The Unexpected Victory

by Timothy Carney

On April 17,1975, troops of the revolution's "Northern and Eastern Regions" captured the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. The Communist Party of Kampuchea (PKK) had capped its twenty-four-year history with a stunning victory, anticipating the Vietnamese communist capture of Saigon some two weeks later. The Cambodian movement was almost totally unknown five years earlier, when Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia's one-time king and then head of state, was overthrown. By 1975, the party had built a tough, innovative armed force of a dozen battle-tested brigades and defeated the army of the rival Khmer Republic.

The process did not start with Sihanouk's 1970 overthrow and his subsequent alliance with the (PKK) in the National United Front of Kampuchea (NUFK). The PKK success begins with its spawning by the Vietnamese during the First Indochina War. In addition to the creating hand of the Indochinese Communist Party, which Ho Chi Minh founded in 1930 and which was almost wholly Vietnamese, the Cambodian communist movement itself recognized both French and Thai communist influences. The party's vicissitudes included a search for an identity from 1951 to 1959, a period of self-examination and contact with other Asian communist centers from 1960 to 1967, the opening of armed struggle against Prince Sihanouk's government from 1968 to 1970, an alliance with the deposed prince and massive Chinese and Vietnamese communist support for a successful war against the American-backed, incompetently led Khmer Republic from 1970 to 1975.

The PKK won the war because: (a) Norodom Sihanouk provided an enormously popular drawing card to recruit troops into the (NUFK), which the party came to control. The prince also helped isolate the Khmer Republic diplomatically and gave the PKK-dominated front credibility among opinion makers in the West; (b) the North Vietnamese army, the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), formed a two-year shield in eastern Cambodia behind which the party developed its infrastructure and the army trained its troops; (c) the adversary Khmer Republic was generally afflicted with an unimaginative set of political and military leaders whose personal corruption undercut the genuine enthusiasm among the elite that had followed the prince's March 18, 1970, deposition; (d) the PKK and its army had the toughness, resolution, and discipline to prevail, and their vision of a new society attracted a dedicated core of followers; (e) China and North Vietnam backed the PKK to the finish, but the United States ended its massive assistance to the Khmer Republic.

Part of the tactical success of the revolution included the PKK decision to remain clandestine throughout the war. Only in September 1977 did the party publicly emerge to claim credit for its leading role in the establishment of a new order. Such a tactic is not unknown to other successful communist movements. In Cambodia, the special importance of remaining clandestine was due to the major campaign Prince Sihanouk had waged in the 1950s and 1960s to equate communism with antimonarchism and antinationalism. By 1977, however, the party believed itself sufficiently in control of the nation it had rechristened Democratic Kampuchea to emerge publicly. At the same time, the PKK's public unveiling probably also aimed to encourage other communist states to pressure the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to desist in the name of communist solidarity. The Vietnamese were even then, in the wake of deteriorating relations since their 1975 accession to power, preparing the first stages of major military action across the border with Kampuchea.

The Khmer case is unusual less in the process that led to victory than in the obscurity surrounding the war. What had looked like a straightforward PAVN invasion in 1970, launched partly in reaction to political change in Phnom Penh and the subsequent U.S. incursion into Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia, had become a Cambodian civil war by early 1973. The active diplomatic operation Prince Sihanouk ran from Beijing masked some of the developments on the ground in Cambodia. The domestic American political battle over a U.S. role in Indochina also helped to hide the realities. In addition, the American focus on Vietnam gave Cambodia short shrift.

Nor did the Khmer communists do much to enlighten us. Khmer documents were rare: first person accounts like those of Vietnam's senior general, Van Tien Dung, still do not exist. Party history, as brought out in connection with the public unveiling of the PKK in 1977 and in propaganda concerning the war with Vietnam in 1978, needs very careful handling to separate the fact from the myth. The creation of a Vietnamese client regime in Phnom Penh since 1979, however, has given scholars access to many documents of the Pol Pot period. Former mid-level leaders of his regime now form part of the Phnom Penh regime and have talked candidly to scholars about party history.

For more than three years Cambodia lived in an era of "socialist revolution, socialist construction and defense of Democratic Kampuchea/' as Prime Minister and Party Secretary Pol Pot described the post-victory period in his speech announcing the reality of the party role in Cambodia's revolution (FBIS IV October 4,1977). What the leaders did with their people after victory demands attention, all the more so because the treatment of the population after April 1975 had a firm base in wartime population control policy.

