When the War Was Over (35 page)

There was an overall restraint about the luxuries the Khmer Rouge leaders allowed themselves, however. They were a dour, puritanical group of people who were rarely seen drinking alcohol, although they offered it to guests; it is said they never drank in private. Very few smoked cigarettes. They adopted an eerie habit of speaking so softly in conversation that they could barely be heard. They seemed to pride themselves on maintaining an outward appearance
of calm composure—walking, talking, gesturing slowly and deliberately. The aim was to hide their true feelings, especially those of hostility or anger, to keep their interlocutors off-balance, to prevent their enemies from knowing they had become enemies or that they were about to be killed. They smiled but rarely laughed. And they were always as clean and manicured as the situation allowed. The cleanliness seemed a part of the same obsession as the need for quiet and order. Their wardrobes and private rooms were to be kept as fastidiously clean as the sidewalks and streets of the city they inhabited. The “modern” revolution in Cambodia was without the distastefully sweaty, raucous, exuberant crowds that once had filled Phnom Penh.

This “calm” life they were building in Phnom Penh was an expanded version of the cooperative style they pioneered during the war. These are the leaders who forbade unauthorized romance under the penalty of death; who considered makeup and colored, tailored clothing for women a sign of Western decadence. These were leaders who considered manifestations of joy or happiness almost sacrilegious. In Phnom Penh they would provide proper examples of the strict life they wanted to impose on the rich Khmer culture—purity, cleanliness, order, total loyalty and obedience, and denial of emotions that might lead to abandon.

Having conquered Phnom Penh, the center was now ready to exert leadership over the entire country.

Most of the new leaders were all in the city: standing committee members Pol Pot, the party secretary; Nuon Chea, deputy secretary; Ieng Sary; Vorn Vet, secretary of the Phnom Penh Special Zone; Son Sen; and Central Committee members Koy Thuon of the old Northern Zone and Khieu Samphan. Their first priority was to unify the country by creating one national army, one national bureaucracy, and a party headquarters and school in the capital. They had to pull together the independent zones and make a single, streamlined administration that would coordinate all political, agricultural, and industrial activities if they were to make their own Cambodian “great leap” into the modern era.

Of all these institutions, the army was the most important. The revolution had been won by the army; the second revolution had to have the army's backing. But the armed forces of Democratic Kampuchea were in reality six separate armies, belonging to the Northern, Northeastern, Eastern, Southwestern, Northwestern, and Special Zones. Out of necessity and the revolutionary mandate of the cooperative system, the zone leaders—zone party
secretaries appointed earlier by the party leadership—had been in charge of the military, the party, and the civilians who lived in their territory. Each zone leader had been expected to operate semiautonomously. They received orders from the party's standing committee—of which several were members—but they provided the wherewithal to follow these general commands and were given tremendous leeway to achieve general aims in whichever fashion they felt appropriate.

The zones were the legacy of the Vietnamese-dominated period of the First Indochina War. They cut across the old provincial lines, and were carved in the same geographical pattern that the Vietnamese had used to create their military organization to correspond to French colonial boundaries. In the first party history published in 1973 the Cambodian communists complained about the problem of “warlordism” that was growing out of the zone system. The cooperative system they inaugurated at that time boomeranged and reinforced rather than diluted the power of the zone secretaries.

After 1973 the zone secretaries were absolute-martial-law rulers. They kept the organizational system of dividing zones into regions, districts, and subdistricts, but the addition of cooperatives canceled out this form of shared responsibility. Cooperatives brought the abolition of markets and money, and the cooperatives were in charge of every decision affecting the people's lives: how much food would be distributed and to whom, who would serve in the army, which children would be assigned to mobile work brigades, who showed signs of disloyalty to the revolution, who should live in which homes, and who would be executed. Cooperatives also dismantled the education system and banned religion, eliminating alternative voices of authority.

As a result, real power rested at two points—the three-member ruling committees of the cooperatives, and the zone party secretary. The zone secretary was the source of supplies for civilians and the army, the voice of command and judgment. The intermediary officials at the descending levels between zone leader and cooperative leader were of less significance, and there was no role for the central party or army in this isolated wartime system. The combination of theories about peasant revolution and the peculiarities of the Cambodian War had produced this situation of not one party but six, not one army but six, and six party secretaries, six warlords, who were used to running their own territory.

The Khmer Rouge had no rebel capital—no caves of Sam Nuea like the Pathet Lao, no Yenan like Mao. And certainly no city like the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi. Sihanouk, acting as titular leader in faraway Beijing, epitomized the vacuum on the ground. The central committee of the
Cambodian communists was headquartered in the Northern Zone. In the very last year of the war the Khmer Rouge did claim that they had established a jungle capital, but this was largely for international consumption. No outsider ever visited this site, and it could not have been a capital, for the nerve centers were scattered in the various zones.

Pol Pot called these zone leaders and representatives of their armies into Phnom Penh in July, three months after victory, to create formally the first national army of the Cambodian communists. He made his major victory speech to them and elaborated on the philosophy that underlined the war and would propel the country onward to the second revolution. They gathered in a large hall. Always cautious, Pol Pot took no chances and required every man to check his weapon at the entryway. Then many of his soldiers got their first glimpse of the man who had been their mysterious leader and who now was calling upon them to shed their loyalty to the zones and become obedient captains of his new Democratic Kampuchea.

