Читать книгу A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide - Samantha Power, Samantha Power - Страница 20

On April 17, 1975, eight years after Proxmire began his campaign to get the United States to commit itself to prevent genocide, the Khmer Rouge (KR) turned back Cambodian clocks to year zero. After a five-year civil war, the radical Communist revolutionaries entered the capital city of Phnom Penh, triumphant. They had just defeated the U.S.-backed Lon Nol government.

Still hoping for a “peaceful transition,” the defeated government welcomed the Communist rebels by ordering the placement of white flags and banners on every building in the city. But it did not take long for all in the capital to gather that the Khmer Rouge had not come to talk. After several days of monotonous military music interspersed with such tunes as “Marching Through Georgia” and “Old Folks at Home,” the old regime delivered its last broadcast at noontime on the 17th.¹ The government announcer said talks between the two sides had begun, but before he could finish, a KR official in the booth harshly interrupted him: “We enter Phnom Penh not for negotiation, but as conquerors.”²

The sullen conquerors, dressed in their trademark black uniforms, with their red-and-white-checkered scarves and their Ho Chi Minh sandals cut out of old rubber tires, marched single file into the Cambodian capital. The soldiers had the look of a weary band that had fought a savage battle for control of the country and its people. They carried guns. They gathered material goods, like television sets, refrigerators, and cars, and piled them on top of one another in the center of the street to create a pyre. Influenced by the thinking of Mao Zedong, the Khmer Rouge leadership had recruited into their army those they deemed, in Mao’s words, “poor and blank,” rather than those with schooling. “A sheet of blank paper carries no burden,” Mao had noted, “and the most beautiful characters can be written on it, the most beautiful pictures painted.”³

Upon arrival, the only burden the KR cadres carried was that of swiftly executing orders from their higher-ups, who were removed from sight. Over the radio and mobile megaphones, they began blasting their demand that citizens leave the capital immediately. As a rationale, the militant newcomers claimed that American B-52 bombers were about to “raze the city.” The KR insisted that only a citywide exodus would guarantee citizens’ safety. Purposeful Communist soldiers filed into the city on one side of Phnom Penh’s leafy boulevards, while on the other side hundreds of thousands of ashen-faced Cambodian civilians tripped over one another to obey the KR’s inflexible orders. Over the next few days, more than 2 million people were herded onto the road. KR soldiers slashed the tires of cars around the capital, and citizens trundled along on foot, moving no quicker than a half a mile an hour. In scenes reminiscent of the Turkish deportation of the Armenians in 1915, unwieldy crowds clogged the roads, leaving in their wake stray sandals, clothing, and in some cases expired bodies. The first sign for most Cambodians and foreigners that this revolution would be like no other was the sight of the city’s main Calmette Hospital being emptied at gunpoint. Scattered among the anxious citizenry were patients dressed in wispy hospital gowns, wheeling their own IVs, carrying fellow patients in their arms, or being pushed in their hospital beds by their trembling loved ones. The infirm collapsed for lack of water, babies were born at the side of the road, heat-struck children squealed for maternal succor, and fathers and husbands cowed before the guns in command. Some Cambodians made their way to the French embassy and pleaded for asylum, hurling themselves against the barbed wire that ringed the compound and flinging their suitcases and even their children over the walls. But most Cambodians meekly trudged away from their homes.

Although the symptoms of the Khmer Rouge evacuation of Phnom Penh bore a superficial resemblance to the symptoms of what we now know as “ethnic cleansing,” the KR did not really discriminate on ethnic grounds. The entire capital was to be emptied.

All but a few American citizens had already departed. One week before, on April 12, 1975, as the KR closed in on the capital, U.S. ambassador John Gunther Dean had led the evacuation of the embassy staff and American nationals. Lon Nol, the U.S.-backed head of state, fled with a tidy sum of U.S. money in his pocket for “retirement” and bought a home in an upper-middle-class suburb east of Honolulu. Prince Sirik Matak, a former Lon Nol ally and premier who had recently been placed under house arrest because of his criticisms of the corrupt Cambodian regime, was released and tapped to become the official head of state. At 7 a.m. on the morning of the evacuation, Ambassador Dean offered Matak a place on a departing U.S. helicopter. Matak, whose apartment was decorated with photographs of President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, idolized the United States. At 9 a.m. Dean received a handwritten note from Cambodia’s new leader, who thanked Dean for his offer of transport but said, “I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion.”The letter continued:“As for you and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would [abandon] a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection and we can do nothing about it…If I shall die here on this spot in my country that I love…I have only committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans.”⁴ Dean, himself a childhood refugee from Hitler’s Germany, boarded a helicopter carrying the U.S. flag folded under his arm. Matak took shelter at the French embassy, where foreigners had already begun to gather, and hoped for the best.

On April 20 and 21, 1975, as the final hours of the foreign presence in Cambodia ticked away, the Cambodians at the French embassy were turned out into the street. French vice-consul Jean Dyrac had fought in Spain in the International Brigade against Francisco Franco and in the French Resistance against the Nazis, who captured and tortured him. The KR now told him that the 1,300 people gathered in the compound would be deprived of food and water if the Cambodians among them did not leave. The departures were wrenching, as parents and children, husbands and wives, and close friends were separated. The Cambodians who had hoped for reprieve at the embassy no longer stood any chance of disappearing into the thicket of evacuees and burying their past identities. They were alone to meet fates worsened by the taint of their association with the capitalist West. Senior Cambodian government officials stood no chance, and vice-consul Dyrac accompanied several members of the toppled regime to the gate. Premier Sirik Matak walked out proudly, but former national assembly president Hong Boun Hor, who carried a suitcase of U.S. dollars, was so agitated that he had to be sedated with an injection. As Dyrac turned the men over to the Khmer Rouge, he leaned his head against a pillar and, with tears streaming down his face, repeated again and again, “We are no longer men.”⁵ The officials, including Sirik Matak, who had trusted earlier American assurances, were taken away in the back of a sanitation truck and executed.

A Khmer curtain quickly descended. For the next three and a half years, the Khmer Rouge rendered Cambodia a black hole that outsiders could not enter and some 2 million Cambodians would not survive.

The U.S. response followed a familiar pattern. In advance of the KR seizure of Phnom Penh, prolific early warnings of the organization’s brutality were matched by boundless wishful thinking on the part of American observers and Cambodian citizens. By sealing the country after their victory, the KR delayed and initially muddied outside diagnosis of the depths of their savagery. But even when the facts had emerged, the American policy of nonengagement, noncondemnation, and noninterest went virtually unchallenged. With the United States smothering under the legacy of the Vietnam War, which had just ended, no Lemkin figure emerged, no U.S. official owned the issue day in and day out, and no individual or organization convinced U.S. decisionmakers that the deaths of Cambodians mattered enough to Americans to warrant their attention. Thus, while analogies to the Holocaust were invoked and isolated appeals made, in three years of systematic terror, a U.S. policy of silence was never seriously contested. It would have been politically unthinkable to intervene militarily and emotionally unpleasant to pay close heed to the horrors unfolding, but it was cost-free to look away. And this was what two U.S. presidents and most lawmakers, diplomats, journalists, and citizens did, before, during, and after the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror.

Warning

Background: U.S. Policy Before Pol Pot

As Lemkin noted, war and genocide are almost always connected. The Ottomans killed more than 1 million Armenians during World War I, and the Germans exterminated 6 million Jews and 5 million Poles, Roma, homosexuals, political opponents, and others during World War II. Iraq later targeted its Kurdish minority during the Iran-Iraq war; Bosnian Serbs set out to destroy Muslims and Croats during a Balkan civil war; and Rwandan Hutu nationalists exterminated some 800,000 Tutsi while the Rwandan army also fought a more conventional civil war against a Tutsi rebel force. History is replete with conflicts between regular armed forces that unleash and fuel the passions that give rise to campaigns to eliminate certain “undesirables.”War legitimates such extreme violence that it can make aggrieved or opportunistic citizens feel licensed to target their neighbors. For outsiders, war between armies can also mask genocide, making it initially difficult to discern eliminationist campaigns against civilians and inviting customary diplomatic efforts. In Cambodia two wars preceded the genocide: the U.S. war in Vietnam and a civil war in Cambodia. These wars earned the Khmer Rouge converts to their cause, and they also helped obscure the savagery of the new Communist movement.

American reticence in the face of the Cambodian horrors between 1975 and 1979 is tightly intertwined with the U.S. role in the region in the previous decade. The American war in Vietnam was intended to prevent South Vietnam, another “domino,” from becoming Communist. The U.S. troop presence in Vietnam peaked at 550,000 in early 1968. The same year the stunning Vietcong Tet offensive against all the main U.S. bases in South Vietnam left some 4,000 Americans dead and strengthened American domestic opposition to the war.⁶ This restiveness on the home front only intensified with coverage of the 1968 My Lai massacre and the outrage over American use of defoliants and napalm.⁷ American lives were being lost in Vietnam, American honor was being soiled, and North Vietnam was winning the war.

Richard Nixon became president in 1969. Although he had pledged to end the Vietnam War, Nixon in fact expanded it into Cambodia. Because North Vietnamese units were taking sanctuary in neighboring Cambodia, the country became a “sideshow” of some importance to the new administration. The United States invested heavily in the idea that the two bands of Communists, the Cambodians and the Vietnamese, were united. In March 1969 Nixon ordered American B-52s to begin bombing Cambodia.⁸ Code-named “Operation Breakfast” for the setting in which National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and U.S. military advisers drafted their bombing plans, the mission was kept top secret for fear of domestic protest. When the bombers failed to locate the Communists’ bases, Nixon expanded the mission. He authorized secret attacks on other sanctuaries and followed up Operation Breakfast with further unappetizing missions, named Operations Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Dessert, and Supper. In the first phase of the bombing campaign, which lasted fourteen months and was known as Menu, U.S. bombers flew 3,875 sorties.⁹

President Nixon did not stop there. In April 1970, frustrated by the elusiveness of the North Vietnamese, he ordered U.S. ground troops to “clean out” North Vietnamese strongholds in Cambodia. Nixon warned, “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation—the United States of America—acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.” Some 31,000 American and 43,000 South Vietnamese forces surged into Cambodia, ostensibly to prevent the Communists there from staging “massive attacks” on U.S. troops in Vietnam.¹⁰ The invasion, which Nixon insisted was only an “incursion,” had nothing to do with the Cambodians and everything to do with the U.S. war with Vietnam. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger later testified to Congress, “The value of Cambodia’s survival derives from its importance to the survival of South Vietnam.”¹¹

The month before the U.S. ground attack on Cambodia, the United States had welcomed a coup by the pro-American prime minister, Lon Nol, against Cambodia’s longtime ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Sihanouk, the father of independent Cambodia, had acquired the aura of an ancient Angkor deva-raj, or god-king, since he had assumed the throne in 1941. A bon vivant, Sihanouk was a movie director, a gourmet, and a womanizer, as well as a popular head of state. But he had alienated the United States by striking up a friendship with China, America’s foe at the time. He had also irritated President Nixon by trying to keep Cambodia neutral in the U.S. war with Vietnam. U.S. officials believed Lon Nol would be far more malleable to American designs.

But the United States had backed a loser. Lon Nol was pro-American, but like many U.S.-sponsored dictators of the period, he was also corrupt, repressive, and incompetent. He secluded himself in his villa in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh and remained woefully out of touch with the affairs of his state. He depended on the mystical advice of a visionary monk named Mam Prum Moni, or “Great Intellectual of Pure Glory.”The only assertive moves Lon Nol made were those designed to increase his own power. He stripped citizens of basic freedoms, suspended parliament, and announced in October 1971 that it was time to end “the sterile game of outmoded liberal democracy.” In 1972 he declared himself president, prime minister, defense minister, and marshal of the armed forces. The United States cared only that Lon Nol was a staunch anti-Communist. The United States spent some $1.85 billion between 1970 and 1975 propping up his regime—evidence, in President Nixon’s words, of “the Nixon Doctrine in its purest form.”¹²

The U.S. ground invasion of April 1970 occurred at the beginning of Cambodia’s five-year civil war, a merciless war that the genocidal Khmer Rouge would win. On one side were Lon Nol and the United States. On the other side stood the Vietnamese Communists and the small, mysterious group of radical Cambodian Communist revolutionaries. The leaders of the Khmer Rouge, or Red Khmer, had been educated in Paris, studied Maoist thought, and received extensive political and military support from China. They were youths who had been driven to Communist resistance out of frustration with Prince Sihanouk’s earlier, authoritarian rule. Under the leadership of Saloth Sar, who later assumed the pseudonym Pol Pot, they had left Cambodia’s cities in the 1960s to plot revolution from the Cambodian and Vietnamese countryside.¹³ It had been Sihanouk’s tyranny that drove them to arms, but when Lon Nol seized power in the 1970 coup, the KR began fighting Lon Nol’s government forces instead and made their former nemesis Prince Sihanouk the figurehead leader of an unlikely coalition. This earned them support from the millions of Cambodians who trusted Sihanouk, the likable man who had brought them independence. Although doubts emerged in 1973 and 1974 about whether the more moderate Sihanouk spoke for the KR, Cambodians trusted his judgment. “I do not like the Khmer Rouge and they probably do not like me,” the prince said in 1973. “But they are pure patriots…Though I am a Buddhist, I prefer a red Cambodia which is honest and patriotic than a Buddhist Cambodia under Lon Nol, which is corrupt and a puppet of the Americans.”¹⁴

Even backed by the United States, the Lon Nol regime did not stand much of a chance in battle. Its forces were equipped for parades, not warfare.¹⁵ In 1972 Lon Nol famously had airplanes sprinkle blessed sand around Phnom Penh’s perimeters to ward off his ungodly Communist enemies. Lon Nol’s officers exaggerated Cambodian army troop strength, listing phantom troops and using U.S. aid to pad their pockets, stuff foreign bank accounts, and build themselves glamorous homes. Regular army soldiers, by contrast, frequently went unpaid and deserted. And though the Cambodian army enjoyed a huge numerical edge over the rebels, many were unenthusiastic about fighting on behalf of Lon Nol. Those who did fight were dependent on U.S. bombing and, later, U.S. military aid.

U.S. interest in Cambodia during the civil war was completely derivative of U.S. designs on Vietnam. So when U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam in January 1973, the bombing of Cambodia became harder to justify. In August 1973 Congress finally stepped in to ban the air campaign. President Nixon was furious. He blamed Congress for weakening regional security and “raising doubts in the mind of both friends and adversaries” about U.S. “resolve.” All told, between March 1969 and August 1973, U.S. planes dropped 540,000 tons of bombs onto the Cambodian countryside.¹⁶ The United States continued to supply military and financial assistance to Lon Nol, warning that a “bloodbath” would ensue if the KR were allowed to triumph.

The U.S. B-52 raids killed tens of thousands of civilians.¹⁷ Villagers who happened to be away from home returned to find nothing but dust and mud mixed with seared and bloody body parts. Lon Nol’s ground forces used massive heavy artillery barrages to pacify areas or villages where some enemy activity was suspected. By 1973, inflation in Cambodia topped 275 percent, and 40 percent of roads and one-third of all bridges had been rendered unusable.¹⁸ With the local economy dysfunctional, U.S. aid came to count for 95 percent of all of Lon Nol’s income.

The U.S. bombing did little to weaken the Vietnamese or the Cambodian Communists. Instead, it probably had the opposite effect. Cambodians who resented America’s demolition derby were captive both to the promise of peace and the anti-Americanism of the Khmer Rouge. British journalist William Shawcross and others have argued that the Khmer Rouge ranks swelled primarily because of the U.S. intervention. Chhit Do, a Khmer Rouge leader from northern Cambodia who later defected, described the effect of U.S. bombing:

Every time after there had been bombing, they would take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see how the earth had been gouged out and scorched…The ordinary people…sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came…Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told…That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over…It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on cooperating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them.¹⁹

Prince Sirik Matak, once a Lon Nol ally, warned U.S. officials not to back the unpopular Lon Nol regime. “If the United States continues to support such a regime,” he warned, “you help the Communists.”²⁰ American intervention in Cambodia did tremendous damage in its own right, but it also indirectly helped give rise to a monstrous regime.

The Unknowable Unknown

Before it begins, genocide is not easy to wrap one’s mind around. A genocidal regime’s intent to destroy a group is so hideous and the scale of its atrocities so enormous that outsiders who know enough to forecast brutality can rarely bring themselves to imagine genocide. This was true of many of the diplomats, journalists, and European Jews who observed Hitler throughout the 1930s, and it was certainly true of diplomats, journalists, and Cambodians who speculated about the Khmer Rouge before they seized power. The omens of imminent, mass violence were omnipresent but largely dismissed.

