12/ THION ON KR, 1977
Libération (A Paris daily), 7 March 1977 (Original: French. Translated in English and published in Serge Thion, Watching Cambodia, Bangkok, 1993.)
Is there a Cambodian revolution ? Yes, one social organization is replacing another. Do we have to judge this revolution ? Of course, like any other political phenomenon. What do we know about it ? We know that the country is in the hands of a revolutionary anonymous organization (Angkar), that the economy seems to be based on total collectivization, that more than half of the population has been chased from the cities and is treated like a slavish mass, exploited without limits, hungry and terrorized, that the Organization is systematically destroying all those who, one way or the other, had anything to do with the former regime.
AFTER HITLER, STALIN, NIXON AND SUHARTO
Are we able to judge this regime ? Certainly,
even from far away, even without knowing the country very well,
even if all the testimonies are not equally valid. The authorities
have not allowed anyone to come and see what is happening. Without
even referring to humanistic views, no revolutionary morality
known to this day could approve of this kind of blind massacre
where, guilty or not, victims fall in the tens, or possibly hundreds,
of thousands. Doubts are unfortunately not possible. After Hitler,
Stalin, Suharto, Nixon, the Revolutionary Organization of Cambodia
is in the process of reaching one of the best "scores"
of our modern barbarity.
The most simple solidarity should compel us to stand with the
victims of this bizarre forest bureaucracy, even if we come across
strange bedfellows. The right wing is crying over Cambodia, which
it viewed with dryer eyes when this country was agonizing under
the 500,000 tons of bombs dropped by American warplanes. Good
souls who used to wander in Phnom Penh when it was ruled by a
weak-minded paranoid called Lon Nol wake up now to explain to
us a revolution which they ignored at the time and which they
saw only from very far away. From the bunch of recent books, one
can take two : François Debré, Cambodge, la Révolution
de la forêt, Flammarion, 261 pp., and François Ponchaud,
Cambodge, annnée zéro, Julliard, 250 pp., because
they contain documents, testimonies and analyses which are not
without interest. Debré, for instance, has the story of
an old guerrilla who fought along with the Viet Minh and documents
about the last attempt of Sihanouk to come back to Phnom Penh
[in April 1975] through an arrangement between the French, the
Chinese and the Americans while Ponchaud has interesting analyses
of the new vocabulary used by the Cambodian authorities. It seems
Ponchaud, as a missionary, knows the Khmer language well. These
two books, in spite of many factual errors (for instance, Debré's
confusion between Seoul and Pyong Yang, p. 252), are worth reading
because there is something to be learned from them. But there
is one important drawback : neither of the authors understands
much about politics, and particularly about the politics of Indochinese
revolutionaries. Condemning a policy should not mean sparing the
effort to understand it. This is perhaps the most compelling task.
THE LAZINESS OF FATALISTIC THINKING
"The Cambodian revolution was ineluctable",
writes Debré (p. 36) and Ponchaud seems to share the idea.
It is one of these serious mistakes generated by the laziness
of fatalistic thinking. Reality is entirely different. Until the
overthrow of Sihanouk in 1970, the Cambodian revolutionary activists'
influence on the Khmer society was practically nil. Their number
ran into the hundreds only, most of them hidden in the forests,
like the usual outlaws who had always haunted the fringes of the
rice-growing areas.
Villagers were poor and victims of the usurers and agents of
the central power. But it was tradition : under pressure, the
individual could just go away and live somewhere else, because
land used to be available. In spite of some peasant rebellions,
which were not asking for social innovation, there was no sign
of a real social crisis. It was in the towns that political power
was confronted by the business class. This showed very clearly
in March 1970 when Sihanouk [in Peking] called an insurrection
against the newly instituted republic ; the peasants massively
answered the call. They did not escape to the maquis, they became
the maquis itself because they remained inside the [traditional]
legitimacy. The towns were the place where a bourgeois revolution
was taking place. It was also the time when the Cambodian communist
cadres sprang out of hiding and, protected by the Vietnamese NLF
troops, started to organize resistance [in the countryside].
