Mao waited his moment to again unleash the Scorpion while celebrating the triumph of another of his vicious protégés, Pol Pot, bizarrely backed by ex-king Sihanouk.
On 17 April 1975, the young fighters of the Khmer Rouge, wearing black pyjamas and red scarves, emerged out of the jungle to occupy the elegant and Frenchified capital Phnom Penh, which resembled a sinking ship as the Americans choppered out, the government fled and the last premier was beheaded. The Khmer Rouge – only 68,000 of them – immediately ordered the capital’s 370,000 people to leave within three days. On 23 April, Pol Pot arrived in a deserted Phnom Penh.
Pol Pot, forty-five years old, ascetic, soft-spoken and neurotic, a fan of French poetry, was ‘very likeable, really nice, friendly’, recalled a comrade, ‘very sensible’. Formed by years of clandestine life in the jungles, ‘he’d never blame you or scold you’, usually holding a fan like the Buddhist monks who had taught him, yet he was a micromanaging fanatic obsessed with a vision of radical revolution to outpace even his patron Mao. General secretary of the Party since 1963, Pol led a tiny cabal of fanatical teachers so secretive that he rarely used a name, usually just Brother No. 1 or Brother No. 87, and so tight-knit that he and Brother No. 3, his old friend from Paris, Ieng Sary, were married to sisters Khieu Thirith and Khieu Ponnary, privileged daughters of a judge, whom they met at their private lycée before the sisters departed to study Shakespeare at the Sorbonne. Their Paris friend, another teacher Son Sen – Brother No. 89 – ran the secret police the Santebal (Peacekeepers) while his teacher wife ran education. This sixsome of homicidal pedagogues dominated Angkar – the Organization, the faceless government. Together, aided by the veteran intellectual Khieu Samphan, No. 4, they planned to forge ‘a precious model for humanity’ by murdering all educated and privileged classes, emptying the capitalistic cities and forcing Cambodians to return to a pre-industrial classless society in a Year Zero of Democratic Kampuchea. ‘We’ll burn the old grass,’ said Pol, ‘and the new will grow.’ Two and a half million people trekked out of the cities, 20,000 died or were killed on the way, with executions starting immediately.
Yet the new head of state was a sacred king descended from four centuries of monarchs: Sihanouk broadcast from Beijing to tell the peasants to support the Khmer Rouge. Earlier he had trekked into the jungle to meet Pol Pot, his ego tickled, his suspicions disarmed by Brother No. 1’s calm humility. Sihanouk returned to Phnom Penh to the royal palace; Pol Pot lived for a while in the Silver Pagoda where the leadership held its meetings, then moved to the old State Bank Building, codenamed K-1. As he orchestrated Year Zero, ‘bad elements’ were told, ‘To keep you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss.’ Then, to save ammunition, they were beaten to death with cudgels. Children were removed from families. Son Sen supervised the slaughter with ‘a schoolmasterish eye for detail’, his Santebal torturing and killing thousands at their headquarters, a converted school codenamed S-21, and at 150 lesser killing centres. The Khmer Rouge sometimes ate the livers of victims, used unborn foetuses as talismans and buried bodies as fertilizer. Over a million were executed; 2.5 million died in all.
Sihanouk defended Democratic Kampuchea publicly. The Khmer Rouge’s brutality was known even before they took Phnom Penh, but in this Faustian compact Sihanouk embraced a benumbed strategic ignorance to ensure his survival and as part of his manoeuvrings to oust the myrmidons when he got the chance. Taken on a rural tour by No. 4 Khieu Sampan he saw what was happening, but it was too late. He tried to resign but was kept under house arrest. He had colluded not just in the slaughter of his people – 33 per cent of males died – but in that of his own family: five of his own children were liquidated. The pressure was punishing even for Angkar. Paranoiac stress drove Pol’s wife insane, until she was finally incapacitated with schizophrenia. Phnom Penh was the first of America’s toppling dominos; next, on 30 April 1975, Saigon fell to the Viet Cong; on 23 August, Vientiane, capital of the kingdom of Laos, fell to the Communist Pathet Lao, its last king worked to death in prison camps.
