Nate Thayer

What Happened to the Khmer Rouge? They are Back in Power. By Nate Thayer

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(Select excerpts from the unpublished manuscript “Sympathy for the Devil: A Journalist’s memoir from Inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge” By Nate Thayer.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)

Excerpts from unpublished manuscript of book “Sympathy for the Devil: A journalist’s memoir from inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge” By Nate Thayer

Khmer Rouge ideology and details of who they murdered--and why. From exclusive, perviously unplublished interviews with top Khmer Rouge leaders with Nuon Chea, Ta Mok, Pol Pot, Duch, and Khieu Samphan By Nate Thayer       (Copyrighted. All rights reserved. No republication without prior permission from Author)

By Nate Thayer

Selected excerpts from unpublished manuscript of book “Sympathy for the Devil: A journalist’s memoir from inside Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge” By Nate Thayer

Although popularly labeled as Communists, evidence from previously unpublished interviews with all the top leadership of the Khmer Rouge show the Khmer Rouge movement and its murderous policies were founded and implemented on an amalgam of ideology and homegrown political theory uniquely Cambodian. The leading all-powerful apparatus of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea came from disparate backgrounds, political influences, and training that clearly point toward a CPK structure of organized power based on no external models. Their policies drew from the structures of  their Cambodian historical political ancestors, with influences from anti-colonialist movements, extreme nationalism, and various non Cambodian communist parties in Europe and Asia in the 1940's and 1950's. In fact it is more accurate that they had no uniform ideology when they seized power, but rather were dominated by a unique amalgam of loosely allied regional fiefdoms with little uniform central ideology, coordination or control. In effect, in April 1975, six separate armies, long void of a unifying central leadership converged on Phnom Penh, simultaneously overthrowing the Lon Nol government. These loosely coordinated regional armed  Khmer Rouhge factions then struggled against each other for dominace within the framework of the CPK to assert inlufluence and control. Once in titular power, there was a stark absence of predetermined strategy or national leadership that implemented what evolved into a bumbling, delusional, ill prepared and shockingly unskilled cadre of government leaders that was predestined to implode in disaster.

It is useful to introduce a historical overview of the KR movement and its leadership prior to them seizing power in 1975.

Cambodia in the 1960’s offered few conditions that traditionally provided fuel to ignite and sustain a communist movement. It had virtually no industrial base or manufacturing sector from which to recruit a working class base of an exploited labor force by those who owned the means of production. Almost all its peasants—85% of the population—owned their own land, eliminating the issue to recruit based on the exploitation tenant farmers by a landlord class. The country was rich in natural resources, with abundant rice crops and some of the most productive fishing waterways in the world. It was a leading exporter of rice until after the war that engulfed the country in 1970. The population was very small compared to the productive land mass and there was virtually no malnutrition or starvation. Cambodia was at peace and a delicate political neutrality, deftly juggling outside pressures of alliances during the superpower struggles that rendered much of the world allied with one of the three great powers of the era. As a result there were no Cambodian proxy armies fighting for the power interests of foreign nations. Cambodia was almost largely ethnically and religiously homogeneous, precluding racial or religious pretext to foment resentment or strife. The conditions for revolution were not abundant.

While a number of anti-colonialist movements and nationalist armed groups flourished in the 1940’s and 50’s, the signing of the French granting independence to Cambodia in 1953 and the subsequent Geneva accords in 1954, spelled the demise of virtually all the armed underground movements in Cambodia. The Cambodian branch of the Indochinese Communist Party—entirely controlled by the Vietnamese—withdrew their entire ethnic Khmer cadre to Hanoi in 1954. The anti-colonialist Khmer Issarak party evaporated. The leftist Pracheochon party and the anti-Sihanouk Democratic party were neutralized.While leftist sentiments lingered and Sihanouk’s autocratic rule kept alive a movement seeking more democratic rule, it was largely marginalized by his heavy handed tactics.

So to what does one attribute the rise of the ultra radical Communist party of Kampuchea that seized power in 1975 leaving millions of bones stacking the killing fields that testified to the Khmer Rouge unprecedented political experiment which ended with the military conquest of Cambodia by Vietnam that brought a halt to the CPK’s 3 years and 8 months in power? What was the genus of its ideology or origins in political theory that allowed them to burgeon and drove the implementation of its disastrous rule?

On September 30, 1960 a group of 10-15 men gathered at a secret meeting in the Phnom Penh railroad station for the first party Congress and formed the Communist Party of Kampuchea. For three days and nights they hammered out and approved a party line and statutes. A Central Committee was chosen with Tou Samouth as Party Secretary, Nuon Chea as Deputy Party Secretary, Saloth Sar, alias Pol Pot, as member, Ma Mong as member, Ieng Sary as member, Chong as member, and Kaev Meas as member. The more powerful sub grouping of the Standing Committee of the CPK compromised Tou Samouth, Nuon Chea, and Pol Pot. As Pol Pot was a teacher, as was Ieng Sary, (as well as both their wives, who were sisters), they were limited to working from Phnom Penh. Nuon Chea was tasked with travelling to the countryside.

According to the unpublished interviews cited from below with Nuon Chea on three separate occasions in January, February, and March 1998: “ We implemented the principle of absolute party leadership in accordance with the slogan: a protracted, difficult, hard struggle, self-reliance, self-mastery, independence…As for the party statutes, the principles of Marxist-Leninism were used and the principle of Democratic centralism. And the Party had to build from the countryside as the foundation and the towns as following behind.”

Nuon Chea’s reference to Marxist-Leninism as a guiding party principle was the sole reference I heard from any senior or other party figure of the CPK, in extensive and repeated interviews with every surviving member of the party leadership in more than ten years of research from the 1980’s to date. These included interviews with Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Ta Mok, Son Sen, Ke Pok, and Khieu Samphan, the only surviving members of the CPK Central Committee after their internal purges and end of their rule in power. They also included hundreds of interviews with other senior political cadre and military commanders who mostly had joined the movement in 1970 or the late 1960's.

Each of the leaders had their origins as members of other political parties that formed and disintegrated in the 1940’s and 1950’s.

In 1962, CPK Secretary Tou Samouth was arrested while riding his bicycle to get medicine for his sick child in Phnom Penh and taken to the home of then Sihanouk security chief Lon Nol, interrogated to reveal the names of other CPK members, tortured and executed. He had been betrayed by a government double agent, Siev Heng, who was a former Secretary general of the earlier VN dominated Communist party--the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP).

The KPRP  had effectively dissolved after the 1954 signing of the Geneva Agreements which mandated the withdrawal of armed forces to Hanoi, and the 1953 bilateral agreement of Cambodian independence between France and Cambodia, which returned Cambodia to independence from Colonial French rule.

After Tou Samouth’s execution, another Party Congress was held in 1963, and Pol Pot was named Secretary General. While logically Nuon Chea was slated to be Secretary General, he was the nephew of the traitor Siev Heng, and deep suspicions of his loyalties—given the impossible to minimize influence of family loyalty in Cambodian culture—precluded him from assuming the top post of the CPK.

The 1963 Party Congress elected Pol Pot as Secretary General, Nuon Chea as Deputy Secretary, and Ieng Sary, Chong, Keu (Sophal), Vorn Vet, Ruoh Nhem (Muol Sambath), Ta Mok, Ma Mong, and Sao Phim to the Central Committee of the CPK. The highest ranking body, the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, was comprised of Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Sao Phim, and Ieng Sary. Of these ten, six were executed by the KR once they obtained power.

Later in 1963, Prince Sihanouk, in his inimitable style, tauntingly announced that he would name 24 specific people as co Prime Ministers of his government. They were the exact list of all 24 members of the central committee of CPK including Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Khieu Samphan, and three leftist CPK supporters who were then members of Parliament, Khieu Samphan, Hou Nim, and Hou Yuon. The decision was made that most named would have to flee the city and go underground.

This splintered the party leadership undermining its ability at central organization and implementation of a coherent national policy to be in place when they seized power in 1975. It resulted in the development of essentially autonomous regional fiefdoms without any effective central party leadership. This is key to explaining the confusion and killings after 1975 when essentially six separate Khmer Rouge armies converged on Phnom Penh simultaneously. The struggle for consolidating leadership and consistent national policy cannot be overemphasized, as the political policies and ideological philosophies differed widely on the ground in the different Khmer Rouge regions throughout the country.

The leadership themselves had scarce communication or coordination with each other, with Pol Pot based in the far Northeastern province of Rattanakiri, Ta Mok based in the Southwest, Nuon Chea travelling from Phnom Penh to the countryside, and Sao Phim based on the Vietnamese border to the East.

It is instructive to note, in an analysis of the origins of the political influences of the ideology that drove the CPK policy, that the CPK didn’t fire a shot for 7 years after its founding in 1960. A spontaneous peasant uprising in 1967 in the remote Battambang district of Samlaught over abusive government tax collectors sparked the CPK to make a decision to react in support. On 17 January, 1968, the Khmer Rouge raided a police post in Samlaught, killed a handful of government soldiers, stole weapons, and fled into the jungle. It was the beginning of a nascent armed struggle that would bring Pol Pot and the CPK to power 7 years later.

And it is crucial to recognize that they chose to embark on this guerrilla war after directly rejecting the plea’s not to initiate an armed struggle by both the Chinese and Vietnamese Communist Party leadership, according to Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Nuon Chea, Khiue Samphan, and Ta Mok in independent interviews with each. “The Chinese and the Yuon (Vietnamese) told us that ‘If you decide to fight, it is like fighting your own father,’” Ta Mok told me in February 1998, referring to Sihanouk. “But we saw that if we didn’t use arms the movement would be finished. Therefore we decided that we had to mobilize the armed movement. And it wasn’t as if there was a proper leadership. The southwest was the southwest, the east was the east, enjoying independence-self mastery.”

This stands as a stark early example of the CPK refusing to follow the leadership or strategy of the international communist movement, even from the countries key to their short term tactical survival

Mok’s analysis that there was no central leadership of the Khmer Rouge forces, contributes to explaining the later purges by Pol Pot and his loyalists of most of the other senior leadership of CPK after 1975.

Of the ten members of the CPK standing committee named in 1963, 6 were executed by Pol Pot after they took power in 1975 and before they were deposed in 1979.

In 1975, when the CPK seized power (although they never publicly announced that the CPK was in fact in power until 1977—instead publicly naming a fictitious group of United Front personalities who held nearly zero internal influence in formulating State policy but represented a broad sector of well known figures, including King Sihanouk, who retained the title of Head of State while under house arrest ), they held another Party Congress and named as their standing committee members, in order of rank, Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Sao Phim, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, Ta Mok, Vorn Vet, and Nheum. Of those 8 members, 3 were executed during the Khmer Rouge reign in power—Sao Phim, Vorn Vet, and Nhuem. They also named 22 members to the central committee of the CPK. Of these, 18 were ordered executed by the time the Khmer Rouge were ousted from power in 1979. The existence of the Party was never publicly acknowledged until 1977.

Among the first to be purged was Hu Yuon, who as finance minister, objected to the abolishment of markets and the use of currency. He was believed to have been executed in the months after the 1975 liberation of Phnom Penh.

Hun Nim, Minister of Information, was arrested  and executed in 1977. It wasn't the first time Hu Nim had been purged. In 1967, while a member of Parliament, Sihanouk publicly berated Nim as "a little hypocrite" whose "words carry the scent of honey, but hides his claws like a tiger", and he "had the face of a Vietnamese or Chinese." he fled to the Khmer Rouge controlled jungles. Sihanouk sdded Hu Nim would be "subjected to the military tribunal and the execution block". After Sihanouk was overthrown in 1970, and he himself joined in alliance with the Khmer Rouge he called Hu Nim "one of our greatest intellectuals. Hu Nim served as Minister of Information for the Khmer Rouge until arrested and tiortured and executed in Tuol Sleng in 1977. On a Tuol Sleng confession of 28 May, 1977 he wrote: "I have nothing to depend on, only the Communist Party of Kampuchea. Would the Party please show clemency towards me?" He also wrote "I am not a human being, I am an animal."

“You say the enemy was trying to assassinate you, but most of your central committee was executed in Tuol Sleng before your years in power were finished, “ I asked Pol Pot, “ Did they deserve to die, or was it a mistake?”

“You raise this question, but let me clarify this. These people were in the central leadership of Democratic Kampuchea, but they were not the people of Democratic Kampuchea,” Pol Pot responded. “In 1976 and 1977, that group of people you were talking about set up a coup d’état committee, especially against me. In that committee there were Vietnamese agents in the majority.”

“And among the leadership, they included whom?” I asked.

“My memory does not serve me well on that,” he answered rather incredulously, unable to remember the names of his top comrades he had ordered executed. He paused for about 30 seconds and then exclaimed, pointed his finger. “but among those who were in the coup committee were Ya. He was a Vietnamese agent since 1946.”

Ya, alias Maen San was the zone secretary for the northeast appointed in January 1976, the same month he was arrested. He was also a member of the Standing Committee of the CPK.

The confession of Ya is particularly chilling. In an S-21 (Tuol Sleng ) document dated January 10, 1976, Duch wrote a note to Ya’s interrogator that “I reported to Angkar ( a reference used either for Pol pot or Nuon Chea. However Duch said he reported only to Son Sen and Nuon Chea and never directly spoke to  Pol Pot until 1988) at ten to nine on the case of Ya based on the documents that comrade (you) provided…Angkar says that in the case that Ya remains reluctant and continues to hide his traitorous connections and activities, Angkar has decided to have him killed…Angkar has decided it is a case of having him looking down on the Party, not just down on our state security. Therefore for Ya, you can use the hot measures and for a long time. Even if those measures led to his death, comrade will not be wrongful toward Angkar’s discipline” Duch signed off with “warm revolutionary fraternity.” Pon, S-21’s top interrogator, added a note to the document in handwriting designated to be read by Ya. “Brother Ya, read this and think it through thoroughly.” The document was then given back to Ya.

Included among those executed were many top leaders of the Communist party of Kampuchea named in power in 1975. They included Ya, Vorn Vet (ranked #7), Ruo Nheum alias Muol Sambat, Chou Chet alias Thang Si, Sao Phim, Koy Thuon, alias Thuoch (ranked #5), Chey Suon alias Non Suon (ranked  #11) and Ruos Nhim. All were members of the Standing Committee of the party. Among the central Committee members of the CPK who were arrested tortured and executed included pang alias Chheum sak-aok alias Seuang, Chan, Pin, Reran alias So Sarouen, Mon, Meah Tal alias Sam Huoy, Nat alias Im Long, Koe alias Kung Sophal alias Kan, Chong, who was Ta Mok’s chief deputy and an ethnic Thai from Koh Kong whose real name was Prasith, and Phuong.

According to an October 30, 1976 party  document entitled ‘ Decision of the Central Committee on a Number of Problems: the Right to decide on extermination within and outside the ranks.” It named the following; All 6 zone heads, the 22 members of the central Committee of the CPK, the Standing Committee of the CPK, and the top leaders of the Armed Forces. Many of these same leaders would also be arrested and executed.

Duch, the head of S-21 (Tuol Sleng) blamed the genesis of the killings on Pol pot’s 1973 decision to have all leaders come from the peasantry, eliminating educated cadre from positions of influence. “ at that time many things changed, and many people were killed. After liberation in 1975, Pol Pot said        ‘We must protect our country by finding enemies within the ranks of the party. We are not strong enough to attack enemies from the outside, so we must destroy them from within.' First we arrested the people from the North, then the Southwest, then the Northwest, then the east. He used Nuon Chea to do the work. Pol Pot never directly ordered the killings. Nuon Chea was always cruel and pompous. He never explained to the cadre. He only ordered them. For arresting people, it was the everyday job of Nuon Chea and Son Sen. Pol Pot knew about S-21, but did  not direct it personally. He left that job to Nuon Chea as number 2 in the Party and Son Sen as head of the Army and Police,” Duch said. “They arrested nearly everyone by the end…it is a permanent rule,” said Duch. "Whoever is arrested must be killed.”

In May 1978, Sao Phim was ordered  arrested and killed at a secret meeting of select top party leaders. In two weeks of recorded interviews totally 40 hours with Duch, the commandant of the KR security service S-21 (Tuol Sleng) that actually carried out the orders of the top political leadership, he said. "It was brother number one (Pol Pot) who decided that Sao Phim would die…a very secret meeting was held—Pol Pot ordered it. Khieu Samphan was there—He was the notetaker. Three men and especially one man ordered it. Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan and Son Sen were at the meeting--not Ieng Sary or Vorn Vet.”

By late 1978, another sweeping purge  was starting to crest. Among high ranking victims was Vorn Vet, a Party Standing committee member who was also the deputy premier in charge of the economy. He was a long time protégé of Pol Pot, who had personally inducted him into the Communist Party. In his “confessions" under torture, he discussed his opposition to Pol Pot’s purges.

When the Vietnamese invaded in late 1978, documents found at Tuol Sleng revealed that another two senior leaders were also targeted for arrest and liquidation. One was a long time Pol Pot associate, Son Sen, the Deputy premier in charge of National Defence, Chairman of the Armed forces general Staff, and  Standing Committee member, he was head of the entire Khmer Rouge Military and Security Services. As such, he was,  along with Nuon Chea, the CPK party representative that was the link between the political leadership and the killing machine itself. He was in fact the direct supervisor of the S-21 (Tuol Sleng) torture and execution center and to whom S-21 commandant Duch reported directly. In Mid-1978, he was dispatched to command the troops fighting the Vietnamese on the eastern front, and relinquished his duties as S-21 liaison with the Party leadership to Nuon Chea. With the war going badly against Vietnam, the CPK leadership blamed not the superior military strength, troop numbers, battlefield experience, and superior firepower and morale of the Vietnamese, but Son Sen as an enemy agent because it was unfathomable that the CPK’s strategy was untenable in itself so it had to be purposeful sabotage of “enemies from within” that it wasn’t succeeding.

Another target for execution found in the files of S-21 from the last days before the Vietnamese overran Phnom Penh, showed that Ke Pok, Party Secretary and commander of the Central zone, also a member of the Standing Committee, was also targeted for arrest and execution. Ironically both were saved by the Vietnamese invasion before their arrests could be carried out.

The remaining five in the years after, all turned against each other.  Ieng Sary broke with Pol Pot in 1996 calling him a “dictator worse than Hitler” and sentencing him to death. Pol Pot and Mok announced that Ieng Sary was a “Vietnamese agent” and in turn sentenced him to death. The irony that both Pol Pot and Ieng Sary had been sentenced to death together in 1979 by the ex-Khmer Rouge installed by the Vietnamese invasion as leaders of the “Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique” went largely unnoticed. Pol Pot ordered the arrest of Nuon Chea, Son Sen and Ta Mok in November 1996, blaming them for the defection of Ieng Sary. He later ordered the execution of Son Sen and Ta Mok, succeeding in killing Son Sen. Khieu Samphan went on the clandestine radio controlled by Pol Pot calling Son Sen a “traitor and Vietnamese agent.” Ta Mok fought back and captured Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, and Nuon Chea.  Days after the execution of Son Sen, Khieu Samphan went back on the radio—this time on behalf of Ta Mok—referring to Son Sen as “comrade” and announcing that “Pol Pot” was under arrest as a “traitor.” Asked if he was a hostage of Pol Pot during the internal fighting, he said: "You could call it something like that."

So in the end, all ten of the original members of the 1963 Standing Committee of the CPK had either been arrested, murdered, or sentenced to death by each other as “traitors.” In fact by the end of Pol Pot’s rule in 1979, of the 22 members of the central committee of the CPK that were named in 1975 when they seized power, 18 had been executed or named to be executed as ‘enemy agents” from within the CPK ranks.

Many cadres who fled to Vietnam in 1977 and 1978, including current premier Hun Sen, ruling party president Chea Sim, the titular head of the original  Vietnamese installed government Heng Samrin, Interior Minister Sar Kheng, and Defence Minister Tea Banh fled in 1977 and 1978. Many were loyal officers who remained in power with the Khmer Rouge while hundreds of thousands died  at the hands of the government they were still loyal to, well after the disastrous policies and purges were implemented, not because of objection to Pol Pot’s policies, but rather because they were aware they were next on the list of targets.

During the massive purge of mid 1978 against “internal enemies” in the Party, the Khmer Rouge publicly announced that they were not just preparing for war against Vietnam, but the extermination of the entire Vietnamese race and the reseizing of territory on the Mekong Delta that had been lost centuries before. The Khmer Rouge strategy was clearly tactically, strategically and psychologically delusional. But they were no doubt serious. They announced on State radio that Cambodia, with a population of 8 million, would eliminate the entire Vietnamese population of battle hardened 60 million, and explained their crude strategy. The may 10, 1978 Khmer Rouge radio proclaimed in a public broadcast. “ The party has instructed that we destroy as many of the enemy as possible, and try to preserve our forces to the maximum. We are few in number, but we have to attack a larger force. This is our slogan:  In terms of numbers, one of us must kill 30 Vietnamese. If we can implement this slogan, we surely can win. Using these figures, one Cambodian is equal to thirty Vietnamese. And 100 Cambodians are equal to 3000 Vietnamese. We should have 2 million troops for 60 million Vietnamese. We don’t have to engage 8 million people. We need only 2 million to crush the 60 million Vietnamese, and we would still have 6 million left We must format our combat line in this manner in order to win victory. The entire army, party, and people must be made fully aware of these views, lines, and stands. We must review our history. Have the Vietnamese succeeded in swallowing Cambodia? No, they have not. We must purify our armed forces, our Party, and the masses of people in order to continue fighting the enemy in defence of Cambodian territory and the Cambodian race. If we do not try and defend our territory, then we shall lose it, and then our race will disappear. The Vietnamese will bring in one or two million people into Cambodia every year, and then we will lose our territory, and our race will be completely swallowed up.”

This official Khmer Rouge strategy was not a secret later unearthed internal party document. It was broadcast on their radio for both internal and foreign consumption Their military and political formula was patently delusional, and based on no remotely viable military strategy. It was simply ludicrous.

The “victory” was that the Khmer race would remain, in theory, with 6 million alive, ancient Khmer territory lost centuries ago would be reconquered, and current territory would be saved from fictional delusional, non-existent foreign plots of foreign designs of annexation rooted in age old historical grievances. It was nothing less than the manifestations of delusions of grandeur, still oozing the puss of the deep humiliation, resentment, and fixation for vengeance o the defeats of ancient history seared into the minds of the popular Cambodian consciousness , harking back 800 years to the forever at the forefront of contemporary political agenda of the Great Angkor Empire, which had evaporated by the 14^th century.

Pol Pot’s other major internal central policy focused singularly on the rapid creation of a patently untenable rise in agricultural production. He based his goals on the superior racial abilities of the Khmer peasants. He set unachievable quotas for rice production that were guaranteed to fail. He was obsessed  with an ability to create a superior agrarian utopia based on self-reliance on Khmer resources, which largely didn’t exist. Pol Pot’s domestic policies of agricultural production goals, regional production of rice quotas mandated by the central party, were simply unattainable. Cambodia’s mechanized resources were simply non-existent, its agricultural productive capacity and infrastructure decimated by years of warfare, and its trained human resources and technically skilled cadre with even minimum expertise  miniscule in number and capability. And anyone with foreign training and the skills, who returned from abroad upon victory to build a new society, were deemed suspected spies and most were killed. In addition, local and regional cadre who questioned the ability to meet the quota’s were deemed foreign enemy agents intent on sabotaging the revolution and arrested and executed.    “They fought against us, so we had to take measure to defend ourselves,’ Pol Pot told me in 1997, blaming “enemies from within” for sabotaging the regimes’ policy goals. He blamed starvation that killed hundreds of thousands on “enemies within our ranks” who “withheld food from the people. There was rice but they didn’t give rice to the population to eat.” The list of enemies ranged from officials of the defeated Lon Nol regime, to “internal agents” within the Party and the army, to Vietnamese, CIA, and KGB plots, often working simultaneously in coordination with one another., to his contention of six attempted coup attempts to depose him, to finally the entire nation of Vietnam.

In 1977, Khieu Samphan stressed the rejection of foreign aid as a “science. “ In the old regime did the school Children, college children, university graduates know anything about the true natural sciences? Could they tell the difference between an early crop and a six month rice crop…they relied completely on foreigners, expecting foreign equipment and even foreign experts to do their job for them. Everything was done according to foreign books and foreign standards. Therefore, it was useless and could not serve the needs of our people, nor could it be of any help building our nation. By contrast, our children in rural regions have always had useful knowledge. They can tell you which cow is tame and which cow is skittish. They can mount a buffalo from both sides. They are masters of the herd. They have practically mastered nature. Only this should be called natural science because this type of knowledge is closely connected with the realities of the nation, with the ideas of nationalism, national construction, and national defense.”

In its place he forced thousands of underfed and overworked forced labour to build poorly designed water irrigation systems, planting and harvesting at a pace that resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands from sheer overwork and exhaustion.

The ban on the use of money was also a direct consequence of the CPK hyper focus on foreign enemies trying to destroy Cambodia. "Pol Pot was convinced that only the ban of the use of money could prevent the CIA from carrying out any activity in Cambodia because in his view the CIA used money to buy people and recruit agents,” said CPK Standing Committee member and Pol Pot’s brother in law Ieng Sary after he defected in 1996.” He boasted that if we used money, his regime would not have lasted three months and so far no other country could do the same.”

In July, 1976, the Khmer Rouge embarked on a Four Year Plan in all Fields, 1977-1980.” The document acknowledged “we are extremely weak” in industry and technology, but said “technology is not the decisive factor; the determinign factors of the revolution are politics, revolutionary people, and revolutionary methods.” It also rejected  accepting foreign assistance saying we would certainly obtain some, but this would affect our political line…there would be political conditions imposed on us without fail.” The document concluded that Cambodia “had leaped over the feudalists and capitalists of every nation, and have achieved a socialist state right away.” They even said they had out achieved North Korea, China, and North Vietnam, saying “ we are faster than them…nothing is confused as it is with them…we don’t need a long time for the transformation.”

 

But while modern Cambodia bears no political or geographical resemblance to the ancient political and military and cultural antecedents of the Angkor period, the Angkor empire is crucial to understanding the motives and psychology of Pol Pot and, indeed, the modern Cambodian society that  created the Khmer Rouge rise to power, and to a significant degree the political culture that succeeded it and remains dominant today. Pol Pot’s political contemporaries almost all shifted allegiance in recent decades to serving alternately as military and political allies and adversaries to the Khmer Rouge. Sharing many similar objectives and characteristics, the political leaders succeeding and preceding Pol Pot in power, comprise a consistent modern political culture remarkably still dominated by the same cast of characters from French independence in 1953 to the present. They together share key responsibility to the disaster wrought by the Khmer Rouge and their short tenure in power.

But it reelected the sincere belief of Khmer racial and cultural and political prowess that was superior to all other nations and theories in history and this belief was carried out in all sectors of government policy.

A look at the backgrounds and statements of the leaders of the CPK provides little substantiation of the theory that there murderous policies were inspired by any allegiance to communism, but rather points instead to its roots in traditional Cambodian political themes of nationalism, anti-colonialism, vitriolic abhorrence to foreign domination, sovereignty, retaking territory lost in past centuries to neighboring powers, racial superiority of Khmers and racial hatred for foreigners, particularly Vietnamese. In detailed personal interviews with every living  member of the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the Communist party of Kampuchea, only once did I ever hear a reference to Communism as an influence in their ideological development

The leadership of the Khmer Rouge was a disparate grouping of individuals with few shared teachings, backgrounds, ideology, or unified vision

*Pol Pot was a failed radio technician student from a rural middle class background influenced by anti-colonialist and nationalist movements who dabbled in leftist politics while a student in France and was inducted into the French Communist party. Upon his return to Cambodia in the early 1950’s he was inducted into the Indochinese Communist Party by the Vietnamese, who held firm control over the communist movement in the three Indochinese countries at the time. Before joining the original formation of the  CPK in 1960, he taught school and wrote articles under pseudonyms signed “The original Khmer” and the “The nation, the People, and the Race.” The later he used to sign his radio broadcasts from the jungles in the 1980’s and 90’s.

“When I asked him about his political influences and what drove his policies during his reign, he said: I would like to say that my conscious is clear. Everything I have done is for the nation the people and the race of Cambodia. I want to tell you, I am quite satisfied with one thing: If there was no struggle carried out by us, Cambodia would have been Kampuchea Krom(a reference to areas of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam which were annexed by Vietnam in the 1700’s) in 1975.” He continued: “ during 1975-78 there were of course some conflicting views, this is true,” he obliquely responded to questions of mass murder under his rule. “There was opposition to Democratic Kampuchea, and, of course, democratic Kampuchea had to do something about that. The Vietnamese carried out activities for some time. Naturally we had to defend ourselves. They wanted kill me.”

“Who is they?” I asked.

“Mainly the Vietnamese." They knew without me they could easily swallow up Cambodia.” Pol Pot saw himself literally as the personal embodiment of the Cambodian nation. Any opposition to him was interpreted as treason against the Khmer race and Cambodian nation itself.

During the trial of Pol Pot in the jungles of Anlong Veng in northern Cambodia, in July 1997, Bang Men, around 50, hobbled up on his amputated leg and one crutch in front of the gathered crowd, Pol Pot only a few feet away, cheeks shaking trying to maintain  his composure. Bang men introduced himself as “a representative of the people.” He spoke with sincerity and passion his voice raised at the crude podium on the dirt jungle floor, into the microphone hooked up to a car battery: “ The people and masses of Anlong  Veng, tens of thousands of people, have abandoned their land, homes, their parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren for close to 20 years, with the aim of solving the problem of the nation, the race….not thinking of the danger, their lives. This struggle is an exceedingly hard and difficult struggle, which has never been encountered before in the history of our nation. In the spirit of loving the nation, of loving the race, we have strived to achieve and express this most lofty and supreme heroism, to continue the struggle. But finally, the result was not in keeping with most of our wishes, our intentions. We have been separated and lost tens of thousands, millions, and then in the period of 1996-1997, we encountered the most terrible, the most barbarous incident of Pol Pot, who continually had us study about the view, the stance, fighting, enduring to fight, the stance becoming even stronger, the situation becoming ever more difficult. They saw enemies everywhere, saw them as rotten flesh, swollen flesh, enemies surrounding them, enemies in front, enemies behind, enemies to the north, enemies to the south, enemies to the west, enemies to the east, enemies in all eight directions, enemies coming from all nine directions, around them, closing in, with no place to breathe…Pol Pot wanted to further strengthen our stance. Strengthen over and over and over, including measures to successfully kill and purge our own ranks, including strugglers in the movement of the same rank….Looking backward, Cambodia was dissolving into nothing…fighting continually and Cambodia steadily dissolving.’

*Nuon Chea was a rural peasant from Battambang province in western Cambodia who was educated in Thailand after they temporarily invaded and annexed that part of Cambodia into Thai territory. He graduated from the prestigious Thammassat University in Bangkok and joined the leftist Thai Democratic Youth League in 1946 and the Thai Communist party in 1950. That same year he joined the Vietnamese controlled Indochinese Communist Party.

*Ieng Sary was born in former Cambodian territory annexed by Vietnam for more than a century in the Mekong delta of Vietnam to a Chinese immigrant to Vietnam and an ethnic Khmer citizen of Vietnam of middle to upper class origins. He received his higher education in France and joined the French Communist Party during his studies there.

*Ta Mok was an uneducated peasant whose family ran a lumber mill in rural Cambodia, trained to be a monk, and joined the anti-colonial Democratic party in 1946 and later the anti-French underground armed movement the Khmer Issaraks.

