questions on the cambodian revolution
Bacy For some months now the situation in Cambodia has been the object of an intense anticommunist slander campaign in several countries. According to the American weekiy Time, a regime of pure terror has been established since the victory of the "Khmers Rouges": "enfire villages massacred, victims tied together and buried alive by bulldozers, a rivers of blood in the irrigation canals. " For François Ponchaud(I), writing in Le Monde, Time's estimate of the number of deaths one year after the liberation of Phnom Penh (500, 000) is apparently too modest, for he puts forward the figure of 800, 000. In a dossier prepared for press distribution, Ponchaud tried to "shed light" on the "Realpolitik" of the Cambodian leadership by quoting a Khmer Rouge who is said to have declared that "if only 20,000 youth are left in Cambodia, then we will reconstruct the new Cambodia with those 20,000 youth!" The escalation of casualty figures was continued by the New York Times, which announced one million dead, and by Newsweek, which blithely upped the ante to a million and a half. One year of the new regime is said to have cost the Cambodian population as much as five years of the American war and the massive bombing. The Western press has no fear of figures. 26
•by PIERRE ROUSSETO The almost total silence of the Cambodian leadership and the closing of the country's borders facilitate the fueling of this broad campaign of slander. But this does not mean that the slander does not exist or that it does not take crude forms. Here are some examples taken From the French press. The weekly Paris-Match published a series of photographs entitled "Terror in Cambodia, " which were later reproduced on television. These photographs, it was said, "had been taken by a refugee." But in fact they had already been published in Thai Rath, a Bangkok daily, which indicated that they had been taken from the Thai side of the border with a telescopic lense. One of these photographs showed a small gathering. Thai Rath claimed it was a "scene of political indoctrination" (cited by the Paris daily Libération, April 22, 1976). In ParisMatch it became a "collective marriage" in which young girls were being "given" to meritorious fighters. The May 26 Figaro, a Paris daily, published a photograph of a woman lying on the ground, "taken clandestinely in April 1975 by an inhabitant of Phnom Penh. " With a wealth of detail, Figaro explained how this woman had been killed by a soldier of the liberation army. But
a check of this photograph (Libération, May 28) indicated that in fact it had been taken in 1974 by an Agence France-Presse photographer in a different place, And the woman was not dead, but lying on the ground crying; a second photograph showed her standing again. Neither Figaro nor AFP offered any explanation. The slander campaign is based essentially on the testimony of refugees, most of whom have gone to Thailand. Here again, their testimony, while sometimes inveresting, must be regarded with more prudence than seems to be the usual practice. On April 18 Le Monde, a newspaper with a reputation for seriousness and objectivity, published the dramatic testimony of len Souvannari, a refugee. This same refugee had been interviewed by the Bangkok correspondent of Le Monde upon his arrival in Thailand (see Le Monde, November 8, 1975), and had offered a considerably less bloody version than the one he wrote several months later. This is not the first time that Bangkok has utilized "disinformation" to such ends. The refugee camps, in which atrocity stories are peddled from mouth to mouth and become inflated in the process, and in which the Thai, American, and French secret services are extremely active, offer an extremely favorable milieu for the manipulation of information, The slander campaign clearly exists. How can truth be sorted from lies given the slander campaign on the one hand and the silence of the Cambodian leadership on the other? It is impossible to draw up a real balance-sheet on the choices made by the Khmer Rouge leadership since the victory of the revolution on April 17, 1975. One can merely advance hypotheses and attempt to raise some problems, using as the basis of analysis the orientation of the Khmers Rouges as it is expressed in the rare official documents and the collective information assembled through monitoring Radio Phnom Penh and reading the accounts of refugees published by F. Ponchaud, whom it is difficult to accuse of excessive tenderness toward the new regime. (2) We may thus relocate the present problems in the history of the Cambodian revolution and of the Cambodian Communist leadership. The option for autarky The evacuation of the population of Phnom Penh by the FUNK shortly after the city's liberation was partially explained by conjunctural reasons. There was famine. The channels of transportation, which had been destroyed, did not allow for rapid resupply, and in any event the previously liberated zones were not capable of providing sufficient food for this mass of population (at least 30 percent of the total population of the country), who had previously been fed by the American aerial bridge. The rainy season was on its way, and everybody had to produce. But these conjunctural reasons did not in themselves explain either the scope of the displacement of the population or the forms it took. The distrust of cadres and soldiers emerging from the peasantry for Phnom Penh, a parasitic and corrupt city if ever there was one, came through in the attitude of the FUNK fighters upon their entry into the Cambodian capital. In the words of a "political commissar" recorded by F. Ponchaud on April 18, 1975: "The people have to learn about the grain of rice. It is in sweating to clean it, sow it, plant it, and harvest it that man learns the real value of things. • The city is bad, not