Pol Pot (71 page)

sacred feeling’

. In the face of such warmth, whatever anxiety Hanoi may have felt about the border issue was laid to rest. Vietnam ‘deemed it necessary to have patience’ with Democratic Kampuchea, a Vietnamese minister explained. Le Duan himself declared that friendship with Cambodia and Laos was ‘the primary and basic content of Vietnam’s foreign policy’.

It was all a smokescreen. The ardour of Pol’s professions of goodwill was matched by his misgivings about Vietnam’s intentions.

In mid-April, China’s Vice-Premier

Zhang Chunqiao

, one of the ultraradical ‘Gang of Four’ headed by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, had paid a secret visit to Phnom Penh. He came to see for himself the policies Pol was applying and to reassure Beijing’s closest ally that the political turmoil in China, which had culminated the previous week in the sacking of Deng Xiaoping, would not affect relations. Their discussions were reflected in a speech Pol made at the beginning of June, subsequently publicised throughout the Party, where, for the first time, he addressed the issue of internal enemies.

In it, he used

a political vocabulary strikingly similar to that then being employed by the Chinese leftists against Deng:

There is a continuous, non-stop struggle between revolution and counterrevolution. We must keep to the standpoint that there will be enemies 10 years, 20 years, 30 years into the future . . . Are [these enemies] strong or not? That does not depend on them. It depends on us. If we constantly take absolute measures, they will be scattered and smashed to bits.

At the present time, he declared, the internal enemies ‘have no big forces’. So long as the Party remained strong, they could do nothing. But if Cambodia were to weaken, it would risk attack not only from within, but also from without. ‘Outside enemies are just waiting to crush us,’ he said. ‘Enemies of all kinds want to have small countries as their servants.’ The allusion to Vietnam was transparent.

On May 19, the day after the Vietnamese delegation returned home, Chan Chakrey, the Eastern Zone general who had fallen under suspicion, was detained, followed over the next two months by six others.

Unlike Koy Thuon, who was treated with kid gloves through most of his confinement, Chakrey and his companions were taken straight to

S-21

, the regime’s new security prison, which had been set up that winter in a disused secondary school at Tuol Sleng in the southern part of Phnom Penh. S-21 was the responsibility of the Defence Minister, Son Sen, who in turn answered to Nuon Chea. It was initially headed by an army officer, but early in 1976 Francois Bizot’s former jailer, Deuch, took over. Deuch was still the same true believer he had been when Bizot knew him, five years earlier, and carried out his task with a mixture of fanatical devotion and schoolmasterly precision. Chakrey was his first high-level prisoner. He was interrogated under torture for four months and, in nearly a thousand pages of confessions, described a fanciful plot to assassinate Sihanouk and the CPK leadership. He also confirmed the accusations against the Region 24 Secretary, Chhouk, who was arrested on August 28. The latter implicated the Eastern Zone Secretary, So Phim, and three other veteran leaders: Ney Sarann, Keo Meas and Non Suon.

Chhouk’s confession marked a watershed. For the

first time

a serving Central Committee member had charged other members of the leadership with treason.

Like all such documents from S-21, it was of little intrinsic value in itself. Pol was not so foolish as to put faith in statements extracted under torture. So Phim, who over the next year or so would be accused more than a dozen times of seeking to overthrow the regime, was left at liberty.

Pol’s former cook

, Moeun, now married to Pich Chheang, the Khmer Rouge Ambassador to China, was accused of betrayal eight times because she had once been part of Koy Thuon’s network. Pol ruled that the charges should be ignored. ‘If Moeun is a traitor,’ he said, ‘then everyone is.’ In the Foreign Ministry, it became a

rule of thumb

that a cadre fell under suspicion only after being denounced three times. Later, as the purges accelerated and the number of denunciations rose exponentially, the figure was increased to five.

The purpose of S-21 and the confessions it generated was not so much

to provide information as to furnish ‘proof’ of treason which would then justify purges that the leadership had already decided to carry out.

