19 On this period of Pol Pot’s life, see Sara Colm, “Pol Pot: The Secret 60s,” Phnom Penh Post, April 24—May 7, 1998, drawing on extensive interviews. For a list of Pol Pot’s bodyguards in 1977, many of whom were tribal people, see Keat Chau’s confession. On Marx’s view of such an undifferentiated society, see Maurice Bloch, Marxism and Anthropology (Oxford, 1982), pp. 10ff.; and Michael Thompson et al., Cultural Theory (Boulder, Colo., 1990), pp. 147ff. In 1976 Pol Pot’s bodyguard was a tribesman named Thoeun (see Kheang Kim Hon’s confession, p. 10). See also the confession of Ket Chau in 1977, which gives the names of two Tapuon and two Jarai tribesmen who worked as bodyguards for “the Organization” (that is, Pol Pot). See also David Ashley’s interview (September 1997) with Phi Phuon, an ethnic Jarai who served as Saloth Sar’s bodyguard from 1967 to 1975.

20 See Frank Smith, Interpretive Accounts of the Khmer Rouge Years: Personal Experiences and the Cambodian Peasant World View (Madison, Wis., 1989). Cambodian refugees often spoke of the Pol Pot era as fulfilling the Buddhist prophecies of disaster (put tumniay) that they had absorbed as children or as monks. Ong Thong Hoeung recalled lectures by Ieng Sary in 1977-1978 in which he admired tribespeople because “they dared to sacrifice their lives to save their chiefs.” Hoeung also said that much of Pol Pot’s favorable reputation among the Khmer came from his “travels through the forests ... like someone in a Cambodian legend” (author’s interview, February 1990). Colm, “Pol Pot,” quotes a former bodyguard: “We carried Pol Pot [in a hammock] because he was a big man, neak thom. He’d lie down in the hammock and not walk. More than 10 or 20 people a day would carry him up and down the mountains. When they carried him, if they brushed him against a branch, they’d beat the porter.” See also Solange Thierry, “Brai et Himavant, les themes de la forêt dans la tradition khmère,” Cambodge (special issue of Asie du Sud-est et monde insulindien) 13, 1—4 (1982): 121—134.

21 For a detailed narrative of the uprising, see Kiernan and Boua, Peasants and Politics, pp. 166-205. Nuon Chea’s “History” suggests that Communists in Phnom Penh, of whom he was the leader, followed the rebellion much more closely than did those in Ratanakiri.