What Happened to the Khmer Rouge? They are Back in Power.
Some thoughts on the trial of Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, and Khieu Samphan
(Select excerpts from the unpublished manuscript “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalist’s memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge” By Nate Thayer. Copyright Nate Thayer. All Rights reserved. No publication in whole or part without express written permission from the author)
By Nate Thayer
The 1996 “defections” or “surrender” of Ieng Sary and thousands of Khmer Rouge troops in Pailin was actually, more accurately, the beginning of the final reintegration of the Khmer Rouge back into the open legitimacy of mainstream Cambodian society. It also sent shockwaves through Pol Pot’s remaining Khmer Rouge loyalists in the north, and rocked the fragile coalition government in Phnom Penh. The “surrender” of thousands of armed Khmer Rouge did not, as one might expect, strengthen the stability of the central government. Rather, it capsized the precarious political balance of Cambodia itself. It forced to the surface the latent, grave tensions between Hun Sen’s CPP and Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party percolating under the veneer of their government partnership. And marked the irreversible escalation of an inevitable process of the collapse of the government itself.
While Cambodia’s mainstream political factions competed in their anti-Khmer Rouge rhetoric, the truth was far more complicated. For both Funcinpec and the CPP their immediate priority was not the destruction of the Khmer Rouge, but the destruction of each other. In order to achieve this, they each entered into a frenzied competition to embrace the Khmer Rouge as military allies. Each now began a mad rush to woo intact the armed strength of the Khmer Rouge and secure their loyalty to—not the government—but their separate political parties. And the reason for this was nothing less than a strategic plan by each political party to procure an alliance with a strong—not weakened—Khmer Rouge. Whichever party successfully romanced the Ieng Sary faction in Pailin and the Pol Potists in the north would use their new found strength to launch a coup d’état against their government partners. So the push to force the “surrender” of the Ieng Sary faction of the Khmer Rouge in late 1996 was not a harbinger of peace at all: It was, in fact, an irreversible and calculated preparation for war.
It is a mistaken and simplistic premise to assume that any of Cambodia’s mainstream political factions were “anti-Khmer Rouge.” They indeed were frightened, almost obsessed, that the Khmer Rouge would declare allegiance to their political opposition. Everyone recognized that in the perverted priorities of the organization of Cambodian political power, the Khmer Rouge was an impressive and useful military and political organization. The government rhetoric against the Khmer Rouge was as cynical and insincere as it was strident. It was designed primarily for the gullible ears of their foreign benefactors on whose largesse they depended to pay the bills to run the country. In late 1996, each government party, while boasting to the United States and others that they were the architects of the demise of the Khmer Rouge, simultaneously intensified secret negotiations with both the Ieng Sary Pailin-based Khmer Rouge and with Pol Pot’s forced holed up in the north to secure their fidelity.
And from his jungle redoubt, Pol Pot was playing the same game. Like a mistress toying with two jealous suitors, Pol Pot schemed how to best manipulate the government factions to secure his maximum foothold in power. The strategy of all factions were the same—seek maximum power with short term tactical allies to destroy whomever they deemed to be the most immediate threat. These new tactical alliances with other enemies, the thinking went, could then be, when appropriately vulnerable, later targeted and dispatched with similar tactics.
No Cambodian leader had a strategic vision that analyzed the consequences of such an approach. Peace, political stability, economic development, strengthening institutions of government and society, or coherent foreign and domestic policies were too far-sighted theories. And make no mistake: indeed theories they were. It had been centuries since Cambodia had enjoyed any such organization of internal power.
Coalition politics has never been an end game for any Cambodian seeking political power. Power sharing is a distasteful, insincere, and temporary step, part of endless military and political maneuvering serving the only shared strategy: to hold sole and absolute power. Absolute power is demanded not just by a political party, but invariably by leaders within each party. That is why Cambodia’s political parties are always dividing like amoebas. Ambitious leaders, like their God-King predecessors, pursue nothing less than personal and complete hegemony over the country. Until that is achieved, all competition or disagreement, or even policy differences, must be, when the time is appropriate, crushed. This truth is fundamental to understanding why Cambodia is on a seemingly endless roller coaster of internal upheaval. The concept of loyal opposition or coalition politics has no successful precedent in Cambodian history. The primary ramification of this paradigmatic tool of ascension to political power is that Cambodia has remained in a constant state of warfare for generations. The norm of civil war ebbs occasionally to an uneasy temporary political alliance or subjugation between squabbling and scheming enemies, often imposed with force by impatient and frustrated foreign powers. These were the circumstances in late 1996 and 1997 that preceded the reintegration of the Khmer Rouge back into national society and the violent collapse of the UN elected government.
The Cambodian government’s efforts to romance the Khmer Rouge, intensifying in late 1996, would be central to the series of crisis that would rock the country in coming months. It would ultimately culminate with a bloody power struggle among the top Khmer Rouge leadership in June 1997 which ousted Pol Pot from power and days later a bloody power struggle within the Phnom Penh government which ousted Ranarriddh and his Funcinpec from power. The two events were, of course, parcel to each other.
This turmoil collapsed the government and plunged Cambodia back into civil war in July 1997, Hun Sen quickly seizing sole control. Once again, as had happened so many times in Cambodian history, after Cambodians were left to control their own destiny alone—this time with the 1993 withdrawal of United Nations peacekeeping forces—the country quickly spiraled downward to its sure fate, eventually imploding in an orgy of chaos and violence until one man was left standing. This time Hun Sen—as Pol Pot, Lon Nol, and Sihanouk before him—lorded over his ‘victory”: a political landscape littered with fresh corpses and the surviving opposition humiliated and beaten into submission. In his defense, Hun Sen had simply won the game fair and square by the rules his opponents were all willing participants. But of course it was not a victory, because such an organization of power is, in the end, untenable.
Perhaps most importantly, however, the events of 1997 showed once again, that despite Pol Pot being ousted from the seat of government in 1979 after a short but shocking tenure in power, twenty years later he continued to dictate political developments in contemporary Cambodia. This fact is surely not a reflection of the attributes of the Khmer Rouge, but rather of the extraordinary weaknesses of their opposition: Even after committing crimes against humanity as a central government policy and unspeakable suffering on a horrific scale, the political options to the Khmer Rouge were so unimpressive that Pol Pot’s political movement remained a viable alternative with sufficient popular sympathy to still be a force to be reckoned with decades later. The tenacity of the Khmer Rouge is nothing other than a wholesale indictment of the failures of the entire Cambodian political culture. In a properly organized country, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge would have utterly collapsed under the weight of its own record. The reasons that it didn’t are an essential prism necessary to view and understand the sad and distasteful realities of the Cambodia that preceded and succeeded the Khmer Rouge.
(Select excerpts from the unpublished manuscript “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalist’s memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge” By Nate Thayer. Copyright Nate Thayer. All Rights reserved. No publication in whole or part without express written permission from the author)