Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  On February 2, the Khmer Rouge radio broadcast an official statement by the Khmer insurgent leadership — Khieu Samphan, Hou Youn, and Hu Nim. It was a bloodcurdling diatribe against the United States and the Lon Nol government, insisting on the March 23, 1970, position, and explaining that “the Cambodian nation and people are obliged to continue their struggle against the U.S. aggressors and the traitors Lon Nol, Sirik Matak and Son Ngoc Thanh in order to liberate the people . . .” The statement contemptuously ruled out all negotiation with the “U.S. imperialists,” declaring that “it is necessary to obstruct and oppose their diplomatic maneuvers. . . .”

  These statements were not just propaganda. On February 2, the Khmer Rouge command issued orders that the fighting would continue, that any political negotiations or compromise with the Cambodian government was ruled out, and that Sihanouk was not to engage in negotiations with the Americans or anyone else. In short, by the time I left for my Asian trip in February 1973, the Cambodian Communists had decided on war to the finish.

  So much for the self-flagellation that we were responsible for the failure to negotiate.

  By the time I visited Peking later in February, a measure of congruence between the American and Chinese positions was emerging. As I discussed in Chapter III, Peking was beginning to understand that the domination of Indochina by Hanoi might be an ideological victory but a geopolitical defeat for China, since it would place at China’s southern border a major power drawn to Moscow and with a record of historical enmity. Perhaps China had always understood it but — like many other nations — could not believe that the United States would accept military defeat, much less engineer it. Both of us, in any event, wanted an independent and neutral Cambodia and both of us were moving toward the return of Sihanouk — we hesitantly because we saw no other unifying force, the Chinese with conviction because they considered him their most reliable friend in Cambodia. Both Peking and Washington were convinced that the best solution for Cambodia was some sort of coalition headed by Sihanouk, whose influence would depend on the continued existence of some of the non-Communist forces represented by the Lon Nol government.

  Zhou Enlai picked up the theme when he told me that if Cambodia became completely red “it would result in even greater problems,” meaning that it would doom Sihanouk and assure Hanoi’s hegemony over Indochina. I responded by proposing an immediate meeting between Sihanouk’s Prime Minister Penn Nouth and a representative of Lon Nol. We would not insist on the participation of Lon Nol in a government that might emerge from such a negotiation, I pointed out, so long as the forces he represented were included. Zhou offered to take this proposition to the Cambodians “in our wording,” meaning that he would identify himself to some extent with our position.

  The scene was confused. The Chinese saw the best guarantee of Cambodian independence in Sihanouk. But the Soviet Union continued to recognize Lon Nol — thus transferring the Sino-Soviet rivalry to Cambodia. The irony was that everybody’s estimate of the Cambodians turned out to be wrong; each of the major Communist rivals backed the wrong horse because both overestimated our determination to back the existing structure in Phnom Penh, for without this both the Lon Nol group as well as Sihanouk were doomed. Thus American abdication made the Khmer Rouge the major force, supported by Hanoi logistically, using Sihanouk for a while to give themselves respectability, but ready to turn him out as soon as they felt strong enough to govern alone.

  Our analysis was that the Khmer Rouge would agree to a negotiated settlement only if deprived of hope of a military victory. That the Khmer Rouge had made exactly the same analysis became evident in July. We learned that in the spring of 1973, the executive committee of the Khmer Communist leadership had made a crucial policy decision. It decided to keep open two basic options: total victory or a compromise. The choice between them was to be determined by the military situation in Cambodia later in the year. In the event that military victory was out of reach and a stalemate emerged, the Khmer Rouge would negotiate for the best conditions obtainable. If, on the other hand, the military situation was favorable, negotiations would be avoided and total victory sought. It was thus a contest between our quest for equilibrium and the Khmer Rouge determination to prevail.

  Upon my return from Asia at the end of February I called a series of WSAG meetings. My attitude was summed up by what I told the group on March 28:

  We’ve been meeting here for four years and we’ve been through it all. I’m not looking for alibis from you for losing this whole thing. There are a hundred ways we could make it look good while turning it over to the Communists, but that’s not what we’re here to do.

