Moreover, Saloth Sar and his associates were still fearful of enemies. They found it impossible to trust “new people,” foreigners, or anyone outside the party. To maintain momentum, they wanted to wage a continuous revolution. There was no time for building consensus—who could be trusted?—and little time to lose. Reminders of the past had to be wiped out. In May 1975, over one hundred officers of the Republican army were rounded up in Battambang and told to prepare for Sihanouk’s return. They were loaded into trucks, taken into the countryside, and shot. The same fate awaited many officials of the Khmer Republic, including ordinary soldiers. In other parts of the country, particularly in the east, thousands of former officers and officials were imprisoned for more than a year.41

The Communist leadership also had other concerns. The Red Khmer army, for example, was still broken into regional commands and had not yet been brought under centralized control. Another problem sprang from the leadership’s uncertainty about Vietnamese and Thai intentions. Also, as many as two million April 17 people had to be resettled and controlled. More prosaically, many rural areas were in turmoil just when the rice planting was scheduled to begin. It is amazing that the new regime survived at all.

In May 1975, at the time of the Mayaguez incident in which an American freighter was impounded by Cambodian authorities near the coast and released after U.S. bombing of Cambodian port facilities, Sar was “worn out completely with headaches and pains in his ears, his arms and his legs; he was unable to eat.” This illness lasted “three or four days” as the Mayaguez crisis played itself out.42

Soon after, Sar welcomed several hundred Chinese technicians flown in to bolster his regime. Several thousand eventually came to work in Cambodia, but their presence was never openly acknowledged. Sar also visited Hanoi for “five or six days” with Nuon Chea, whose presence suggests that party matters were discussed, as well as the frontiers, economic relations, a friendship treaty, and the withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodian territory. Chhim Samauk accompanied them. Sar returned briefly to Phnom Penh before setting off for Beijing, where he was photographed with Mao Zedong and told that the Chinese would provide Cambodia with over $1 billion in economic and military aid. Neither the visits nor Chinese assistance were publicized at the time. From China, Sar made a brief visit to North Korea, where he received promises of military aid. Returning to Beijing, he underwent medical treatment.43

For the remainder of 1975 Sihanouk remained the figurehead chief of state; but the party’s leaders, who had always distrusted him, made no effort to bring him home. Under pressure from the Chinese, who wanted the prince to be treated fairly, the Red Khmer allowed him to return in September 1975. For awhile, Sihanouk worked assiduously at the protocol tasks assigned to him. A week after his arrival, the Vietnamese reopened their embassy in Phnom Penh. In what they probably considered an inspired move, the man they designated as ambassador was Pham Van Ba, who had enrolled Saloth Sar in the Indochina Communist party twenty-two years before. Pol Pot’s reaction to the reappearance of his former supervisor was not recorded.44