Interview With Pol Pot, Brother Number One of the Khmer Rouge Regime- part two

Picture: Pin Samkhon (right) interviewing Pol Pot (left) in Anlong Veng on the 2nd of April, 1998.

Interview With Pol Pot, Brother Number One of the Khmer Rouge Regime- part two.

This interview was recorded by Mr. Pin Samkhon of Radio Free Asia’s Khmer Service, in Anlong Veng on the 2nd of April 1998, two weeks before Pol Pot died in April, 1998.

Translated from Khmer by Khmerization
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Continues from part one….
Pol Pot: First, because our country is a small country, we have to protect it and not to let it become another Kampuchea Krom. Secondly, I knew the Vietnamese very well. I don’t talk about the ordinary Vietnamese people. The majority of the Vietnamese people are good people. But the Vietnamese leaders I knew them very, very well. I can even name them all. They are very, very bad. They have had a strategy of swallowing Cambodia and they hated me so much because I resisted against them, like Vo Van Giap, Pham Van Dong and many other Vietnamese leaders etc, they are really bad people. I knew these people very, very well. In front of us they say one thing. Behind us they say another thing. For example, about the border agreements. We have agreed at the administrative, the provincial and at the district levels but they changed their mind and attacked us and said that we attacked them first. How can we attack them? Cambodia is a small country with a small population and small poorly-equipped army. So we have always wished to live in peace with our neighbours. Vietnam had always wanted Cambodia to become part of the Vietnamese Indochinese Federation, before and even now.
Samkhon: Have they changed?
Pol Pot: They have not changed. At the moment I have nothing much to say but I wish to say a little about their puppet, the Cambodian People’s Party. Before it was called the Indochinese Communist Party. And later it was divided and splintered into three parties, ie: the Workers’ Party of Vietnam, the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party and the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party. It was divided into three parties but in fact they were like one country having the same strategy. That’s why they called the three countries the “Three Brothers“. We will never be able to be free from them because Vietnam has a strategy of protecting its own territorial boundaries. I said to them: you have encroached on Cambodian land how can you say you are protecting your borders? So we must protect our country as well. This is the first thing I wanted to tell you.
Secondly, they said that they need more land to accommodate their population because they have too many people, about 70 million of them now. So in my nationalistic heart I will never allow Vietnam to take over Cambodia. I swore to people that I’d rather die than let the Vietnamese take over my country. Now we have seen that Laos has already been swallowed by Vietnam through the 1977 agreement.
Samkhon: How many years was the agreement with Cambodia?
Pol Pot: No, that was Vietnam’s agreement with Laos which abolished all borders demarcations between the two countries in order to make these two countries become one. I went to see Le Duan and proposed to him that we must establish a friendship and cooperative treaty between Cambodia and Vietnam but he didn’t answer me. He didn’t answer me at all.
Samkhon: That was before 1975?
Pol Pot: That was in 1975. And from then on Vietnam started to attack us along the border areas. So I felt that I have been stabbed in the heart because I was in charge of the country. They have taken over our border areas, that was one thing. But the other thing was that our people have no land to live. And when Vietnam toppled Democratic Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge regime) in 1978, it had its plans worked out already before establishing a Revolutionary Liberation Front. This front was not established by Hun Sen, Chea Sim and others but it was established by another leader named So Phim. But later the Hun Sen-Chea Sim clique fled to Vietnam and was later installed by the Vietnamese invading forces when it toppled the Democratic Kampuchea regime on the 7th of January 1979. This Cambodian People’s Party, which was called the Cambodian Revolutionary Party, appointed Heng Samrin as it head of state and Hun Sen as its minister for foreign affairs and so on and so forth.
Samkhon: What do you think was Vietnam’s strategy?
