Pol Pot (69 page)

At the highest level, everything was available. Thiounn Mumm recalled how at Vorn Vet’s headquarters ‘there was always a basket of fresh fruit on the table. I never ate better in my life.’ When an aide’s wife was pregnant, Son Sen’s wife Yun Yat sent round a gift of pears. Sihanouk remembered the Central Committee commissariat providing ‘Japanese biscuits, Australian butter, French-style baguettes, ducks’ eggs . . . and succulent Khmer crabs’, together with locally-grown tropical fruits, Oranges from Pursat, durians from Kampot, rambutans and pineapples’. When

Ieng Sary

returned from a trip to the UN, he brought with him a hamper of foie gras and Swiss cheeses. All the leaders grew fat. Contemporary photographs show Pol and Nuon Chea looking bloated. Khieu Samphàn put on weight and acquired an unhealthy, reddish complexion.

In the countryside, meanwhile, the ideological thumbscrews were being tightened still further.

Foraging, which had helped many villagers avoid starvation in the first year of Khmer Rouge rule, was now denounced as a manifestation of individualism and banned on the grounds that it would result in some having more than others. For the same reason, local officials refused to allow villagers to fish, or to kill the monkeys and wild boar that raided their plantations.

Picking a coconut without authorisation was an anti-revolutionary act. Ieng Sary had a Foreign Ministry official dismissed for doing so. Fruit that fell to the ground should be allowed to rot, rather than be gathered for individual use. ‘That belongs to Angkar,’ the soldiers would say as they forbade anyone to touch it.

From the summer of 1976 onward, children above the age of seven were separated from their parents to live communally with Khmer Rouge instructors who taught them revolutionary songs and assigned them light tasks in the fields — much as earlier generations of Cambodian children had gone to live as Buddhist novices at a

Parents were not allowed to discipline their children. That right, too, belonged to Angkar on behalf of the collectivity, not to the individual.

Yet among the revolutionary elite, ‘familyism’ and ‘siblingism’, as Pol called them, grew apace. Ieng Sary was one of the worst offenders, systematically placing his children and nephews in high posts for which they were unsuited. Son Sen, on the other hand, behaved with a rigour matching the severity of his image. As highly placed a man as Nuon Chea, the number two in the regime, authorised his mother, a devout old lady who lived near Battambang, to keep a Buddhist monk, almost certainly the only practising bonze in the country, to recite the sutras for her. Even more striking was an experience that befell Sihanouk one day when Khieu Samphân was accompanying him on a provincial tour.

Suddenly our driver

pulled over to the side of the road and stopped to let past another vehicle . . . We were in the company of the Khmer Rouge Head of State, which should have meant we had an absolute right of way Who, then, was this other person, in a car flying not just a pennant but a large red flag of Democratic Kampuchea, to whom even a president had to give way? . . . To my astonishment, I saw a woman in her 60s, with greying hair, and a small boy, perhaps a grandchild, beside her . . .

The Prince never did work out the passenger’s identity. She was Pol’s (and Ieng Sary’s)

mother-in-law

.

At less exalted levels, cadres’ positions in the hierarchy were reflected in the quality of the

they wore, silk or checkered cotton; or the number of pens in their breast pocket. Commune secretaries had bicycles; district secretaries, motor-bikes; regional secretaries and above, cars.

Other human longings also tarnished the immaculate, selfless existence to which Khmer Rouge ideology aspired. At a time when husbands and wives were supposed to show no public sign of affection and even to stand several yards apart, local cadres seduced attractive young women and then executed them for moral turpitude. One girl turned the tables on her accuser, claiming that she had also had intercourse with two other village tyrants. She was killed, but so were they. Her fellow deportees regarded her as a heroine. As in China and North Korea, the revolutionary art troupes which put on propaganda performances were a source of nubile young women.

They enjoyed special rations, and in a country deprived of any other form of entertainment, were the equivalent of film stars. Tiv Ol, the handsome young Deputy Information Minister, fell from grace after his superior, Hu Nim, learnt that he had been ‘caressing the breasts and vulvas’ of the Ministry’s performing artists. Nuon Chea, who was consulted, recommended taking no action. But Nim insisted, saying the incidents were too widely known simply to be brushed aside. Thiounn Thioeunn remembered a woman hospital director being executed for procuring nurses to work at a clandestine brothel for Khmer Rouge cadres.

