Pol Pot (5 page)

Loth’s family, like many Cambodians, including the Royal House, was of Sino-Khmer extraction. Sâr derived his name from his light ‘Chinese’ complexion — the word

â

means ‘white’ or ‘pale’ — a characteristic shared by his brother Nhep. But race in Cambodia is determined by behaviour rather than blood line. Loth — or Phem Saloth as he later called himself, to satisfy the colonial authorities’ insistence that everyone must have a family as well as a given name — did not practise the Chinese rites. He and his wife did not sweep their ancestors’ graves at the Qingming festival, or celebrate the Chinese New Year. Nor did they speak Chinese. They lived as Khmers and therefore, racially, they

Khmer, in their own minds as well as those of their neighbours. Their culture was Indianised, like that of the Burmese and the Indonesians, and all the other serendipitous nations which inhabit the water margin of Asia, from Sri Lanka to the Timor Sea.

It was, in Nhep’s words, a normal, happy family. Loth was a reserved man, who kept his own counsel. ‘He never joked with us, or with anyone else. If he was angry, he didn’t show his feelings or become violent. He always remained calm. Our mother was the same, and I think that’s why they got on so well.’ The younger children closely resembled him, and Sâr inherited some of his character. He was a disciplinarian, like most Cambodian fathers, but by the standards of the time the chastisement he meted out was mild. For those were the days when a village schoolmaster would make a recalcitrant pupil lie down on a red ants’ nest to help him mend his ways.

Keng Vannsak endured

that once, and never misbehaved again:

I didn’t like arithmetic, and I hadn’t learnt my multiplication tables. So every time we were going to have a lesson, I said that I had a stomach ache and wanted to go home. The third time I did that, the teacher said: ‘All right, you may go. But first recite the seven times table.’ Of course, I didn’t know it. Ai-ya! How he beat me! Kicks and punches . . . he was brutal! Then he took me outside, and put me under a grapefruit tree — full of red ants! After that, I knew my times tables. I knew them so well that I did all the other children’s questions, and in return they gave me things from their lunch-boxes, because their parents were richer than mine and they had nicer things to eat.

Yet punishments like this were so much the norm for Cambodian youngsters that Vannsak remembered that same teacher as ‘an adorable, saintly man’who first instilled in him a love of learning. Certainly he was no worse than his own father, who used to tie his arms together, throw him on to a bed and beat him with a cane until he fainted.

Sâr and his brothers were more fortunate. Or, as the people in the village would have put it, it was not their fate to suffer that way: a genie protected them.

Cambodians, at that time even more than today, lived parallel sets of lives: one in the natural world, among the laws of reason; the other, mired in superstition, peopled by monsters and ghosts, a prey to witches and the fear of sorcery. In this sense Cambodia was, and to some extent is still, a medieval country, where even the King takes no important decision without first consulting the court astrologer. The resemblance to Africa is again overwhelming. Every village has its witch, or

and its

or healer; each rural community its

the ancestor figure or tutelary genie who inhabits a stone or an ancient tree and must be propitiated by offerings of incense and perfumed water. In the countryside, more murders are attributed to sorcery than to any other single cause. Cambodian officials, university-educated men, still sometimes justify the beating to death of a suspected witch by a mob by saying: ‘The powers of those persons are too terrible. What else can the peasants do?’

Sâr’s earliest memories

were coloured by the lore of this nether world. One story that he would retell as an old man was about a

or wizard, whose mouth, as a punishment for his blasphemy, had been shrunk until it was no bigger than a straw. To feed himself, so the story went, he rolled dough into fine strips, which was how the Cambodian people came to eat noodles. He recalled tales about glutton spirits, which, like the ancient Chinese

had only a head and intestines, and fed on foul things that lived in the mud; and there were gruesome stories of corpse wax, extracted from the newly dead to make potions, and of foetuses ripped by husbands from their wives’ bellies and mummified as

’smoke-children’, familiar spirits with magical powers of protection.

Not all Cambodian folk-tales were so grim. The common lore of childhood in Sâr’s day revolved around the exploits of Judge Hare and the human and animal companions he constantly outwitted. Yet here, too, was an undertow of menace and of the injustice and unpredictability of life.

Unlike children’s stories in most lands, in which virtue is rewarded and evildoing punished, the imagined world from which Sâr and his contemporaries derived their first insights into the ways of Cambodian society had no such clear-cut rules. In Khmer legend, thieves go unpunished and live

happily to the end of their days. Men are executed for deeds of which they are wholly blameless. Villainy is praised so long as it succeeds. Trickery is admired; honest conduct decried; and goodness regarded as stupidity. There is little place for compassion. Judges are portrayed as fools; true justice can come only from the King, whose rulings brook no appeal.

Through these stories, Sâr and his brothers were introduced to the moral tenets of Theravada Buddhism, which teaches that retribution or merit, in the endless cycle of self-perfection, will be apportioned not in this life but in a future existence, just as man’s present fate is the fruit of actions in previous lives.

Prek Sbauv was too small to have a Buddhist temple of its own. But on Buddhist holy days, four times a month, Loth and his wife travelled by oxcart to the great

or monastery, of Kompong Thom, where their two eldest sons, Suong and Seng, had learnt to read and write. Loth himself had been taught his letters there, and though the boys’ mother, Nem, was illiterate, there was enough Chinese ancestry in Loth’s make-up for him to understand that education was important. In the early 1930s, rice prices rose. The family prospered and he decided that the time had come to send the younger children to school in Phnom Penh, where Suong, now well-established in his job at the palace, had recently married a young woman from the Royal Ballet corps.