  If there were officials favoring an elegant collapse of the free Cambodians, they did not speak up at the meetings. One of the participating agencies at the WSAG had indeed sent me a thoughtful analysis of the situation in a memorandum of February 27: Our dilemma was that we seemed to have two mutually dependent objectives in Cambodia. One was to strenghten the present government in Phnom Penh; the other was to achieve a cease-fire — which probably only a strengthened government could accomplish. Yet, reluctant to repeat the Vietnam and Laotian experience in Cambodia, we had deliberately kept our profile there low, and although supplying the Cambodian government with both military and economic aid, we had largely adopted the attitude that it was up to the Cambodians to apply this aid successfully. Also, by Congressional constraints we were limited in the funds and personnel we could apply to the Cambodian problem and prohibited from the use of US military advisers. Thus, we were caught in a vicious circle. We could not achieve a cease-fire without a stronger government in Phnom Penh, and the government could not be strengthened without a more active American policy, which in turn was prevented by legislative restrictions.

  Not unnaturally, the strain began to show in Cambodia. The guerrilla war conducted with unparalleled cruelty by the Khmer Rouge, assisted by the North Vietnamese, drove refugees from the countryside into the cities, especially into Phnom Penh, distorting the social equilibrium of the country. It imposed a war on a Cambodian army that had first been deliberately kept small and ineffective by Sihanouk to discourage any temptation for a coup and then had been deprived of effective training by our legislative restrictions. Assaulted by battle-tested North Vietnamese and ferocious indigenous Communists, the free Cambodians fought with extraordinary bravery that was both made possible and shackled by an American aid program perversely legislated to prevent any decisive success. Lon Nol accepted his unhappy fate with grace and dignity. He took our advice readily (unlike Thieu). But his government showed symptoms of progressive demoralization in factionalism, corruption, and inefficiency.

  The Lon Nol government was in reality Sihanouk’s without the Prince; its institutions and personalities were the leadership groups that had governed Cambodia since independence. As in many authoritarian societies there had always been corruption — under Sihanouk and his family as under his successors. This is partly because in traditional societies the distinction between the private and public sectors tends to be less sharply defined and partly because the insufficient power to tax invites corruption as a means of financing the costs of government. It was perhaps inevitable that Lon Nol should lean increasingly on the few people he trusted, who tended to be his family, especially his younger brother, Lon Non; the latter unfortunately carried corruption and favoritism to new heights beyond what could be explained by sociological analysis. Lon Nol came to be described in the world’s press as paralyzed and arbitrary and Lon Non as the “evil genius.” It resembled a similar drama a decade earlier in Saigon when the Ngo Dinh Diem government began to disintegrate under the impact of Communist guerrilla war, American pressure to reform, and its own inherent rigidities, and Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu was blamed. Diem and Nhu were killed (in an American-encouraged coup) — and the situation almost totally unraveled.

  In Washington, participants at the WSAG proposed that to lay the ground for a negotiated return of Sihanouk we should
persuade Lon Nol to “broaden the base of his government” and indeed to resign. I had, of course, already privately indicated to Zhou Enlai that we were ready for talks on these lines (though, unlike some of my colleagues, I saw the iniquities of the Cambodian government as primarily a symptom of the crisis, not its cause). A scheme was hatched to send Lon Non to military school in the United States and Lon Nol abroad for medical treatment. Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak, perhaps the ablest Cambodian leader (who had been Sihanouk’s Deputy Prime Minister until the 1970 coup), was to become Vice President and acting President during Lon Nol’s absence. In early April, Al Haig visited Phnom Penh to present the scheme. Lon Nol agreed to send his brother into exile and to bring Sirik Matak into the government. We decided to delay Lon Nol’s departure as a bargaining chip for an eventual negotiation.

