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Back Brother Number One
Chapters (28)
  1. Title Page
  2. Preface
  3. Acknowledgements
  4. CHAPTER ONE - Introduction
  5. Who Was Pol Pot?
  6. The First Year in Paris
  7. Joining the Viet Minh
  8. CHAPTER FIVE - “Red Khmer,” 1963—1970
  9. CHAPTER SIX - Coming to Power, 1970—1976
  10. CHAPTER SEVEN - Prairie Fire, 1976-1977
  11. Pol Pot in China and North Korea
  12. CHAPTER NINE - “Grandfather 87,” 1979—1998
  13. Chronology
  14. Appendix 1: - Non Suon’s Biography of Pol Pot
  15. Appendix 2: - Khmer Personnel at “Office 100,” 1963—1966
  16. Notes
  17. Chapter One
  18. Chapter Two
  19. Chapter Three
  20. Chapter Four
  21. Chapter Five
  22. Chapter Six
  23. Chapter Seven
  24. Chapter Eight
  25. Chapter Nine
  26. Interviews by Author
  27. Index
  28. Copyright Page
Document

CHAPTER FOUR

Multiple Identities, 1953—1963

Joining the Viet Minh

When Saloth Sar returned to Cambodia in January 1953, he stayed for a time with his brother Loth Suong in Phnom Penh. Suong noticed that Sar had become interested in politics. “I think about the people,” Sar told him. He also “praised Russia, he bragged about Russia, and talked about working in Yugoslavia.” He told Suong how much he had learned from his “teacher” in Paris, Thiounn Mumm.1 Less than a month later, he left Suong’s house to join the resistance. He returned to Phnom Penh from time to time, informing his brother that he had been trying to contact anti-French, noncommunist guerrilla forces commanded by Prince Norodom Chantaraingsey in the nearby province of Kompong Speu or those commanded by Son Ngoc Thanh in the northwest. Sar’s brother Saloth Chhay was in touch with both groups. Indeed, Saloth Chhay, when he was interviewed by Steve Heder in 1975, recalled encouraging his brother to work with Chantaraingsey. Saloth Sar told him that he thought Chantaraingsey was “feudal” and spoke vaguely of joining “those engaged in armed struggle”—that is, the Vietnamese-dominated Khmer Issarak. Concealing his intentions from both brothers, Saloth Sar left them with the impression that he was interested in siding with those “most truly interested in democracy.”2

On a visit to the capital, it seems that Saloth Sar made contact with Pham Van Ba, the local representative of the Indochina Communist party, and asked to be inducted into the party on the basis of his membership in its counterpart in France. Ba told an interviewer in 1981 that he had verified Sar’s credentials by communicating with Paris via Hanoi. The procedure took a couple of weeks. Ba then inducted Sar into the ICP, leapfrogging the Khmer People’s Revolutionary party. (Steve Heder has accurately referred to this rudimentary Khmer formation as a “secret united front party,” semantically a contradiction in terms.) Presumably, Sar’s membership in the French Communist party entitled him to join a grouping with international status—the Indochina Communist party—whose continuing existence was kept secret from noncommunist outsiders.

Sar’s initiation probably occurred in eastern Cambodia, which he reached in August 1953. In any case, he was soon absorbed into the Viet Minhdominated resistance. He worked in a headquarters cell that was half Khmer and half Vietnamese. According to Pham Van Ba, Sar was a “young man of average ability but with a clear desire for power.” He went to work in a mass propaganda section and later attended a cadre school.3