Pol Pot: Its strategy was not to fight Cambodia by military means but to use and incite Khmers to fight Khmers. Like now we see that they have incited Sam Rainsy, the Khmer Nation Party, Funcinpec party etc.to break up and now they have all been splintered. Its no one else’s but it’s their works (the CPP and Vietnam). Like when Samdech Krom Preah (Norodom Ranariddh) won the election. They attacked his forces first but they said that his forces attacked them instead. These people depended on the support of the Vietnamese forces because the Vietnamese have logging businesses and drug trafficking businesses with them in order to get the money to finance the Cambodian People’s Party and bribe people from other parties to cause trouble within their parties and to splinter and beak up those parties in order to weaken them. That’s what happened. I have cried for Cambodia many times. I don’t think that all Khmer people wanted the Vietnamese to swallow our country, firstly. And secondly, no Khmer like the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). The CPP has always claimed that they have immense popular support. But if the election was held democratically like in France, the United States or Australia they will not even get 10% of the votes. That’s what I would like to tell you.
Samkhon: If I am not wrong, are you claiming that Hun Sen will try to win the election by all means and after winning the election he will abolish and open up the border to make Vietnam and Cambodia one country?
Pol Pot: They have already opened up the border.
Samkhon: When?
Pol Pot: Since a long time ago. Samdech Krom Preah has said that the Vietnamese have come to cut down the columns of the Khmer people’s houses. And when he wanted to send our troops to investigate the claims Hun Sen told him to bring the coffins as well. That’s very insolent. So who he has to depend on for support? Our people from the eastern part, like in Takeo for example, has nothing to use for firewood. They don’t even have cow dung to burn for fuel. They lived a miserable and wretched life. They have suffered so much. So how can we solve this problem? If we try to solve it they will divide us from the Upper Cambodia down to the Lower Cambodia (Kampuchea Krom). In Kampuchea Krom people are waging a struggle too but at a smaller scale because the world has not paid much attention to their plight and because they don’t want to support any separatist groups. But for the Upper Cambodia we get international support but even them can’t help. Samdech Krom left Cambodia on the 30th (July 1997?) but on the 29th the CPP’s people assassinated a colonel loyal to Samdech Krom Preah. On the day Samdech Krom Preah returned to Phnom Penh they organised a demonstration against him. You asked that we have already joined the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Yes, it’s true that we have joined ASEAN but Khmers are still fighting against Khmers and the CPP has won, not by political means but by military means, because the Vietnamese were behind them, behind the curtain. As you can see they were not afraid of ASEAN. There were some people who thought that when we joined ASEAN, ASEAN will put pressures on them. But as you can see ASEAN cannot do anything because the Vietnamese did not attack us directly but it used a its proxy, the CPP, to launch the attack. So ASEAN cannot do anything. And they always use the policy of “non-interference” to stop ASEAN from intervening. Even Hun Sen dares to say like that too, so the ASEAN Troika dare not say anything. They dare not interfere but they did help. That’s what happened.
So our people from Kampuchea Krom must struggle, even a small scale struggle, against the land confiscation. They even have weapons, but not much, for their struggle. But it was not a large armed struggle. That’s why we need ASEAN, the United Nations and our friends combined, in order to solve the current (1997 coup) crisis. This is what I think. I am not a fortune-teller. I say this because it’s for our Khmer survival. If we lose our motherland where can we live? I cannot run away from my country. I would rather die here with my people. I cannot run anywhere because I can’t even walk. Thank you so much…// END. ( Nuon Chea’s interview will be posted next, so please stay tuned and come back again…). To return to part one click here.
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Khmerization’s comment: The opportunity to interview Pol Pot was one in a life time but Mr. Pin Samkhon has not asked any relevant and important questions. Many questions that need to be asked remained unanswered. It seemed that he went to the interview unprepared. Now the opportunity has passed as Pol Pot has left our world. So most of the unanswered questions will remain to be unanswered forever. It is sad.

1. To listen to audio click here: http://www.rfa.org/service/audio_popup.html?file=http://www.rfa.org/content/service/khm/audio/polpot-khon2.mp3

2. To read Khieu Saphan's interview click here.
3. To read Nuon Chea's interview click here.
4. To read Duch's biography click here.