Before the fall of Phnom Penh in April 1975, Cambodia’s Communists were well enough known to cause some Americans alarm. In June 1973 Kenneth Quinn, a thirty-two-year-old U.S. foreign service officer, was introduced to the Khmer Rouge quite by accident. For six years, he had worked in Vietnam as an American provincial adviser, and he had spent his last two years posted in Chou Doc, the Vietnamese province bordering Cambodia on the Mekong River. One day, Quinn hiked up a mountain outside Chou Doc that allowed him to survey the terrain for 10 miles around. In scanning the Cambodian horizon, he encountered a scene that both stunned and chilled him. “The villages in Cambodia are clustered in circles,”Quinn recalls. “When I looked out, I saw that every one of these clusters was in flames and there was black smoke rising from each one. I didn’t know what was going on. All I knew was that as far as the eye could see, every single village in Cambodia was on fire.”

Confused, Quinn hand-wrote a description of the scene, stuffed it into an envelope, and put it on the plane that flew to the nearest U.S. consular headquarters, where it was typed up and sent back to the United States as a spot report. He also set out to learn more about Cambodia’s internal divisions. In the subsequent weeks he interviewed dozens of Cambodian refugees who had fled to Vietnam, including a former KR official. The refugees described such brutality and the visual image of the burning horizon was so memorable that Quinn had what he calls a “eureka moment.” He concluded that although the Khmer Rouge may have been wellbehaved “boy scout revolutionaries” when they began their military campaign in 1970, in June 1973 they had launched a far more radical program designed to communalize the entire Cambodian society overnight. The KR were deporting people from their ancestral homes to new communes and were burning the old villages to enforce the policy.

In February 1974 he sent to Washington a forty-five-page classified report, “The Khmer Krahom [Rouge] Program to Create a Communist Society in Southern Cambodia.” Quinn wrote: “The Khmer Krahom’s programs have much in common with those of totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, particularly regarding efforts to psychologically reconstruct individual members of society.” He described KR attacks on religion and on parental and monastic authority as well as the widespread use of terror. “Usually people are arrested and simply never show up again, or are given six months in jail and then die there,” he reported. The “crimes” that “merited” this treatment were fleeing KR territory and questioning KR policies.²¹ Today Quinn’s voice still betrays shock at the bloodiness of the KR approach to social transformation: “They were forcing everybody to leave their homes and build new collectivized living communities. They were setting fires to everything the people owned so they would have nothing to go back to. They were separating children from parents, defrocking monks, killing those who disobeyed and creating an irrevocable living arrangement.”

Quinn’s reporting stood out from that of his State Department colleagues because at that time U.S. government officials rarely interviewed refugees. Instead they relied almost exclusively on official, government-to-government sources. But Quinn also urged his superiors to begin distinguishing between Communists in Cambodia and those in Vietnam. Vietnam had certainly supplied the KR with weapons, military advisers, and direct combat and logistical help in the past, but the two groups had begun to feud. Quinn sent detailed accounts of the KR’s purge of Vietnamese civilians from Cambodia and their disruption of Vietnamese supply lines. Quinn’s analysis was at complete odds with the prevailing view in Washington, which held that the Khmer Rouge were simply an extension of the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. Quinn’s reports were never heeded. Quinn recalls his rude awakening:

It was of course disappointing to me. I was young and didn’t know how government worked. I thought I would write this huge report and everybody would read it, but it was just another piece of paper. When I got back to Washington, people were still analyzing Cambodia in the old way, as if it were run by Hanoi. People would hear me out, and then just say, “Yeah, but…”

Although the American press, too, occasionally mentioned “infighting” among the different Communist “factions,” the myth of monolithic communism died hard. U.S. involvement in Cambodia was justifiable because the various Communist forces were joined in revolution. The KR rebels had shrouded their leadership in a thick cloak of mystery, and Quinn’s hilltop survey was not going to sway Americans who assumed all Communists were in cahoots.

But others were beginning to stop lumping the two neighbors together. Elizabeth Becker became a “stringer” for the Washington Post in 1972. She was twenty-five when she arrived, and with her short blond hair, petite frame, and unending inquisitiveness, she might have been mistaken for a teenager. Most of the eager young correspondents had flocked to neighboring Vietnam to make their professional fortunes, but Becker had chosen to cover Cambodia, the sideshow. Permanently based in Phnom Penh, she did not depart for mini-sabbaticals or alternate assignments. Unlike her more senior, established colleagues, she lived among the Cambodian people and was thus better positioned to pick up stray gossip.

By the time Becker arrived in Cambodia, only 25,000 U.S. troops were left in Vietnam, and U.S. correspondents from the major news outlets were heading home. Initially, Becker joined her other American colleagues in defining the rebels according to the regime they opposed (as “anti–Lon Nol insurgents”) or by the generic ideology they pursued (“Cambodian Communists” or “indigenous Communist rebels,” to distinguish them from the North Vietnamese rebels who were presumed to direct them). The reporters used shorthand references that gave no hint of the aims or the character of the revolutionary force.

In early 1974, around the time Quinn was circulating his detailed report, Becker had begun to notice that Cambodians in Phnom Penh were becoming increasingly alarmed by what they learned about the mysterious rebels storming across Cambodia. The KR already occupied 85 percent of the country, and they seemed certain to take the rest. Becker saw that pedicab drivers, riverboat captains, and politicians alike were devouring the contents of a small book distinguishable by its cover, which depicted Cambodia shaped like a heart torn in two by the Mekong River. The book, Regrets of the Khmer Soul, was the published diary of Ith Sarin, a former Phnom Penh schoolteacher who had traveled through KR territory for nine months in 1972 and 1973, interviewing KR soldiers and peasants. Becker and Ishiyama Koki, a Japanese friend and colleague, paid to have Sarin’s diary translated. Becker thought it time to ask a question that no American reporter to date had posed. She wrote a story for the Post entitled “Who Are the Khmer Rouge?” and answered the question in a way that few afterward would believe.

Becker’s long feature, to which the Post gave a full-page spread in March 1974, drew heavily on Cambodian government and Western diplomatic sources, as well as Ith Sarin’s diary. In her exposée, Becker quoted Sarin’s description of the KR’s appealing discipline and daunting severity. “I paid attention to the great help the Khmer Rouge gave to the people; building dikes, harvesting crops, building houses and digging bunkers,” Sarin noted. “I also saw them force all people to wear black clothes, forbid idle chatter and severely punish any violations of their orders.”²²

Becker also quoted Cambodians who had defected from KR zones to the dwindling patch of territory controlled by the government. Becker’s article was the first to mention Pol Pot, who was then still known by his given name of Saloth Sar. It was the first to note that relations between the KR and the Vietnamese Communists were strained. And it was the first to describe the cruelty of KR rule.

But if Becker depicted life under the KR as spartan, she did not depict it as savage. And if she described their rule as clinically disciplined, they did not come across as criminally disposed. In places Becker herself seemed taken with the egalitarian premises of the organization, which attracted Cambodians and foreigners alike. When the disreputable Lon Nol government captured KR women soldiers, Becker wrote, the government generals were appalled by the women’s self-possession. Becker quoted one diplomat as saying, “They complained of the audacity of these virgins who had the nerve to look a man straight in the eye and who didn’t shuffle their feet demurely like good women.” Becker did not suggest that life under KR rule would be fun. But she also did not imply that life would not be permitted.²³

Becker’s description proved too bold for most American Cambodia observers. Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times faulted her for running a story without ever having toured KR territory. Since it was the KR that denied access, she said she could not ignore the horror stories simply because she could not see for herself. She told Schanberg, “We have to publish what we can find out.” Back in the United States, she was severely criticized by both the right and left. U.S. government officials said she had been duped into believing the KR were not Vietnamese puppets, whereas leftist intellectuals chided her for falling for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) warnings of an imminent KR-induced bloodbath. Much more serious than any of these criticisms was another consequence of the research: Her close friend and colleague Ishiyama Koki followed up his story on Sarin’s diary by attempting to become the first journalist to visit the KR side. “It was strange,”Becker recalls. “The sum result of my learning more about the Khmer Rouge was that I knew I never wanted to see these guys up close. The sum result for Koki was that he wanted to meet them and learn more.” Koki vanished behind KR lines, as did another of Becker’s Japanese colleagues shortly thereafter.

For the remainder of 1974 and into 1975, journalists attempted to shed light upon the KR leadership, but Pol Pot and his leading associates, Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary, operated behind the scenes in complete isolation. With the KR resolutely unknowable, their mystery received almost as much attention as the misery they inflicted upon Cambodians. Even Lon Nol’s government had no idea with whom it was dealing. In April 1974, when the Khmer Rouge’s Khieu Samphan visited New York, Becker’s reports focused not on what Samphan had to say at the United Nations but on whether he was in fact Samphan, who was rumored to have been executed by Prince Sihanouk. Becker wrote:“Some Cambodians say he is too fat in the photos, his voice is too high, and that he gave only one speech in French in Pyongyang, which they find suspicious since he holds a doctorate in economics from Paris.”²⁴ The sternly secretive Khmer Rouge bewildered even the most informed Cambodia observers.

The presence of the soothing Sihanouk at the head of the KR front also continued to throw people off. As one Western diplomat put it, “They know it is Sihanouk’s army out there and they think once that army gets inside everything will be all milk and honey—or rice and dried fish if you will—again.”²⁵ In 1974 Sihanouk sent several Democrats in the U.S. Congress a letter in which he described rumors of an imminent Khmer Rouge massacre of Lon Nol and his supporters as “absurd.” Sihanouk assured the legislators that the KR front would not establish a socialist republic upon taking power, “but a Swedish type of kingdom.”²⁶ His was the public face of the coalition, but it was difficult to judge whether the public face had influence over the private soul of the movement.

However worrying the rumors that swirled before the KR victory, few Cambodia watchers grasped what lay ahead before it was too late.

Wishful Thinking

As foreigners collected their impressions of the Khmer Rouge, they deferred, as foreigners do, to the instincts of their local friends and colleagues. If anybody had the grounds to anticipate systematic brutality, it seems logical that it would be those most immediately endangered.Yet those with the most at stake are in fact often the least prone to recognize their peril. The Cambodian people were frightened by the reports of atrocities in the KR-occupied countryside, but they retained resilient hope.

Françcois Ponchaud was a French Jesuit priest who spoke Khmer and lived among the Cambodians. He heard the chilling local gossip that preceded the KR’s capture of Phnom Penh. “They kill any soldiers they capture, and their families too,”Cambodians said. “They take people away to the forest,” they warned. But in the mental duel that was fought in each and every Cambodian’s mind, it was the concrete features of a horrifying, immediate war that won out over the more abstract fear of the unknown. The toll of the civil war on Cambodia’s civilians had been immense. Some 1 million Cambodians had been killed.²⁷ Both sides got into the habit of taking no prisoners in combat, unless they planned to torture them to extract military intelligence. Cannibalism was widespread, as soldiers were told that eating the livers of captured enemies would confer the power of the vanquished upon the victor. The country’s rice crop had been obliterated. More than 3 million Cambodians had been displaced, causing the population of the capital to swell from 600,000 to over 2 million by 1975. The daily privations were such that Cambodians naturally preferred the idea of the KR to the reality of Lon Nol. Moreover, most assumed that the KR excesses were the product of the heat of battle, and not the result of ideology or innate callousness. The most ominous warnings about the KR were dismissed as Lon Nol propaganda. As Ponchaud later noted, “Khmers were Khmers, we thought; [the KR] would never go to such extremes with their own countrymen. Victory was within their grasp: what psychological advantage could they gain by taking wanton reprisals?”²⁸

The kinds of conversations that went on in Phnom Penh in the months preceding its fall resembled those that Lemkin had struck up as he toured eastern Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania as a refugee during World War II. Why would Hitler round up defenseless people? Why would he divert precious resources from the eastern front during World War II so that he could finish them off? Because the extermination of the Jews constituted its own victory, and it was the triumph for which he was sure he would be remembered. Similarly, Pol Pot would treat as discrete policy objectives the eradication of those associated with the old regime, as well as the educated, the Vietnamese, the Muslim Cham, the Buddhist monks, and other “bourgeois elements.”Violence was not an unfortunate byproduct of the revolution; it was an indispensable feature of it. But like so many targeted peoples before them, Cambodians were consoled by the presumption of reasonableness.

As the KR rebels closed in on the capital, ordinary people dared to visualize the end of deprivation, bombs, and bullets. Once the civil war between Lon Nol and the KR ended and they were rid of foreign interference, they told themselves, they could return to their Buddhist, peaceable heritage. Since high politics was the province of the elite, most Cambodians assumed that the politicians would settle scores with the “traitorous clique” of seven senior officials in the Lon Nol government and everybody else would be left alone, free at last to resume normal life. “I have no ideas about politics,” My Vo, a twenty-nine-year-old Cambodian, was quoted as saying two weeks before Phnom Penh fell to the KR. “I am just a man in the middle…If this side wins, I’ll be an office assistant. If the other wins, I’ll be an office assistant. I don’t care which side wins.”²⁹ What mattered to Cambodians was that the fighting stop.

Having known only conflict for five years, the Cambodians considered the KR promise of peace an appealing alternative. The Communists talked about justice to a people who had known nothing but injustice. They spoke of order to a people who knew only corruption. And they pledged a brighter future free of imperialists, whereas the Lon Nol government promised only more of the dim present. Having watched their leaders cozy up to the United States and the United States repay them by bombing and invading their country, Cambodians longed for freedom from outside interference.

Major U.S. newspapers reflected the optimistic mood. Once the KR won the war, Schanberg wrote, “there would be no need for random acts of terror.”³⁰ He, too, made rational calculations about what was “necessary.” He recalls:

We knew the KR had done some very brutal things. Many reporters went missing and didn’t come back. But we all came to the conclusion—it wasn’t a conclusion, it was more like wishful thinking—that when the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh, they’d have no need to be so brutal. There’d be some executions—of those on the Khmer Rouge’s “Seven Traitors List”—but that was it. We were talking to people—talking to our Cambodian friends who want to believe the best. Nobody believes they will get slaughtered. It is unthinkable and you don’t wrap your mind around it.

Schanberg, Times photographer Al Rockoff, and British reporter Jon Swain were so incapable of “wrapping their minds around” what lay ahead that they chose to remain in Cambodia after the U.S. embassy had evacuated its citizens. They stayed to report on the “transition” to postwar peace.³¹ Hope and curiosity outweighed fear.

A Bloodbath?

Alarming reports of atrocities are typically met with skepticism. Usually, though, it is the refugees, journalists, and relief workers who report the abuses and U.S. government decision-makers who resist belief. Some cannot imagine. Others do not want to act or hope to defer acting and thus either downplay the reports or place them in a broader “context” that helps to subsume their horror. In Cambodia atrocity warnings were again minimized, but it was not officials in the U.S. government who dismissed them as fanciful.

In early 1975 senior U.S. policymakers in the administration of Gerald Ford reiterated earlier warnings that a bloodbath would follow a KR triumph. In March 1975 President Ford himself predicted a “massacre” if Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge.³² A National Security Council fact sheet, which was distributed to Congress and the media the same month, even invoked the Holocaust. The briefing memo warned, “The Communists are waging a total war against Cambodia’s civilian population with a degree of systematic terror perhaps unparalleled since the Nazi period—a clear precursor of the blood bath and Stalinist dictatorship they intend to impose on the Cambodian people.”³³ The U.S. ambassador in Phnom Penh, Dean, said he feared an “uncontrolled and uncontrollable solution” in which the KR would kill “the army, navy, air force, government and Buddhist monks.”³⁴

But few trusted the warnings. The Nixon and Ford administrations had cried wolf one time too many in Southeast Asia. In addition, because the KR were so secretive, America’s warnings were by definition speculative, based mainly on rumors and secondhand accounts. To the extent that the apocalyptic warnings of U.S. government officials were sincere, many Americans believed they stemmed from the Ford administration’s anti-Communist paranoia or its desire to get congressional backing for an $82 million aid package for the Lon Nol regime. They did not believe that the administration had any tangible evidence that the Communists were murdering their own people. In the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam, Americans doubted whether any truth existed in politics.