In several interviews with Ta Mok, he expounded in straightforward detail about CPK politics and theory. He was a military man who, while ranked number three in the party hierarchy, he had no formal schooling, and his more sophisticated comrades in the leadership would cringe when he spoke of politics. But in Cambodia, whoever has the guns has the power, and Mok had just overthrown Pol Pot in a day’s long duel of life and earth.” He acknowledge that “hundreds of thousand s died. Hundreds of thousands yes. Not millions like the Americans say. He contended that the “Communist party had sucked the blood of the people” and that “Pol pot had clearly committed crimes against  humanity. But he was clear in parsing the distinctions of who was legitimately killed. “ I joined the movement when I was 16. I have no theoretical ideology. My ideology is patriotism. Before I joined the Communist party, but I had no idea what communism was!,” he said throwing his arms in the air and chuckling. “ They said the Party was a patriotic one. That is why I joined the party. Later I found out that the Communist party was sucking the blood of the people.” He added that his one regret was working with Pol Pot “whose hands are soiled with blood….each of us has our own lessons to learn from ourselves. Ours is Pol Pot.”

But there was a reason Mok earned the nickname “the Butcher.” ‘I never killed Khmers,” he said. “ Vietnamese yes.” When I asked about the purges of other of his senior KR cadre comrades he was known to have been dispatched to murder, Mok said: “ Sao Phim. He was Vietnamese,” he said bluntly referring to the former number four in the Standing Committee of the CPK who headed the eastern zone military on the Vietnamese border. The tens of thousands of ethnic Khmer soldiers who Mok commanded the killing of who were subordinates of Sao Phim Mok did not view as Khmer. “They were Vietnamese,” he said dismissively/ There is a saying in Cambodian “Kluen Khmer, Kbal Yuon.” It means “To have a Khmer Body but the mind of a Vietnamese.” Mok was deeply implicated in the purges of thousands of civilians and cadre during the KR rule. Including his own deputy who he sent to his death at Tuol Sleng. “he was Vietnamese,” Mok said. Three westerners who ventured to close to his control zone in the months before my visits, were captured and executed—two European humanitarian workers sightseeing near ancient temples and a British former military officer who was volunteering training Cambodians how to unearth buried landmines.

* Son Sen was born in South Vietnam, studied in Phnom Penh and Paris, and returned to teach at the prestigious secondary school of Lycee Sisowath in Phnom Penh. Son Sen, during the KR period was directly in charge—as Army Commander and chief of national security—for the activities of the CPK secret police, including overseeing the Tuol Sleng Torture and extermination  center

*Khieu Samphan was born in the eastern province of Svay Rieng and educated in Paris, receiving a Doctorate of Economics. He returned to Cambodia to be elected to the national Assembly, was widely idolized for his reputation as incorruptible under Sihanouk, and served briefly as his minister of commerce, before fleeing to the jungle in 1967 after public threats by Sihanouk. While serving as the public face of the Khmer Rouge, he was never a member of the CPK most powerful body, the Standing Committee. He never revealed his affiliation with the CPK.

Ina February 1978 meeting in the jungles of Anlong Veng, I sat at a roundtable over fresh fish and warm soda in Ta Mok’s house dining for three hours with Ta Mok, Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, and several other Khmer Rouge cadres. I was allowed to film and record the entire event. Mok had by then captured Pol Pot and controlled the army and therefore the power. Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan hated Mok with a passion, considering him a competent military commander but wholly ignorant of political theory and a loud and course peasant soldier.

Ta Mok began to recite the names and ranks of the Party leaders who had been executed. “ That is right, a (“a” is a pejorative Khmer term for ‘”the contemptible’) Nhim was what number> A-Chong was what number?”, referring to their ranks in the Standing Committee of the CPK. “ A-Phong was what number? Why do I want to count them all? Because I want to relate clearly that all of them were what?” he was naming top leaders arrested, tortured, and executed at Tuol Sleng. “ from number One Pol Pot to all of those I mentioned, some of them were Yuon ( a derogatory term for Vietnamese) was Pol Pot Yuon or not? I don’t know, it is not clear. But So Phim is clear. He was Yuon. From the east., he was Yuon through and through, a pure Yuon. Chong was Yuon. He was a person of the Yuon.”

Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea were seething sitting next to me and Ta Mok. Their loyalties were still with Pol Pot and they despised Ta Mok. They looked like they were about to explode. Revealing Party secrets is an offensive that had always meant certain death, and to do so in front of an American was unfathomable to them. I knew they had already concluded I was a CIA agent, but considered me a useful back channel.

Cor Bun Heng, a young intellectual, asked “ Chong was from where?

Ta Mok replied: “Koh Kong. Or CIA. It is the same.”

Mok then laughed and pointed his finger at me. “ CIA, have you heard of them?”laughing louder and more. I had been told earlier by Khmer Rouge confidantes that Mok was convinced I was Cia. I said nothing. “ So within the leadership, there were Yuon and CIA. And there were Americans. Have you heard of them?”  he asked me again, perhaps trying to be both funny and menacing.

Mok laughed again. “ A-Thuch, what was his original name?” laughing and cackling, clearly enjoying making the whole table very uncomfortable for very different reasons.

Khiue Samphan, who was decidedly not laughing and decidedly annoyed, answered; ‘Koy Thuon.’

“Koy Thuon was an American,” Mok declared.” This is what I want to explain to you, “he said to me.. “it was like this. It was a mess. And it is this that causes the talk of two million or three million killed.” Because internally things weren’t good, they carried on killings. The Yuon group wanted to kill the American group. The American group wanted to kill the Yuon group and kill the Khmers. Internally, there were these three, three parties: The American party, the Yuon party, and the Khmer party. I want to tell you this just honestly, straightforwardly.”

It was the first time Nuon Chea had ever granted an interview in the 50 years since he joined the revolution. And he wasn’t happy. Mok presided and was periodically sarcastic, animated, and demeaning towards his senior colleagues, whose expressions seethed at Mok’s flippant and derogatory remarks.  Mok put down Khieu Samphan, who was seated next to him, saying: “Pol Pot, it is like the Americans say about Khieu Samphan, that he is only a figurehead. Because where are the forces? Who is Cambodia? I am not saying this to boast. Ask the Army. Pol Pot had only himself. The forces were the Southwest,” he said referring to the zone he commanded.

I asked Nuon Chea about the alleged coup attempts against Pol Pot and Nuon Chea between 1975 and 1979. “ During the three years holding power, it was the Yuon and the henchmen of the Yuon, “ Nuon Chea replied through clenched teeth.

“What happened?” I asked. “ this is a historical matter of long past, long ago. There were assassination attempts, there were attempts to poison, from what I could gather,” Nuon Chea replied. “But most of it, some places, it is hard for me to recall. I don’t know what Ta would say,” he continued trying to avoid an answer. “ This I am telling you frankly,” Nuon says. “They accuse us.”

Ta Mok then speaks, offering specific and never before revealed details to the consternation of Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan. “okay, I’d like to tell you. This matter isn’t something that is clear and transparent, it is very difficult, because internally who was it who was in charge, who was responsible? It was Pol pot who was responsible. There wasn’t anyone else who was number one but Pol Pot. Pol Pot was number One.’ Then Mok turns to Nuon Chea, smirks, eyes twinkling in a mixture of menace and mockery.” Brother, you were number two, right?’

Nuon Chea glares, pauses, and answers curtly, “yes.”

“Yes, you were number two,” Mok repeats, “ Ieng Sary was number three. So Phim was number four. And Ta Mok was only number five. And A-Nhim was what number?” Mok goads Nuon Chea.

“don’t know what number, Ta,’ Nuon Chea says.

‘it is the number two individual who knows the most,: Mok laughs referring mockingly to Nuon Chea,” But I didn’t understand much. I just looked from the outside. I observed. I just want to express that opinion.”

END OF PART ONE FROM EXCERPTS OF “Sympathy for the devil” Unpublished book manuscript by Nate Thayer

 

More excerpts will be posted as the trial continues.

‘I AM IN DANGER’: Duch talks of the risks to his life, provides details of Khmer Rouge death machine By Nate Thayer

‘I AM IN DANGER’: Duch talks of the risks to his life, even as he provides further details of Khmer Rouge death machine 

By Nate Thayer in Battambang province

Far Eastern Economic Review

May 13, 1999

 

(Authors note: At the time of the publication of this interview, the UN special representative to Cambodia on Human Rights, Thomas Hammarberg, called for the Phnom Penh government to ensure Duch’s protection “from possible retaliation or attempts to reduce him to silence…because of his key role as a cadre at the heart of the political security machinery he is a crucial witness to some of the worst of human-rights violations which have occurred during this century. Because of the publication of his interview, his safety and life may seriously be in danger.” Hammarberg called for an “ad hoc international tribunal” to be set up outside Cambodia. “The Cambodian judiciary unfortunately is unfit to handle a trial of this complexity and magnitude,” he said, because it failed to meet certain conditions such as “a culture of respect for due process.” The charges proposed by a UN panel of experts cover crimes against humanity, genocide, war crimes, forced labour, torture, and crimes against internationally protected persons. I was asked by the court for raw copies of my taped interviews of Duch, Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, Nuon Chea, Ta Mok, and Ieng Sary. I was also asked to be a witness and testify at the trial. I rejected both requests. Not because I oppose a trial for those indicted (and many others)--quite the opposite--but because I oppose being party to a politically motivated/manipulated/influenced show trial. Not to mention it is in violation of international standards of justice which forbid hearsay. And international law where if a person is alive and available to testify themselves, it is forbidden for a third party to quote that person when he is available to testify on his own behalf. A third reason, is I am a journalist, and portions of the interviews were given on various degrees of "on/off the record" and "background" basis. No court has the right to compel a journalist to reveal their sources. It undermines the whole basis of the role of a free press in a free society. But mostly, in this case, it is clear that there is little difference between this trial and a Stalinist era communist show trial where accused are cherry picked for political reasons, not based on an evidentiary process where investigators gather evidence, decide where they constitute sufficient, court admissible information to base an  indictment, and then press charges. These defendants were pre determined for political reasons and many others were excluded, also for political reasons, despite overwhelming evidence of culpability sufficient for indictment. For Cambodians, it reinforces the reality of impunity from justice for those with political influence. This trial is being given the rubber stamp of approval by the UN and international community, sending a message to your average Cambodian peasant that there exists no where to turn where an independent judiciary will seek justice on their behalf. In thousand sof Cambodian villages, people remain alive and in political power who have committed crimes against international law and their victims have no recourse.)

 

Kang Kek Ieu’s name is usually spelled “Kiang” by scholars, but in his interviews with the REVIEW, he said he writes it as Kang. He is an odd looking man, his large head seemingly out of proportion to his short, thin body. His huge ears frame a wide grin, which exposes his missing teeth and the rotting remaining ones. Both eyes are unfocused, clouded grey-blue with what appears to be glaucoma. His left hand is missing its index finger and is curved like a claw, the result, he says, of an accident while cleaning a weapon in 1983.

He seemed calm about being exposed as a mass—murderer, even laughing briefly at the irony of being asked by the REVIEW to write his own “confession.” Presented with a rough biography to verify, as well as copies of orders he and other leaders issued to torture and kill prisoners, he spoke for days and wrote long descriptions of the workings and structure of the Khmer Rouge killing machine. In the process, he sometimes wept and expressed deep remorse.

He was intent on concealing his whereabouts. “I don’t want any man to know our relationship,” he told the REVIEW, “They will make me unsafe. I have no secrets from the Far Eastern economic Review, but I fear the people around me. I don’t know who is the man of Nuon Chea, of Ta Mok, of Khieu Samphan. I am in danger. My life is at risk. My sister will worry if I speak in Khmer. She will say, ‘My brother will die!’ They can kill me. They will say I am the man of the CIA who sold out to the USA.”

Duch said he had been visited by the local police chief after being seen talking to the review in this remote hamlet. “I see you are talking to the bad people,” Duch quoted the police chief as telling him, “You should be careful.”

There are many people who don’t want the truth to be known, leading the United Nations to fear for his safety. In a statement, the UN special representative to Cambodia on human rights, Thomas Hammarberg, called for the Phnom Penh government to promptly take steps to ensure Duch’s protection “from possible retaliation or attempts to reduce him to silence…because of his key role as a cadre at the heart of the political security machinery he is a crucial witness to some of the worst of human-rights violations which have occurred during this century. Because of the publication of his interview, his safety and life may seriously be in danger."

Hammarberg called for an “ad hoc international tribunal” to be set up outside Cambodia. “The Cambodian judiciary unfortunately is unfit to handle a trial of this complexity and magnitude,” he said, because it failed to meet certain conditions such as “a culture of respect for due process.” The charges proposed by a UN panel of experts cover crimes against humanity, genocide, war crimes, forced labour, torture, and crimes against internationally protected persons.

If Duch goes before an international tribunal, his evidence would potentially be damning. Among his statements to the REVIEW:

--“Foreigners don’t know who ordered the killings. I want to explain clearly to you: It was a decision of the central committee of the Communist Party. I followed the orders of my superiors, Nuon Chea and Son Sen, but I have great difficulty now, thinking that the people who died did nothing wrong.”

--“My superior first was Vorn Vet during the war time, then after liberation (in 1975) I reported directly to Son Sen. In July 1978, I was transferred to Nuon Chea when Son Sen went to command the fighting in the east with the Vietnamese.”

--Duch later killed Vorn Vet at Tuol Sleng (see “Death in Detail”) after he was purged. “Ta Mok personally arrested Vorn Vet at his house. (Standing Committee member) Ke Pok was there and hid under the bed, trembling with fear. Nuon Chea's wife told me this.” Ke Pok, who as a Khmer Rouge commander was implicated in the purges of the late 1970’s, is now a one-star general in the Cambodian army.

--“The decision to arrest all the women and children, the families of suspects, was made by the provincial committee, the regional leaders, or the central committee of the party. Everyone connected must be killed.”

--Duch said that photos were taken of all the prisoners sent to Tuol Sleng “to prove to the party that they were arrested. For some people, Nuon Chea wanted me to give him pictures of their dead bodies for proof. He ordered me to bring pictures of their dead bodies to his office.”

The arrest of Hu Nim, the former Khmer Rouge Minister of Information, was decided by the entire Central Committee, Duch said. But it was Nuon Chea and Son Sen who actually ordered the arrests and executions of purged cadres. “For arresting people, it was the everyday job of Nuon Chea and Son Sen.” Nuon Chea was in charge of the killing machine and “the second man for the killing was Son Sen.” (Son Sen is now dead; Nuon Chea is living freely in western Cambodia)

--Neither Vorn Vet nor Ieng Sary (the former Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister, now also living in Pailin) was present at the 1978 meeting at which the leaders decided to purge the Khmer Rouge eastern zone, Duch recalled. “Son Sen and Nuon Chea ordered the arrest and killing of many of the party leaders,” he said. Then, looking puzzled, he added: “I don’t know why.”

He described the process of distributing the confessions he extracted from his victims under torture: “I made four copies of every confession. I would give the original to Son Sen and keep one copy at Tuol Sleng. Son Sen would give a copy to Nuon Chea and Nuon Chea would give to others depending on the case. After July, 1978, I gave copies to Nuon Chea directly.”

I had a special telephone in my house direct to Son Sen that could not be tapped. Nuon Chea talked less on the phone, but preferred to write instructions and I would visit him at his office. Son Sen loved to talk on the phone, sometimes for more than an hour.”

The Khmer Rouge leaders are aware that the archives seized at Tuol Sleng are potentially incriminating, Duch indicated.” On 25 June 1986, Son Sen asked me, ‘What about the papers at S-21? (a name for the national-security apparatus)’ I told him the truth, that Nuon Chea didn’t tell me the Vietnamese were coming.” (Duch had already said that because of this lack of warning, he didn’t have time to destroy the papers) “Son Sen got very angry with Nuon Chea.”

Poring over some of the Tuol Sleng documents, which ordered the torture and killing of thousands of people, Duch said: “This is the handwriting off Nuon Chea. You see this handwriting is square; mine is oval, like Son Sen’s.”

Having spoken of the fates of eight westerners killed at Tuol Sleng, Duch also recalled the death of another foreigner, a French truck driver who had been working in Indochina before the Khmer Rouge took power. The man’s death was ordered by Ta Mok, Duch said. “I killed him in 1971. Ta Mok ordered me to kill him.” He said the Frenchman, whose name is being withheld by the REVIEW pending the notification of his family, ‘was very courageous. He explained to me about Catholicism.”

Though Duch seemed to realize that these revelations would change his life, he didn’t know quite how. “I guess I cannot work to build schools in my district now, “he said. He then asked whether he might get a job as a human rights worker.

DEATH IN DETAIL: ‘Duch’ implicates living Khmer Rouge leaders in killings. Says Nuon Chea ran Pol Pot’s Death machine By Nate Thayer

DEATH IN DETAIL: ‘Duch’ implicates living Khmer Rouge leaders in killings. Nuon Chea ran Pol Pot’s Death machine, Duch says.

By Nate Thayer in Battambang province

Far Eastern Economic Review

May 13, 1999

(Authors note: This article was written one week after the REVIEW published a several story package by myself and photographer Nic Dunlop. Dunlop had first located Duch, who was living under an alias doing social work and recognized his face, in a truly extraordinary focus by Dunlop on what was then one of the most notorious and in hiding mass murderers in the world, weeks earlier. While Dunlop took his photograph, he did not, with good reason, broach the subject with Duch of  who he really was. The area was dangerous and Nic wanted to be sure it was indeed Duch, and be prepared for a negative reaction. He returned to Bangkok, contacted me, and we returned to a remote village in western Cambodia and confronted Duch with who he was. It was not a relaxing encounter. If Duch had chosen to, he could have disposed of us and no one would ever prove the details. This was hours from any communication with the outside and the heart of territory still controlled by nominally defected ex-KR. I knew the government had long been aware of Duch's location. And I had closely kept track of rumours of him for years which had him dead, working as a school teacher, a converted born-again Christian, and using a similar name to the alias he had introduced himself to Dunlop with. I had informed the REVIEW office that if I was not in contact in 48 hours, there was probably a serious problem. After a very brief denial when I asked if he "had ever worked for the security services between 1975 and 1979" (he contended he was a school teacher then), Duch took a second look at my business card, paused, and silently stared directly in my eyes for perhaps 30 seconds. He then said: "You are from the Far Eastern Economic Review. You are the one who interviewed Pol Pot and Ta Mok." Those seconds hung in the air far longer than was comfortable. "Yes," I said, " And we know who you are." Duch stared silently again for what seemed like forever, his mind obviously racing with the implications of the encounter, reached over, put his hand on my leg, and said "It is God's will you are here. My future is now in God's hands." And he never  lied again. We brought copies of his own torture and execution documents from Tuol Sleng, many with his handwriting and those of Nuon Chea and others. He meticulously acknowledged and identified each one. I gave him a rough biography I had written of him and asked him to correct or add details. He did so with great focus adding many dates and events. I had contacted several Catholic and Protestant Priests and said I was going to meet with someone who had " perhaps killed many people" and asked which passages of the bible might such a person most relate to. ( The answer was Paul: "chief of the Sinners" who was himself a murderer and converted, confessed his sins, sought redemption, was forgiven, and was granted salvation. It was a passage that Duch knew by memory)  After several days of interviewing him, the story was published in the REVIEW. We warned and made clear to Duch that his life would be in danger at 5:00 pm on that wednesday night, when the Review would send its normal press release of the next issues top storiies. We knew it would be picked up everywhere and broadcast in the VOA Khmer language service at 8:00pm that night. Arrangements were made for a secret arrest warrant to be issued in Belgium, so there would be legal authority to have him smuggled across the Thai border to safety, as many powerful people would have reason to silence him. Amnesty International and the UN Centre for Human Rights were pre alerted to the public release of the fact that Duch had been located. They were prepared to release public statements simultaneously with the story publication calling for the Cambodian government to ensure his safety as his life was in danger and he was a key defendent and witness for any trial on Khmer Rouge crimes against humanity. Duch was given mobile phone contacts for me in Battambang city, about two hours away, and told arrangements were in place for a safe house for him or to be smuggled out of the country if he felt his life was in danger. He chose to initially stay in his village. Within hours of the story being released, the very angry village police chief came to his house and said he was ordered to "come to a meeting.' A well known euphamism to Duch, he fled on foot and contacted me in Battambang. I checked him in under a pseudonym in the room next to mine at an obscure hotel. There, tape recorders were turned on and for a week he spoke in great detail of the entire machinery of the Khmer Rouge movement and specifics of many instances of war crimes and crimes against humanity and who ordered carried out and was involved. During this time, international pressure was significant; Governments called for his arrest, many called for his safety to be ensured by Cambodia authorities. The story was published but Duch had seemingly vanished again. After initial refusal, Hun Sen formally agreed to launch a government search for his whereabouts, and journalists descended on Battambang. As a journalist it wasn't my job to arrest him. It was also my responsibility to ensure he understood the consequences of his public statements and to ensure he wasn't murdered for speaking out to the REVIEW, as he had as much a right to due process of law as that he denied to thousands. I was beseiged by Cambodian government, military, diplomats and journalists demanding to know the whereabouts of Duch, who by this time had been known to have dissapeared from his village. One pro--government paper's front page banner headline was "Is Nate Thayer Hiding Duch?" above photogrpahs of us both. After a week, Duch decided he would seek, like Nuon Chea, Khiue Samphan, Ieng Sary and thousands of other former KR, the protection of  a senior Khmer Rouge military officer who had 'defected' to the government and was now a general in the Hun Sen army. We both left the hotel at the same time, he to the compound of the General and a rather nervous me--with 40 hours of the only copy of tape recordings detailing the Khmer Rouge killing apparatus--by land through a myriad of government military checkpoints over the border into Thailand. Duch was immediately betrayed by his contact and was whisked by helicopter to Phnom Penh where he has been in prison ever since. This story is one of those published after the two weeks spent with Duch.)

This time, it was Duch’s turn to write his confessions. In the weeks since the REVIEW broke the news that the notorious Khmer Rouge security boss was still alive, Kaing Kek Ieu has been in hiding, answering verbally and in writing the magazine’s questions about his role in the movement’s 1975-79 reign of terror.

The revelations about his job as chief executioner were chilling enough. But even more importantly, he recounted in detail how senior Khmer Rouge officials ordered the mass murder of prisoners processed through Tuol Sleng detention centre, which Duch—as he was then known—directed. Notably, he implicated Pol Pot’s number 2, Nuon Chea, who is living freely in Pailin, western Cambodia.

Duch’s testimony, which began with last week’s article, is fueling calls for the arrest and international trial of surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. It has also made Duch the most wanted man in Cambodia, with the United Nation’s warning that his life is in danger from those who want him silenced.

Phnom Penh fears that moving against the Khmer Rouge leaders, who have officially defected to the government but still effectively control the ex-Khmer Rouge guerrillas surrounding Pailin, could plunge the country back into civil war. Only one Khmer Rouge leader—former military chief-of-staff Ta Mok—is in custody.

Duch, now a born-again Christian, said he was ready to testify against his former comrades and answer for his own crimes in front of an international tribunal. “It is Ok. They can have my body, Jesus has my soul. It is important that this history be understood. I want to tell you everything clearly.” And he did.

“I was a technician for the Communist party,” he declared, then went on to describe the inner workings of S-21, the Khmer Rouge security apparatus that he directed from Tuol Sleng, a converted Phnom Penh school where at least 16,000 people—many of them purged Khmer Rouge cadres and their families—were taken for interrogation. Only seven survived.

Duch said the policy of killing all prisoners was ‘an oral instruction of the party since 1971, when we were trying to rid our ranks of the enemy.” The definition of enemy expanded in 1973, when Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot decided that all cadres should come from the peasantry and the educated should be eliminated. “At that time many things changed and many people were killed,” Duch said.

Once the Khmer Rouge seized power, the internal purges widened. “After liberation in 1975, Pol Pot said: ‘We must protect the party and country by finding the enemies from within the Party. We are not strong enough to attack the enemies from outside, so we must destroy them from within.’ First we arrested the people in the north, then the southwest, then the northwest, then the east. He used Nuon Chea to do the work. Pol Pot never directly ordered the killings. Nuon Chea was always cruel and pompous. He never explained to the cadre, he only ordered them.”

Nuon Chea was in direct command of the Communist party’s killing machine, Duch said. “Vorn Vet and Chay Kim Hour were ordered killed by Nuon Chea,” he said referring to two top leaders. Duch said he personally carried out the orders. “I even had to exhume the body of Vorn Vet from the earth to take a picture of him dead because Nuon Chea wanted proof that he was killed.”

Duch said he also killed eight westerners at Tuol Sleng on Nuon Chea’s orders. “Nuon Chea ordered me to burn their bodies with tires to leave no bones.” The victims were from America, Australia, Britain, France and New Zealand, theoretically making their killers indictable in their country of origin. He said the foreigners were held for a month and tortured using electric shocks by chief interrogator Mam Nay, now a police officer in western Cambodia.

Duch’s testimony could also bolster the case against Ta Mok, the one-legged general who was captured in March, but as of early may, the authorities in Phnom Penh had made no effort to summon Duch to give evidence. “Ta Mok had his own prison,” Duch said—a revelation previously unknown to investigators. “It was located at Cherie O’Phnoe in Kampot province. Many were killed there.”

Duch said his technique for killing prisoners was superior to Mok’s. “I knew from experience that if they were only tortured they wouldn’t say anything. So torture had to be accompanied by psychological tactics; so I told them they would be released if they talked. This was a lie, but it worked. Ta Mok didn’t care about the mental state of his victims. He just tortured them and killed them.”

Duch’s execution methods were similarly efficient.” We had no instruction from the party on how to kill them, but we did not use bullets. Usually we slit their throats,” he said, drawing his finger across his aorta to demonstrate. “We killed them like a chicken.”

Asked about the thousands of women and children he killed, Duch turned away as tears welled in his eyes. “It was a fact that everyone in the Communist party knew that everyone arrested must be killed. Ask anybody in the party.”

Now that his past has been revealed, Duch clearly fears for his life. He sometimes spoke only in whispers, referring to Khmer Rouge leaders by their initials so that listeners would not recognize their names. At other times, he asked to be driven to remote areas to speak in a vehicle where he couldn’t be overheard. Over two weeks, the REVIEW conducted over forty hours of interviews that shed unprecedented light onto the workings of the Khmer Rouge.

“The decisions to kill were not made by one man, not just Pol Pot, but the entire central committee,” Duch stressed.

“Nuon Chea, he was the principal man for the killings. Pol Pot was interested in military strategy. Khieu Samphan did not have the right to decide who to arrest and order killed. He was a notetaker.”

“Pol Pot knew about S-21, but did not direct it personally. He left that job personally to Nuon Chea as No. 2 in the party and Son Sen as head of the army and police.” Then, shaking his head, he added: “They arrested nearly everyone by the end.”

The decision to purge thousands of cadre in the eastern zone in 1978 was taken at a secret meeting of top leaders, Duch said. “Pol Pot ordered it. At the meeting were Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot, and Son Sen.”

Duch said the purge reached its worst in the last weeks of 1978. “My prison was full. Nuon Chea ordered 300 (Khmer Rouge) soldiers arrested. He called to meet me and said, ‘Don’t bother to interrogate them—just kill them.’ And I did.”

The purge didn’t save the movement. Angered by repeated cross-border attacks by the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978 and captured Phnom Penh within two weeks. “It is true that the last days before the Vietnamese came I personally killed the remaining prisoners” at Tuol Sleng, Duch said. “I was called by Nuon Chea to his office and he ordered me to kill all the remaining prisoners.”

“I asked Nuon Chea to allow me to keep one Vietnamese prisoner alive to use for propaganda on the radio and he replied, ‘Kill them all. We can always get more and more.’”

“I was like a waterboy for Nuon Chea. He didn’t tell me that the Vietnamese were invading so I had no time to burn the documents. When I met Nuon Chea in 1983, he told me, ‘All the papers from the Party were burned except for yours. You are stupid.’”

Thousands of forced confessions bearing notations that Duch identified as his own, or those of Nuon Chea and others, were left behind at Tuol Sleng. The documents, including orders to torture and kill prisoners, would serve as key evidence in any trial of Khmer Rouge leaders.

“I think a trial is a very good idea. It is a good thing to arrest Ta Mok and Nuon Chea. And if Pol Pot and Son Sen were still alive, they should be tried as well. Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan did not have the right to decide the killings by themselves,” Duch said.

Pol Pot committed suicide in 1998, a year after ordering the murder of Son Sen. Khieu Samphan lives in Pailin with Nuon Chea and Ieng Sary, the former Khmer Rouge foreign minister.

Duch, who worked for several years for foreign aid organizations under various aliases, is uncertain about the future. “I guess that I will have to go to jail now, but it is OK. The killings must be understood. The truth should be known.”

Additional excerpts from Thayer’s interviews with Duch will be posted on May 7 on the REVIEW’s Web site. www.feer.com

 

End of Story?: Last Khmer Rouge defections don't bring closure - yet By Nate Thayer in Bangkok

End of Story?: Last Khmer Rouge defections don't bring closure -  yet

By Nate Thayer in Bangkok

Far Eastern Economic Review

December 17, 1998

After 28 years and more than 2 million dead, the war in Cambodia ended on December 4. That was the day the last remnants of the Khmer Rouge agreed to lay down their guns and accept the authority of the government in Phnom Penh.

   Conspicuously absent from the deal, however, were the names of the
three most senior Khmer Rouge leaders: military supremo Ta Mok, political
leader Khieu Samphan, and former party No. 2 Nuon Chea. International investigators want to see all three indicted for crimes against humanity for their role in the Khmer Rouge's brutal 1975-79 rule over Cambodia.

  The REVIEW has learned that Thai authorities are detaining all three at the request of the United States. Thai and Khmer Rouge sources say U.S. officials have requested that Thailand hold the trio until an international tribunal is created to try the architects of Cambodia's "killing fields."

     Senior Khmer Rouge and government military commanders negotiated the Khmer Rouge defection in a series of secret meetings at the temple ruins of Preah Vihear, in the remote northern jungles near the Thai border, Khmer Rouge Gen. Khem Nuon told the REVIEW on December 4. Phnom Penh confirmed the agreement the next day.

     The guerilla military commanders, who defected with as many as 5,000 soldiers and up to 30,000 civilians from the Thai-Cambodian border, will be integrated into the government and armed forces, according to Nuon and Cambodian government officials. In exchange, the guerillas have vowed to lay down their arms, don the government uniforms, and recognize the new government and constitution. They will in effect be given an
autonomous zone where the central government wields little influence.

     The decision follows two years of steady defections from the Khmer Rouge, who have been weakened by bloody infighting, a halt to foreign assistance, low morale and the evaporation of popular support. Though Khmer Rouge leaders say they still oppose Hun Sen's government, they have recognized the futility of further armed struggle. "We all agree to join the government. We are tired of war. We will fight politically for the peasants
from now on," says Khem Nuon.

     Ta Mok, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea - the top three Khmer Rouge leaders following the April death of Pol Pot - were not among the defectors. According to Nuon, they are "retired and play no role."

A source close to the guerilla leaders says Thai authorities are holding the three, separately, in Sisaket province near the Cambodian border. "They are in a bad position," the source says. Thai and Khmer Rouge officials add that U.S. officials, who want to see the three tried for crimes against humanity, asked that they be detained. (U.S. officials refused to comment, and the Thai government denied that the Khmer Rouge leaders were on Thai soil.)

     There's no guarantee that they will be brought to trial, however. Both guerilla and government sources say they expect that Khieu Samphan,  a former Khmer Rouge diplomat who has at times been the public face of the movement, is likely to be granted amnesty by the Cambodian government in coming months.

     Even more significantly, an appropriate international tribunal has yet to be created, and doing so may be difficult. Prime Minister Hun Sen has said that such a tribunal should be held in Cambodian territory and controlled by Cambodian authorities. The major democracies, which want to maintain a policy of engagement with Hun Sen, may be reluctant to confront him on the issue. "The U.S. wants to influence and guide the leader, not alienate him," says a U.S. diplomat.

     However, the United Nations sent foreign experts to Cambodia in November to assess the prospect for creating an effective tribunal -  and they are not likely to be so diplomatic. They say Hun Sen's proposal would be unacceptable, as any tribunal would have to be controlled by an independent judicial process, like the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague for the former Yugoslavia. "We will not be party to a judicial farce," says a foreign expert close to the UN team.

