Free Pol Pot by Philip Short Page B

consolidate. But by the end of the year his margin for manoeuvre was exhausted. In December 1946, his Viet Minh army, numbering 28,000 men, abandoned the capital to fight the French Expeditionary Corps from the jungle.
    The First Vietnam War had begun.
    Ever since the foundation of the ICP, in 1930, the Vietnamese communists, encouraged by the Comintern,
    *
    had taken the view that they had
    a responsibility to promote revolution not merely in their own country but throughout Indochina. In practice, this had remained a dead letter.
    The struggle for independence from France changed that. The Viet Minh, ostensibly an alliance of progressive forces in Vietnam, obtained most of its arms from Bangkok, then the hub of a South-East Asian black market in weaponry left over from the Pacific War. The only way to transport them to southern Vietnam was overland through Cambodia or by sea along the Cambodian coast. The need to secure these arms routes — without which Ho’s forces would have been unable to fight the French — gave Cambodia a whole new strategic importance. Defence planners under General Vo Nguyen Giap urged that the country be transformed into a ‘logistical support area’ for southern Vietnam. That implied the establishment of a Cambodian revolutionary movement, similar to that being created in Laos. The problem was that there was no indigenous Khmer communist structure to build on. Hanoi’s only options were to try to co-opt existing non-communist Thai-backed Khmer Issarak groups, or to recruit among the Overseas Vietnamese community, which accounted for almost one in twelve of Cambodia’s population, some 300,000 people in all.
    In practice, the Vietnamese tried to do both.
    First they recruited a former Buddhist lay preacher, calling himself Son Ngoc Minh, to serve as President of a newly-formed Cambodian People’s Liberation Committee (CPLC) in Battambang. Minh had been born in a Khmer district of southern Vietnam of mixed Khmer-Vietnamese parentage, which meant he was the nearest the Vietnamese had to an authentic Khmer revolutionary. According to French intelligence, his real name was Pham Van Hua. The
    nom de guerre
    was intended to capitalise on the popularity of Sihanouk’s banished rival, Son Ngoc Thanh, then still languishing in exile in France. Minh spent most of the first two years escorting arms convoys and groups of Overseas Vietnamese recruits through Cambodia to communist-controlled areas in southern Vietnam. But in 1948, the Vietnamese decided that the time had come to try to give the nascent Cambodian movement greater substance. The country was divided into four geographical zones. Minh was placed in charge of the South-West. Dap Chhuon, an army deserter who led an 800-man Issarak band in Battambang province, was assigned to the North-West. Keo Moni, an Issarak chief from Prey Veng province, assisted by another Buddhist preacher, Tou Samouth, had responsibility for the South-East. The North-East, a sparsely populated
    montagnard
    region where the French presence was tenuous, was for the time being spared Viet Minh attentions.
    Attempts were made throughout the areas of Cambodia under guerrilla control to set up an embryonic revolutionary administration — complete with a tax system, land survey, economic and judicial departments, revolutionary tribunals and even a public works service — and on May 15 1948, Son Ngoc Minh sent birthday greetings to Ho Chi Minh on behalf of a purported ‘revolutionary provisional government’. But in practice most of the new structures existed only on paper.
    The artificial nature of the Vietnamese communist implant in Cambodia, coupled with historical animosities, made it a virtual certainty that relations between the ICP and its Issarak protégés would be uneasy when not openly hostile.
    In the ‘liberated districts’, Khmer leaders, including Son Ngoc Minh himself, could do nothing without the approval of Vietnamese political commissars. A French