the people; because the people can be reformed, but not the city. It is in the city that you find money and corruption. " Beyond the anecdote, what we see here is also the problem of the choices and development priorities of the Khmer Rouge leadership, posed in crude terms by the forced exodus of the urban population. The watchword of the orientation of the Cambodian Communists today is "independence and sovereignty." Their project for the economic restructuring of the country is an attempt to realize this independence immediately. "Our people, workers and peasants, " declared VicePrime Minister leng Sary, * are wedded to their position of being independent and sovereign, of counting on their own strength, of being master of the country and of their own destiny." (Speech of April 17, 1976, translation by the GRUNK mission in Paris.) To be sure, it is necessary to get the factories running again, but in order to reduce the need for foreign aid the accent has to be placed on the search for self-sufficiency in food and the creation of an exportable rice surplus assuring the future reentry of currency and permitting an upturn of foreign trade. The essential part of the work force must consequently leave for the countryside and participate in hydraulic development. "If we have dikes, " declared Radio Phnom Penh on February 21, 1976, "we will have water. If we have water, we will have rice. If we have rice, we will be able to have everything." To this project of economic development - search for self-sufficiency in food by relying on the country's own forces, creation of an exportable surplus and reentry of currency, controlled priming of foreign trade - there corresponds a political orientation that is fiercely notionalistic. In official speeches, of course, the very general assertion of the need for international solidarity remains. *The revolution of Kampuchea (Cambodia) cannot be divorced from the revolutionary movements of the world, " declared leng Sary in his speech. But the present leitmotiv is quite different, to judge by the speeches of the president of the FUNK in France during the commemoration of the first anniversary of the victory. He declared: "Our people and our revolutionary army are determined ... to defend the territorial integrity of the country at all costs, its waterways and land, its maritime borders, its islands, its air space, against any aggressor, large or small, coming from near or far." And he drew the balance-sheet of the anti-imperialist struggle without once mentioning the common fight of the Vietnamese and Laotian peoples! There is now a border dispute between Cambodia and Vietnam, and everything suggests that Vietnam is in fact the "near country" referred to here.
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CAMBODIA The effort at production the FUNK has imposed on the population was in part made necessary by the state of ruin in which the United States had left the country. The 1973 bombing, when Washington concentrated the whole of its Indochina air force on Cambodia, was terribly devastating. The figures on the destruction of the economic infrastrücture now advanced by the GRUNK are extremely high. But this excessively intense effort was also made necessary by the Khmer Rouge leadership's choice of autarkie development. A different choice was possible, one that would have permitted much more progressive measures of reconstruction to be faken and would ha e avoided the organization of the population in the form of an army in the countryside. That choice was to have relied on Indochinese development, thus fostering trade with and aid from the bureaucratized workers states. In addition, certain judicious options of trade with the capitalist countries could even have been envisaged. The nationalist retreat ihe orientation of the Cambodian Angkar (the "organization") in fact sanctions the breakup of the Indochinese revolutionary front that had been formed during the war. This nationalist retreat is one of the central problems with which the Indochinese revolutions are now confronted. It has taken particularly sharp forms in Cambodia. To understand this, it is necessary to go back to the history of these leaderships. The first Khmer Communists were members of the Indochinese Communist party, within which they, along with the Laotians, were o small minority compared with the Vietnamese. During the 1930s, the progrom of this party called for a strongly integrated Indochinese revolution leading to the "Union of Soviet Republics of Indochina, " as it was put in the draft resolution on work among ethnic minorities submitted to the 1935 congress of the French Communist party. The right of the Laotian,
Khmer, and Montagnard minorities to determine their own future, up to and including state separation, was recognized at that time. But the full measure of the nafional aspect of the liberation struggle had apparently not yet been completely grasped. Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia were united by French domination and later by the American intervention. But they remained profoundly different in socioeconomic structure, self-consciousness, culture (Sino-Confucion in one case, Indo-
Buddhist in the others), and civilization. Now, the reaffirmation - or affirmation - of a national identity against imperialism was to be one of the essential motor forces of the revolutionary upsurge, The revolutions had to be Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian before they could be Indochinese. The turn of the Communist movement on this question began in 1941 with the creation of the Vietminh (which was Vietnamese) and led in 1951 to the formation of three different Communist parties:
the Workers party of Vietnam, the People's Revolutionary party of Laos, and the Khmer Communist party. Nevertheless, the leading nucleus of each of these three par-.
