 |
|
Paddyfield.com
Paddyfield.com
ALSO SEE
The Economist
TIME
The IHT
The Christian Science Monitor
More reviews by Kerry Brown
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
|
|
|
Pol Pot: the History of a Nightmare by Philip Short
Pol Pot always stressed the paramount importance of secrecy in politics. It wasn't until eighteen months into the Khmer Rouge's period of power in Cambodia that the regime admitted it was led by the Communist Party, and that Pol Pot was the Prime Minister. Even then, this name put many off the scent. Colleagues and pupils of Saloth Sar, as Pol had been known as a boy, were only to recognise him as leader of the new regime when they saw the first photos of the leadership. For Pol, his emergence was a case of coming from one set of shadows into another. He certainly had 'something of the night' about him.
A 400 page biography of such an obsessively hidden figure is a brave enterprise. Part of Short's strategy is simply to admit that for a large amount of Pol Pot's life his story was the story of the traumas and dislocations of Cambodia's national history since 1950. He led a movement, in fact, that demanded the complete annihilation of the personal. Instructions in training manuals from the Khmer Rouge period of 1975 simply declared all 'personal thoughts', desires and wishes as being in contravention of what the Centre (called Angkar) wanted. These even reached down to the choice of marriage partners, and to the destruction of family bonds through setting up communal living where eating, sleeping and working were done collectively. In this environment, the concept of a personal history, and the expression of private choices and interests, was anathema. For Pol Pot, as for any ideal citizen of the new state he 'led', the state really was all of its citizens, and their biography was simply its history.
Short describes the unique aspect of the Pol Pot regime as the utter enslavement of its people. The abolition of money (something even the severe systems in Mao's China and Stalin's Russia didn't do), the complete mobilisation of people to collective production, and the micro-management of the economy by the central leadership, meant that the tiniest areas of individual choice were simply obliterated. That there was a massive (and in the end unmanageable) paradox in this, with God-like powers gained by a tiny number of people, and a great deal of hypocrisy goes without saying. In fact, in many areas, the regime did act rationally. It did attempt, in its early days, to serve its main, exhausted rural constituency. In its final year, there was an attempt, according to Short's analysis, to create contacts with the outside world, and wage a public diplomacy war of sorts against the Vietnamese, ominously threatening across the border. All of this, however, could not hid the fact that the regime was economically murderously inefficient, and that it was increasingly divided by internal battles, most of these fuelled by the very lack of openness and paranoia that had been placed as its main characteristic.
Short attempts, after a sort, to demystify Pol Pot, and give him a voice. But as a previous biographer, David Chandler, admitted in his Brother Number One of 1993, there is always a sense of the 'real' Pol Pot being just visible at the edge of vision, a sort of ominous presence that flits in and out of view tantalisingly (ironically, Short's book includes the information that Pol Pot in his old age used to enjoy having a Cambodian translation of Chandler's book read out to him). This was something picked up on by the people who met him while in power. The American journalist, Elizabeth Becker, who saw him in 1978 just before his ousting, commented on his impeccable manners, and his calm delivery -- and on the stark disjuncture between how he spoke, and the violent hatred of the words he was so calmly delivering. Pupils of his in the 1950s and 60s, before his revolutionary career began, were impressed by his kindness and patience. But the mask concealed an appetite for murderous intrigue that enveloped even his closest advisers, and that brooked no compromise to the principles he felt he was defending.
It is clear that Pol Pot never shifted from this conviction that the path he had followed had been the right one. His final interview, to the journalist Nate Thayer in 1997 had indicated that he was troubled by no doubts about the programme that he had ruthlessly implemented in Cambodia, nor did he admit any responsibility for the deaths of so many of his countrymen during his period in power. Perhaps this is another ruse to conceal himself and his real role in history -- a sort of perverse self-deprecation. And while Short's magisterial history contains an excellent narrative of the last 50 years of Cambodia's traumatic story, and is excellently researched and written, the ambiguous, enigmatic smile on the photo of Pol Pot on the dust cover still hides the sneaking suspicion that once more, and probably for good, the real Pol Pot is just out of sight.
Kerry Brown
20/02/2005
| |
|