By the time Chhouk was arrested, an insidious linkage had begun forming in Pol’s mind between opposition at home and enmity abroad. Vietnam, he concluded, was bent on undermining his regime ‘the way that weevils bore into wood’. Some time that summer, probably in July, he had discussed his concerns with Nuon Chea and Son Sen, the other two members of the ultra-secret Security Committee responsible for the suppression of internal dissent.

Shortly afterwards

, Sen told divisional commanders to prepare ‘to deal with enemies buried within the country as well as with those without’. Those ‘living in the warmth of the Party’, he warned, were the most dangerous of all. The same month, Pol began emphasising the need for military preparedness against Thailand and Vietnam. They were ‘lying in wait, looking for opportunities to make trouble’, he said. ‘Every day they are making plans to destroy us.’

Security was tightened in Phnom Penh. Army units were ordered to route radio messages through the General Staff HQ instead of communicating with each other directly. Soldiers were forbidden to carry weapons ‘or anything which might be mistaken for a weapon’ at meetings attended by Party leaders. A purge of ‘no-good elements’ was launched within the military.

But unexplained incidents continued.

In September, shots were fired near the palace and

tracts

attacking the regime were found scattered in the streets. A mastermind was at work, Son Sen declared:

These leaflets were made here in Phnom Penh. They were made in official workplaces like division and regimental offices and ministries . . . The conflicts are getting sharper . . . The actions [of our enemies] are becoming so provocative that [we must expect them] to attack us without delay . . . We must get rid of those we suspect!

On September 20, Ney Sarann was detained and taken to S-21. Keo Meas followed. They were accused of conspiring with Chhouk to create a new, Vietnamese-backed ‘Kampuchean Workers’ Party’ whose goal was to bring down the regime and install a revisionist government allied to Hanoi. No such party had ever existed, as Pol very well knew. But from then on membership of the phantom ‘Workers’ Party’, like membership of the CIA or the KGB, became a portmanteau crime to which real and imagined adversaries were forced to confess.

Over time, the supposed conspiracy ramified. It was claimed that soldiers had been sent to assassinate Pol and Nuon Chea at the National Day

meeting in April 1976, but that the plot had failed because the would-be assassins did not recognise their intended victims (or, in an alternative version, because their weapons had been discovered when they tried to enter the meeting place). Pol’s driver allegedly tried to poison him by putting DDT in his drinking water. A second poisoning attempt was foiled when a guard tasted Pol’s food and died. In the end, the regime claimed to have ‘documentary proof — meaning confessions extracted under torture — of no fewer than six bungled attempts on Pol’s life.

Many years later Ieng Sary admitted that none of it had been true. ‘There were no coup attempts,’ he said. ‘It was all greatly exaggerated. In Pol’s mind, there were serious incidents. But in fact they were a pretext — a pretext for a crack-down.’

The crack-down was necessary, Pol believed, because those Party leaders who ‘think that the socialist revolution is too deep and too extensive [and] . . . that class struggle is unnecessary’, were the same men who doubted the necessity of resisting Vietnam — in other words, who advocated compromise with Cambodia’s external enemies. The two attitudes were ‘yoked together’, he declared.

In simple language, moderates were traitors.

The convulsions within the Party were kept a tightly guarded secret. When, for the first time, Son Sen mentioned the arrests of Ney Sarann and Keo Meas at a meeting with senior army officers in October, he warned them: ‘This matter must not get out. Don’t let it become known at the lower levels.’ Pol spoke of an ‘uncompromising, bitter, life-and-death struggle’ against class enemies ‘who furtively steal their way into and hide themselves in our revolutionary ranks’, and warned ominously that it would continue ‘long into the future’. But it was not until December, in an address to Central Committee members and senior provincial leaders, that he spelt out the extent of the problem and his plans to deal with it:

There is a sickness

inside the Party, born in the years [of struggle] . . . Because the heat of the revolution [at that time] was insufficient . . . we searched for the microbes without success . . . [Now], as our socialist revolution advances . . . we can locate the ugly microbes . . . If we scratch the ground to bury them, they will rot us from within. They will rot society, rot the Party and rot the army . . .

The string of traitors that we smashed recently had been organized secretly during [the years of struggle] . . . In the socialist era, [such people] must be cast aside.

