To build socialism and to defend Cambodia from Vietnam, Pol Pot and his colleagues needed all the cooperation they could get. To attack the major enemy (Vietnam) they had to unite with lesser ones, such as Cambodians in contradiction with the party. This meant relaxing the hostility extended to “new people” and ending the quarantine that had been applied to Cambodians who had returned from abroad ostensibly to help the revolution. Several hundred well-educated men and women, mostly university students, had come home from France, the United States, and elsewhere in 1976-1977. Many of them were sympathetic to the revolution, but those whose credentials were dubious—which included everyone who had come from the United States—were executed soon after they arrived. The survivors were sent to work in factories and, at the end of 1976, to perform rural labor in a special camp in western Kompong Cham. Conditions in the camp were harsher than anything they had known before but easier than those in most of the country. Many intellectuals were humiliated at not being given work appropriate to their education. Others resented being lectured on “Max-Lenin” (as the names appear, unexplained, in many party texts) by near-illiterates. In mid-1978 some of the returnees were brought into Phnom Penh, given better food, and lionized by Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan. Fifteen of them were selected in October to form the faculty of a technological university under Thiounn Mumm. Three hundred students, aged ten to sixteen, were enrolled. Plans were set in motion to reintroduce money and a mixed economy in 1979.18

As part of Cambodia’s opening up, primary schools now appeared in many cooperatives. Survivors recalled that the children of “new people” were not enrolled. Workmanlike, well-printed textbooks in geography and basic mathematics came into use. In some areas, people were allowed to wear brightly colored clothing (if they could find any) instead of the black pajamas that had clad the nation in 1975-1977. Here and there, workers were also given more time off. In May 1978 the differential classification of citizens into “fullrights citizens,” “candidates,” and “depositees” that had been in effect since 1975 was abolished and in the following month some categories of enemies were amnestied—although most Cambodians were too busy and unwell by then to notice. No measures were taken to relax rules about collectivized eating, to revive religious practices, or to strengthen family relationships at the expense of those of such collective units as cooperatives, work brigades, and military formations. Instead, the regime’s paeans to collective living became even more strident, and claims were made that the country’s collective strength would prevail over the individualistic character of Vietnam.19