The people Saloth Sar addressed in the 1960s were to provide the Cambodian Communist movement with many of its recruits. Monks, teachers, and students were familiar with Buddhist rhetoric and susceptible to moral sermons. They considered themselves an elite, with high ethical standards. They may have felt superior to workaday Khmers; after all, students and monks did not work for money—monks were not even allowed to touch it. Students and monks also had no families to support. Unlike other public servants, teachers had fewer opportunities for corruption and greater opportunities to influence young people. By and large, monks, teachers, and students were more aware of social issues than others Saloth Sar might have assembled. For these reasons, many of them made ideal recruits.

By the end of 1962, Hou Youn, Khieu Samphan, and others in the party were also running seminars of this kind. They capitalized on a growing impatience with Sihanouk among young people and on a widespread longing for decent government, justice, and social change. They were also on the lookout for recruits. At Chamraon Vichea, a student named Siet Chhae took charge of a student union whose members, he wrote later, “were engaged in revolutionary work.” The term probably meant that Siet Chhae, like Sar, was engaged in raising people’s consciousness and organizing them into secret, autonomous groups. Chhim Samauk (Pang) had similar duties at the Lycée Yukhanthor. At other lycées, after-school discussion groups sprang up to debate political issues. Some of the meetings were probably known to the police but were considered harmless; others were held in secret.40

Efforts like these, carried out by schoolteachers in the party, soon bore fruit. In early 1963, lycée students in Siem Reap, angry at prolonged police harassment, demonstrated outside the police station. Their banners proclaimed that “The Sangkum is rotten!” and “The Sangkum is unjust!” Over the next few days, one student was killed and several were wounded. Similar demonstrations soon broke out in Phnom Penh and Kompong Cham.

Sihanouk was out of the country when he received news of the demonstrations. Angered, he sent a telegram demanding an investigation. Lon Nol saw the prince’s request as license to crack down on people Lon Nol viewed as Communists. When Sihanouk returned to the capital in early March, Lon Nol gave him a list of thirty-four men he had decided were subversive. The list was a hodgepodge of journalists, activists, and noncommunist liberals like Keng Vannsak. Alarmingly, it also included the names of Saloth Sar and Ieng Sary—probably because they taught at leftist schools.41