As head of the National United Front for the Salvation of Kampuchea (KNUFSK) declaring the birth of a new regime for Cambodia in December 1978, Heng Samrin promised tolerance and the rallying of all patriotic forces regardless of political and religious tendencies, and announced that Cambodians were free to move to “native lands, and to build their family life in happiness.”78
75 Hun Sen was one key figure who deserted from Khmer Rouge ranks.
76 Party membership stayed low and the new regime’s dependence on former Khmer Rouge
cadres and their acceptability was strongly debated within the Party Central Committee. See Gottesman, Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge, 49 and 65-69; and Chandler, "Cambodia in 1984," 179-81. On engaging intellectuals see Gottesman, Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge, 73-74.
77 Chanda, "Cambodia in 1986," 119; Heder, "Kampuchea," 17-29; Khatharya Um, "Cambodia
in 1989: Still Talking but no Settlement," Asian Survey 30, no. 1 (1990): 102; and Huxley, "Cambodia in 1987," 161-73.
People took the new regime at its word despite some apprehension that the regime was still communist and revolutionary.79 Nagging doubts remained that there could be a return to former ways or, at least, that those who had been officials or in the military during Sihanouk or Lon Nol times, those who had been part of the Khmer Rouge regime, or those who were educated, would be disadvantaged. Some people set out to search for food, others headed for the border and still others sought their former villages. People also flocked to the edge of towns but were barred entry. They settled in camps waiting to be admitted, since the authorities needed staff and labour to revive the towns and to establish some form of civil administration. Others sneaked in to collect goods from their former residences or to leave messages on walls in the hope of contacting other family members, or simply to loot. Some bribed their way in. However, preventing people from entering the towns was reminiscent of the Khmer Rouges and, along with revolutionary slogans, suggested that the risk of a return to old times was not completely removed.80 The educated, in particular, who were sorely needed, tired of war and oppression, simply decided to leave the country all together.
Interim and often ad hoc arrangements were put in place in the first months of the new regime. The Front had been given the task of holding the revolution together and, with the Vietnamese, had decided to create village committees; village militia and “solidarity groups” (krom samakki). People were also urged to rise against the Khmer Rouge and to elect “people’s self-management committees” particularly from those who had suffered at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and those who had supported their overthrow, as well as patriarchs trusted by the villagers. Former village heads and civil servants from the Sihanouk and Lon Nol periods were favoured by this approach which was, in the end, necessary due to the dearth of experience and ability. While it gave some confidence to the people that the Khmer Rouge period was really over, it also meant that the middle level and poor villagers of the past gave way to the better-off and experienced.81
The solidarity groups were important and basically successful in meeting the immediate and urgent need in early 1979 to share whatever resources existed to
79 The following discussion is from ibid., 38-41.
80 Ibid., 76. Phnom Penh had a population of around 300,000 by end of 1979. This had risen
to 700,000 in 1986. See Huxley, "Cambodia in 1987," 166.
restore agricultural production and provide for a rural population not only disrupted by the war, but left with few animals and little production equipment.82 To some extent, as small groups of ten to fifteen families, they would appear to have roughly replicated traditional agricultural practices whereby families shared resources and labour. However, these groups were also designed to become part of functioning socialist communes in due course but, to maintain political support, there was considerable caution in the official approach due to innate fears among the people of a return to Khmer Rouge cummunalism. The government therefore adopted an approach under which land would be communal but the means of production would remain private.83 In the longer term, however, the solidarity groups failed for a variety of reasons including lack of economic incentive and lack of interest in communalism by group members, shortage of cadres and a government more concerned to improve production than to impose socialist objectives.84 They also failed because state and local officials, at village and commune level, began to misappropriate land for their own purposes, social differentiation emerged, land was rented out for sharecropping, and usury returned. There was thus a return to the past as solidarity groups ended up with the worst land and those who had been poor before the Khmer Rouge, and privileged under that regime, were mistrusted, marginalised and returned to poverty.
While the reluctance of peasants to cooperate in the formation of communal production has been discussed in terms of peasant resistance and everyday politics by Scott and Kerkvliet, it would seem that in the Cambodian countryside everyday politics took several forms. While the majority of people simply clung to private plots to secure their own household needs, others, mainly officials, deliberately abused or obstructed government policies to accumulate personal wealth and status. They did so with the knowledge and connivance of more senior officials. Everyday local politics was confronted on the one hand by official policy and, on the other, by the corrupt ‘everyday’ politics of a hierarchy of officials.85 A similar problem
82 Viviane Frings, "The Failure of Agricultural Collectivisation in the People's Republic of
Kampuchea (1979-1989)," (Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University: 1993). The solidarity groups which seemed initially to fall under the direct oversight of the Front, were later moved to the control of the Party and Council of Ministers.
83 Heder, "Kampuchea," 32-33; and Frings, "The Failure of Agricultural Collectivisation." 84 Ibid.: 54-67.
85 See James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New
confronted the Commune Revolutionary Committees which were later set up as part of the government administrative system.
Committee elections were organised in 1981 but a half-hearted response meant that only about 400 of 1,300 communes completed their elections.86 A democratic process was considered necessary to encourage the people to enhance production, to increase security and to improve their lifestyle and happiness under the new regime. The Committees had broad responsibilities, ranging from security to oversight of solidarity groups and production, health and welfare, education and party propaganda. Their responsibilities had a strong resonance with those of today’s commune councils. Committees were expected to be instruments of hierarchical government, functioning, in theory at least, side by side with Party organisations and Front “mass movements.”87 The actual involvement of government ministries in the work of the Committees is unclear though many of the decisions and circulars quoted by Slocomb and Frings were prepared by ministries (such as agriculture and education) and addressed directly to local officials. There is little to explain whether provincial authorities had a direct role in overseeing the implementation of policies by local Committees. However, their poor performance was the subject of a 1988 Decision of the Council of Ministers which tightened instructions requiring them to prepare development plans and to properly manage their budgets. It also placed them under direct Party oversight.88 Members of these committees remained in office into the 1990s and some were elected to the new commune councils in 2002.