On April 13, 1975, on the eve of the fall of Phnom Penh, Schanberg published a dispatch titled “Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life.”“It is difficult to imagine,”he wrote, how the lives of ordinary Cambodians could be “anything but better with the Americans gone.”³⁵

Many members of Congress agreed. U.S. legislators felt lied to and burned by their previous credulity. To warn of a new bloodbath was no excuse to continue the bloody civil war. As Bella Abzug (D.–N.Y.), who had just returned from Cambodia, told a House hearing:

It is argued that we must give military aid because if we do not there will be a bloodbath. One thing we did discover, there is no greater bloodbath than that which is taking place presently and can only take place with our military assistance…Suppose we were asked to address either 75,000 or 100,000 of those Cambodians who may very well lose their lives or be maimed by our military assistance for the next 3-month period…and they said to you, “Why do I have to die?”…or “Why should my body be mangled?”—What would you tell them? That we are doing it in order to avoid a bloodbath?³⁶

Abzug suggested that if the United States would only change its policy, it could likely work with the Khmer Rouge and “arrange for an orderly transfer of power.”³⁷ Senator George McGovern (D.–S. Dak.), a leader of the antiwar movement, trusted nothing the U.S. government said about the Cambodian Communists. He expected the KR to form a government “run by some of the best-educated, most able intellectuals in Cambodia.”³⁸ The editorial pages of the major newspapers and the congressional opposition were united in the view, in the words of a Washington Post editorial, that “the threatened ‘bloodbath’ is less ominous than a continuation of the current bloodletting.”³⁹ Western journalists in Phnom Penh sang a song to the tune of “She Was Poor but She Was Honest”:

Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath

When the Khmer Rouge come to town?

Aye, there’ll be a dreadful bloodbath

When the Khmer Rouge come to town.

Becker, the young Post reporter who had offered one of the earliest depictions of the Khmer Rouge, was pessimistic. She departed Cambodia ahead of the KR capture of Phnom Penh, as she did not want to be around for what she knew would come next. Besides fearing the worst for Cambodians and her colleagues who had disappeared, Becker also sensed the impossibility of generating outside interest in the story. This was a region whose problems the world was anxious to put behind it. She predicted that she would be unable to cover the ensuing horrors, and the outside world would do nothing to stop them. She was right on both counts.

Recognition

From Behind a Blindfold

Although most foreigners hoped for the best in advance of the fall of Phnom Penh, most of those with passports from non-Communist countries did not remain to test the new regime. Nearly all American and European journalists had left Phnom Penh by early April 1975. Twenty-six reporters had already gone missing.⁴⁰ Most of the others had come to agree with Becker that something extremely ugly lay ahead. The U.S. embassy kept its evacuation plans secret until the morning that U.S. Marines secured a helicopter landing area in the outskirts of the capital. On April 12, in Operation Eagle Pull, diplomatic staff and most U.S. correspondents left aboard the U.S. helicopters. President Ford said that he had ordered the American departure with a “heavy heart.”

Not all the signs from Phnom Penh were grim. Prince Sihanouk, the titular leader of the KR coalition, had sent mixed signals all along. On the one hand, he had spoken confidently of the KR’s intention to establish a democratic state. On the other hand, he had cautioned that the KR would have little use for him: “They’ll spit me out like a cherry pit,” he once said.⁴¹ But in the immediate aftermath of the KR triumph, Sihanouk was less interested in prophesying than in gloating. “We did what they said we could never do,”he boasted. “We defeated the Americans.”⁴²The day after the harrowing evacuation of Phnom Penh began, bewildered Western reporters led their stories by again posing the question that the Post’s Becker had posed a full year before, “Who are the Khmer Rouge?”

A few hundred brave, foolish, or unlucky foreigners stayed in Phnom Penh. On April 17 they heard the same unforgiving commands that jolted their Cambodian friends into flight. They did not believe KR claims that American B-52s were going to bomb the town, but they attempted to offer rational explanations for the exodus. The KR would be unable to feed the swollen population in the capital, and dispersal to the countryside would move the people closer to food sources. The dislocation would make it easier for the KR to distinguish allies of the old regime from ordinary Cambodians. Or maybe the KR leaders simply wanted their pick of housing in the capital. All assumed the evacuation would be temporary. Cambodians would surely return to their homes once the new Communist government felt secure.

Forbidden to move around the city, the remaining foreigners huddled at the French embassy, awaiting KR clearance to leave.⁴³ The best early intelligence on the nature of the new KR regime consisted of mental snapshots that these reporters, aid workers, and diplomats had gathered before they were confined at the embassy. Most had seen the fearsome KR cadres driving trembling Cambodians out of town, but they had not witnessed killings. “There were no massacres committed in front of us,” recalls Schanberg, who was very nearly executed, along with his colleagues Rockoff and Swain, while snooping around a hospital on the day of the KR victory. “We did see these people from another planet.You had the feeling that if you did something they didn’t like they would shoot you. But we had no awareness of what was to come.”

On May 6 a final caravan of trucks carrying Schanberg and the last Western witnesses to KR rule left Cambodia. The evacuees peered out from behind their blindfolds on the stifling hot journey. The KR had been in charge less than three weeks, but the signs of what we would later understand to be the beginning of genocide were already apparent. All of Cambodia’s major towns had already been emptied of their inhabitants. The rice paddies, too, were deserted. The charred remains of cars lay gathered in heaps. Saffron-robed monks had been put to work in the fields. Decomposed bodies lay by the side of the road, shot or beaten to death. KR soldiers could be spotted with their heads bowed for their morning “thought sessions.”⁴⁴ The overriding impression of those who drove through a country that had bustled with life just weeks before was that the Cambodian people had disappeared.

Once the final convoy of foreigners had been safely evacuated, the departed journalists published stark front-page accounts. They acknowledged that the situation unfolding was far more dire than they had expected. In a cover story for the New York Times, Schanberg wrote: “Everyone—Cambodians and foreigners alike—looked ahead with hopeful relief to the collapse of the city…All of us were wrong.… That view of the future of Cambodia—as a possibly flexible place even under Communism, where changes would not be extreme and ordinary folk would be left alone—turned out to be a myth.”⁴⁵ Schanberg even quoted one unnamed Western official who had observed the merciless exodus and exclaimed, “They are crazy! This is pure and simple genocide. They will kill more people this way than if there had been hand-to-hand fighting in the city.”⁴⁶ That same day the Washington Post carried an evacuation story that cited fears of “genocide by natural selection” in which “only the strong will survive the march.”⁴⁷

Although Schanberg and others were clearly spooked by their chilling final experiences in Cambodia, they still did not believe that American intelligence would prove right about much. In the same article in which Schanberg admitted he had underestimated the KR’s repressiveness, he noted that official U.S. predictions had been misleading. The U.S. government had said the Communists were poorly trained, Schanberg noted, but the journalists had encountered a well-disciplined, healthy, organized force. The intelligence community had forecast the killing of “as many as 20,000 high officials and intellectuals.” But Schanberg’s limited exposure to the KR left him convinced that violence on that scale would not transpire. He wrote:

There have been unconfirmed reports of executions of senior military and civilian officials, and no one who witnessed the take-over doubts that top people of the old regime will be or have been punished and perhaps killed or that a large number of people will die of the hardships on the march into the countryside. But none of this will apparently bear any resemblance to the mass executions that had been predicted by Westerners.⁴⁸

Once the reporters had departed, the last independent sources of information dried up. Nine friendly Communist countries retained embassies in Phnom Penh, but even these personnel were restricted in movement to a street around 200 yards long and accompanied at all times by official KR “minders.”⁴⁹ For the next three and a half years, the American public would piece together a picture of life behind the Khmer curtain from KR public statements, which were few; from Cambodian radio, which was propaganda; from refugee accounts, which were doubted; and from Western intelligence sources, which were scarce and suspect.

Official U.S. Intelligence, Unofficial Skepticism

When the KR first took power, U.S. officials eagerly disclosed much of what they knew. The Ford administration condemned violent abuses, reminding audiences that its earlier forecasts of a Khmer Rouge bloodbath were being borne out by fact. The day after the fall of Phnom Penh, Kissinger testified on Capitol Hill that the KR would “try to eliminate all potential opponents.”⁵⁰ In early May 1975, President Ford said he had “hard intelligence,” including Cambodian radio transmissions, that eighty to ninety Cambodian officials and their spouses had been executed.⁵¹ He told Time magazine, “They killed the wives, too. They said the wives were just the same as their husbands. This is a horrible thing to report to you, but we are certain that our sources are accurate.” Newsweek quoted a U.S. official saying “thousands have already been executed” and suggested the A Khmer Rouge guerrilla orders store owners to abandon their shops in Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, the day the city fell into rebel hands. figure could rise to “tens of thousands of Cambodians loyal to the Lon Nol regime.” With intercepts of KR communications in hand, U.S. officials were adamant about the veracity of their intelligence. “I am not dealing in third-hand reports,” one intelligence analyst told Newsweek. “I am telling you what is being said by the Cambodians themselves in their own communications.”⁵² Syndicated columnists Jack Anderson and Les Whitten, who would regularly relay reports of atrocities over the next several years, published leaked translations of these secret KR radio transmissions in the Washington Post. “Eliminate all high-ranking military officials, government officials,”one order read. “Do this secretly. Also get provincial officers who owe the Communist Party a blood debt.”Another KR unit, relaying orders from the Communist high command, called for the “execution of all military officers from lieutenant to colonel, with their wives and their children.”⁵³ In a press conference on May 13, Kissinger accused the KR of “atrocity of major proportions.”⁵⁴ President Ford again cited “very factual evidence of the bloodbath that is in the process of taking place.”⁵⁵

But the administration had little credibility. Kissinger had bloodied Cambodia and blackened his own reputation with past U.S. policy. Just as critics heard the Ford administration’s earlier predictions of bloodshed as thinly veiled pretexts for supplying the corrupt Lon Nol regime with more U.S. aid, many now assumed that American horror stories were designed to justify the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and Vietnam. Events elsewhere in Southeast Asia were only confirming the unreliability of U.S. government sources. The United States had similarly warned that the fall of Saigon would result in a slaughter, but when the city fell on April 30, 1975, the handover was far milder than expected. The American public had learned to dismiss what it deemed official rumor-mongering and anti-Communist propaganda. It would be two years before most would acknowledge that this time the bloodbath reports were true.

The U.S. government also lost reliable sources inside Cambodia. One of the side effects of the closing of U.S. embassies in times of crisis is that it ravages U.S. intelligence-gathering capabilities. Cambodia was especially cut off because journalists, too, were barred from visiting. Because the perpetrators of genocide are careful to deny observers access to their crime scenes, journalists must rely on the eyewitness or secondhand accounts of refugees who manage to escape. Reporters trained to authenticate their stories by visiting or confirming with multiple sources thus tend initially to shy away from publishing refugee accounts. When they do print them, they routinely add caveats and disclaimers: With almost every condemnation or citation of intelligence that appeared in the press about Cambodia in 1975 and 1976, reporters included reminders that they had only “unconfirmed reports,”“inconclusive accounts,”or “very fragmentary information.” This caution is warranted, but as it had done during the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust, it blurred clarity and tempered conviction. It gave those inclined to look away further excuse for doing so. “We simply don’t know the full story,”readers said. “Until we do, we cannot sensibly draw conclusions.” By waiting for the full story to emerge, however, politicians, journalists, and citizens were guaranteeing they would not get emotionally or politically involved until it was too late.

If this inaccessibility is a feature of most genocide, Cambodia was perhaps the most extreme case. The Khmer Rouge may well have run the most secretive regime of the twentieth century. They sealed the country completely. “Only through secrecy,” a senior KR official said, could the KR “win victory over the enemy who cannot find out who is who.”⁵⁶ When Pol Pot emerged formally as KR leader in September 1977, journalists hypothesized out loud about his identity. “Some say he is a former laborer on a French rubber plantation, of Vietnamese origin,”AFP reported. “Others say he is actually Nuong Suon, a onetime journalist on a Communist newspaper who was arrested by Prince Norodom Sihanouk in the 1950s.”⁵⁷ When Pol Pot’s photo was released by a Chinese photo news agency, analysts noted that he bore a “marked resemblance” to Saloth Sar, the former Communist Party secretary-general. The resemblance was of course not coincidental.⁵⁸

The KR did have a voice. They spurred on their cadres over the radio, proclaiming, “The enemy must be utterly crushed”; “What is infected must be cut out”; “What is too long must be shortened and made the right length.”⁵⁹ The broadcasts were translated daily by the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service, but they were euphemisms followed by the KR’s glowing claims about the “joyous” planting of the rainy season rice crop, the end of corruption, and the countrywide campaign to repair U.S. bomb damage.

In the United States, the typical editorial neglect of a country of no pressing national concern was compounded exponentially by the “Southeast Asia fatigue” that pervaded newsrooms in the aftermath of Vietnam. The horde of American journalists who had descended on the region while U.S. troops were deployed in Vietnam dwindled. Only the three major U.S. newspapers—the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times—retained staff correspondents in Bangkok, Thailand, and they were tasked with coveringVietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (known as VLCs, or “very lost causes”) as well. As soon as U.S. troops returned home, the American public’s appetite for news from the region shrank. Journalists who did publish stories tended to focus on the Vietnamese boat people and the fate of American POWs and stay-behinds. Responsible for such broad patches of territory, they were slow to travel to the Thai-Cambodian border to hear secondhand tales of terror.⁶⁰ Those who did make the trip found that many of the Cambodian refugees had experienced terrible suffering, hunger, and repression, but few had witnessed massacres with their own eyes. Soon after seizing the capital, the KR had hastily erected a barbed-wire barrier to prevent crossing into Aranyaprathet, Thailand, and had laid mines all along the border. The Cambodians with the gravest stories to tell were, by definition, dead or still trapped inside the country. U.S. officials estimated that only one in five who attempted to reach Thailand survived.

The dropoff in U.S. press coverage of Cambodia was dramatic. During Cambodia’s civil war between 1970 and 1975, while the United States was still actively engaged in Southeast Asia, the Washington Post and New York Times had published more than 700 stories on Cambodia each year. In the single month of April 1975, when the KR approached Phnom Penh, the two papers ran a combined 272 stories on Cambodia. But in December 1975, after foreigners had left, that figure plummeted to eight stories altogether.⁶¹ In the entire year of 1976, while the Khmer Rouge went about destroying its populace, the two papers published a combined 126 stories; in 1977 they ran 118.⁶² And these figures actually exaggerate the extent of American attention to the plight of Cambodians. Most of the stories in this period were short, appeared in the back of the international news section, and focused on the geopolitical ramification of Cambodia’s Communist rule rather than on the suffering of Cambodians. Only two or three stories a year focused on the human rights situation under the Khmer Rouge.⁶³ In July 1975 the Times ran a powerful editorial asking “what, if anything” the outside world could do “to alter the genocidal policies” and “barbarous cruelty” of the KR. The editorial argued that U.S. officials who had rightly criticized Lon Nol now had a “special obligation to speak up,” as “silence certainly will not move” Pol Pot.⁶⁴ But the same editorial board that called on the United States to break the silence did not itself speak again on the subject for another three years.

Cambodia received even less play on television. Between April and June 1975, when one might have expected curiosity to be high, the three major networks combined gave Cambodia just under two and a half minutes of airtime. During the entire three and a half years of KR rule, the network devoted less than sixty minutes to Cambodia, which averaged less than thirty seconds per month per network. ABC carried one human rights story about Cambodia in 1976 and did not return to the subject for two years.⁶⁵

American editors and producers were simply not interested, and in the absence of photographs, video images, personal narratives that could grab readers’ or viewers’ attention, or public protests in the United States about the outrages, they were unlikely to become interested. Of course, the public was unlikely to become outraged if the horrors were not reported.

