Pol Pot Page 7

  As the 1940s drew to a close, even the little that had been achieved was compromised when Dap Chhuon defected with his forces to Sihanouk, followed by several other Khmer Issarak leaders. French intelligence estimated that, in the entire country, the Viet Minh and their allies controlled a Khmer population of only 25,000. Out of an estimated 3,000 guerrilla troops in the country, barely 20 per cent were Khmer — and most of those were Khmer Krom, recruited from Khmer-speaking districts of southern Vietnam, not from Cambodia itself. The rest were Vietnamese. The Cambodian revolution was not yet even a sideshow.

  In these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that Sâr and his schoolmates knew little of Issarak and Viet Minh activities. News of the rebels was censored in the Cambodian press, and such incidents as did occur were on so small a scale that even politically engaged students like Ieng Sary and Mey Mann ignored them. Sâr, at that time, was the reverse of engaged. According to Ping Sây, he never discussed politics while at Sisowath and, unlike Sây himself and others of their age, he had no contact with the Democratic Party. Apart from his somewhat juvenile admiration for the exiled Son Ngoc Thanh, it seems that the subject simply did not interest him.

  In the summer of 1948, he, Sây and their friend Lon Non sat the brevet, the exam which determined admission to the upper classes of the lycée. Sây passed. Sâr and Non failed. Non’s parents were wealthy enough to send him to France to continue his education. Sâr went to the Technical School at Russey Keo, in the northern suburbs of Phnom Penh.

  It cannot have been a happy move. The place itself was depressing — two long dormitory huts and a collection of barrack-like workshops that looked as though they dated from the industrial revolution. For a young man who had been on track for the baccalauréat and the possibility of a university education, it must have been a dreadful come-down. His former classmate Khieu Samphân remembered: ‘Most students used to look disdainfully at the boys at the Technical School. No one wanted to be seen with them.’ They had a reputation as toughies. When the ‘apprentices’, as they were mockingly called, played football against other schools, the match invariably degenerated into a brawl and they would bring out the brass knuckles they had made in their metalwork classes.

  But Sâr had no choice. Without a brevet, the Technical School was the only way forward for a Cambodian youth who wished to continue his education. And there did turn out to be a silver lining. The previous year the government had introduced bursaries allowing the three best students at Russey Keo to pursue their studies at French engineering schools. This year there were to be five such scholarships.

  In this situation, Sâr’s arrival was not entirely welcome. Nghet Chhopininto, another final-year student, recalled: ‘He was regarded as an intruder. If he got better marks than we did, he would get a bursary and we wouldn’t. We didn’t ostracise him — but he was a rival.’ Chhopininto was so keen to go abroad that he made himself a wooden book-stand so that he could revise his lessons in the dormitory under his mosquito net at night. He and Sâr both did carpentry, which was regarded as the easiest subject. The woodwork teacher, a Vietnamese, was ‘a charming man, who always gave everyone good marks’. Whether for that reason, or because Sâr had decided that now he really did need to work, he and Chhopininto both obtained their brevet in the summer of 1949 and each was awarded one of the coveted scholarships.* In the end it had been easier than they had thought, for there were only twenty final-year students at Russey Keo; not all of them passed their exams, and of those who did, not all wished to go abroad. The same was true at Sisowath and at the Public Works School which Mey Mann attended. Under the protectorate, the French had so neglected higher education in Cambodia that in the late 1940s, fewer than a hundred students a year left secondary school with the requisite qualifications. The problem, whatever Chhopininto may have thought, was not so much a paucity of scholarships as of candidates. That was especially true in the technical field, where even the humblest posts were filled by Vietnamese because of the lack of trained Cambodians. To the Democratic Party leader, Chhnean Vâm, and his colleagues, remedying this state of affairs was an essential part of the struggle for independence.

  Even with those caveats, Sâr had become part of a minuscule élite. Although the numbers were rising, fewer than 250 Cambodians had been trained abroad since the beginning of the century, including those sent by their families without government support.

