The Red Flag: A History of Communism

by Priestland, David

  The Ethiopian students seem to have been as enthusiastic as their Russian predecessors, but unlike them they had a great deal of support from the southern peasants themselves. The peasants were desperate to rid themselves of the domination of the ethnically alien northern military lords (or neftenya – ‘gunmen’), who had established a highly exploitative regime. The arrival of the zemecha students could therefore spark off revolutionary demands and ethnic separatism, which the students often sympathized with. This was precisely what the Derg, committed to the integrity of Ethiopia, did not want, and the result was often the use of force and student disillusionment. However, whilst the students could join with the peasants against the northern landlords, they could also clash with them as they tried to impose ‘enlightenment’, much as their Soviet predecessors had done. If anything, the ethnic differences between the student ‘enlighteners’ and the peasants made the violence more extreme. In one episode, the students tried to undermine the power of a local chief, who had religious as well as political significance. According to an American report:

  In an act of calculated effrontery the semi-divine and normally secluded geramanja was unceremoniously paraded in the streets of a provincial town… the students deliberately desecrated the geramanja’s sacred eating utensils and, after dinner, seated a low-caste manjo on his special horse. The outraged followers of the geramanja waited until the students had assembled in a school building in the neighbourhood. The building was surrounded and put to the torch.93

  The Derg, officially, was still pursuing ‘Ethiopian socialism’, but this looked much more like Marxism-Leninism, and the land reform was welcomed by the student Marxists. From September 1975 the Derg began to formulate a Marxist-Leninist doctrine, and sought to create a more formal alliance with the Marxist parties. But Ethiopian Marxism was divided between the more Stalinist, modernizing Marxism of the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement (MEISON), largely consisting of ethnic southerners, and the more decentralized Marxism of the ‘Maoist’ Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), with a largely northern membership. It is no surprise that Mengistu ultimately allied with the MEISON. Partly as a result, serious conflicts broke out, within both the Derg and the Marxist movement. The regime sought to suppress the EPRP, and it went underground and began a guerrilla campaign, leading to a vicious ‘red terror’ which lasted for about a year from early 1977. The violence was extreme, and at times spilled into the streets – most notably the massacres that followed the EPRP’s attempts to disrupt the 1977 May Day rallies in Addis Ababa.

  Mengistu’s extremism intensified separatist movements – the Marxist Eritreans, the Maoist-inspired Tigreans and rebels in other regions – and he also came under serious threat from within the Derg. He was further weakened when the United States, which under Kissinger’s realpolitik had continued to fund the regime despite the Derg’s violence, began to reduce aid under the new Carter administration and support Ethiopia’s enemy, the formally Marxist regime of Somalia. Meanwhile, the Soviets, who had been supporting Somalia, began to move closer to Ethiopia. The Somalis, sensing weakness now American support was being withdrawn, invaded the Ethiopian Ogaden. However, the war, far from undermining the Derg, only served to consolidate the regime, much as World War II had reinvigorated Stalin’s rule. Mengistu was able to present himself as a defender of the nation, and, in an even more striking echo of the Stalinist past, he began to associate himself with the Ethiopian Orthodox church to bring the nation together against the foreigner. In other respects too he adopted the ideology of High Stalinism. He was committed to using force to preserve the multi-ethnic hierarchical Ethiopian state, in which Amharas controlled other ethnicities, and to further signal the debt, he increasingly adopted a monarchical style and was to be seen sitting on a gilded armchair-cum-throne covered with red velvet to watch his military parades.94

  By 1978, Mengistu, with Soviet and Cuban military aid and the support of the southern peasants who manned his army, had won the Ogaden war. His internal enemies had been crushed, and the separatist insurgents were being contained. He responded to victory by resuming his transformation of the economy, setting high targets for agriculture and building up industry, following a Stalinist strategy. The result was peasant passive resistance and soil erosion, contributing, together with the Tigrean war and drought, to a devastating famine in 1984.95 Having neglected the disaster, the regime was goaded into action by international outrage (helped by the televised ‘Live Aid’ charity rock concert), but its solutions caused even more traumas. It decided to relocate the peasants, in a coercive programme of villagization that further increased support for the guerrilla insurgencies now threatening the regime.

  Mengistu was one of Stalin’s most faithful disciples, and the world was yet again reminded of the devastating effects of this violent form of politics. Again, the hatreds created by a crumbling ancien régime had given rise to an angry and destructive modernizing Prometheus. But even Mengistu’s cruelty was put in the shade when, a few weeks after the Derg launched its campaign of rural transformation, another Communist regime of extraordinary violence came to power. In April 1975, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (known as the ‘Khmer Rouge’) occupied Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge championed a variety of Communism very different to the pro-urban Afro-Stalinism of Ethiopia. This was a Maoist Marxism – one that used peasants rather than an urban vanguard to pursue goals of modernity and national greatness. The Khmer Rouge was to take Cambodia (or Kampuchea as they called it) into a world more nightmarish even than that of the Cultural Revolution, one pursued with a single-minded violence that ended up destroying the modernity it was trying to create.

  VI

  In 1971, a French student of Cambodian Buddhism, François Bizot, then touring the Cambodian countryside, was captured by Khmer Rouge guerrillas who were fighting a guerrilla war against the American-backed regime of Lon Nol. Suspected of being an American spy, Bizot was imprisoned in a camp, and his fascinating and subtle memoir of his captivity includes a gripping account of conversations with his captor, ‘Comrade Duch’, the former mathematics teacher who was later to become the head of the notorious torture chamber, the Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison.96 Despite the circumstances, Bizot and Duch established a strange rapport, and engaged in an extraordinary debate about Kampuchean Communism. Bizot, an enthusiast for traditional Cambodian culture, challenged Duch with a powerful critique of what he saw as the Khmer Rouge’s modernizing Promethean impulse – namely its subservience to Western ideas, its contempt for ‘backward’ peasants, and its willingness to sacrifice ordinary people on the altar of national greatness: ‘If you destroy these structures of peasant society, if you impose a new rational model, don’t you risk humiliating them even more than your enemies do?’ he asked. Duch, however, refused to accept that the peasantry would resist modernity, and insisted that they would welcome the Khmer Rouge’s programme:

  ‘Quite the reverse,’ he erupted. ‘It’s because… we know that the peasants are the source of true knowledge, that we want to free them from oppression and abuse. They’re not like the lazy [Buddhist] monks who don’t know how to grow rice. They know how to take control of their destiny… This society will retain the best of itself and will get rid of all of the contaminated remains of the current period of decline… it’s better to have a sparsely populated Cambodia than a country full of incompetents!’97

  At the same time, however, he declared himself committed to helping those peasants who were willing to shoulder their responsibilities: ‘My duty is to lead each of them back to a life of simple pleasures; what more can anyone want from life than a bicycle, a watch and a transistor radio?’98

  Duch went on to condemn Bizot for hypocrisy, for forgetting that France had created a nation through bloody revolution, just as the massive ancient Cambodian temples of Angkor Wat had involved massive sacrifice:

  For a Frenchman, I find you very timid. Did you yourselves not have a revolution and execute hundreds and hundreds of people? Woul
d you care to tell me when the memory of these victims prevented you from glorifying in your history books the men who founded a new nation that day? It’s the same with the monuments at Angkor, whose architecture and majesty everyone admires… who now thinks about the price, about the countless individuals who died from the endless labour over the centuries? The extent of sacrifice matters little; what counts is the greatness of the goal you choose for yourself.99

  Bizot was shocked by Duch’s callousness, but his feelings were complex:

