Pol Pot by Philip Short Page A

Other leaders criticised the ‘arrogance’ of Vietnamese cadres. To make matters worse, Hanoi’s efforts to export its revolution were bedevilled by internal rivalries and conflicting chains of command. It is true that at the time the Vietnamese communists were fighting for their own survival. None the less, their programme for Cambodia was chaotic.
    As the 1940s drew to a close, even the little that had been achieved was compromised when Dap Chhuon defected with his forces to Sihanouk, followed by several other Khmer Issarak leaders. French intelligence estimated that, in the entire country, the Viet Minh and their
    allies controlled a Khmer population of only 25,000. Out of an estimated 3,000 guerrilla troops in the country, barely 20 per cent were Khmer — and most of those were Khmer Krom, recruited from Khmer-speaking districts of southern Vietnam, not from Cambodia itself. The rest were Vietnamese. The Cambodian revolution was not yet even a sideshow.
    In these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that Sâr and his schoolmates knew little of Issarak and Viet Minh activities. News of the rebels was censored in the Cambodian press, and such incidents as did occur were on so small a scale that even politically engaged students like Ieng Sary and Mey Mann ignored them. Sâr, at that time, was the reverse of engaged. According to Ping Sây, he never discussed politics while at Sisowath and, unlike Sây himself and others of their age, he had no contact with the Democratic Party. Apart from his somewhat juvenile admiration for the exiled Son Ngoc Thanh, it seems that the subject simply did not interest him.
    In the summer
    of 1948, he, Sây and their friend Lon Non sat the
    brevet,
    the exam which determined admission to the upper classes of the lycée. Sây passed. Sâr and Non failed. Non’s parents were wealthy enough to send him to France to continue his education. Sâr went to the Technical School at Russey Keo, in the northern suburbs of Phnom Penh.
    It cannot have been a happy move. The place itself was depressing — two long dormitory huts and a collection of barrack-like workshops that looked as though they dated from the industrial revolution. For a young man who had been on track for the
    baccalauréat
    and the possibility of a university education, it must have been a dreadful come-down. His former classmate Khieu Samphân remembered:
    ‘Most students
    used to look disdainfully at the boys at the Technical School. No one wanted to be seen with them.’ They had a reputation as toughies. When the ‘apprentices’, as they were mockingly called, played football against other schools, the match invariably degenerated into a brawl and they would bring out the brass knuckles they had made in their metalwork classes.
    But Sâr had no choice. Without a
    brevet,
    the Technical School was the only way forward for a Cambodian youth who wished to continue his education. And there did turn out to be a silver lining. The previous year the government had introduced bursaries allowing the three best students at Russey Keo to pursue their studies at French engineering schools. This year there were to be five such scholarships.
    In this situation, Sâr’s arrival was not entirely welcome. Nghet Chhopininto, another final-year student, recalled: ‘He was regarded as an intruder. If he got better marks than we did, he would get a bursary and we wouldn’t. We didn’t ostracise him — but he was a rival.’ Chhopininto was so keen to go abroad that he made himself a wooden book-stand so that he could revise his lessons in the dormitory under his mosquito net at night. He and Sâr both did carpentry, which was regarded as the easiest subject. The woodwork teacher, a Vietnamese, was ‘a charming man, who always gave everyone good marks’. Whether for that reason, or because Sâr had decided that now he really did need to work, he and Chhopininto both obtained their
    brevet
    in the summer of 1949 and each was awarded one