Plausible Deniability: “Propaganda, the Fear of Propaganda, and the Excuse of Propaganda”

Some of the guilt that Americans might have had over ignoring the terror behind KR lines was eased by a vocal group of atrocity skeptics who questioned the authenticity of refugee claims. They were skeptical for many of the usual reasons. They clung to the few public statements of senior KR officials, who consistently refuted bloodbath claims and confirmed observers’ hopes that only the elite from the last regime had reason to fear. “You should not believe the refugees who came to Thailand,” said Ieng Sary, deputy premier in charge of foreign affairs, in November 1975, while visiting Bangkok, “because these people have committed crimes.” He urged the refugees in Thailand to return to Cambodia, where they would be welcomed.⁶⁶ In September 1977 Pol Pot said in Phnom Penh that “only the smallest possible number” out of the “1 or 2 percent” of Cambodians who opposed the revolution had been “eradicated.” Conceding some killings gave the KR a greater credibility than if they had denied atrocities outright, and many observers were taken in by these concessions.⁶⁷

Another factor that blunted understanding of the evil of the regime was that many Cambodians died of starvation and malnutrition, which outsiders associated with “natural” economic and climatic forces. This probably helped obscure the human causes of the disaster. In addition, refugees who told horror stories were presumed to be affiliated with the old regime. International relief workers in Thailand were said to be politically motivated as well because many were funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development or were thought to be anti-Communist.⁶⁸

Leading voices on the American left, a constituency that in other circumstances might have been the most prone to shame the U.S. government into at least denouncing the KR, ridiculed the early atrocity claims as conservative “mythmaking.” They pursued the speculative bloodbath debate that had preceded the KR victory with even greater ferocity. The directors of the antiwar Indochina Resource Center, George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter, released a study in September 1975 that challenged claims that the evacuation of Phnom Penh had been an “atrocity” causing famine. Instead they said it was a response to Cambodians’ “urgent and fundamental needs” and “it was carried out only after careful planning for provision of food, water, rest and medical care.” ⁶⁹ The following year they published the widely read Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. Without ever having visited the country, they rejected atrocity reports. The city evacuations, they argued, would improve the welfare of Cambodians, whose livelihoods had been devastated by the Nixon years. They were convinced that American and European media, governments, and anti-Communists were colluding to exaggerate KR sins for Cold War propaganda purposes. This account was read widely at the State Department and received backing from Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, who, in an article in the Nation, “Distortions at Fourth Hand,” praised Hildebrand and Porter. As the title of their article indicates, Chomsky and Herman faulted reporters for their third- and fourth-hand sourcing.⁷⁰

The motives of the skeptics varied. A few leftists were so eager to see an egalitarian band of Communist revolutionaries taking control of yet another Southeast Asian state that they paid little attention to reports of terror. But many who in fact cared about the welfare of Cambodians were relieved that the corrupt, abusive Lon Nol had been deposed. Most had learned to doubt any claim that emerged from a U.S. government source. But above all, politics and recent history aside, they possessed a natural, human incapacity to take their imaginations where the refugees demanded they go.

Within a decade and a half, human rights organizations would gather refugee testimony and shame governments that committed abuses, as well as the outside powers that ignored them. At the time of the Cambodian genocide, however, Amnesty International, the largest human rights organization in the world, was not yet oriented to respond forcefully. Founded in 1961 with a budget of $19,000, it had increased its annual expenditures to about $660,000. As a letter-writing organization best suited to getting political prisoners freed from jail, the organization’s reporting from the 1970s tended to focus on a small number of specific victims whose names were known; it had never before responded to systematic, large-scale slaughter like that alleged in Cambodia. The organization did not dispatch monitors to the Thai-Cambodian border but instead relied mainly upon tentative press reports. A September 1975 Amnesty report stated that “allegations of mass executions were impossible to substantiate.” Amnesty’s research department noted that a number of allegations were based on “flimsy evidence and second-hand accounts.” ⁷¹ The following year the organization’s annual report devoted a little over one page to Cambodia. It noted “allegations of large scale executions” but added that “few refugees seem to have actually witnessed executions.”⁷²

An internal policy document sent in March 1977 from Amnesty’s London headquarters to national chapters explained the organization’s reticence. Amnesty was mistrustful of “conservative opinions” and refugee testimony alike. “Allegations made by refugees must be examined with care in view of their possible partiality and the fact that they often give only fragmentary information and have a tendency to generalize,” the document said.⁷³ Of course, the dead had not lived to tell their tales, and the living, the refugees, could describe only the abuses they had suffered, which were often “lesser” crimes, or those that they had witnessed but could not substantiate.

Even when they had reliable evidence in hand, Amnesty officials operated very much like the committees the United Nations had established to monitor human rights: They avoided public shaming when possible and approached governments directly. Amnesty’s 1977 policy report described its tactics:“In view of the existing international attention and of the polemical aspects of the public debate on Cambodia,” it would be better to establish private contact with the KR than to embarrass them publicly.⁷⁴ Each year the organization sent letters to the regime requesting further information on specific reports of torture and disappearances. When the Pol Pot regime failed to respond, Amnesty ritually included a complaint about its unresponsiveness in the following year’s annual report. Only in 1978, three years after the killing and starvation campaign had begun, did the organization finally accept refugee claims and seek avenues for more public shaming.

Other atrocity skeptics concentrated on the impossibility of resolving debates over the number of Cambodians killed. They insisted, accurately, that the estimates of dead and wounded were arbitrary. Ben Kiernan, a young Australian historian who later became a prominent critic of the Khmer Rouge, objected to the lack of “evidence to support anything like the figures quoted,” saying that “huge figures have been plucked out of the air for numbers of victims.”⁷⁵ Journalists joined the numbers debate by noting shifts in estimates, sometimes in a self-satisfied tone. In the Washington Post Lewis Simons observed in July 1977 that the estimates of deaths had dropped dramatically. Once, he wrote, “it was popular to say that anywhere between 800,000 and 1.4 million Cambodians had been executed by vengeful Communist rulers,” but suddenly Western observers had begun “talking in terms of several hundred thousand deaths from all causes.”⁷⁶ Observers of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979 did pass figures and anecdotes from one account to the next. And often these figures were unconfirmed, but circumstances also rendered them unconfirmable. Because Cambodia was completely inaccessible, analysts could give only their best guess of the scale of the violence, and those guesses tended to vary wildly.

With so much confusion about the precise nature of the KR reign, apathy became justified by what journalist William Shawcross later called “propaganda, the fear of propaganda and the excuse of propaganda.”⁷⁷ Those who believed refugees argued that the sameness of their accounts revealed a pattern of abuses across Cambodia. Yet for those who wanted to turn away or who were unsure of the utility of turning toward Cambodia, this very sameness offered proof of scripting.

“This Is Not 1942”

Many came around once they had personal contact with the traumatized refugees. Charles Twining was a thirty-three-year-old foreign service officer who had served in Vietnam and—to the bemusement of his State Department colleagues—had spent 1974 diligently learning the Khmer language. In June 1975 he was posted to the U.S. embassy in Bangkok, and within a week of his arrival his new-found language skill proved all too useful. He was dispatched to the Thai-Cambodian border to interview refugees who were arriving exhausted, emaciated, and petrified. Twining initially could not bring himself to trust the stories he heard. “The refugees were telling tales that you could only describe as unbelievable,” he remembers. “I kept saying to myself, ‘ This can’t be possible in this day and age. This is not 1942. This is 1975.’ I really thought that those days, those acts, were behind us.”⁷⁸ After his first trip Twining did not even file a report because he found the refugees’ recollections literally “inconceivable” and felt he would be laughed at back in Washington. But every time he took the four-hour car journey to the border, he found it harder to deny the reality of the atrocities. The Cambodians had heard the howls of their starving infants. They had watched KR cadres use plastic bags to suffocate Buddhist monks. They had seen their loved ones murdered by teenage warriors who mechanically delivered the blow of a hoe to the back of the neck.

Twining pointed to a small milk can and asked the refugees to indicate the amount of rice the Khmer Rouge fed them each day. They said that they had been given rice that would have filled about half of this palmsized implement. When Twining argued that they would not have been able to live on such portions, they agreed but told him that anybody who complained was dragged away to what the KR called Angkar Loeu. Angkar was the nameless and faceless “organization on high,” which prided itself on never erring and on having “as many eyes as a pineapple.”⁷⁹ At first most Cambodians believed that those who disappeared were being taken to Angkar for reeducation or extra training and study. Despite the agony of daily life and the rumors of daily death, they had again hoped for the best. Often the truth became clear only when they stumbled upon a huge pile of bones in the forest. After encountering these concrete artifacts of evil, most accepted that a summons by Angkar meant certain death, a realization that was enough to cause only some to risk flight.

One refugee, Seath K. Teng, was only four years old when she was separated from her family. She later remembered fierce hunger pain as the KR forced four children to share one rice porridge bowl. “Whoever could eat the fastest got more to eat,” she recalled:

We worked seven days a week without a break. The only time we got off work was to see someone get killed, which served as an example for us…In the center of the meeting place was one woman who had both of her hands tied behind her. She was pregnant and her stomach bulged out. Before her stood a little boy who was about six years old and holding an ax. In his shrill voice he yelled for us to look at what he was going to do. He said that if we didn’t look, we would be the next to be killed. I guess we all looked, because the woman was the only one killed that day. The little boy was like a demon from hell. His eyes were red and he didn’t look human at all. He used the back of his ax and slammed it hard on the poor woman’s body until she dropped to the ground. He kept beating her until he was too tired to continue.⁸⁰

By August 1975 Twining had heard enough of these stories to become a convert:

I remember there was one moment.I was in a place in Thailand called Chantha Buri, a province that borders the Cambodian town of Pailin. I was sitting in this little dark house on the border, and suddenly twenty or thirty Cambodians appeared like ghosts out of the forest. They told me stories of such hardship and horror that it just hit me. Somebody afterwards said to me, “you know they rehearsed their stories.” But these Cambodians had just arrived from weeks on the road. They were lean, tanned. They had been wearing the same clothes for days. They were smelly, if I dare say it. And the one thing I knew was that they were genuine. Genuine. From that point on, I believed…

After he was jolted into belief by the smell of the distraught survivors, Twining filtered future testimony through the prism of the Holocaust. “My mind wanted, needed, some way of framing the thing,” he recalls, “and the Holocaust was the closest thing I had. This sounded to me like extermination—you wipe out a whole class of people, anyone with glasses, anyone with a high school education, anyone who is Buddhist. I mean, the link was natural.” Although there were similarities between the Nazis and the KR, he and others at the border gradually assembled an understanding of the specifics of KR brutality. They learned that in the new Cambodia freedom had become undesirable, dissent intolerable, and joy invisible. All facets of life had been mandated by Angkar, which made the rules. By the end of 1975, those who had once known enough to fear but had hoped enough to deny had come to accept the contours of the hell that had befallen Cambodia.

Refugees told them:

 Citizens could not move. Travel passes were required even to cross town. Cities were evacuated at gunpoint.

 They could not feed themselves. In most areas the state supplied a tin or less of rice each day.

 They could not learn what they chose. Only KR tracts were permitted. Libraries were ravaged. And speaking foreign languages signaled “contamination” and earned many who dared to do so a death sentence.

 They could not reminisce. Memories of the past life were banned. Families were separated. Children were “reeducated” and induced to inform on parents who might be attempting to mask their “bourgeois” pasts. “Cambodia,” a colonial term, was replaced by “Democratic Kampuchea.”

 They could not flirt. Only Angkar could authorize sexual relationships. The pairings for weddings were announced en masse at the commune assemblies.

 They could not pray. Chapels and temples were pillaged. Devout Muslims were often forced to eat pork. Buddhist monks were defrocked, their pagodas converted into grain silos.

 They could not own private property. All money and property were abolished. The national bank was blown up. Radios, telephones televisions, cars, and books gathered in the central squares were burned.

 And they could not make contact with the outside world. Foreign embassies were closed; telephone, telegraph, and mail service suspended.

Work was prized to a deadly extent. Cambodians were sent to the countryside, where an average day involved planting from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m., 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., and then again from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Communist cadres transported annual harvests to central storage sites but refused to distribute the fruits of the harvests to those who had done the reaping. Health was superfluous to the national project, and starvation and disease quickly engulfed the country. Upon taking power, the Khmer Rouge terminated almost all foreign trade and rejected offers of humanitarian aid.

“Enemies” were eliminated. Pol Pot saw two sets of enemies—the external and the internal. External enemies opposed KR-style socialism; they included “imperialists” and “fascists” like the United States as well as “revisionists” and “hegemonists” like the Soviet Union and Vietnam. Internal enemies were those deemed disloyal.⁸¹ Early on the Khmer Rouge had instructed all military and civilian officials from the Lon Nol regime to gather at central meeting posts and had murdered them without exception. Another child, Savuth Penn, who was eleven years old when the evacuation was ordered, recalled:

They shipped my father and the rest of the military officers to a remote area northwest of the city…then they mass executed them, without any blindfolds, with machine guns, rifles, and grenades…My father was buried underneath all the dead bodies. Fortunately, only one bullet went through his arm and two bullets stuck in his skull. The bullets that stuck in his skull lost momentum after passing through the other bodies. My father stayed motionless underneath the dead bodies until dark, then he tried to walk to his hometown during the night…The Khmer Rouge threatened that if anyone was hiding the enemy, the whole family would be executed. My father’s relatives were very nervous. They tried to find a solution for my family. They discussed either poisoning my father, hiding him underground, or giving us an ox cart to try to get to Thailand…The final solution was reached by my father’s brother-in-law. He informed the Khmer Rouge soldiers where my father was…A couple of soldiers climbed up with their flashlights and found him hiding in the corner of our cabin…The soldiers then placed my father in the middle of the rice field, pointed flashlights, and shot him.⁸²

This was the kind of killing that journalists and U.S. embassy officials in Phnom Penh had expected—political revenge against those the Khmer Rouge called the traitors. What was unexpected was the single-mindedness with which the regime turned upon ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese, Muslim Chams, and Buddhist monks, grouping them all traitors. Xenophobia was not new in Cambodia; the Vietnamese, Chinese, and (non-Khmer) Cham had long been discriminated against. But it was Pol Pot who set out to destroy these groups entirely. Buddhist monks were an unexpected target, as Buddhism had been the official state religion and the “soul” of Cambodia. Yet the KR branded it “reactionary.” The revolutionaries prohibited all religious practice, burned monks’ libraries, and destroyed temples, turning some into prisons and killing sites. Monks who refused to disrobe were executed.

More stunning still in its breadth, as Twining had gathered at the border, the Khmer Rouge were wiping out “class enemies,” which meant all “intellectuals,” or those who had completed seventh grade. Paranoid about the trustworthiness of even the devout radicals, the KR also began targeting their own supporters, killing anybody suspected of even momentary disloyalty. Given the misery in which Cambodians were living at the time, this covered almost everyone. As a witness against Pol Pot later testified, Brother Number One (as Pol Pot was known) saw “enemies surrounding, enemies in front, enemies behind, enemies to the north, enemies to the south, enemies to the west, enemies to the east, enemies in all eight directions, enemies coming from all nine directions, closing in, leaving no space for breath.”⁸³ Citizens lived in daily fear of chap teuv, or what people in Latin America call being “disappeared.” Bullets were too precious and had to be spared; the handles of farming implements were preferred.

The key ideological premise that lay behind the KR revolution was that “to keep you is no gain; to kill you is no loss.”⁸⁴ Liberal societies preach a commitment to individual liberty embodied in the mantra, “Better ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted.” Khmer Rouge revolutionary society was predicated on the irrelevance of the individual. The KR even propagated the adage, “It is better to arrest ten people by mistake than to let one guilty person go free.”⁸⁵ It was far more forgivable to kill ten innocent men than to leave one guilty man alive, even if he was “guilty” simply of being less than overjoyed by the terms of service to Angkar.

Soon after the fall of Phnom Penh, Henry Kamm of the New York Times visited three refugee camps at the Thai border, none of which was in contact with the others. He wrote a long piece in July 1975, which the paper accompanied with an editorial that compared the Khmer Rouge practices to the “Soviet extermination of kulaks or…the Gulag Archipelago.”⁸⁶ In February 1976 the Post’s David Greenway filed a front-page story describing the harsh conditions. “For Westerners to interpret what is going on is like the proverb of the blind men trying to describe an elephant,” Greenway wrote. “Skepticism about atrocity stories is necessary especially when talking to refugees who tend to paint as black a picture as they can, but too many told the same stories in too much detail to doubt that, at least in some areas, reprisals occurred.”⁸⁷ Collectively, although all were slow to believe and none gave the terror the attention it deserved, diplomats, nongovernmental workers, and journalists did gather ghastly accounts of death marches, starvation, and disease in 1975 and 1976. The media did not lead with these reports, and the politicians did not respond to them, but the stories did appear.