     Hun Sen's reluctance to see the creation of an independent tribunal is understandable. He is a former Khmer Rouge commander, and his government is filled with former Khmer Rouge; some defected when he did, in 1977, and others defected in recent years. They include the ministers of defence, interior, justice, finance and foreign affairs, as well as hundreds of officers in the military, security service and civilian administration.

     Among the most notorious is Keo Pok, a former senior Khmer Rouge cadre who became a government official after defecting in March. In charge of purges in the 1970s that killed at least tens of thousands, his role is detailed in documents captured from Tuol Sleng, where the Khmer Rouge tortured and executed more than 16,000 people.

    Mam Nay, another defector, served as chief interrogator at Tuol Sleng and is implicated in the murder of thousands. His signature is on scores of documents detailing the torture and killing of political opponents. He currently grows corn in western Cambodia.

     The demise of the Khmer Rouge began in earnest in July 1996, when thousands rebelled against Pol Pot and other leaders who wanted to return to open warfare against the government formed after the UN-sponsored 1993 elections. The government backed the rebellion, led by Ieng Sary and senior field commanders. Pol Pot and other leaders holed up in the northern jungles deemed the Khmer Rouge rebels traitors and "worse
than excrement." "We want to make one thing clear. We will never
surrender," one senior cadre, Mak Ben, told the REVIEW at the time. "As long as there is grass, we can eat the grass." He defected to the government in July 1997.

     In June 1997, Pol Pot's paranoia about traitors from within peaked. He ordered the assassination of his long-time comrade and defence minister, Son Sen, brutally murdering 16 of his family members in the process. Also targeted was Ta Mok, the one-legged military commander known as "the butcher," who escaped, mustered his troops and overthrew Pol Pot.

     But under Ta Mok's leadership, little improved. By March 1998 he was losing many of his troops to mass defections. An offensive by former loyalists then forced Pol Pot, Ta Mok and thousands of troops and civilians to retreat to the jungles near the Thai border.

     On April 15, Pol Pot died - of a "broken heart," his wife told the REVIEW -  and a livid Ta Mok continued to demand all-out warfare against defectors. "They are traitors who will all die," he said. Ta Mok's interpreter that day was Tep Kunnal, a senior political official and former UN diplomat. During the interview, he turned and whispered grimly: "This movement is finished."

     Later, as he plotted his own escape, Tep Kunnal sent a letter that revealed the bizarre idealism of a movement responsible for one of history's worst mass murders. "How great our sorrow is when we lose someone that we nourish and love dearly," Kunnal wrote. "But here it is not only the loss of someone's life, but the life of a movement that involves hundreds of thousands of human lives that have perished. You can imagine our grief." [End]

Ambiguous Alliances: Can the Khmer Rouge survive Pol Pot? By Nate Thayer

Ambiguous Alliances: Can the Khmer Rouge survive Pol Pot?

Far Eastern Economic Review                 

By Nate Thayer in Phnom Penh              

July 3, 1997

(This article came out 8 days before the Cambodian coup d-etat and the country erupted into civil war, and a few weeks before Pol Pot was put on jungle trial)                            

              It's the philosopher's classic conundrum-in
              reverse. From the dense jungles of northwestern
              Cambodia has come the sound of a giant tree
              falling. But since nobody in Phnom Penh has seen
              it happen, nobody's certain it has.

              Now, internal Khmer Rouge documents obtained by
              the REVIEW throw the first clear light on the
              bizarre developments surrounding Pol Pot's
              recent "arrest" by former loyalists-and on the
              path the rebel movement aims to take towards
              political legitimacy. The documents suggest that
              the events of early June were precipitated by a
              deal struck in May, after three months of secret
              negotiations, between moderate elements of the
              Khmer Rouge and the Funcinpec party of First
              Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh.

              The deal, in turn, is rooted in the long-running
              feud between Cambodia's two premiers, both of
              whom are jockeying for alliances ahead of
              general elections scheduled for 1998. It seeks
              to unite the disparate political and military
              forces-Funcinpec, opposition leader Sam Rainsy's
              Khmer National Party and the Khmer
              Rouge-arraigned against the Cambodian People's
              Party of Second Prime Minister Hun Sen. The
              rivalry between the two prime ministers may
              offer the Khmer Rouge an opportunity to return
              to the legitimate political arena, analysts say.

              The two premiers recently made a rare display of
              solidarity when they appeared together on June
              21 to announce the seizure of Pol Pot and agreed
              that he should be brought before an
              international tribunal. But seasoned Cambodia
              watchers say the two men were putting on a show
              for an international audience. Behind the public
              smiles, they say, the Ranariddh-Hun Sen rivalry
              remains intense. Indeed, some political analysts
              worry that the shifting alignments in Phnom Penh
              could eventually throw the country back into
              civil war.

              Ranariddh's courting of the Khmer Rouge is rich
              with irony. In 1970, his father, Prince Norodom
              Sihanouk, had formed a similar alliance with a
              relatively unknown Pol Pot. At the time, their
              common enemy was the United States-backed Lon
              Nol regime.

              In 1970, the Khmer Rouge needed Sihanouk's
              prestige to emerge from the jungles and onto the
              political stage. Now, the rebels are banking on
              Ranariddh's legitimacy to revive their fortunes.

              But there is one crucial difference: Funcinpec
              cannot ally itself with a Khmer Rouge that
              includes the widely reviled Pol Pot. Sources
              close to the negotiations say the Khmer Rouge
              leadership was told they would have to separate
              themselves from Pol Pot in order to make the
              alliance palatable for local and international
              consumption. The 69-year-old guerrilla leader
              apparently went along with the deal until he
              realized it would mean his own eviction and
              perhaps exile.

              The Khmer Rouge documents explain what happened
              next. Pol Pot called a meeting of senior leaders
              on the night of June 9, at a jungle encampment
              near his headquarters at Anlong Veng in the
              northern jungle. When former Defence Minister
              Son Sen refused to turn up, a Pol Pot loyalist
              was dispatched to execute him, his wife and 16
              members of his family. Khmer Rouge army chief Ta
              Mok, apparently sensing that a purge was under
              way, slipped out of the meeting and fled into
              the thick jungle.

              The events of the next few days remain shrouded
              in confusion. Pol Pot loyalists maintained
              control of Khmer Rouge Radio at least until June
              12, when they broadcast a report denouncing Son
              Sen as a "traitor." The radio then fell silent.

              It came back to life briefly on June 16, to
              announce that "treason of Pol Pot took place on
              the night of June 9 to June 14 . . . This
              incident was resolved and normalcy restored as
              of June 14."

              One Khmer Rouge document, dated June 18, says
              that the leadership uncovered a plan by Pol Pot
              to kill other senior cadres in an attempt to
              scuttle the deal with Funcinpec. "Pol Pot had
              prepared a plan to kill the just and good
              leaders and cadres who are loyal to our
              principles and our good leadership," says the
              document. Pol Pot's actions, it adds,
              compromised the "internal solidarity . . . and
              the spirit of our agreements." Sources close to
              the Khmer Rouge say this is a reference to the
              deal with Funcinpec.

              There are other, more obvious indications of a
              Funcinpec-Khmer Rouge alliance. Recent Khmer
              Rouge Radio broadcasts have expressed support
              for the National United Front, an anti-Hun Sen
              coalition created by Ranariddh and Rainsy
              earlier this year. In a May 21 internal document
              obtained by the REVIEW, Khmer Rouge President
              Khieu Samphan said "it should be possible for
              all national forces to unite within the
              framework of the NUF." The previous day,
              Ranariddh had announced "a very great welcome"
              to Khieu Samphan and the Khmer Rouge into the
              alliance.

              Ranariddh has since admitted to secretly meeting
              Khieu Samphan on June 1 in the remote northern
              provincial capital of Preah Vihear. In the days
              following Pol Pot's apparent ouster, Khmer Rouge
              Radio openly said the guerrillas would "uphold
              the stand of supporting the National United
              Front with . . . Ranariddh as the chairman."

              Later, after a brief street battle on June 17
              between bodyguards loyal to the two premiers in
              Phnom Penh, Khmer Rouge radio announced an
              "appeal to all combatants," to "unite in
              launching an offensive against the puppets, with
              Hun Sen as the most active ringleader, in an
              increasing vigorous and militant manner."

              Hun Sen's response was to issue Ranariddh an
              ultimatum on June 18: The first prime minister,
              he said, must choose to "join the Khmer Rouge or
              [remain in] the Royal government."

              Earlier, on June 6, Hun Sen said Ranariddh was
              "rescuing the Khmer Rouge from ruin" and "taking
              the wrong route by using the Khmer Rouge's Khieu
              Samphan as a political counterweight to us."

              The effectiveness of that counterweight is far
              from certain. For one thing, there's still
              considerable confusion over Pol Pot's fate. Nor
              is it clear who is in control of the Khmer
              Rouge-and whether the current leadership can
              recast the rebels as a moderate, politically
              acceptable force. Rebel radio has announced that
              "a new era has begun," but has said little about
              Pol Pot's hardline comrades-in-arms.

              For instance, no mention has been made of Nuon
              Chea, Pol Pot's chief ideologue, or of Ta Mok,
              the military commander who directly controls the
              bulk of the rebel troops. Cambodian military
              officials who have been meeting with the rebels
              in recent days say Ta Mok-one of the architects
              of the Khmer Rouge's "killing fields" rule from
              1975 to 1979-was a key figure in organizing the
              purge of Pol Pot. Analysts say it would be just
              as hard for Ranariddh to do a deal with Ta Mok
              as it was with Pol Pot.

POL POT: UNREPENTANT An Exclusive Interview By Nate Thayer

POL POT: UNREPENTANT

An Exclusive Interview

Cover Story

Far Eastern Economic Review

October 30, 1997

(Three story cover package)

The world holds Pol Pot responsible for the deaths of more than 1 million Cambodians. But the former Khmer Rouge leader, now a jungle captive of ex-comrades, expresses no remorse. In an historic, exclusive interview with Nate Thayer he defends himself as a patriot. His two-hour exposition ranges over the notorious killing fields, atrocities, party intrigues and his own early life. Plus:The first ever interview with Khmer Rouge strongman Ta Mok

Day of Reckoning: Pol Pot breaks an 18-year silence to confront his past. In defending his murderous rule, he sheds new light on the dark secrets of the Khmer Rouge 

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng

Far Eastern Economic Review

October 30, 1997

P OL POT is dying. He's helped slowly out of the backseat of a blue four-wheel drive truck, then stands unsteadily in the dust of the narrow road, smiling shyly and raising his clasped hands to his face in a traditional greeting.

He needs to grasp my arm to walk the 25 meters to an open-air hut, in a clearing hacked out of the dense jungles of the Dangrek mountains. His breathing labored, he eases himself down at a simple wooden table.

A deferential young KR cadre places a plastic bottle of water and a coffee jar filled with salt in front of him. Pol Pot adjusts his traditional peasant scarf, his face drawn and eyes blinking rapidly, and looks sadly across the table at the nearest thing to an interrogator he has ever faced.

The man who presided over the Cambodian holocaust is about to give his first interview in 18 years. It's his chance to make some kind of peace with his bloodstained past, to try to atone for a four-year reign of terror that left a million or more of his countrymen dead.
He refuses.

"I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people," he rasps, his voice almost a whisper. He pauses, fixing his interviewer with an almost pleading expression. "Even now, and you can look at me, am I a savage person? My conscience is clear."

In a two-hour interview, Pol Pot is chillingly unrepentant about the horrors of his 1975-1978 rule over Cambodia. His humanity shows only when he talks about himself or his family; he describes in detail his youth, the origins of his political ideology, his health problems and his 12-year-old daughter's difficulties in school.

Grilled on his culpability for the mass murders, disease and starvation of the late 1970s - when his regime tried to turn Cambodia into a collectivist agrarian utopia - he comes back time and again with the same basic line: The KR made "mistakes," but without their unrelenting struggle Cambodia would have been swallowed by Vietnam.

"I do not reject responsibility - our movement made mistakes, like every other movement in the world. But there was another aspect that was outside our control - the enemy's activities against us. I want to tell you, I'm quite satisfied on one thing: If we had not carried out our struggle, Cambodia would have become another Kampuchea Krom in 1975," he says, referring to the Mekong Delta region, seized by Vietnam from the Khmer empire in the 17th century.

Pol Pot even claims that the notorious Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, where the KR meticulously documented their torture and execution of 16,000 suspected "enemies," was a Vietnamese propaganda exhibit.

Yet the rare trip into the KR stronghold of Anlong Veng yielded some stunning revelations. The KR commander who ousted Pol Pot in June, Ta Mok, acknowledged in his first interview ever that "hundreds of thousands" of people had died during the group's time in power. Neither he nor other KR leaders interviewed would admit personal responsibility; instead, they point fingers at Pol Pot or one another.

Pol Pot does admit that he ordered the killing of his longtime comrade-in-arms Son Sen, slain on June 10 along with 14 family members, including grandchildren. "You know for the other people, the babies, the young ones, I did not order them to be killed. For Son Sen and his family, yes. I feel sorry for that. That was a mistake that occurred when we put our plan into practice. I feel sorry. You asked me to say something." Then he says abruptly: "Now I want to talk about the present situation in Cambodia."

It was Son Sen's killing that brought about Pol Pot's ouster from the helm of the revolutionary movement he led for 37 years. Ta Mok, who was also targeted but escaped, arrested Pol Pot on June 19. Five weeks later, Pol Pot was brought before a "people's tribunal" in Anlong Veng and sentenced to life imprisonment for Son Sen's murder.

The KR decided to make Pol Pot's ouster public, hoping to win international support for their battle against the government of Premier Hun Sen. They allowed this journalist to witness the July 25 tribunal, the first time Pol Pot had been seen by a journalist in 18 years. But an interview with the deposed leader took months more to arrange, through intensive contacts with a series of secret operatives both inside and outside of Anlong Veng. It took place on October 16.

For now, that's as far as the KR will go. Pol Pot is not going to be turned over to an international tribunal to face charges of crimes against humanity, Ta Mok said in a separate interview. "I will turn Pol Pot over no problem, if you bring Hun Sen and they go together," he says, setting an unrealistic condition.

Trial or no trial, Pol Pot's line of defence is the same: His youthful, inexperienced movement made "mistakes" under pressure from its enemies, but they saved the country from Vietnamese annexation. Asked whether he wanted to apologize for the suffering he caused, he looks genuinely confused, has the interpreter repeat the question, and answers: "No."

"We had no other choice. Naturally we had to defend ourselves," he says. "The Vietnamese... wanted to assassinate me because they knew without me they could easily swallow up Cambodia."

The anti-Vietnamese rhetoric isn't surprising: the ultra-nationalism of the KR became evident when they started raiding the territory of their erstwhile Vietnamese communist allies in Vietnam in the years after seizing power. But Pol Pot reveals that distrust between the two communist movements dates back to at least 1970, when Le Duan and other Vietnamese leaders tried to persuade him to take nominal command of a combined Cambodian-Vietnamese-Laotian army to fight the American-backed governments in Phnom Penh and Saigon.

"Le Duan and Le Duc Tho, they told us: 'You don't have to fight. You should wait until the Vietnamese victory then the Vietnamese will come and liberate you'," Pol Pot says.

Instead, he raced to beat the Vietnamese to victory. He says that by capturing Phnom Penh on April 17, two weeks before the communist victory in Saigon, the KR saved Cambodia from Vietnamese communist occupation. And immediately, he contends, he took steps to balance Vietnamese influence in Cambodia. "In May 1975, I sent my foreign minister to Thailand because I knew that the east is very savage... what I wanted was to have a friend in the West. Vietnam was furious at me."

There may be truth in Pol Pot's claim that Vietnam had designs on Cambodia. But he goes on, outrageously, to blame even the mass starvation during his rule on the Vietnamese. Nobody knows the precise figure, but during their 1975-1978 rule the "Democratic Kampuchea" regime killed perhaps 200,000 people, many from its own ranks. For every person executed, perhaps seven more died of starvation or disease as a result of the KR's inept central policies.

"To say that millions died is too much. Another aspect you have to know is that Vietnamese agents, they were there. There was rice, but they didn't give rice to the population," Pol Pot claims.

Even more outrageous is Pol Pot's claim that Phnom Penh's notorious Tuol Sleng prison was a "Vietnamese exhibition" set up for propaganda purposes after Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978 and drove the KR from power. Scholars say the KR documented each of the 16,000 people whom they tortured and executed, often on Pol Pot's direct orders.

In fact, admissions he makes in the interview link Pol Pot directly to Tuol Sleng. He acknowledges that he ordered the arrest and murder of political enemies, accusing them of collusion with Vietnam. These included Vorn Vet, Hu Num, and Hu Yuon, fellow standing committee members killed after the KR took power. "Those people were in the central leadership of Democratic Kampuchea, but they were not the people of Democratic Kampuchea," he says. "In 1976... that group of people you were talking about, they set up a coup d'etat committee, especially against me. In that committee there were Vietnamese agents in the majority." He names "Comrade Ya" - the nom de guerre of Men San, who commanded the northeast region - as chief conspirator.

KR documents obtained by the Post show that Ya was tortured to death on Pol Pot's orders at the Phnom Penh prison. In a handwritten September 1976 note accompanying a "confession" extracted from Ya under torture, notorious Tuol Sleng chief Duch writes that he "reported this morning at 0910 to the Organization about Ya." The Organization is how Pol Pot was officially known.

"The Organization decided that if this guy continues stubbornly to hide his traitorous linkages and activities, that he should be executed and not allowed to play games any more ... Therefore, with this Ya you can forcefully use the hot method and for prolonged periods, even if you slip and it kills him." The document ends with a chilling addendum: "Ya to read so that he can think it over carefully."

Pol Pot demonstrated that same willingness to turn on his closest comrades 21 years later, when he ordered the killing of Son Sen, his longtime defense minister. In a soft monotone that contrasts starkly with the subject matter, he tried to justify the murder, saying that he had discovered proof that Son Sen was conspiring against him. The principle evidence? "The brother of Son Sen, Son Chhum... even let his daughter marry people who worked with Hun Sen. So the connection has been established."
Pol Pot's paranoia may have helped him survive as a guerrilla fighter, but it ultimately led his movement to self-destruct, fracturing into rival factions. It's a process that began soon after the group took power, and resumed with new intensity in mid-1996. As a result, separate KR groups are now scattered throughout the country, many of them aligned with Funcinpec or the CPP - whose premier, Hun Sen, himself defected from the KR in 1978.

"Pol Pot's stance got even loftier, and our territory got even smaller," says an elderly Anlong Veng villager. "He saw enemies as rotten flesh, swollen flesh. He saw enemies surrounding. Enemies in front, enemies behind, enemies to the north, enemies to the south... leaving us no place to breathe."
Indeed, only six of the original 22 members of the Democratic Kampuchea party central committee survived their years in power unscathed, according to documents obtained from Tuol Sleng. The rest died, or survived only because they were rescued from Tuol Sleng, ironically, by the invading Vietnamese army.

After that, the KR rose from the ashes, with military or political support from China, Asean and Western powers opposed to Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia. They capitalized on the animosity towards Vietnam that permeates Cambodian society.

But since the 1993 UN-run elections, which the KR boycotted, the movement's cannibalization has resumed. Of the nine younger military commanders chosen in 1985 to form the new generation of leadership, six have defected to the Cambodian government and two were arrested for killing Son Sen. In August 1996, senior leader Ieng Sary and more than half of the KR fighters in the northwest broke with Pol Pot, Son Sen, Ta Mok and Khieu Samphan, rallying around the town of Pailin.

While Khieu Samphan is officially head of the KR remnant in Anlong Veng, Ta Mok is clearly the strongman. In fact, Khieu Samphan seems to retain sympathy for Pol Pot. On June 12, in a clandestine radio broadcast, he called Son Sen a "traitor." Asked if he was a hostage of Pol Pot when he made that broadcast, Samphan replies unconvincingly: "You could call it something like that." He refuses to elaborate.

The turmoil has shaken the movement to its core. "All of us - our parents, our children - are poor peasants. We agreed to abandon everything for many years to join the struggle," says Khem Nuon, Ta Mok's chief-of-staff. "And ultimately, in order to kill each other? How can that be?"

So has the KR movement truly turned on its master, Pol Pot? Certainly Ta Mok says so: "Pol Pot's hands are filled with blood." And from Pol Pot's own words, the answer also seems yes. "For me it is over. Over politically, and over as a human being."

Since his sentencing, Pol Pot says he has been confined to a wood-and-thatch hut, where he's virtually bedridden and sometimes on oxygen. When he discusses his health problems he becomes animated, a contrast to the implacable way he discussed those who died under his rule. "You look at me from the outside, you don't know what I have suffered. If you allow me, I would like to tell you about my sickness.

"One night around 2 a.m. I woke up to go to the bathroom," he says, describing an apparent stroke he suffered in late 1995. "My left eye was closed. I thought that maybe nothing was wrong. But when I came back my eye just did not work any more... Now my left side from my head to my toe does not work. And my left eye is 95 percent blind. That is why when I walk it is not normal."

As the interview nears its second hour, Pol Pot often licks his parched lips and sips from his glass of water. Sometimes he becomes annoyed when he is interrupted or his answers are challenged. But he never raises his voice. And he seems eager to elicit sympathy. "In Khmer we have a saying that when one is both quite sick and old there remains only one thing, that you die."

Pol Pot says his days are bleak. His books have been confiscated, and he rarely gets out of bed. "I have nothing to do now," he says, adding that the hut is plagued with mosquitoes.

He listens to the radio every morning: both the clandestine Democratic Kampuchea radio and the Voice of America. "I want to listen to VOA every night as well, but sometimes I fall asleep," he says, complaining that the morning broadcast isn't as interesting as the evening one.

"I feel a little bit bored, but I have become used to that. You know, I can't even play with my daughter or my wife any more because in the morning, even after I wake up, I can't get out of bed. I stay still while my wife occupies herself with gardening and sewing. My daughter gathers wood and works in the kitchen. But we are together for dinner... We dine together at a small table."

He speaks with fatherly affection of his only child, aged 12. "She is a good daughter, a good person. She gets along with the others quite well. "But he says she isn't doing as well in some school subjects as others. On that score, "she is like me." When she grows up, will she be proud to say she is the daughter of Pol Pot? "I don't know about that. It's up to history to judge," he responds.

Then Pol Pot, with an engaging smile, apologizes and says he needs to go back to the hut and lie down. "I feel very, very tired," he says.

He is helped to his feet, unable to rise on his own. As he's assisted down the steps and along the jungle path, he pauses to offer pleasantries to hovering cadres, who remain grim-faced. Then he raises his hands together again in a polite farewell. Before climbing back into the truck, he turns to one of his captors and says softly: "I want you to know that everything I did, I did for my country."

 

On the Stand

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng

Far Eastern Economic Review

October 30, 1997

There are good reasons to be worried when coming face-to-face with the man responsible for one of the worst mass murders in history. But Nate Thayer was most worries that Pol Pot wouldn’t talk, or would cut off the interview after a few minutes. So from the outset he hit Pol Pot with the big question: Does he admit guilt for his murderous 1975-78 rule? It was a question that Thayer pressed again and again. Because Pol Pot is more likely to die than be turned over to an international tribunal, the jungle interview may be as close to a courtroom as he ever gets.

Thayer’s interpreter, a senior Khmer Rouge cadre, tried to beg out of his translating duties, perhaps anticipating the tone of the questions. Thayer speaks conversational Khmer, but he prevailed upon the interpreter to translate both the questions and answers while a tape recorder and television camera rolled. Here are excerpts, starting with Thayer’s opening questions.

 

Q Nate Thayer: He knows he is accused of leading and organization that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and that he has been condemned by most of the world for it. Is he a mass murderer, or what has he contributed to his country?

A Pol Pot: I think that you can raise all of the questions at one time, and some questions I think that I can answer connecting one to another to simplify things. But it's up to you...

Q: I'm interested in the issues of the time he was in power between 1975 and 1979. The millions of people who indeed did suffer during that time, and whether he feels that he's fairly accused. That's one question, let's start with.

A: Yes, I want to reply. Your question is not unfamiliar. That question has been raised time and again: I would like to say first that my conscience is clear. Everything I have done and contributed is first for the nation and the people and the race of Cambodia.

[Pol Pot then spoke about how the Vietnamese wanted to take over Cambodia, adding "they wanted to assassinate me because they knew without me they could easily swallow up Cambodia".]

Q: I would like to hear all of that, and if he's willing to stay here for hours, I am too. But if we could please deal with this first. As you know, most of the world thinks that you're responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Cambodians who didn't deserve to suffer. Could you answer that question directly? Do you feel that you were indeed responsible for crimes against humanity, against your own people?

A: I'm going to reply. I want to tell you clearly. First, I would like to tell you that I came to carry out the struggle, not to kill people. Even now, and you can look at me, am I savage person? My conscience is clear... As I told you before, they fought against us, so we had to take measures to defend ourselves...

Q: You have an opportunity here, a historical opportunity. You know well that during your years in power, your policies - agrarian experiments, social and political organizations, the direct executions of many thousands of people - that many families suffered. The country itself also suffered because of your policies. Your fellow Cambodians want to know whether you feel any remorse, whether you acknowledge that you made very serious mistakes while you were in power?

A: There are two sides to it, as I told you: There's what we did wrong, and what we did right. The mistake is that we did some things against the people - by us and also by the enemy - but the other side, as I told you, is that without our struggle there would be no Cambodia right now.

Q: But for all those hundreds of thousands who suffered - not just died but suffered from forced labor, from lack of food, from what were clearly failed central policies while you were in power - don't you think that they deserve an apology?

A: For the wrong things of our struggle, as I told you, for the wrong things, it has been written in the book. This is a testimony before history.

Q: Which book?

A: The book is the "The Right and Wrong of Democratic Kampuchea". [Pol Pot was apparently referring to a political tract released by the Democratic Kampuchea movement, as the Khmer Rouge calls themselves, in the late 1980s.]

Q: But that acknowledged only 30,000 deaths. All independent scholars, from all political ideologies, acknowledge a minimum of hundreds of thousands of people who died as a result of failed central policies while you were in power...That is a fact. While you were in sole power-and all the other members of your standing committee say you were in full power-thousands of people died because of failed social policies of your government. Are you willing to acknowledge that fact?

A: As I told you, that was written in the book, and I'm tired of talking about it...

Q: Let's talk about Tuol Sleng. There is overwhelming evidence that you had overall responsibility for Tuol Sleng. Sixteen thousand people who signed confessions were executed, including women and children who were suspected CIA, KGB, Vietnamese agents. Were you responsible for Toul Sleng and do you really believe that those 16,000 - including women and children - were agents of a foreign government?

A: I was at the top. I made only big decisions on big issues. I want to tell you - Tuol Sleng was a Vietnamese exhibition; a journalist wrote that. People talk about Tuol Sleng, Tuol Sleng, Toul Sleng, but when we look at the pictures, the pictures are the same. When I first heard about Tuol Sleng, it was on VOA [Voice of America]. I listened twice. And there are documents talking about someone who did research about the skeletons of the people... They said when you look closely at the skulls, they are smaller than the skulls of the Khmer people.

Q: Are you saying that you never heard of Tuol Sleng before 1979?

A: No, I never heard of it. And those two researchers, they said that those skeletons, they were more than 10 years old.

Q: Sir, let me say that there is overwhelming scientific evidence, overwhelming proof that thousands of people, Cambodians, were executed at Toul Sleng while you were in control of Phnom Penh. There is no dispute among anybody else in the world outside of Anlong Veng, perhaps, that it is true.

 A:[No response.]

 

Forbidden City: New strongman Ta Mok Reaches out of isolation

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng

Far Eastern Economic Review

October 30, 1997

 

TA MOK, the one-legged Khmer Rouge general known to the outside world as "the butcher," smiles and chuckles warmly as he welcomes the first journalist he has ever met.

During a three-hour interview over a luncheon of fish and Pringles potato chips specially imported for the occasion, the man who overthrew Pol Pot speaks with a peasant's directness and the ease of a man in total control.

His words, though, are sometimes as chilling as his laugh is warm. In an unprecedented admission by a KR leader, he says "hundreds of thousands" died during the revolutionary regime's 1975-78 rule, though he blames their deaths on Pol Pot.

As for the thousands of fellow KR that his forces killed during the purges of 1978, he shrugs. Their leader, he explains, had been discovered to be Vietnamese.

The new KR strongman can seem a study in contradictions. He has earned a fearsome reputation as a military chief, but in person he comes across as grandfatherly. He is clearly revered by many of the approximately 60,000 people living under his control around Anlong Veng. It's and area almost completely isolated by mountains and dense, land-mine-strewn jungles, but Mok's development projects seem to have turned it into one of the more prosperous swaths of countryside in Cambodia.
But for Mok, 71, there's no contradiction. He's a peasant leader who defends what he sees as the interests of his people. And like Pol Pot, that includes an obsession with the perceived threat of Vietnamese domination. Mok would kill a Vietnamese intruder with the nonchalance with which a farmer plucks a leech off a bare leg.

Mok believes that what his people need now is international support for their guerrilla war against Premier Hun Sen. To that end, he has agreed to an unprecedented interview. Sitting in a wooden pavilion freshly painted with revolutionary slogans, he talks about supporting "liberal democracy." It's not clear if he really understands the term, but since he ousted Pol Pot in June, cadres say he has allowed new freedoms in the guerrilla zone.

The potential benefits of world acceptance are plainly evident form the hard-packed dirt logging road that snakes down the Dongrek escarpment from Thailand to Anlong Veng. Millions of dollars' worth of logs lie by the roadside, blocked from going anywhere by an international agreement that bars the export of timber without central government permission.

That permission isn't about to come: The central government is at war with the KR. Evidence of past battles is everywhere: The few concrete buildings in Anlong Veng are pockmarked by bullets and shrapnel, and government tanks disabled during intense fighting two years ago sprawl in the roadway, political graffiti now adorning their turrets.

Yet Anlong Veng is more than a battlefield. A two-day tour shows a wealth of agricultural projects, making it one of the more developed rural areas in Cambodia. Sophisticated dams, irrigating systems and other water projects are everywhere. Tractors and earth-moving vehicles imported through Thailand work the land.

Water spills over new concrete dams into rivers where dozens of villagers, many missing limbs from mines, haul in large fish with nets.

"The people here love grandfather because he cares very much about the well-being of the poor," says Noun Nov, a cadre in his 40s. Like many others in Anlong Veng, Nov has followed Mok since his mid-teens.

Indeed, Mok says it was his passion for rural development projects ("My hobby is agriculture") that cost him his leg. He stepped on a mine when building a road. "I was inspecting a road project. I was behind a bulldozer," he recalls, shifting his artificial limb.

Is this the one place where the KR's ideology, which caused the death of perhaps one million Cambodians in the 1970s, actually works? Hardly. Mok denies that he ever embraced communism. "I was a monk," he says, and when he was just 16 he was recruited into the resistance. "When I joined the Communist Party of Cambodia, I did not know what communism was," he says with a burst of laugher. "They told me the party is a patriotic one. That is why I joined the party. Later on I found that the Communist Party was sucking the blood of the people.

"When we talk about economic life, I have no theoretical ideology," says Mok. " What is policy? When we talk about life we talk about land and water. For the people, having these is having freedom and democracy."

Actually, KR cadres say Mok has introduced new freedoms in Anlong Veng in the four months since he ousted Pol Pot. Previously, there were no schools, while now scores of brightly dressed schoolchildren carrying notebooks can be seen casually returning home from lessons. Listening to radio other than the clandestine guerrilla station was forbidden; now they can listen freely to foreign broadcasts. "We can even watch TV," one cadre exclaims proudly.

Ironically, there are signs that opening up has spawned social problems the puritanical KR never faced before. Mok has responded in a characteristically KR way: "No Gambling" has been added to revolutionary slogans such as "Defeat for the Contemptible Yuon Enemy Aggressors" adorning the walls of Anlong Veng.

That's not the only new slogan. "Defeat for the Traitor Pol Pot Whose Hands Are Stained With Blood," "Long Live the Emerging Democracy," and "Cambodians Don't Kill Cambodians" are all freshly painted. Mok, who has basically spent his entire life in the jungle, seems to think the appearance of the new slogans will be enough to inspire Cambodians to rally in support of is movement.

