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p Ashis Barman

p Patriot, New Delhi January 11, 1979

p As a consequence of the liberation of the Kampuchean capital of Pnom Penh, the hated tyrannical regime of Pol Pot and his stooges met its downfall. Leadership of the victorious army and the Kampuchea United Front for National Salvation was assumed by such prominent communist activists as 167 Heng Samrin, who became the country’s chairman, Chea Sim, vice-president, and Roh Samay, General Secretary of the KUFNS Central Committee.

p All these leaders took part in the Kampuchean people’s long fight for independence. Waging an unyielding struggle against the French, and later international imperialism, they headed the first revolution in the country with such people as Pol Pot, Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan. The initial successes of the Kampuchean people in their struggle against imperialism coincided, however, with a fierce Maoist campaign in China, Kampuchea’s strong and influential neighbour. The erroneous Maoist ideas affected some of the Kampuchean leaders who fought for independence and consisted mainly of nationalistically inclined peasants who were not well schooled in Marxism. This segment of the leadership, headed by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, swallowed the Maoist propaganda, and under its influence, buckled under to strong pressure from Peking, hoping to use it in restoring the country’s economy.

p Since they were unable to apply Marxist principles correctly and creatively in tackling the country’s socio-economic problems and pursued a chauvinistic policy, the part of the Kampuchean leadership headed by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary became more and more alienated from the Kampuchean people and began carrying out repressions against the population. It attempted to entangle the popular masses in Maoist-type economic adventures, and dealt mercilessly with anyone within the party or the revolutionary army who disagreed with its methods. This exacerbated the contradictions between the ruling clique and the group of veteran Marxist leaders and revolutionary army commanders, among them Heng Samrin, Chea Sim and Roh Samay.

p This split did not, however, lead to the automatic collapse of the Pol Pot regime; even the revolutionary leaders themselves did not come out against Premier Pol Pot as an individual, but against the senseless, anti-popular policy that he and his clique attempted to pursue under pressure from the Peking adventurists, which eventually had catastrophic consequences in Kampuchea.

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p For example, in accordance with the Maoist Utopia concerning agricultural communes, based on a primitive organisation of labour and a backward economy, Pol Pot and his stooges tried to combine the Kampuchean peasantry forcibly into agricultural communes, taking away their right to hold private land. This policy was executed with extreme persistence and cruelty, despite fierce resistance from the peasants. Money and the domestic market were abolished as well.

p All these policies evoked strong opposition from the broad Kampuchean population and also within the leadership itself. Sensing this, the ruling clique set out to physically eliminate its political opponents and began annihilating peasants in the villages and intellectuals in the cities. On the pretext of an “all-round radical social revolution”, the Pol Pot regime followed the pattern of the Chinese “cultural revolution" by forcibly resettling handreds of thousands of townspeople in the countryside, so that “they could learn from the popular masses”. All this was done, of course, without providing the proper conditions in the countryside, which was completely unprepared to accommodate such an army of people.

p Rural inhabitants also came in for extremely cruel repressions, because of the policies of forced collectivisation and the abolition of money and the domestic market. As a result, in the towns and villages of Kampuchea active resistance mounted daily to the Pol Pot regime, which hastened its own downfall with its suicidal measures. Thousands of armed peasants joined the regiments of the Kampuchean Revolutionary Army headed by Heng Samrin and began liberating districts that had been under the control of the Pol Pot administration one after another. The Chinese hegemonists and imperialists raised a clamour about intervention on the part of Vietnam. China even began supplying Pol Pot with weapons, but, all these armaments eventually wound up in the hands of the revolutionary United Front.

Thus the people of Kampuchea have won a fresh, glorious victory. The new Kampuchean leaders know that they still have many more difficulties to overcome, particularly the fierce hostility of the USA and China, which are expressing 169 their dissatisfaction over the recent developments. The United Front leaders are, however, confident of their strength, of the fact that they will be able to counter any direct Chinese interference, especially in view of the intensifying high-level power struggle in China itself.