The most detailed and eventually the most influential examination of KR brutality was prepared by the French priest François Ponchaud. Ponchaud, a Khmer speaker, had lived in Cambodia for ten years before he was evacuated from the French embassy in early May 1975. He debriefed refugees at the Thai border and then later in Paris, and he translated Cambodian radio reports. In February 1976, less than a year after the Khmer Rouge seized power, Le Monde published his findings, which said some 800,000 had been killed since April 1975.⁸⁸ For Elizabeth Becker, then a metro reporter in Washington, this was enough. “As soon as his stories came out, I believed,”she recalls. “You have to know your shepherds. In Cambodia the French clerics had lived the Khmer life, not the foreigners’ life. It took Ponchaud to wake the world up.” Soon thereafter, a former KR official came forward in Paris claiming to have helped execute some 5,000 people by pickax. He estimated that 600,000 had already been killed.⁸⁹ In April 1976, a year into the Khmer Rouge reign, Time ran a story, soon followed by other accounts, that included graphic drawings of the executions and described Cambodia as the “Indochinese Gulag Archipelago.” “A year after the takeover, Cambodia is still cocooned in silence—a silence, it is becoming increasingly clear, of the grave,” Time wrote. “There is now little doubt that the Cambodian government is one of the most brutal, backward, and xenophobic regimes in the world.”⁹⁰

Even when the diplomats, journalists, and relief workers no longer assumed the Cambodians were exaggerating, it was another step entirely for them to move along the continuum toward understanding. One need only recall the exchange during World War II between Polish witness Jan Karski and U.S. Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter in which Frankfurter told the eyewitness, “I do not mean that you are lying. I simply said I cannot believe you.” Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has spoken of the difference between “information” and “knowledge.” In Cambodia observers had initially resisted certifying the refugee accounts even as “information.” The words were available, describing death marches, roadside executions, and the murder of the rich, the intellectuals, and even office assistants. But the first photos were not smuggled out of Cambodia until April 1977, and they depicted harsh, forced labor conditions but not the systematic elimination of whole ethnic groups and classes.⁹¹ With the country sealed tight, statesmen and citizens could take shelter in the fog of plausible deniability. But even once they accepted the information, the moral implications of that information did not really sink in. For those back in Washington, 10,000 miles from the refugee camps at the Thai border, it would take years to promote the raw, unconfirmed data to the status of knowledge.

Response

Options Ignored; Futility, Perversity, Jeopardy

Those who argued that the number of Cambodians killed was in the hundreds of thousands or those who tried to generate press coverage of the horrors did so assuming that establishing the facts would empower the United States and other Western governments to act. Normally, in a time of genocide, op-ed writers, policymakers, and reporters root for a distinct outcome or urge a specific U.S. military, economic, legal, humanitarian, or diplomatic response. Implicit indeed in many cables and news articles, and explicit in most editorials, is an underlying message, a sort of “if I were czar, I would do X or Y.” But in the first three years of KR rule, even the Americans most concerned about Cambodia—Twining, Quinn, and Becker among them—internalized the constraints of the day and the system. They knew that drawing attention to the slaughter in Cambodia would have reminded America of its past sins, reopened wounds that had not yet healed at home, and invited questions about what the United States planned to do to curb the terror. They were neither surprised nor agitated by U.S. Apathy. They accepted U.S. noninvolvement as an established background condition. Once U.S. troops had withdrawn from Vietnam in 1973, Americans deemed all of Southeast Asia unspeakable, unwatchable, and from a policy perspective, unfixable. “There could have been two genocides in Cambodia and nobody would have cared,” remembers Morton Abramowitz, who at the time was an Asia specialist at the Pentagon and in 1978 became U.S. ambassador to Thailand. During the Khmer Rouge period, he remembers, “people just wanted to forget about the place. They wanted it off the radar.”

From the mountains of Vietnam, foreign service officer Ken Quinn had spotted early indicators of the Khmer Rouge’s brutality back in 1974 and had since been rotated back to the United States, where he served as the Indochina analyst at the National Security Council. Quinn remembers the impossibility of generating constructive ideas after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam:

The country was in a state of shock. There was a great sense that we were powerless. We were out. We were done. We had left. It was painful, but it was over…Vietnam had been such an emotional, wrenching, painful experience that there was just a huge national relief and a sense the country needed to be put back together. Our country.

Those who retained curiosity about the region continued to do so with the aim, in military parlance, of “fighting the last war.” Most observers remained unable or unwilling to look at events as they transpired or to see Cambodia as anything other than a stepchild of Vietnam. They interpreted events on the ground accordingly. As Becker later wrote:

Too many people in and out of government had staked their reputations, their careers, and their own self-esteem on the positions they took during the [Vietnam] war. Each side wanted the postwar era to shore up those old positions and prove them correct. News was [seen]…as potential ammunition against old American opponents, as proof of America’s guilt or honor.⁹²

Certainly, it is impossible to overstate the importance of the historical context in dictating America’s response to atrocities in Cambodia. Neither President Ford nor President Carter, who took office in January 1977, was going to consider sending U.S. troops back to Southeast Asia. But it is still striking that so many Americans concluded that nothing at all could be done. Even the “soft” response options that were available to the United States were passed up.

The United States barely denounced the massacres. The Ford administration had initially done so, but official U.S. reprimands proved shortlived, as Washington tuned out. Twining, the designated Cambodia watcher at the U.S. embassy in Bangkok, continued collecting and passing along hefty and chilling refugee accounts.⁹³ But these reports led only to a low-key U.S. government request to Amnesty International to begin investigations. A confidential June 8, 1976, policy paper on human rights from the State Department to embassy posts contained the following press guidance:

We share the concern about reported conditions in Cambodia…We are prepared to support any effective action that might be taken to inquire further into the question of violations of human rights in Cambodia…Reports of conditions in Cambodia are…difficult to verify.Information available to the [U.S.government] is not significantly different from that obtained by journalists and comes primarily from refugees. Nevertheless, these reports are too numerous to ignore and sufficient information certainly exists for further inquiry by appropriate international or private humanitarian organizations.

…We have already urged Amnesty International to investigate the situation in Cambodia but have avoided any public actions which would give the appearance of leading a campaign against Cambodia or would lend credence to Cambodian allegations that we are behind reports of their transgressions.⁹⁴

Apart from casual appeals for “further inquiry,” the United States did not itself launch its own determined inquiry or act upon the facts already acquired.

U.S. officials could have publicly branded Pol Pot’s killings as genocide. But they did not do so. Indeed, I have not found a U.S. official who remembers even reading the genocide convention to see if events in Cambodia met its requirements. Because the treaty excluded political groups and so many of the KR murders were committed against perceived political enemies, it was actually a harder fit than one would expect. But even though many killings met the law’s terms, no faction emerged inside the Carter administration arguing for any change in U.S. policy toward Cambodia. Thus, it is not surprising that nobody thought to ask the State Department legal adviser’s office to issue a legal finding of genocide. Such a finding would have been moot in the face of the “reality” of U.S. nonengagement. And since the United States was not a party to the convention, a genocide proclamation would have created no legal obligation to act.

The United States could have urged its allies to file genocide charges at the International Court of Justice. The court could not weigh in on individual criminal guilt and had no enforcement powers to ensure its rulings were heeded. But if it had determined that genocide was under way, the ICJ could have issued a declaratory judgment on Cambodia’s responsibility and demanded that provisional measures be taken. This would have signaled to Cambodians that at least one institution was prepared to judge the KR slaughter.

Proxmire hoped that the United States might turn to the ICJ for a genocide finding, but he knew U.S. ratification of the genocide convention had to come first. By the beginning of 1977, it had been a decade since he had started delivering his daily speech urging ratification. In ten years he had stood up 1,761 times, drawing frequently upon the “textbook case of genocide” being committed by the Khmer Rouge.⁹⁵ In 1977 and 1978 Proxmire ratcheted up his attention to the KR. “The destruction of 2 million Cambodians is the numerical equivalent of murdering every man, woman, and child in the entire state of Colorado,” he declared. “Every human being in Boston, Massachusetts. Every person in Washington, DC—and that includes you and me.” The numbers of victims was still disputed, but he knew he would be better off estimating than waiting. “As we leave the Senate tonight, the Khmer Rouge will be awakening for another bloody day’s business,” he said. “The noose of genocide will tighten with a jerk around the necks of another 1,577 Cambodian peasants.”⁹⁶ Even those countries that had ratified the convention deferred to diplomatic niceties among states; other countries resisted and refused to challenge a fellow member of the club of nations in court. Cambodia, which itself had ratified the genocide treaty in 1951, never had to answer to genocide charges.

Apart from bilaterally denouncing the KR for its terror or attempting to get an ally to file a genocide case in the World Court, the United States might have condemned the crime in the UN General Assembly, the Security Council, or one of the multiple committees at the UN that had sprung up since Lemkin’s day. Neither the United States nor its European allies did this. Israel became the first country to raise the issue of Cambodia at the United Nations. Representative Chaim Herzog, knowing that much of the violence was Khmer on Khmer, warned of “auto-genocide.”⁹⁷ And finally, in March 1978, Britain’s UN representative responded to popular pressure from the main churches of England by raising the subject before the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR). He called for the appointment of a special human rights rapporteur to investigate.⁹⁸ The Khmer Rouge dismissed the Human Rights Commission as an imperialist, partisan body of which it would make “mincemeat.”⁹⁹ And true to form, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Syria teamed up to block even this rhetorical route, delaying consideration of Cambodia’s human rights record for another full year. By three years into the genocide, no official UN body had condemned the slaughter.

Economist Albert Hirschman observed that those who do not want to act cite the futility, perversity, and jeopardy of proposed measures. The United States and its allies defended their reticence on the grounds that speaking out or applying soft sanctions to such a reclusive regime would be futile. Normal diplomatic demarches, symbolic acts, and criticisms were unlikely to affect radical revolutionaries who were committing atrocity on this scale. In testimony on Capitol Hill, foreign service officer Twining noted, “I am not sure that the Cambodian leadership would care a hoot about what we…say.”¹⁰⁰ Because the United States gave the KR regime no support, it could not suspend trade or military aid.

Bilateral denunciations by the United States may well have had little effect on the Khmer Rouge’s internal practices. Unfortunately, because so few U.S. officials spoke out publicly against the genocide, we cannot know. But contrary to American claims, the Khmer Rouge were not completely oblivious to outside commentary. Isolated though they were, KR leaders still piped up to refute allegations made by foreign powers. When the British raised the issue of Cambodian human rights violations at the UN Commission in Geneva, the KR responded by claiming that British citizens enjoyed only the right to be slaves, thieves, prostitutes, or unemployed. In April 1978 the KR’s Ieng Sary submitted a letter to the UN, denouncing the “propaganda machine of the imperialists, the expansionists, annexationists” who charged them with mass killing. He made a logical argument about why the KR could never kill on the scale suggested:“There is no reason for the [KR] to reduce the population or to maintain it at its current level,” he wrote, “since today’s population of 8 million is well below the potential of the country, which needs more than 20 million.”¹⁰¹

U.S. policymakers also cited the possibly perverse results of taking a more outspoken approach. Public rebukes would likely anger the Khmer Rouge, causing them to intensify their violence against innocents or withdraw even further into darkness. Diplomats fell into the trap of believing (because they hoped) that the KR were on the verge of emerging from their isolation.¹⁰² It is of course possible that outside expressions of interest in the KR’s treatment of its citizens would have made the regime more barbarous and xenophobic, but it is hard to imagine how much worse the regime could have become. Often choosing a policy of isolation can deprive a concerned state of its only means of influencing a violent regime. But in this case the United States had nothing to risk losing by speaking the truth. A far steadier stream of condemnations could conceivably have convinced those educated KR officials who maintained covert radio links to the outside world to press for a more humane policy or even to revolt against Pol Pot and his clan.

The United States might also have pressured China, the KR’s main backer, to use its considerable leverage to deter the KR from its murderousness. But the Carter administration was determined not to jeopardize its burgeoning relationships with either of the KR’s regional allies: Thailand and China. Thailand was anti-Communist, but it maintained civil relations with the Khmer Rouge because its top priority was containing Vietnam. And China, which viewed the Khmer Rouge as a natural and ideological ally, had occupied center-stage in U.S. foreign policy circles since Nixon’s 1972 trip to Beijing. The Chinese had long been supplying the KR with military advisers, light arms, and ammunition. In early 1978 Chinese military aid to the Khmer Rouge reportedly increased to include 100 light tanks, 200 antitank missiles, a number of long-range 122- and 130-millimeter guns, and more than a dozen fighter aircraft. Despite the gruesome reports of KR terror, the United States did not protest the transaction.¹⁰³ In May 1977 President Carter called the U.S.-Chinese relationship “a central element of our global policy” and China a “key for global peace.”¹⁰⁴ Although China was the state most likely able to affect KR behavior, the Carter administration was not about to risk normalization by carping about the KR’s human rights abuses.

Analogy and Advocacy

U.S. policy toward Cambodia was not contested within the executive branch. Nothing could be done, State Department and White House officials assumed, and virtually nothing was done. It took a handful of members of Congress to begin demanding that the United States take a more expansive view of the land of the possible. Stephen Solarz was a Democratic House member from New York who had won election in 1974 on an antiwar platform and had earlier helped block further U.S. funding to the Lon Nol regime. Unlike most of his colleagues, Solarz had not lost interest in the region with the cutoff of U.S. funds. In August 1975 he had traveled with a House delegation to Thailand, where he had taken a helicopter ride with the embassy’s Twining to Aranyaprathet. There, the man who would become known as the “Marco Polo” of Congress for all his foreign travel, heard tales that reminded him of the forced deportation of Jews in World War II. As a Jew and as a politician—his district contained more Holocaust survivors than any other in the country—he became incensed. “They were killing anyone who wore glasses,” Solarz remembers, “because if they wore glasses, it suggested they knew how to read, and if they knew how to read, it suggested they had been infected with the bourgeois virus. It was a Great Leap Forward that made the Great Leap Forward under Mao look like a tentative half-step.”

In 1976, despite reports of nearly a million dead, no congressional hearings had been held specifically on human rights abuses in Cambodia. Solarz and a few other avid legislators had settled for including the grim press articles in the Congressional Record and occasionally condemning the KR in floor debates. Senator Claiborne Pell, who partnered with Proxmire in pushing the genocide convention and who would later do more than any other senator to try to punish Saddam Hussein for gassing Iraqi Kurds, took a parallel interest in Cambodia. On the floor of the Senate in 1976, he declared:

[If estimates of 1 million killed are] true, approximately one-fifth of the Cambodian population has been annihilated—a record of barbarous butchery which is surpassed in recent history only by the Nazi atrocities against the Jews during World War II…I am amazed that so little has been done to investigate and condemn what is happening in Cambodia. The UN Human Rights Commission has so far ignored the situation in that country.¹⁰⁵

By 1977, Solarz, Pell, and others had finally generated enough interest to stage hearings on Capitol Hill devoted exclusively to Cambodian atrocities. In one of those hearings, much of Solarz’s frustration over the U.S. policy of silence and the ongoing squabbles over numbers of dead burst forth. Indochina specialist Gareth Porter testified, again denouncing the “wild exaggeration and wholesale falsehood” of allegations of KR terror. Porter insisted that it was a “myth” that “one-to-two million Cambodians [had] been the victims of a regime led by genocidal maniacs.” Solarz exploded. “It is beyond belief to me that anyone could seriously argue that this hasn’t been going on,” he exclaimed.¹⁰⁶ For the next year and a half, Solarz attempted to get the House to pass a resolution calling on President Carter to turn his attention to curbing the killings.

Solarz was one of several Americans who, in drawing attention to the KR horrors, linked his advocacy to the Holocaust. Seated more than two decades later in a study lined with shelves filled with 123 books on the Holocaust and another fifty-two on Hitler and Nazi Germany, Solarz reflects, “The Holocaust is the key to the whole thing. It is the Rosetta stone. For me, the Holocaust was the central fact of the twentieth century and has had more of an influence on my view of the world and America’s role in it than anything else.”

By the mid- and late-1970s, Hitler’s destruction of the Jews was at last becoming the subject of scholarly and public focus. The term “Holocaust” had not entered into popular usage until the late 1960s, but in 1970 two books analyzed the U.S. indifference to the Holocaust for the first time: Arthur Morse’s While Six Million Died:A Chronicle of American Apathy and Henry Feingold’s Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration, 1939– 1945. One of the most pivotal instruments for “popularizing” the Final Solution was the four-part, nine-and-a-half-hour television dramatization Holocaust, starring James Woods and Meryl Streep, which some 120 million viewers watched in 1978. The same year President Carter appointed a special commission on Holocaust remembrance and education and decided to build a monument to the horror on the National Mall in Washington,D.C.

