For all of Khieu Samphan’s efforts to distance himself from the Khmer Rouge’s inner workings at his war crimes trial, British author Philip Short on Tuesday painted a portrait for the tribunal of a man devoted to the cause and central to its bloody work.
From the trial’s start, the Khmer Rouge head of state has insisted that he only fell in with the rebels in the 1960s to save himself from a government violently mistrustful of the political left. He has insisted that he played no part in setting policy, even after the rebels took over in 1975.
Mr. Short, author of one of the more popular books on the period, “Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare,” conceded Monday that Khieu Samphan had little choice but to toe the ultra-Marxist party line or risk his life.
But continuing his expert testimony Tuesday, he said Khieu Samphan was nevertheless brought ever closer to the heart of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) while it was still hiding out in the country’s eastern forests, by 1971 ascending to its all-important Central Committee.
With the rebels held up in Kompong Thom, Mr. Short recounted Khieu Samphan moving through offices and ever closer to Pol Pot himself before finally ending up at party headquarters.
Asked by prosecutors what convinced him of Khieu Samphan’s growing role in the party, he replied: “The fact that he was moved to be closer to Pol Pot and the fact that he remained close to Pol Pot, while the others were not.”
That Pol Pot personally saw to it at the time that Khieu Samphan get married, he added, also showed “an unusual level of interest in his well being, as it were.”
With Phnom Penh’s fall still on the horizon, Mr. Short recalled Khieu Samphan’s trip to China to meet Mao Zedong and his tour of Asia and Africa with the late King Father Norodom Sihanouk, who had been deposed as head of state in a 1970 coup and became allied with the Khmer Rouge.
The tour was meant in part to help shore up support for the Khmer Rouge among its allies abroad, Mr. Short said, “but more than anything else to keep Sihanouk tied to the movement.”
Soon after his ouster by U.S.-backed rivals in his government, a self-exiled Sihanouk formed the National United Front of Cambodia with the aim of retaking power and quickly allied himself with the same communists he had driven underground.
As Mr. Short described it, Khieu Samphan helped the Khmer Rouge balance the relationship. While keen for Sihanouk’s resilient popularity among the masses and the fresh military recruits it brought them, the Khmer Rouge was just as eager to keep him from taking the rebellion over. Sihanouk knew from early on who was truly in control on the ground, Mr. Short told the tribunal.
As Sihanouk was well aware, he said, “It [the front] had absolutely no control over what was going on inside. It was a facade.”
Drawing on his own book, Mr. Short likened the Khmer Rouge to a fundamentalist religious order, and Khieu Samphan to an unreserved devotee.
“The CPK was in many ways like a monastic sect,” he said, with its devotion to self-sacrifice and an embrace of hardship. “I think that’s one of the keys to Khieu Samphan’s behavior, but it also applied to many others.”
With the Khmer Rouge now at Phnom Penh’s doorstep in the early months of 1975, the rebels used their radio broadcasts to announce that they would execute only the top seven leaders of the Lon Nol regime that had toppled Sihanouk, a message officially attributed to Khieu Samphan.
With the record unclear about Khieu Samphan’s actual part in the message, prosecutors asked Mr. Short if he knew the defendant to have ever distanced himself from it.
“I’m sure he did not distance himself from it,” the author replied. “In fact, I’m sure he was in agreement with the policies in it.”
Prosecutors will continue to question Mr. Short today, followed by civil parties and the defense.
