Free Pol Pot by Philip Short

but they were an irritant rather than a threat to French power. In November of that year, Thailand agreed to return the disputed provinces, and eighteen months later a change of government in Bangkok ended direct Thai support for the rebels. Conditions remained unsettled and many groups turned to brigandage. Agricultural production was disrupted — the economy, in the words of one French observer, was at death’s door — and tax revenues fell sharply. But
    Cambodian politics would have to evolve further before the Issarak could become a major force again.
    In the summer of 1947, Sâr passed the end-of-year examinations and, with a few other children from Kompong Cham, was admitted to the Lycée Sisowath, which was still recovering from the disruption caused by the war and had vacant places in 3 èrne. For the decidedly average student that he was, it was no small achievement, for the lycée’s normal intake was only 120 pupils a year. One of his closest friends at Kompong Cham, Lon Non, whose elder brother, Nol, would become Cambodia’s Head of State in the early 1970s, made the move at the same time. With Ping Sây, an extrovert, mischievous youth, a year younger than Sâr, they formed an intimate trio, visiting each other’s homes and spending the holidays together. Sâr was once more living with his eldest brother, Suong, who had recently divorced and remarried. His new wife, Chea Samy, had also been a dancer at the palace. She was a cultivated young woman, and Ping Sây was impressed by her. But the house was sparsely furnished, with chairs made of woven bamboo, and Sây remembered thinking that they could not have much money.
    Ieng Sary
    and his best friend, Rath Samoeun, a bright boy from a poor rural family, whom Sâr now encountered for the first time, were in the class above him at Sisowath.
    Every Thursday afternoon, they and the other boarders, wearing the school uniform — a white shirt, blue trousers and a blancoed white pith helmet — walked in a crocodile up Boulevard Doudart de Lagrée (named after a nineteenth-century French explorer) as far as the French Quarter, where they were allowed to disperse and spend the afternoon as they wished. The more hard-working among them used to go to the National Library, a yellow-and-white stuccoed building with an imposing Grecian faÇade and an inscription in French and Khmer, on either side of the main entrance, declaiming prophetically: ‘Force binds for a time; ideas enchain forever.’ There the politically inclined Mey Mann read the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Victor Hugo’s
    Les Miserables.
    The latter, he acknowledged, was too long for him to finish, but nearly sixty years later, he could still quote from it the words, ‘Life is struggle. Those who struggle, live!’ Ieng Sary devoured Montesquieu and Voltaire, who advocated constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament, an independent judiciary, equality of the citizenry and fundamental freedoms, all of which were conspicuously absent in Cambodia.
    Mey Mann and his friends were not alone in being influenced by the thinkers of eighteenth-century Europe. Sihanouk had also been through
    the French colonial school system with its — in Cambodian terms — wholly inappropriate emphasis on the French Revolution, and the uncomfortable parallel between the absolutism of the Khmer monarchy and the fate of Louis XVI had not escaped him. In the second half of the 1940s, the young King took the first tentative steps towards liberalising the political system. Under the
    Modus Vivendi
    Cambodia, no longer a protectorate, was destined to become a member of a still-to-be-established French Union and endowed with a constitution enshrining limited autonomy. To the annoyance of the French — who viewed the new arrangements as no more than a figleaf for the restoration of their pre-war rule — Sihanouk insisted that the text be approved by a consultative assembly elected by universal male suffrage, and that