1869, Ep. 164 with Andrew Mertha, author of Bad Lieutenants

7:17PM Apr 22, 2025

Speakers:

Jonathan Hall

Andrew Mertha

Keywords:

Khmer Rouge

Bad Lieutenants

Andrew Mertha

class struggle

United Front

Pol Pot

Vietnamese invasion

refugee camps

insurgency

Cambodia

historical trajectory

institutional analysis

foreign aid

Democratic Kampuchea

legacy.

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode, we speak with Andrew Mertha, author of the new book Bad Lieutenants: The Khmer Rouge, United Front, and Class Struggle, 1970- 1997. Andrew Mertha is the George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies and Director of the School of Advanced International Studies China Research Center at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of three other books from Cornell University Press, Brothers in Arms, China's Water Warriors and The Politics of Piracy. We spoke to Andrew about how the Khmer Rouge remained forced to be reckoned with long after the fall of Pol Pot's government, how they were able to keep their political power intact and the three key Khmer Rouge leaders who were instrumental in the movement's strange durability. Hello Andy, welcome to the podcast.

Hey, Jonathan, delighted to be here.

Well, I'm excited to talk to you about your new book, Bad Lieutenants: The Khmer Rouge, United Front, and Class Struggle, 1970- 1997.I'm also very excited, because it's an open access book, and that means anyone that's listening to this right now can download it for free. You can go to cornellpress.cornell.edu and download it from there. You can go to Amazon, wherever you wherever you normally would get an ebook. Andrew Mertha's new book is available on that platform. So with that all said, tell us the back story to this book. How did, how did it come to be?

So I could go back as far as 2009 but I won't I. I'll start with I had a previous book on so I'm, I should say up front that I'm a China scholar. And I got interested in Cambodia actually, quite a long time ago, but I did not really have an opportunity to indulge it until I came to Cornell as faculty back in 2009 2008 rather, but I started the interest in Cambodia in 2009 so I just finished a book on China's foreign aid to the Khmer Rouge called Brothers in Arms, which was also published by Cornell University Press. And I was casting about for another for another project, and I had some stuff left over from that project. You know, I had some data, and I had some interest and momentum to essentially look at the structure of the Khmer Rouge movement after 1979 because that's something that is relatively understudied for, you know, for obvious reasons. And after about a year or so of casting about trying to figure out how to move forward on this I came about this close to giving up. I just thought, you know, I was on a I was on leave, I was in China. I was doing a little bit of research up in central North, northern part of the country, and I decided one night that, you know what? I'm just going to cut my losses and not move forward on this. After that, immediately after that stint in China, I went to Hong Kong, met with an old friend named Stephanie Giri, who works for the New York Times editorial page based in Hong Kong, and she said, Don't give up on it just yet. Talk to this scholar named Steve header, based in London, who I'd interacted with before. He'd been very helpful, but he was somebody whose time was quite valuable, and I didn't want to, you know, I didn't want to basically annoy him, you know, for a project that I was already, you know, pretty much, you know, 90% ready to put to bed. But I contacted him when I was in Cambodia right after Hong Kong, and it turns out I'd just been interested. I'd just been interviewing some ex Khmer Rouge soldiers earlier that day, trying to get a sense of which division reported to which command center. And it was really getting anywhere. And in an email exchange with Steve, he said that he basically sent me a an attachment which had all that information on and so we arranged to meet. I was up in cm, reap. We arranged to meet and put on pen. And Steve said, Look, I just retired. I got three or four books left in me, you know, if you want to write this one, then that's one less book I need to write. But he said, You got to do it. Got to do it correctly, you know, don't do it, you know, don't do a half baked project on. On this. And so what he did was, he very graciously invited me to come to London when, after he returned, where he had these, these archives that he had amassed over, you know, really decades that had been kind of legendary, that people were hoping to, you know, maybe get a sense of what was inside and all that. And Steve made, gave me access to them, and he did so with with some of his students as well. But what I did was I spent, got the so I was there in December. I spent, you know, the better half of a week just spending hours and hours and hours at the School of Oriental and African Studies scanning as many of these files as I could, you know, hundreds, even 1000s, of pages. And then I returned on subsequent visits to do that. Once I had this data, I not only felt that i i I had something to offer, but I also felt I had an obligation to do justice to this information and to the trust that Steve and others had put in, you know, you know, put in this project. And so there were a lot of fits and starts, you know, I chained jobs. I moved from Cornell to Johns, Hopkins, sais, of course, we had COVID. I worked as in a stint as Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs at SAIS. So this took a little bit longer than I than I hoped it would, but it was once, once I got that initial access to Steve's materials, when combined with the other data that I already had and would and would later compile as well, it created its own momentum. And so it really, you know, there I didn't look from that point onwards. I really didn't look

back. Nice, nice. That's a great story that you were just on the precipice of quitting, but then Steve shows up, and so generous with all these materials that he's collected, and it took some time, but it's well worth the wait. So we're so glad that you stuck with it.