1976 was a year of furious, diligent class struggle . . . Many microbes emerged. Many networks came into view . . .

Sometimes there is no active opposition. There is only silence . . . We should ask: are there still treacherous, secret elements, buried inside the Party, or are they gone? According to our observations over the last 10 years, it’s clear they’re not gone at all . . . They have been entering the Party continuously . . . They remain.

The language was pure Stalinism. Pol was harking back to his reading as a student in Paris. Stalin, too, had compared his opponents to ‘an ulcer in a healthy body’, and had described the cure to be applied: ‘to be victorious we must, before all else, purge the Party and its leading headquarters’. The first step, he added, was ‘the meticulous verification of the life histories of all Party members’. Pol also now decreed: ‘Everyone must be verified accordingly, and the Party will be stronger.’

On September 9 1976, Mao Zedong died. Cambodia declared official mourning, and at a memorial meeting just over a week later, Pol Pot revealed for the first time that Angkar was a Marxist-Leninist organisation. It was intended as a first step towards the public announcement of the CPK’s existence, long urged by the Chinese, which was to take place on the anniversary of the Party’s foundation at the end of the month. This year’s anniversary would be celebrated not as the 25th but the 16th, in line with the Standing Committee’s secret decision the previous March to date the Party’s establishment from 1960. But the campaign against ‘traitors’ made Pol think again. Publicising the Party’s existence would entail disclosing its new birth date, which would not please Hanoi. With an anti-Vietnamese purge under way, this was not the moment to be openly provocative. Accordingly, urgent messages were despatched on the eve of the planned celebrations, ordering that they be put on hold. Finally, on October 11, nearly two weeks later than usual, a scaled-down anniversary meeting took place. The Party marked its sixteenth birthday as planned. But its existence, and its new history, remained secret.

*

Amid these events it was announced that, ‘because of ill-health’, Pol had resigned as Prime Minister and Nuon Chea had taken his place. The

resignation

was effective from September 20. Four weeks later, Ieng Sary also dropped from sight.

If this was a diversionary manoeuvre intended to confuse Hanoi, it succeeded brilliantly. A jubilant Le Duan informed the Soviet Ambassador that Pol and his brother-in-law had been removed from power. They were ‘bad people’, he said. ‘Nuon Chea is our man indeed and my personal friend.’ The Soviets evidently believed him, for in Moscow Leonid Brezhnev referred favourably for the first time to ‘the path of independent development [of] Democratic Kampuchea’.

It just went to show how out of touch the Vietnamese had become. Several more months would pass before Hanoi realised that Pol was not only still in power but carrying out a merciless purge of every potential Vietnamese sympathiser he could find.

The day after the Party’s delayed anniversary, October 12, Cambodia, like the rest of the world, began to receive reports of astounding developments in Beijing. A few days earlier, Mao’s successor, Hua Guofeng, had secretly arrested Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao and the other members of the so-called ‘Gang of Four’. Ieng Sary heard the news in Belgrade on his way back from the United Nations. The Yugoslav diplomat who briefed him remembered that the colour drained from his face. ‘It can’t be true,’ he muttered. ‘They are good people.’ Pol was outwardly less concerned. China, in his view, had a strategic interest in Cambodia which was independent of ideology. None the less, he preferred the Left. Two weeks earlier he had personally drafted a congratulatory message to Hua on China’s National Day, which attacked by name the disgraced reformist Deng Xiaoping, as ‘anti-socialist and counter-revolutionary’. Common to both Pol’s and Ieng Sary’s appreciation was the fear that political turmoil in China would weaken Cambodia’s ties with its only powerful ally at the very moment when relations with Vietnam were poised to go sharply downhill. The Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister was sent post-haste to Beijing to seek assurances from the new leadership that relations would remain unchanged.

In

November 1976

, Pol himself followed. The visit, like most of his journeys to China, was secret. Hua was waiting at the state guesthouse to

greet him, and in an effusive speech of welcome, congratulated him on having stripped the enemy’s defences from Phnom Penh in April 1975 ‘like peeling a banana’.