"Reports reach me everyday saying that the new policy that 'Cambodians Don't Kill Cambodians' is a magic slogan indeed," he says.

Of course, killing Cambodians was exactly what the KR did during their years when Mok was at the very core of the leadership. Mok denies personal culpability for the mass murder of those years - a denial that scholars say is patently untrue. But in an unprecedented admission by a senior KR leader, he does admit that the regime committed wide-scale abuses.

"It is clear that Pol Pot has committed crimes against humanity," he says. "I don't agree with the American figure that millions died, but hundreds of thousands, yes."

Mok's venom for Pol Pot seems genuine and personal. Yet his denials of personal responsibility ring false, scholars say. For example, he claims no involvement in the Tuol Sleng prison. "Pol Pot alone was in charge of the prison," he insists.

Academics who are analyzing documents seized at Tuol Sleng, including 16,000 signed "confessions" of people who were tortured and executed there, say there's no doubt that Mok both ordered arrests and viewed " confessions". "His fingerprints are all over the place. The proof is irrefutable," says Stephen Heder, a professor at the University of London.

Mok's "butcher" nickname may have been earned in 1978. As commander of the southwestern zone of Cambodia and fifth-ranking party leader, he was ordered by Pol Pot to purge KR cadres from the eastern zone who were accused of conspiring with Vietnam. Zone commander Sao Phim and thousands of his loyalists were killed.

Asked about this brutal purge, Mok makes clear that he believes anyone associated with the Vietnamese is a fair target for murder. "I learned from documents produced by Pol Pot that Sao Phim was Vietnamese," he says of the fourth-ranking party leader.

Mok shrugs again in reference to two other leaders, Hu Num and Hu Yuon, who were killed under torture. "Sao Phim I can understand. This man was Vietnamese," he says, but he then adds that the deaths of "Hu Nim and Hu Yuon I do not understand."

Mok's virulent anti-Vietnamese statements come as no surprise. In 1993, his troops carried out numerous massacres of Vietnamese. "I have never taken a nap in my life, in order to go faster than the Vietnamese, to beat the Vietnamese, to not allow the Vietnamese to attack us," he says. He considers anyone working with Hun Sen or the CPP to be Vietnamese and thus a legitimate target for murder.
That may explain why the straight-talking guerrilla chief seems to feel no guilt for his role in the horrors of 1975-78. Asked about the deaths of those years, he laughs and waves his hand dismissively. "If my hands were stained with the blood of my compatriots, why would the people love me? Go ask them yourself."

Mok says that if he had the chance to live life differently, he would not have joined with Pol Pot, whose "hands are soiled with blood".

Yet his rejection of the long-time KR supremo seems rooted not in the crimes of the 1970s but those on June 1997, when Pol Pot ordered the killing of Son Sen and attempted to murder Mok in a power struggle.

Since the 1993 UN-sponsored elections, the KR had been fracturing, and Pol Pot had moved his base of operations, first from Trat in the southwest, to Pailin, then to Phnom Chhat in the northwest, Mok says. "From Phnom Chhat he came to ask me to stay here. Then....he tried to kill me and the people of Anlong Veng. How can I trust him?"

After nearly three hours talking about the revolutionary movement that has been his world for more than half a century, Mok says Pol Pot has been taken to a mountainside location and is waiting to be interviewed. "Ask Pol Pot whether he recognizes his faults. Ask him why he has assassinated his fellow Cambodians. After all that he has done, what more does he want?" Mok says, scoffing at the man he served for decades. He then asks the interviewer: "Can you still say that Pol Pot and I are not estranged?"

 

 

My Education: How Saloth Sar became Pol Pot

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng

Far Eastern Economic Review

October 30, 1997

The bones stacked in the Killing fields dotting Cambodia testify to the results of Pol Pot's 1975-1978 experiment in radical agrarian reform. Until now, however, the ideology that drove it has been left largely to the realm of speculation. Some scholars have described Pol Pot as a Cultural Revolution-style Maoist, while others have conjectured that a youthful grape-picking trip to Tito's Yugoslavia planted the seeds for his later break with the mainstream Marxists of the Soviet Union and Vietnam.

But Pol Pot tells his own story differently. He claims that as a student in France in 1949-53, he was influenced by a range of progressive movements-including, ironically, that of non-violent Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi.

In his first interview with a foreign journalist in 18 years, Pol Pot may have refused to repent for the horror of his rule, but he was clearly concerned with what the history books say about his personal life. He became animated in talking about his youth and family, after remaining impassive during questioning about the abuses of his rule.

Historians haven't even been able to agree on the ultra-secretive Pol Pot's birthday: Some say May 25, 1925, while others put it on the same day in 1927. Pol Pot said neither was correct: He was born in January 1925. "January-I remember, because my mother wrote it in chalk on the wall of the house, next to the cupboard," he said in Khmer, adding "janvier" in French to make sure there was no mistake. He had lied about his age, he said, to remain eligible for a scholarship.

Born Saloth Sar in Kampong Thom province, he attended secondary school in Phnom Penh and won a scholarship to France in 1949. Clearly defensive of his status as an "intellectual," Pol Pot volunteered that biographer David Chandler was "not entirely accurate" when characterizing him as a poor student. "I was not a bad student. I was average . . . I studied just enough to keep my scholarship. The rest of the time I just read books," he said.

It was those books, as well as the leftist student movements brewing in Europe in the years after World War II, that gave Pol Pot his early political education. "I looked at the second-hand books that were on sale along the Seine River, the old books that I loved to read," he recalled. "When I got money from my scholarship, I had to spend it on rent and food, so I only had 20 or 25 francs left to spend.

But I got a lot of books to read. For example, La Grande Revolution Francaise. I did not understand it all, but I just read. At the same time I saw the movement in India of Mahatma Gandhi. He was well known and I was very pleased with that. And later on Nehru.

"I started as a nationalist and then patriot and then I read progressive books. Before that time, I never read L'Humanite [the French communist party newspaper]. It scared me, " he smiled, "But I got used to it because of the student movement."

Pol Pot said there was nothing political about his trip or trips to Yugoslavia in the early 1950s. "I went to Yugoslavia because it was vacation time and I had no money. They organized a brigade... I paid just 2,000 francs, including everything. It wasn't influenced by any ideology. We just went for pleasure.

The next year . . . I went camping. So I cannot tell you of any single influence. Maybe it's a little from here, a little from there."

Pol Pot said his real political awakening, though, came upon his return home to Cambodia. "Before I went to France, my relatives, they lived comfortably. They were middle peasants. When I came back, I went to my village by bus. When I got off the bus, I met someone with a wagon. He asked my name and he said: 'Ah- you've come back!' And I look at him and see he's my uncle. And he asks me 'Do you want to go home?' I was shocked. Before he had a piece of land and a buffalo, now he had become a rickshaw-puller... I met and talked with the relatives who used to have land and buffaloes and had nothing now... What influenced me most was the actual situation in Cambodia."

The secrecy that made the Khmer Rouge so effective was, Pol Pot said, second nature to him. "Since my boyhood, I never talked about myself ... That was my nature. I was taciturn ... I'm quite modest. I don't want to tell people that I'm a leader ... I didn't tell anybody, not my brother, not my sister, because I didn't want to worry them. If anything happened to me, I didn't want them to have any connection to it. So some people think that I don't care about them. But on the contrary, I respect, I love my relatives. But I never revealed my political thinking to them."

Pol Pot said that it was as much "by chance" as anything that he became leader of the Cambodian communist party in 1960, when Tou Samouth disappeared. "There was nobody else to become secretary of the party, so I had to take charge," he said.

He vehemently denied that he had killed his "best friend", explaining in detail how Tou Samouth had been betrayed and arrested when he left his safe house in Phnom Penh to fetch medicine for his sick child. Tou Samouth was taken to the house of Lon Nol - the military commander who would later lead Cambodia- and interrogated for a week, Pol Pot said. "At that time I was his aide. If Tou Samouth had talked, I would have been arrested. He was killed at Stung Meanchey pagoda. We loved each other."

POL POT: THE END By Nate Thayer

POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

Far Eastern Economic Review

By Nate Thayer

August 7, 1997

In a stunning journalistic achievement, REVIEW correspondent Nate Thayer comes face-to-face with the elusive Pol Pot, architect of Cambodia’s killing fields. In a story packed with exclusive photos, Thayer describes Pol Pot’s jungle “trial,” and reveals the turmoil within the Khmer Rouge. Separate stories profile Pol Pot, introduce the new Khmer Rouge leadership, and shed new light on Cambodia’s deadly July coup and the suspected drug baron who financed it.

BROTHER NUMBER ZERO

On Other Pages:

19: Pol Pot Unmasked

21: New Face of the Khmer Rouge

22: Casualties of Hun Sen’s Coup

23: The Money Man Behind the Coup

24: On History’s Front Line

Pol Pot caused the deaths of more than a million Cambodians. But when he turned on his longtime military commander, Ta Mok, that was one Cambodian too many

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng, Cambodia

After a series of furtive rendezvous, using coded messages over mobile phones, I slipped into one of the most impenetrable, malarial-ridden and landmine-strewn jungles of the world: Khmer Rouge-controlled northern Cambodia. I was hoping to interview Pol Pot, one of the century’s most notorious and elusive mass murderers.

What I did not fathom, as I entered the Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng at 12:12 p.m. on July 25, was that I was about to witness nothing less than history.

“Long live! Long live! Long live the new strategy!” hundreds of voices chanted in unison. The clenched fists of the crowds pumped toward the sky, as a smiling middle-aged Khmer Rouge cadre led me toward an open-air mass meeting hall. Old artillery pieces and a captured Russian tank stood nearby.

“Crush! Crush! Crush! Pol Pot and his clique!” shouted the crowd on cue as we approached, their fists striking down towards the ground.

There, slumped in a simple wooden chair, grasping a long bamboo cane and a rattan fan, an anguished old man,  frail and struggling to maintain his dignity, was watching his life vision crumble in utter, final defeat.

This was how the “people’s tribunal’ began for Pol Pot, reviled around the world for personally orchestrating a reign of terror that left more than a million human beings dead and shattered the lives of many millions more.

The crude podium held a microphone, and crackling loudspeakers—powered by a car battery lying on the earthen floor—began to spew humiliating public denunciations of the long-time Khmer Rouge leader.

A shocking number of participants stood on crude wooden stumps, sat in home-made wheelchairs, or were missing eyes—sacrifices to the revolutionary cause of Pol Pot. Others, their arms blown off by landmines, were unable to join the frequent clapping as speaker after speaker denounced the man once venerated as “Brother Number One.”

“Our ultimate goal today is that the international community should understand that we are no longer Khmer Rouge and we are not Pol Potists!,” roared Ta Neou, the governor of the approximately 60,000 civilians who live in the area, which was under Pol Pot’s control until weeks ago.

The carefully orchestrated performance evoked the image of a grainy, black-and-white film clip from China’s Cultural Revolution. But the message was starkly different. “Long live the emergence of the democracy movement!” shouted individuals in the crowd, periodically interrupting leaders offering carefully crafted speeches at the microphone. A chorus would repeat the slogan, followed by prolonged applause by the roughly 500 participants. “Crush! Crush! Crush! Pol Pot and his murderous clique!”

Pol Pot sat alone, near three other manacled loyalists. Many in the crowd of women, children, and uniformed guerrillas seemed more interested at gazing at the first Westerner they had ever seen than in watching the traumatized old man sitting alone in a chair.

Each speaker, seemingly chosen to represent a sector of society—a farmer, an intellectual, a soldier, a woman—got up to denounce and humiliate Pol Pot “and his clique.”

Pol Pot often seemed close to tears as the vitriol was unleashed. In contrast,  three  younger army commanders put on trial alongside him had menacing, almost arrogant expressions, staring coldly into the eyes of the speakers, the crowd and the visiting reporter.

“We have sacrificed everything for the sake of the movement,” Ta Neou continued, “Our parents and all of us are children of peasants and farmers, we have sacrificed everything for the sake of the movement, but at the end we kill each other.”

Pol Pot, who ruled Cambodia for more than three years and ruled the Khmer Rouge for more than three decades, is genuinely finished. He has been denounced and imprisoned by his own movement. Not for the 1975-1978 Cambodian genocide, but for turning on his own comrades in an attempted purge in June, according to speakers at his trial.

Those commanders, led by longtime military commander Ta Mok, struck back and took Pol Pot prisoner after the purge failed. The tribunal sentenced Pol Pot to life imprisonment, but ruled out turning him over to international courts, where he could face charges of crimes against humanity.

The Khmer Rouge of Anlong Veng have good reason to try and distance themselves from the notorious Pol Pot. They want to attract international support for their struggle to unseat Cambodian premier Hun Sen. That is why they let a foreign reporter witness the show trial, the first time a journalist had entered Anlong Veng and left alive.

Yet lengthy interviews with Khmer Rouge cadre left little doubt that his ouster was authentic. Still, the cadres clearly saw it as a tragedy, and continued to treat the 72-year-old Pol Pot with Gentle respect.

The fall of Pol Pot underlines the view that the Khmer Rouge movement that ruled Cambodia in the 1970’s essentially no longer exists. The original leaders have largely been replaced by younger ones less steeped in communist ideology, and the movement has fractured into numerous factions, many of whom are allied with the mainstream political parties contesting power in Phnom Penh.

“It no longer makes any sense whatsoever to call whatever remains a Khmer Rouge movement,” says Stephen Heder, a Cambodian Scholar at the University of London’s School of Advanced International Studies. “Because of the realignment of forces over the last several years, the concept of a Khmer Rouge movement as we know it no longer has any meaning.”

But that doesn’t mean the Khmer Rouge have become irrelevant in Cambodia. The aggressive courting of Khmer Rouge factions by Cambodia’s rival premiers, Hun Sen and Prince Norodom Ranariddh, was central to the July 5-6 coup in Phnom Penh. In fact, the REVIEW has learned, the Khmer Rouge finalized their alliance with Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party on July 4. Worried that the balance of power would be tipped in his rival’s favour, Hun Sen ousted Ranariddh the next day.

 

Photo: Nate Thayer

Pol Pot also opposed those negotiations, and it led to his downfall, according to Khmer Rouge cadre interviewed in Anlong Veng. Virtually the entire leadership favoured a political deal with the royalist Funcinpec, but Pol Pot was opposed, said Gen. Khmer Nuon, who is now the Khmer Rouge’s army chief of staff.

“Domestically and internationally, Pol Pot has his own personal problems to take care of,” Khem Nuon said, referring to Pol Pot’s blood-soaked reputation. “He has no way out. That is why he keeps dragging this movement toward the darkness.”

The visit to Anlong Veng opened an unprecedented window into the inner workings of one of the world’s most secretive guerrilla movements. The Khmer Rouge have splintered dramatically since July 1996, when forces in western Cambodia, representing almost half the movement, broke with Pol Pot’s northern forces headquartered at Anlong Veng. The western split was headed by Ieng Sary, Pol Pot’s brother-in-law and longtime comrade-in-arms.

Khem Nuon said the western split was aimed against Pol Pot himself, but the 72-year-old leader blamed his top leaders—Ta Mok, Nuon Chea, and Son Sen—for losing the west by failing to heal the rift. “ So Pol Pot asked Mao—over there,” Khem Nuon explained, pointing to a young Khmer Rouge cadre standing listening to the interview,” to shoot Ta Mok and burn him—last October—to leave no evidence.”

The grim-faced young cadre, who looked capable of such a deed, nodded in agreement with his commander. But he didn’t carry out Pol Pot’s order. Because Ta Mok, who is known to the outside world as “The Butcher,” is immensely popular with the troops and civilians under his control. So Much so, Khem Nuon said, that Pol Pot saw him as a threat. “All the combatants here are under Ta Mok and they really like him a lot because he is so helpful to them in terms of standard of living. He built roads, bridges, dams within this area,” Khem Nuon said. “This is the reason Pol Pot wanted to get rid of Ta Mok.”

Pol Pot turned to two senior military field commanders, Gen. Sarouen and Gen. San, and attempted to consolidate power against Ta Mok. He called a mass meeting on February 25 of this year, and had them declared the new political and military leaders, replacing Ta Mok, Khem Nuon said. “What is the main cause that steered our people to rise up against Pol Pot? One, the leadership and the grip on power by Pol Pot was so long. All the power was within his hands,” Khem Nuon said. “Pol pot took decisions without even consulting the top leadership.”

About the same time, according to Cambodian government sources and diplomats, secret negotiations accelerated between envoys of Prince Ranariddh and elements of the Khmer Rouge in Anlong Veng. Most of these efforts were conducted by Ta Mok loyalists—often behind Pol Pot’s back—and the top royalist military commander, Gen. Nyek Bun Chhay. By May, the faction agreed in principle to join in alliance.

Increasingly isolated, Pol Pot launched a desperate attempt on June 9 to scuttle the peace deal by purging Ta Mok and other top leaders. That night, longtime defence minister Son Sen and 14 of his relatives, including a five-year-old child, were shot dead by Sarouen’s men, according to both Khmer Rouge and intelligence sources. “On the 9^th of June at 12:15 a.m., Pol Pot issued a direct order to take two Toyota pick-up trucks loaded with 20-30 soldiers to kill Mr. Son Sen,” said Khem Nuon.

The killings sparked several days of turmoil, with commanders fleeing into the jungle in disarray. But they rallied behind Ta Mok and trapped Pol Pot and his band of 300 remaining supporters on June 15, Khem Nuon said. Four days later, they had surrendered.

With Pol Pot neutralized, the remaining Khmer Rouge leadership moved rapidly forward to finalize a secret, tactical, political and military alliance with Ranariddh’s political faction. The two factions were allies against Hun Sen’s Phnom Penh government in a decade-long guerrilla war before Cambodia’s 1991 peace treaty.

The deal was closed July 4 in Anlong Veng. Hun Sen, learning about Funcinpec’s new alliance through his agents, launched his deadly coup the next morning, according to Cambodian political cadres and Asian intelligence sources. It has tipped Cambodia, which enjoyed four years of relative peace after 1993 United nations-sponsored elections, back into the throes of the warfare that seems to define this nation of 10 million people.

Hun Sen has claimed the entire tribunal was stage-managed by Pol Pot himself. Khem Nuon paints a very different picture, but he did say that Pol Pot had ‘consented’ to having a foreign reporter witness the mass meeting, as a way of acknowledging his guilt for moving against his comrades.

“ Pol Pot did himself confess to me clearly, after his arrest,” Khem Nuon said. “ When I met him the first time, he embraced me and burst into tears and said: ‘It is the right thing comrade that this has happened,’ and then he cried. It was on June 21, 1997, and he told me: ‘I am wrong, comrade, all the mistakes were made by me, alone,’ and then he cried.”

“ Pol Pot told me that this is the end of his life, he has nothing left, but he begged me to allow him to live,” Khem Nuon continued. “ I also want to make clear that if Pol Pot was vested with any credibility or respect, he would not have shown up and let you see him like you just did today.”

: I told him this morning that you were going to be here,” to witness his condemnation, Khem Nuon told the REVIEW. “ I told him that we want to prove to the world that we no longer want to associate ourselves with him. Then he consented.”

As the “People’s Tribunal of Anlong Veng” continued into its second hour, the new leaders somberly paced on the outskirts of the crowd, concerned by the deteriorating health of a now clearly weak and traumatized Pol Pot. Guerrilla officials acknowledged that Pol Pot suffered from serious heart disease and high blood pressure long before the events of recent days.

Khem Nuon said relatives and friends of those killed on June 9-10 wanted the blood of Pol Pot and his co-defendants San, Khon, and Sarouen—said to have carried out the murders on his orders. “ You notice that here today nobody was allowed to carry a weapon to this meeting, otherwise they would have been killed by the mob already,” Khem Nuon said.

But the cadre who overthrew Pol Pot seemed anguished as they watched the white-haired old man, who was dressed in loose cotton clothes with a blue-and-white Cambodian scarf looped around his neck. Confusion and sadness were etched on men who had spent their entire adult lives following Pol Pot from Cambodia’s jungles to its capital and back again.

“ We have put an end to the leadership which has betrayed our organization and the people,” Mak Ben, a bespectacled French-educated economist, dressed in a green Chinese-style military uniform, said from the podium. “ They are completely gone, as of right now, the Pol Pot regime has ended.”

“ Having acknowledged the betrayal of our group in recent months by Pol Pot and his clique,” the loudspeaker roared into the nearby forest, then Pol Pot’s crimes were read out. They included the murder of Son Sen, the attempted murder and ‘detention’ of Ta Mok and Nuon Chea, and “destroying the policy of national reconciliation,” a reference to the attempt to block the Funcinpec deal.

“These are the criminal acts—the betrayal by Pol Pot and his clique—against the people, the armed forces, and our cadre. In conclusion, we all decide to condemn and sentence this clique to life imprisonment.”

He immediately was helped up, unable to walk unassisted, by a guard in Chinese-style military fatigues. “ get someone under his other arm, get him more help,” Khem Nuon ordered. Patting his heart, Khem Nuon added: “ I am worried that he may die from the stress.”

Some people respectfully bowed, as if to royalty, as Pol Pot walked 25 meters to a waiting vehicle. “ I said what I said with a very heavy heart,” said Tep Kunnal, an emerging political leader, as he walked slowly away with his head bowed after denouncing Pol Pot. “ It is very, very difficult for me, but it had to be done. Before there were two dangers for Cambodia. Pol Pot and the Vietnamese puppet Hun Sen. Now there is only one.”

The cadres suggested that I ask Pol Pot questions while he was led away, but balked at translating when told the questions I wanted to pose. “ I cannot ask such a question to the leaders. You must ask them in Khmer yourself. It is better.”

Pol Pot, perhaps never to be seen alive again, was helped into a Toyota Landcruiser with tinted windows—captured booty from UN peacekeeping soldiers prior to the 1993 elections. Seconds after the trial ended, a torrential rain began.

 

POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

 

POL POT UNMASKED: He was obsessed with secrecy and total control

By Nate Thayer in Bangkok, Thailand

Far Eastern Economic Review

August 7, 1997

Pol Pot, whose name is synonymous with the Cambodian genocide, exercized total control over the Khmer Rouge for more than three decades from behind a wall of impenetrable secrecy.

By putting him on trial, his former comrades-in-arms have unmasked a man who shunned exposure, even when he was premier of Cambodia. They have also broken the vice-like grip on the movement he retained through a combination of charisma and utter ruthlessness.

Born to a peasant family in Kampong Thom on May 18t, 1925, Saloth Sar—Pol Pot’s real name—was educated at a Buddhist monastery before entering technical school in Phnom Penh. His clandestine life began in his teens, when he joined the anti-French resistance movement in Indochina during World War ll.  By 1946, he was a member of the underground Indochinese Communist Party.

In 1949, he won a scholarship to study radio electronics in Paris, where he was active in radical student politics. His studies, apparently, took a back seat and he failed his exams three years in a row. He spent one summer picking grapes in Tito’s Yugoslavia, where he may have acquired his radical communism that challenged Soviet-style orthodoxy.

It was also during his sojourn in France that he charmed Khieu Ponnary, whose sister was married to Ieng Sary, another future Khmer Rouge leader.

Returning to Phnom Penh with no degree, Pol Pot taught at a private secondary school and wrote articles for left-wing publications that he signed, “The Original Khmer.” His underground activities went farther than that, however. He became a senior member of the Cambodian Communist Party at its founding congress in 1960, and was named secretary in 1963 after the mysterious death of Tou Samouth.

It was then that his secret life became his whole life. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, no longer content to belittle the Cambodian communists as “me Khmer Rouges”—“My Red Khmers”—was stepping up police pressure. Pol Pot and his comrades fled into the jungle, leaving no trace. “When a secret is kept secret, 50% of the battle is won,” Pol Pot once said.

Twelve years later, after fighting first Sihanouk’s army and then American-backed troops of Gen. Lon Nol, the battle was won. On April 17, 1975, Pol Pot’s army of peasants, clad in simple black-cotton uniforms, marched into Phnom Penh. Finally, Pol Pot could put his ideas into action.

The result was one of the most brutal and disastrous social experiments in history. After emptying the capital at gunpoint, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge tried to transform Cambodia into a communal agrarian utopia, but instead turned the country into a vast slave-labour camp. More than one million Cambodians—out of a population of some 7 million—were executed, tortured, or starved to death under the Khmer Rouge reign of terror.

The educated were the first to be slain. But later, as the reign of terror turned on itself, waves of purges decimated the ranks of Khmer Rouge cadres. Anyone who could pose a threat to Pol Pot was killed.

Through it all, Pol Pot stayed behind his mask. When it was announced in 1976 that Pol Pot had been named premier of “Democratic Kampuchea,” as the country was renamed, American intelligence officials—who had been fighting the Khmer Rouge for years—could not figure out who he was.

“Secret work is fundamental,” Nuon Chea, the party’s number 2, told a visiting Danish delegation in 1977, the only time Nuon Chea was seen in public.

Nevertheless, a personality cult started to spring up around him in May 1978, pushed by cadres eager to show their loyalty as purges spiraled. Tens of thousands of Khmer Rouge cadres were executed as Pol Pot eliminated competition. His power was clearly growing, Chandler says: whereas he was addressed as ‘Elder Brother Pol” or “Brother Number One” soon after taking power, that gradually changed to “Uncle Secretary” or “party centre” to “Leading Apparatus” to, finally, the “High Organization.”

Pol Pot’s radical ideas were nourished by a five month sojourn in China in 1965-66, when the country was in ferment leading up to the Great proletarian Cultural Revolution. His admiration for the Gang of Four was mutual: Pol Pot went to China after his 1975 victory and met Mao Zedong, who congratulated him on his speedy revolution.

While Pol Pot’s thinking may have been influenced by his foreign experiences, at its root it is deeply Khmer. And in Pol Pot’s case, that means a visceral hatred of Vietnam, the much larger neighbor that seized the Mekong Delta from the medieval Khmer empire. Egged on by that HATRED, Khmer Rouge guerrillas carried out raids into southern Vietnam, triggering the December 1978 Vietnamese invasion.

Pol Pot again fled into the jungle, after ruling for three years, eight months, and 20 days. Reverting to form, he took the code name “81.” Until July 25, 1997, he hadn’t been seen by foreign journalists since 1979, when he was filmed by Naoki Mabuchi, a Japanese photographer with close ties to the Khmer Rouge.

Pol Pot officially retired from his official posts in 1985, but there was never any question that remained in total control of the movement. Cadres who have heard him speak say he is an amazing orator, making speeches so resonant in revolutionary and patriotic spirit that they bring his listeners to tears. Yet he refrained from appearing publicly.

Now, it appears Pol Pot has lost both his mask and his powers. That doesn’t auger well for the movement he helped found, and which is now in danger of segmenting further. As Nuon Chea said in his 1977 interview: “The leadership apparatus must be defended at any price…as long as the leadership is there, the party will not die.”

 

POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

NEXT GENERATION: Khmer Rouge put on a new face

By Nate Thayer in Anlong Veng, Cambodia

Far Eastern Economic Review

August 7, 1997

A tiger, according to Gen. Khem Nuon, can indeed change its stripes. And if foreigners doubt that the Khmer Rouge movement has  done just that, he said, they should come and see for themselves in the jungles of Northern Cambodia.

That is the message that the movement’s new military chief-of-staff wanted to send in an unprecedented interview at his headquarters of Anlong Veng. “ From now on, we are going to open this area free for foreigners, so they can see the real facts about our movement,” he said.

Anyone who accepts that invitation will find a mixed picture. Clearly, the purge of Pol Pot and a generational transfer of leadership has profoundly changed the secretive movement. In the interview, Khem Nuon spoke with openness about the past “crimes” and future plans, and he showed no interest in communist ideology.

At the same time, however, the group continues to sound the drum of rabid anti-Vietnamese ultra nationalism, and remains bent on the overthrow of Cambodian premier Hun Sen. Some of the older leaders who orchestrated the 1975-78 Cambodian reign of terror still wield influence, and younger cadres talk of “democracy” rang hollow against the backdrop of a Cultural revolution-style show trial.

The movement is opening up for a reason: It wants to build alliances both within the country and overseas for its crusade against Hun Sen and the “Vietnamese aggressors” that it claims are still occupying the country. Specifically, it wants to join forces with Funcinpec—whose leader co-Premier Prince Norodom Ranariddh, was ousted by Hun Sen in a July 5-6 coup—as well as with other political parties opposed to Hun Sen.

But Khem Nuon and other new leaders are aware that if they’re going to have any hope of winning Western support, they have to break with the movement’s blood-soaked past. “ The reason we put an end to the Pol Pot regime is because we want the international community to see and help us in our struggle with other movements in order to fight against Hun Sen and the Vietnamese,” Khem Nuon said.

To an international community that equates the Khmer Rouge with genocide, it’s going to be a hard sell. But Khem Nuon says the Khmer Rouge—or, more precisely, Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea Party—no longer exists. The movement is now called the National Solidarity Party.

“ If they still call me Khmer Rouge they haven’t seen what I have just done. I am the one who destroyed Pol Pot, who has been in power for many years,” he said after the group’s longtime leader was publicly denounced. “ Even the United States and the Vietnamese failed to get rid of him, but I can. So how can you call me the Khmer Rouge?”

In an unprecedented admission, he said that “crimes” had been committed during the Khmer Rouge’s nearly four year rule of Cambodia. But even when pressed, he would not go much farther, Blaming individuals rather than the group. “ We do condemn those who have committed crimes, which were not right,” Khem Nuon said. “ At the time I committed no crimes, only Pol Pot and some of his close people. Now they are gone, while Pol Pot is arrested. Some of them have defected to the Vietnamese side, and the rest I don’t know where they are.”

According to Khem Nuon and other Cadres, the movement is now led by a nine-member standing committee that includes only one member of the old guard: Khieu Samphan, the head of the committee, a diplomat who for years has been the public face of the Khmer Rouge. Khem Nuon, who’s aged about 50, is the second-ranking member, but his power is bolstered by his being the top military figure.

Yet Khem Nuon freely acknowledges that older leaders such as Gen. Ta Mok and Nuon Chea, who were key members of the murderous 1975-78 Khmer Rouge regime, still have a say in “all important matters.” Khem Nuon, who did military training in China, is the right-hand-man of the one-legged Ta Mok. “I’m the one who is in charge of the armed forces right now, but I keep consulting him all the time,” he said.

Once Hun Sen is driven out, the National Solidarity party would be happy to participate in democratic elections, Khem Nuon said. Tep Kunnal, another top-ranking standing committee figure, also spoke of liberal democracy as desirable. It seems that the new generation is driven less by communist ideology than by the ultra nationalism that has long under laid politics in a country squeezed between more powerful neighbors.

Khem Nuon claims there are 10,000 guerrillas and 60,000 civilians loyal to the movement around Anlong Veng. “Our movement is pure and clean,” he said. “ I hope the international community will help us.” For starters, he urged, “ Please ask them to stop calling us ‘Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.’”

 

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POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

Harrowing Tales: Hun Sen’s forces torture and kill former allies

By Nate Thayer in Samrong, Cambodia and Bangkok

Far Eastern Economic Review

August 7, 1997

 

At the jungle hide-out along the Thai-Cambodian border, Gen. Serei Kosal, stuttering and wide-eyed with fear, relates five-days of flight from Phnom Penh through the Cambodian countryside. He was one of the top military officers targeted for arrest by Hun Sen, Cambodia’s second prime minister, who deposed the first prime minister, prince Norodom Ranariddh, in the July 5-6 coup.

Gen. Serei fled the capital on the morning of July 5 by commandeering a military aircraft to the western city of Battambang. From there, he travelled three days by foot with no food until he reached resistance-controlled zones along the Thai border. Claiming 700 troops under his command, he vowed to organize guerrilla war.

He was lucky to have escaped: The coup left scores dead, including two of his fellow generals, and hundreds arrested. Thousands of others are fleeing or in hiding.

“ We need a safe haven to protect our people from killing and arrest,” said Serei, dressed in borrowed shorts and shoeless. “ Hun Sen is hunting down our people, killing them, arresting them. Why hasn’t the world condemned the coup makers and acted in support of democracy and against the dictators?”

