The Emergence of Pol Pot

A few days before these discussions, the Central Committee had met to discuss the elections scheduled for the People’s Representative Assembly. Saloth Sar noted that the elections, although modeled on capitalist ones, were being held primarily so that “our enemies can’t take advantage of us.” The elections were for overseas consumption. No benefits accruing to the people from the elections, or from the assembly, were mentioned.55

April 17 people were not allowed to vote, and the 250 candidates were named from slates of peasants, soldiers, and workers rather than from particular districts. The job attributions of some figures were bizarre, as when Khieu Thirith and Yun Yat called themselves “Phnom Penh factory workers.” Representing “rubber workers” was an otherwise unidentifiable figure, Pol Pot, soon to be named prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea.

Although Saloth Sar is known to have used the pseudonym “Pol” in the 1950s, and was using it again in 1975 when he convened meetings of the Central Committee, no pre-1976 references to “Pot” have come to light, and the election announcement marked the first public appearance of “Pol Pot” as a person and as a name. It is unclear how thoroughly his colleagues in the party had been prepared for the new man or for Saloth Sar’s disappearance. In Paris, Pol Pot’s old friend Thiounn Prasith told supporters of the new Cambodian regime that “Pol Pot” had been born along the Vietnamese frontier, had fought against the Japanese, and had worked in the Memot rubber plantation. While it is tempting to view this explanation as an attempt to throw people off the trail, it is possible that Prasith, without better information, was fabricating the biography. More likely, he had been given the cover story without being told the truth. In that case, it is intriguing that Sar chose to provide details of his life not known to many—such as his time on the eastern border in 1953-1954 and his two years as a semihostage of the Vietnamese in Office 100, adjoining the plantation at Memot—while concealing his original name and his activities as leader of the Cambodian Communist party. The new name was probably chosen to hide Saloth Sar and to celebrate a rite of passage. In 1977 the Cambodian ambassador in Beijing told a visitor that “Comrade Pot has always used that name; Comrade Saloth Sar perished during the war.”56

It is baffling but consistent for Saloth Sar to assume a pseudonym at precisely the moment when he might have been expected to step into the open, using his own name or a revolutionary one that ordinary people would have known (like “Ho Chi Minh”). None of the other members of the government would take new names at this time, although they did not reveal their nonrevolutionary ones. Pol Pot’s fondness for obscurity may have sprung from a conscious drive to build a humble, bleached persona, like Stalin’s or Ho Chi Minh‘s—men who forsook everything, including their personalities, for the revolution. “Pol Pot” was a personification of the revolution, a revolutionary name (like “Ho” or “Stalin”) without a personal past.