Even more stunning, although prefigured to a certain degree by Soviet action in Czechoslovakia, was the Vietnamese offensive launched December 25,1978, after a long buildup. The successful Vietnamese capture of Phnom Penh, January 7, 1979, on behalf of a "Solidarity Front for the Salvation of the Kampuchea Nation," has sought to return Cambodia to the paths traced by Ho Chi Minh's Indochinese Communist Party. That front is led by a coalition of obscure former military figures of the Pol Pot regime; a section of First Indochina War veterans who lived much of the post-Geneva period in Vietnam and escaped purge on return to Cambodia in 1970; and a few new recruits who had been too young or apolitical under Sihanouk and Lon Nol.

Pre-Independence

Some of the key questions about the formation of the party in the 1940s and 1950s are slowly being answered. The Pol Pot-led leadership tried to obscure the Vietnamese role in the creation of the PKK. The Vietnamese themselves let out only what served their interest in the fight with Cambodia. Internal documents show that the party long regarded 1951 as the date of its origin. A key party history, written for its anniversary in 1973, explains that "the international communist movement and the Vietnamese communists ... injected proletarian class Marxism-Leninism into our revolutionary movement." The document traces the background of Cambodian communism to the "Indochinese Communist Party, about 40 men in 1951; in the French Communist Party, 10 men in 1951; and in the Thai Communist Party, 3–4 men in 1951" (Democratic Kampuchea 1973:7). After the party publicly emerged in 1977, claiming a 1960 date for its formal establishment, the Khmer ambassador to North Korea nevertheless told a Pyongyang banquet that the party had a 1951 founding (FBIS IV, October 4, 1977).

The original creation, the Revolutionary Cambodian People's Party, was probably not a true Marxist-Leninist organization. A captured contemporary Vietnamese telegram orders Chinese and Vietnamese communists living in Cambodia to join the Vietnamese Lao Dong Party, also an offshoot of the dissolved Indochinese Communist Party, instead of the new Khmer grouping. The cable explained that the Khmer party was a sort of united front and "is not the vanguard of the working class (American Mission Saigon. No. 598. Translation of Telegram No. 749 S.D.C.S)."

The Revolutionary Cambodian People's Party grew out of the wing of the anti-French "Khmer Issarak" independence movement that had come under Vietnamese control. The steps along the way included the foundation of a National Central Executive Committee (the Moutkeaha) in 1950. This body had followed on the emergence in 1949 of a "Khmer National Liberation Committee." That creation had a certain resistance captain, Dap Chuon, as Vietnamese-backed leader, but he rallied to Sihanouk in October 1949 (to betray the prince and suffer death ten years later). The earliest Khmer ties to Vietnamese communism date to at least 1945 when Prime Minister Son Ngoc Thanh entertained Viet Minh contacts who sought to coordinate resistance to the returning French. After Thanh's arrest, his economic minister, Pach Chhoeun, the same Cambodian resistance leader who had sparked the 1942 creation of the Khmer Issarak in Bangkok, subsequently tried for Vietminh support, but the French crushed his budding effort in the ethnic Khmer areas of the Mekong delta in April 1946.

The 1951 party did not have enough time to grow. Prince Sihanouk's Royal Crusade for Independence began in 1952 and caused massive defections from both the Thai-oriented and the Vietminh-dominated Khmer independence ranks. Finally, the 1954 Geneva Conference closed the door on the Cambodian communist movement as communist powers bowed to Royal Cambodian insistence that the Khmer radicals be excluded. Two thousand or more Khmer, pretending to be Vietminh fighters, went to North Vietnam by ship under the terms of the Geneva accords. A small number stayed in Cambodia to continue activities both legal and clandestine.

Era of Political Struggle

1950s: CONFUSION AND BETRAYAL

Secretary Pol Pot's September 1977 party history depicts the 1950s as a time when poorly organized intellectuals cast about for issues to mobilize the people. The party tried to tackle Sihanouk's Cambodia on three fronts, with a legal political organization, a leftist press, and clandestine struggle.

The legal challenge to Sihanouk was totally rebuffed as the PKK's creature, the political party known as the "Pracheachon Group," went down to defeat in the 1955 and 1958 national elections. They could not, nor could any political grouping, compete with the mass organization, the Sangkum Reastr Niyum (People's Socialist Community), which King Sihanouk abdicated to build in 1955. A few years later, the Pracheachon leadership went underground, citing suppression in a later account of their motives. The leftist press flourished for a number of years before the 1959 murder of the editor of one procommunist daily.

The clandestine party itself suffered from lack of a "political line," slight resources, poor quality cadre, and major problems in its national leadership, divided between an in-country wing and an expatriate wing in North Vietnam. After 1954, a "temporary central committee of Sieu Heng, Secretary; Tou Samuth; Ng.M.; S.V.; and N.T.Nh." launched into a political struggle. This initial body foundered on unspecified urban activities. A renewed central committee of 1956 split rural and urban committees between Sieu Heng and Tou Samuth, repectively, as chairmen (Democratic Kampuchea 1973:12–14).

