Although the new leadership in China was happy to use Cambodian forces to punish the Vietnamese, they were unhappy that the Cambodian Communists continued to conceal the party’s existence and to claim independence from the international Communist movement. Clearly, the Chinese, perhaps along with the North Koreans, had been the “friends” whom Pol Pot had mentioned as having urged him to bring the party into the open in 1976. After Keo Meas’s execution in 1976, there seem to have been few domestic pressures to do so. It seems likely that the Chinese increased their pressure on Pol Pot as hostilities with Vietnam grew. In any case, Pol Pot announced the existence of the Communist party of Kampuchea in a five-hour speech recorded for Radio Phnom Penh on September 27, 1977, just as his armies were plunging into Tay Ninh. By the time it was broadcast three days later, to commemorate the party’s seventeenth anniversary, Pol Pot had been in China for two days.42

In the days preceding the speech, banners were prepared in government bureaus proclaiming the existence of the party, and freshly typed copies of the “Internationale” were circulated to be memorized in time for the party’s birthday. There is no evidence that celebrations extended into the countryside. 43

Coming into the Open

Pol Pot’s speech encapsulated his ideas about Cambodian history and the Communist party of Kampuchea. He saw Cambodia’s history in terms of its inexorable progress from a slave society through feudal and capitalist phases to 1960, when the national democratic revolution broke out soon after his elevation to the Central Committee. Here Pol Pot was following the schema of evolution, supposedly applicable throughout the world, that had been sketched by Marx and elaborated by Stalin. A distinctive element in Pol Pot’s reading of history was that so few people were mentioned. His own name does not appear in the speech; nor does Sihanouk’s or those of any of his colleagues except the trusted Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan. Those singled out by name—Lon Nol, Sim Var, Sirik Matak, U.S. ambassador John Dean, and so on—are almost all defeated, absent enemies of the party. Living enemies (Vietnam; traitors inside the party), party leaders, and potential allies (Sihanouk; China) remain hidden.