  On the eve of their departure, King Sihanouk granted the new bursars an audience amid the opulence and glitter of the palace’s Khemarin Hall. At the age of twenty-six, he was only two or three years older than they were, but already had four wives and eight children. Sâr and the others stood in line, self-conscious in their new suits and ties, waiting to be presented by a palace official, who handed the young King an envelope for each of them. It contained 500 piastres (equivalent to about 30 US dollars), an appreciable sum in those days, enough for a student to live on for a month. Mey Mann, who was there, too, remembered feeling ‘very happy and proud. For all of us, it was a unique opportunity. Very few young people in Cambodia had the chance to travel like us.’

  Many of those present that evening would later become influential figures on the Cambodian Left. Some were destined to have exemplary governmental careers. Chau Seng, an ethnic Khmer from Ieng Sary’s home district of Travinh, across the border in Vietnam, became Sihanouk’s Cabinet Director and, later, Minister of Education. Toch Phoeun would head the Public Works Department. Phuong Ton would go on to be Rector of the Royal University.

  Others were agreeable but uninspiring youths, for whom even their closest friends could not imagine much of a future. Sâr was one of these. The only thing that distinguished him from the others was that his upbringing had been more eclectic than theirs. Like them, his childhood had been steeped in the legends and superstitions of the countryside and in the moral suasion of the cpap. But, unlike most of his peers, he had gone on to a Buddhist novitiate; to catechism at a Roman Catholic primary school; adolescence in Phnom Penh amid the royal harem; a middle school imbued with the values of Vichy France; the Lycée Sisowath, where he had been surrounded by some of the most gifted young minds in the country; and finally, Russey Keo, among student carpenters and boilermakers, tinsmiths and lathe-workers. One might call it a motley training for life or, if one wished to be kind, a variegated education.

  However, it gave Sâr one great advantage. He was able to communicate naturally with people of all sorts and conditions, establishing an instinctive rapport that invariably made them want to like him. In this, he was helped immensely by what Mey Mann called ‘Sâr’s famous smile’. Many years later, Mann still wondered about the smile. ‘He never said very much,’ he remembered. ‘He just had that smile of his. He liked to joke, he had a slightly mischievous way about him. And there was never the least hint of what he would become after.’

  Sâr’s smile was too open to be enigmatic, too striking to be merely a mannerism. One of Sihanouk’s advisers, a Frenchman of left-wing views named Charles Meyer, wrote that the Khmer smile — ‘that indefinable half-smile that floats across the stone lips of the Gods at Angkor and which one finds, replicated identically, on the lips of Cambodians today’ — served as a mask, ‘at the same time ambiguous and likeable, that one erects between oneself and others . . . [like] a screen hiding an emptiness that has been deliberately created as an ultimate defence against any who might wish to penetrate the secret of one’s innermost thoughts.’ Meyer never met Saloth Sâr. But his words offer an uncanny glimpse into one aspect of his personality.

  The morning after the royal audience, Sâr’s group, twenty-one young men in all, set out before dawn for Saigon — not in a charcoal-fired bus this time but a modern, petrol-engined vehicle, which completed the 150-mile journey in less than seven hours. They were accommodated at the Lycée Chasseloup-Laubat, where ten years earlier Sihanouk and Thiounn Thioeunn had been classmates. The future South Vietnamese capital was a well-kept, elegant city, bigger than Phnom Penh. ‘We
felt like bush-monkeys,’ Mann recalled. ‘We were rustics in from the countryside.’ But at the Buddhist wat and on the streets, they heard passersby speaking Khmer, ‘which gave the older ones among us, including ââr, a feeling that it was still a Cambodian city’.

  Prey Nokor, as they called Saigon, and all the surrounding region, had been Cambodian territory until the mid-eighteenth century. In April 1949, a few months before their arrival, France had incorporated Cochin-China into the new state of Vietnam. Sihanouk had declined to recognise Vietnamese sovereignty.