His bewilderment is shared by other Ranariddh loyalists who are flocking to north and northwest Cambodia to seek sanctuary and organize guerrilla resistance. They are joined daily in these jungles and remote villages near the Thai border by opposition-party members, journalists, and other civilians. Many relate harrowing tales of witnessing summary executions, atrocities, and the arrest of anyone suspected of affiliation with Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party.

From their accounts and evidence gathered by human rights officials, a grim picture is emerging of torture and summary execution by Hun Sen and his cohorts, many of whom are former Khmer Rouge soldiers who took part in the “killing fields” of the late 1970’s. Equally disturbing are allegations that foreign embassies refused help to Cambodians who feared for their lives in the first days after the coup when many of the killings occurred.

International human rights officials in Phnom Penh say they had confirmed 36 executions by mid-July and were verifying a dozen others. “ We have had many cases of bodies found, hands tied behind their back, with bullets in the head. But sometimes we arrive too late for the bodies and there are only ashes. They are literally incinerating the evidence,” said a senior Western human rights investigator in Phnom Penh. United Nations officials say they know of another 30 Funcinpec supporters who were tortured and forced to drink sewage.

Investigators say at least 617 people have been detained in Phnom Penh and another 271 are known to have been arrested outside the capital. They say the evidence beginning to trickle in is “only the tip of the iceberg,” but includes specific information linking Hun Sen’s top lieutenants to unspeakable acts of torture and murder.

Gen. Chau Sambath, a military advisor to Ranariddh, was captured while trying to flee the capital by motorcycle. According to human rights officials and Cambodian intelligence officers, Sambath was taken to Hun Sen’s personal compound on July 8 where he was tortured, then executed. The sources say his fingernails were pulled off and his tongue ripped out before he was killed by Gen. Him Bun Heang, chief of security for Hun Sen and head of his personal bodyguard. “ They wanted to know the military radio frequencies of Funcinpec leaders, so they tortured him at Hun Sen’s house,” said a senior Cambodian military intelligence officer. “ They pulled his tongue out of his head with pliers when he wouldn’t talk.”

Another Funcinpec general, secretary of state at the Ministry of Interior Ho Sok, was executed on the grounds of the ministry by the bodyguards of National Police Chief Gen. Hok Lundy, a loyalist of Hun Sen. According to Amnesty International, Ho Sok was arrested “ while attempting to find a country that would give him asylum.” He had taken refuge at the embassy of an Asean country, but was expelled at the request of Hun Sen’s aides and arrested as he drove to the luxury Cambodiana hotel, where many foreigners and Funcinpec officials had fled in the days after the coup. A Ministry of Interior spokesman confirmed the killing, saying it was done by “people who were angry with him.”

At least five bodyguards of Gen. Nyek Bun Chhay, the commander of Funcinpec forces, had their eyes gouged out while they were under interrogation, then executed, according to Western human rights officials and Cambodian military sources. After 14 days of flight through the countryside Nyek Bun Chhay has since arrived at the jungle headquarters and commands the resistance army.

Hundreds have already arrived in Thailand, including scores of Funcinpec officials, at least 24 members of parliament, journalists associated with independent newspapers, and officials of other political parties.

“The soldiers came to my house with rocket launchers looking for my steering committee members, putting their pictures on TV and posted in military offices,” said Sam Rainsy, Cambodia’s most prominent opposition politician and head of the Khmer Nation party. “ There is a campaign to destroy the KNP. The soldiers told people at my office ‘ We will not even let a baby asleep in a hammock stay alive.’ This is real Khmer Rouge language We cannot operate anymore. Democracy is finished.” More than 1000 of his party workers are now amassed at a jungle encampment along the Thai border under the protection of Funcinpec troops still loyal to Ranariddh.

“Killing and repression are going on on a very large scale. Hun Sen is a murderous prime minister,” Ranariddh told the REVIEW in Bangkok on July 20. “ I hope that the U.S. congress will call for a cessation of all aid to Hun Sen.”

But international condemnation of the coup has been decidedly muted, with the major donor countries still considering whether to support a government controlled by Hun Sen. If he maintains a credible coalition by co-opting ministers from Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party, he may win that support.

The ambivalence of major Western governments was foreshadowed by the reaction of their embassies in Phnom Penh during the coup—a response that has been criticized bitterly by Cambodian and human rights officials. They say the American and Australian embassies refused entry to Cambodian government officials who sought refuge on embassy grounds. The U.S. embassy also “flatly refused” requests of political asylum for some members of parliament or to issue them with emergency visas.

“We begged visas from Western embassies. We begged them to open their gates for people who were clearly targeted for persecution, and the Americans, the Australians, flatly said no,” said a foreign human rights official in Phnom Penh. “ These are the embassies who have pushed people to exercise their rights, have said they supported human rights and free expression and opposition politics, but when these very values are trampled upon and those who exercised their  rights were targeted, they did nothing to help.”

American embassy sources said they had no clearance from Washington to offer political asylum and claim they were not approached directly by any Cambodians for sanctuary on embassy grounds.

The U.S. also set up a sanctuary on the grounds of the Cambodiana hotel in downtown Phnom Penh during the fighting that raged in the city. Some Cambodian parliamentarians who have since fled the country said they were denied access to the sanctuary in the hotel’s ballroom. The correspondent for Voice of America, Cambodian citizen Som Sattana, was refused access to the ballroom by embassy personnel, despite having received death threats, according to human rights workers. He has since left the country.

“We set up a U.S. embassy reception centre at the Cambodiana hotel early on Sunday (July 6) for American citizens,” said an embassy spokeswoman, who added: “ We were not open for visas during the fighting.”

The able to flee are regrouping in newly formed resistance zones in northern Cambodia. Several thousand heavily armed troops backed by tanks and artillery control a swath of territory across several provinces abutting the Thai border, including the contested northwestern provincial capital of Samrong.

Hundreds of Funcinpec members, exhausted from days of trekking across the country to reach Funcinpec-controlled areas, spoke of being hunted by Hun Sen’s forces. “ They are arresting people in their houses, in the jungle, along the road—anybody they think works for Funcinpec,” said Sok Nuon, a policeman who fled from Kampong Chhnang province.

Gen. Long Sereirath, formerly deputy commander of the 5th Military Region in the north, fought his way out of Siem Riep city four days after the coup. He said he went without food for three days before reaching Samrong. “ We will blow up key bridges to keep them from coming north with artillery,” he said, but added that his forces were desperately low on ammunition.

His commander, Lt. Gen. Khan Savouen, who is now leading resistance forces, appealed for foreign assistance from his front-line command post near national Route 6 in Siem Riep province.” We will fight even if we don’t get foreign assistance,” he said, surrounded by Russian T-54 tanks, armoured personnel carriers, heavy artillery and anti-aircraft guns. Heavy fighting raged a few kilometers away and his position was overrun the day after the REVIEW interviewed him.

 

POL POT: THE END

COVER STORY

DUBIOUS DONOR

Money man: Theng Bunma sent cash and gold for Hun Sen’s coup

By Nate Thayer

Far Eastern Economic Review

August 7, 1997

How much does it take to buy a coup? In Cambodia, the going rate seems to be $1 million. Suspected drug baron Theng Bunma said he gave that much in cash and gold to Second Prime Minister Hun Sen to fund the putsch which toppled co-premier Norodom Ranariddh.

“For the clash of 6^th of July, 1997, I called Mr. Hun Sen and I talked to him. I gave him $1 million dollars to do whatever to control the situation,” said Bunma in an interview with Australian Channel 7 television.” He asked me if I had the money. I said no, but I would send 100 kilograms of gold in a plane into Cambodia.’ In return for his generosity, Bunma, reputed to be Cambodia’s richest businessman, enjoyed a perk of being a big-time coup financier: More than 300 hundred of Hun Sen’s troops, backed by tanks, were dispatched to protect Bunma’s property during the coup.

“ I say what the second prime minister did was correct. Why? One reason, take the example of my hotel. The other side wanted to destroy it, the government put three tanks and soldiers around to protect it,” he said. Asked whether Bunma had given the government the money, Cambodian Secretary of State for Information Khieu Kanharith replied:” Why would he give us a million dollars? I do not know what we are supposed to do with this money—it’s nothing, we need $100 million to finance the redevelopment of the whole country.”

Bunma also said he gave $50,000 dollars each to three leaders of a renegade faction of Ranariddh’s Funcinpec party “to encourage them”—Siem Riep governor Toan Chhay, Banteay Meanchey provincial governor Duong Khem and Minister of State Ung Phan.

The tycoon has denied allegations by the United States that he is involved in heroin trafficking.

KR HARDLINERS- DOWN BUT NOT OUT-By Nate Thayer

KR HARDLINERS- DOWN BUT NOT OUT

Phnom Penh Post

By Nate Thayer

Friday, 04 October 1996

The Khmer Rouge split has brought much attention to the mysterious rebel group's inner workings. Nate Thayer analyses the break-up and assesses where the Pol Pot faction now stands.

AFTER the raw drama and spell-binding intrigue of the unprecedented Khmer Rouge break-away, one thing remains sure: thousands of hardcore troops and commanders remain loyal to Pol Pot. These hardliners, who have long warned against dealing with the enemy, have likely been hardened by recent events.

The schism has pitted Ieng Sary - former Khmer Rouge foreign minister, brother-in-law of Pol Pot, and former No. 4 in the all powerful Standing Committee of the Party - and a group of powerful younger military field commanders, against the old guard leaders and their loyalists. Not since the purges and open warfare of 1978, that led to the Vietnamese invasion and the fall of the KR regime, has the movement's inner-circle been so rocked.

Remaining intact, however, is virtually all of the important KR political leadership and most of its military command structure. These include party supremo Pol Pot, his second in command Nuon Chea, chief of the general staff Ta Mok, and Defense Minister Son Sen.

Mok, who opposed the Paris peace agreements and advocates an aggressive military posture, has seen his power significantly rise as a result of the internal strife. He now directly commands at least 80 percent of the KR troops, though the rank and file remains split, with final alliances not expected to clarify themselves for months.

Though Sary has taken as much as 20 percent of the KR's fighting force, he has not gone over to the Royal Government. Sary's faction has effectively set up an autonomous command with a tenuous agreement of a truce with government forces.

But the rebel faction has removed a major stronghold and leadership base, as well as control of rich gem and timber territory that provided desperately needed cash to the movement's central coffers - a major economic and political blow to the leadership.

In addition, for the first time in 30 years the KR loyalists find themselves without foreign or domestic allies that have been critical to it's survival.

The United Nations, the United States and ASEAN, who all backed the KR-led guerrilla movement prior to the 1991 peace accords, are all now firmly behind the Cambodian government. China halted all support in 1991, and Thailand has gone to lengths to stop cross border traffic and covert assistance to the guerrillas. In addition, their former battlefield allies - the two non-communist factions - are now part of a coalition government and formally at war with the KR.

Pol Pot, known as a brilliant military strategist, saw the writing on the wall in 1992, and warned his comrades of impending danger: "While Democratic Kampuchea has indeed now become strong, without others to be with it, Democratic Kampuchea cannot be strong all on it's own. When these guys...leave Democratic Kampuchea on it's own, it is possible for us to be weakened. Once that happens, they will attack the DK and drag the other forces into joining with Phnom Penh. It would become an alliance between the West, the Youn [Vietnamese], the contemptible puppets and two of the three parties. If this were to be the situation, then the Chinese, the Thai, and ASEAN would all accept it whether they liked it or not...the forces sustaining us would be enfeebled, which would lead to our being isolated and attacked." He termed it "a life and death struggle".

The scenario that Pol Pot described as his faction's worst nightmare is precisely the situation they face now, many analysts say, and is key to the pressures which contributed to his movement's implosion.

Since 1992, when the KR pulled out of the UN-sponsored election they have attempted to become self sufficient, relying on timber and gem trading for new resources. The breakaway faction has taken with them control of the most lucrative area. In 1993, at least 57 Thai companies were operating over 1,000 earth moving vehicles in KR-controlled ruby regions of Pailin, with more than three billion baht invested, according to then Thai MP Thanit Traivut. Western intelligence and Thai businessmen put the guerrillas' monthly gem profits at $10 million from Pailin alone, until the early 1990's.

In a speech to senior cadre before the peace agreement, Pol Pot explained the importance of Pailin: "Our state does not currently have sufficient capital either to expand its strength or enlarge the army. We are spending many tens of millions of baht to augment the assistance of our foreign friends, but that is still not enough and there are many shortages. It is thus imperative that we find ways to develop the natural resources that exist in our liberated and semi-liberated zones as assets to be utilized in the fight the aggressor enemy."

ORIGINS OF THE CURRENT CONFLICT

It was a centrally-ordered directive by the senior leadership in recent months to re-seize control over resources in Pailin that sparked the crisis.

Importantly, KR radio - still in the hands of the loyalists - and the rebel radio provided important and accurate details of the origins of the split.

While often used for propaganda, KR radio also serves as a vital communication link to the rank and file. References to its importance are often cited in internal KR documents.

Between radio broadcasts, intelligence reports, and guerrilla and loyalist sources, the origins of the split are relatively clear. There are several important factors.

Firstly, there are long personality disputes among the leadership that have simmered for years. Particularly, Ieng Sary was in fact purged from all positions of political importance within the organization more than six years ago. While he continued to live in DK zones, he was in many ways a minor figure. It was the younger field commanders, Y Chhien in particular, who held the real power.

Secondly, the KR, in the aftermath of the failed Paris Agreements, the cut off of foreign assistance, and the loss of their former Cambodian allies to a government coalition, are suffering from an increase in "regional fiefdoms". In areas like Pailin the large amount of trading in valuable resources has made many ordinary KR cadre, soldiers and civilians relatively wealthy - and reluctant to go back to the times of warfare and central control by the DK leadership.

Thirdly, because of the cut-off of foreign assistance and pressure on cross border trade with Thailand, the KR leadership increasingly is in need of cash and was trying to consolidate central control of resources and political loyalty.

Furthermore, the massive trading with Cambodians from government territory and Thais has left sectors such as Pailin vulnerable to infiltration by enemy operatives. Senior KR sources say they have been suspicious of locating important bases at Pailin since at least 1990, when they began detecting radio emissions not under their authorization. The brief government military capture at Pailin in 1994 was blamed by senior KR officials on government special forces units and other "spies" posing as businesspeople.

The split erupted publicly on 6 August when KR radio called for the arrest and "destruction of the traitors", naming Ieng Sary, 450 Division commander Sok Pheap and 415 commander Y Chhien.

Ieng Sary, in a rebuttal broadcast over government radio, called Pol Pot "the cruelest and most savage murderer", and also condemned Ta Mok and Son Sen.

On 7 August, the DK radio again denounced Sary as a traitor, accusing him of embezzling millions of baht from the movement to lavish on himself and his family.

On Aug 8, the loyalist radio called for the arrest of Chhien for spying and stealing party coffers.

Importantly, the radio also said "this Chhien and a couple of his thugs, such as the named Nhoek, Lanh, and Khieu, threatened to arrest, in a pseudo coup, the NADK supreme command representatives... This open offense and threat to arrest the supreme command representatives took place on the morning of 6 August."

The rebel faction shot back, announcing loyalty "to support our leader" Ieng Sary and "deny[ing] our support to Son Sen who is not our leader who confiscated possessions, such as ox-carts".

The rebel broadcast also referred to Son Sen accusing "patriotic fighters...such as the late comrade in arms Hoem and Mich, of being traitors.."

Many aspects of the radio reports were confirmed by Khmer Rouge loyalist and rebel sources, and the radio was used, during this crisis, as a means to communicate with the rank and file to attempt to explain the events and halt the erosion of unity within the ranks.

The spoils of rubies and timber sparked an internal party conflict that has escalated to what we have today. In essence, the Khmer Rouge military leadership, including Ta Mok, Son Sen and Nuon Chea, attempted in recent months to re-assert central control over elements in the army in control of the Pailin sector. These forces, particularly Chhien and his allies, balked, and the confrontation escalated.

Furthermore, the rebels' reference to the "late comrade in arms" Mich of being a traitor suggest a purge was under way prior to the open split. Mich served as a senior military chief of Front 250, elements of which joined the rebels.

The government reference to Chhien and a "couple of his thugs" attempting to arrest the leadership is a direct reference to younger field commanders seeking to arrest Ta Mok, Nuon Chea, Son Sen, and Nikon after the attempt to seize control over the area in early August.

What is clear is that the rift had virtually nothing to do with politics, and even less to do with factions of the KR defecting to the royal government, which was decidedly a spectator - although beneficiary - to the events.

IENG SARY AND LEADERSHIP CONFLICTS

Ieng Sary - a long-standing member of the Communist Party standing committee, foreign minister and deputy prime minister during the DK years in power, and the key liaison for all Chinese military and financial aid throughout the guerrilla war of the 1980s - was stripped of power in a bitter break with the organization many years ago.

His fall came after years of friction, much of it based on personality conflicts.

As foreign minister during the KR rule, most of the intellectuals who came back to Cambodia after the KR victory in 1975 were under his charge. Hundreds perished, and many more were kept in reeducation camps or were forced to do menial work in state ministries.

When the KR retreated to the jungle in 1979 after its overthrow by the Vietnamese, Sary caused a major rift within the leadership by acknowledging to a reporter the existence of the Toul Sleng torture center in which at least 16,000 people were interrogated and executed - mostly party cadre and their families. Sary was denounced in internal party meetings for violating a key tenet of the KR - to never make public statements not sanctioned by the leadership.

But Sary had the support of the Chinese, who insisted that all their assistance be passed through him. As a result, he was effectively in charge of distributing weapons and money throughout the 1980s, a role which gave him concrete power. But he is known to have had several disputes with Pol Pot, and to have angered field commanders and political cadre with his autocratic style and abrasive personality. When the signing of the Paris agreements ended all Chinese covert aid in 1991, his influence effectively ceased.

Ousted from the Standing Committee of the Communist Party around 1989, Sary was no longer invited to high level meetings, according to KR officials. In a late 1992 meeting between Pol Pot and another senior official, Pol Pot agreed with criticism of Sary, saying "I have known for a long time that Ieng Sary was a bad leader", according to sources close to the faction.

KR sources say that serious rifts between Sary and the leadership began in 1986, "when one guy who was in charge of security for Ieng Sary organized a bandit attack with some Thais at Pailin and stole millions of dollars," according to one source.

Many Khmer Rouge intellectuals complained bitterly about Ieng Sary's abrasive personality. "We have a saying in Cambodian that people had to 'walk like a duck' around Ieng Sary and his wife. If they dropped something, someone else picked it up. They complained about the quality of the food. Their servants were nervous and obsequious, like around a king. It was very feudalistic," says one source close to the KR leaders.

"In 1993, Ieng Say still lived in Thailand in a very nice home built with DK money. That was denounced by the leadership. While others suffered in the jungle, he lived in a nice home in Thailand."

During the 1980's, most of the KR intellectuals were based at Phnom Malai, in areas under Sary's influence. But in the early 1990's, almost all of the political leadership, including the foreign affairs staff, young intellectuals, and Khieu Samphan and the office of the president of Democratic Kampuchea, moved north to the base of Phnom Chhat. Under the control of So Hong, commander of sector 102 and the nephew of Pol Pot, it served as a major base for the leadership until it was overrun by government forces in a surprise attack in August 1993.

While Sary is held responsible for the deaths of many intellectuals during his tenure as DK foreign minister, Cambodian scholar Steve Heder points out that some of the only ones who survived were those directly under his charge. Department heads in the Foreign Ministry during the Khmer Rouge rule included Suong Sikoeun (who joined Sary's breakaway in August), Kiet Chhon (who defected in 1993 and is the current Finance Minister), Thionn Prasith (former KR ambassador to the UN through the 1980s until his retirement), Long Norin (who is with Sary's breakaway), Ok Sokhun (KR ambassador in Paris until the embassy was turned over to the government after the Paris agreements), Pech Bun Ret (who remains with the loyalists), and Chan Youran (the current DK "foreign minister"). Such survival rates among these intellectuals, who had all been named to the security services at Toul Sleng as traitors, suggests that Ieng Sary was able to protect them from the purges that claimed many of their colleagues.

THE REAL POWER

Many KR sources say that by far the most important defector, rather than Sary, was military commander Lt. Gen. Y Chhien, who, as officer in charge of Pailin, controlled crack troops and the lucrative gem and logging trade with nearby Thailand.

"Officially Chhien should be under Ieng Sary, but many believe that Chhien now controls Ieng Sary," said one source close to the KR. "He controls concrete forces - troops and money."

Chhien "was said to be a protégé of Pol Pot", says scholar Heder. "He was responsible for the personal security of both Pol Pot and Nuon Chea," according to the confession of senior Khmer Rouge official executed at Toul Sleng prison in 1977. In 1977, he accompanied then Foreign Minister Ieng Sary on an officials visit to Rangoon, in the capacity of "bodyguard".

By 1981, he was identified as Division 415 commander, and in 1991 promoted to overall Pailin sector commander - equivalent of a governor, civilian administrator, military commander and economic czar.

It was a role that gave him great influence, and one that would be bestowed on someone with the total confidence of the leadership, including Pol Pot. Chhien was viewed as one of a rising group of six or seven younger commanders being groomed for taking over the movement.

Sary's daughter, a graduate of the State University of New York at Stony Brook in the late 1980s, is married to a top lieutenant of Chhien.

"Both Sok Pheap and Chhien had a high degree of interaction with the international community. They had extensive contact with Thais and other foreigners," said Heder. "Elements of both Divisions voted in the UNTAC elections, against the directive of the leadership."

On the other side of the KR, perhaps the most key military man is Ta Mok

The number three on the standing committee and Chief of the General Staff of the army, has seen his influence considerably enlarged since the UN peace agreements. He increased his control from 6 to 12 divisions in 1992, and is responsible for troops from the northwestern Thai border throughout the north and the entire east of the country on the Vietnam border.

This gave him control of perhaps 70 percent of the Khmer Rouge army. But one of the consequences of the recent split is the marked rise in influence of Ta Mok in the wake of the loss of Pailin. Now more than 80 percent - and perhaps as much as 90 percent - of the remaining troops are under his direct command.

Ta Mok, otherwise known as Chhit Choeun, studied Buddhism when young, and reached the status of "Lok Kru Achhar". He took over his father's lumber business and was described as "bright".

According to a senior KR official in 1977, Ta Mok "made vital contributions...by building up a solidly reliable base. He was able to build up military strength in every sector", "throngs of people supported him" and "he was able to build up massive armed forces rapidly" and "went down personally to lead the military". But, continued Non Suon, who was later executed at S-21, Ta Mok had "shortcomings"; "he thinks only his zone is important" and "is quick to become angry, even furious...his attitude is displayed in loud rages and cursing. A lot of other cadre have been cursed out by him". Non Suon continued to say Mok has a "boastful personality and clings stubbornly to his understanding of things. Whatever he says has to be done, is to be done. If this is not curbed in time he could be transformed into an authoritarian strongman."

THE NUMBERS GAME

While Prime Minister Hun Sen said in August that the two commanders Chhien and Sok Pheap would bring 3,000 troops to defect to the government, analysts urged caution, and the intelligence figures suggest otherwise.

In August 1991, the NADK formally submitted military organization charts to the UN, in accordance with the agreements reached in Paris. They said that 415 division had a strength including combatants, guerrillas (militia), and porters of 1,200 men and women. In 1992, UN military intelligence put the real number under arms at about 400. In internal documents of the RCAF's 2nd bureau responsible for military intelligence dated June 1995 put the troop strength at 350.

For division 450, the August 1991 NADK official figure was 1,635 (of which the DK said about 65 percent were under arms). UNTAC estimates in 1993 put the figure at 400, and the later RCAF internal intelligence documents reported about 300 under arms.

Whichever way one analyses it, the figures bandied about by the government of late can be dismissed as propaganda.

For overall figures of DK armed strength, their formal submissions to UNTAC in August 1991 was 25,175 combatants and porters plus 2,510 guerrillas, of which 65 percent - or about 18,874 - under arms. These figures are consistent with the upper ranges of State of Cambodia and Vietnamese intelligence estimates at the time. In the mid-1992 UNTAC's "guestimate" was about 10,000 KR under arms. But after the DK's withdrawal from the peace process, they began a central directive of remobilization of troops. By December 1992, UNTAC had increased their estimates to 15,000 under arms. In June 1995, RCAF intelligence put the KR strength at 4,750 regular forces, with militia bringing the total to 8,500.

Using the government own intelligence figures, the two divisions comprise approximately 800 soldiers, or between 10 and 20 percent of the entire KR fighting force.

But the KR leadership is not only short of friends and money, but also ammunition. The group has ordered all soldiers and civilians to meet a quota of homemade bamboo stakes and other crude weapons since last year. In an internal strategy document from the leadership to cadre earlier this year, the leadership spoke of "The strategic weapons that we call our main forces, sharp pointed soldiers, which are punji sticks, poison punji sticks, and booby traps...machetes, axes, and knives are locally abundant."

THE FUTURE

While the internal split within the movement has caused concrete damage and is a major propaganda victory for the government, it is much too early to count the KR out.

Virtually the entire KR political leadership, and much of its military command, is intact. The entire northern command structure - which has successfully defeated all government attempts to destroy it in recent years - is largely unaffected. It is this area that the leadership moved its political operations several years ago.

It is cogent to remember that the Sary's forces have given no sincere indication that they are willing to join the government, or indeed that peace and national reconciliation was ever their aim in breaking away.

In scores of interviews with defectors by this reporter in recent years, few cited political disagreements with the KR as a motive for leaving. Most said that they were treated well by the commanders and were proud of their role in defending the country against the Vietnamese threat. That is the case with those loyal to the Pailin commanders.

It is likely that, for the time being, the Pailin rebels will remain a "third force" - with a shaky tactical alliance with the government - unless a confrontation between the new "allies" is forced.

For the rest of the KR, many government officials acknowledge that they have little to offer in the eyes of the average guerrilla, and that life in the "liberated zones" is often better than that of his counterpart across government front lines.

Hardline KR elements - who have long advocated no contacts with the enemy and who support an increase in guerrilla warfare and terrorism - are now in greater control of their faction.

In a 1994 KR document issued to northern forces, Ta Mok warned: "We have continued to exist with them, eat with them, peacefully allied with them to the point that some of our cadres and ranks have been repeatedly put in danger... in some of our units, enemy elements comprise 50-60 percent."

Ta Mok warned that "pacifism has entered our cadres" and that "there is a confusion, a blending our essence and our enemies."

He reminded cadre of "our absolute duty to smash and sweep away the enemy."

An October 1995 internal KR military strategy document outlined their emphasis on avoiding "tricks of the enemies", especially the "peaceful relationship scheme".

The document also urged the KR to target foreigners, particularly Americans.

"The resistance forces are everywhere. We can attack the two heads and their American boss everywhere. We can cut highway four anywhere, any bridge, any culvert on the road. We are going to cut it over and over until the two-headed government will not be able to use it and until the Americans and their construction on highway four turn their tails and run back to Phnom Penh...the short reminder of historical events is nothing more than a desire to caution that the strategic supply lines are the life and death key to winning or losing a war...cut the enemy' throat! Cut the enemy's throat! Cut the enemy's blood arteries! Tragic fit, tragic death to all enemies near and far!"

The US Army has detachments of military engineering units involved in road construction on Route 4 and special forces units training Cambodian deminers elsewhere in Cambodia. Western intelligence sources say they have information that the KR are targeting Westerners in Cambodia, and have issued at least three confidential "threat alerts" in recent months.

Similarly, other internal documents and references on radio push the same line: that the KR must guard against all enemies, and remain at a distance from corrupting influences.

One document said: "Our first responsibility is we must be clean. Our major responsibility is to clean up our act. We must be clean. Our ranks, especially our cadre, must be clean, our skin clear, free of all smell, no peaceful relationship scheme, no spying activity, no internal undermining, nothing to be compromised at all..."

With the recent events, those elements of the KR who have been warning of the "peaceful relationship scheme" are likely to be saying "I told you so" - and be that much more intent to strengthen their hands with the remaining ranks.

 

(Nate Thayer, correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, is currently a Visiting Scholar and Fellow at the School of Advanced International Studies, Foreign Policy Institute, Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC.)

Ambiguous Alliances: Can the Khmer Rouge survive Pol Pot? Nate Thayer

Ambiguous Alliances: Can the Khmer Rouge survive Pol Pot? (Authors note: This article was published the day before Hun Sen launched a succesful coup deposing co-PM Ranariddh)

Far Eastern Economic Review

By Nate Thayer in Phnom Penh
July 3, 1997
It's the philosopher's classic conundrum-in reverse. From the dense jungles of northwestern Cambodia has come the sound of a giant tree falling. But since nobody in Phnom Penh has seen it happen, nobody's certain it has.

              Now, internal Khmer Rouge documents obtained by
              the REVIEW throw the first clear light on the
              bizarre developments surrounding Pol Pot's
              recent "arrest" by former loyalists-and on the
              path the rebel movement aims to take towards
              political legitimacy. The documents suggest that
              the events of early June were precipitated by a
              deal struck in May, after three months of secret
              negotiations, between moderate elements of the
              Khmer Rouge and the Funcinpec party of First
              Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh.

              The deal, in turn, is rooted in the long-running
              feud between Cambodia's two premiers, both of
              whom are jockeying for alliances ahead of
              general elections scheduled for 1998. It seeks
              to unite the disparate political and military
              forces-Funcinpec, opposition leader Sam Rainsy's
              Khmer National Party and the Khmer
              Rouge-arraigned against the Cambodian People's
              Party of Second Prime Minister Hun Sen. The
              rivalry between the two prime ministers may
              offer the Khmer Rouge an opportunity to return
              to the legitimate political arena, analysts say.

              The two premiers recently made a rare display of
              solidarity when they appeared together on June
              21 to announce the seizure of Pol Pot and agreed
              that he should be brought before an
              international tribunal. But seasoned Cambodia
              watchers say the two men were putting on a show
              for an international audience. Behind the public
              smiles, they say, the Ranariddh-Hun Sen rivalry
              remains intense. Indeed, some political analysts
              worry that the shifting alignments in Phnom Penh
              could eventually throw the country back into
              civil war.

              Ranariddh's courting of the Khmer Rouge is rich
              with irony. In 1970, his father, Prince Norodom
              Sihanouk, had formed a similar alliance with a
              relatively unknown Pol Pot. At the time, their
              common enemy was the United States-backed Lon
              Nol regime.

              In 1970, the Khmer Rouge needed Sihanouk's
              prestige to emerge from the jungles and onto the
              political stage. Now, the rebels are banking on
              Ranariddh's legitimacy to revive their fortunes.

              But there is one crucial difference: Funcinpec
              cannot ally itself with a Khmer Rouge that
              includes the widely reviled Pol Pot. Sources
              close to the negotiations say the Khmer Rouge
              leadership was told they would have to separate
              themselves from Pol Pot in order to make the
              alliance palatable for local and international
              consumption. The 69-year-old guerrilla leader
              apparently went along with the deal until he
              realized it would mean his own eviction and
              perhaps exile.

              The Khmer Rouge documents explain what happened
              next. Pol Pot called a meeting of senior leaders
              on the night of June 9, at a jungle encampment
              near his headquarters at Anlong Veng in the
              northern jungle. When former Defence Minister
              Son Sen refused to turn up, a Pol Pot loyalist
              was dispatched to execute him, his wife and 16
              members of his family. Khmer Rouge army chief Ta
              Mok, apparently sensing that a purge was under
              way, slipped out of the meeting and fled into
              the thick jungle.

              The events of the next few days remain shrouded
              in confusion. Pol Pot loyalists maintained
              control of Khmer Rouge Radio at least until June
              12, when they broadcast a report denouncing Son
              Sen as a "traitor." The radio then fell silent.

              It came back to life briefly on June 16, to
              announce that "treason of Pol Pot took place on
              the night of June 9 to June 14 . . . This
              incident was resolved and normalcy restored as
              of June 14."

