Pol Pot Read Free

1970 from the country’s hereditary ruler, Prince Sihanouk. But it had been to no avail. The Khmers Rouges told themselves proudly that their ill-educated peasant troops had defeated all that the mightiest military power on earth had been able to throw in their direction.
    Hubris is the besetting sin of despotisms everywhere. In later years, Khmer Rouge officials, including Ieng Sary himself, contemplating the ruins of the Utopian vision to which they had devoted their lives, would argue that the very speed of their victory in 1975 had held the seeds of their undoing. As a Khmer Rouge village chief put it: ‘The train was going too fast. No one could make it turn.’
    But even to the extent that it is true, such reasoning is self-serving. There were many causes of the egregious tragedy that befell Cambodia in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and many actors amongst whom responsibility must be shared. The overconfidence of the country’s new leaders, above all of its principal leader, the man who would become Pol Pot, was but one element among them and, at the time of the Khmer Rouge victory, it was artfully dissembled.
    *   *   *
    Another full year would pass before the reclusive figure who had guided the Cambodian communists to victory would emerge from clandestinity and take the name by which his compatriots, and the rest of the world, would remember him.
    Even then, he did so reluctantly. For two decades he had operated under multiple aliases: Pouk, Hay, Pol, ‘87’, Grand-Uncle, Elder Brother, First Brother — to be followed in later years by ‘99’ and Phem. ‘It is good to change your name,’ he once told one of his secretaries. ‘The more often you change your name the better. It confuses the enemy’ Then he added, in a phrase which would become a Khmer Rouge mantra: ‘
    If you preserve
    secrecy, half the battle is already won.’ The architect of the Cambodian nightmare was not a man who liked working in the open.
    Throughout the five years of civil war that pitted the communists against Lon Nol’s right-wing government, most people, inside the country as well as out, were convinced that the movement was led by Khieu Samphân, a left-wing intellectual with a reputation for incorruptibility who had won widespread popular support as a champion of social justice in the time when Sihanouk had been in power. He had joined the maquis in 1967 and, after the Prince’s overthrow three years later, became the Khmers Rouges’ principal spokesman. As nominal Defence Minister and Commander-in-Chief of the resistance army, Samphân travelled to Beijing to meet Mao. He issued communiqués detailing the war’s progress, and in 1973, when Sihanouk, having concluded an improbable alliance with his former communist opponents, visited the ‘liberated zones’, Samphân acted as host.
    But that was a smokescreen. Power lay in the hands of others, whose names were unknown outside the inner circle of the communist leadership itself.
    Nuon Chea, for instance, had come to the notice of the colonial government in 1950 as a member of the Issarak movement, fighting for independence from the French, who had established a protectorate over Cambodia almost a century before. But in those days he was called Long Rith. No one ever made the connection between Rith and a portly Khmer businessman, employed by a Sino-Cambodian trading house, who travelled all over the country in the 1950s and ‘60s, ostensibly selling building materials. Still less did anyone, either in Sihanouk’s or in Lon Nol’s government, identify ‘Nuon’ as the Khmer Rouge second-in-command.
    And who had heard of Saloth Sâr, who in 1971 was listed merely as one of ninety or so ‘
    patriotic intellectuals
    ’ rallying to the revolutionary cause?
    A teacher of that name who had frequented ‘progressive circles’ had attracted the attention of the Phnom Penh police twenty years earlier and subsequently figured on a blacklist of suspected