  After a week, their French visas were ready, and on the morning of August 31 they piled their baggage on to bicycle-drawn rickshaws and made their way to the port. Their ship, the SS Jamaique, was an elderly passenger liner which had been converted into a troopship for the French soldiers being brought, in ever greater numbers, to fight Ho Chi Minh’s communist armies in the north. Sâr and his companions were put with the ordinary ranks, the marsouins, travelling fourth-class in the hold, where they slept on narrow bunks, stacked in tiers of three. Many of them were seasick throughout the four-week-long voyage, Sâr, Chhopininto and Mey Mann being among the few exceptions. But though that meant there was food in abundance — since the sufferers had no appetite — none of them was yet used to French cooking, and Mann fanned their sense of deprivation by launching into mouth-watering descriptions of Cambodian dishes prepared with tamarind seeds and coconut milk. The ship stopped at Singapore and Colombo — where they bought ebony carvings of elephants — before heading for the Red Sea. By then Sâr had had enough of ship’s mutton — ‘cooked the French way, we thought it tasted terrible!’ Mann remembered — so at the next stopover, in Djibouti, the two of them went to the market and bought lemons, pepper and African spices. After that, he remembered, they were able to eat properly again. Sâr was in charge of the cooking. Mann and another student, who was training to become a vet, assisted.

  Sâr’s talent as a cook was not the only surprise of the voyage. He struck up friendships with some of the French soldiers, who had a daily ration of red wine and used to give him a pichet to share with his friends. As they sailed through the tropics, he and Mann often slept on deck, partly to avoid the smell of vomit wafting up from their stricken colleagues below. ‘We talked about our studies,’ Mann remembered, ‘and we worried about how we would cope with the cold. Politics never came up. Not once. It was just a great adventure.’

  2

  City of Light

  SINCE THE TIMEof Beaumarchais and Voltaire, Paris has called itself, with fine indifference to the intellectual claims of other European centres, La Ville Lumiè re, the source of light and of enlightenment for the rest of the civilised world. At times that has been a mixed blessing. It was in Paris, not in Moscow or Beijing, that in the early 1950s Sâr and his companions laid down the ideological foundations on which the Khmer Rouge nightmare would be built.

  That this occurred was not — as Sihanouk and his French advisers liked to pretend — because their minds were warped by the Stalinist vision of the world then being propagated by the French communists, the country’s largest political party; nor was it due to the influence of Mao Zedong, whose writings the young Cambodians encountered in France for the first time. Stalin and Mao both had their part in the making of Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea. So did the Vietnamese and the Americans. But the foreign intellectual legacy which would underpin the Cambodian revolution was first and foremost French.

  How, indeed, could it have been otherwise? Language forms the building blocks of thought. The Cambodian students spoke French; they had attended French schools; and they had grown up in a French colony. French was the prism through which they viewed the outside world. And in the Paris of 1950, what an outside world it was! If Saigon had made Sâr and Mey Mann feel like country bumpkins, the French capital seemed to be on a different planet. The young Cambodians climbed the Eiffel Tower and marvelled at the ancient stonework of Notre-Dame and the He de la Cité; at the broad, tree-lined boulevards laid out by Baron Haussmann in the 1860s, with their elegant boutiques, classical façades and polished, belle époque department stores — ‘all the beauty of the structure of the city’, as one of them put it — a city, moreover, that had rebounded from wartime austerity and was now experiencing a cultural and social ferment not seen since the 1920s. In the cobbled streets of the Latin Quarter, the heart of the student district, ‘bebop’ had arrived, scandalising the strait-laced with its ‘sensualism and immorality’. Sidney Bechet’s New Orleans Jazzband played at the Vieux Colombier, just across from the rue St Sulpice, where Thiounn Mumm’s brother, Chum, now a law student, had rooms and the Khmer Student Association (1’Association des Etudiants Khmers or AEK), its headquarters. Mumm himself was at the Ecole Polytechnique, then also in the Latin Quarter not far from the rue de Carmes, where Claude Luter presided over all-night jam sessions at the Lorientais, sponsored by the Hot Club de France.