Chhay went first, followed, in 1934, by Sâr. They travelled, not by oxcart, but in one of the new-fangled steam buses the French had just introduced, powered by an engine burning charcoal. Cambodians were being dragged willy-nilly into the modern age. But they went reluctantly, full of backward glances.

Although the reason for sending Sâr to Phnom Penh was to allow him to attend one of the new Western-style primary schools, he did not do so at once. Instead his parents decided he should first spend a year at the Wat Botum Vaddei, a large Buddhist monastery a couple of hundred yards south of the palace.

It was a compromise which reflected, perhaps unconsciously, the anxieties of the time. Tensions were developing between the emancipated, Westernised values transmitted by the French and the immovable, inward-looking conservatism of Cambodian tradition. The anguish this generated was captured in a play by Sâr’s future mentor, Keng Vannsak, which took the plight of a gauche young man from a traditional household, torn between the demands of his elderly grandfather and his fashion plate of a lady-love, a thoroughly modern miss infatuated with foreign ways, as a metaphor for that of the Cambodian people, groping their way through a

transition they did not understand towards a goal they could not see. A group of intellectuals, led by a young lawyer named Son Ngoc Thanh, began planning the first Khmer-language newspaper, the title of which,

the Pali spelling of Nokor Wat (‘Land of the Temple’), evoked the glories of Angkor. Cambodian nationalism was stirring, and the issue of Cambodian identity became its prime concern.

Wat Botum Vaddei, which belongs to the Thommayut order, a small, elitist Buddhist school favoured by the royal court, is a walled village. A warren of narrow lanes and dwellings, sleeping quarters and refectories encircles the temple proper, which stands, hidden in a grove of banyan and palm trees, beside two immense grey-blue stupas. Novices, in indian red robes, squat between the houses, doing washing, preparing rice for the monks’ lunch, shouting, fighting, ribbing lay friends who have come to visit. One day, the roles will be reversed: the young acolytes will rejoin the workaday world outside, and their friends will become novices in their place. The

is a revolving door, a place of constant interchange between the hustle and bustle of the city and Cambodians’ inner yearning for spiritual release through ritual and meditation.

Each year

about a hundred children, between seven and twelve years old, were sent there to be initiated into the mysteries of the Triple Jewel and the Eightfold Path and, scarcely less important, to learn to read and write in Khmer.

The majority, like Sâr, were from the countryside, but there were also boys from aristocratic households, brought by their parents for a few months to fulfil a religious obligation. Many were desperately homesick. Nhep remembered feeling wretched after being packed off to Phnom Penh. But if Sâr missed his mother and father he never spoke of it. On the contrary, in later years he reminisced fondly about the time he had spent at the

even on various occasions falsifying his biography to make it seem that he had stayed there longer than was actually the case.

It was a crucially important formative period. Monastic discipline was strict. As a novice, Sâr was part of a rigidly ordered community in which, as in all traditional Cambodian institutions, including the court and the Royal Ballet, originality and initiative were discouraged, the least deviation was punished and the greatest merit lay in unquestioning obedience to prevailing orthodoxy. Nhun Nhget, later abbot of Botum Vaddei, was among Sâr’s contemporaries:

In those days

, if you came to the

as a novice, you had to study for three months before you were allowed to wear the robe. You were taught the etiquette of a monk: how to put on the robe; how to speak; how to walk; how

to put your palms together to show respect . . . And you were given a thrashing if you didn’t do as they said. If you didn’t walk correctly, you were beaten. You had to walk quietly and slowly, without making any sound with your feet, and you weren’t allowed to swing your arms. You had to move serenely. You had to learn by heart in pali the rules of conduct and the [Buddhist] precepts so that you could recite them without hesitation; if you hesitated, you were beaten.

The boys had dormitories of their own, separate from those of the older monks. They rose at 4 a.m., lit sticks of incense and made obeisance to the Buddha, the Law and the Clergy. Then for two hours they recited sutras, led by a senior monk, before doing their assigned chores — sweeping the temple courtyard, and cooking the rice for breakfast. After two more hours spent memorising the scriptures, they accompanied the monks to beg alms, repeating silently to themselves an impetration in pali to subdue the self. On their return, they prepared the second, and last, meal of the day, consisting of rice and vegetables, which had to be finished by noon — for under monastic rules no food could be consumed between midday and the following sunrise. In the afternoon, they attended classes where, in addition to basic literacy, they were taught from the

traditional collections of moral maxims which first appeared in the sixteenth century — the

the

the

and others of the same kind — chanting them aloud until they had them by rote.

The content of these edifying texts was not intrinsically very different from that in China or most other Asian countries, being rooted in respect for parents, for elders and for hierarchy — and, in the case of women, for men. But it was notably more rigid, more intransigent. Where the Confucian primers treat children as individuals, with personalities of their own and talents to be encouraged and drawn out, the

view them as objects — as ‘aggregates of cause and effect’, in Buddhist terms — whose behaviour must be moulded to ensure the faithful transmission of immutable values. The

for boys were stern enough — ‘Do not destroy the tradition that your parents pass on to you! Do not oppose their advice!’ Those for girls — inevitably, in the feudal scheme of things — were still more stiff-necked and dehumanised:

Never turn your back

to your husband when he sleeps and never touch his head without first bowing in his honour . . . Respect and fear [his] wishes and take his advice to heart . . . If [he] gives an order, don’t hesitate a moment in responding . . . Avoid posing as an equal to your husband — and never above he who is your master. If he insults you, go to your quarters and reflect, never insult or talk back to him . . .

The

at least in the form in which Sâr would have learnt them, had another particularity. They portrayed the Khmers as honest and sincere but ‘foolish and ignorant’, constantly being duped by their smarter Chinese and Vietnamese neighbours: