KHIEU SAMPHAN AND POL POT: MOLOCH’S POODLE

By Stephen R Heder*

Royal Seal of Approval In 1965, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s head of state, asserted the nation’s opposition to the U.S.-backed government in South Vietnam by allowing North Vietnamese guerrillas to set up bases within Cambodia’s borders. The North Vietnamese had an alliance with a Cambodian Marxist insurgency group, the Khmer Rouge, whose top brass Sihanouk is pictured here with in 1973. (Fed up with always being made to pose for the camera, a youthful Princess Monique lost her royal patience and opted to stand behind it for a change! – School of Vice) AFP.

Pol Pot’s Utopia: An undated photograph shows forced laborers digging canals in Kampong Cham province, part of the massive agrarian infrastructure the Khmer Rouge planned for the country. AFP/GETTY IMAGES

“If the teacher was vicious, the student would be vile.”

Pol Pot‘s success as a political killer was based on his great skills in deception and manipulation and the help of a handful of trusted and loyal assistants. He relied on his uncanny ability to win his colleagues ‘ trust. He would exploit their gullibility to use them to help him create the bases for a political system with which they would not agree, and then kill them to prevent them from obstructing his hidden political agenda when he decided it was time to move on to take the next step. His personal charm and charisma and his astute manipulation of Stalinist united front tactics made it possible for him to eliminate one potential rival and opponent after another. But even the greatest maestro of murder could not succeed alone on Pol Pot’s scale, and the Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea Central Committee had a few attendants who were crucial to this process. Some were odious patsies who eventually also became his victims, and some were unpredictably crass brutes whose ultimate usefulness was limited. But one docile and more urbane minion upon whose loyalty Pol Pot could always rely was Khieu Samphan.

Before Pol Pot’s Communist Party took power in April 1975, its secret member Khieu Samphan was well-known in Cambodia as an highly-educated economist and politician who was willing to work hard at what he believed in. In any political system Khieu Samphan would have been a good staffer, diligent if somewhat mediocre intellectual who would take seriously his assigned responsibilities. He would always produce the required brief on time, and could always be relied upon to do what his superior told him. But such banality was inexcusably evil in the service of Pol Pot, and it was with him that Khieu Samphan found his historical niche. It was his usefulness as an accomplice in murder rather than his faded economic expertise which made him so highly valuable to Pol Pot. During the brief but bloody course of Pol Pot’s tenure in power, Khieu Samphan was promoted up the ranks of his Party and State apparati to become one of the key accomplices in the political execution machine that Pol Pot created. Khieu Samphan became an ever more important assistant to Pol Pot because he remained steadfastly loyal to his leadership and policies while others who had earlier cooperated with Pol Pot and his Communist Party were detained or killed because they disagreed with or were suspected of disagreeing with what Pol Pot was doing. Khieu Samphan’s political star rose literally on heaps of corpses. He continued to rise in importance as he helped Pol Pot purge other communists who had worked longer and more closely with his boss, but whom Pol Pot came to suspect were sceptical about his murderous revolution . As Pol Pot successively chopped off the hands of other people in his inner circle, the circle grew narrower and narrower and Khieu Samphan more and more important in it until he was Pol Pot’s chief servitor.