By 1977, because it had become widely accepted that a bloodbath was indeed taking place in Cambodia, advocates of U.S. engagement tried to jar decisionmakers and ordinary citizens by likening Pol Pot’s atrocities to those of Hitler. Syndicated columnists Jack Anderson and Les Whitten published a total of fifteen opinion pieces on Cambodia, most of which invoked the Holocaust.¹⁰⁷ On July 21, 1977, they wrote, “The uproar over human rights has ignored the world’s most brutal dictatorship. Adolf Hitler at his worst was not as oppressive as the Communist rulers of tiny Cambodia.”¹⁰⁸ Several months later, Anderson and Whitten called the KR terror “the greatest atrocity since the Nazis herded Jews into the gas chambers.”¹⁰⁹When the Holocaust docudrama aired in 1978, Anderson noted that “another Holocaust story, every bit as stark as the recent TV saga” was ongoing. The Nazis had disguised their crimes with euphemisms such as “resettlement,”“removal,” and “special action,” Anderson wrote. So, too, the Khmer Rouge had introduced a sanitized language. “The Khmer word for ‘kill, assassinate, execute’ was never spoken when the annihilation policy was discussed,” he noted. “The Khmer term used was ‘baoh, caol,’literally ‘sweep, throw out’ or ‘sweep, discard.’”¹¹⁰ The next day Anderson penned another column, entitled “Cambodia: A Modern-Day Holocaust,” in which he condemned President Carter for averting his gaze from the extermination of Cambodians.¹¹¹

Others chimed in, also adopting the analogy. The Economist described “brutality that would make Hitler cringe.”¹¹² In an April 1978 New York Times editorial, “Silence is Guilt,” William Safire also referred to the Holocaust miniseries and asked why the world was doing nothing. “In terms of numbers of people killed,”Safire wrote, “this generation’s rival to Adolf Hitler is the leader of Communist Cambodia, Pol Pot.”¹¹³ Leo Cherne of the International Rescue Committee and Freedom House wrote in the Wall Street Journal on May 10, 1978, that “the ruthlessness in each country has come about in service to an ideal—of racial purity in Nazi Germany, of political purity in Democratic Kampuchea.” A May 1978 front-page New York Times story said that refugees in Thailand “recall concentration camp survivors in Europe of 1945.”

As the months passed, Capitol Hill became more engaged. Senator Bob Dole (R.–Kans.) was moved by the story of a Cambodian refugee who had visited him. He compared the Cambodian crisis to “the death camps in Nazi Germany, and the excesses of Stalinist Russia.”¹¹⁴ Pleading as always for the ratification of the genocide convention and denouncing the KR, Proxmire noted the parallels with the destruction of the Jews:“This is no ordinary genocide. There are no concentration camps and gas chambers disguised as showers. This is genocide without technology.”¹¹⁵

Donald Fraser (D.–Minn.), the Hill’s most vocal human rights advocate, chaired a House International Relations Subcommittee hearing in July 1977. Ken Quinn, who in 1977 was tapped as special assistant to the new assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs, Richard Holbrooke, told his boss, “This is a chance to go public with all we know.” Holbrooke and Twining appeared on Capitol Hill and ended the State Department’s two-year policy of silence. Holbrooke noted that “journalists and scholars guess that between half a million and 1.2 million have died since 1975.” U.S. intelligence indicated that “for every person executed several have died of disease, malnutrition, or other factors, which would have been avoidable if the Government itself had not followed…a policy which seeks to completely transform the society by the most Draconian measures possible.”¹¹⁶ Holbrooke concluded that “we should speak out,” even though, as he admitted, he was unsure “what the impact of our words” would be.¹¹⁷ This was the first time Twining had been publicly summoned to relay his graphic findings. The U.S. government had detailed knowledge of Pol Pot’s atrocities. A February 13, 1978, State Department cable reported plainly, “A renewed emphasis was placed on completely eliminating all vestiges of the former government and completing the executions of all people who were not from the poor farmer-working class.”¹¹⁸ Still, twining recalls his attitude at the time of the hearing. “It was easy to come before Congress because I was so sure about what was going on,” he says. “When it came to ‘what to do,’ though, I just had this overwhelming feeling of helplessness.”

With American editorial writers weighing in on the subject with some frequency in 1978, and with congressional pressure mounting, the daily press coverage of human rights abuses finally expanded. In the summer of 1978, the Washington Post and New York Times began running two to three news stories a month on human rights in Cambodia, still a small number but far more than the two or three per year they had run in 1975, 1976, and 1977. By late 1978 death estimates that had earlier been referred to as “reports of mass death” became “hundreds of thousands, possibly 2 1/2 million” and “one to three million killed.”¹¹⁹

Not until 1978 did nongovernmental actors urge that trying and failing to influence the KR would be preferable to making no effort at all. “One may not be able to triumph over evil, but one need not remain silent in its presence,” syndicated columnist Smith Hempstone wrote in the Washington Post in May 1978. “President Carter might speak up more than once on the subject. He might instruct Andrew Young to walk out of the United Nations General Assembly whenever the representative of ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ rises to speak. At every time and in every available forum, those who speak for the United States could call on the conscience of the world to condemn those who commit such atrocities.”¹²⁰ None of these steps were taken.

President Carter’s first firm public denunciation came in April 1978 when he sent a message to an independent commission examining the atrocity reports in Oslo:

America cannot avoid the responsibility to speak out in condemnation of the Cambodian government, the worst violator of human rights in the world today. Thousands of refugees have accused their government of inflicting death on hundreds of thousands of Cambodian people through the genocidal policies it has implemented over the past three years…It is an obligation of every member of the international community to protest the policies of this or any nation which cruelly and systematically violates the right of its people to enjoy life and basic human dignities.¹²¹

Sixteen months had passed since his inauguration and three years since the fall of Phnom Penh.

In early June 1978, a group calling itself United People for Human Rights in Cambodia fasted and protested in front of the White House, and Freedom House convened a colloquium in Washington, “Cambodia: What Can America Do?” Amnesty International appealed more adamantly for scrutiny of Cambodia’s record. Its 1977–1978 report removed many of its earlier disclaimers. The report cited Ponchaud’s claim that 100,000 was the absolute minimum number of Cambodians executed and said it was possible that “two or three times as many” had been murdered.¹²² Rather than simply writing privately to the KR, Amnesty called upon the regime to allow independent investigators to deploy to Cambodia and made its own submission to the UN Human Rights Commission.¹²³ Citing refugee and press accounts, the submission stated that although many allegations remained “uncorroborated,” their number and consistency “give cause for great concern.”¹²⁴ Public and political groups were finally taking notice of a people in dire need.

Although elite opinion had concluded “something had to be done,” the “something” remained narrowly defined. Behind the scenes, U.S. ambassador Andrew Young urged United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to visit Cambodia, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance instructed U.S. embassies to discuss with host countries the possibility of raising the issue of Cambodia in the UN General Assembly. Warren Christopher, Carter’s deputy secretary of state, criticized the KR for its massive human rights abuses but pledged only to support “international efforts to call attention to this egregious situation.”¹²⁵ The U.S. foreign policy establishment remained persistently passive, issuing only a handful of public statements and never investing its political capital in a serious attempt to alter KR behavior.

Military What? George Who?

As press coverage steadily picked up and as the U.S. legislature responded with hearings, one lonely American official argued that an outside military force should intervene in Cambodia to dislodge the Khmer Rouge. That person was a Democratic senator from South Dakota named George McGovern—the same George McGovern who had captured the Democratic Party’s nomination in the 1972 presidential election and run on a platform of opposition to the Vietnam War. McGovern had spearheaded congressional efforts to proscribe funding for U.S. military operations in Indochina, and he had initiated the passage of the War Powers Act. He said he carried Vietnam “in my stomach and heart and mind for ten years above any other concern in public life.”¹²⁶ His antiwar credentials were unimpeachable.

But McGovern had come to the conclusion that events in Cambodia amounted to genocide, and for him this carried steep and unavoidable consequences. McGovern felt such a diagnosis meant first that the United States had to condemn the KR, which it had done hardly at all since the terror began. But it also meant that the United States had to contribute its military might to stopping the horrors. In August 1978 Senator McGovern publicly urged the Carter administration to consider deploying an international military force to launch a humanitarian intervention. It was time for the United States and its allies to ask, “Do we sit on the sidelines and watch an entire people be slaughtered, or do we marshal military forces and move in quietly to put an end to it?”¹²⁷ The press corps darted for the telephones. “They thought this was big news,” he recalls. “They wondered, ‘How could this dove have become a raving hawk?’” A Wall Street Journal editorial lambasted McGovern for his “truly mind-boggling” stance. For the next several weeks, he deployed three staff aides to answer the phones, which rang off the hook. Some Americans called to denounce him for his opposition to the war in Vietnam and to blame Cambodia’s misery on the U.S. withdrawal from the region. But most telephoned either to applaud him for his proposal or, in the case of old friends, to ask, somewhat shyly, for clarification.

McGovern saw the duty to oust the Khmer Rouge as an outgrowth of, not a challenge to, the United States’ duty to get and stay out of Vietnam. The American role in the war in Vietnam only heightened U.S. responsibility, as he believed the rise of the Khmer Rouge was one of the greatest single costs of U.S. involvement in Indochina. McGovern understood the apparent irony of his position. But at the hearings, he, too, alluded to the parallel to the Holocaust:

I am the last person to be enthusiastic about military intervention except under the most extreme circumstances, but it does seem to me that these are the most extreme I have heard of. If anything close to 2.5 million people have been killed in a few years’ time out of a population of seven million, percentage-wise that makes Hitler’s oppressions look rather tame.¹²⁸

McGovern argued that the United States should take the lead politically and militarily. To him Vietnam and Cambodia had little, apart from geography, in common.In Vietnam U.S.forces had squared off against an indigenous independence movement headed by a popularly backed leader, Ho Chi Minh. In Cambodia, by contrast, Pol Pot and a “handful of fanatics” were imposing their vision on millions of Cambodians. In light of Pol Pot’s “bloodthirsty” rule, his victimized populace could not possibly support him; indeed, McGovern believed the Cambodians would welcome rescue from the “murderous, slaughtering regime.”¹²⁹

McGovern was not the first American to make such a proposal. The previous year conservative essayist William F. Buckley Jr., perhaps the least likely of all of McGovern’s possible bedfellows, made a similar recommendation in the Los Angeles Times. “I am quite serious,” Buckley wrote. “Why doesn’t Congress authorize the necessary money to finance an international military force to overrun Cambodia?” The force, he argued, should be composed of Asian units from Malaysia, thailand, Japan, the Philippines, and even Vietnam. The troops did not have to establish a democratic state. They simply had to “go there and take power away from one, two, three, perhaps as many as a half-dozen sadistic madmen who have brought on their country the worst suffering, the worst conditions brought on any country in this bloody century.”¹³⁰

The McGovern-Buckley premise—that a barbarous, beatable small clan of murderers could be quickly vanquished—was challenged by the State Department. Douglas Pike, a foreign service officer and Indochina expert who testified at the 1978 Senate hearings, agreed that the Pol Pot regime was savage. But he said Cambodian troops loyal to the Khmer Rouge were fighting extremely effectively against their one-time allies, the Vietnamese. “If the regime is as bad as it is portrayed,” Pike asked, “why do the people fight?” He insisted that international forces would face tough resistance:“I think we should not entertain the idea that a quick indochop in Phnom Penh could put things right,” Pike testified. “To control Cambodia and the government, you would have to control the villages, all of them. You would have to put forces into the villages. The idea of just trying to take off the head in Phnom Penh sounds good…but it isn’t.”¹³¹

Robert Oakley, deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, was present when McGovern made his appeal for intervention. He was dumbstruck. So far as the Carter administration was concerned, Oakley testified, multilateral military intervention was not a “live option.” The United States would not consider generating or participating in an invasion. In reading Oakley’s testimony today, one can hear the loss of confidence in the U.S. capacity to shape the world or even accurately to diagnose its developments. “We don’t have the sort of intelligence on that that we sometimes in the past told ourselves that we had,” Oakley said, reminding the committee members, “We have learned a lot about the degree of appropriate U.S. involvement in the internal affairs of other countries, as well as an ability to influence them.”¹³²

McGovern was puzzled. He had heard a great deal about why the situation was more complicated than it seemed, about how difficult it would be to dislodge Khmer Rouge cadres at the village level. And he could find nobody at all prepared to use outside force to end the slaughter. McGovern did not mention the genocide convention. For him, it was not the law but the atrocities that necessitated acts aimed at suppressing the crime:

It just strikes me that we ought not to dismiss out of hand the responsibility of the international community to stop this kind of indiscriminate slaughter. I realize it is a long way from home. These are people with different colored skins and so on. But nevertheless, one would think that the international community would at least be considering the possibility of intervening in what seems to be a clear case of genocide.¹³³

Two political dissidents facing trial in the Soviet Union were then being celebrated, their imprisonment denounced. Yet, he observed, Americans were ignoring the killing of at least a million Cambodians. Instead of fighting the “last war,” McGovern believed, the United States should pay attention to the current genocide. “I hate needless and ill-conceived military ventures,” he said. “That is why I opposed our military intervention…in Vietnam. But to hate a needless and foolish intervention that served no good purpose does not give us the excuse to do nothing to stop mass murder in another time and place under vastly different circumstances.”¹³⁴ Later he remembered the glee with which some of his former adversaries greeted his alleged “reversal” and the grief he got at the time:

Dean Rusk was by then out of office, but I remember he gave a public statement after he heard I had called for military intervention in which he said, “Now there is irony.” The implication of Rusk’s statement was that I had finally come around. Of course I’ve never been a pacifist. I always thought there was a time when military intervention was necessary. I never regretted for one minute my time as a bomber pilot in World War II. Fighting genocide is one cause worth fighting for.¹³⁵

McGovern’s proposal went nowhere. The State Department issued a statement that the Carter administration was focusing attention on the “monstrous” situation in Cambodia but that it had no intention of resolving “the terrible situation in Kampuchea by military force.”It added, “Nor are we aware of any international support for [such] a plan.”¹³⁶ In truth McGovern had not expected that states would rush to respond to his summons, but he had hoped the “old shock technique” would at least spark a discussion of the horrors that the Carter administration, the general public, and the international community had resisted to date.¹³⁷ The appeal did cause a ripple effect in certain quarters, as even the KR, who so many had argued did not care about the opinion of outsiders, felt compelled to respond. On August 26, 1978, McGovern received a letter from the radical regime, slamming him for his “wanton and shameless attacks” and rebutting the genocide charge with the claim that it was the United States that had committed genocide in Cambodia.

In October 1978 McGovern did succeed in getting most of his fellow senators to sign on to a letter to Secretary of State Vance.¹³⁸ Eighty senators called for international action to halt the Cambodian genocide, urged the secretary to introduce the issue immediately at the UN Security Council, and criticized the Carter administration’s lethargy. In August 1978 the United States had finally submitted to the UN Human Rights Commission a 667-page report on the atrocities based on refugee testimony, but the senators noted that this belated, written submission “seems to be a rather low-key approach in light of the enormity of the crimes being committed in Cambodia.”¹³⁹

The First Visit

By 1978 the Khmer Rouge were feeling more vulnerable to the outside world. They had moved from scapegoating their own citizens to scapegoating their neighbors. The KR had begun trying to infiltrate and occupy southern Vietnam in 1977, and border skirmishes had intensified.In early December 1977,Vietnam, fed-up with Pol Pot’s attacks and backed by the Soviet Union, had sent some 60,000 troops just inside the Cambodian border.¹⁴⁰ A propaganda war between the two sides had ensued, publicly confirming Ken Quinn’s 1974 conclusion that no Communist monolith existed in Indochina. On December 31, 1977, the Cambodian Foreign Ministry, which had kept past clashes with Vietnam silent, denounced Vietnam’s “ferocious and barbarous” aggression, comparing it to Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia. Pol Pot severed relations with Vietnam. Throughout 1978 the Khmer Rouge took measures aimed at improving their public image, inviting diplomatic visitors and friendship delegations, pledging reforms, and quietly relaxing their xenophobic stance toward the outside world. In March 1978 Pol Pot announced that Cambodia was “open to our friends…We invite them to visit our country.”¹⁴¹

Elizabeth Becker, the Washington Post metro reporter, had been clamoring to get back into Cambodia since she left in 1974. She had written more than a dozen letters paying what she remembers as “disgusting”homage to the KR’s “glorious revolution” in the hopes of winning a visa. Whenever Ieng Sary visited the United Nations for the annual General Assembly session, Becker trekked up to New York to appeal to him in person. In November 1978 she received a telegram from the KR (postmarked from Beijing) inviting her to Cambodia. She was one of three Western guests chosen.