I should also jump in just to say I you know, I've been getting a lot of pressure from some China folks to kind of come back to the fold and reorient myself to do some more China research, which I have since done. But, you know, that was also a bit of pressure to kind of get this, get this thing, you know, tied up and, you know, with a bow, and get it out there.

That makes sense. That makes sense. So your book pass a fundamental question, how is it that the Khmer Rouge movement, which was responsible for the death, it's horrific, responsible for the death of up to a third of Cambodians in the mid to late 1970s How were they able to re emerge after that, they came back in 1979 and by 1994 they'd actually begun to engage in widespread killing again. How did this happen? What did you discover? How were they able to do this?

So I think there was a confluence of a number of different things. So first of all, you had the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, and the Vietnamese backed government kind of put in place there. So that created a kind of a common enemy for, you know, various groups to fight against. And so what the Khmer Rouge did at that point was they were, I think, most kind of deeply embedded, kind of in the either within the country or just on the border of the country. And once the initial initially recovered from, from from being kind of pushed out of power and expelled from from most of the country, they cast about from a way to to come back to power. And the way they had done that in the past was by building up a united front with both, both royalist Cambodians, as well as those who are associated with kind of the pre Khmer Rouge regime or the Khmer Republic. It gets a lot more complicated than that, and I go into that in the book, but that was generally the kind of the broad contours of the United Front, in addition to the fact that they were all kind of united against the Vietnamese, one of the things that became clear was, as you had these these refugee camps building up on the Thai Cambodian border, each of these groups essentially developed a base of operations there, where the refugee camps would act as places to to retreat to, but also to mobilize people and resources, recruiting soldiers, handling financial tracks, transactions and those types of things. And. So it became fairly clear by the mid 1980s if not before, that the Khmer Rouge camps were run much better than the other camps, and so that really gave the Khmer Rouge a leg up when it came to insurgency within Cambodia, just through command and control logistics and that kind of thing. And they were really, you know, by the by the beginning of the 1990s one could argue that the Khmer Rouge had the best kind of organization, political organization, within Cambodia proper, which all things being equal. One could be forgiven for expecting that they might come to power yet again. That didn't happen, but they became, at least from you know, from my perspective, dangerously close to potentially regaining power, luckily for for Cambodians and for those kind of adjacent to Cambodia, that did not happen, because when they were ultimately unable to translate their military strategic and tactical advantages to to actual chicken in Every pod, baby kissing, retail politics and so they were. They eventually seceded from the from the electoral process when it was clear that they would not come close to winning.

Well, that's that's good news. Definitely. It's good news that they weren't able to continue on. But you said that following up on what the things that they were able to do. Well, you said in your book they were able to do two things and only two things. Well, what were their two core strengths?

So this really comes from a bunch of conversations that I and others have had with David Chandler, who really is the father of modern Cambodian studies, and he was somebody who had very few illusions about the Khmer Rouge. We very often look at the just, just the horrific killing and the poor governance that led to things like famine, widespread disease that killed millions of Cambodians, but at their core, and this is one of the things that I tried to argue in the book, is that they were not the sharpest tools in the communist shed. So these were, you know, these were people who, in a sense, they didn't revel in this, because they certainly would not accept this characterization. But they were pretty mediocre from start to finish. These were not terribly creative, not terribly innovative, not terribly I don't want to say educated, because they were educated. And so what David would say is that the Khmer Rouge were really good at only two things. One was class struggle, which we know a lot of, because so many accounts of the Khmer Rouge are of their rule over Cambodia from 1975 to the very beginning of 1979 which was very much a time of of class struggle that manifested itself in widespread killings of not only people who were deemed class enemies at the very, very beginning of the regime, but also essentially devouring their own people who were within The Khmer Rouge ranks, who were blamed for the inevitable failures of the regime. And so the other thing that they were good at was this notion of United Front, which is to say in the rise to power when they were in a vulnerable or a relatively weak position, that they could ally with other groups and kind of build up their own strength through this kind of alliance system, but an alliance system whereby at the very end, when they consolidated power, They would almost immediately, and in the case of the Khmer Rouge, even before that, they would start manipulating and overtaking the alliance and ultimately expelling or or executing their erstwhile allies. And so my question to all of this was, Okay? Well, both class struggle and united front are from the canons of Marxism. This is, you know, we've seen this. We've seen innumerable debates over both of these issues. Name. Your communist state, whether it's the Soviet Union, whether it's China, you know, and so on and so on. But what was intriguing to me was that the you could do this once, but after you go again, after your previous allies, they're going to be a little bit, you know, the ones that survive, as well as the one anybody, kind of on the outside, looking at observing all of this, will not want to enter into an alliance with you in the future, because you can't be trusted. And you know, the outcome of this is not simply that. You know, if you're an ally to the Khmer Rouge, you will, you know, you'll be kind of thrown aside, you may very well lose your life. And so what intrigued me was, as I was looking at this information, not only the fact that the Khmer Rouge were good at these two things and only these two things, but the fact that this wasn't your normal communist historical trajectory of United Front, achieving victory, and then class struggle as consolidating that victory, which is a linear progression. But rather what we see is we see this happen twice, and there is everything's historically contingent, but there wasn't necessarily anything at play there that would preempt this from happening, you know, yet again, you know, if it started earlier or went further into the into the present. So that was the question that really intrigued me, how can you do it twice? And that really formed the, essentially, the historical kind of arc of the book, so that it's no longer this linear phenomenon, but it's a cyclical phenomenon. And how do we how do we understand that? And so I traced that through this period, from when the first United Front began in 1970 all the way to essentially the implosion of the movement, or just before the implosion of the movement, the movement pretty much ended in 1998 but by 1997 with the arrest of Pol Pot, for all intents and purposes, it was over

interesting. It reminds me of that that Mark Twain quote, History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. The fact that they were able to almost pull it off a second time. But that's idea of a cyclical history. I think is fascinating. What I think is also fascinating is that most books on the Khmer Rouge focus solely on Pol Pot, and obviously he had a huge role, but your book goes beyond him, and you tell us more about the Khmer Rouge leaders that you chose to examine in your book. They were Paul Potts, top three lieutenants, hence the name bad lieutenants. Why were they so important? And why did you want to focus on them?

So that's a great question, and I I think the one way to start anyway, answering it is that when I look at Chinese politics. I don't look at the individuals as much as I really look at the institutions. I look at things like incentives and the ways in which people are their behavior is shaped by institutions, by opportunities, by constraints, as well as kind of where they fit into this kind of larger, this larger political puzzle. And so my book Brothers in Arms, where I looked at Chinese foreign aid to the Khmer Rouge regime in the mid 1970s it was very much. I did not really look at leaders then either I really looked at at institutions and organizations. And one of the things that I really enjoyed doing there was finding information that really had not been previously published, but on how, the how, the the Democratic kampuchean state, which is what it was called after 1976 how it actually operated. So, in addition to the things that we all know about, the killings and all of that, and the starvation, how did the rest of the state work, you know, in a more quotidian fashion, you know, kind of everyday, you know, how did, how did the trains run on time? If they did, what was the actual process of grain, you know, being centralized and redistributed. So these are all questions that I was really, really interested in in that particular book. And so, much like the work I do on Chinese politics, I I'm very interested not only in the way policy is made, but part, probably even more so, how policy is implemented, and there's there has not been a systematic look at how this policy was implemented, really, since Elizabeth Becker's just foundational when the war was over, but she approaches it. More from a journalistic sense. And so she's got a lot more stuff in there. That is, you know, in addition to the actual implementation, I really just wanted to focus on that. She also, not surprisingly, focused on Paul pod. And so, you know, her book, Philip Short's biography of pod. I mean, there's a there's a bunch of really, really good stuff out there on Pol Pot. There's Pol Pot second in command, a guy named non chia. He was such a mystery and still remains an enigma, that that would be a more difficult and I think, a less interesting book, because he was essentially Pol Pot enforcer, but not really the implementer of this policy. And so I kind of went down to the level of kind of the three kind of survivors of the regime, if you will. The first one was young sari, who was the Foreign Minister and brother in law by marriage to Pol Pot, the person, kind of in the second person was a guy named son Sen, who was in charge of the security apparatus and the Minister of Defense. So he was really the person, ultimately, at a operational level in charge the deliberate killings of the regime. And then the third person is a guy named tamoch, and he is very much a kind of warlord general. He was the zone commander of the southwestern zone during the rise to power and during the Democratic Kampuchea period. And these three were very, very different in terms of where they lay on the ideological spectrum. So Tom Hawk was not really an ideologue, but he was a true believer in and had very little regard for gray areas. Young city was also a true believer, but he was also somebody who was a pragmatist and understood that at least in terms of how Cambodia interacted with the outside world, that it could not that it needed some sort of finesse to kind of maintain its internal security as well as its revolutionary purity. And then Sun Sen is, in a sense, both the most enigmatic, but simultaneously the most kind of interesting of the three, in that he was very much a somebody who was closely identified with s 21 tool slang, the you know, the not only that, that that, that killing apparatus, but the apparatus you know, existed throughout the country, but he was also The one who seemed to be most in favor of establishing the Khmer Rouge as a viable political party for competitive elections in the early 1990s and which rebounded very badly on him and led to his his eventual fall from grace. Young, sorry, I should add, would have, would have taken up that that mantle, but he'd already been marginalized to a great degree within the movement by that time. And so these three were both there from the from the beginning to the end of the regime. Back the end of the regime was marked by Pol Pot's execution of Sun Sen and then Tom hooks arrest of Pol Pot as a result of that, but they were key individuals in implementing and fashioning and moving forward Khmer Rouge policy, really, from 1970 even before that, all the way up through 1997

great, great. And so I see in the you in the beginning of the book, you have this chronology, and it points out, yes, Pol Pot orders the execution of sun, sand, mock, and then, then you have later, 1998 death of Pol Pot. Then 1999 arrest of mock, and then 2006 death of mock. And then young sorry gets indicted. So none of these guys had a very good ending, I guess would be, to put it mildly, what is, what's their legacy? I know this is an historical look, but what's their legacy now in Cambodia today?

So I think that there's, there's lots of layers to that, to an answer to that question. I mean, I think on the. One hand, you do see some of the kind of the offspring of these, you know, I guess we would call them Nepo babies, you know, at this point, have entered into the kind of the current Cambodian governing apparatus, current Cambodian state, young cities. One of his sons is has been very prominent in the province of pilin in the North West of the country, and the you know, the family has generally done fairly well mock, on the other hand, is less he still remains Reviled in most of Cambodia, insofar as people even give him a second thought These days, but in the areas where he was situated, particularly in areas like on long veng on the Thai Cambodian border in north in the north of the country. He's still very much seen as the, you know, the son who who made good. He was somebody who was then and remains deeply beloved, in part because he invested a lot of money into the local communities, hospitals, schools and things like that, but also among his troops and the people who worked with him, for for doing the kinds of essentially working alongside people in the trenches and disdaining the more the trappings of power. Sure, he had a couple villas, you know, in that area, which you could still visit today as a, you know, as part of this kind of red tourism that they're trying to promote in Cambodia. Good luck with that. But when you look, for example, at Pol Pot's grave, it's pretty much just some wood with some metal roofing kind of on the top, and it really looks, you know, doesn't really look like much. There's a serrated spirit house there as well that, I mean, it just, it just looks really sad. And it's, it's adjacent to this garbage dump near, you know, right near the Tai Cambodian border. Whereas if you look at mocks final resting place, it is, you know quite, you know quite the Buddhist shrine. Mock became a Buddhist, or returned to his Buddhist roots later in life, as did non Xia, so, but outside of an Long Bang. I mean, I think he is still see reviled and feared again in so far as he's, you know, it's been almost 20 years since he died, so I don't, I don't think his legacy has extended too far beyond those places where he was particularly active.

That's good news. So you start off your book saying that that the Khmer Rouge, in its many iterations, was a clandestine organization, that it was difficult to get information you in the beginning of our talk, you had mentioned you were interviewing people and weren't getting anywhere. So come across this treasure trove of information is fantastic and the basis of this incredible investigation. So, you know, a secret organization, you were able to unravel many of the secrets. So I just want to commend you on this information that would be very difficult to get. It was difficult for you and it was difficult for other scholars. So you've really opened up a whole new avenue of exploration and information with your book. And I encourage anyone that's listening to this to please go to our website. Download it for free. It's you can just read it right now. Andy's new book, Bad Lieutenants: The Khmer Rouge, United Front, and Class Struggle, 1970- 1997 . Andy, it was really a pleasure talking with you.

Same with you, Jonathan, thanks very much. And I hope people find the book worth their while. I had a lot of fun writing it, and hope you'll have maybe fun is too strong a word, but that you'll you'll find it of interest.

Yes, definitely, definitely Excellent. Well, thank you so much.

Thank you.

That was Andrew Murtha, author of the new book, bad lieutenants, the Khmer Rouge, united front and class struggle 1970 to 1997 Andrew's new book is open access, so you can download a free. Copy of the e book at our website, Cornell press.cornell.edu, if you want to buy the print edition, you can use the promo code 09 pod to save 30% off if you live in the UK, use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combined, academic.co.uk. Thank you for listening to 1869 the Cornell University Press podcast, music.