Unfortunately for the nascent movement, Sieu Heng betrayed the party by working for Lon Nol. His betrayal began as early as 1956, and he formally defected to the Royal Government in 1959. Phnom Penh security services must have known just exactly who the enemy was. Party Secretary Pol Pot had admitted that "in 1959 about 90% of our revolutionary forces in rural areas [Sieu Heng's committee] were destroyed (FBIS IV, October 4, 1977:H8)."

RENAISSANCE IN 1960

The restructuring of the party began with a major national congress on September 30, 1960. Tou Samuth became secretary and the party changed its name, eventually to become the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Saloth Sar, a teacher now called Pol Pot, one of the first French-trained younger elements in the party during the early 1950s, took the deputy secretary position. The assembly approved a political line, and formed "the Marxist-Leninist Party in Cambodia (Democratic Kampuchea 1973:18)."

The rejuvenated party quickly came to official attention. Prince Sihanouk criticized the legal manifestation of the party, the Pracheachon Group, by name in January 1962, calling it a communist party directed from abroad. On July 20,1962 the "enemy" kidnapped the party secretary and presumably murdered him. Leadership passed to the man we know as Pol Pot (Democratic Kampuchea 1973:18 and Democratic Kampuchea March 1978a: 22).

CLANDESTINE STRUGGLE

The suppression of the Pracheachon Group and the antileftist campaign throughout 1962 convinced party leaders that they should disappear. Then acting secretary Pol Pot headed for the bush in 1963 along with Ieng Sary and Son Sen, both subsequently revealed as members of the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the PKK. In April 1976, the three became premier, deputy premier charged with foreign affairs, and deputy premier charged with national defense, respectively, in the national government of newly renamed "Democratic Kampuchea."

Other figures stayed in Phnom Penh, notably party theoretician Khieu Samphan, who eventually became head of state in April 1976. In the early 1960s he joined Sihanouk's political movement, became a National Assembly deputy, and served in the August 1962 cabinet for two months. Only in 1967, when Sihanouk threatened military court for Khieu Samphan and two other prominent leftist deputies in connection with a peasant uprising at Samlaut in western Cambodia, did that trio join the maquis. A number of other teachers and intellectuals had trickled into the bush in the intervening years to become cadre for an armed struggle.

At the same time, a wing of the party existed in Vietnam, biding its time. Old line leaders like Son Ngoc Minh and Chan Samay, active in the First Indochina War, led the Vietnam branch. They apparently had little or no say about activities in Cambodia. Sometime after the 1970 coup, Ieng Sary himself moved to Hanoi. He did so doubtlessly as much to watch the external wing of the PKK as to establish liaison with the Vietnamese party.

Difficulties with the Vietnamese arose early over both theory and practice. The Pol Pot group claimed that Hanoi ridiculed their class analysis, arguing that, like Laos, Kampuchea had not developed into a class society. The Vietnamese themselves have recently suggested that they had opposed the PKK'S political line of both armed and political struggle (Chanda 1978). They did so, according to the PKK, to assure their troops' sanctuaries in Cambodia and their access to supplies funneled through Sihanouk's bureaucracy (Democratic Kampuchea 1978a:31–36).

Armed Struggle Begins

REVOLT

A peasant uprising in Samlaut District of Battambang Province in early 1967 provided the spark for armed struggle. The revolt evidently surprised the party as much as it did both Sihanouk, who was on a cure in France, and his government in Phnom Penh (Kiernan 1976). Pol Pot has said that the party had to dampen the Samlaut rebellion because it was premature and would have been crushed. The government could have massed forces against such an isolated movement (Pol Pot 1977:17–18). Indeed, central authorities reacted in Samlaut with fire and sword.

Real action got underway January 17, 1968, when newly created party forces hit a government post at Bay Damram near Battambang City. The PKK dates the founding of the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea to that attack, when party "secret defense units" were formed into guerilla units. This two-year era of civil war, as Pol Pot described the 1968–1970 fighting, showed the party leadership's ability to capitalize on genuine peasant grievances. Peasants particularly reacted against government efforts to enforce low official paddy prices while traders were paying top dollar to buy rice for resale to PAVN and Viet Cong troops in the sanctuaries (Kiernan 1976 11:20).

Despite two years of sporadic armed dissidence, by the time of Sihanouk's overthrow in 1970, insurgent forces had neither the strength nor the armament to stand up against even the 30,000-strong ceremonial and civic action force the government fielded. Pol Pot publicly claimed that party forces had 4,000 regular troops and 50,000 guerrillas. Party documents, however, admit that regular forces were organized into companies. Such a small-scale organization suggests that forces were scattered and probably not nearly as numerous as 4,000 regulars.