ties had come out of the Indochinese Communist party..
The historical links among them were close. A iwofold break, political and generational, was later to occur in the case of Cambodia. The bull of the present leaders of the Khmer Rouge did not experience the first anti-French resistance. In 1954 the Cambodian Communists, overshodowed by Sihanouk, were the first to be sacrificed by the Geneva Accords and the machinations of the great powers. While the Laotian revolutionaries were able to withdraw to. two provinces in the northeast and while the Vietnamese won the formation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the Khmers had to go underground or seek exile in North Vietnam. the Cambodian Communist cadres seem to have gone to Son Ngoc Minh and the bulk of the DRV. The lesser known militants probably remained in Cambodia and some codres, among them the representatives of the left of the Khmer Issarak resistance to the Gene va Accords, founded the Pracheachon (Party of the People). The militants who remained in Cambodia milite or who assured the permanence of the inactive guerrilla base (and probably stilll do), while the second layer of cadres now occupy posts of secondary responsibility. Sien An, for example, became ambassador to Hanoi and Keo Meas ambassador to Peking. Most of the members of the present goverment whose political histories are known become Communists during the 1950s in France, where they were pursuing their studies. This is notably the case for Hou Youn (former planning minister of the GRUNK, who seems to have been killed in the fighting in 1975, Son Sen (viceminister of defense), leng Sary (vice-prime minister and minister of foreign affairs), Mai Mann (who led the resistance inside Phrom Penh), Khieu Samphan (president of the presidium), and Saloth Sar (one of the major leaders of the party). These people joined the French Communist party and became leaders of the Khmer Students Association. It was during this period that Hou Youn wrote his university thesis on the Khmer peasantry and
Khieu Samphan his thesis on the industrialization of
Cambodia.
Sihanouk and Khieu Samphan.