  Existentialism was the rage and St Germain-des-Prés at its apogee. Juliette Greco had become the emblem of an introverted, self-indulgent generation, parodied by the young mime Marcel Marceau. Mey Mann recalled going late one night with a group of friends to a cellar club, where ‘everyone was dressed in black’. It was Le Tabou, on the rue Dauphine, where Albert Camus, Alberto Giacometti, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and a certain Jean-Paul Sartre used to gather after the bigger bars closed. The Khmer Student Association’s magazine, Khemara Nisut, caught the mood of the times — as viewed by Cambodians, at least — in a sketch lampooning the plight of a new arrival from Phnom Penh, who found himself surrounded by ‘policemen who gesticulate like opera singers’, something called ‘autumn’ which made the leaves turn red and fall, and ‘strange places which deafen you with bawdy, syncopated music, [where] lithe young adonises dislocate themselves, each more frantically than the next, in a kind of collective hysteria . . . and a girl with pouting lips and upturned trousers takes you off to join a group of intense young men, wearing bow-ties and slicked-back hair, who are earnestly discussing whether “essence” precedes “existence” in the case of peas and gherkins, or should it be the other way round?’

  Sâr and his companions disembarked into this glittering, chaotic, intimidating new world on the morning of October I 1949, having travelled up on the overnight train from Marseilles. They were met at the Gare de Lyon by an official of the French Education Ministry, responsible for ‘colonials’, and, more helpfully, by representatives of the Khmer Student Association.

  It was a Saturday and it was raining. The temperature that afternoon was barely 15 degrees centigrade, colder than the worst winter day in Cambodia. None of them had winter outfits. Mey Mann remembered being taken to a second-hand clothes market beneath the iron railway bridge of La Motte-Picquet, on the Left Bank of the River Seine, where he discovered to his delight that they could haggle with the Jewish stallholders just as they did with Khmer traders at home. Then they all went to a student hostel in rue Monsieur-le-Prince, across the road from the Sorbonne, the oldest of the city’s universities. But that was only a temporary refuge. Finding permanent accommodation was a student’s biggest headache. In principle, the Cambodians were supposed to stay at the Maison d’lndochine, a well-appointed hall of residence with white walls and fake Vietnamese eaves, supposedly reminiscent of Saigon, at the Cité Universitaire, a park-like campus for non-French students in the south of Paris. But there were never enough rooms to go round. Mey Mann, Nghet Chhopininto and their friends took lodgings in the suburb of Bourg La Reine. Others were happy to find a chambre de bonne, a servant’s room in a bourgeois apartment, usually a garret, eight floors up, within the city itself.

  Sâr was lucky. One of King Monivong’s nephews, Prince Sisowath Somonopong, had arrived in Paris a year earlier to study radio technology at the Ecole Française de Radio-Electricité, the same school that Sâr was to attend. Somonopong’s mother held a position comparable to that of Sâr’s sister, Roeung. It may well have been the young Prince’s example that led Sâr to choos
e the Radio-Electricity School in the first place, for it was not an obvious step for a boy who had been studying carpentry. In any event, Somonopong took Sâr under his wing and found him lodgings with two friends, the sons of the governor of Kratie, not far from the school workshops on the rue Amyot, just behind the Panthéon. Sâr never afterwards referred to this royal connection, saying merely that he had spent the year staying with ‘a cousin’.

  Despite difficulties with the French language, in which he was never completely at ease, he seems to have had no difficulty settling in.

  Encouraged by Somonopong and his two flatmates, Sâr joined the AEK and took part in many of its activities. The following spring, the association organised a memorial meeting for leu Koeuss, the leader of the radical wing of the Democratic Party, who had been killed in a grenade attack — allegedly ordered by right-wing opponents — in Phnom Penh in January. There were lavish celebrations in Versailles to mark the Cambodian New Year in April. These included traditional Khmer dances, a midnight ball, and what was termed ‘a Pantagruelian feast’. Part of the proceedings were broadcast by French radio. The next month the students held a Cambodian Soirée at the Palais d’Iéna in Paris, with an art exhibition, a play starring a young Khmer actor named Hang Thun Hak (later to become Cambodia’s Prime Minister), a poetry recital by Keng Vannsak and dancing until dawn. There was even talk of taking a Khmer play on tour in France and Germany that summer. Sâr’s friends regarded him as a ‘bon vivant’ whose purpose in life was to have a good time.