For most of the year, Saloth Sar remained at his headquarters in the north. In March 1972 it was announced in China that he was chief of the military directorate of the armed forces of Sihanouk’s National Front. His deputy, Nuon Chea, was named chief of the army’s political directorate. Sar’s position does not seem to have involved day-to-day military decisions; these were left to the regional commanders. Sar was undoubtedly responsible for strategic decisions, such as rejecting the 1972 cease-fire proposed by North Vietnam and the Khmer Republic, the “strategic storming attacks” on Phnom Penh in 1973-1974, and the final assault on the capital the following year.15

After 1971, party documents became more insistent in their class analyses of Cambodian society. They stressed that cadre must be drawn from poor peasant, lower-middle-class peasant, and worker backgrounds—“from deep down in [rural] areas,” as one document suggested, “extracted from the earth like diamonds.” Relying on these categories, it was thought, guaranteed the disappearance of feudal or capitalist elements. The superiority of workers and peasants, however, like the superiority of communism itself, was an article of faith, even though the prophets of this faith—Marx and Lenin—were never identified and seldom cited. The documents themselves were not expected to generate discussion; rather, they were intended to display the authority of the party. They were memorized and key passages were recited to lower echelons. The documents were the regalia of a new, all-powerful regime that, like many preceding it, enjoyed pretensions of total control. Those in power sprang from segments of society different from those in the past, but they soon behaved in much the same way—for example, people who questioned their authority were often put to death.

The documents were intended to expand the listeners’ “revolutionary consciousness.” As such, they reflected Saloth Sar’s background as a teacher as well as his authority within the party. It is tempting to imagine him at party schools delivering these sermons with subdued eloquence (voha) in his low, resonant voice, using few gestures and no notes.16

From Cease-Fire to Bombardment

As we have seen, the fortunes of the Red Khmer had always been dependent on events inside Vietnam. Although the war strengthened the Red Khmer, it also deepened their dependency on the Vietnamese. Saloth Sar himself was a creature of an earlier Vietnamese conflict, eased along inside the subsidiary Cambodian movement. Until the end of 1972, his troops were armed, trained, and often led by the Vietnamese. The defeats suffered by Lon Nol in 1970-1971 had been at the hands of Vietnamese regular forces. The Red Khmer’s progress, or lack of it, had been calibrated to a large extent by Vietnam. 17