              One Khmer Rouge document, dated June 18, says
              that the leadership uncovered a plan by Pol Pot
              to kill other senior cadres in an attempt to
              scuttle the deal with Funcinpec. "Pol Pot had
              prepared a plan to kill the just and good
              leaders and cadres who are loyal to our
              principles and our good leadership," says the
              document. Pol Pot's actions, it adds,
              compromised the "internal solidarity . . . and
              the spirit of our agreements." Sources close to
              the Khmer Rouge say this is a reference to the
              deal with Funcinpec.

              There are other, more obvious indications of a
              Funcinpec-Khmer Rouge alliance. Recent Khmer
              Rouge Radio broadcasts have expressed support
              for the National United Front, an anti-Hun Sen
              coalition created by Ranariddh and Rainsy
              earlier this year. In a May 21 internal document
              obtained by the REVIEW, Khmer Rouge President
              Khieu Samphan said "it should be possible for
              all national forces to unite within the
              framework of the NUF." The previous day,
              Ranariddh had announced "a very great welcome"
              to Khieu Samphan and the Khmer Rouge into the
              alliance.

              Ranariddh has since admitted to secretly meeting
              Khieu Samphan on June 1 in the remote northern
              provincial capital of Preah Vihear. In the days
              following Pol Pot's apparent ouster, Khmer Rouge
              Radio openly said the guerrillas would "uphold
              the stand of supporting the National United
              Front with . . . Ranariddh as the chairman."

              Later, after a brief street battle on June 17
              between bodyguards loyal to the two premiers in
              Phnom Penh, Khmer Rouge radio announced an
              "appeal to all combatants," to "unite in
              launching an offensive against the puppets, with
              Hun Sen as the most active ringleader, in an
              increasing vigorous and militant manner."

              Hun Sen's response was to issue Ranariddh an
              ultimatum on June 18: The first prime minister,
              he said, must choose to "join the Khmer Rouge or
              [remain in] the Royal government."

              Earlier, on June 6, Hun Sen said Ranariddh was
              "rescuing the Khmer Rouge from ruin" and "taking
              the wrong route by using the Khmer Rouge's Khieu
              Samphan as a political counterweight to us."

              The effectiveness of that counterweight is far
              from certain. For one thing, there's still
              considerable confusion over Pol Pot's fate. Nor
              is it clear who is in control of the Khmer
              Rouge-and whether the current leadership can
              recast the rebels as a moderate, politically
              acceptable force. Rebel radio has announced that
              "a new era has begun," but has said little about
              Pol Pot's hardline comrades-in-arms.

              For instance, no mention has been made of Nuon
              Chea, Pol Pot's chief ideologue, or of Ta Mok,
              the military commander who directly controls the
              bulk of the rebel troops. Cambodian military
              officials who have been meeting with the rebels
              in recent days say Ta Mok-one of the architects
              of the Khmer Rouge's "killing fields" rule from
              1975 to 1979-was a key figure in organizing the
              purge of Pol Pot. Analysts say it would be just
              as hard for Ranariddh to do a deal with Ta Mok
              as it was with Pol Pot.

Duch Confesses-He was the chief executioner in one of history's most murderous regimes. Now, he's a born-again Christian and aid worker. In his first interview, 'Duch' confesses to his Khmer Rouge crimes--Nate Thayer and Nic Dunlop

Duch Confesses

Far Eastern Economic Review

May 6, 1999

 

He was the chief executioner in one of history's most murderous regimes.
Now, he's a born-again Christian and aid worker. In his first interview,
'Duch' confesses to his Khmer Rouge crimes. The revelations could shake
Cambodia.

By Nic Dunlop and Nate Thayer in Battambang province

At first, the old man speaks only of his passion for Jesus and his mission
to bring the Gospel to these squalid jungle hamlets populated by Khmer
Rouge defectors.

Ta Pin, as he calls himself, has worked with international aid groups in
recent years, and he speaks for an hour--in a combination of Khmer, French
and English--of the needs of the peasants. He proudly displays a pair of
laminated certificates he received after attending seminars held in
Cambodia by American evangelical churches--they commend his "personal
leadership development, team-building and deepening commitment to Jesus
Christ."

He sidesteps several political questions, until one causes him to look
down and examine the business card of a visiting reporter. Following a
long pause, his eyes narrow and he looks directly at his visitor,
betraying a racing mind. "You are from the Far Eastern Economic Review,
the one who interviewed Pol Pot, Ta Mok and the other leaders," he says.
"Yes," the reporter replies. "They told me who you are and that you were
here."

The old man stares silently into the distance for a moment, then sits
down next to the reporter. Without being asked another question, Kang
Kek Ieu--alias Ta Pin, alias Hong Pen, alias "Duch"--begins to speak of
his life as the chief executioner for Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.

"First, I want to say that I thank God to be meeting the Far Eastern
Economic Review today," says the one-time warden of Cambodia's most
notorious death camp who has been on the run for 20 years. "It is God's
will you are here. Now my future is in God's hands."

With that, he talks freely of his role and that of others in the horrors
of 1975-79, when the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia and as many as 2 million
people perished out of a population of less than 7 million. "I have done
very bad things before in my life. Now it is time for les represailles
[to bear the consequences] of my actions."

He makes the confession in interviews on April 22 and 26 in his one-room
hut in the jungles of western Cambodia. His pregnant niece lies sick and
nearly comatose on a mat behind him, her arm taped to an intravenous
drip that hangs from a ceiling beam. His son sits nearby, his wooden leg
with carved toes--he stepped on a landmine in 1985--hanging over the
edge of the hut's raised floor. Hundreds more mines, in all likelihood,
still seed the earth around the hamlet.

"The first half of my life I will remember forever. Then I thought God
was very bad, that only bad men prayed to God. My unique fault is that I
did not serve God, I served men, I served communism," the 56-year-old
Duch says. "I feel very sorry about the killings and the past. I wanted
to be a good communist. Now, in the second half of my life, I want to
serve God by doing God's work to help people."

Comrade Duch has much to be sorry about. He was chief of the Khmer Rouge
"S-21" national-security apparatus and ran the notorious Tuol Sleng
detention centre in Phnom Penh. A converted secondary school, Tuol Sleng
was the nerve centre for a nationwide network of prisons and execution
grounds. Thousands of people--many of them purged Khmer Rouge cadres and
their families--were tortured, forced to confess to fantastic plots and
executed at Tuol Sleng, their bodies dumped in shallow graves outside
the city.

The treatment and the confessions of inmates were meticulously
documented. Duch's own signature and detailed comments are on hundreds
of documents ordering barbarous torture methods ranging from electric
shocks and severe beatings to the pulling out of toenails and submersion
in vats of water. At least 16,000 people were "processed" through Tuol
Sleng, according to scholars; only seven survived, escaping when
invading Vietnamese troops captured Phnom Penh in January 1979.

If an international tribunal is convened to try the Khmer Rouge for
genocide, Duch would be a pivotal figure: He was the direct link between
the Khmer Rouge political leadership and its killing machine.

"Duch would in fact be in a key position to close key gaps in the
evidence," says Stephen Heder, a Cambodia expert at London University's
School of Oriental and African Studies. "Although we have documents
linking S-21 to Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ta Mok, Ke Pok and Son Sen, among
others, they do not establish incontrovertibly that any of the above
ordered all the crimes against humanity that we know were committed, and
leave very unclear the roles of key figures such as Ieng Sary and Khieu
Samphan."

Heder was referring to the top leaders of the Communist Party of
Kampuchea, who ran the country from April 1975 to the end of 1979. In
the past few years, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan and Ke Pok have
all "defected" from the Khmer Rouge and now live freely in Cambodia; Ta
Mok is alone in having been jailed after his capture in March. Son Sen
was murdered in June 1997 on Pol Pot's orders, and Pol Pot committed
suicide in April last year to avoid trial.

Duch's confessions will likely give new impetus to calls by the United
Nations, the United States and other major aid donors for the arrest and
trial of Khmer Rouge leaders. Indeed, in the interview, Duch says that
the entire leadership was responsible for the executions he carried out.
"The decisions for the killings were made not by one man, not just Pol
Pot, but by the whole central committee," he says. "Whoever was arrested
must die. It was the rule of our party. S-21 had no right to arrest
anybody. We had the responsibility to interrogate and give the
confession to the central committee of the party."

Putting on his glasses, he solemnly leafs through copies of documents
recovered from Tuol Sleng and shown to him by the REVIEW. They are
"confessions" extracted under torture, riddled with notations in Duch's
handwriting giving instructions for questioning, torture methods and
execution. "Yes, this is my signature," he says, pointing to a scrawl
ordering the torture of one victim. "And this handwriting is Nuon Chea's
and this one Son Sen's."

Another forced confession bears a long note from Duch to the party
leadership on the "traitorous activities" of a perceived enemy. "That is
my handwriting," he volunteers, then pointing elsewhere on the document,
he adds: "And this here is Nuon Chea's handwriting." The prisoners were
later executed. He identifies what he says is the handwriting of Nuon
Chea and fellow leaders on other documents, many with notations to or
from "Elder Brother" or simply the ominous "Organization," as the
Standing Committee of the Communist Party was known.

Nuon Chea, formerly No. 2 in the party hierarchy behind Pol Pot, was
effectively given amnesty by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen last year.
After staying in luxury hotels in Phnom Penh and vacationing in the
seaside resort of Sihanoukville, he now lives freely in the western
Cambodian border town of Pailin.

Examining the documents, Duch expresses what seems like genuine remorse.
"I am so sorry. The people who died were good people. I am here now. God
will decide my future." He adds: "There were many men who were innocent.
I tried to understand the punishment and orders to kill. I have a great
difficulty in my life thinking that the people who died did nothing
wrong."

He goes on to identify those he says made the command and control
decisions of organized genocide. "The first was Pol Pot, the second was
Nuon Chea, the third Ta Mok," he says.

Referring to seven Westerners known to have been executed at Tuol Sleng,
he says: "Nuon Chea ordered that the foreigners be killed and their
bodies burned so no bones were left. Only the Europeans were burned. I
remember well the Englishman. He was very polite."

At the same time, Duch offers a degree of exoneration for others. "Ieng
Sary knew nothing," he says of the regime's foreign minister. "He only
knew a little of the internal situation of the country because his work
was outside Cambodia." In 1980, Ieng Sary was sentenced to death for
genocide in a show trial staged in his absence by the government
installed in Phnom Penh by Vietnam. He was pardoned in 1996 by King
Norodom Sihanouk after leading mass defections from the Khmer Rouge to
the government.

The regime's figurehead prime minister, Khieu Samphan, was not as
oblivious, according to Duch. "Khieu Samphan knew of the killings, but
less than the others," he says. Khieu Samphan now lives with Nuon Chea
in Pailin, which is controlled by Ieng Sary and other ex-Khmer Rouge.

While Duch's revelations would be a prosecutor's dream, the chances of a
hearing being convened before an international tribunal abroad or a fair
trial being held in Phnom Penh remain remote. Cambodian Prime Minister
Hun Sen has resisted calls for a wide-ranging trial, saying it could
spark a new civil war in a country at peace for the first time in 30
years.

In fact, the REVIEW has learned, the Cambodian government has been aware
of Duch's whereabouts since at least mid-1997, but apparently made a
political decision not to arrest him. Questioned by international
human-rights investigators as to why Duch had not been detained, the
army deputy chief of staff, Gen. Pol Saroeun, remarked: "What do you
want to do, cause a panic?"

The fear is that the arrest of Khmer Rouge figures implicated in the
genocide could destroy the fragile peace. Large areas of northern and
northwestern Cambodia are controlled by ex-Khmer Rouge, and thousands of
soldiers remain loyal to their leaders. These leaders have nominally
defected, but actually operate autonomous zones outside the control of
the Phnom Penh government.

On April 19, Hun Sen said foreign judges would be allowed to take part
in the trial of the jailed Ta Mok, but he insisted it would be held in a
Cambodian court. He was noncommittal on the issue of arresting others
implicated in the crimes of 1975-79, saying the government couldn't tell
the judicial branch what to do. Four days later, the UN special
representative for human rights in Cambodia, Thomas Hammarberg,
nonetheless reiterated the commitment of the international community to
push for a trial of key leaders implicated. Hammarberg has asked to meet
Ta Mok but was denied permission to do so by Hun Sen.

In his remote village in northwest Cambodia, Duch says he is willing to
let his fate be decided by others. "For the trial of myself, I don't
worry, it is up to Hun Sen and Jesus."

Instead, he speaks of his wish to leave politics behind. "For the
present and future, I want three things: Schools for the children, for
my stomach to be full, and I want to finish my life to pray to God, to
bring the spirit of God to everybody in Cambodia."

Cambodians, however, may not find it so easy to forgive and forget.

"Rage, tears greet Khmer Rouge"-By Nate Thayer

Rage, tears greet Khmer Rouge

By Nate Thayer

Monday, November 18,1991

Associated Press

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Sophan Nary broke down in tears Sunday when told the Khmer Rouge leaders who killed her family had returned and were staying next door to her noodle shop. "The government can give them permission to walk in the streets, but the people won't. We will kill them," said Nary, 26, whose shop is next to the heavily guarded villa housing the Khmer Rouge entourage.

Sixteen years after triumphantly entering Phnom Penh to begin a 3 ½ year reign that killed hundreds of thousands, the Khmer Rouge returned Sunday to Cambodia. They are part of a national reconciliation council set up by a UN brokered peace plan to usher in 1993 elections. Few Phnom Penh residents knew of the arrival of the 10-member Khmer Rouge delegation, led by Son Sen, the former chief of its secret police.

But crowds quickly gathered outside the government guest house where they are staying, exchanging tears and" angry stories of what the bloody regime had done to them. Several threatened to kill the Khmer Rouge if they emerged from the walled compound. Shortly after the Khmer Rouge arrived, Premier Hun Sen told a news conference that state radio had announced the return, but that national television would not broadcast pictures of

the delegation for security reasons. "If Son Sen goes out and the people recognize him, they might try to harm him," said Hun Sen. He added that he would not deal with the Khmer Rouge outside actual council sessions, saying he might be "stoned by people" if he did.

Khmer Rouge leaders

The two Khmer Rouge leaders who returned

Sunday to Cambodia are:

SON SEN — As chief of the secret police, Son Sen was reportedly responsible for the forced evacuation of cities, Internal purges and executions that ravaged entire classes of Cambodian society in the mid-1970s.

KHIEU SAMPHAN — Served as head of state, and became— by process of brutal elimination — the right-hand man of leader Pol Pot. His doctoral thesis was the blueprint for a deadly agrarian revolution. 

While maintaining some popular support in this largely rural rice-growing nation, the Khmer Rouge is despised in the cities, whose populations it targeted as class enemies in its pursuit of a radical agrarian Utopia. Government officials have expressed concern over the safety of the delegates and the government has guaranteed their security — although they will only allow them three bodyguards armed with pistols outside the compound. Under the peace accord signed last month, the Hun Sen government, the Khmer Rouge and two non-communist guerrilla groups will work as the Supreme National Council.

Yet many fear that the Khmer Rouge, which fought the Hun Sen government since its own ouster in 1978 by a Vietnamese invasion, will try again to take over. Apparently to prevent such a scenario, Hun Sen's government has been publicly cozy with Prince Norodom Sihanouk, a still-beloved former Cambodian leader who heads the reconciliation council. Nearly everybody in Phnom Penh says they remain afraid of the Khmer Rouge. "Don't believe anything the Khmer Rouge say. They are no better than dogs," said a somber Pen Chuut, who was one of several hundred people who gathered around the guest house. Down the street is a former Khmer Rouge torture center that has been preserved as a testament to its brutality. Adorning its walls are 20,000 photographs of those tortured and executed by the 1975-1978 regime.

'If (Khmer Rouge leader) Son Sen goes out and the people recognize him, they might try to harm him.'

Hun Sen

Premier of Cambodia

Khmer Rouge leader returns, is beaten by Cambodian mob -Nate Thayer

Khmer Rouge leader returns, is beaten by Cambodian mob

Chicago Sun-Times

November 27, 1991 | Nate Thayer

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia An angry mob screaming "Dog!" and "Murderer!" today surged past police and beat a top leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist guerrilla group whose reign of terror in the 1970s left hundreds of thousands dead.

The government ordered in armored personnel carriers to evacuate Khieu Samphan, the right-hand man to top Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, as the crowd prepared to lynch him. Khieu Samphan and Son Sen, another Khmer Rouge leader, and their aides were flown back to Bangkok, Thailand.

Bleeding from the head and chest, Khieu Samphan cowered in a bedroom as security officers prevented him from being strung up by a wire tied to a ceiling fan.

"Please help me, please don't leave me," he pleaded, asking three foreign photographers to say in the room.

Only hours earlier, Khieu Samphan ended his exile and returned to Phnom Penh to take part in a UN-backed plan to end 13 years of civil war between the Khmer Rouge, its two non-Communist guerrilla allies and the government Vietnam installed after invading Cambodia in 1978.

The attack delayed what would have been the first meeting of a national reconciliation council and appeared to jeopardize a UN-brokered peace accord signed last month in Paris by all four warring factions.

The government, in a statement carried by its official news agency, said it remained fully committed to the peace pact. Under the accord, a Supreme National Council led by Prince Norodom Sihanouk would help pave the way for elections in 1993.

More than 10,000 angry demonstrators converged on the villa housing the Khmer Rouge delegation today after the 60-year-old Khieu Samphan's return. Khieu Samphan was one of the prime architects of the Khmer Rouge's murderous regime, which killed hundreds of thousands of people as the group tried to turn the country into a vast rural commune. Khieu Samphan is now the group's president.

After storming and ransacking the villa, the mob broke into the second-story room where Khieu Samphan was hiding. Reporters saw him huddled against a wall, wearing a steel helmet and bleeding profusely. He apparently had been struck by a rock.

As thousands of protesters ringed the house, six government armored personnel carriers moved into position outside. One backed into the front entranceway and Khieu Samphan, with several other members of his delegation, clambered onto the back of the vehicle.

Khmer Rouge Torturer Gives Interview - AP Online

 

Khmer Rouge Torturer Gives Interview

AP Online

May 5, 1999 | CHRIS FONTAINE, Associated Press Writer

1

CHRIS FONTAINE, Associated Press Writer
AP Online
05-05-1999
Khmer Rouge Torturer Gives Interview

BATTAMBANG, Cambodia (AP) -- Eight Westerners were among the 14,000 people tortured and executed two decades ago at the Khmer Rouge's infamous Tuol Sleng prison, the former commandant said in a magazine interview.

Kaing Khek Iev, known as Duch, said American, British, French, Australian and New Zealand citizens were tortured with electric shocks for a month by the prison's chief interrogator, Mam Nay, before being killed.

Speaking in an interview published Thursday in the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review, Duch voiced remorse for the killings and said he would be willing to testify against Khmer Rouge leaders.

However, since the interview, Duch has disappeared. The Review said in a news release Wednesday that he had gone into hiding in fear for his life.

Human rights groups and experts on the Khmer Rouge genocide have said Duch could be killed to keep him from testifying before a Cambodian or international court.

The journalist who conducted the interview told The Associated Press that Duch said a former Khmer Rouge now in the Cambodian military police visited him last week and issued a veiled threat, saying, ``We see you have been talking to the bad people.''

Magazine correspondent Nate Thayer said Duch has good reason to be afraid.

``He is the link between the command-and-control and the killing machine,'' Thayer said. ``I'm sure there are a lot of people nervous that he will name them.''

In the interview with Duch, the former commandant said prisoners were killed ``like chickens.''

``Usually, we slit their throats,'' he said, drawing his finger across his neck.

The Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975 and transformed the country into a slave labor camp, causing the death of an estimated 1.7 million people from overwork, starvation and execution. They were toppled in 1979 by a Vietnamese invasion.

The government has given most Khmer Rouge leaders de facto amnesties in exchange for ending a long guerrilla war.

Prime Minister Hun Sen, a one-time Khmer Rouge field officer, has rejected calls for a U.N.-organized tribunal, insisting that Cambodia can handle the trials with help from foreign jurists.

Torturer compares himself to St. Paul

Torturer compares himself to St. Paul

Sunday Gazette-Mail

May 2, 1999 | Seth Mydans

BANGKOK, Thailand - Cambodians know him as the cruelest of the Khmer Rouge torturers, the author of such directives as "Use the hot method, even if it kills him" and, in the margin of a list of 17 children, "Kill them all."

In his own mind, he is St. Paul, a persecutor who renounced his past and became a Christian evangelist.

Kang Kek Ieu, better known by his revolutionary nickname, Duch, was the head of the Khmer Rouge secret police and the commandant of Tuol Sleng prison, where at least 14,000 people were tortured and killed. In the 20 years since the Khmer Rouge were ousted from power, he converted to Christianity and devoted himself to spreading the Gospel and to helping refugees who fled the brutality of his regime. "I think my biography is something like Paul's," he told Nate Thayer, an American reporter who recounted his strange story in an article last week in the Far Eastern Economic Review. "I feel very sorry about the killings and the past," said Duch (pronounced Dook), who is now 56 and had been living quietly and anonymously in western Cambodia. "I wanted to be a good communist. Now in the second half of my life, I want to serve God by doing God's work to help people." But he sought to make it clear that he had not tortured and killed for the fun of it. Indeed, he portrayed himself as a harried bureaucrat, constantly concerned about the quality of his product. "I did not get any pleasure about my work," he assured Thayer, speaking in broken English and in French. "All the confessions of my prisoners - I worried, is that true or not?" Almost as extraordinary as his personal story is the fact that, for the past two years, Cambodian authorities have known where he is, according to Thayer, and have made no move to arrest him. A senior Cambodian Justice official said Thursday that even now that Duch's whereabouts have been revealed, there are still no plans to put him in custody, as a defendant or a witness against other leaders. "I have no plan to summon him to Phnom Penh as a witness in Ta Mok's case," said Ngin Sam An, the investigating judge in the case of the only Khmer Rouge official to have been arrested, the commander Ta Mok. "There are also no plans yet to charge him separately with crimes." Youk Chhang, a researcher who has prepared evidence against Khmer Rouge leaders at the Documentation Center of Cambodia, called Duch a "very essential" witness against the people who are responsible for the deaths of more than a million people when they held power from 1975 to 1979. "He is the key to the conviction of Khmer Rouge leaders. His testimony can show that they were aware of what was happening," Youk Chhang said. Prime Minister Hun Sen has resisted international demands that other Khmer Rouge leaders be arrested, saying he fears this could cause a violent reaction among their followers, who now live in semiautonomous areas in the north and west of the country. Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea are prominent among these leaders. The two men surrendered last December and were given a guided tour of the country before returning to the security of the remote Khmer Rouge- controlled town of Pailin. In the interview, Duch implicated both men, as well as Ta Mok, as leaders who ordered the torture and killings he carried out at the prison known as S-21. "The first was Pol Pot," he said, naming the Khmer Rouge leader who died a year ago. "The second was Nuon Chea, the third Ta Mok." He added: "Khieu Samphan knew of the killings, but less than the others." The overriding rule at Tuol Sleng, Thayer quoted Duch, was a simple one: "Whoever was arrested must die." When a Vietnamese invasion drove the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979, Duch fled with other Khmer Rouge leaders into the jungles. According to his own account he left the movement in 1992 and became a teacher. Then, under assumed names, he worked until a few months ago with United Nations and private relief organizations. It was at that time that he converted to Christianity, he said. "After my experience in life I decided I must give my spirit to God," he said. Duch, whose thin face, large teeth and prominent ears made him one of the more recognizable faces in photographs of the Khmer Rouge, said he was fully prepared to face trial. "I have done very bad things in my life," he said, the first Khmer Rouge leader to make that admission. "Now it is time to bear the consequences of my actions."

Second Thoughts for Pol Pot; Fallen Tyrant Defends His Brutal Regime but Now Wants Cambodia Tied to West

Second Thoughts for Pol Pot; Fallen Tyrant Defends His Brutal Regime but Now Wants Cambodia Tied to West

The Washington Post

October 28, 1997  

By Nate Thayer  

In a clearing of the thick teak jungles of northern Cambodia, Pol Pot looked sadly across a wooden table and expressed the wish that his life's work be undone.

"When I die, my only wish is that Cambodia remain Cambodia and belong to the West," said the tyrant who presided over one of the most murderous regimes of modern times. "It is over for communism, and I want to stress that. . . . When I say Cambodia {should} be part of the West, I mean that if you belong to the West, at least there is no fascist regime."

This might seem a strange statement, coming from a man who seized power in 1975 by defeating a U.S.-backed government and who tried to transform Cambodia into a communist agrarian utopia. But it fits with the current position of Pol Pot's captors, who allowed him to be interviewed Oct. 16 as part of an effort to reach out to the West in general, and the United States in particular. Accounts of the interview by this correspondent first appeared last week in the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Wall Street Journal. As unrealistic as this effort might appear to outsiders, the Khmer Rouge remnants led by Ta Mok, 71, a feared guerrilla commander who lost a leg to a land mine, clearly hope that their purge of Pol Pot will encourage support for their struggle against the Phnom Penh government of Hun Sen. First installed as prime minister by Vietnamese occupation forces in the 1980s, Hun Sen forced his way into a coalition government after losing U.N.-sponsored elections in 1993, then overthrew his royalist partner in July. "When the Cambodian people hear our new slogans, they will surely send money to help our struggle," Ta Mok declared in a separate interview, pointing to freshly painted revolutionary slogans on the walls of a meeting hall. Among the slogans were "Defeat to the race-exterminating Vietnamese enemy," "Down with Pol Pot and his genocidal clique" and "Cambodians do not kill Cambodians." While Ta Mok expressed open revulsion for his former mentor, blaming him for the deaths of "hundreds of thousands" of Cambodians during the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge rule and the suffering of millions more, Pol Pot seemed oddly complacent about the former followers who turned against him and sentenced him to "life imprisonment" at a show trial here in July. The revolt against Pol Pot had little to do with the "genocide" that he is accused of waging against his own people during his rule, but was triggered by the massacre of the former Khmer Rouge defense minister and his family during a Pol Pot-ordered purge in June that also had targeted Ta Mok. Although he acknowledged that he is finished, "both politically and as a human being," Pol Pot made it clear he takes comfort from the fact that his disciples are carrying on the driving passion that guided his leadership of the Khmer Rouge for more than 30 years: a deep-seated hatred of the Vietnamese. "We had no reason to kill our own people," Pol Pot said in dismissing the charges of genocide. "But of course things happened that made people suffer." He insisted that his leadership had saved the country from an expansionist Vietnam. "Without our struggle, Cambodia would have been swallowed by the Vietnamese in 1975," he declared. He said his distrust of Vietnam dates back to at least 1970, when he met Vietnamese leaders who, he said, "tried to flatter me . . . but they wanted to assassinate me in order to swallow Cambodia. They asked us to not fight and to wait until they liberated Saigon and then they would come liberate us. I knew then that they wanted to be our masters." It is Pol Pot's obsession with Vietnam, a theme he returned to repeatedly, that allows him to justify to himself all the excesses of his rule. "Everything I have done and contributed is first for the nation and people and race of Cambodia," he said. "Our movement made mistakes like every other movement in the world. We were young. But without our struggle, there would be no Cambodia today." He even claimed that the infamous Tuol Sleng school-turned-prison, where at least 16,000 Cambodians were tortured into signing "confessions" before they were executed, was a fabrication of the Vietnamese. Pol Pot claimed that he first heard of Tuol Sleng from a Voice of America broadcast at a jungle hideout after being driven from power. "People talk about Tuol Sleng, Tuol Sleng, Tuol Sleng, but when we look at the pictures, they are all the same," he said. Referring to the displays of skulls at the site, now a museum documenting Khmer Rouge brutality, Pol Pot asserted, "When you look closely . . . they are smaller than the skulls of the Cambodian people." During the two-hour interview, his first in 18 years, Pol Pot often became annoyed when challenged or interrupted. But he maintained a gentle demeanor, never raised his voice and often looked pained when defending himself against the charges of genocide against his nation. He became animated and seemed eager to talk only when the subject turned to such matters as his health and his family life, and he sought to elicit sympathy for his own tribulations. "You look at me from the outside and you don't know what I have suffered," he said. "If you allow me, I would like to tell you about my sickness." He went on to describe a catalogue of health problems that had been publicly unknown, including serious heart disease, chronic respiratory difficulties that require an oxygen tank by his bed, and a stroke in late 1995 that has left him blind in one eye and partially paralyzed on his left side. "Two or three times I almost died," he said. He complained about scholars who wrote that he was not particularly bright, saying, "That is not entirely accurate. . . . I was not a bad student. I was average." During his student days in France, where he studied radio-electricity from 1949 to 1953 and joined the French Communist Party, "I studied just enough to keep my scholarship," he said. "The rest of the time I just read books." Pol Pot said he was born in January 1925, making him 72, and said he had lied about his age to qualify for the scholarship in France. He previously was thought to be 69. Among his early influences, he said with no apparent irony, was Mohandas K. Gandhi. He said he was never "from the traditional school of communism" and that he was influenced "a little from here, a little from there." Now living his dying days in the forbidding jungles of northern Cambodia, he comforts himself with his radio and his 12-year-old daughter, born of his marriage in the 1980s to a Khmer Rouge porter much younger than he. "I listen to the radio every morning," he said. "The Voice of America. But they don't have much news in the morning. The evening news is better."

Cambodian Peace Was Just a Day Away; Hun Sen's Coup Derailed Ceremony to Announce Truce With Khmer Rouge

Cambodian Peace Was Just a Day Away; Hun Sen's Coup Derailed Ceremony to Announce Truce With Khmer Rouge

The Washington Post

August 17, 1997 | Nate Thayer

2

After six weeks of secret meetings and a violent power struggle here in the jungles of northern Cambodia, a watershed moment in this country's tortured history was at hand.

The last holdouts of the Khmer Rouge, the radical Communist guerrillas who had killed more than 1 million people when they ruled Cambodia in the late 1970s and thousands more after their ouster, were giving up. They had deposed their notorious leader Pol Pot, effectively abandoned their war against Cambodia's government and had agreed to a formal "surrender" ceremony in which their forces would join the Cambodian army.