In April 1976, Prince Norodom Sihanouk refused to serve as the legitimizing symbol of Pol Pot’s regime. In a protest against Pol Pot’s policies, he resigned as the country’s chief of state. Pol Pot responded by keeping the Prince under house arrest for most of the time until the Vietnamese invasion in December 1978. Pol Pot chose Khieu Samphan to replace Sihanouk. Thus Khieu Samphan became Chairman of the State Presidium of Democratic Kampuchea, the new name the communists gave to the country. As Sihanouk realised, however, this role was powerless, and it was not in this public capacity as Pol Pot’s chief of state that Khieu Samphan played a direct and personal role in his relentless campaigns of political murder. Khieu Samphan did his substantive work for Pol Pot in his secret role as a leading member of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, in which he was known by the pseudonym Haem. “Haem” became particularly useful to Pol Pot after the Central Committee Secretary promoted him to be the powerful Chairman of the Communist Party of Kampuchea Office 870. 870 was the code-name for the Party Central Committee, of which Pol Pot was the Secretary. Communist Party member was killed in early 1977 to clear the way for Khieu Samphan’s promotion to the crucial Office 870 chairmanship. The victim was a fellow intellectual named Seua Vast, whose Party pseudonym was Deuan. Once Deuan was purged Khieu Samphan began helping Pol Pot kill large numbers of other communist “intellectual links” who like the new Office 870 Chairman had joined the Party, but who unlike him were seen as a threat to Pol Pot’s leadership and policies. Khieu Samphan also began working directly with Pol Pot to implement his boss’ decision to carry out a more general purge of the party’s ranks. Deuan was arrested on 16 February 1977, evidently in part because he had demonstrated too much hesitancy in purging. In “confessions” extracted from him by interrogators’ of Pol Pot’s security service, Deuan admitted that he was guilty of “shortcomings “because of “a lack of firmness in his proletarian stance”. He indicated that one of his blunders was that although he had always gone along with arrests of alleged dissidents in 1975 and 1976, he had sometimes delayed “sending people accused of things to the secret police “because he believed there should be further investigation of them, at least in order to avoid instances of mistaken identity. It appears Khieu Samphan may have gotten his promotion to Office 870 Chairman because he had already achieved a good record of loyal service to Pol Pot’s purge machine. It seems he had demonstrated he could be relied upon not to commit any such shortcomings. It is not clear in what capacity Khieu Samphan did this, but it is clear that he did it while working directly for Pol Pot.

In late 1976, Prum Sam-An, a low-ranking communist intellectual working at the Democratic Kampuchea Ministry of Propaganda, came under severe political suspicion after he criticised the deaths that resulted from the Communist Party of Kampuchea’s policies since April 1975. He voiced opposition to its evacuation of the towns, during which many urban people had died. He had also talked about his opposition to Pol Pot’s insistence on constantly “intensifying class struggle”, which had the effect of creating a large number of additional “class enemies” marked for death, particularly among intellectuals. When Prum Sam-an’s dissident remarks came to Pol Pot’s attention , he despatched Khieu Samphan to the Ministry of Propaganda to pass on instructions “to conduct further investigations in order to determine whether or not he was an enemy.” In early 1977 PrumSam-An realized that he was about to be arrested and killed himself. His suicide was immediately reported to Pol Pot through the proper channel, Khieu Samphan, who gave instructions that his body “be disposed of secretly “. The idea was apparently to prevent the dissident’s suicide from creating further political difficulties for Pol Pot. The victims of Pol Pot’s early 1977 purge of Communist Party intellectuals included many of Khieu Samphan’s long-time personal friends and political associates. It seems not only that Khieu Samphan was outstanding among his intellectual peers for being above Pol Pot’s prodigious suspicions, but also that he did not bat an eye as they were murdered one after the other. Moreover, Khieu Samphan’s promotion coincided with Pol Pot’s decision that his Communist Party’s most important task was not the economic reconstruction of Democratic Kampuchea, but the ferreting out of alleged “enemy” agents who were supposedly sabotaging his revolution. This shift to giving the highest priority to purge work was disseminated to other leading cadre by Pol Pot’s alter ego, Party Central Committee Deputy Secretary Nuon Chea. For example, “Brother Number Two”, as Nuon Chea was known, announced the policy shift at a conference of the Democratic Kampuchea West Zone in June 1977.

