The comedy evaporated a few months later when Chou Chet was arrested and ordered to concoct a narrative of his lifelong betrayal of the party. Buried inside his voluminous “confession” was a perceptive assessment of Democratic Kampuchea. This was cast in the form of a conversation Chou Chet had allegedly had with a Vietnamese agent in late 1976. In reality, the remarks probably reflect what he had been picking up from unhappy colleagues in the party. He wrote: “[I said that] the current regime was a highly dictatorial one, too rigid and severe, one that overshot the comprehension and consciousness of the people. Therefore a lot of people were muttering and moaning about how they were doing a lot of work and getting little back for it, how they couldn’t get together with their families, couldn’t rest, never had any fun, and so on.”10

It is impossible to say whether Pol Pot was aware of such widespread discontent. Perhaps he saw fighting with Vietnam as a way of producing solidarity and lessening unrest. He probably saw Vietnamese “aggression” as connected with “treasonous elements” inside the Cambodian Communist party. People who disagreed with Red Khmer policies were “enemies”; enemies, generically, were labeled as CIA, KGB, or Vietnamese. Those who agreed with the leadership, or kept their heads down, stayed alive—for the time being.

The War Begins

The Vietnamese attacks of December 1977 were the most serious so far. Their forces penetrated more than 20 kilometers inside Cambodia in some places and reached the city of Svay Rieng. The Livre noir claims that the Vietnamese committed fifty thousand troops to the incursion. They probably hoped that the exercise would force Cambodia to desist from its own operations (several thousand troops in small units had plunged into Vietnam earlier in December, leaving the frontier undefended) and to agree to a cease-fire. 11

On December 31, 1977, while Vietnamese units were still on Cambodian soil, Democratic Kampuchea broke off diplomatic relations with Hanoi, broadcast a catalog of Vietnamese “aggression,” and opened its own propaganda war. The decision to break relations had been taken on December 25, when the Central Committee decided to send troops from the capital to reinforce the areas that had been attacked. Preparing the documents used to announce and justify the break occupied officials in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (B-1) for a stretch of forty-eight hours.12