Two days later, the party secretary in the northeast, Ney Saran (Ya), was arrested as a traitor. Another party stalwart, Keo Meas, was arrested on September 25. By then, Pol Pot’s own resignation as prime minister had been announced, on the grounds of his ill health. He was replaced by Nuon Chea. Because Pol Pot resumed work in October and Nuon Chea was never chastised, the resignation may have reflected genuine ill health. Perhaps it was connected in an obscure fashion with the succession crisis in China. More likely, however, Pol Pot resigned to confuse and encourage enemies in the party who could be crushed once they came into the open. That the resignation was announced over Radio Phnom Penh, known to be monitored abroad, suggests that he hoped to spread some of this confusion among foreign powers.19

Toward the end of September, the political crisis gathered momentum. Its basis was an apparently trivial difference of opinion about the founding date of the Cambodian Communist party. In its September issue, the party’s youth magazine published a ten-page article praising the party’s twenty-fifth anniversary, locating its beginnings in 1951, during the First Indochina War. The article was out of step with Pol Pot’s thinking, although it was probably “planted” by him to smoke out his opponents. As we have seen, party documents from 1974 had already referred to the 1960 congress as the “first,” foreshadowing a revision of party history favoring Pol Pot; also, the March 1976 meeting of the standing committee had noted in this regard, “Do not use 1951—make a clean break.” In October 1976, after Keo Meas and Ney Saran had gone to S-21, a thirty-one-page article traced the party’s beginnings to its “first” congress in 1960, noting that “we must rearrange the history of the Party into something clean and perfect”—that is, without a Vietnamese, pre-Pol Pot component.20

It is unlikely that Keo Meas, who was under house arrest, had been plotting to overthrow Pol Pot. Ney Saran’s case is more ambiguous, for his surviving confession is very fragmentary and he was known to have maintained extensive contacts with the Vietnamese after 1975. His name was the only one mentioned as a traitor by Pol Pot when he was interviewed by Nate Thayer in 1997. Keo Meas was probably purged because he retained a following among those radicalized in the 1950s who were unhappy with Pol Pot and the extreme policies embodied in the Four Year Plan. Ieng Sary later spoke of a “coup d‘état” in September 1976, but if there was one it does not seem to have involved any military forces: No important military cadre were brought into S-21 between September and the end of the year. It is more likely that Pol Pot moved against the two defenseless senior party figures to terrorize the clients they had built up over the years and to tighten his own grip on the party’s apparatus.