A picture of Nuon Chea from the Khmer Rouge era.This is the sixth of an eight-part interview with Nuon Chea, Brother Number Two of the Khmer Rouge regime, which was conducted and recorded by Mr. Sam Borin of Radio Free Asia about one year ago but was re-broadcast again in September 2007.
Translated from Khmer by Khmerization
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Borin: The fact that you are willing to talk about the history of the Communist Party of Cambodia is very important to me and I have recorded what you have said….
Chea: So I will have to prepare myself from now on because my recollections are limited. I wish to write a book a long time ago but at that time I lived in secret so it was hard to write and to keep the documents. Now the environment is very favourable to start writing. I know that I will regret it if I didn’t write about what I knew because I have no legacy to leave my children and grandchildren. What I will write is not in the framework of a national project but it is my own works which I want to leave to the next generations to read and analyse by themselves. This is my asset which I wanted to offer to the future generations.
Borin: Also many people didn’t know exactly about what had happened….
Chea: That’s why I wanted to write it. Some people thought that my party was a Vietnamese party, a satellite party of the Chinese Communist Party and the Russian party etc. But it was not true. When Khieu Samphan, Hou Youn and Hu Nim fled Phnom Penh they did not go to China, the Soviet Union or Vietnam. They stayed in a secret location in Cambodia, in Cheang Tong commune, Takeo district. It was me who secretly accomodated them there.
Borin: You were there at that time?
Chea: Yes, I was the one who had secretly facilitated their stay there.
Borin: Yes, last year I interviewed Khieu Samphan and he had described about his escape from Phnom Penh. So at that time you were among the people who had come to meet up with him as well?
Chea: No, I was not the one who personally facilitated his escape but I directed my contacts in Phnom Penh and in our rural areas to facilitate his escape. My agent in Phnom Penh drove them in his car to the rural area and our people from the rural area went to fetch them and took them to Cheang Tong village. Did you know this village? It was near Ang Ta Sorm town in Ang Ta Sorm district. This was a history for all Khmers to learn that we Khmers can survive by ourselves. We didn’t need to depend on any country. How can we depend on any country? It was and is very difficult to depend on anyone, even if they were our close friends.
Borin: A moment ago you mentioned about a mixed group of people, such as from Europe, China, Vietnam and Cambodia, who were the original founders of the Communist Party of Cambodia. So you are saying that there were all sorts of people who were the first founders of the party?
Chea: Yes, there were all sorts of people.
Borin: Can you remember who and where they came from?
Chea: Yes, I remembered their names because there weren’t many of them. Only 3 or 4 of them such as Saloth Sar who were among the first to join me. And two more people from France such as Khieu Samphan who had joined us in the 1960s which I couldn’t remember exactly when. But I have joined the movement since 1950 so I have followed the history since then. And because I was in the struggle and was the one who had personally suffered greatly, who had won and have been defeated, I knew everything that had happened then.
Borin: Before Saloth Sar joined the resistance movement, who worked along side with you as the leaders of that movement?
Chea: At that time Tou Samouth had died or he was probably arrested. I don’t know for sure because at that time they didn’t let anybody know. The leaders at that time were Tou Samouth, Sieu Heng and so on. But later Tou Samouth was arrested. At that time he was the secretary of the Party and I and Saloth Sar were his assistants. There were some other leaders in the movement too but those people had jobs in the city and were well known to the authority so it was hard for them to conduct their activities. People such as Saloth Sar, Ieng Sary and Mey Mann were teachers so it was very difficult for them to attend our meetings. It was only me and some farmers who lead the movement secretly.
In Pol Pot’s view he made the farmers to be the core of the Party because he considered that the farmers have suffered more than the workers because the workers live in the cities. They have probably involved in some inappropriate and un-revolutionary behaviours. But in the internationalist communist theory they take both the elements of the farmers and workers, they take the elements not the actual persons, as status and class to combine as a core of the party. In the implementation of the communist theory in Cambodia we combine the forces. We take the farmers as the basis and the intellectuals as the force to support our Party. In short, in our great national solidarity as a great family struggle, people have seen the government officials enjoying a very good lifestyle so they understand us because they have seen that we were clean, incorruptible and have never committed any immoral acts. So they respect us.
Take Saloth Sar as an example. Even though he went to study in France he has never been a corrupt person. He might have enjoyed his privileged lifestyle because of the society at the time, but he has never committed any corruption, like hording hundreds of thousands and millions in bribe money. He had never done that.
Borin: I have discussed about Saloth Sar with Prof. Keng Vannsak, who is currently living in France, who said that he knew Saloth Sar very well.
Chea: Yes, they were friends. But Keng Vannsak’s and Saloth Sar’s views were totally different because Keng Vannsak was a more highly educated intellectual than Saloth Sar. Saloth Sar was also an intellectual but on the technical field.
Borin: How were they different?
Chea: In the sense that Keng Vannsak had confessed and later escaped to overseas but Saloth Sar had never escaped from Cambodia and continued to wage a struggle from within Cambodia. This is about a stance. It is very important because you cannot run to overseas when there is trouble but when the problem is solved you returned back. This is not an element of a true resistance leader. But hiding yourselves inside the country is a normal thing.
Borin: But at that time Keng Vannsak was one of the leaders too?
Chea: No, he was not. In reality he was the public face but deep down it was the work of the Party. No communist party will take a public person as their leader because a public figure always has contacts with the society in general and these kinds of people are easily influenced by the society. They need an ordinary person who has his ideal in order to lead the party.
So the leaders who were always in hiding have never had an easy life. I myself for example. I dared not go to have a haircut at the marketplace. I have never had a chance to go out and drink tea, coffee or eat out. Whatever we need we buy them and cook them at home to eat with our children. Also I have rarely met my relatives because I was too afraid to go out and see them. Even though they loved me but they always tried to convince me to return back to the society. For example I and Gen. Sak Sutsakhan. We were second cousins and were breastfed from the same nanny. My mother always said to me that “look at Sak Sutsakhan, he was breastfed from the same nanny and now he had become an important person. But you had become nothing”.
That was how the society at that time. But I felt pity with my mother who was widow who had no one to depend on. So I thought that to pay gratitude to the nation is like paying gratitude to my mother. We don’t have to pay gratitude to them directly. So I have to sacrifice because I can only see her one in a long while and she always cried when I went to see her. This is a sentiment between a mother and her son. Do not think that a communist does not have any sentimental feeling. We love our nation but we love our parents more. That’s the fact.
But for someone who didn’t know the truth and who didn’t see us visiting our parents as frequently thought that we were ungrateful to our parents. It was not like that. We have a moral dilemma. But for the interests of the nation and for the interests of the people we must make sacrifices. This was the case with me. Whenever I came to see my mother she was always crying in front of me but I have nothing to give to her because my salary was not even enough to cover my living expenses.//(To be continued in parts 7 and 8..). To read part seven click here.
To listen to part five please click here:http://www.rfa.org/service/audio_popup.html?file=http://www.rfa.org/khmer/audio/2007/10/08/hbs0926-nc5.mp3
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