Pol Pot Read Free Page B

empire stretching from Malaysia to Laos, from Vietnam to Burma. The new regime would reverse the long decline that had lasted ever since.
    It would build
    socialism ‘without reference to any existing model’, Ieng Sary told an interviewer. The CPK would lead Cambodia along roads where ‘no country in history has ever gone before’.
    It would be impossible, as well as meaningless, to try to pinpoint the moment at which Cambodia’s descent into madness began. Like a medieval incubus, it grew from a coalition of differing causes and ideas. But one can fairly ask at what point the nightmare became irreversible. In the autumn of 1974, when the decision was taken to evacuate Phnom Penh? On April 19 1975 — two days after Phnom Penh fell — when Sâr first expounded to the Standing Committee the deceptively simple guideline for the new polity he wished to create: ‘Build and Defend!’? Or in January 1976, when the CPK Central Committee formally approved the abolition of money?
    The most plausible answer is none of these, but a leadership work-conference whose secret was so closely held that for a quarter of a century afterwards no one outside the twenty or so participants knew that it had even taken place.
    The Khmer Rouge leaders met in May 1975 at the Silver Pagoda, the holiest of the Buddhist shrines inside the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, at a time when the regime was still weighing its future course. A new currency had been printed, but should it be circulated or withheld? The capital had been
    evacuated, but was it to be emptied permanently or just for a time? What role should be assigned to Prince Sihanouk, still in exile in Beijing? What policies should be adopted to meet the perceived threat from Cambodia’s larger, more powerful neighbours, Thailand and, above all, Vietnam?
    The pagoda, built at the turn of the century for Sihanouk’s great-grandfather, King Norodom, is stronger on symbolism than antiquity. Its steeply raked roof, covered in green and gold tiles, with elaborately carved, gilded beams and soaring antler finials, epitomises Khmer tradition. But the so-called Emerald Buddha in its central hall was manufactured by the French glassmaker Lalique, and its stone base is overlaid with Italian marble. The incongruous-looking veranda, ornamented with mock-Grecian columns, was added in the 1960s.
    There the assembled
    leaders of the new Cambodia slept, out in the open air, like schoolboys at a summer camp, on iron-framed beds with wooden slats brought from a nearby hospital. The fact that they now held power seemed to have changed nothing. In their minds they were still guerrillas fighting a jungle war.
    Only Saloth Sâr chose to sleep elsewhere. His aides set up a bed for him, with a mosquito net, on the raised dais in the centre of the sanctuary normally occupied by statues of the Buddha.
    Khmer Buddhist temples rarely inspire awe and exaltation, as great Christian cathedrals do. Bereft of worshippers, the Silver Pagoda is a tawdry place. But it is sacred ground. Sihanouk lived there as a monk during the year of his ordination in 1947, when the divinity of his kingship was ritually affirmed. In the courtyard outside stand four towering, ornately carved white stupas, containing the ashes of dead kings, An artificial hill symbolises Mount Kailash, the Buddhist Paradise. The
    enceinte
    is surrounded by a covered gallery, 600 yards long, decorated with frescoes depicting the Reamker, the Khmer version of the Ramayana, an epic tragedy of war between the forces of good and evil. One of the cadres, a former professor, explained to Samphân and some of the other leaders the significance of the different scenes, which are crueller and more violent than the Indian original.
    Sâr’s choice of living quarters revealed more than he knew. Nowhere else in the Cambodian capital do memories of past glory and the mirage of future greatness fuse so easily. No Cambodian leader, however determined to expunge the old, could