Cambodia: the end of a butcher

The Cambodian government has announced the capture of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot at the Khmer Rouge (KR) base near Anlong Veng. His arrest by KR 'dissidents' comes after the murder of his long-time accomplice Son Sen, who had tried to negotiate with the government. Although the media calls the KR Pol Pot regime 'Marxist', what kind of 'Marxists' were these who butchered the workers and peasants? JOHN TULLY* looks at the rise and fall of this ultra-nationalist Stalinist gang.

We should not waste sympathy on these people. They have an ocean of blood on their hands. Son Sen oversaw the torture centre at Tuol Sleng during the period of 'Democratic Kampuchea' (DK) in the 1970s. Ta Mok, who appears to head the anti-Pol Pot faction, is a pitiless butcher. Another leader, Khieu Samphan, lamented that that DK had not killed enough people. Pol Pot was 'Brother Number One' in the hierarchy.

Whatever happens now, the Khmer Rouge has splintered and will never again play a central role in Cambodian politics, although some of its leaders may emerge from the jungles into regular politics.

The disintegration was speeded up by dirty politics in Phnom Penh. Although elections are scheduled for 1998 a 'cold war' situation exists between the two main parties; the royalist FUNCINPEC, headed by Prince Norodom Ranariddh, and Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party.

Hun Sen has accused Ranariddh of negotiating with the KR factions to bolster FUNCINPEC's political and military power and has declared that there will be no amnesty for the top KR leaders.

And the royalists do have a long history of cohabitation with Pol Pot. They have already pardoned a number of KR leaders, including Pol Pot's brother-in-law, Ieng Sary. Despite the horrors of Pol Pot's rule, the royalists joined his so-called 'resistance coalition' following the Vietnamese invasion in 1978.

Ranariddh may well seek to bring more 'respectable' KR figures such as Khieu Samphan back into mainstream politics. This could prove a deadly game.

The nightmare of 'Democratic Kampuchea'

The Khmer Rouge came to the world's attention in April 1975, when their forces stormed Phnom Penh. They proclaimed 'Democratic Kampuchea', and virtually sealed off the country from the world.

Despite the secrecy, evidence piled up about killings on an appalling scale by the new regime. Although the statistics are rubbery (and sometimes include the victims of the criminal US bombing) at least one million and possibly as many as 1.7 million, people died in the DK years between 1975 and late 1978. Of these, around two hundred thousand were killed by the regime. The others perished from starvation, exhaustion and heartbreak at the hands of a cruel, incompetent and heartless regime which modelled its policies on China's disastrous 'Great Leap Forward'.

People were put to work on vast collective farms, often at gunpoint. Intellectuals were marked for almost certain death. The Cambodian working class - such as it was - was wiped out down to the last engine driver and power station operative.

Yet when they first came to power, the KR were not a united force and were only just strong enough to seize the cities. Like Stalin, Pol Pot grasped absolute power over the corpses of untold thousands of members of his own party and maintained his grip by relentless terror.

Among the dead were Hou Yuon and Hu Nim, Paris-educated intellectuals who had served in the KR leadership. They were murdered for calling on Pol Pot to show mercy to the people and for questioning his lunatic economic policies.

The pattern was repeated as the paranoid Pol Pot wiped out any real or potential opposition to his power. The purges were overseen by Son Sen, chief of the torturers at Tuol Sleng, who recently suffered the same fate at his master's hands.

A creature of the shadows

Pol Pot has always worked in the shadows. When the KR seized power in 1975 his name was known only to a handful of people and even they were not sure of his exact identity. Until his recent denunciation on KR radio, Pol Pot had not been publicly mentioned by them or seen in public since the early 1980s.

Pol Pot, whose real name is Saloth Sar, was born in 1928 into a family with royal connections. Like a number of other KR leaders, he studied in Paris in the late 1940s and early '50s. He also absorbed a hefty dose of Stalinism from the French Communist Party, then in the iron grip of Stalin's servant Maurice Thorez.

Saloth Sar had a hard time of it back to Cambodia, then under the highly personalised dictatorship of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, and in 1966 he fled Phnom Penh for the jungle. There, he remained in the background and many thought that the 'Three Ghosts' - Khieu Samphan, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim - were the KR's leaders.

The Cambodian civil war (1970 -75) was brutal and the US bombing was relentless. Hundreds of thousands of refugees choked the cities. Many peasants flocked to the KR banner, incensed at the US bombing, and buoyed up by Sihanouk's blessing. The country's food production and infrastructure was blasted to pieces. Finally, in April 1975, abandoned by its US allies, the Phnom Penh regime fell to the KR and the nightmare years of DK began. Pol Pot allied himself closely with China and stridently denounced Vietnam, tapping into a dark vein of ethnic hatred towards Vietnamese people in Cambodia. Refusing to resolve border disputes by negotiations, he sent numerous armed raids into Vietnam. This was his downfall.

On Christmas day 1978, Vietnam invaded and Pol Pot's regime collapsed. The United States and China responded by imposing a crippling diplomatic and economic blockade on Cambodia and Vietnam.

Although the KR had been smashed and were hated by the people, they were included in a so-called 'resistance coalition' headed by Sihanouk. DK even kept its seat at the United Nations! China supplied the KR with guns - and there is evidence that Britain and the US did too.

After UN-brokered elections established the current Phnom Penh coalition government and Sihanouk was put back on the throne, Pol Pot lost his value on the geo-political chess board. He was abandoned by his international backers and his forces dwindled to the present rump at Anlong Veng. Pol Pot should be tried, but by whom?

Whilst Pol Pot should be put on trial, who should do it? Cambodian co-premier Prince Ranariddh says it should be the United Nations. There are a number of problems with this.

Firstly, Ranariddh's royalist FUNCINPEC party is quite willing to amnesty significant numbers of other hard core KR. Ieng Sary, for example, was pardoned last year by Ranariddh's father, King Sihanouk. Such a selective approach casts doubt on FUNCINPEC's motives and lends credibility to claims by Ranariddh's rival and co-premier Hun Sen that the royalists want the guerrillas' military muscle.

Secondly, we should remember that the United Nations was willing to accept Pol Pot's nominee to the Cambodian UN seat after the 1978 invasion. Pol Pot's crimes were known then, so what has changed now? The truth is that the United States and China, backed up by Australia and Britain, were happy to use Pol Pot as a weapon against Vietnam and the post-invasion regime in Cambodia.

Thirdly, we must ask if the UN has the moral credentials to try anyone. It includes butchers like Indonesia's Suharto who are worse than Pol Pot. Suharto came to power in a US-backed coup in 1965 and butchered up to two million people. Since then, he has killed over one third of the people of East Timor. Yet who proposes to try this despot?

Fourthly, the USA cannot be allowed to take the moral high ground. By 1975 US bombing had smashed the Cambodian countryside to smithereens. Further, it was President Nixon and his familiar, Kissinger, who sucked the country into the Indochina War in the first place.

If Pol Pot and his accomplices are to be put on trial, it must be by the Cambodian workers and peasants, not by these self-righteous hypocrites. Many young Cambodians know of KR rule only as the nightmare that blighted their parents' lives. Today Cambodia suffers the same old corruption and abuse of power that existed after the departure of the French. However, as reported in the last issue of Militant, Cambodia is undergoing a degree of industrialisation, thus creating a new working class. It is this class that will provide the social basis for a new workers' party founded on the principles of socialist democracy as opposed to the bloody dogmas of the Stalinist butchers at Anlong Veng.

*The writer has a PhD in Cambodian history and is author of Cambodia Under the Tricolour. King Sisowath and the 'Mission Civilisatrice', 1904-1927.