For a while, Pol Pot was a media sensation. Some observers saw him as a “genocidal fascist” and compared him to Hitler. Others labeled him a “genocidal Communist” like Stalin; one journalist referred to him as a “moon-faced monster.” These comparisons had little explanatory power, but by the end of 1979, “Pol Pot” had become a household word, synonymous with genocide, chaos, and everyone’s worst fears of “communism.”

Nonetheless, he held on to many of his supporters. To his cadre and combatants, he could do no wrong. The leadership in Beijing, for their part, while distancing themselves from his “excesses,” saw him as a nationalist, an ally, and a revolutionary. The Thai found him cooperative and a good performer militarily. As information about his years in power proliferated (and peaked, perhaps, with the powerful film The Killing Fields in 1985), Pol Pot became an embarrassment to his American patrons, but they lacked the courage to abandon him, enmeshed as they were in a net of realpolitik.

Concealing Democratic Kampuchea

By 1981 worldwide revulsion against Pol Pot and impatience among noncommunist Cambodian refugees with Vietnam’s prolonged occupation led the United States and its allies to sponsor the formation of an anti-Vietnamese coalition government that could replace the Red Khmer delegation at the United Nations and provide a noncommunist coloring to the anti-Vietnamese resistance. In December 1981, while the preliminaries to these arrangements were taking place, the Communist party of Kampuchea was officially dissolved following a decision by its Central Committee. However, since none of the committee members were purged and several retained the positions they held before the party was dissolved, it seems likely that the dissolution was a charade for overseas consumption. Indeed, a defector in 1989 stated that new members had been recruited into the party as recently as 1984.

The coalition “government” was formed in the middle of 1982. It was dominated by DK officials because of Democratic Kampuchea’s patrons and military prowess; the other two factions were led by Prince Sihanouk, who lived for the most part in exile in Beijing, and by a prerevolutionary prime minister, Son Sann, who had lived for many years in France. Support for the noncommunist factions came from Cambodian refugees in Thailand and the West. Democratic Kampuchea retained the foreign affairs portfolio (the only meaningful one for a government-in-exile), and its diplomats remained on duty at the United Nations. Pol Pot’s trusted lieutenant Khieu Samphan (who became the prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea in 1979) was the faction’s spokesman overseas, joined from time to time by Son Sen, who had been responsible for S-21 between 1975 and 1979. Samphan spoke of his newly discovered attachment to capitalist economics and said that he had been forced to work under Democratic Kampuchea against his will. The story pleased people who wanted to give Democratic Kampuchea a “human face,” but it failed to persuade those familiar with Samphan’s long, intimate, continuing relationship with Pol Pot and Ieng Sary and his association with the purges in Democratic Kampuchea.7