part these measures reflected the suspicion in which the Cambodian government held even friendly foreign states. Pol told the cabinet that spring:

Diplomatic missions

are there to check on us . . . to analyse our [situation] so that they can act in their own interests . . . [Although] these governments are our friends, some of their diplomats may be bad people serving as CIA agents . . . [Therefore] we must be very careful in our contacts with foreigners. We should be cordial, sincere and polite, but secret — because secrecy is the basis of being careful . . . We should let them talk more than we do. We just listen . . . If we talk a lot we can make mistakes . . . Our principle is that we don’t want them to know about us, because . . . [then] they cannot attack us . . . If they know about us in advance . . . during negotiations they will put pressure on us in order to dominate us.

These were essentially the same principles that applied within Cambodia itself. What seemed in diplomatic circles an unconscionable restriction of liberty was less severe than the regimentation within the Cambodian administration. For an official from one Ministry to visit another required special authorisation. To travel from one part of the capital to another required a special pass. Members of the Standing Committee, including Pol himself, were stopped at military checkpoints. After late 1975, when large-scale population transfers finally came to an end, similar restrictions on movement were imposed in the rural areas.

Sihanouk was brought face to face with the awfulness of life in Democratic Kampuchea for the first time during two provincial tours he made that winter in the company of Khieu Samphân, one to the Eastern and Northern Zones, the other to the North-West. ‘[It]

bowled me over,’

he wrote later. ‘My people . . . had been transformed into cattle . . . My eyes were opened to a madness which neither I nor anyone else had imagined.’ His account of those journeys is self-centred and self-pitying. He often seemed more outraged by Khmer Rouge table manners, or the decrepitude of buildings where he had once entertained state guests ‘like Prince Raimondo Orsini of Italy or the great German actor Curt Jurgens’ than by

the wretchedness of his compatriots, labouring in the fields. Yet there is no doubt that he was deeply shocked. The question was posed: Could he continue to lend his name to a regime which inflicted such egregious suffering?

In his

memoirs

, Sihanouk wrote that he had made up his mind to resign even before he got back to Phnom Penh. In fact, he hesitated. To step down, barely two months after returning home, was to invite a head-on confrontation with the Khmer Rouge leadership, with unpredictable consequences. Nor could he be sure how China would react. His old ally, Zhou Enlai, had died in January and the ultra-leftists, headed by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, were in the ascendant. Penn Nouth advised him to stay his hand. So did his wife, Monique.

But then

, in the first week of March, Sihanouk learnt that, in violation of all the rules of protocol, Ieng Sary had despatched new Democratic Kampuchean ambassadors to Beijing, Hanoi, Pyongyang and Vientiane without asking him, as Head of State, to sign their letters of credence. It seems to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Pol acknowledged later: ‘Although an incident of no importance, it made him feel that we no longer needed him. It raised the question of [his] status.’

On March 10, Sihanouk gave the palace factotum, Chhorn Hay, his letter of resignation, in which he pleaded health problems. He wished to step down, he said, before March 20, when parliamentary elections were to be held, and to go to China for medical treatment.

Next day Pol called a meeting of the Standing Committee to discuss the Prince’s request. In one sense the timing was fortunate. The imminent appointment of a new State Presidium offered a perfect occasion to replace him if he insisted on going. But Pol still hoped that might be avoided. ‘Our position,’ he told the meeting, ‘is always to recognise his noble contribution, his deeds and efforts for the country, particularly in the international arena. The nation owes him its gratitude.’ Khieu Samphân and Son Sen were instructed to try to change the Prince’s mind. Two days later, Samphân reported that they had failed: Sihanouk was adamant, his decision irrevocable. The Committee then decided that the Prince should be denied further contact with foreigners and refused permission to travel abroad — not because he himself would behave badly, but because his wife, ‘who has no patriotic spirit’, and her mother were

untrustworthy

. For the same reason, the couple’s sons, the Princes Narindrapong and Sihamoni, were to be brought back from Moscow and Pyongyang in order to ‘solve this problem once and for all’.

None the less, Pol did not give up hope entirely that Sihanouk would reconsider. The Prince might look fierce, he said, but he was now ‘an old, meek tiger, all skin and bones with no claws or fangs’, incapable of doing harm. If he withdrew, it would be the revolution’s loss. Moreover, he

warned, China and North Korea, both of which viewed Sihanouk as ‘a long-standing and very dear friend’, might think the Khmers Rouges had ‘chased him away’ and react negatively.