Tou Samouth

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Tou Samouth ( khm. ទូ សា មុត; approx. 1915–1962), also known as Achar Sok , was a Cambodian communist politician. He was one of the founding members of the Kampuchea Communist Party and leader of its more moderate faction . He is remembered mainly as the mentor of Saloth Sar, who later changed his name to Pol Pot .

Career in the Khmer resistance

Samouth was a Khmer Krom who was born and raised in Cochinchina (in the southern part of Vietnam ). In his youth he was trained as a Buddhist monk , and during World War II he was professor of Pali at Unnalom Monastery in Phnom Penh . In 1945, an American air raid against Japanese military targets struck the monastery and resulted in several deaths. Samouth was so terrified by the event that he fled to the country and eventually went to Vietnam, where he joined the Viet Minh . During World War II he had also joined the Indochinese Communist Party (KPI), which was controlled by the Communist Party of Vietnam . In the KPI he was one of the most important Cambodian members. In the late 1940s, Samouth taught political consciousness and economics to groups of Khmer recruits.

Samouth founded, together with Sơn Ngọc Minh , the Revolutionary People's Party of the Khmer (English Khmer People's Revolutionary Party , KPRP), the forerunner of the Communist Party of Kampuchea . He was also one of the leaders of the Khmer Issarak Association (KIA), a largely left-wing gathering of various different elements of the anti-French resistance, the Khmer Issarak . When the front established their Provisional Revolutionary Government , Samouth was appointed Home Secretary.

Position in the KPRP

As the leader of the Vietnamese-backed “urban” faction of the party, Samouth helped attract many Buddhist monks to the left. The “urban” communists, in contrast to the “rural” cadres of Sieu Heng, generally advocated a more moderate policy; in particular, they supported the Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk as a figure of national unity and useful ally in the North Vietnamese struggle against South Vietnam . It was Samouth's faction in the party that Pol Pot and the other recent returnees from Paris who formed the core of the party's later embodiment as the Khmer Rouge gained experience. Samouth appears to have adopted Pol Pot as his protégé, which led to his rapid promotion within the party after Cambodia's independence.

The party's "rural" cadres were decimated by Sihanouk security forces in 1959 after Sieu Heng defected to the government. In 1960, amid increasing repression by the Sihanouk government, the KPRP held a secret meeting at Phnom Penh train station. Samouth, who remained in favor of working with Sihanouk, was elected Secretary General. Pol Pot was named third in the party hierarchy behind Samouth and Nuon Chea .

death

Samouth disappeared in July 1962 under unknown circumstances; the incident was a closely guarded secret until the late 1970s. Although it is widely believed that he was murdered by Sihanouk's police, there has also been suspicion that Pol Pot may have arranged for Samouth's death to secure his promotion to party secretary. Pol Pot denied this in one of his last interviews before his death, stating that Samouth had left his safe house to get medicine for his sick child, having been arrested, interrogated and killed by Lon Nol's men: “Had Tou Samouth talked about, I would have been arrested. He was killed in the Stung Mean Chey Pagoda . We made love. ”Historian Ben Kiernan notes, however, that there is strong evidence that Pol Pot County was responsible for the disappearance of Samouth; in particular, a secret party report from 1978 on "enemies within" accused the Kandal Province Secretary Som Chea of ​​killing Samouth. Chea, who was later executed, was a courier for Pol Pot's group in 1962.

Pol Pot was elected party secretary in early 1963, then broke with the Vietnamese communists and secured the support of China instead .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ David P. Chandler : Brother Number One. A Political Biography of Pol Pot. Revised Edition. Silkworm, Chiang Mai 2000, ISBN 978-974-7551-18-1 , p. 24.
  2. ^ Arthur J. Dommen : The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 2001, ISBN 978-0-253-33854-9 , p. 63.
  3. ^ David P. Chandler: Brother Number One. A Political Biography of Pol Pot. Revised Edition. Silkworm, Chiang Mai 2000, ISBN 978-974-7551-18-1 , p. 23 f.
  4. ↑ Ben Kiernan : The Pol Pot Regime. Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79. 3. Edition. Yale University Press, New Haven (CT) 2008, ISBN 978-0-300-14434-5 , p. 13; According to Kiernan, the frequently used designation United [or Unified] Issarak Front is based on a false French translation of the Khmer-language name Samakhum Khmer Issarak .
  5. ^ Russell R. Ross: The KPRP Second Congress. In: Cambodia. A Country Study. Library of Congress Country Studies , Washington 1987.
  6. ^ Nate Thayer: Day of Reckoning ( Memento of September 23, 2009 in the Internet Archive ). In: Khmerkampongspeu.org.
  7. ↑ Ben Kiernan : How Pol Pot Came to Power. Verso, London 1985, ISBN 978-0-86091-097-8 , p. 241.
personal data
SURNAME Tou Samouth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Achar Sok
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Cambodian politician
DATE OF BIRTH around 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Cochinchina
DATE OF DEATH around 1962