  Up until then, I had been convinced by the reassuring image of a brutal executioner. Now the man of faith, staring ahead of himself with an expression combining gloom and bitterness, suddenly emerged in its immense solitude. Just as he revealed such cruelty, I surprised myself by feeling affectionate towards him… As I looked at him, tears came into my eyes, as if I were dealing with a dangerous predator I could not bring myself to hate… His intelligence had been honed as the tooth of the wolf or the shark, but his human psychology had been carefully preserved. Thus prepared, his masters employed him as a cog in a vast timepiece beyond his comprehension.100

  Bizot may or may not have been right in his view of Duch’s motivations, and in his conviction that Duch was the victim of inhumane bosses. But his record of Duch’s views helps us to understand why leaders of the Khmer Rouge such as Duch were prepared to organize such violence. Duch’s language – and especially his praise for the achievements of the ancient Angkor civilization – was more explicitly nationalistic than most Communists’, and clearly war and Cambodian nationalism are central to any explanation of these events. But his words echo those we have seen in Stalin’s and Mao’s Radical voluntaristic thinking – that national greatness and economic success could only be achieved if the people became self-sacrificing heroes, whilst the unheroic or the unreliable had to be eliminated. But the Khmer Rouge were Maoist rather than Stalinist in believing in the virtues of the peasantry, at least in the abstract; they did not have the contempt for their culture or the admiration for the urban that Stalinists did. Even so, ‘Communist State No. 1’, as they called their regime, went even further than Mao in valorizing the Radical over the modernizing side of the Promethean synthesis and in their efforts to mobilize the nation as a peasant guerrilla army at a time of war. The Khmer Rouge also used the enormous resentments of the countryside towards the cities. The consequence was murder and destruction on a massive scale.

  The Khmer Rouge’s leader Saloth Sâr (better known by his pseudonym ‘Pol Pot’) arrived at his extremist version of Marxism in the course of a life that was in some respects similar to that of other Asian Communist leaders. He came from a prosperous peasant background (like several other Communist bosses in the developing world); he went abroad as a student, where he encountered Communism, and then returned to a land beset by anti-colonial and post-colonial guerrilla wars. But his outlook was also forged by the peculiar ethnic and social hierarchies of his home-land. Cambodia was a particularly agrarian part of the French Indochinese empire, and the native Buddhist Khmers were largely peasants. The French saw the Khmers as less developed than the Confucian Vietnamese, who filled many of the administrative posts in the country, and Cambodian nationalists became increasingly resentful of their lowly status amongst the dominant Vietnamese and Chinese. As a child in the 1930s, Pol Pot himself had close connections with the more traditional aspects of Cambodian culture: he spent some months as a novice in a Buddhist monastery, where he was given a highly disciplinarian and traditional education. His family also had links with the royal household: Pol’s cousin Meak was a member of the royal ballet and became the King’s consort, and Pol himself spent some time in the palace. We do not know what he thought of the court at the time, but his later denunciations of the monarchy and its decadence became very harsh.101And if he was not aware of it before, he would have understood Cambodians’ place in the ethnic pecking order when he went to a French school in Phnom Penh, a city dominated by French, Vietnamese and Chinese. All this may be one reason why he came to believe that Cambodia’s status could only be raised by eliminating its traditional culture.

  Pol Pot reached adulthood at a time of nationalist ferment, when the French had reimposed control after World War II but tolerated a constitutional monarchy under Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Even though he was a mediocre student, Pol managed to secure a scholarship in 1949 to study in France at the Radio-Electricity Institute in Paris, but he had little interest in the subject. Much more compelling to him were French history and nationalist politics, and Rousseau was one of his favourite authors. However, at a time when the Communist party had so much influence in France, it was no surprise that he should move into the Communist orbit.