As a result of negotiations that Pol Pot violently opposed, but ultimately failed to prevent, it seemed that the end of the 35-year-old guerrilla movement was near -- and with it a termination of the civil war that has gripped the country for most of that time. Plans were made to announce the deal in a ceremony scheduled for July 6. The ceremony never took place. On that day, Second Prime Minister Hun Sen declared himself in full control of the government and announced the overthrow of his rival, First Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh. Apparently fearing that the peace agreement was a ploy to weaken him politically and militarily, Hun Sen had launched a coup July 5 to scuttle it. Now, Hun Sen's political opponents are waging armed resistance to his authoritarian rule, and there are signs that the Khmer Rouge remnants -- minus Pol Pot -- are reuniting to help them. In the tragic logic of Cambodian politics, an initiative that seemed only a day away from bringing long-awaited peace has instead brought more war. The story of the ill-fated peace initiative, played out in this Khmer Rouge jungle stronghold surrounded by land mines, emerges from documents and interviews with the government and Khmer Rouge negotiators involved in the talks. The Khmer Rouge officials were interviewed at the time of an extraordinary July 25 show trial in which an ailing Pol Pot was sentenced to "life imprisonment" by a tribunal made up of younger guerrilla leaders, who had revolted against him in June. Frail, white-haired and visibly traumatized, the former dictator hobbled on a bamboo cane as he was escorted away to house arrest. Government documents obtained by The Washington Post, signed by both the government and Khmer Rouge negotiators, show that on July 4 the guerrillas finally had agreed to integrate their troops into the army and recognize the government. The agreement, principally between Ranariddh and the Khmer Rouge's nominal leader Khieu Samphan, was the culmination of a score of secret meetings between Khmer Rouge leaders and government military negotiators. The talks proceeded against a backdrop of bitter divisions within both the government and the Khmer Rouge. Ranariddh and Hun Sen, steadfast political opponents, coexisted uneasily as co-prime ministers. The Khmer Rouge, meanwhile, had split a year ago when about half its fighters, followers of former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary in the western gem-mining center of Pailin, agreed to join the government army in a deal brokered by Hun Sen. Pol Pot, in firm control of the rest of the organization in its northern redoubt of Anlong Veng, bitterly opposed any peace negotiations. But many of his top commanders, seeing continued warfare as futile if they played no political role, wanted to strike a deal like the one agreed to in Pailin. Pol Pot's notoriety made him a major obstacle to such an accord. Between April 1975 and January 1979, when he ruled the country as head of a Khmer Rouge government, Pol Pot orchestrated a campaign of terror and mass murder that left more than 1 million Cambodians dead and the country in ruins. Formal negotiations with the Khmer Rouge were attempted last February, but Pol Pot loyalists ambushed a government team of 15 emissaries when its helicopter landed in Khmer Rouge territory. Ten of the government officials were executed and the rest were taken prisoner. Negotiations resumed on May 16, when a government military delegation met with Khmer Rouge officials led by Tep Kunnal, a senior political figure. A government negotiator who was at the meeting quoted Tep Kunnal as saying "he was in favor of national reconciliation and wanted a permanent cease-fire . . . to study whether we could work together to allow their territory and army to join the government." Tep Kunnal, a French-educated engineer and longtime Khmer Rouge diplomat and political strategist who joined the group in the early 1970s, has emerged as a top new leader. He served more than a decade in New York in the U.N. mission of the former Khmer Rouge government-in-exile and is knowledgeable about U.S. politics. A series of talks continued through the end of May and into early June, with government army negotiators repeatedly traveling by helicopter to Anlong Veng. "Pol Pot was informed of the negotiations," said a government negotiator. "At first Pol Pot said he was in favor of negotiations. But our side insisted strongly that Pol Pot must be completely out. So we discussed secretly with the new {Khmer Rouge} military leaders. So that was why Pol Pot was getting mad. We asked to exclude him." The guerrillas agreed in principle to integrate their army into the government armed forces, recognize the Cambodian constitution and formally disband their "provisional government," according to Khmer Rouge and government sources. On June 1, Ranariddh met Khieu Samphan, the nominal leader, secretly near the Thai border, according to Ranariddh. On June 5, the two sides met at the historic temples at Preah Vihear, where the guerrillas were preparing a site to announce the agreement. But that evening, Im Nguon, chief military representative on the negotiating team and chief of staff of the new Khmer Rouge army, called a senior government negotiator by mobile telephone "and asked me to work carefully on the issue secretly, because the negotiations were very sensitive," the government negotiator said. "I realized that this was a signal that there was a split within the Khmer Rouge. I realized that within the Khmer Rouge there was a split on negotiations. I didn't know who it was between, but {Im} Nguon was warning me." The next meeting was scheduled on June 10, "but there was a big problem," one of the government negotiators said. Khmer Rouge defense minister Son Sen and 12 members of his family and inner circle had been found murdered. It was the beginning of Pol Pot's attempt to scuttle the political negotiations through a violent purge of Khmer Rouge ranks. On June 12, top government military commander Gen. Nhek Bun Chhay and one other government colonel arrived by helicopter in Anlong Veng to find a Khmer Rouge at war with itself. Most of the Khmer Rouge negotiating team, including Tep Kunnal and Khieu Samphan, had been taken hostage by Pol Pot and his loyalists. Heavy fighting, involving mortars, artillery and small arms, could be heard just a couple of miles away, as the Khmer Rouge factions battled for control. Pol Pot's Hostages The Khmer Rouge negotiator, Im Nguon, reported that Pol Pot was holding hostage "all those who were in favor of national reconciliation." The Khmer Rouge said the situation was critical, and asked for immediate military support "to help liberate the hostages," according to one of the government negotiators. "After that we immediately took the helicopter to {the nearby government military base at} Samrong to bring ammunition -- mainly AK-47 ammunition but also heavier ammunition," including helicopters loaded with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and other heavy munitions, the government negotiator said. With Pol Pot and his loyalists on the run and the entire political leadership held hostage in nearby jungles, government negotiators moved fast. Nhek Bun Chhay flew in from Phnom Penh on June 12 and shuttled back and forth delivering ammunition before returning to the capital. It was that day, while fighting raged in the surrounding jungle, that Nhek Bun Chhay first met Khmer Rouge strongman Ta Mok, the 72-year-old, one-legged overall commander of the new Khmer Rouge who had joined the revolution in 1963 with Pol Pot -- and now had turned against him. "I place all my hope on you," he reportedly told Nhek Bun Chhay. "Please continue the negotiations for national reconciliation in order to bring trust between our two groups. I want to see peace in Cambodia and to not see any more killing," he was quoted as saying. The next day, June 13, the government team returned by helicopter. "It was a very tense meeting because the fighting was still going on, and they asked us to postpone the meeting because they had to solve their internal problems first," one of the negotiators said. The team left after four hours. When they returned four days later, they were told that "the situation had calmed down" and that some of the hostages had been rescued. "They said that Tep Kunnal and the others had been liberated and they would arrive back the next day, but political leader Khieu Samphan was still held and Pol Pot had not yet been captured," one of the negotiators said. On the next day, they returned and met with Tep Kunnal, who "expressed fear for his group because Khieu Samphan, their leader, was missing with Pol Pot," according to the government negotiator. Tep Kunnal said that Pol Pot's battle slogan was, "Fight! Fight! Fight! Struggle! Struggle! Struggle!" Meanwhile, back in Phnom Penh, there was another developing issue: the attitude of Cambodia's other prime minister, Hun Sen. Nhek Bun Chhay and other government military officials say Hun Sen was kept informed of daily developments by a committee of senior military and political officials, formed earlier this year to ease tensions between the two government camps headed by Ranariddh and Hun Sen. "Tep Kunnal . . . asked about Hun Sen's stance. What did Hun Sen say about the groups returning back to join the society?" recalled a government negotiator. The team replied that there "was no problem provided that he abandon Pol Pot, accept the constitution, and integrate their army." Strongman's Downfall As the days went on, Pol Pot's remaining loyalists, who had numbered only about 300, began to abandon him one by one. He had fled northeast toward the Thai border, and by June 19 was surrounded. When the man who had once wielded absolute power over 7 million people was finally captured, two of his soldiers were carrying him through the jungle in a green Chinese military hammock strung on a bamboo pole. With him were his wife, a woman in her 30s, their 12-year-old daughter, a niece, three other loyalists and Khieu Samphan as hostage. A witness to his capture said he was given oxygen immediately and seemed near death from exhaustion and trauma, which were exacerbating his serious heart disease and high blood pressure. A white Toyota Land Cruiser that the Khmer Rouge had seized from U.N. peacekeepers years earlier was sent to bring him back to Anlong Veng. On June 21, government negotiators returned to Anlong Veng, where they met a tired and drained Khieu Samphan. Nearby was a very sick 72-year-old man hooked to an intravenous drip with an oxygen mask over his face. When asked by government negotiators if they could take a picture of Pol Pot to prove to the world that he was alive and captured, Ta Mok erupted: "Let me throw the contemptible Pol Pot in a cage first, and then you can take his photograph!" "He was very angry," said a witness. Ta Mok reportedly told negotiators they could take Pol Pot away if they could find a suitable place in exile for him, but no specific country was mentioned. From that point, the peace negotiations moved more quickly. On June 20, during an official visit by Thai Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh to Phnom Penh, Ranariddh announced that Pol Pot was under arrest and Khieu Samphan would agree to surrender. The comments were met with widespread skepticism by diplomats and others, coming on the heels of similar claims over recent months that had proved unfounded. A military subcommittee was formed to hammer out the details of integrating the guerrillas into the government army. Nhek Bun Chhay demanded that the Khmer Rouge announce its support of the Cambodian constitution over their clandestine radio broadcasts. The Khmer Rouge prepared a draft statement agreeing to support the constitution, turn over their army and territory to formal central government command and recognize the role of King Norodom Sihanouk as sovereign of the nation. But the government negotiators spent days hammering out wording and demanding the deletion of vitriolic language condemning Hun Sen -- particularly frequent references to the second prime minister as "contemptible" and a "puppet" of Vietnam. Hun Sen defected from the Khmer Rouge in 1977. Vietnam installed him as Cambodia's foreign minister after its invasion toppled Pol Pot in 1979 and later elevated him to prime minister. "We said to them to you must stop using these words. . . . We asked specifically to stop using `puppet' . . . in their language on the draft announcement to surrender to the government," said one of the chief government negotiators. On June 22, the Khmer Rouge reiterated a request for assurances that they be allowed to keep the same military arrangement in Anlong Veng that was given to earlier defectors. In those cases, the military units changed into government uniforms and pledged allegiance to the king, government and constitution, but were not forced to disperse from their territory. Nhek Bun Chhay agreed. And it was agreed that the former Khmer Rouge, who now called themselves the National Unity Party, could join the National United Front coalition of anti-Hun Sen political opposition parties, which had been formed earlier this year in preparation for elections scheduled for 1998. Request for Amnesty On June 29, Khmer Rouge leader Ta Mok met the government negotiators over lunch at Anlong Veng. Ta Mok complained about attempts to bring him to an international court on charges of crimes against humanity, citing the royal amnesty granted to former Khmer Rouge official Ieng Sary after his defection last year. "Now Ieng Sary has already been given amnesty by the king, and Ieng Sary was number three in the command structure of the Khmer Rouge. But I was number five. So if the number three is amnestied, why not me who was less powerful?" complained the commander who has been accused of leading major purges of political enemies during the Khmer Rouge's years in power. "From the very beginning of the struggle to now I have never issued an order to kill anyone," Ta Mok contended, according to sources who were present. "All orders were decided by Pol Pot alone. Pol Pot made all decisions with absolute dictatorship!" The question of Ta Mok's fate was left unresolved. A formal surrender ceremony was tentatively set for June 30, "but the problem was lack of helicopter transportation for all the journalists and diplomats" to the remote jungle base, which is surrounded by thousands of land mines and is unreachable by road. In any event, a few small issues remained. By July 3 both sides had hammered out all details of the agreements, "and we flew back to Phnom Penh to report to the prime minister that everything was finished," one of the government negotiators said. A statement that was to be announced on the radio and read by Khieu Samphan at a press conference on July 6 was signed by both sides, including Ranariddh on behalf of the government. "On 4 July we flew back to Anlong Veng and we informed the Khmer Rouge to proceed because we got the final agreement from Prime Minister Ranariddh," said one of the chief government negotiators. The surrender ceremony was to be held at the Preah Vihear temple site, with diplomats and journalists flown in to witness the historic occasion. It never happened. Early on the morning of July 5, Hun Sen launched his coup d'etat in Phnom Penh, targeting Nhek Bun Chhay and inflicting a total military and political defeat on Ranariddh's forces in the capital within 48 hours. The chance for a negotiated peace, only 24 hours away, was gone. Back to Square One Ranariddh's forces are now holed up in jungle sanctuaries, and Hun Sen, in control of the government, is sending thousands of troops and heavy weapons to the areas in an attempt to subdue them. The forces loyal to Ranariddh have begun to form a military coalition with former Khmer Rouge fighters, both from Anlong Veng and from the other faction that surrendered last year. "I hope that ASEAN {the Association of Southeast Asian Nations} and the international community will be aware that our government was not able to take Anlong Veng militarily, in a series of major offensives since 1993," Ranariddh said in an interview in Bangkok last week. "Now it is Hun Sen alone. My priority is diplomatic and political struggle, but I have clearly warned the U.S. if you do not help me put pressure on Hun Sen, you will have civil war, a bloody civil war, and you cannot avoid having the participation of the Khmer Rouge." He added, "The Khmer Rouge are coming back, but they are coming back as nationalists, patriots, not as killers. It is not fair that they accuse Ranariddh. It is Hun Sen who has brought back the war."

Cambodian Peace Was Just a Day Away; Hun Sen's Coup Derailed Ceremony to Announce Truce With Khmer Rouge

Cambodian Peace Was Just a Day Away; Hun Sen's Coup Derailed Ceremony to Announce Truce With Khmer Rouge

The Washington Post

August 17, 1997

By Nate Thayer 

After six weeks of secret meetings and a violent power struggle here in the jungles of northern Cambodia, a watershed moment in this country's tortured history was at hand.

The last holdouts of the Khmer Rouge, the radical Communist guerrillas who had killed more than 1 million people when they ruled Cambodia in the late 1970s and thousands more after their ouster, were giving up. They had deposed their notorious leader Pol Pot, effectively abandoned their war against Cambodia's government and had agreed to a formal "surrender" ceremony in which their forces would join the Cambodian army.

As a result of negotiations that Pol Pot violently opposed, but ultimately failed to prevent, it seemed that the end of the 35-year-old guerrilla movement was near -- and with it a termination of the civil war that has gripped the country for most of that time. Plans were made to announce the deal in a ceremony scheduled for July 6. The ceremony never took place. On that day, Second Prime Minister Hun Sen declared himself in full control of the government and announced the overthrow of his rival, First Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh. Apparently fearing that the peace agreement was a ploy to weaken him politically and militarily, Hun Sen had launched a coup July 5 to scuttle it. Now, Hun Sen's political opponents are waging armed resistance to his authoritarian rule, and there are signs that the Khmer Rouge remnants -- minus Pol Pot -- are reuniting to help them. In the tragic logic of Cambodian politics, an initiative that seemed only a day away from bringing long-awaited peace has instead brought more war. The story of the ill-fated peace initiative, played out in this Khmer Rouge jungle stronghold surrounded by land mines, emerges from documents and interviews with the government and Khmer Rouge negotiators involved in the talks. The Khmer Rouge officials were interviewed at the time of an extraordinary July 25 show trial in which an ailing Pol Pot was sentenced to "life imprisonment" by a tribunal made up of younger guerrilla leaders, who had revolted against him in June. Frail, white-haired and visibly traumatized, the former dictator hobbled on a bamboo cane as he was escorted away to house arrest. Government documents obtained by The Washington Post, signed by both the government and Khmer Rouge negotiators, show that on July 4 the guerrillas finally had agreed to integrate their troops into the army and recognize the government. The agreement, principally between Ranariddh and the Khmer Rouge's nominal leader Khieu Samphan, was the culmination of a score of secret meetings between Khmer Rouge leaders and government military negotiators. The talks proceeded against a backdrop of bitter divisions within both the government and the Khmer Rouge. Ranariddh and Hun Sen, steadfast political opponents, coexisted uneasily as co-prime ministers. The Khmer Rouge, meanwhile, had split a year ago when about half its fighters, followers of former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary in the western gem-mining center of Pailin, agreed to join the government army in a deal brokered by Hun Sen. Pol Pot, in firm control of the rest of the organization in its northern redoubt of Anlong Veng, bitterly opposed any peace negotiations. But many of his top commanders, seeing continued warfare as futile if they played no political role, wanted to strike a deal like the one agreed to in Pailin. Pol Pot's notoriety made him a major obstacle to such an accord. Between April 1975 and January 1979, when he ruled the country as head of a Khmer Rouge government, Pol Pot orchestrated a campaign of terror and mass murder that left more than 1 million Cambodians dead and the country in ruins. Formal negotiations with the Khmer Rouge were attempted last February, but Pol Pot loyalists ambushed a government team of 15 emissaries when its helicopter landed in Khmer Rouge territory. Ten of the government officials were executed and the rest were taken prisoner. Negotiations resumed on May 16, when a government military delegation met with Khmer Rouge officials led by Tep Kunnal, a senior political figure. A government negotiator who was at the meeting quoted Tep Kunnal as saying "he was in favor of national reconciliation and wanted a permanent cease-fire . . . to study whether we could work together to allow their territory and army to join the government." Tep Kunnal, a French-educated engineer and longtime Khmer Rouge diplomat and political strategist who joined the group in the early 1970s, has emerged as a top new leader. He served more than a decade in New York in the U.N. mission of the former Khmer Rouge government-in-exile and is knowledgeable about U.S. politics. A series of talks continued through the end of May and into early June, with government army negotiators repeatedly traveling by helicopter to Anlong Veng. "Pol Pot was informed of the negotiations," said a government negotiator. "At first Pol Pot said he was in favor of negotiations. But our side insisted strongly that Pol Pot must be completely out. So we discussed secretly with the new {Khmer Rouge} military leaders. So that was why Pol Pot was getting mad. We asked to exclude him." The guerrillas agreed in principle to integrate their army into the government armed forces, recognize the Cambodian constitution and formally disband their "provisional government," according to Khmer Rouge and government sources. On June 1, Ranariddh met Khieu Samphan, the nominal leader, secretly near the Thai border, according to Ranariddh. On June 5, the two sides met at the historic temples at Preah Vihear, where the guerrillas were preparing a site to announce the agreement. But that evening, Im Nguon, chief military representative on the negotiating team and chief of staff of the new Khmer Rouge army, called a senior government negotiator by mobile telephone "and asked me to work carefully on the issue secretly, because the negotiations were very sensitive," the government negotiator said. "I realized that this was a signal that there was a split within the Khmer Rouge. I realized that within the Khmer Rouge there was a split on negotiations. I didn't know who it was between, but {Im} Nguon was warning me." The next meeting was scheduled on June 10, "but there was a big problem," one of the government negotiators said. Khmer Rouge defense minister Son Sen and 12 members of his family and inner circle had been found murdered. It was the beginning of Pol Pot's attempt to scuttle the political negotiations through a violent purge of Khmer Rouge ranks. On June 12, top government military commander Gen. Nhek Bun Chhay and one other government colonel arrived by helicopter in Anlong Veng to find a Khmer Rouge at war with itself. Most of the Khmer Rouge negotiating team, including Tep Kunnal and Khieu Samphan, had been taken hostage by Pol Pot and his loyalists. Heavy fighting, involving mortars, artillery and small arms, could be heard just a couple of miles away, as the Khmer Rouge factions battled for control. Pol Pot's Hostages The Khmer Rouge negotiator, Im Nguon, reported that Pol Pot was holding hostage "all those who were in favor of national reconciliation." The Khmer Rouge said the situation was critical, and asked for immediate military support "to help liberate the hostages," according to one of the government negotiators. "After that we immediately took the helicopter to {the nearby government military base at} Samrong to bring ammunition -- mainly AK-47 ammunition but also heavier ammunition," including helicopters loaded with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and other heavy munitions, the government negotiator said. With Pol Pot and his loyalists on the run and the entire political leadership held hostage in nearby jungles, government negotiators moved fast. Nhek Bun Chhay flew in from Phnom Penh on June 12 and shuttled back and forth delivering ammunition before returning to the capital. It was that day, while fighting raged in the surrounding jungle, that Nhek Bun Chhay first met Khmer Rouge strongman Ta Mok, the 72-year-old, one-legged overall commander of the new Khmer Rouge who had joined the revolution in 1963 with Pol Pot -- and now had turned against him. "I place all my hope on you," he reportedly told Nhek Bun Chhay. "Please continue the negotiations for national reconciliation in order to bring trust between our two groups. I want to see peace in Cambodia and to not see any more killing," he was quoted as saying. The next day, June 13, the government team returned by helicopter. "It was a very tense meeting because the fighting was still going on, and they asked us to postpone the meeting because they had to solve their internal problems first," one of the negotiators said. The team left after four hours. When they returned four days later, they were told that "the situation had calmed down" and that some of the hostages had been rescued. "They said that Tep Kunnal and the others had been liberated and they would arrive back the next day, but political leader Khieu Samphan was still held and Pol Pot had not yet been captured," one of the negotiators said. On the next day, they returned and met with Tep Kunnal, who "expressed fear for his group because Khieu Samphan, their leader, was missing with Pol Pot," according to the government negotiator. Tep Kunnal said that Pol Pot's battle slogan was, "Fight! Fight! Fight! Struggle! Struggle! Struggle!" Meanwhile, back in Phnom Penh, there was another developing issue: the attitude of Cambodia's other prime minister, Hun Sen. Nhek Bun Chhay and other government military officials say Hun Sen was kept informed of daily developments by a committee of senior military and political officials, formed earlier this year to ease tensions between the two government camps headed by Ranariddh and Hun Sen. "Tep Kunnal . . . asked about Hun Sen's stance. What did Hun Sen say about the groups returning back to join the society?" recalled a government negotiator. The team replied that there "was no problem provided that he abandon Pol Pot, accept the constitution, and integrate their army." Strongman's Downfall As the days went on, Pol Pot's remaining loyalists, who had numbered only about 300, began to abandon him one by one. He had fled northeast toward the Thai border, and by June 19 was surrounded. When the man who had once wielded absolute power over 7 million people was finally captured, two of his soldiers were carrying him through the jungle in a green Chinese military hammock strung on a bamboo pole. With him were his wife, a woman in her 30s, their 12-year-old daughter, a niece, three other loyalists and Khieu Samphan as hostage. A witness to his capture said he was given oxygen immediately and seemed near death from exhaustion and trauma, which were exacerbating his serious heart disease and high blood pressure. A white Toyota Land Cruiser that the Khmer Rouge had seized from U.N. peacekeepers years earlier was sent to bring him back to Anlong Veng. On June 21, government negotiators returned to Anlong Veng, where they met a tired and drained Khieu Samphan. Nearby was a very sick 72-year-old man hooked to an intravenous drip with an oxygen mask over his face. When asked by government negotiators if they could take a picture of Pol Pot to prove to the world that he was alive and captured, Ta Mok erupted: "Let me throw the contemptible Pol Pot in a cage first, and then you can take his photograph!" "He was very angry," said a witness. Ta Mok reportedly told negotiators they could take Pol Pot away if they could find a suitable place in exile for him, but no specific country was mentioned. From that point, the peace negotiations moved more quickly. On June 20, during an official visit by Thai Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh to Phnom Penh, Ranariddh announced that Pol Pot was under arrest and Khieu Samphan would agree to surrender. The comments were met with widespread skepticism by diplomats and others, coming on the heels of similar claims over recent months that had proved unfounded. A military subcommittee was formed to hammer out the details of integrating the guerrillas into the government army. Nhek Bun Chhay demanded that the Khmer Rouge announce its support of the Cambodian constitution over their clandestine radio broadcasts. The Khmer Rouge prepared a draft statement agreeing to support the constitution, turn over their army and territory to formal central government command and recognize the role of King Norodom Sihanouk as sovereign of the nation. But the government negotiators spent days hammering out wording and demanding the deletion of vitriolic language condemning Hun Sen -- particularly frequent references to the second prime minister as "contemptible" and a "puppet" of Vietnam. Hun Sen defected from the Khmer Rouge in 1977. Vietnam installed him as Cambodia's foreign minister after its invasion toppled Pol Pot in 1979 and later elevated him to prime minister. "We said to them to you must stop using these words. . . . We asked specifically to stop using `puppet' . . . in their language on the draft announcement to surrender to the government," said one of the chief government negotiators. On June 22, the Khmer Rouge reiterated a request for assurances that they be allowed to keep the same military arrangement in Anlong Veng that was given to earlier defectors. In those cases, the military units changed into government uniforms and pledged allegiance to the king, government and constitution, but were not forced to disperse from their territory. Nhek Bun Chhay agreed. And it was agreed that the former Khmer Rouge, who now called themselves the National Unity Party, could join the National United Front coalition of anti-Hun Sen political opposition parties, which had been formed earlier this year in preparation for elections scheduled for 1998. Request for Amnesty On June 29, Khmer Rouge leader Ta Mok met the government negotiators over lunch at Anlong Veng. Ta Mok complained about attempts to bring him to an international court on charges of crimes against humanity, citing the royal amnesty granted to former Khmer Rouge official Ieng Sary after his defection last year. "Now Ieng Sary has already been given amnesty by the king, and Ieng Sary was number three in the command structure of the Khmer Rouge. But I was number five. So if the number three is amnestied, why not me who was less powerful?" complained the commander who has been accused of leading major purges of political enemies during the Khmer Rouge's years in power. "From the very beginning of the struggle to now I have never issued an order to kill anyone," Ta Mok contended, according to sources who were present. "All orders were decided by Pol Pot alone. Pol Pot made all decisions with absolute dictatorship!" The question of Ta Mok's fate was left unresolved. A formal surrender ceremony was tentatively set for June 30, "but the problem was lack of helicopter transportation for all the journalists and diplomats" to the remote jungle base, which is surrounded by thousands of land mines and is unreachable by road. In any event, a few small issues remained. By July 3 both sides had hammered out all details of the agreements, "and we flew back to Phnom Penh to report to the prime minister that everything was finished," one of the government negotiators said. A statement that was to be announced on the radio and read by Khieu Samphan at a press conference on July 6 was signed by both sides, including Ranariddh on behalf of the government. "On 4 July we flew back to Anlong Veng and we informed the Khmer Rouge to proceed because we got the final agreement from Prime Minister Ranariddh," said one of the chief government negotiators. The surrender ceremony was to be held at the Preah Vihear temple site, with diplomats and journalists flown in to witness the historic occasion. It never happened. Early on the morning of July 5, Hun Sen launched his coup d'etat in Phnom Penh, targeting Nhek Bun Chhay and inflicting a total military and political defeat on Ranariddh's forces in the capital within 48 hours. The chance for a negotiated peace, only 24 hours away, was gone. Back to Square One Ranariddh's forces are now holed up in jungle sanctuaries, and Hun Sen, in control of the government, is sending thousands of troops and heavy weapons to the areas in an attempt to subdue them. The forces loyal to Ranariddh have begun to form a military coalition with former Khmer Rouge fighters, both from Anlong Veng and from the other faction that surrendered last year. "I hope that ASEAN {the Association of Southeast Asian Nations} and the international community will be aware that our government was not able to take Anlong Veng militarily, in a series of major offensives since 1993," Ranariddh said in an interview in Bangkok last week. "Now it is Hun Sen alone. My priority is diplomatic and political struggle, but I have clearly warned the U.S. if you do not help me put pressure on Hun Sen, you will have civil war, a bloody civil war, and you cannot avoid having the participation of the Khmer Rouge." He added, "The Khmer Rouge are coming back, but they are coming back as nationalists, patriots, not as killers. It is not fair that they accuse Ranariddh. It is Hun Sen who has brought back the war."

Cambodian Peace Was Just a Day Away; Hun Sen's Coup Derailed Ceremony to Announce Truce With Khmer Rouge

Cambodian Peace Was Just a Day Away; Hun Sen's Coup Derailed Ceremony to Announce Truce With Khmer Rouge

The Washington Post

August 17, 1997 | Nate Thayer

After six weeks of secret meetings and a violent power struggle here in the jungles of northern Cambodia, a watershed moment in this country's tortured history was at hand.

The last holdouts of the Khmer Rouge, the radical Communist guerrillas who had killed more than 1 million people when they ruled Cambodia in the late 1970s and thousands more after their ouster, were giving up. They had deposed their notorious leader Pol Pot, effectively abandoned their war against Cambodia's government and had agreed to a formal "surrender" ceremony in which their forces would join the Cambodian army.

