Communist Party of Kampuchea

His, uh, sister was a concubine of the king of earlier days.

And Pol Pot himself was, uh, not really acquainted with peasant conditions, but he saw his future in the communist movement, and he took it over when his predecessor as leader of what was then the Workers' Party of Kampuchea was killed mysteriously, I suspect, by, uh, Pol Pot's actions.

He was handed over to the police of Lon Nol and was killed in 1962.

Pol Pot immediately, uh, seized leadership of the communist movement and took to the forest and begun prep-preparations for the uprising that started in 1967.

You work with the mentioned material you have, including the leadership element.

And of course, since Saigon fell on April 30th of 75, upon Khmer Rouge victory, a man named Ng Sari, born Kim Trang, he was one of six members of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea.

He was the spokesman for all practical purposes of the Communist Party of Kampuchea.

And as of April 17th, 1975, he was held out by Western observers Media personalities, diplomats, American military officialdom as the leader of the Khmer Rouge, which is fascinating.

And he was cast as this sort of grotesque villain.

Well, and to give you an idea, it was some years later, this one British diplomat, so I think he, I think this guy had been the ambassador briefly.

He talked about having lunch with Sari and Sari's wife, and he likened the man to Fred West and, and his wife, these two sex deviants who were serial killers in England, that the hyperbole was just ridiculous.

But I think this is interesting because this was before, uh, you know, the, the identity of the true control group of the, of the, uh, Communist Party of Kampuchea was even known.

That would be a big offense to the Khmer Rouge, who they're already on pretty rocky terms with.

And before long, with no real prospects of, you know, challenging the actual Communist Party of Kampuchea, but also being rightfully scared to go back to Cambodia, they just kind of take some low-level jobs, tried to stay low in this period of limbo, you know? Now, put that next to what Pol Pot is saying in the Black Paper about the Vietnamese creating a rival communist party out of these Hanoi-trained Khmers, waiting in the shadows to be inserted into the country.

Maybe this was the kind of thing that had filtered through to him and been given far more weight than it deserved.

Maybe he had found out about these few people in Hanoi saying, "Yeah, you know what? We'll have our own party." Maybe that rumor sort of built into something and was passed up through into his desk.

And what does that produce? Pressure.

A feeling that the walls are closing in, that this might be the only shot they have, and that there's a clock running.

So the Communist Party of Kampuchea is going to have to move quickly.

But something I really wanna point out here, and something that I think is often lost, is that they are given a choice in 1973.