The West Zone was one of several large regions into which the country was divided under Pol Pot, and each zone was led by its own Communist Party Secretary. To assist Pol Pot in the conduct of the general purge, Office 870 Chairman Khieu Samphan was despatched to the West Zone in August to conduct an investigation into the confused situation it had provoked there. Top West Zone Communists had fallen into mutual recriminations as they accused each other in secret reports to Pol Pot of being soft on alleged enemies. Khieu Samphan listened to the accusations made by West Zone Secretary Chou Chet against its Deputy Secretary Heng Pal and other communists in the Zone. This gave Chou Chet the impression that Pol Pot was paying attention to his views. However, Pol Pot decided that Chou Chet and not Heng Pal was a traitor, and on 26 March 1978 Chou Chet was arrested, while Heng Pal was left in place. After his arrest, Chou Chet “confessed” that he had been lax in carrying out systematic executions, and revealed he had therefore been reprimanded by Central Committee Deputy Secretary Nuon Chea. He also wrote that he had been involved in discussions with high-ranking communists from other zones about the need to stop or at least slow down the killing. Chou Chet explains that he had been executing “anybody and everybody who opposed the revolution,” and that “the generation of kids” his older victims “left behind were taken away” and also killed. Brother Number Two, however, was concerned that despite such measures, not all former soldiers of the Lon Nol regime which the Communist Party overthrew in April 1975 had been executed. He therefore “gave instructions that former soldiers should not be kept on as anything because it was not easy for them to abandon their old ideas. So they all had to be exterminated.” Chou Chet “confessed” he also made an incorrect “strategic decision” to “re-educate” rather than exterminate people who had allegedly worked as police informers under the Lon Nol regime. In his “confessions” West Zone Secretary Chou Chet also describes a conversation he supposedly had in mid-1976 with Sao Pheum, Secretary of Democratic Kampuchea’s powerful East Zone, which shared a long border with Viet Nam. Sao Pheum is quoted as telling Chou Chet while the two zone secretaries were visiting China for medical treatment that back home in Democratic Kampuchea, “we seemed to be just too dogmatic. One little false move and it was an ideological, political or … morals error.” The East Zone Secretary supposedly expressed concern that dogmatic leadership was creating a culture of violence within the Party and among the masses. He is quoted as citing the aphorism that “if the teacher was vicious, the student would be vile.” According to Chou Chef s “confessions”, in March or early April 1977, while Khieu Samphan was cutting his teeth on purges of fellow intellectuals and others, Sao Pheum complained that almost a thousand Communist Party “comrades who were veterans of the struggle have been arrested and accused of being agents of Viet Nam or the CIA.” He complained that Pol Pot’s policies were “extremely dogmatic,” and that anyone who disagreed with his dogmatism was “accused of serving the enemy, of being non-proletarian ideologically, of immorality, of making nothing but appointments that are not in proper conformity to the line, and the like.” Sao Pheum is quoted as saying disapprovingly that those who didn’t “understand the line” being advocated by Pol Pot or implemented it “erroneously” were “being seized and taken for re-education and even being accused of being enemies and taken away and casually exterminated like garbage.” In May 1978, Pol Pot went after Sao Pheum and other suspected dissenters. Sao Pheum was evidently slated for arrest and execution not only because of his opposition to purges, but also because he wanted more general changes in Communist Party policy. He evidently advocated that it switch from an offensive to a defensive military strategy in order better to defeat Vietnamese threats to Democratic Kampuchea’s territorial integrity and political independence, and that the Party moderate its ultra-communist domestic policies in order to help rally the population to resist the large-scale Vietnamese invasion he rightly feared could take place at almost any time. When Sao Pheum realized in June 1978 his arrest was certain, he committed suicide, but meanwhile many others associated with him and such dissident ideas were being seized.

The mid-1978 purges greatly enhances Khieu Samphan’s importance as an accomplice of Pol Pot because among those arrested was his boss’ closest aid for many years, Chheum Sam-aok. Known by the pseudonym Pang, he had previously been considered Pol Pot’s right-hand man. After April 1975, Pang was the Chairman of Office S-71, which organized Party congresses and other large-scale Party gatherings convened by Pol Pot. Pang was arrested along with many of the other personnel who since 1975 had served as attendants to Pol Pot in his day-to-day life. Most of them were implicated in Pang’s “confessions” for alleged dissidence or disloyalty of which he was accused. In his “confessions” after his arrest Pang wrote that he was lax in dealing with possible enemies on Pol Pot’s staff. He wrote that “if they made a mistake, or if they did things in a liberal or happy-go-lucky manner, I always just averted my eyes, and sometimes pretended that I saw nothing and heard nothing.” The elimination of the too lenient Pang left Khieu Samphan unrivalled as Pol Pot’s right-hand man. As he had earlier done with West Zone Secretary Chou Chet, Khieu Samphan served Pol Pot’s latest purge wave by helping make sure intended victims were relaxed and did not suspect the imminence of their death. He thus helped Pol Pot to make sure his victims would not try to escape or otherwise resist arrest, and would therefore be simpler to kill. One leading East Zone communist on whom the Office 870 Chairman performed this deadly trick was Veung Chhaem, a fellow member of the Party Central Committee whose pseudonym was Phuong. Phuong was in charge of rubber production in Democratic Kampuchea. He was arrested on 6 June 1978 in the capital of Phnom Penh, to which he had been invited from his head quarters in an East Zone rubber plantation. Phuong had ostensibly been brought to Office 870 for discussions with Pol Pot and his alter ego Nuon Chea about reorganization of the East Zone. In one meeting, Nuon Chea reassured him that if there was anything he needed to make himself more comfortable, he should get from Khieu Samphan. Khieu Samphan also hosted dinners at Office 870 for Phuong and other Party Central Committee members who were about to be purged, keeping his treacherous counsel while they discussed the arrests that had taken place so far. In the “confession” extracted from him after his arrest on 6 June 1978, Phuong declares that as a result of the deceptions to which he was subjected there, “during the four days that I was at Office 870 I never suspected that it was a certainty that the [Pol Pot] would arrest me.” In his “confessions”, Phuong also describes he had criticized Pol Pot’s purges as early as the end of 1976, when he convened a meeting of personnel from state rubber plantations and gave them a highly disapproving analysis of “the social situation in contemporary Kampuchea” and “the situation of the people”. He wrote that he declared that the worst thing was “that the people are losing all popular democratic rights and freedoms, all the cadre and the entire state power are under the examination and surveillance of the Communist Party of Kampuchea at all times.” The result was that “day by day the people and the cadre are being imprisoned and enchained, massacred by the hundreds, and there’s not a thread of organization or law that can guarantee or ensure these people’s democratic rights. The people are silent as if they are in so much pain that they don’t dare utter a thing . . . “

