Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
where people camped out in the empty shop-fronts along Monivong Boulevard, cooking
on wood-fires. For another less charitable visitor, the city resembled “something between
a refugee camp and a mammoth rubbish dump.”
32
The inner workings of the Cambodian regime were opaque. Like its “fraternal” coun-
terpart in Vietnam, the KPRP ruled unchallenged, and mostly in secret. According to a
constitution promulgated in June 1981, power was vested in the KPRP's 21-member Cen-
tral Committee (led by an eight-member Politburo), whose policies were theoretically im-
plemented by a network of people's committees stretching down to the provincial and
district levels. For a communist party, however, KPRP had surprisingly few commun-
ists. One East German appraisal from April 1983 observed flatly that the number of party
members, and their level of “political maturity,” did “not yet correspond with the de-
recalled that “there were no Marxist-Leninists” in the PRK, he exaggerated—but not by
much.
34
The regime also faced a mounting crisis of legitimacy. From the very first moment,
the PRK defined itself by the fact that it had overthrown DK. One of its first acts had
been to convene a five-day show trial which dramatized the crimes of the regime and sen-
tenced Pol Pot and Ieng Sary to death in absentia. But once the euphoria of liberation had
faded, many Cambodians began to see the Vietnamese and their 100,000-strong military
garrison as a hostile occupation force. Their fears were encouraged by resistance propa-
ganda depicting the Vietnamese invasion as the culmination of a centuries-long ambition
to swallow Cambodian territory. The early 1980s saw a trickle of defections from the
PRK, mostly by civil servants in western Cambodia who complained about the stifling
with a firm hand. Hundreds of suspected agents of the resistance were rounded up and
jailed, usually without trial. The regime had no proper criminal code. Most crimes—even
petty offenses—were seen as stirrings of “counterrevolution” and punished accordingly.
36
At the same time, former Khmer Rouge were coming to dominate the upper echelons
of the new government. The influence of Hanoi-trained revolutionaries like Pen Sovan,
appointed prime minister in June 1981, waned as the decade went on. Having barely set
foot in Cambodia since the 1950s, Sovan and his Vietnamese-trained comrades had few
contacts on the ground. Former DK cadres, on the other hand, controlled extensive net-
works left over from the Pol Pot years. One of the most prominent examples was Interior
Minister Chea Sim, who controlled appointments to the new police force and filled its
ranks with his relatives and colleagues. Former Eastern Zone cadres were appointed as
provincial governors and party secretaries, and proceeded to give jobs to their own friends
and family members. The importance of ideology began to recede next to the ability to
mobilize support through patronage and personal connections. For all the corruption and
