Ieng Sary

IT WAS, he said, the greatest revolution the world had ever seen. It would be written in golden letters on the pages of history: how the Cambodian people had returned to the countryside to become pure, agrarian communists, relieved of all private property, free of all ties of family, religion and culture, devoted only to Angkar (“the organisation”) and the teachings of Mao and Stalin. When Ieng Sary, then deputy prime minister and foreign minister for the Khmer Rouge regime, sent out such messages in 1975 to thousands of Cambodian students and intellectuals living overseas, they naturally came home—to be condemned as spies, thrown in jail, tortured and killed. Few survived his propaganda.

There were, Ieng Sary admitted—disarming Western listeners with his ready, radiant smile, as he savoured a sip of champagne—a few technical hitches along the revolutionary way. For example, the regime had to remove everyone from Cambodia’s cities, because there was not enough transport to bring in food for them. It made more sense to take the people to the countryside, where the food was. What he did not add was that these “new people”, once in the fields, became slave labour, forced into punishing manual work and so underfed that they tried to survive on grass; and that over the four years of Khmer Rouge rule perhaps 2m Cambodians, or around a quarter of the population, died from overwork, malnutrition and starvation, as well as mass killings.