Pol Pot Read Free Page A

subversives. But there had
    never been anything to suggest that he was more than just another
    disaffected schoolmaster
    . Even when Sâr’s name
    cropped up again
    in 1972 as Chief of the Military Directorate of the Front’s guerrilla army, bracketed with that of Nuon Chea, the Chief of the Political Directorate, they were assumed to be just two among many, more or less anonymous, second-echelon figures in the opaque Khmer Rouge hierarchy. During Sihanouk’s visit to the resistance-held areas, photographs show Sâr sitting unobtrusively to one side, leaning forward politely to listen as the stars of the occasion, Khieu Samphân and another former parliamentarian, Hu Nim, expounded to their entranced royal visitor the prospects for the coming victory. In other pictures Sâr is barely visible, in a back row at a theatrical performance or on the fringes of a welcoming party.
    Like a Hollywood director making a fleeting, incognito appearance in one of his own films, Saloth Sâr, the one-time schoolteacher, delighted in appearing to be what he was not — a nameless face in the crowd, whom everyone glimpsed but nobody remembered. He had told a follower ten years earlier:
    The enemy is searching
    for . . . us everywhere. They are like noodle-sellers mincing pork. They mince from the top and the side. The enemy is trying to mince us, but they miss us, [they can’t do it] . . . That means the enemy is weak. The enemy must lose and we must win.
    Sihanouk’s police in the 1950s, he recalled with his characteristic, gentle smile, ‘
    knew
    who
    I was
    ; but they did not know
    what
    I was’.
    As the Khmer Rouge forces rolled to victory in April 1975, that boast still held good. In the whole country, probably fewer than two hundred Cambodians — CPK Central Committee members, divisional commanders and their deputies, trusted cadres and personal aides, including his doctor and his
    montagnard
    bodyguards — knew
    what
    Sâr was, and even then, in most cases, not under that name. One of Lon Nol’s secret agents got close to him in 1974 but did not realise his importance. The CIA knew he existed but failed to connect him with the mysterious ‘Pol’, whom the agency had identified as the head of the Khmer communist movement. It was hardly surprising when some mid-level officials within the CPK itself remained ignorant of their leader’s identity until almost two years after the communist victory.
    On April 17
    1975, Saloth Sâr was at the CPK Central Committee’s Forward Headquarters, in a tract of thick jungle heavily scarred by B-52 bomb craters, near a wretched hamlet called Sdok Toel, south of Cambodia’s former royal capital, Oudong. Conditions were spartan. The cadres lived
    in palmthatched bamboo huts, built on stilts and open to the elements on all four sides. Sâr’s hut stood beneath the spreading branches of a banyan tree, whose broad, dark-green leaves provided cover from aerial reconnaissance. He had no furniture and no bed, just a sleeping-mat on the floor. A second hut, thirty yards away, was occupied by Khieu Samphân.
    That day, as the radio crackled away bringing news from newly ‘liberated’ Phnom Penh, they had taken their midday meal together. It was an understated, low-key occasion, ‘totally different from the way it would have been in the West’, Samphân recalled. ‘We avoided showing our feelings. There was no explosion of joy, or anything like that . . . I didn’t congratulate him. He said simply that it was a great victory which the Cambodian people had won alone. That was all.’ A bodyguard confirmed his account. ‘There was nothing special,’ he remembered. ‘It was just like any other day’
    A few weeks later, diffidence would give way to apocalypse.
    April 17 became the day when ‘two thousand years of Cambodian history ended’ and Cambodians began building a future ‘more glorious than Angkor’, whose kings, at the peak of their power in the thirteenth century, had ruled an