  Sihanouk gave us no help. It is hard to believe that the Chinese did not indicate to him that in the right circumstances he could go back as head of state. But to make himself more acceptable to the implacable Khmer Rouge, the Prince kept on parroting their insistence on a fight to the finish. Despite his obvious self-interest in Peking’s preferred solution, Sihanouk understood that the Khmer Rouge and Hanoi were determined to block such an outcome. He was too weak to abandon the only base he had — whatever his convictions. Sihanouk repeatedly let it be known that the “interior resistance,” that is to say, the Khmer Rouge, opposed all compromise. On April 19 he said from Hanoi:

  I tell you solemnly that the leaders of the interior will never accept any compromise with the Phnom Penh clique. It is completely illusory for countries like the United States, France or the Soviet Union to count on a compromise solution.

  And on April 28 he again stressed his own irrelevance. “He said,” reported an AFP dispatch,

  that the strategy and tactics of the people’s forces were worked out in Cambodia itself by Khieu Samphan, Deputy Prime Minister of the Cambodian Royal Government of Popular Union and his general staff, and nowhere else.

  As for eventual negotiations between himself and the United States, Prince Sihanouk toughened his position in declaring that even for preliminary contacts before any negotiations the decision rested with the “interior resistance” and not with himself.

  That Sihanouk’s assessment of Khmer Rouge dominance was accurate soon became evident. Sihanouk made a brief visit to the “liberated zone” of Cambodia in March 1973, widely publicized afterward. But the Communists were trying to undermine Sihanouk’s standing in the country even while exploiting his prestige internationally. The Khmer Rouge made every effort to ensure that his prestige would not be reinforced by disseminating what he said within Cambodia. Other reports revealed that the Khmer Rouge were systematically purging pro-Sihanouk elements from their organization and launching a propaganda campaign to discredit him and eliminate all vestiges of his popularity in the countryside.13

  So much for the argument that it was American opposition that prevented the return of Sihanouk to power in Cambodia.

  Our only remaining card was to produce a military stalemate. And to achieve this our sole asset was American air power — advice and training to improve Cambodian military performance and increases in American aid having been precluded by our legislation. Part of the new Cambodia guilt-shifting myth is that our bombing was indiscriminate, that it produced monstrous civilian casualties, and that the “punishment” we inflicted on the Khmer Rouge turned them from ordinary guerrillas into genocidal maniacs driven by “Manichean fear.”14 The reality is otherwise.

  Ambassador Emory C. Swank, often critical of our policy, and his deputy Thomas O. Enders, have set out the facts about the bombing in a document submitted to the Historical Division of the Department of State. (The document is in the Appendix. The analysis here follows their account.) On January 27, 1973, when the Cambodian government unilaterally halted offensive military actions in the hope of achieving a cease-fire, American tactical air and B-52 operations also stood down. The bombing was to be resumed only if the Khmer Rouge insisted on continued hostilities, and only at the request of the Cambodian government.

  These conditions were unfortunately fulfilled early in February 1973. The Khmer Rouge answered the cease-fire appeal by launching an offensive; the North Vietnamese refused to withdraw their forces and continued to give logistical and occasional rocket and artillery support to their Cambodian allies. The United States had to respond or face the collapse of free Cambodia — and probably South Vietnam as well. American air operations were resumed, as Swank and Enders demonstrate, through regular channels (not, as some hyperactive imaginations would have it, through clandestine procedures devised by me in my Bangkok meeting with Swank in February behind the back of Secretary of State Rogers).15

  The accusation that B-52 operations were conducted sloppily, with large-scale and out-of-date maps in the US Embassy, turns out to be a canard as well. In fact, the targeting was controlled by the Seventh Air Force, which relied on up-to-date photography, precision radar, and infrared sensors and conducted reconnaissance both before and after every strike. Our air operations were subject to careful rules of engagement that prohibited the use of B-52s against targets closer than one kilometer to friendly forces, villages, hamlets, houses, monuments, temples, pagodas, or holy places. These rules were observed. There were tragic accidents — only two serious ones, Swank and Enders note — but they hardly amounted to systematic bombing of civilians. On a number of occasions the Seventh Air Force turned down Cambodian requests for strikes because our reconnaissance showed risks to the civilian population that we were unwilling to take.

