Origins of Khmer Communism

Abstract

On 3 April 1979, the new pro-Vietnamese Government in Kampuchea renamed Phnom Penh's Avenue General de Gaulle after a Buddhist monk called Achar Hem Chieu, who died in a French prison in 1943. Other main streets were named after former anti French monks who, unlike Chieu, became communist leaders in the 1950s and the 1960s: Achar Mean (Son Ngoc Minn), Tou Samouth (Achar Sok), and Keo Moni (Achar Mao), whose name now belongs to the Boulevard which had borne that of another Asian communist leader called Mao. The names of nineteenth century anti-French rebels such as Pou Kombo and Si Votha were also given to some of Phnom Penh's avenues. This symbolic change was an attempt by the remnants (and the successors) of the early communist movement, now ruling Kampuchea, to declare their links with the anticolo nial tradition out of which Khmer communism was born. The period (1963-79) of the Pol Pot group's leadership of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), when anticolonial figures were ignored or despised as Vietnamese puppets and nearly all veteran communists were among the hundreds of thousands executed, was thus seen as a break from this tradition which needed to be corrected. Although the early communists such as Son Ngoc Minn never won unchallenged leadership of the 1945-54 Kampuchean anti-French movement, they did play an important role in securing independence for the country. This role is worth studying, if only to see how their descendents, the Heng Samrin/Pen Sovan regime, now seek to cast themselves in terms of Khmer patriotism.