It was in this speech that Pol Pot claimed that no other communist revolution in history had so decisively and independently defeated the United States, that at no other time in its 2,000-year history had Cambodia been truly liberated. He appealed to the assemblage as a radical revolutionary and as a powerful political boss. He already controlled the party center, and he easily took over organizational control of the army. But as a leader he had to assert his command and explain the sacred duties the army would have in the next phase. He said: “We made the war and won the victory rapidly. . . . We must thus build the country rapidly, too.”

Pol Pot gave first and full credit to the army of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, of which he was the chief during and after the war. The zone secretaries and other power brokers sat and listened, agreeing with his vision and relinquishing the troops he requested. The result of this reorganization was a central committee or center army that took two-thirds of the soldiers who were stationed in Phnom Penh. The remaining third was placed under the Center's nominal control but the soldiers remained posted in their home zones.

Then the Center restructured the military and the zones along lines the party had decided were essential for mobilizing a major reconstruction of the country and defending it. The boundaries of the zones were redrawn, which further diluted the power of the zone secretaries. The Southwest Zone was divided into two zones, the Western and the Southwestern. The old Special Zone was dissolved and divided between other zones. The old North Zone was eventually abolished and reorganized as the Central Zone.

Now Pol Pot and the Center were satisfied that the zone leaders were enthusiastic about the revolution and would follow party directives. There was little reason to believe otherwise. At that point Pol Pot seemed a brilliant leader. He had outmanipulated Sihanouk and taken advantage of all the opportunities Sihanouk's overthrow offered without abdicating Cambodian independence to either the Vietnamese or the Chinese. He had been the secretary who had lifted the party from obscurity in 1963 to absolute power in a dozen years. Toward the end of the war when the party was able to coordinate the final offensive and evacuation of the city, all zone armies had cooperated. The zone armies had divided the city into wedges like a pie and evacuated the sections bordering on their zones. There is no record of dissent. Soldiers may have been confused about the purpose of the evacuation, whether it was permanent or temporary, but they followed orders as they threw out the sick from the hospitals, executed dissenters, and murdered soldiers and bureaucrats.

By leaving the zones as powerful units, however, Pol Pot and the party created a dangerous tension that undermined the unity they were seeking. The Center wanted the cooperatives to become more inclusive in their reconstruction programs. Were the cooperatives under the command of the zone or the Center? If conditions varied from one zone to another, should orders be followed or should they be adapted as during the war? Who was responsible for failures—the zones, the cooperatives, or the Center? The zone leaders had a strong following in their own territory; to many local party people the Center was a vague abstraction. Would the zone leaders act as brakes, as gobetweens for the Center and cooperatives, or would they become the problem rather than the solution to the party's quest for the ultimate revolution?

The answer as it unfolded over the next three years lay in part with the separate histories and personalities of the zones and their leaders. The zone secretaries were men of a different ilk than those at the very top of the party hierarchy. None had received the advanced education of Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, and Son Sen or had even traveled outside their country except to Vietnam and Thailand. They represented a cross section of the regions and political movements that had fed the Cambodian communist party. Their talents were varied and their stature was largely tied to the importance of the zones they controlled and the length of their service to the revolution. In the immediate postwar period, the leaders of the Northwestern and the Eastern Zones were the most senior of the zone secretaries. But in the long run the Southwestern Zone, not the Northwestern, would become important, along with the Eastern Zone, as the pivotal zones.

During the war the Southwestern had been the largest zone and the poorest. It stretched from the flat central plains of Kandal and Kompong Speu provinces down to the white shores of the Gulf of Siam, and from the eastern delta border with Vietnam to the western maritime province of Koh Kong. In modern times much of this area was considered endemically poor; peasants of the southwest were the most debt-ridden. They were among the earliest and most loyal recruits to the communist cause. Their war contribution was tremendous. The Southwestern Zone fielded the largest single army and grew more rice than any other zone for the rebel cause.

The Southwestern Zone army was also one of the more zealous and suffered some of the worst defeats of the war—notably during its suicidal attack on Phnom Penh in 1973 at the height of the American air war. By 1975 it had lost some of its strength and stature but it was as ardent about transforming its villages into cooperatives as it had been in fighting, and was second only to the Eastern Zone in establishing such systems. Moreover, during the war the Southwestern Zone had earned a reputation for producing cadres with leadership potential for the Center. Ta Mok, the leader of the Southwestern Zone at war's end, combined the strengths and the weaknesses of his territory.

His
nom de guerre
was Mok but he was generally known by the honorific Ta, “Grandfather,” Mok. He was a native of the southwest, from Takeo province. Born into a rich peasant family, Mok entered a Buddhist monastery, where he received a scholarly education in Pali. He left the clergy to take over his family's timber business. He was a supporter of the Democrat Party and he joined the anti-French resistance, first with the independent Khmer Issaraks, later with the Vietnamese and Cambodian communists. He stayed in Cambodia after the Geneva disaster and continued organizing in the countryside of the southwest throughout the fifties and sixties—a true veteran of every phase of the revolution.

He survived setbacks and betrayals because of his military prowess, according to contemporaries. One Khmer Rouge figure considered him something of a little Napoleon: arrogant, boastful, hot-tempered, and clever at building his own power base. He was also ruthless. Toward the end of the war he murdered two rivals who might have challenged his role as zone secretary.