Such abuses occur in all countries with dictatorial systems where privilege depends on power and no checks and balances exist to ensure a minimum of social justice. It is a characteristic not of communism but of tyranny, whatever its political colour.

But in Democratic Kampuchea the contrast was so flagrant that it became a caricature. Not only did a tiny, cosseted elite preside over the destinies of a nation of slaves. But the regime which that elite imposed made ideological purity, abstinence and renunciation, material detachment and the repression of the ego, the foundations of national policy, outweighing all other considerations.

The ban on foraging was not an oversimplification by uneducated local officials. It was approved by the national leadership in Phnom Penh. When the choice was between allowing starving people to feed themselves, and observing absolute egalitarianism (in the process letting food go to waste), the regime chose egalitarianism. It may be argued that this was an aberration, that the leadership never envisaged the ban being enforced in districts where there was hunger. And it is true that Pol spoke often of the need to raise living standards. In August 1976, he exhorted regional leaders to recruit good cooks, ‘so that no one can criticise the notion of collectivism, saying that the food . . . made collectively tastes bad . . . If they make tasty food, people’s stomachs will be full.’ Revealingly, however, his concern was not that, if collectivism failed, people would be discontented, but that individualism would re-emerge. He certainly knew that, in some areas, there was acute privation —

detailed reports

from the Zone leaders arrived on his desk each week — but either he did not wish to think about it or he regarded it as unimportant.

This was not an exception: it was the rule. Whenever ideological principle and practical benefit came into conflict, principle won out, regardless of the material cost.

The emptying of the towns had resulted in the abandonment of a capital stock of housing, commercial buildings and factories that represented a substantial part of the national wealth of one of the world’s poorest

countries. Pol had initially given instructions that ‘the beauty of the towns must not be spoiled’, but by late 1976, any thought that they would ever be repopulated had been definitively abandoned. Visitors to a saltworks at Kampot found ‘5,000 young girls and women . . . living in makeshift barracks, [while] in the town only half a mile away hundreds of well-preserved houses stood empty’. The past had been repudiated and was never to rise again. The leadership spoke of rebuilding every rural village in the country within ten years, so that the peasants’ individualistic, wooden homes, each slightly different from the other, would be replaced by a uniform, small, model, family dwelling, identical from one end of Cambodia to the other. Similarly the traditional rice-paddies, small plots which followed the topography of the terrain, were to be levelled and amalgamated into square one-hectare fields, grouped in units of a hundred, in perhaps unconscious imitation of the checkerboard pattern utilised at the time of the Angkorian kingdom, five hundred years before. Like many Khmer Rouge innovations, the giant fields had mixed results: they were easier to irrigate and plough, but harder to make level, which is essential for rice cultivation.

This ‘irrational radicalism’, as a Yugoslav visitor called it, permeated the entire economy. Cars, including Mercedes and other luxury vehicles, were cut in two by village blacksmiths: ‘the metal . . . was melted down to make ploughshares; the motor was adapted to drive a water-pump; the wheels were attached to ox-carts’. Often there was no petrol for the pump and no oxen for the cart, but no matter. Pin Yathay, formerly Sihanouk’s Director of Public Works, watched a convoy of wagons being pushed by teams of men, taking goods from the coast to the interior. As the radicalisation drive gathered speed, autarky was the watchword. Mechanisation was increasingly disdained. In Pol’s mind, it was a sign of weakness, of lack of confidence in the peasants’ strength.

Intellectual resources were squandered too. Doctors, schoolteachers, lawyers, mechanics, airline pilots, electricians, merchant seamen, even factory workers — all, with few exceptions, ended up working in the co-operatives as labourers, if they survived at all.

Two hospitals in Phnom Penh, headed by Thiounn Thioeunn and his long-time partner In Sokhan, treated senior leaders and foreign diplomats. Central Committee members often went for medical treatment to China. Khmer Rouge cadres in the provinces had access to Western medicines, as did some other privileged groups. The rest of the population relied on rural clinics, where untrained nurses administered intravenous drips of coconut juice, vitamin injections, and pills containing a herbal remedy against malaria. The school system was in a similar state. Ping Sây and two colleagues were put to writing revolutionary textbooks for the day when secondary

education would begin. But that day never came. In the cooperatives, former students taught children the rudiments of literacy and arithmetic for a few hours a week, but even that depended on the attitude of the village chief.

