Excerpts from The Pol Pot Journals

The Pol Pot Journals will probably be released some time this summer:


Chapter 7
Collaborating with the Vietminh

Journal Entry: Sâr:

As the plain dropped down on the runway of the Cambodia International Airport, I couldn’t wait to be back in my own country again. France was interesting enough, but this was my home and I couldn’t help but feel a sense of joy at my returning.
For a while, Ponnary, Hem and some of the others stayed in Phnom Penh and tried to build up the party there. Ponnary worked as a school teacher at Lycee Sisowath, the very school she had graduated from before she left for France. For a while I taught at Chamraon Vichea, a new private college.
But it didn’t take for me to decide I needed to be in the country side helping to ensure that Kampuchea would become an independent country. I decided to become active in the Khmer Issarak. It was there that I met Comrade Chhit Choeun, who later changed his name to Ta Mok. He had fought against the Japanese as well as fighting with the resistance to the French. He was a seasoned fighter and new how to run a battle. With his balding head and his small thin frame, he could move through the jungle like a cat.
“You couldn’t have come at a better time,” Mok said, as we stood on the muddy embankments of the Chinit River. “I don’t think it will be much longer before we finally run the French out of Indochina. They took a real beating from the Germans in the World War.”
It was through the Vietnamese that we read books on guerrilla war, including Mao’s views on peasant and people’s war and the tactics of Vo Gip. We had a common enemy with the colonists in Indochina. Mao’s victory was a boost to our efforts. But we knew the war was not over yet, far from it. Ho had founded a government in the North of Vietnam and China was the first country to recognize it. The Soviets and their allies quickly followed.
At the time we were all united against the French. The Vietminh had formed a federation with all three countries, but they wanted to concentrate on pushing the French out of Vietnam once and for all.
“The Vietnamese seem to run everything.” I said.
“I’ve noticed that. But I don’t think that will last either. There are some of us who will not help Vietnam create a small empire and call it a federation.”
I was glad to hear that. I wasn’t the only one who felt suspicious of the Vietnamese intentions on Laos and Kampuchea.
Our Khmer Association was now considered a Marxist Study Circle. We had learned the basics of Marxism, now we needed tactics, especially guerrilla tactics. Reading out of books was helpful, but when members of the Vietminh actually invited us to go with them to Vietnam and learn to fight guerilla warfare for real, we were all ecstatic.
Once there, we got to see the French soldiers. After all these years, I finally saw the tables turned on them. They still had superior weapons, but we developed superior tactics. We fired at them from behind the dense jungle brush and they couldn’t even see us. They fell like flies, often getting it right in the head and going down before they knew what hit them. At times they seemed like a flock of panicked geese, not knowing what to do next. They had a hard time spotting us and at times they were like blind men shooting in the dark.
The Vietminh were setting up Khmer cells across Kampuchea and forming a front, similar to one they had formed in Vietnam. However, very little fighting was going on in Kampuchea. By 1953 Kampuchea had gained independence from France and the Vietnamese considered the conflict over. But they had left four zones, East, West, Southeast, and a zone nearly completely controlled by the Vietnamese, in control of party Khmer Communist Party operatives.
The war with the French was about through, although they left a puppet government in the south. It took the French Indochina Flag, yellow with the French tri-colors and replaced it with a yellow flag with three red lines.
All the Vietnamese had to do was push out the fledging government to the south and their country was liberated. But two problems came up. First, they didn’t realize the United States would send military adviser, weapons and establish a presents there. This meant the South had a government that would be much harder to over through than first believed. The second was that they never considered our revolutionary potential for anything other than independence. I began to overhear Vietnamese officers saying that Laos and Cambodian had a common enemy, but Vietnam would was mature enough to liberate itself and form a people’s government, based on socialism. This line went straight up to the top.
When I discussed the development of a socialist people’s government in Kampuchea, the Vietnamese always scoffed at the idea.