Becker did not hesitate for a second. All of the fears that had driven her from the country in 1974 had been overtaken by a desperate desire to peer behind the Khmer curtain. She felt as if she had been “put in a coffin” since the KR sealed the country. She remembers:

I hadn’t guessed they would isolate themselves like they did. I mean, the idea that you could go to an airport and it would never say “Phnom Penh” on the departures board—that broke my heart. I had to go back to see what was happening. Since the KR were busy killing their own people, I didn’t think they would make time for us. Nobody said, “Don’t go.”

Becker and Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch became the first American journalists to enter the country since the Khmer Rouge had seized Phnom Penh in April 1975. Joined by Scottish academic Malcolm Caldwell, a leftist sympathizer with the KR regime, they arrived on a biweekly flight from China, the only country that retained landing rights in Cambodia. For the next ten days, Becker, Dudman, and Caldwell were given an “incubated tour of the revolution” that included immaculate parks, harangues about Vietnamese aggression, and screenings of propaganda films.¹⁴² Throughout their stay, the three foreigners were forbidden from independently exploring. They spoke only with those who had been handpicked by Angkar to represent the KR, and even these meetings were steered by a guide who was present at all times. Nothing Becker’s group saw resembled either what she remembered or what the refugees at the Thai border had described. Fishermen, rubber plantation workers, weavers, all were wheeled out to speak of the joys of the revolution and the bounty of their productivity.

Only when Becker sneaked out of her compound did she get a sense of what lay behind the Potemkin village. If Phnom Penh’s main Monivong Boulevard was clean-shaven for the consumption of visitors, the surrounding streets were littered with stubble. Shops and homes had been weeded over. Furniture and appliances were stacked haphazardly. Just as many religious shrines in Bosnia would later be reduced to rubble overnight, so, too, the French cathedral and the picturesque pagodas had vanished without a trace. Even when she participated in the KR’s regimented activities, Becker observed a country that was missing everything that signaled life. She later recalled, “There were no food-stalls,no families,no young people playing sports, even sidewalk games, no one out on a walk, not even dogs or cats playing in alleyways.”¹⁴³ When she spotted people out in the countryside, they were working joylessly, furiously, without contemplating rest. The country’s stunning Buddhist temples had been converted into granaries.

It is difficult to imagine how confused Becker and the others must have been at that time. They had heard refugee reports of massacres and starvation. They suspected the number killed was in the hundreds of thousands. But they knew virtually nothing specific about the bloody Pol Pot regime. Becker was unable to muster the practical or moral imagination needed to envision the depths of what was happening behind the pristine and cheery front presented. She recalled:

We were the original three blind men trying to figure out the elephant. At that time no one understood the inner workings of the regime—how the zones operated; how the party controlled the country; how the secret police worked; that torture and extermination centers…even existed; the depth of the misery and death…We had the tail, the ears, the feet of the monster but no idea of its overall shape…¹⁴⁴

By the time the two-week trip began winding down, the luster of being the first to visit had long since worn off. On December 22, 1978, the group’s last full day in the country, Becker became the first American journalist ever to interview the famed Pol Pot. Although she had heard of Brother Number One’s charisma, his smile was far more endearing and his manner more polished than she had predicted. But it was not long before he turned off his charm, treating Becker and colleague Dudman as if he had granted them an audience, not an interview. Pol Pot delivered a onehour stinging and paranoid indictment of Vietnam, forecasting a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact over Cambodia. He warned: “A Kampuchea that is a satellite of Vietnam is a threat and a danger for Southeast Asia and the world…for Vietnam is already a satellite of the Soviet Union and is carrying out Soviet strategy in Southeast Asia.”¹⁴⁵ Ironically, as American decisionmakers formed their policy in the coming months, they operated on assumptions that mirrored Pol Pot’s.

Caldwell, the Scottish Marxist, was granted a separate interview with the supreme revolutionary leader. When he later traded notes with Becker, he delighted in describing Pol Pot’s mastery of revolutionary economic theory. Before retiring for the evening, Becker sparred with her zealous colleague one last time about the veracity of refugee accounts, which he still refused to believe, and the worthiness of the revolution, in which he refused to abandon belief. She was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of tumult and gunfire outside her room. A half dozen or more shots were fired, and an hour and a half of the longest, most terrifying silence of Becker’s life passed. When she finally heard the voice of her KR guide, she emerged trembling into the hall. Dudman was fine, she was told. Caldwell, the true believer, had been murdered.

Becker did not know why Caldwell had been killed, but she suspected that one faction wanted either to embarrass another or to plug the crack of an opening to the outside world before it widened. A murder would deter meddlesome foreigners from visiting again. On December 23, 1978, Becker and Dudman arrived in Beijing with the wooden casket containing Caldwell’s body. Two days later Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia.

Aftermath

“Humanitarian” Rescue

Kassie Neou, one of Cambodia’s leading human rights advocates today, survived Pol Pot’s madness and the outside world’s indifference. An English teacher before the genocide, he posed as a taxi driver, shedding his eyeglasses and working around the clock to develop a “taxidriver manner.” He had to make the KR believe that he had not been educated. Captured nonetheless, Neou was tortured five times and spent six months in a KR prison with thirty-six other inmates. Of the thirty-seven who were bound together with iron clasps, only Neou’s hope of survival was rewarded. The young guards executed the others but spared him because they had grown fond of the Aesop’s fables he told them as bedtime stories. When Neou discusses the terror today, he lifts up his trouser leg and displays the whitened, rough skin around his ankle where a manacle held him in place. The revolutionaries’ crimes were so incomprehensible that some part of him seems relieved to be left with tangible proof of his experience.

During his imprisonment, though he had been highly critical of the earlier U.S. involvement in Cambodia, Neou was one of many Cambodians who could not help but dream that the United States would rescue his people. “When you are suffering like we suffered, you simply cannot imagine that nobody will come along to stop the pain,” he remembers. “Everyday, you would wake up and tell yourself, ‘somebody will come, something is going to happen.’ If you stop hoping for rescue, you stop hoping. And hope is all that can keep you alive.” Survivors of terror usually recall maintaining similar, necessary illusions. Without them, they say, the temptation to choose death over despair would overwhelm.

Neou had fantasized that the United States would spare him certain death, but it was Vietnam, the enemy of the United States, that in January 1979 finally dislodged the bloody Communist radicals. In response, the United States, which in 1978 had at last begun to condemn the KR, reversed itself, siding with the Cambodian perpetrators of genocide against the Vietnamese aggressors.

Vietnam’s invasion had a humanitarian consequence but was not motivated by humanitarian concerns. Indeed, for a long time Vietnam and its Soviet backer had blocked investigation into the atrocities committed by their former partner in revolution. In 1978, however, as KR incursions into Vietnam escalated, Vietnam had begun detailing KR massacres. Vietnamese officials used excerpts from Ponchaud’s book, Year Zero, as radio propoganda. They called on Cambodians to “rise up for the struggle to overthrow the Pol Pot and Ieng Sary clique” who were “more barbarous…than the Hitlerite fascists.” Vietnam also began reindoctrinating and training Khmer Rouge defectors and Cambodian prisoners seized in territory taken from Cambodia. It crept ever closer to the Soviet Union, joining the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), signing a twenty-five-year treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Soviets, and receiving ever larger military shipments from them. The Soviet Union joined Vietnam’s anti-KR campaign, condemning the KR “policy of genocide.”

For the previous year, the United States had been flirting with restoring relations with Vietnam but was not keen on seeing it overrun its neighbor.¹⁴⁶ From the U.S. embassy in Bangkok, Ambassador Morton Abramowitz wrote in a secret August 1978 cable to the State Department: “Neither the Khmers nor the world would miss Pol Pot. Nonetheless, the independence of Kampuchea, particularly its freedom from a significant Hanoi presence or complete Hanoi domination, is a matter of importance to us.”¹⁴⁷ Far from encouraging the overthrow of the KR, as Neou and others would have hoped, U.S. officials urged the Vietnamese to think twice. In November 1978 Secretary of State Vance sent a message to the Vietnamese: “Don’t you see what lies ahead if you invade Cambodia? This is not the way to bring peace to the area. Can’t we try some UN instrument, use the UN in some way?”¹⁴⁸

The United States had its own reasons for frowning upon a Vietnamese triumph. It planned to restore diplomatic relations with China on January 1, 1979. China’s hostility toward Vietnam and its Soviet military and political sponsor greatly influenced the U.S. reaction to the invasion. For neither the first nor the last time, geopolitics trumped genocide. Interests trumped indignation.

Aware of the Khmer Rouge’s isolation and unpopularity in the West, Hanoi thought it would earn praise if it overthrew Pol Pot. It also concluded that regardless of the outside world’s opinion, it could not afford to allow continued KR encroachments into the Mekong Delta. By December 22, 1978, Vietnamese planes had begun flying forty to fifty sorties per day over Cambodia. And on December 25, 1978, twelve Vietnamese divisions, or some 100, 000 Vietnamese troops, retaliated against KR attacks by land. Teaming up with an estimated 20, 000 Cambodian insurgents, they rolled swiftly through the Cambodian countryside. Despite U.S. intelligence predictions that the KR would constitute a potent military foe, McGovern’s earlier forecast of rapid collapse turned out to be prescient. Lacking popular support, the Khmer Rouge and its leaders fled almost immediately to the northern jungle of Cambodia and across the Thai border.

The Vietnamese completed their lightning-speed victory with the seizure of Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979.

Skulls, Bones, and Photos

Upon seizing the country, the Vietnamese found evidence of mass murder everywhere. They were sure this proof would strengthen the legitimacy of their intervention and their puppet rule. In the months and years immediately after the overthrow, journalists who trickled into Cambodia were bombarded by tales of horror. Every neighborhood seemed to unfurl a mass grave of its own. Bones could still be seen protruding from the earth. Anguished citizens personalized the blame. “Pol Pot killed my husband,” or “Pol Pot destroyed the temple,” they said. Rough numerical estimates of deaths emerged quickly. All told, in the three-and-a-half-year rule of the Khmer Rouge, some 2 million Cambodians out of a populace of 7 million were either executed or starved to death.¹⁴⁹ National minorities were special targets of the regime. The Vietnamese minority was completely wiped out. Of the 500, 000 Muslim Cham who lived in Cambodia before Pol Pot’s victory, some 200, 000 survived. Of 60, 000 Buddhist monks, all but a thousand perished.

The Tuol Sleng Examination Center in Phnom Penh, which was code-named Office S-21, quickly became the most notorious emblem of the terror.¹⁵⁰ A pair of Vietnamese journalists discovered the center nestled in a part of the capital known as Tuol Svay Prey, or “hillock of the wild mango.” While roaming the neighborhood with Vietnamese troops the day after they had seized the capital, they smelled what they thought was rotting flesh and poked their heads into the lush compound that had once served as a girls’ high school. They quickly discovered that of the 16, 000 Cambodians who had arrived there, only five had departed alive.¹⁵¹

The Tuol Sleng complex consists of four triple-story, whitewashed concrete buildings, lined on the top floor by a Motel 6– like balcony-corridor and overlooking identical grassy courtyards, once playgrounds for the young schoolgirls. A single-floor wooden building divides the compound in two. Some time in late 1975, Kang Keck Ieu (known as “Duch” ), a former schoolteacher, took over the management of the facility and helped turn a seat of innocence into a seat of inhumanity. Most of the instruments found in Tuol Sleng were primitive, “dual-use” garden implements. Building A, which contained individual prison cells, was divided into small rooms, each containing a metal bed frame, an ammunition box to collect the prisoners’ feces, and garden shears, lead pipes, and hoes. When the Vietnamese journalists first entered these rooms in 1979, they found these tools beside bloodied victims whose cadavers lay shackled to the bed posts. The prisoners’ throats had been slit, and their blood still dripped slowly from the beds onto the mustard-and-white-tiled floors.

When the Vietnamese wandered around the ravaged compound, they found other adornments, including bulkier torture implements and busts of Pol Pot. They also rummaged through surrounding houses and came across thousands of documents, notebooks, and photos. Years later this paper trail would be used to spur prosecution of the aging former KR leaders for genocide and crimes against humanity.

Like the Nazis, those who ran the extermination center were bureaucratically precise. A prisoner’s time at Tuol Sleng consisted of four basic activities. The prisoners were photographed, either upon arrival or upon death. They were tortured, often electrocuted as they hung by their feet, their heads submerged in jars of water. They were forced to sign confessions affirming their status as CIA or Vietnamese agents and to prepare lists of their “networks of traitors.” Then they were murdered. Low-ranking prisoners were usually disposed of quickly, whereas more senior inmates were typically kept alive for protracted torture sessions. The highest daily tally was May 27, 1978, when 582 people were executed. A day’s targets were often clustered according to their affiliation. For example, on July 22, 1977, the KR “smashed” those from the Ministry of Public Works.¹⁵² The photos and confessions of four Americans were also found. The men had disappeared in 1978 while sailing yachts off the coast of Cambodia. Hoping to convince their brutal torturers to relent, the men wrote detailed, bizarre accounts of their elaborate CIA plots to destabilize Cambodia.

If ever there was a document that captured the regimental tenor and terror of the KR regime, it was the set of instructions for inmates that had been posted at the Tuol Sleng interrogation center. It read in part:

1 You must answer in conformity with the questions I asked you. Don’t try to turn away my questions.

2 Don’t try to escape by making pretexts according to your hypocritical ideas.

3 Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dares to thwart the revolution.

4 You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect…

5 During the bastinado or the electrification you must not cry loudly.

6 Do sit down quietly. Wait for the orders. If there are no orders, do nothing. If I ask you to do something, you must immediately do so without protesting…

7 If you disobey [any] point of my regulations you will get either ten strokes of the whip or five shocks of electric discharge.¹⁵³

An “interrogator’s manual” was another of the many damning documents left behind. A forty-two-page guide for Tuol Sleng torturers, it reminded them they should use both political pressure and torture on prisoners. “Prisoners,” the guide said, “cannot escape from torture. The only difference is whether there will be a lot of it or a little…We must hurt them so that they respond quickly. Don’t be so bloodthirsty that you cause their death quickly.You won’t get the needed information.”¹⁵⁴

The Vietnameseinstalled regime was savvy enough to create a Tuol Sleng Museum almost as soon as it had solidified control of the capital city. The new leaders turned the snapshots of murdered prisoners into perhaps the most vivid visual indictment of evil in the second half of the twentieth century. The photos had been taken of boys and girls and men and women of all shapes, shades, and sizes. Some have been beaten; others seem clean-shaven and calm. Some look crazed, others resigned. As in the German concentration camps, all wear numbers. And all display a last gasp of individuality in their eyes. It is with these eyes that they interrogate the interrogator. That they plead. That they grovel. That they accuse. That they accost. That they mock. And for those who visit, that they remind. It is in their eyes, much more than in the stacks of skulls gathered in villages throughout Cambodia, that visitors are prodded to confront the extremity of the victims’ last days. With their eyes, most of the Cambodians signal that they remained very much alive and that they hoped to stay that way.

U.S. Policy: Choosing the Lesser Evil

The existence of the torture center testified to the depravity of the KR regime.¹⁵⁵ Cambodia was not widely visited immediately following the KR overthrow, but enough evidence of KR brutality emerged for many Americans to know that they should celebrate their defeat. Senator McGovern, the new humanitarian hawk, learned of the Vietnamese victory and thought it offered the real irony. “After all those years of predictions of dominos falling and Communist conspiracies,” he remembers, “it was Vietnam that went in and stopped Pol Pot’s slaughter. Whatever their motivation, the Vietnamese were the ones who supplied the military force to stop the genocide. They should have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize.” Foreign service officer Charles Twining, who by then had been transferred to the Australia–New Zealand desk at the State Department, was overjoyed at reports of the Vietnamese victory. He recalls, “I didn’t see how else change would have happened. Those of us who knew about the Khmer Rouge cheered, but we quickly realized that everyone else just heard it as ‘Vietnam, our enemy, has taken over Cambodia.’” Some prominent U.S. officials confessed publicly to being torn. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, told reporters in New York: “I almost always think it’s always wrong for a country to transgress the borders of another country, but in the case of Cambodia I’m not terribly upset…It is a country that has killed so many of its own people, I don’t know if any American can have a clear opinion of it…It’s such a terribly ambiguous moral situation.”¹⁵⁶

But rational, interest-based calculations led the United States to different official conclusions, which quickly overtook these isolated bursts of relief among Cambodia watchers. The Vietnamese victory presented President Carter with a difficult moral and political choice. Which was the lesser evil, a regime that had slaughtered some 2 million Cambodians or a Communist regime backed by the Soviet Union that had flagrantly violated an international border and that now occupied a neighboring state? After weighing the politics of the choice, Carter sided with the dislodged Khmer Rouge regime. The United States had obvious reasons for opposing the expansion of Vietnamese (and, by proxy, Soviet) influence in the region. It also said it had an interest in deterring cross-border aggression anywhere in the world. But this principle was applied selectively. In 1975, when its ally, the oil-producing, anti-Communist Indonesia, invaded East Timor, killing between 100, 000 and 200, 000 civilians, the United States looked away.¹⁵⁷ In the Cambodia case perhaps the most important factor behind Carter’s choice was U.S. fondness for China, which remained the prime military and economic backer of Pol Pot’s ousted government. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski saw the problem through the Sino-Soviet prism. Since U.S. interests lay with China, they lay, indirectly, with the Khmer Rouge. Slamming the KR might jeopardize the United States’ new bond with China. Slamming the Vietnamese would cost the United States nothing.