After unleashing the Killing Fields, Pol flew to meet Mao, who praised Year Zero: ‘One blow and no more classes … a splendid achievement’. But, just as Stalin had lectured him, he lectured No. 1. ‘You’re right. Have you made mistakes? Certainly you have. Do rectification.’ Pol privately disdained both Khrushchev and Mao; the latter’s revolution ‘has faded and is wavering’ unlike ‘the brilliant red’ of his own. But Mao’s warning was shrewd. Pol Pot aggravated the pro-Soviet Vietnamese, who fresh from their defeat of America would tolerate no lessons from their own former province.
Soon after meeting Pol, in January 1976, Mao’s elegant premier Zhou Enlai died. The Helmsman himself could barely move or speak without the interpretation of his nurses, but was still acute and vigilant. When students used Zhou’s funeral to protest, he dismissed Deng, again, but placed Little Cannon under house arrest, specifying that he was not to be harmed. After planning to crown his wife’s acolyte, Wang Hongwen, one of the Gang, he surprised everyone by choosing Hua Guofeng, governor of his home province, whom he had met when he inspected the shrine at his birthplace. His nurses read him Sima Guang’s history and, as he sank, Jiang Qing barged in, massaging his limbs, giving orders to doctors. But the master of the deathbed does not always inherit the kingdom.
THE CRUSADER AND THE PRINCE: EUROPEAN TYRANTS AND DEMOCRATS
As Mao listened to the histories of the emperors and toyed with his heirs, a European monarch was arranging his own succession. On 30 October 1975 Francisco Franco, now eighty-two, fell into a coma. He saw himself as a ruler in the tradition of Ferdinand and Isabella and Philip II, so only a king could succeed a Franco. It helped that he had no son, just a daughter Carmen. He planned a royal succession of the Bourbons, the ancient French Capet family that had ruled Spain from 1714 until the revolution of 1931, balancing both branches along with his own Movimiento Nacional.
The count of Barcelona, son of the last king, had asked Franco if his sons could study in Spain. Franco agreed. In 1956, the two princes, the elder son Alfonso and Juan, were fooling around with what they assumed was an unloaded pistol. Juan pointed it at Alfonso and pulled the trigger. It was loaded, and the prince was killed. ‘Say you didn’t do it on purpose?’ screamed their father. As he toyed with the two branches of the Bourbons, Franco took an interest in the handsome Juan, who, advised by his father, promised the generalissimo to respect his authoritarian vision.
In 1962, Franco invited Prince Juan and his wife to move into the Zarzuela Palace; seven years later, he asked Juan to swear loyalty to the Movimiento Nacional and declared him the heir, advising him to take the name Juan Carlos. Franco had another condition: the prince must raise his daughter Carmen to duchess. Juan agreed. Courtiers warned Franco that the prince was a secret liberal and louche libertine, but Juan Carlos treated Franco like an old king; the Caudillo trusted him. In 1968, the dictator, ageing and controlled by his daughter and her husband, handed over Spain’s last possession, tiny Equatorial Guinea, to Macías Nguema, a Fang witchdoctor’s son, who had seen his father murder his brother before being bludgeoned to death by a Spanish colonial official; his mother committed suicide; and he himself was mentally ill, a drug user, who had sought treatment in Spanish mental hospitals. At a meeting in Madrid to discuss the country’s future, he claimed that Hitler had meant to liberate Africa but had conquered the wrong continent. He often lost his thoughts during speeches, which voters interpreted as charming feyness, but soon after winning the first presidential election, he threw his foreign minister out of a window and embarked on a reign of terror of astonishing intensity. Seeing himself as the Unique Miracle and glorified with the motto ‘No other God than Macías Nguema’, he organized mass executions of around 50,000 victims, sometimes drowned out by loud English pop music. He kept the entire treasury in suitcases in his house, looting the tiny oil-rich country and killing or exiling a third of the population. Equatorial Guinea was so tiny that Nguema ruled with the help of his family, who were the only people strong enough to destroy him.*