Upon returning to Phnom Penh, sometimes by way of Hanoi, these militants integrated themselves into the political life of the capital, along with other militants such as Hu Nim (now minister of information). In 1962 the Procheachon was hit by repression. Nong Suon, its secretary general, and thirteen other militants were arrésted and sentenced to death. During the following year a large number of intellectuals and militants disappeared from Phnom Penh to aid in the reorganization of uerrilla centers. These included leng Sary, son sen saloth Sar, leng Thirith (minister of social affairs an wife of leng Sary), and many others. In 1967 in the province of Battambang, where the Communist tradition is strong and the concentration of land ownership more advanced than elsewhere in the country, a peasant uprising broke out. Sihanouk launched an anticommunist campaign and three deputies, Hou Youn, Hu Nim, and Khieu Samphan, in turn joined the guerrillas. From that point on, the "Khmer Rouge" guerrilla movement was to experience important advances, up to the time of the Lon Nol coup of March 18, 1970. Thus, it is a rather homogeneous team that took the leadership of the internal resistance and rapidly won hegemony within the FUNK against the Sihanoukists. By the time the victory came, Sihanouk held no longer but a shadow of power. (3) In December 1975 the "National Congress of Representatives of the People" met. On January 5, 1976, a new constitution was promulgated, the monarchy was officially abolished, and the birth of "Democratic Kampuchea" was proclaimed. Elections to the National Assembly were held on March 20; on April 2 Sihanouk "retired, " and on April 6 the government of Penn Nouth, Sihanouk's prime minister, resigned. Power was in the hands of the Angkar-Khmer Rouge. Most probably, the abandonment of the 1935 program and the nationalist retreat of Cambodian Communism are explained by a combination of several elements: the awakening of Khmer nationalism in the course of the liberation struggle; the political trauma of Geneva in 1954 and the abandoning of the struggle by the Stalinist bureaucracy; the much more pronounced tumover in generations than in Laos or Vietnam (in spite of the maintenance of a certain continuity). In the absence of a revolutionary development in Thailand, the largest country of Southeast Asia, a close alliance with Vietnam presented certain objective dangers: 7 or 8 million Cambodians compared with 50 million Vietnamese, greater socioeconomic backwardness of Cambodia. But these dangers were less serious than those entailed for the Cambodian revolution by the forced course and autarkic refreat decided on by the leadership of the Angkar. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of the economic development of Cambodia outside the regional framework at least. The harnessing of the Mekong River, for example, con be accomplished only on the basis of an Indochinese policy tightly linked to Vietnam, Laos, and in the future, if the Thai revolution is successful, Thailand. Only such regional cooperation can permit international trade with any balance at all and can prevent the social costs of development from rising too high.
CAMBODIA leng Sary (right) "Radical" measures The measures taken just after the victory were radical. "The state of Kampuchea is a state of the workers, peasants, and other toilers of Kampuchea, " declares Article I of the constitution. Article Il states: "All the important means of production are the collective property of the people's state and the collective property of the people in common. " The immediate nationalization of all the land was perhaps not the sharpest measure. Traditionally, the land had been the property of the king, who leased it on a usufruct basis for cultivation. The privatization of the land introduced by colonization was imposed only relatively. But money was abolished and the requisition of goods was carried out administratively, through distribution, and sometimes, it appears, through barter among enterprises. The main feature of the orientation of the Khmer Rouge leadership appears in this administrative and bureaucratic organization of society. The population is organized in military fashion in the countryside in order to assure the relaunching of production. The asserted objective is the quantity of food production, "to build the most dikes possible as rapidly as possible before the rainy season. ... Next year we will add to and fortify these dikes. (Radio Phnom Penh, January 10, 1976.) It is necessary "to cover all Kampuchea with a network of dikes and canals cutting the country at right angles so as to fill the country with a checkerboard of rice paddies. " (Radio broadcast of February 21) We must "not choose grain like rich people who want good rice but like poor people who are trying to get a lot of rice." (Broadcast of January 15) Everything for rapid and mossive producThe initial results of the effort engaged seem rather impressive. Cambodia is naturally suited to agriculture, but it was one of the countries in Southeast Asia with the lowest productivity of labor. And food shortages, bordering on famine, prevailed just after the victory. All observers today agree in recognizing that the harvest of the end of 1975 and beginning of 1976 will be excepfional in quantity. The per capita rice ration, according to Radio Phnom Penh, has been increased to 500 grams per day (slightly more than one pound). Photo-