As a result of negotiations that Pol Pot violently opposed, but ultimately failed to prevent, it seemed that the end of the 35-year-old guerrilla movement was near -- and with it a termination of the civil war that has gripped the country for most of that time. Plans were made to announce the deal in a ceremony scheduled for July 6. The ceremony never took place. On that day, Second Prime Minister Hun Sen declared himself in full control of the government and announced the overthrow of his rival, First Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh. Apparently fearing that the peace agreement was a ploy to weaken him politically and militarily, Hun Sen had launched a coup July 5 to scuttle it. Now, Hun Sen's political opponents are waging armed resistance to his authoritarian rule, and there are signs that the Khmer Rouge remnants -- minus Pol Pot -- are reuniting to help them. In the tragic logic of Cambodian politics, an initiative that seemed only a day away from bringing long-awaited peace has instead brought more war. The story of the ill-fated peace initiative, played out in this Khmer Rouge jungle stronghold surrounded by land mines, emerges from documents and interviews with the government and Khmer Rouge negotiators involved in the talks. The Khmer Rouge officials were interviewed at the time of an extraordinary July 25 show trial in which an ailing Pol Pot was sentenced to "life imprisonment" by a tribunal made up of younger guerrilla leaders, who had revolted against him in June. Frail, white-haired and visibly traumatized, the former dictator hobbled on a bamboo cane as he was escorted away to house arrest. Government documents obtained by The Washington Post, signed by both the government and Khmer Rouge negotiators, show that on July 4 the guerrillas finally had agreed to integrate their troops into the army and recognize the government. The agreement, principally between Ranariddh and the Khmer Rouge's nominal leader Khieu Samphan, was the culmination of a score of secret meetings between Khmer Rouge leaders and government military negotiators. The talks proceeded against a backdrop of bitter divisions within both the government and the Khmer Rouge. Ranariddh and Hun Sen, steadfast political opponents, coexisted uneasily as co-prime ministers. The Khmer Rouge, meanwhile, had split a year ago when about half its fighters, followers of former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary in the western gem-mining center of Pailin, agreed to join the government army in a deal brokered by Hun Sen. Pol Pot, in firm control of the rest of the organization in its northern redoubt of Anlong Veng, bitterly opposed any peace negotiations. But many of his top commanders, seeing continued warfare as futile if they played no political role, wanted to strike a deal like the one agreed to in Pailin. Pol Pot's notoriety made him a major obstacle to such an accord. Between April 1975 and January 1979, when he ruled the country as head of a Khmer Rouge government, Pol Pot orchestrated a campaign of terror and mass murder that left more than 1 million Cambodians dead and the country in ruins. Formal negotiations with the Khmer Rouge were attempted last February, but Pol Pot loyalists ambushed a government team of 15 emissaries when its helicopter landed in Khmer Rouge territory. Ten of the government officials were executed and the rest were taken prisoner. Negotiations resumed on May 16, when a government military delegation met with Khmer Rouge officials led by Tep Kunnal, a senior political figure. A government negotiator who was at the meeting quoted Tep Kunnal as saying "he was in favor of national reconciliation and wanted a permanent cease-fire . . . to study whether we could work together to allow their territory and army to join the government." Tep Kunnal, a French-educated engineer and longtime Khmer Rouge diplomat and political strategist who joined the group in the early 1970s, has emerged as a top new leader. He served more than a decade in New York in the U.N. mission of the former Khmer Rouge government-in-exile and is knowledgeable about U.S. politics. A series of talks continued through the end of May and into early June, with government army negotiators repeatedly traveling by helicopter to Anlong Veng. "Pol Pot was informed of the negotiations," said a government negotiator. "At first Pol Pot said he was in favor of negotiations. But our side insisted strongly that Pol Pot must be completely out. So we discussed secretly with the new {Khmer Rouge} military leaders. So that was why Pol Pot was getting mad. We asked to exclude him." The guerrillas agreed in principle to integrate their army into the government armed forces, recognize the Cambodian constitution and formally disband their "provisional government," according to Khmer Rouge and government sources. On June 1, Ranariddh met Khieu Samphan, the nominal leader, secretly near the Thai border, according to Ranariddh. On June 5, the two sides met at the historic temples at Preah Vihear, where the guerrillas were preparing a site to announce the agreement. But that evening, Im Nguon, chief military representative on the negotiating team and chief of staff of the new Khmer Rouge army, called a senior government negotiator by mobile telephone "and asked me to work carefully on the issue secretly, because the negotiations were very sensitive," the government negotiator said. "I realized that this was a signal that there was a split within the Khmer Rouge. I realized that within the Khmer Rouge there was a split on negotiations. I didn't know who it was between, but {Im} Nguon was warning me." The next meeting was scheduled on June 10, "but there was a big problem," one of the government negotiators said. Khmer Rouge defense minister Son Sen and 12 members of his family and inner circle had been found murdered. It was the beginning of Pol Pot's attempt to scuttle the political negotiations through a violent purge of Khmer Rouge ranks. On June 12, top government military commander Gen. Nhek Bun Chhay and one other government colonel arrived by helicopter in Anlong Veng to find a Khmer Rouge at war with itself. Most of the Khmer Rouge negotiating team, including Tep Kunnal and Khieu Samphan, had been taken hostage by Pol Pot and his loyalists. Heavy fighting, involving mortars, artillery and small arms, could be heard just a couple of miles away, as the Khmer Rouge factions battled for control. Pol Pot's Hostages The Khmer Rouge negotiator, Im Nguon, reported that Pol Pot was holding hostage "all those who were in favor of national reconciliation." The Khmer Rouge said the situation was critical, and asked for immediate military support "to help liberate the hostages," according to one of the government negotiators. "After that we immediately took the helicopter to {the nearby government military base at} Samrong to bring ammunition -- mainly AK-47 ammunition but also heavier ammunition," including helicopters loaded with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and other heavy munitions, the government negotiator said. With Pol Pot and his loyalists on the run and the entire political leadership held hostage in nearby jungles, government negotiators moved fast. Nhek Bun Chhay flew in from Phnom Penh on June 12 and shuttled back and forth delivering ammunition before returning to the capital. It was that day, while fighting raged in the surrounding jungle, that Nhek Bun Chhay first met Khmer Rouge strongman Ta Mok, the 72-year-old, one-legged overall commander of the new Khmer Rouge who had joined the revolution in 1963 with Pol Pot -- and now had turned against him. "I place all my hope on you," he reportedly told Nhek Bun Chhay. "Please continue the negotiations for national reconciliation in order to bring trust between our two groups. I want to see peace in Cambodia and to not see any more killing," he was quoted as saying. The next day, June 13, the government team returned by helicopter. "It was a very tense meeting because the fighting was still going on, and they asked us to postpone the meeting because they had to solve their internal problems first," one of the negotiators said. The team left after four hours. When they returned four days later, they were told that "the situation had calmed down" and that some of the hostages had been rescued. "They said that Tep Kunnal and the others had been liberated and they would arrive back the next day, but political leader Khieu Samphan was still held and Pol Pot had not yet been captured," one of the negotiators said. On the next day, they returned and met with Tep Kunnal, who "expressed fear for his group because Khieu Samphan, their leader, was missing with Pol Pot," according to the government negotiator. Tep Kunnal said that Pol Pot's battle slogan was, "Fight! Fight! Fight! Struggle! Struggle! Struggle!" Meanwhile, back in Phnom Penh, there was another developing issue: the attitude of Cambodia's other prime minister, Hun Sen. Nhek Bun Chhay and other government military officials say Hun Sen was kept informed of daily developments by a committee of senior military and political officials, formed earlier this year to ease tensions between the two government camps headed by Ranariddh and Hun Sen. "Tep Kunnal . . . asked about Hun Sen's stance. What did Hun Sen say about the groups returning back to join the society?" recalled a government negotiator. The team replied that there "was no problem provided that he abandon Pol Pot, accept the constitution, and integrate their army." Strongman's Downfall As the days went on, Pol Pot's remaining loyalists, who had numbered only about 300, began to abandon him one by one. He had fled northeast toward the Thai border, and by June 19 was surrounded. When the man who had once wielded absolute power over 7 million people was finally captured, two of his soldiers were carrying him through the jungle in a green Chinese military hammock strung on a bamboo pole. With him were his wife, a woman in her 30s, their 12-year-old daughter, a niece, three other loyalists and Khieu Samphan as hostage. A witness to his capture said he was given oxygen immediately and seemed near death from exhaustion and trauma, which were exacerbating his serious heart disease and high blood pressure. A white Toyota Land Cruiser that the Khmer Rouge had seized from U.N. peacekeepers years earlier was sent to bring him back to Anlong Veng. On June 21, government negotiators returned to Anlong Veng, where they met a tired and drained Khieu Samphan. Nearby was a very sick 72-year-old man hooked to an intravenous drip with an oxygen mask over his face. When asked by government negotiators if they could take a picture of Pol Pot to prove to the world that he was alive and captured, Ta Mok erupted: "Let me throw the contemptible Pol Pot in a cage first, and then you can take his photograph!" "He was very angry," said a witness. Ta Mok reportedly told negotiators they could take Pol Pot away if they could find a suitable place in exile for him, but no specific country was mentioned. From that point, the peace negotiations moved more quickly. On June 20, during an official visit by Thai Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh to Phnom Penh, Ranariddh announced that Pol Pot was under arrest and Khieu Samphan would agree to surrender. The comments were met with widespread skepticism by diplomats and others, coming on the heels of similar claims over recent months that had proved unfounded. A military subcommittee was formed to hammer out the details of integrating the guerrillas into the government army. Nhek Bun Chhay demanded that the Khmer Rouge announce its support of the Cambodian constitution over their clandestine radio broadcasts. The Khmer Rouge prepared a draft statement agreeing to support the constitution, turn over their army and territory to formal central government command and recognize the role of King Norodom Sihanouk as sovereign of the nation. But the government negotiators spent days hammering out wording and demanding the deletion of vitriolic language condemning Hun Sen -- particularly frequent references to the second prime minister as "contemptible" and a "puppet" of Vietnam. Hun Sen defected from the Khmer Rouge in 1977. Vietnam installed him as Cambodia's foreign minister after its invasion toppled Pol Pot in 1979 and later elevated him to prime minister. "We said to them to you must stop using these words. . . . We asked specifically to stop using `puppet' . . . in their language on the draft announcement to surrender to the government," said one of the chief government negotiators. On June 22, the Khmer Rouge reiterated a request for assurances that they be allowed to keep the same military arrangement in Anlong Veng that was given to earlier defectors. In those cases, the military units changed into government uniforms and pledged allegiance to the king, government and constitution, but were not forced to disperse from their territory. Nhek Bun Chhay agreed. And it was agreed that the former Khmer Rouge, who now called themselves the National Unity Party, could join the National United Front coalition of anti-Hun Sen political opposition parties, which had been formed earlier this year in preparation for elections scheduled for 1998. Request for Amnesty On June 29, Khmer Rouge leader Ta Mok met the government negotiators over lunch at Anlong Veng. Ta Mok complained about attempts to bring him to an international court on charges of crimes against humanity, citing the royal amnesty granted to former Khmer Rouge official Ieng Sary after his defection last year. "Now Ieng Sary has already been given amnesty by the king, and Ieng Sary was number three in the command structure of the Khmer Rouge. But I was number five. So if the number three is amnestied, why not me who was less powerful?" complained the commander who has been accused of leading major purges of political enemies during the Khmer Rouge's years in power. "From the very beginning of the struggle to now I have never issued an order to kill anyone," Ta Mok contended, according to sources who were present. "All orders were decided by Pol Pot alone. Pol Pot made all decisions with absolute dictatorship!" The question of Ta Mok's fate was left unresolved. A formal surrender ceremony was tentatively set for June 30, "but the problem was lack of helicopter transportation for all the journalists and diplomats" to the remote jungle base, which is surrounded by thousands of land mines and is unreachable by road. In any event, a few small issues remained. By July 3 both sides had hammered out all details of the agreements, "and we flew back to Phnom Penh to report to the prime minister that everything was finished," one of the government negotiators said. A statement that was to be announced on the radio and read by Khieu Samphan at a press conference on July 6 was signed by both sides, including Ranariddh on behalf of the government. "On 4 July we flew back to Anlong Veng and we informed the Khmer Rouge to proceed because we got the final agreement from Prime Minister Ranariddh," said one of the chief government negotiators. The surrender ceremony was to be held at the Preah Vihear temple site, with diplomats and journalists flown in to witness the historic occasion. It never happened. Early on the morning of July 5, Hun Sen launched his coup d'etat in Phnom Penh, targeting Nhek Bun Chhay and inflicting a total military and political defeat on Ranariddh's forces in the capital within 48 hours. The chance for a negotiated peace, only 24 hours away, was gone. Back to Square One Ranariddh's forces are now holed up in jungle sanctuaries, and Hun Sen, in control of the government, is sending thousands of troops and heavy weapons to the areas in an attempt to subdue them. The forces loyal to Ranariddh have begun to form a military coalition with former Khmer Rouge fighters, both from Anlong Veng and from the other faction that surrendered last year. "I hope that ASEAN {the Association of Southeast Asian Nations} and the international community will be aware that our government was not able to take Anlong Veng militarily, in a series of major offensives since 1993," Ranariddh said in an interview in Bangkok last week. "Now it is Hun Sen alone. My priority is diplomatic and political struggle, but I have clearly warned the U.S. if you do not help me put pressure on Hun Sen, you will have civil war, a bloody civil war, and you cannot avoid having the participation of the Khmer Rouge." He added, "The Khmer Rouge are coming back, but they are coming back as nationalists, patriots, not as killers. It is not fair that they accuse Ranariddh. It is Hun Sen who has brought back the war."

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Ousted Cambodian Prince Seeks Foreign Supporters; Ranariddh Criticizes U.S. Response to Coup

Ousted Cambodian Prince Seeks Foreign Supporters; Ranariddh Criticizes U.S. Response to Coup

The Washington Post

August 15, 1997

By Nate Thayer

As Cambodian leader Hun Sen consolidates his power in Phnom Penh following a successful coup there last month, the rival he ousted is stepping up efforts to rally international opposition to the takeover and is openly criticizing the Clinton administration's response.

Prince Norodom Ranariddh, whom Hun Sen deposed as first prime minister in the coup on July 5 and 6, called on the United States to take a tougher stand on Cambodia and reveal what it knows about possible terrorism, drug trafficking and human rights violations by Hun Sen's supporters.

In an interview here on Monday, Ranariddh said Hun Sen's takeover of the shaky coalition government will not lead to greater stability in Cambodia, as some U.S. officials have theorized, but to a renewal of that nation's long-running civil war and a new lease on life for the notorious Khmer Rouge guerrillas. "I have clearly warned the U.S. if you do not help me put pressure on Hun Sen, you will have civil war -- a bloody civil war -- and you cannot help but have the participation of the Khmer Rouge," Ranariddh said at the house of Cambodia's ambassador to Thailand, a member of the prince's royalist party, known as Funcinpec. "The Khmer Rouge are coming back, but they are coming back as nationalists, as patriots, not as killers." While Hun Sen's coup was aimed at scuttling a political alliance between Funcinpec and remnants of the Khmer Rouge, it has driven the royalists and the rebels together militarily as they try to defend territory in northwestern Cambodia from attack by Hun Sen's forces. In response to the coup, the Khmer Rouge has stepped up its condemnation of Hun Sen as a "puppet" of neighboring Vietnam, which installed him in power after the Vietnamese invaded in 1979, ending nearly four years of bloody Khmer Rouge rule under Pol Pot. Because of Cambodians' widespread fear and resentment of Vietnam, a historical adversary, the Khmer Rouge propaganda appears likely to strike a more responsive chord in the wake of the coup, particularly since the group formally broke with Pol Pot in a show trial on July 25. In the interview, an emotional Ranariddh accused Washington of ignoring human rights violations by Hun Sen, notably a March 30 grenade attack that killed at least 17 people and wounded more than 100 at an opposition political rally in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. Because the injured included an American, Ron Abney of the Washington-based International Republican Institute, an FBI team was sent to investigate. It has produced an internal report that implicates a bodyguard unit loyal to Hun Sen, government sources have said. However, according to other sources close to the investigation, the report is not being released because of U.S. concerns that it would upset internal political stability in Cambodia. "We have to talk about the grenade attack," Ranariddh said. "President Clinton must release the FBI investigation. They know Hun Sen is a terrorist, but why are the Americans hiding the information, protecting Hun Sen?" Ranariddh also accused Washington of concealing connections between Hun Sen and suspected drug traffickers who have bankrolled his projects and helped fund last month's coup. "We should bring Hun Sen to an international trial," Ranariddh said. "They are terrorists, they are drug traffickers, and they have committed crimes against humanity." At least 41 of Ranariddh's supporters were tortured and executed following the coup, and hundreds more are missing, according to international human rights groups. Soldiers have taken scores of bodies to Buddhist temples and incinerated them, the groups say. "My priority is a political struggle, but the people will not let such a regime last," Ranariddh said. "With or without Ranariddh, Cambodia will have a resistance. It is not a problem between Hun Sen and Ranariddh. It is a problem between dictatorship and democracy." He added, "It will be a big mistake if the world community thinks strengthening Hun Sen will mean stability." Ranariddh's Funcinpec party "is now in the process of reorganizing militarily and politically," he said. Facing an arrest order by Hun Sen if he returns to Cambodia, Ranariddh vowed to go to Funcinpec-held territory in the country's northern jungles if the fighting continues. When his military commanders call him, he said, "I will not hesitate for one second to go back to lead the resistance."

Secret talks lead to final purge

Secret Talks lead to final purge

Phnom Penh Post

Friday, 15 August 1997

By Nate Thayer

EMERGING details of the violent power struggle within the Khmer Rouge show that government negotiators were on the brink of ending the guerrilla movement's armed struggle against the central government.

But instead of bringing peace, the negotiations ruptured not only the Khmer Rouge but the fragile coalition government itself, sparking the coup d'etat and raising the possibility of protracted fighting between RCAF forces loyal to Second Prime Minister Hun Sen and those of ousted First Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh.

The final surrender of the Khmer Rouge-successfully formalized on July 4 by Ranariddh and Khmer Rouge nominal leader Khieu Samphan-was viewed as a political plot by Hun Sen.

Cambodian government documents obtained by the Post, signed by both the government and Khmer Rouge negotiators, show that the guerrillas had reached final agreement to integrate their troops into the government army and join the government on the afternoon of July 4.

The agreement was the culmination of six weeks of a score of secret meetings between Khmer Rouge leaders and government military negotiators in remote jungles.

A formal ceremony was scheduled to surrender Khmer Rouge forces on July 6 and announce their recognition of the Cambodian government and Constitution.

But Hun Sen viewed the move as a plot by his coalition partners within the government and launched his violent coup on the morning of July 5. Instead of ending the 27 year old war, the ouster of Prince Ranariddh has forced his remaining loyalist generals into a new military alliance with the ex-Pol Potists against Hun Sen.

The emerging arrangement is giving new life to the former Khmer Rouge forces-weeks ago totally isolated and on the brink of final collapse-whose military prowess is now wedded with the political legitimacy of the ousted elected government and remaining forces of Prince Ranariddh which have taken to the jungle.

Government negotiators have been encouraging Khmer Rouge defections since about half of the guerrilla army in the west of the country, loyal to long-time leader Ieng Sary, laid down their arms in August 1996.

Pol Pot, in firm control of the rest of the organization in control of northern redoubts, bitterly opposed the peace negotiations. But many of his top commanders, seeing continued warfare as futile if they played no political role, were sympathetic to attempting a reconciliation.

Formal negotiations with the Khmer Rouge were attempted in February, but a government team of 15 emissaries had their helicopter ambushed by Pol Pot loyalists when it landed in Khmer Rouge territory. Ten of the government officials were executed and the remainder released only after the purge of Pol Pot and the coup d'etat in recent weeks.

Negotiations resumed on May 16, according to both Khmer Rouge and government officials, when a government delegation of military officials met with Khmer Rouge officials led by senior political figure Tep Kunnal "who said he was in favour of national reconciliation and wanted a permanent ceasefire...to study whether we could work together to allow their territory and army to join the government, like in Pailin," said a government negotiator who was there.

Tep Kunnal, a French-educated engineer and longtime Khmer Rouge diplomat and political strategist in his mid 40's who joined the revolution in the early 1970s, has emerged as a top new leader of the group.

A series of talks continued through the end of May and into early June as government soldiers repeatedly traveled by helicopter to the remote Khmer Rouge stronghold at Anlong Veng to debate counter demands from each side.

"Pol Pot was informed of the negotiations," said the senior government negotiator. "At first Pol Pot said he was in favour of negotiations. But our side insisted strongly that Pol Pot must be completely out. So we discussed secretly with the new military leaders. So that was why Pol Pot was getting mad. We asked to exclude him."

The guerrillas agreed in principle to integrate their army into the government armed forces, recognize the Cambodian constitution, and formally disband their 'provisional government', according to both Khmer Rouge and government sources.

On June 1, Prime Minister Ranariddh met Khmer Rouge Prime Minister Khieu Samphan secretly near the Thai border, Ranariddh told the Post on Aug 11.

On June 5, the two sides met at the historic temple at Preah Vihear, on a mountain jungle base controlled by the guerrillas where they were preparing a ceremony site to hold a press conference and ferry up diplomats to witness the surrender of the rebel forces.

But "that evening Gen Khem Nguon," chief Khmer Rouge military representative on the negotiating team and now chief of staff of the new Khmer Rouge army, called a senior government negotiator by mobile telephone "and asked me to work carefully on the issue secretly, because the negotiations were very sensitive. I realized that this was a signal that there was split within the Khmer Rouge. I realized that within the Khmer Rouge there was split on negotiations. I didn't know who it was between, but Nguon was warning me."

The next meeting was scheduled on June 10 " but there was a big problem-the killing of Son Sen and his family." It was the beginning of Pol Pot's attempt to scuttle the political negotiations through a violent purge of Khmer Rouge cadre.

On June 12, top government military commander Nhek Bun Chhay and one other government colonel arrived by helicopter in Anlong Veng to find a Khmer Rouge at war with itself. Most of the Khmer Rouge negotiating team, including Tep Kunnal and Khieu Samphan, had been taken hostage by Pol Pot and his loyalists and heavy fighting raged nearby.

In the meeting with Gen Khem Nguon, he said "Pol Pot held hostage all those who were in favour of national reconciliation. The situation in Anlong Veng is very tense. The two groups were those in favour of Pol Pot and those in favour of national reconciliation," said Gen. Nguon.

Heavy fighting from small arms, mortars and artillery was heard throughout the meeting "about three kilometers from where we met," said the government negotiator.

The Khmer Rouge asked for immediate military support "to help liberate the hostages and said the situation was critical.

"After that we immediately took the helicopter to (the nearby government military base at) Samrong to bring back ammunition - mainly AK-47 ammunition but also heavier ammunition" including helicopters loaded with mortars, rocket propelled grenades, and other heavy ammunition.

With Pol Pot and his loyalists on the run and the entire political leadership held hostage in nearby jungles, government negotiators moved fast.

General Nhek Bun Chhay on June 12 flew from Phnom Penh to Samrong, Samrong to Anlong Veng, Anlong Veng to Samrong to pick up ammunition, back to Anlong Veng, and eventually back to Phnom Penh to report to the Prime Minister.

It was that day, in the midst of heavy fighting in the surrounding jungle, that Bun Chhay first met Khmer Rouge strongman Ta Mok, the 72-year-old one-legged overall commander of the new Khmer Rouge who had joined the revolution in 1963 with Pol Pot and now had turned against him.

"I place all my hope on you," he told Bun Chhay. "Please continue the negotiations for national reconciliation in order to bring trust between our two groups. I want to see peace in Cambodia and to not see any more killing," he was quoted as saying.

It was this day that Ta Mok handed over gory pictures of the murder of defense minister Son Sen, his wife and 12 of their relatives and associates that had happened two days before.

"We could hear heavy fighting nearby while we talked with Ta Mok, both mortars and rifle fire about three kilometers away," said a government negotiater who was present.

The next day, on June 13, the team returned by helicopter.

"It was a very tense meeting because the fighting was still going on, and they asked us to postpone the meeting because they had to solve their internal problems first."

But they "wanted an assurance from us that once their internal problems were solved, they wanted to have peace deal based on the Pailin model. They used that term. So we left after three hours."

The government team returned four days later and were told that "the situation had calmed down" and that some of the hostages had been rescued. "They said that Tep Kunnal and the others had been liberated and they would arrive back the next day, but political leader Khieu Samphan was still held and Pol Pot was not yet captured.

On the next day, they returned and met with Tep Kunnal, who "expressed fear for his group because Khieu Samphan, their leader, was missing with Pol Pot."

"They said that in the case that Khieu Samphan was missing and killed by Pol Pot, they might find someone else in the group to replace him. They said they might pick (elder statesman and 'foreign minister') Chan Youran based on group consensus."

"Pol Pot's slogan was 'fight!, fight!, fight!, struggle!, struggle!, struggle!'," said Tep Kunnal.

"Tep Kunnal then asked about Hun Sen's stance. What did Hun Sen say about the group's returning back to join the society?" said the government negotiator who said there "was no problem provided that he abandon Pol Pot, accept the constitution, and integrate their army."

Bun Chhay and other government military officials say that Hun Sen and his CPP had been kept informed of the daily developments throughout the turmoil through the Joint Abnormal Conflict Resolution Committee. The Committee comprised senior military and political officials from both government parties and was formed earlier in 1997 to ease tensions within the government.

Meanwhile, in the jungles of northern Cambodia, Pol Pot was being abandoned one by one by his last loyalists which had numbered only 300 after the initial turmoil of June 10. He had fled northeast towards the Thai border, and on the 19th was now surrounded.

On June 21, government negotiators returned to Anlong Veng, where they met an exhausted Khieu Samphan. Nearby was a very sick, 72- year- old man hooked to an intravenous drip and an oxygen mask over his face.

When asked by government negotiators whether they could take a picture of Pol Pot to prove to the world that he was alive and captured, Ta Mok erupted: "Let me throw the contemptible Pol Pot in a cage first and then you can take his photograph!"

"He was very angry," said a witness. Ta Mok also reportedly told negotiators then: "If you have a place for him you can take him", but no specific country was mentioned by the Khmer Rouge.

From the capture of Pol Pot on the 19th, the move towards finalizing the peace negotiations proceeded quickly.

On June 20, during an official visit of Thai Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh to Phnom Penh, Prime Minister Ranariddh announced publicly that Pol Pot was under arrest and Khieu Samphan would agree to surrender. The comments were met with widespread scepticism by diplomats and others, coming on the heels of similar comments over recent months that never seemed to bear fruit.

A military subcommittee was formed to hammer out the details of integrating the rebel guerrillas into the government army. Bun Chhay demanded that the rebel group announce the support of the Cambodian Constitution over the guerrillas' clandestine radio.

A draft statement where the Khmer Rouge agreed to support the constitution, turn over their army and territory to formal central government command, and recognize the role of the King as the sovereign of the nation was prepared by the Khmer Rouge.

But the government negotiators spent days hammering out wording, and demanding the removal of vitriolic language condemning Hun Sen-particularly frequent references to the Second Prime Minister as "contemptible" and a "puppet" of Vietnam.

"We said to them you must stop using these words because in the Constitution it says, for the first term, there are two prime ministers, so to support the Constitution you cannot condemn the Second Prime Minister. We asked specifically to stop using 'puppet' and (the derogatory Khmer phrase, roughly translated as 'the contemptible') 'a' in their language on the draft announcement to surrender to the government," said one of the chief government negotiators.

On June 22 the Khmer Rouge agreed to cease using the term "provisional government" to refer to their jungle organization.

In return the Khmer Rouge reiterated a request for assurances that they be allowed to keep the same military arrangement in Anlong Veng as was given to the Pailin defectors, where the military units changed into government uniforms, and pledged allegiance to the King, government and Constitution, but were not forced to disperse from their territory. Gen Bun Chhay agreed.

And it was agreed that the former Khmer Rouge who now called themselves the National Solidarity Party, could join the National United Front coalition of anti-Hun Sen political opposition parties led by Funcinpec that had been formed earlier in the year in the run up to elections scheduled for 1998.

On the 29th of June, Khmer Rouge strongman Ta Mok met the negotiators over lunch at Anlong Veng. Ta Mok complained about attempts to bring him to an international court on charges of crimes against humanity, citing Ieng Sary's Royal amnesty granted in 1996 after his defection.

"Now Ieng Sary has already been given amnesty by the King and Ieng Sary was number three in the command structure of the Khmer Rouge. But I was number five. So if the number three is amnestied, why not me who was less powerful?" complained the one legged commander who joined the revolution in 1963 and is accused of leading major purges of political enemies during their years in power. "From the very beginning of the struggle to now I have never issued an order to kill anyone," he contended," All orders were decided by Pol Pot alone. Pol Pot made all decisions with absolute dictatorship!"

After the meeting with Ta Mok, government negotiators and the Anlong Veng Khmer Rouge had finalized a series of documents and had come to final agreement to announce their surrender.

They scheduled a formal surrender ceremony for June 30, " but the problem was lack of helicopter transportation for all the journalists and diplomats" to the remote jungle base surrounded by thousands of landmines and impenetrable by road.

On July 3 both sides had hammered out all details of the agreements, "and we flew back to Phnom Penh to report to the Prime Minister that everything was finished."

A statement to be announced on the radio and read by Khieu Samphan at a press conference to be held on July 6 was signed by both sides, including Prime Minister Ranariddh. "On July 4 we flew back to Anlong Veng and we informed the Khmer Rouge to proceed because we got the final agreement from Prime Minister Ranariddh," said one of the chief government negotiators.

The Khmer Rouge had already built a ceremony cite at Preah Vihear temple at which a formal ceremony was agreed to be held on Sunday July 6 with the attendance of the diplomatic corps and journalists.

Early on the morning of July 5, Hun Sen launched his coup in Phnom Penh, targeting Gen Nhek Bun Chhay and inflicting a total military and political defeat of the Funcinpec forces in the capital within 48 hours.

Now the tables have turned on Funcinpec, who find themselves in a position of needing military support as Hun Sen has moved thousands of troops and heavy weapons toward jungle sanctuaries where the Funcinpec forces are back fighting the guerrilla war they ended with the signing of the Paris peace Agreements in 1991.

With Funcinpec are emerging a military coalition of former Khmer Rouge, both from Anlong Veng and those who gave up to the government last July, along with government military units that were loyal to former non-communist guerrillas before the UN elections held in 1993.

"I hope that ASEAN and the international community will be aware that our government was not able to take Anlong Veng militarily in a series of major offensives since 1993," said ousted Prince Ranariddh in an interview in Bangkok on August 11. "Now it is Hun Sen alone. My priority is diplomatic and political struggle, but I have clearly warned the US if you do not help me put pressure on Hun Sen you will have civil war, a bloody civil war, and you cannot avoid having the participation of the Khmer Rouge."

Funcinpec military forces are regrouping now in the far north of Cambodia and are short of ammunition and under attack.

"What I am afraid of is this: How can my military leaders refuse to welcome the participation of the former Khmer Rouge forces from Pailin, from Anlong Veng, who are forming an anti-Hun Sen force in the framework of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces," said Ranariddh in the interview. "The Khmer Rouge are coming back, but they are coming back as nationalists, patriots, not as killers. It is not fair that they accuse Ranariddh, it is Hun Sen who has brought back the war."

THE DEAL

A copy of a joint declaration - signed by Prince Norodom Ranariddh on July 3 - between Ranariddh and the Anlong Veng Khmer Rouge. The declaration was never signed by KR nominal leader Khieu Samphan and the deal collapsed when Hun Sen attacked Funcinpec military forces in Phnom Penh July 5-6. An unofficial translation follows:

Co-Declaration between Samdech Krom Preah and HE Khieu Samphan, President of the National Solidarity Party, co-decided in the NUF based on the 14 political principals.

1. On [space left blank] July 1997 at Prasat Preah Vihear temple Semdech Krom Preah, President of NUF, and HE Khieu Samphan, President of the National Solidarity Party, have discussed the situation in Cambodia in the climate of the great national solidarity path.

Samdech Krom Preah Norodom Ranariddh and HE Khieu Samphan have also agreed on the 14 political principles of the NUF.

2. The National Solidarity Party declares:

• A. The regime and the governing of Pol Pot is completedly finished.
  
  
• B. Recognizes and strongly defends the constitution of the Kingdom of Cambodia that every person must be strongly respected in both essence and in spirit.
  
  
• C. Support His Majesty Preah Bat Samdech Preah Norodom Sihanouk. His Majesty the King is a symbol of the Nation, and is the cement to bind national unity in order to end war to reach the reality of national reconciliation and peace.

3. Samdech Krom Preah Norodom Ranariddh and HE Khieu Samphan decided to join hands together in the NUF which contains 14 political principals.

Date [undated], Norodom Ranariddh [signed], Khieu Samphan [not signed], Initialed by Nhek Bun Chhay and Tep Kunnal

Khmer Rouge leader returns, is beaten by Cambodian mob

 

Khmer Rouge leader returns, is beaten by Cambodian mob

Chicago Sun-Times

November 27, 1991 | Nate Thayer

Associated Press

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia An angry mob screaming "Dog!" and "Murderer!" today surged past police and beat a top leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist guerrilla group whose reign of terror in the 1970s left hundreds of thousands dead.

The government ordered in armored personnel carriers to evacuate Khieu Samphan, the right-hand man to top Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, as the crowd prepared to lynch him. Khieu Samphan and Son Sen, another Khmer Rouge leader, and their aides were flown back to Bangkok, Thailand.

Bleeding from the head and chest, Khieu Samphan cowered in a bedroom as security officers prevented him from being strung up by a wire tied to a ceiling fan.

"Please help me, please don't leave me," he pleaded, asking three foreign photographers to say in the room.

Only hours earlier, Khieu Samphan ended his exile and returned to Phnom Penh to take part in a UN-backed plan to end 13 years of civil war between the Khmer Rouge, its two non-Communist guerrilla allies and the government Vietnam installed after invading Cambodia in 1978.

The attack delayed what would have been the first meeting of a national reconciliation council and appeared to jeopardize a UN-brokered peace accord signed last month in Paris by all four warring factions.

The government, in a statement carried by its official news agency, said it remained fully committed to the peace pact. Under the accord, a Supreme National Council led by Prince Norodom Sihanouk would help pave the way for elections in 1993.

More than 10,000 angry demonstrators converged on the villa housing the Khmer Rouge delegation today after the 60-year-old Khieu Samphan's return. Khieu Samphan was one of the prime architects of the Khmer Rouge's murderous regime, which killed hundreds of thousands of people as the group tried to turn the country into a vast rural commune. Khieu Samphan is now the group's president.

After storming and ransacking the villa, the mob broke into the second-story room where Khieu Samphan was hiding. Reporters saw him huddled against a wall, wearing a steel helmet and bleeding profusely. He apparently had been struck by a rock.

As thousands of protesters ringed the house, six government armored personnel carriers moved into position outside. One backed into the front entranceway and Khieu Samphan, with several other members of his delegation, clambered onto the back of the vehicle.

Khmer Rouge leader returns, is beaten by Cambodian mob

Khmer Rouge leader returns, is beaten by Cambodian mob

Chicago Sun-Times

November 27, 1991 | Nate Thayer

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia An angry mob screaming "Dog!" and "Murderer!" today surged past police and beat a top leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist guerrilla group whose reign of terror in the 1970s left hundreds of thousands dead.

The government ordered in armored personnel carriers to evacuate Khieu Samphan, the right-hand man to top Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, as the crowd prepared to lynch him. Khieu Samphan and Son Sen, another Khmer Rouge leader, and their aides were flown back to Bangkok, Thailand.

Bleeding from the head and chest, Khieu Samphan cowered in a bedroom as security officers prevented him from being strung up by a wire tied to a ceiling fan.

"Please help me, please don't leave me," he pleaded, asking three foreign photographers to say in the room.

Only hours earlier, Khieu Samphan ended his exile and returned to Phnom Penh to take part in a UN-backed plan to end 13 years of civil war between the Khmer Rouge, its two non-Communist guerrilla allies and the government Vietnam installed after invading Cambodia in 1978.

The attack delayed what would have been the first meeting of a national reconciliation council and appeared to jeopardize a UN-brokered peace accord signed last month in Paris by all four warring factions.

The government, in a statement carried by its official news agency, said it remained fully committed to the peace pact. Under the accord, a Supreme National Council led by Prince Norodom Sihanouk would help pave the way for elections in 1993.

More than 10,000 angry demonstrators converged on the villa housing the Khmer Rouge delegation today after the 60-year-old Khieu Samphan's return. Khieu Samphan was one of the prime architects of the Khmer Rouge's murderous regime, which killed hundreds of thousands of people as the group tried to turn the country into a vast rural commune. Khieu Samphan is now the group's president.

After storming and ransacking the villa, the mob broke into the second-story room where Khieu Samphan was hiding. Reporters saw him huddled against a wall, wearing a steel helmet and bleeding profusely. He apparently had been struck by a rock.

As thousands of protesters ringed the house, six government armored personnel carriers moved into position outside. One backed into the front entranceway and Khieu Samphan, with several other members of his delegation, clambered onto the back of the vehicle.