Free Pol Pot by Philip Short Page A

the same system be used in future elections. That made possible for the first time the formation of political parties.
    Sihanouk’s motives were mixed. As monarch, he had every intention of preserving the reality of undivided power. But he also saw himself as a moderniser and wished to appear to his people as such. Moreover, he had acute political antennae. The continuing popularity of Son Ngoc Thanh (in whose arrest he may secretly have connived) troubled him. So did the nationalists’ whispered criticisms over the renewal of his entente with the French following Japan’s defeat. By deciding to grant ‘his people’ the right to involve themselves in the political process, he hoped to refurbish an image that had become tarnished.
    Cambodia’s first national election, in September 1946, brought to power the Democratic Party, led by Prince Yuthévong, who was named Prime Minister. Yuthévong had a French wife, a doctorate in mathematics and an ambition to install in Cambodia the democratic values and practices that he had come to admire in Paris.
    Students flocked to the Democrats’ cause. Mey Mann voted for them and helped as a volunteer — preparing the meeting rooms for sessions of the Executive Committee at Yuthévong’s headquarters, a villa overlooking the esplanade in front of the city’s railway station. In 1947, Rath Samoeun and two other young radicals, Hou Yuon and a boy named Keo Meas, who was studying at the Phnom Penh Teacher Training College, worked in the party campaign office. That April, after only six months in office, Yuthévong died at the age of thirty-four, apparently from lung complications caused by tuberculosis. Thiounn Mumm’s brother-in-law, Chean Vâm, who had returned from Europe two years earlier to become, at the age of thirty, the first Cambodian headmaster of the Lycée Sisowath, succeeded him. In 1948, Ping Sây joined the party; and in November of the following year — when Sihanouk, exasperated by the Democrats’ fractiousness, suspended the National Assembly — Samoeun
    and Ieng Sary helped to organise a protest demonstration which ended with numerous arrests. Sary was freed a few hours later, but more than a hundred others were held in prison for a week. A student strike was declared, which quickly spread to other cities, and a twelve-man delegation, of which Sary was a member, sought an audience with the King. ‘He was quite reasonable,’ Sary recalled. ‘He heard us out, and then ordered everyone released.’
    It was around this time that Sary came across a copy of the
    Communist Manifesto
    in the library of Yuthévong’s brother, Prince Entaravong. Marxism was a taboo subject under the colonial regime. Schoolteachers were forbidden to mention the Russian Revolution in class. But Yuthévong had brought back to Phnom Penh a suitcase-full of ‘progressive’ works, which Entaravong inherited after his death.
    Sary and Rath Samoeun puzzled over the
    Manifesto
    and argued about what it might mean.
    While the Democratic Party was challenging Sihanouk’s power,
    conflict of a different kind
    was brewing across the border in Vietnam. In the southern provinces of what was then known as Cochin-China, armed clashes had broken out within weeks of Japan’s capitulation as local communist and nationalist groups sought to resist the reimposition of French control. The movement, initially piecemeal and poorly organised, was gradually taken in hand by the Nambo Territorial Committee, the southern branch of Ho Chi Minh’s Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) which had seized power in Hanoi. It was headed by Le Duan, an intensely nationalistic young southerner who, twenty years later, would succeed Ho as the leader of the communist movement throughout Vietnam. Le Due Tho, the future Paris Peace Talks negotiator, was his chief assistant. Together they organised guerrilla attacks and sabotage. In Hanoi, Ho strung out the negotiations with France to gain time for the communist forces to