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CAMBODIA graphs recently taken in several regions of Cambodia depict a genuine transformation of the countryside by hydraulic works. (See, for example, Wilfred Burchett's article in the May 3-16 issue of Afrique-Asie.) Self-sufficiency in food seems to have been achieved and this result is far from negligible in view of the conditions into which the country had been plunged by the war. A small transformation industry has been reconstituted: various textiles, tires, bicycles, batteries, paints, glass, soap, paper, food products, cigarettes, wood cutting, cement, and small ovens are the enterprises Radio Phnom Penh has mentioned. This productive effort implies a turnabout in mentality for a population to whom this work pace had been foreign. The change in mores also affects the family. Children go to school, often far from their villages; young boys and girls are organized into groups; marriage requests are no longer handled by parents, who no longer have anything to say about them, but by the head of the young women's group. Likewise, the former place of women in society is tending to be shaken up by the challenging of the traditional family and the reorganizafion of labor. Women have the right to ask men to marry them and the state radio hails equality of labor: "What men can do women can do as well." (Broadcast of February 11.) On the administrative and social level, new structures have been established. Each level of organization seems to be directed by a triumverate: the president, vice-president, and secretary. Ten to Fifteen families form a "group" (krom), several groups a village (phum), then a canton (khum), the president of which holds authority on questions of repression (according to F. Ponchaud), then an arrondisement (rock), district (damlan), and finally region (phumpheak), of which there are eight. Cooperatives are also being set up. Their function and organization is little known. In any case, there are distribution cooperatives and labor is organized collectively. In fact, the uniform term "cooperative" seems to be replacing the old "solidarity production groups, "solidarity groups for dike construction and canal digging, " and "mutual aid teams." In fact, it seems that the "group" of ten families is nominally becoming the cooperative and that the "group of cooperatives" is tending to replace the "village. The omnipotence of the Angkar But these radical measures seem to have been taken through authoritarian displacement of population, excepting, perhaps, the population of the previously liberated zones. The bulk of the urban population has been sent to clear new land or to work sites. In the villages. the population has been organized into "three forces". The "first force" is composed of young unmarried people more than fourteen years old who can be sent away from their villages in "mobile groups"; the "second force, " composed of "middle aged" couples, is assigned to work in the fields; the "third force, " aged persons, takes care of the children and small-scale projects. Many 30
"work sites" have been set up around canal digging and dike construction. Those mentioned by the state radio include anywhere from 400-500 workers to 25,000. The intensity of the work required and the pace of successive jobs in the fields or work sites appear to be quite high. In this context, the role of the mass organizations seems very small, if not nonexistent, and the power of the Angkar apparatus total. The elections to the National Assembly, which designated 150 peasant representatives, 50 workers and other toilers, and 50 representatives of the army, obviously had nothing to do with the reality of power. The political structure of Kampuchea is substantially different from that of Vietnam, where the mass organizations of the population have a different weight and the Communist party a different tradition. But while there has been authoritarian organization and bureaucratic constraint of the masses, there has not been, contrary to the allegations of the Western press, massive physical liquidation. To judge notably from the "dossiers" of F. Ponchaud, "it does not seem that there were many summary executions during the first days." The group executions that were reported to have taken place, according to witnesses, were essentially directed against noncommissioned officers of the puppet army, and this in an uneven fashion according to region. The repression is said to have been most severe in the regions of BattambangSiemreap. In other cases, the NCOs of the puppet army are said to have been arrested and grouped into prison camps. The degree of arbitrariness seems largely dependent on the quality of the local organization. One social category, that of officers and functionaries of the puppet regime and the urban elite, was hit very hard, although it is difficult today to draw a serious balancesheet of the repression that followed the victory. But the bulk of the refugees did not flee out of terror, but because of food shortages and the intensity of labor required. "Fear of being eliminated, " François Ponchaud has written, "seems to have motivated the departure of the officers and functionaries of the old regime, but the motive most often mentioned by the other exiles is not only the extreme rigor of living and working conditions, but above all hunger and the small hope of seeing the basic situation improve in the short run." (Dossier of January 1976, p. 11.) The famine is not the work of the Khmer Rouge. It was born in Phnom Penh under American domination. American documents estimate that 250 people were dying each day in the Cambodian capital on the eve of liberafion. Washington estimated that the rupture of the aerial bridge would result in the death of tens of thousands of people during subsequent weeks. (Patrick Ruel in Libération, April 18, 1976.) Those responsible for the crushing bombing of Cambodia are the ones who are now waging the anticommunist campaign in the name of human values.
