Pedagogic War with Vietnam } 389
returning home. They entered the Kampuchean revolutionary movement and
coalesced around the view that Norodom Sihanouk was a puppet of the United
States who needed to be overthrown to make Cambodia truly independent.
Saloth Sar, a former electrical engineering student who eventually took the
nom de guerre Pol Pot, emerged as the key leader of this returned students
group. They were much enamored of Mao Zedong’s emphasis on class strug-
gle and uninterrupted revolution. There was another cohort of Cambodian
communists who had not been educated in France but who stayed home to
work with the VWP in the struggle against the French and the Americans.
Most of the work of this group had taken place in the rural areas, and these
rural veteran cadres had lots of experience in hands-on grass-roots organi-
zation. They had typically worked closely with their Vietnamese comrades.
The returned student group had not. The rural veteran cadres followed Hanoi
in viewing Sihanouk as playing a vital role in the revolutionary struggle by
condoning Hanoi’s use of eastern Cambodia and the port of Kompong Som
(then known as Sihanoukville) for the struggle against the Americans. From
the standpoint of the VWP and their “veteran cadre” Kampuchean commu-
nist allies, the victory of the Kampuchean revolution should wait until after
the victory of the Vietnamese revolution. Pol Pot’s returned students group
viewed this notion as nothing less than betrayal of the Kampuchea revolu-
tion. This conflict within the Kampuchean communist movement continued
throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Eventually, Pol Pot’s group concluded that
the Vietnam-tainted “veteran cadres” were nothing less than Vietnamese
agents (“Khmer bodies with Vietnamese minds”) and enemies of the revolu-
tion. They were added to Pol Pot’s growing list of enemies.
The overthrow of Sihanouk by a group of Cambodian generals in March
1970 led both Hanoi and Beijing to support a revolutionary offensive across
Cambodia. Hanoi began allowing larger quantities of arms to reach the
Khmer Rouge. The VWP and the Khmer Rouge soon fell out, however, over
administration of the new territories being seized. The VWP proposed a
mixed Vietnamese-Khmer military command. But Pol Pot rejected this, fear-
ing Vietnamese infiltration of Khmer Rouge organs by Vietnamese-trained
cadres. Hanoi’s forces in Cambodia countered Khmer Rouge anti-Vietnamese
propaganda by adopting a friendship policy toward the Cambodian popula-
tion in areas under their control. The Khmer Rouge, for their part, adopted
extreme radical policies in areas they ruled: collectivization of agriculture,
deurbanization, suppression of markets, the banning of “extravagance,” and
so on. From the viewpoint of ordinary Cambodians, PAVN and “veteran
cadre” rule was preferable to Khmer Rouge rule. To the Khmer Rouge, this
was further evidence of Vietnamese “sabotage” and hostility to revolution.^13
Early in 1973, the Khmer Rouge launched a campaign to expel all Vietnamese
and their supporters from Cambodia. Dissidents of all shades were rounded
up, questioned under torture, and executed. In Khmer Rouge base areas,