Technicians from the ‘old society’ were not trusted and therefore not employed. Ieng Sary told the Chinese Ambassador, Sun Hao, in the spring of 1976: ‘

Our principle

is to use qualified people to run the factories. But it is a very difficult problem, because, as well as being technically qualified, they must also have a revolutionary background. Our enemies know this, and try to infiltrate their agents.’ Shortly afterwards the Standing Committee approved the sending of half a dozen intellectuals to work in industrial enterprises. More followed during the summer. But by September the leadership had had second thoughts and they were all withdrawn. A Central Committee directive warned:

We must heighten

our revolutionary vigilance [towards] . . . professors, doctors, engineers and other technical personnel. The policy of our Party is not to employ them . . . [Otherwise] they will infiltrate our ranks each year more deeply . . . For the workers of the old regime, we [also] do not employ them any longer [unless] we know their background quite well.

Pol’s answer was to recruit and train young people, whose minds were judged to be ideologically pure. Children barely into their teens were brought in from the countryside to become factory workers, radio operators, photographers and seamen. It was not a complete answer. In practice, some of the old technicians had to be kept on because the factories would not run otherwise. But the regime’s aim in the long term was to eliminate them altogether.

In the new Khmer Utopia, everything, material or spiritual, that was contaminated by the past, had to be jettisoned so that a new and more beautiful world could emerge. The key which would unlock this radiant future was not technology, but political consciousness:

Is the possession

of technical skills a result of education and culture, or does it come from the stance of socialist revolution? It comes from the socialist revolution.

By cultivating good political consciousness, we can all learn swiftly . . . Formerly to be a pilot required a high school education . . . [Now it takes three months]. It’s clear that political consciousness is the decisive factor . . . As for radar, we can learn to handle it after studying for a couple of months . . . We can also learn about navigating ships . . . We can learn anything at all, and we can learn it fast.

These were the beliefs Pol had developed in the ‘liberated areas’ ten years earlier. If people could only develop the right mentality, the rest would

follow Like all metaphysical theories, it was an article of faith. Ideology was primary. Everything else took second place.

In line with Pol’s injunction to ‘build and defend’ the new Cambodia, the nation’s efforts were now devoted entirely to two linked goals: strengthening its military capability, which was being achieved through massive aid from China (a singular exception to the rule of self-reliance, justified on the grounds of necessity); and the building of a vast network of irrigation channels to expand the area under rice cultivation. ‘With water we have rice,’ went a Khmer Rouge jingle, ‘with rice we have everything!’ (or, in a later, more ominous version, ‘with rice we can make war!’).

Irrigation had been the basis of the prosperity of Angkor, and both Sihanouk and Pol Pot wished to emulate that achievement. It is certain, moreover, that if Cambodia is ever to prosper, a nationwide irrigation system is indispensable. Sihanouk spoke endlessly about the need ‘to master water resources’, but most of his schemes remained on paper and those which were implemented often failed because of poor planning. The Khmers Rouges achieved more, at vastly higher human cost, but the absence of technical expertise meant that the results were uneven. A huge dam in the Eastern Zone, 800 yards long and 40 yards wide, on which 20,000 people had laboured for five months, was successful in preventing flooding during the exceptionally heavy rains of 1978. But later, after the regime fell, it collapsed, like many others, for lack of maintenance. ‘Major dams were constructed on the same principles as small ones across streams,’ one worker recalled. ‘They were built without the use of theodolites or other instruments and by men with little or no technical training . . . Practical knowledge gained on the job, through trial and error, was prized above anything to be found in books.’ Often a dam would be built, would then collapse, and finally, at a second or third attempt, would hold. A vast reservoir in the north-west, built by joining up three mountains, failed completely because each year the enormous volume of Water coming down the hillsides swept away the retaining walls. The idea itself was sound: the mountain basin could have been the centre of an irrigation network covering hundreds of square miles. But the machinery and know-how for such an immense project were lacking.