  Pol attended Marxist discussion groups, and became a member of the French Communist Party. A contemporary recalls that he had a particular admiration for Stalin’s idea of the secretive, vanguard party, and for Stalin himself; indeed he hung a portrait on his wall.102 When he returned to Cambodia at the beginning of 1953, the Vietnamese Communists had extended the anti-French guerrilla struggle across the border, and controlled about a sixth of Cambodian territory. Pol joined the Indochinese Communist Party, founded by the Vietnamese, and joined a guerrilla band for a time, although he probably did not actually fight. Shortly after the French granted independence to Cambodia later that year, he returned to Phnom Penh and became a secret Communist activist whilst working as a teacher. He was popular, and one of his students remembers his mild and personable style:

  I still remember Pol Pot’s style of delivery in French: gentle and musical. He was clearly drawn to French literature in general and poetry in particular… In Paris many years later I watched him speaking Cambodian on the TV… He spoke in bursts, without notes, searching a little but never caught short, his eyes half-closed, carried away by his own lyricism.103

  Pol’s monastic teaching style was also effective in recruiting the monks, teachers and students of Phnom Penh for the Communist party at a time when Sihanouk, an authoritarian modernizer, was expanding education. In 1962, with the mysterious death of the Communist Party’s leader, Pol became acting secretary of the party. But student riots in 1963 forced him to flee to guerrilla camps in the east and north-east of the country. Pol was following the route followed by Mao and the Chinese Communists after 1927, from the town to the countryside.

  By the early 1960s Sihanouk, desperate to keep Cambodia out of the Vietnam War, had broken with the United States and forged an alliance with China and North Vietnam, allowing the Vietnamese guerrillas to use his territory. The Vietnamese were therefore not eager for the Cambodian Communists to attack the Sihanouk regime, a message that was clearly communicated when Pol Pot visited Hanoi in 1965. The radical Pol was looking for support for his insurgency, and resented the patronizing Vietnamese, but he found a much warmer welcome in Beijing when he visited at the end of the year. The Chinese did not want to help him against Sihanouk either, but they were politer, and Pol was excited by the radical atmosphere he saw there. The Socialist Education Movement was in full swing, and the Cultural Revolution was only months away. The 1965 Chinese visit, and a subsequent one in 1970, were to have an enormous impact on Pol’s thinking, and would provide him with a new vision. On his return he changed the name of the Communist party from the Vietnamese-style ‘Revolutionary Workers’ Party’ to the Chinese-style ‘Communist Party of Kampuchea’, and departed from Vietnamese-influenced areas to a more remote Yan’an-type part of the north-east, inhabited by ‘tribal’ minorities. The Khmer Rouge also began to prepare for an armed struggle against Sihanouk, which they launched the following year.104

  The prospects for the radicalized Pol’s Communists began to look much brighter in 1969–70, partly as a result of Washington’s Vietnamese strategy. In 1969 Washington began to bomb Vietnamese bases in Cambodia, thus demonstrating the abject failure of Sihanouk’s efforts to avoid war. It also helped to precipitate his fall in a pro-American coup. The Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge and Sihan
ouk were now all united against the Washington-backed regime of Lon Nol, and by 1972 the Khmer Rouge controlled about half of Cambodia’s territory, mainly in the countryside. Led by teachers and urban people, most of its recruits were young poor peasants, and the classic Maoist methods of self-criticism, study sessions and manual labour were used to forge a united force. It was from this time that the Khmer Rouge began its campaigns against ‘feudalism’ in its ‘liberated’ areas, eradicating Buddhism and imposing an extreme egalitarianism and collectivism, symbolized by the demand that peasants wear sets of identical black pyjamas.

  In 1973 the constellation of forces changed yet again, as the Vietnamese agreed with the Americans to withdraw from Cambodia, and the Khmer Rouge were left alone, bitter at Hanoi, but continuing the struggle. American bombing intensified, but it probably only increased support for the guerrillas. On 17 April 1975 the residents of Phnom Penh looked on anxiously as the victorious young peasants of the Khmer Rouge entered the capital – much as the residents of Beijing had in 1949. It soon transpired that they had a lot to be anxious about.

  The party that took control of Cambodia looked so unusual that some have doubted whether we should really call it Marxist at all. Several have pointed to the influence of Theravada Buddhism, its collectivism and fatalism, and this was François Bizot’s own explanation for this extraordinary movement.105 As he asked an angry Duch: