Tou Samouth
| Tou Samouth | |
|---|---|
| General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea | |
|
In office 1951 – July 1962 |
|
| Preceded by | Office established |
| Succeeded by | Saloth Sar (Pol Pot) |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 1915 |
| Died | 1962 (aged 46–47) |
| Nationality | Khmer Krom |
| Political party | Communist Party |
Tou Samouth (Khmer: ទូ សាមុត; c. 1915–1962), also known as Achar Sok, was a Cambodian Communist politician. One of the founding members of the Party in Cambodia, and head of its more moderate faction, he is mainly remembered for mentoring Saloth Sar, who would later change his name to Pol Pot.
Samouth was a Khmer Krom who was born and raised in Cochinchina (in the Southern part of Vietnam). Samouth was trained as a Buddhist monk in his youth, and by World War II, he was professor of Pali at Unnalom Monastery in Phnom Penh. In 1945, an American air raid directed against Japanese military targets struck the Monastery, causing several deaths. Samouth was so frightened by this event that he fled to the countryside, eventually making his way to Vietnam, where he joined the Viet Minh. In the late 1940s, Samouth lectured groups of Khmer recruits on political awareness and economics.
Samouth went on to be a founder member of the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party, the precursor to the Communist Party of Kampuchea, along with Son Ngoc Minh. He was also one of the leaders of the United Issarak Front, a broadly leftist affiliation of various disparate elements of the anti-French resistance, the Khmer Issarak. When the Front formed its 'Khmer Resistance Government', Samouth was named as the Interior Minister.
As head of the Vietnamese-sponsored 'urban' faction of the Cambodian Party, Samouth's presence helped to attract many Buddhist monks to the left-wing cause. The 'urban' communists, as opposed to Sieu Heng's 'rural' cadres, advocated generally more moderate policies; in particular, they supported the presence of the Cambodian king, Norodom Sihanouk, as a figure of national unity and a useful ally in the North Vietnamese attempt to overcome the South. It was within Samouth's faction of the Party that Pol Pot, and the other recent returnees from Paris who would form the nucleus of the Party's later incarnation as the Khmer Rouge, would gain experience. Samouth appears to have adopted Pol Pot as his protégé, leading to the latter's rapid promotion within the Party subsequent to Cambodian independence.
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