  Today it is clear that the Communist Khmer Rouge, not the Americans or Sihanouk, were the obstacle to peace in Cambodia. My repeated, vain efforts in 1972 and 1973 to extract a commitment from Le Duc Tho for a cease-fire or political settlement ran into Hanoi’s plea, probably truthful, that it had little influence over Khmer Rouge decisions. Indeed, the Khmer Rouge bitterly denounced Hanoi for signing the Paris Agreement; they saw the Vietnam settlement as a betrayal, and not only because they thought it allowed us to shift the brunt of our military operations to Cambodia. In a document published after they came into power, they admitted that they resisted all pressures for a cease-fire because “if the Kampuchean revolution had accepted a ceasefire it would have collapsed.”16 Later they blocked a settlement because they were bent on total victory.

  The myth that Khmer Rouge brutality was the result of our bombing may fulfill some masochistic imperatives; it, too, does not stand up to serious analysis. Not only is there no evidence for it; what evidence there is suggests something completely different. As early as 1971 or 1972, the Khmer Rouge were carrying out deliberately, in all areas of Cambodia they controlled, the same totalitarian practices that horrified the world when applied to Phnom Penh after their victory in 1975. The forced uprooting and dispersal of village populations; destruction of traditional local social organization, religious practices, and family structures; forced collectivization of agriculture; deliberate liquidation of the middle class as an obstacle to a “new society”; and the systematic terror of the Communist police state — all these features of the post-1975 holocaust in Cambodia were in evidence in Khmer Rouge-controlled areas for several years before 1975. They represented deliberate policy, founded in ideological fanaticism.

  A French priest who worked in Cambodia until the end, and who has written perhaps the best account of Cambodia’s tragedy, called it “a perfect example of the application of an ideology pushed to the furthest limit of its internal logic.” And he states flatly that it was “traditional revolutionary practice” dating back at least to 1972.17 Another expert analyst, who interviewed hundreds of Cambodian refugees in South Vietnam from 1972 to 1974, methodically sketches the outline of a brutal program of social transformation — “everything that had preceded it was anathema and must be destroyed” — and points out that the process “actually began in some parts of the country as early as late 1971.”18 It was not American b
ombing that produced the flood of refugees and the horror of Cambodia. It was a demonic ideology, ruthlessly applied.

  We had no more fervent desire in the summer of 1973 than to end the Cambodian war. Both the broadening of the Phnom Penh government and the intensification of the bombing were only means to prompt resumption of negotiation. Sihanouk’s public remarks, unfortunately, continued virulently negative about its prospects. On April 13, after returning from his visit to the “liberated zone” in Cambodia, undoubtedly reflecting what he had been told by the Khmer Rouge inside Cambodia, Sihanouk told a press conference in Peking that he would “never accept a cease-fire nor compromise.”

  This news of current Khmer Rouge policy could not have been entirely welcome to his Chinese hosts. They knew that a total Khmer Rouge victory would ruin the viability of their carefully nurtured Sihanouk card and guarantee Hanoi’s domination of Indochina. China doubtless also calculated that we would not permit a total defeat of the forces with which we had been associated. A continuation of the war would therefore increase Peking’s foreign policy problems without altering the outcome. At a minimum it would delay the rapprochement with the United States that my February 1973 visit had shown was a principal objective of Chinese policy.

  Zhou Enlai tried to cut through these perplexities — at first a bit too obliquely for us to grasp. He used the occasion of Sihanouk’s return to Peking to articulate Chinese preferences. At a state banquet for Sihanouk on April 11, Zhou condemned the United States for continuing its “wanton bombing” in Cambodia and its support for the “traitorous Lon Nol clique.” An authoritative editorial in the People’s Daily gave added emphasis to Zhou’s observations; the Prince’s visit to the “liberated zone,” it argued, showed that he was “the legitimate ruler of Cambodia.” In our anger at one of Zhou’s rare public statements critical of us, we overlooked the thrust of his remarks: China’s emphatic backing for Sihanouk as Cambodian head of government. According to Zhou, Sihanouk’s visit to Cambodia had proved what the Khmer Rouge, as noted earlier, had sought to deny: that Sihanouk was “beloved and supported by the Cambodian people.”