With the policy decided and the tilt toward China firm, Secretary of State Vance called immediately for the Vietnamese to “remove their forces from Cambodia.” Far from applauding the KR ouster, the United States began loudly condemning Vietnam. In choosing between a genocidal state and a country hostile to the United States, the Carter administration chose what it thought to be the lesser evil, though there could hardly have been a greater one.

The new government in Phnom Penh was led by Heng Samrin and Hun Sen, two former Khmer Rouge officials who had defected to Vietnam in 1977. Meanwhile, the KR regrouped at the border, thanks to military and medical aid from Thailand, China, Singapore, Britain, and the United States.¹⁵⁸ With the Soviet Union arming Vietnam and the Heng Samrin government, China opened up the Deng Xiaoping Trail for Chinese arms deliveries to the KR guerrillas through Thailand.¹⁵⁹ Brzezinski told Becker: “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the [Khmer Rouge].…Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him but China could.”¹⁶⁰The military and political conflict took on the flavor of a Sino-Soviet proxy war. Vietnam and the states that made up the Soviet bloc argued that the will of the Cambodian people had been gratified and it was absurd to support a genocidal regime. On the other side were China, most members of ASEAN, and the jilted Khmer Rouge officials themselves, who argued that whatever the abuses of the past regime, nothing could excuse a foreign invasion.

The Khmer Rouge did their part, launching an image campaign of sorts. Khieu Samphan replaced Pol Pot as prime minister in December 1979 and invited journalists to hear his version of events. Rejecting charges of genocide, he said, “To talk about systematic murder is odious. If we had really killed at that rate, we would have no one to fight the Vietnamese.”¹⁶¹ Yet now that the evidence of the horrors had surfaced, Samphan could not deny abuse outright. He shrewdly acknowledged some 10, 000 executions under Pol Pot, and admitted “mistakes” and “shortcomings.” Samphan swore that if the KR returned to power, they would not again evacuate the cities, restrict movement and religion, or eliminate currency. In pursuit of U.S. help, he also brushed aside mention of America’s prior sins. “These things are in the past,” he said, referring to Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, “and should not be brought up.”¹⁶² Well aware that it was American hostility toward Vietnam rather than any love of the KR that earned the KR U.S. support, he warned that without U.S. help and with the backing of Moscow, “The Vietnamese will go further—toward the rest of Southeast Asia, the Malacca Strait, toward control of the South Pacific and Indian oceans.”¹⁶³ He spoke the fashionable language of falling dominoes.

The Carter administration’s policy choice was made easier because at home no voices cried out to supportVietnam. America’s most ardent anti-Communists were still angry at Vietnam for the U.S. defeat. American leftists were mostly disengaged. Die-hard Communists were befuddled by the seemingly sudden division of Southeast Asia into two rival and bitterly contested Communist camps. The mass protests in the United States in the 1960s were a reaction against American imperialism and the loss of American lives. With neither at stake in the 1979 Vietnam-Cambodia conflict, the activists who had once made it to the mainstream did not resurface. The administration was able to reduce its policy calculus to pure geopolitics without rousing dissent.

The issue was not simple. Cambodians themselves were elated to be rid of the KR but opposed to the Vietnamese occupation. The Vietnamese had brought about a liberation from hell, but they did not usher in the freedom for which Cambodians longed. Vietnam’s claims to have invaded simply to stop atrocity and to defend its borders from Cambodian attacks were proven more hollow with the passage of time. Some 200, 000 Vietnamese troops patrolled the Cambodian countryside, and Vietnamese advisers clogged the Cambodian governmental ministries. The Vietnamese-backed regime earned further criticism because of its mishandling of a potential famine. It initially dismissed as Western propaganda reports that Cambodians faced imminent starvation because of disruption of planting and poor cultivation. Then, when outside aid was clearly needed, the regime was more intent on using food as a political weapon than ensuring Cambodians were fed. Kassie Neou, the former English teacher who had long fantasized about rescue, remembers his reaction to the Vietnamese invasion: “My first response was raw. It was a simple, ‘Phew, we survived.’ My second thought, upon understanding that our land was occupied, was, ‘Uh-oh.’ Basically, the Vietnamese saved us from sure death, and they deserved our thanks for that. But years later, we felt like saying, ‘We already said thank you. So why are you still here?’”

Prince Sihanouk, once the nominal leader of the KR front, had been placed under house arrest soon after the KR seized Phnom Penh. In the course of Pol Pot’s rule, he had lost three daughters, two sons, and fifteen grandchildren. Sensing yet another political opening, he emerged from the shadows after the KR’s ouster to criticize both the KR and the Vietnamese. “It is a nightmare,” he said. “The Vietnamese, they are like a man who has a very delicious piece of cake in his mouth—Cambodia—and all that man can do is swallow the cake.”¹⁶⁴ For many Cambodians, the occupation by the Vietnamese quickly came to feel like a “liberation” similar to that of Poland by the Soviets after Nazi rule.

A Regime Less “Stinky”?

The UN Credentials Committee, an obscure ninemember body based at UN headquarters in New York, became the unlikely forum for the international debate on what to do about Cambodia. The Credentials Committee routinely met twice a year to determine whether states had the “credentials” to occupy their UN seats. In September 1979, when the committee convened, both the vanquished KR regime and the victorious Vietnamesebacked regime submitted applications. UN delegates from the Communist and non-Communist worlds sparred over which regime should be recognized and which violation of international law was more egregious.

Three layers of geopolitics made it unlikely that the U.S. representative was going to favor stripping the Khmer Rouge of their UN seat. First, of course, the United States was determined not to condone the Vietnamese invasion. Second, it wanted to please China. And third, as a matter of standing policy, the United States wanted the Credentials Committee to remain a pro forma paperwork clearinghouse rather than a political body that would weigh in on the relative “goodness” or “badness” of a regime. If the committee moved away from ritual rubberstamping and began judging the merits and demerits of member states, the United States feared, the committee might next strip UN credentials from Israel.

Robert Rosenstock was the lawyer who represented the United States on the Credentials Committee. The Secretariat tried to select people who would treat the granting of credentials as a technical issue, not a substantive one. They wanted people, he says, who would not “start carrying on if a government was obnoxious.” Rosenstock did not find the Cambodia vote especially difficult:

We at the Credentials Committee…don’t make waves…For us to go against our long-standing mode of operating, somebody in Washington would have had to call us up, and say, “Listen these Khmer Rouge guys really stink and the new guys, the Vietnamese, stink a little less so let’s take away the credentials of the stinkier regime.” That didn’t happen. Washington looked at it as, “They all stink, so let’s support the status quo.”

Rosenstock duly argued that what was at issue was not the conduct of a government toward its own nationals. Since the KR credentials had been accepted at the 1978 session of the General Assembly, they should be accepted again. The committee had a “technical” task to perform and not a political one.

On September 19, 1979, after some heated debate and despite the submission by Congo of a compromise proposal that would have left Cambodia’s UN seat open, the committee voted 6–3 to award UN credentials to the KR regime. The committee did not even review the credentials of the Vietnamese-backed Heng Samrin government.¹⁶⁵

“I was told to engineer the result on the Credentials Committee,” says Rosenstock, “so I engineered the result.” The happiest and most surprised man in New York on the day of the vote was the KR’s Ieng Sary.¹⁶⁶ He came bounding up to Rosenstock after the tally and extended his hand. “Thank you so much for everything you have done for us,” Ieng said. Rosenstock instinctively shook the extended hand and then muttered to a colleague, “I think I now know how Pontius Pilate must have felt.”

The battle was not yet won, as the debate over the two regimes’ competing moral and legal claims simply shifted from the Credentials Committee to the General Assembly two days later. Here multiple critics spoke out against the Credentials Committee’s recommendation that the KR regime be recognized. UN delegates, mainly from the Soviet bloc, argued that the KR’s brutality was of such magnitude that they had forfeited their claim to sovereignty. These UN representatives contended that the new regime controlled Cambodia’s territory, represented the people’s will, and therefore earned the rank of legitimate sovereign. Some pointed to the Holocaust. The Grenada representative compared the Vietnamese liberators to the Allied liberators who administered Germany after defeating it. The Soviet and Byelorussian delegates cited the terms of the genocide convention, which they said required withholding recognition from the genocidal regime. Far from deserving to occupy the UN seat, they said, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, who had fled to the Thai border, should be extradited back to Cambodia to be tried for genocide under the convention.

The debate was highly charged, as blistering condemnations of the old and new regimes were traded across the floor. Although the majority of the speakers supported the U.S. and Chinese view that Vietnam’s invasion should not be recognized, none contested the atrocities committed by Pol Pot. Indeed, all were quick to preface their support for maintaining recognition of the KR with disclaimers that they “held no brief” for the Pol Pot regime, “did not condone their human rights record,” and “did not excuse their abominable crimes.” Their votes to seat the KR government, they stressed, “did not mean agreement with the past policies of its leaders.”¹⁶⁷

The United States carried Rosenstock’s arguments from the Credentials Committee to the General Assembly. “For three years,” U.S. representative Richard Petree said, “we have been in the forefront of international efforts to effect fundamental changes in these practices and policies by peaceful means.” In the absence of a “superior claim,” however, the regime seated by the previous General Assembly should be seated again.¹⁶⁸ Moral values were at stake—a commitment to peace, stability, order, and the rule of law, as well as the insistence that states carry out their obligations under the UN charter. The UN charter had made non-interference in sovereign states a sacred principle. No doctrine of humanitarian intervention had yet emerged to challenge it.

Most of the arguments made by those who voted for seating the KR were internally contradictory. They first insisted that recognizing the Vietnamese-installed regime would mean condoning external intervention and licensing foreign invasions by big powers into small states, thus making the world a “more dangerous place.” Yet they next claimed that maintaining recognition of the Pol Pot government would not mean condoning genocide or licensing dictators elsewhere to believe they could treat their citizens as abusively as they chose.

Nonetheless, the U.S. position prevailed. The first debate of many, on September 21, 1979, lasted six and a half hours, and the assembly voted 71–35 (34 abstentions, 12 absences) to endorse the Credentials Committee resolution. The KR’s Khieu Samphan was quoted later on the front page of the Washington Post, saying, “This is a just and clear-sighted stand, and we thank the U.S. warmly.”¹⁶⁹

Although it would take years for Pol Pot to enter the ranks of the maniacs of our century, where he is ritually placed now, even by 1979 many grasped the depth of his terror. Those who visited were able to tour Tuol Sleng, witness the skeletal remains that lay stubbornly scattered throughout the country, tabulate death counts, and speak with their Cambodian friends, who would often simply burst into tears without a moment’s notice. Rosenstock remembers, “I realized enough at the time to feel that there was something disgusting about shaking Ieng Sary’s hand. I wasn’t in the habit of comparing myself to Pontius Pilate. I mean, I felt like throwing up when the guy shoved his hand in my face. Oooh, it was awful.” Yet not so awful as to cause him or his more senior colleagues to challenge U.S. policy, which was driven by U.S. distaste for Vietnam and its interest in pleasing China.

Even with the 1979 vote behind the United States, the presence of KR officials at the UN continued to upset many Americans. In advance of the Credentials Committee vote in 1980, ten U.S. senators signed a letter calling for the United States to abstain on the vote in order to “stand apart from both” brutal regimes. A Washington Post editorial urged the United States to hold the seat open, as nothing about the U.S. policy of recognizing the KR was working. “Geopolitically, it has brought the United States no evident gains,” the editorial said. “Politically, it has been used by Hanoi to justify both its support of Heng Samrin and its suspicion of U.N. relief efforts. Morally, it is beyond characterization.”¹⁷⁰ A subsequent editorial, entitled “Hold-Your-Nose Diplomacy,” noted, “There are many close calls in foreign policy, but this is not one of them.”¹⁷¹Yet no American lobby really pressed the empty-seat solution and, on the other side of the issue, the five ambassadors from the ASEAN countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines) urged the White House to stand its ground. In an effort to win support for the Khmer Rouge claim to the UN seat, they also held a secret meeting with members of the House Asian and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee.¹⁷² After a brief period of suspense, Secretary of State Edmund Muskie announced that since Vietnam continued to refuse to withdraw from Cambodia, the United States would again support the seating of Pol Pot’s government. He stressed that the U.S. decision “in no way implies any support or recognition” of the Khmer Rouge regime. “We abhor and condemn the regime’s human rights record,” Muskie said.¹⁷³ The General Assembly voted 74–35, with 32 abstentions. By the following year, the debate over whether to recognize the KR had become pro forma.¹⁷⁴

In 1982, under ASEAN pressure, the Khmer Rouge joined in a formal coalition that included the non-Communist forces, the so-called National Army of Sihanouk, and the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front under Son Sann. This coalition shared the UN seat. At the request of the United States, China supplied Sihanouk and Son Sann with arms, and in 1982 the United States began to provide nonlethal covert assistance. Estimated initially at $5 million a year, this funding grew to $12 million by 1985, when Congress authorized up to $5 million in overt aid.

The Khmer Rouge coalition continued to occupy the UN seat as its guerrillas battled the Heng Samrin regime from the countryside. KR tactics changed little. KR soldiers captured and executed foreign tourists and inflicted terror upon those Cambodians who had the misfortune to live under KR control.¹⁷⁵ The consequences of international recognition were significant. The legitimate KR coalition received international financial and humanitarian support, whereas the illegitimate Vietnam-installed regime in Phnom Penh was treated like a pariah. The Cambodian people who had so recently been isolated by the paranoid KR were now isolated by the United States and its allies.¹⁷⁶

Ignoring all the evidence available in Cambodia and their commitments to punish genocide, UN member states continued to refuse to invoke the genocide convention to file genocide charges at the International Court of Justice against the Cambodian government. Indeed, official UN bodies still refrained even from condemning the genocide. Only in 1985 were bureaucratic inertia and political divides briefly overcome so that a UN investigation could finally be conducted. By then, because it had emerged that the Khmer Rouge had killed huge percentages of Muslim Chams, Buddhist monks, and Vietnamese as such, it proved relatively easy to show that the regime was guilty of genocide against distinct ethnic, national, and religious groups. Once the UN chair of the Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities had thoroughly documented the crimes, the 1985 final report described the atrocities as “the most serious that had occurred anywhere in the world since Nazism.” The subcommission noted that the horrors were carried out against political enemies as well as ethnic and religious minorities but found that this did not disqualify the use of the term “genocide.” Indeed, in the words of Ben Whitaker, the UN special rapporteur on genocide, the KR had carried out genocide “even under the most restricted definition.”¹⁷⁷

Yet nothing changed as a result of the declaration. The Khmer Rouge flag continued to fly outside the United Nations, and KR foreign minister Ieng Sary continued to represent Cambodia at the UN as if the KR terror had never happened. Only with the thawing of the Cold War and the visit of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to former arch-enemy China in May 1989 did Cambodia cease to be a pawn on the superpowers’ chessboard. With the Chinese and the Soviets no longer interested in fighting a proxy war through the KR and the Vietnamese, the United States had no reason to maintain support for the KR. Not until July 1990 did Secretary of State James Baker write a letter to Senate majority leader George Mitchell laying out a new U.S. policy toward the KR at the UN. Henceforth, the United States would vote against the KR coalition at the United Nations and at last support the flow of humanitarian aid into Vietnam and Cambodia.¹⁷⁸ Still, during negotiations in Paris aimed at brokering a peace deal among the rival factions, the United States sided with China and the KR in opposing the word “genocide” in the Paris peace accords. This led to an embarrassing moment in the midst of an all-night negotiation in which, according to U.S. officials present, Prince Sihanouk stood up and said, “I am for genocide, I am for genocide, I am for genocide.” Because the U.S. position again prevailed, the accords referred not to genocide, but to “the universally condemned policies and practices of the past.”¹⁷⁹