By late 1978, yet another sweeping purge wave was beginning to crest. The first of its many intended high-ranking victims was Penh Thuok, whose Party pseudonym was Von Vet. Von Vet was a long-time personal protégé of Pol Pot, who had personally inducted him into the Communist Party. He was seized just after the closure of a national Communist Party Congress in early November 1978, at which time he was in overall charge of Democratic Kampuchea’s economy and also involved in deploying the Democratic Kampuchea army in its fight against Viet Nam. In the “confessions” extracted from him, Von Vet discussed his opposition to Pol Pot’s purges. He wrote he had tried to protect lower-ranking figures associated with him from arrest by claiming “there wasn’t yet any evidence against them”. He had “delayed their arrest for a period, and only allowed them to be arrested when there was no way to resist.” Von Vet moreover “confessed” that in April and May 1978 he had also tried to warn East Zone Secretary Sao Pheum that he and his zone were about to be massively purged. Von Vet’s “confessions” suggest that after the suicide of Sao Pheum, and several other leading communists previously very close to Pol Pot tried desperately to organize opposition to the Party Central Committee Secretary. They apparently had drawn the conclusion that Sao Pheum had been right to advocate domestic moderation and a defensive military strategy so that Democratic Kampuchea would be better able to fend off the Vietnamese invasion everybody feared .When the Vietnamese indeed invaded in December 1978, the arrest of those allegedly involved in this conspiracy to find an alternate to Pol Pot’s plans to save the country was imminent. The men marked for arrest and death included long-time Pol Pot associate Son Sen, the Chairman of the Democratic Kampuchea armed forces’ General Staff; and Kae Pok, Secretary of the Democratic Kampuchea Central Zone. They had been very deeply involved in the bloody purge of the East Zone earlier in 1978 and in numerous previous political executions. However, it seems they too had now finally become actively dissident, and in particular to oppose Pol Pot’s never-ending large -scale killings. Pol Pot suspected Son Sen’s and Kae Pok’s sympathy for the view that his military strategy was dangerously provocative and adventurist and his domestic policies disastrously unpopular, and in particular that his purges were devastating Democratic Kampuchea’s capacity to defend itself against the Vietnamese. General Staff Chairman Son Sen was accused, among other things, of believing it was more important for Democratic Kampuchean troops under his command to fight the Vietnamese than kill each other in the purges ordered by Pol Pot. The accusation against Central Zone Secretary Kae Pok was that in May 1978 he would have preferred to side with East Zone Secretary Sao Pheum against Pol Pot, but was backed into a political corner when Pol Pot ordered him to carry out the purge. He, thus, “lost the initiative and so stood on the side” of Pol Pot against Sao Pheum.

There is, however, no evidence that Khieu Samphan had reached any anti-Pol Pot conclusions or that his cooperation with him was anything other than willing. Rather, all indications are that as one of the last significant Pol Pot loyalists in the upper ranks of the Party leadership, he remained safely off the Party Secretary’s death list.

*Stephen R Heder, a Cambodia specialist, wrote this article while a Research Fellow at the Australian National University.
Source: repository.forcedmigration.org