It is tempting to place Tou Samouth beside other role models Sar encountered, beginning in the 1940s with Kvan Siphan and continuing into the 1950s with Ieng Sary, Keng Vannsak, Thiounn Mumm, and Khieu Ponnary. Like them, Samouth was an idealist with a passion for teaching who commanded affection and respect. One difference lay in Samouth’s Buddhist rather than French education. This may have appealed to Sar in his apparent eagerness to become less French and more Khmer. A more cynical view would have Sar ingratiate himself to Samouth as a way of rising inside the movement. On balance, it seems likely that Tou Samouth’s eloquence, patriotism, and commitment drew the younger man to him as a disciple. They worked together for the next nine years.6

In May 1954 a twenty-five-year-old revolutionary named Sok Thuok arrived on the frontier and began a close association with Saloth Sar that ended in 1978 when Thuok, by then a deputy prime minister known as Vorn Vet, was purged at Pol Pot’s behest for being “pro-Vietnamese.” In his confession, Vet recalled meeting the “brothers from France” in eastern Cambodia and also his political training under Tou Samouth. His enthusiasm for Samouth foreshadows the statements of many who studied under Saloth Sar/Pol Pot: “He made me so happy, and I believed in him (chhoeou cho’t). When he opened a study course, I tried hard to understand him, and when he went out on propaganda missions, I followed along after him. This [experience] awakened me to the clear realities of the revolution.”7

Geneva and the 1955 Elections

By mid-1954 the Viet Minh and their Cambodian colleagues were in a state of suspended animation, awaiting the results of the international conference convened at Geneva to reach a political settlement to the First Indochina War. The conference, in the planning stages for several months, convened soon after the French army suffered a humiliating defeat in northern Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu. The Soviet Union and Great Britain were asked to convene the conference as members of the United Nations Security Council. Both powers were eager to settle the conflict. The conference attendees included France, the United States (which was stubbornly anticommunist), the People’s Republic of China (recently at war with the United States in Korea), and the component regimes of Indochina.