RADICALISM AND CHOUANNERIE
Until then, even when they were hunted
down, the communists suported Sihanouk, although they thought
his regime was "feudal" and corrupt, because his neutralism
was providing a huge tactical advantage for the struggle in Vietnam,
where the decisive confrontation with imperialism was taking place.
If the communists, after 1970, persisted in putting the Sihanouk
label on their propaganda, if they stopped doing so around 19734
because their feared a peace compromise, if they evacuated the
cities immediately after their military victory, it was precisely
because Sihanouk and all his conservative weight still had a very
powerful impact in Phnom Penh and in the countryside. Neither
the peasants nor the suburban poor felt by themselves the need
to make a revolutionary move. The maquis, in 1972, with its Buddhist
monks and its peasant cadres, looked rather like a chouannerie.
Radical views belong only to a handful of ideologists, probably
born in the countryside but with a smear of education acquired
in the pagoda or State village schools. Their power comes from
the control they have on the military machine ; they make themselves
acceptable by an extreme nationalism which certainly meets a deep
popular aspiration. Nevertheless, it is obvious the regime is
politically very weak : this weakness explains the use of the
concentration camps method. Contradictory to what it claims, this
revolution is led from above.
MOVING BACKWARD TO THE TIME BEFORE CLASSES
When the Swedish ambassador Kaj Bjork, one of the very few Western visitors allowed into the new Kampuchea, says that "the Khmer revolution is much more radical than the Chinese and the Russian ones", his implicit thinking needs to be turned upside down. In Russia and China, class struggles brought about revolutions, but these struggles have been going on under different forms. If in Cambodia there is no longer a class struggle, it is because the old ruling class is physically annihilated. It is thus a way to come "radically" back to the situation which existed before the emergence of classes. The authorities say that the country is led by "the workers, the poor peasants, the lower strata middle peasants and the other layers of country and town workers who constitute more than 95 per cent of the whole Kampuchean nation". Is this not a picture of a radically disappeared past ?
THE EYES OF THE PINEAPPLE
Ponchaud, Debré, and many others
believe, in their naive vision of historical progress, that Cambodia
is a place where a modern revolution is happening, a "Marxist"
one, bent on creating the nightmare of the New Man. They speculate
heavily on the personality of the leaders and the splits between
them. Debré believes that the division of tasks among
the militants proves the existence of these splits. By isolating
the Cambodian problem from its Indochinese context, they both
condemn themselves to a kind of new kremlinology which in the
end will mire in the fertile rice fields of their imagination.
If we had to qualify these leaders politically, it would probably
be best to refer to good old Stalinism. Schooled by the French
Communist Party in the 1950s or by the Vietnamese who did not
always resist the Stalinist temptation, these Cambodian leaders
use old recipes : absolute discipline, the pervasive power of
the organization, surrounded by an imposed cult. As a former revolutionary
says [in an unwitting tribute to George Orwell] : "The Angkar
has got eyes like a pineapple and it sees everything" (Ponchaud,
p. 131).
One may ask who is responsible for this bloody mess : the revolutionary
leaders who want to change history by force ? The Vietnamese communists
who know and keep quiet ? The former leaders of the Lon Nol regime
whose stupid greed and sordid selfishness have thrown the country
into this atrocious chaos ? They all share a part of the burden.
But the main people responsible, those who, against the advice
of their diplomats and their intelligence services, launched this
country into a chilling war, for some mean electoral profits,
Mr Nixon and Mr Kissinger, can rove around today, free and honoured,
their hanging for war crimes being most improbable. Talking about
the American intervention in Cambodia, Mr Kissinger quietly said
: "I may lack imagination, but I do not see where the moral
problem is."
Serge Thion
END