CAMBODIAN VILLAGE destroyed by U.S. bombing. It remains true that a serious social and political gap probably opened up just after the liberation between the Khmer Rouge leadership and a part of the population. While April 17, 1975, probably meant greater wellbeing for the population of the previously liberated zones, it also meant exodus and deportation under very difficult conditions for the population of the newly liberated zones. Sickness and undernourishment, it seems, caused the death of many aged citizens. Under these difficult conditions of the post-victory period, the democratic organization of the population would have been indispensable in preventing a political rupture from occurring and prolonging social tensions. The democratic organization of the masses does not exist and the Angkar seems to have developed the theory of the "guiding party" more than any other Indochinese movement. Omnipotent, the "revolutionary organization" is also elusive. Its organizational boundaries, political program, and relationships to other bodies are not clearly defined as, for example, in Vietnam. One may, it seems, assimilate the Angkar to the politicoadministrative apparatus of power. There is certainly no cult of the personality and the constitution preaches the "collective principle in the method of leadership and work." But the anonymity of "the organization" does not guarantee its democratic character. And the affirmation of its guiding power goes beyond the substitutionist relations between the party and the masses that prevail in the other Indochinese countries. This was grossly expressed during the elections to the National Assembly, when the radio was able to announce: "To thank the Angkar for the honor of being allowed to elect deputies, all have resolved to press forward and develop production. " (Broodcast of February 7.) "All the victories, "declared leng Sary on April 17, 1976, "are due essentially to the far-seeing and correct leadership of our revolutionary organization." (Document of the GRUNK mission in Paris.) Once again, in the absence of substantial and sure information, one is reduced to making hypotheses. The results obtained in one year, the existence of a movement of return to the country, illustrated by the recent declaration of 127 Cambodians, a number of them former refugees, and the qualities manifested during the liberation struggle rule out making hasty and definitive judgments. But the very fact that the leadership of the Angkar feels neither the need to respond more amply to the ongoing campaign of denigration, nor even to more clearly define its program, orientation, and projects, provides a heavy dose of questions. If is to be feared that the anonymity with which "the organization" cloaks itself serves as a cover for the bureaucratic power of local potentates and that the tests to which a part of the population were subjected just after the liberation may lastingly remove them from the revolution. From the strict point of view of economic development, which seems to be the priority defined by the Khmer Rouge leadership, the choice of maximum production will tend to rapidly lower the growth rate, especially in view of the authoritarian organization of labor. Indeed, it requires a too considerable effort on the part of the population to be accepted for long. An optimum growth rate must take account of the real capacities of the masses for mobilization. Even the struggle against famine did not necessarily require the brutality of "setting the urban masses to production." An urgent request for aid and an international campaign of solidarity would have permitted the food crisis to have been eased in a different manner. The example of the Russian revolution and the more recent example of the Laotian revolution (after the closing of the Thai border) confirm this. In spite of that, the Cambodian anticommunist action movements seem extremely weak and absolufely dependent on Thailand. Divided, each including several hundred members at most, they act essentially from the Thai side of the border. What could have been the only anticommunist guerrilla center of any degree of consistency, in the Cardoman chain, seems to have been extinguished. The border areas are frequently porous and sparsely populated, which allows certain journalists to write reports about "anticommunist liberated zones." But these seem to be more gathering spots for smugglers than popular centers of resistance to the new regime. June 4, 1976 FOOTNOTES:
1. François Ponchaud, who lived in Cambodia for a long time, now works for "Echanges France-Asie" in the framework of "foreign missions of Paris" (Catholic). This body publishes a series of dossiers on China, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.
2. Dossier "Echanges France-Asie, " of JanuaryMay 1976 (26 rue de Babylone, 75007 Paris). The quotations from Radio Phnom Penh without specific indication of source come from this dossier. Translations of Radio Phnom Penh broadcasts, an essential source of information, can also be found in the BBC bulletin "Summary of World Broadcast.
3. On the reasons for Sihanouk's influence and the evolution of the relationship of forces within the FUNK, see "La révolution cambodgienne et le sihanoukisme," in Quatrième Internationale, May/August 1973, and INPRECOR, No. 14, November 28, 1974.
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