Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land

by Joel Brinkley

  No one knew exactly what to expect from the Khmer Rouge. Its leadership remained a mystery; the movement had never explained its intentions. Quinn’s prescient airgram had no impact, and in the meantime Sihanouk sent several U.S. senators a letter in which he predicted that the Khmer Rouge, his allies, planned to set up “a Swedish type of kingdom.”

  On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge army marched into Phnom Penh. Over the next few frantic days, journalists covered what they saw before they were forced to leave. They watched, astounded, as Khmer Rouge soldiers, young peasants from the provinces, mostly uneducated teenage boys who had never been in a city before, swept through town. For them, Phnom Penh offered many mysteries. The boys didn’t know what to make of telephones, or toilets. But they set to their job right away, evacuating Phnom Penh, forcing all of its residents, at gunpoint, to leave behind everything they owned and march toward the countryside. Hospital patients still in their white gowns stumbled along carrying their IV bottles. Screaming children ran in desperate search for their parents.

  Yet while the mass evacuation of 3 million people was stupefying, the foreign correspondents saw little bloodshed before they were deported. And that is about all the world knew of the new Khmer Rouge government. Some writers and analysts saw this as the beginning of a horror show. Others believed they were witnessing the early days of a new, utopian society.

  Charles Twining, a thirty-three-year-old State Department officer, couldn’t have been more excited about his new assignment: political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh. In 1974 he had left a foreign-service posting in Africa to spend a year at the Foreign Service Institute in Washington, learning to speak Khmer. He was supposed to take up his new post in June 1975. But then, of course, in April the United States lost its embassy in Phnom Penh. After that no one in Washington professed to know what was going on inside Cambodia. So the State Department assigned Twining to be America’s “Cambodia watcher,” as they called the position, and sent him to Bangkok.

  When he arrived at the end of June 1975, he was quite familiar with the debate. “With the fall of Cambodia, we all knew the accounts about the evacuation of Phnom Penh, and I believed them,” he said. “But did anyone have a good grasp on the situation in the other cities at the time? Hardly.”

  So Twining set out to find the truth. He drove out to Aranyaprathet, the tiny, primitive Thai town that sat right on the Cambodian border. He was a careful young man, not given to quick flights of judgment. He knew his audience for what they were: hidebound bureaucrats in Washington. Nixon had resigned from office, and, in theory, the State Department no longer had to tailor its policy judgments so that they conformed to Washington’s convoluted explanations for its policies in Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia. The Vietnam War was over; the American troops were gone. But even so, the men who had made those judgments about the war and staked their careers on them still sat in the big chairs at the department. President Gerald Ford had been Nixon’s vice president, after all. Ford was not making wholesale changes in staffing at State or anywhere else. Kissinger was still secretary of state. Twining also knew that the general public in the United States wanted nothing to do with Southeast Asia. Whatever he found, whatever he wrote, he knew he would face a tough audience.

  At the border he found a few like-minded investigators. “I and a few other diplomats and journalists who had left Phnom Penh had gathered in Bangkok. During the summer of 1975, we were all trying to figure out what was happening, with no one having very much hard information. There was a lot of comparing of notes, almost a case of the blind leading the blind.”

  In one of his first airgrams back to Washington that summer, he simply summarized the reigning points of view, since he was not ready to form his own. The journalists and others “can be divided roughly into hardliners and softliners. The hardliners believe Cambodia has been going through a considerable bloodbath whose end is not yet in sight. The softliners reject this theory, stating that, although there are undeniable reports of atrocities being committed in some parts of the country, these should not be permitted to form” a conclusion. Later, when Twining heard his first atrocity accounts, he too didn’t know what to make of them. The killing and mayhem were “so tinged with chaos that the reality was hard to decipher.”

  In Washington, meanwhile, the State Department had another problem—eighty-one Cambodian military officers were studying in the United States under the Pentagon’s Military Assistance Program. On April 17, 1975, the department’s consular division canceled their student visas. The Lon Nol government had sent them to the United States for training. But that government no longer existed. Suddenly, all of these men were classified as refugees.

  Almost to a man, they wanted to go home. “Everyone wanted to go back,” said Bay Sarit, who was a lieutenant colonel in Lon Nol’s army, stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, for fourteen months of training. He and his colleagues had heard the rumors of mass killings. “But we kept saying, ‘Cambodians are not going to kill other Cambodians.’ We just couldn’t believe that. The government had just fallen. Maybe they’d kill a couple of high-ranking people. But that’s all. The others were saying. ‘We need to go back and fight!’ I asked them, ‘Fight who?’ We were confused. We didn’t know what to do.”

  In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge quickly assigned Bay Sarit’s wife, Bay Sophany, to a work detail, “breaking rocks for a road.” She knew where her husband was, but she also realized that if the Khmer Rouge caught her carrying anything written, proving education and literacy—or, worse still, some connection to Lon Nol’s army—she’d have been executed. So “I wrote it on my upper thigh: ‘Fort Benning Georgia.’ They wouldn’t look there. When it wore off, I wrote it again,” so she would not forget.

  The State Department had no idea how to deal with those officers. So they contracted the problem out. They hired a refugee assistance group to take care of the Cambodians until Washington figured out what to do with them. Cindy Coleman, who had a long and distinguished record of work with refugees, was named project director. By the fall of 1975, “the group was getting restive,” Coleman said. “They had wives and family back home. They were threatening to kill themselves if they were not sent back.”

  The department told them they had to wait a few months until they could find a solution. Washington had no diplomatic relations with the new Cambodian regime. In the meantime, in the fall of 1975 all of the military officers, plus three dozen other Cambodian refugees who had somehow managed to make it to the United States, 114 Cambodians in all, were herded to Philadelphia and given quarters in a downtown YMCA. They still clamored about going home, Coleman said, “but none of us knew what was really going on in Cambodia.”

  On the Thai-Cambodian border, Twining knew he had to be careful. The people he was interviewing were just refugees, after all, and given the mind-set back at State, their views did not count for much. Through the summer and fall of 1975, his reports were factual, even anodyne. “Life in Cambodia is undoubtedly very harsh, particularly for urban dwellers suddenly yanked out of their relatively comfortable surroundings,” he wrote in an airgram dated August 25, 1975. Food is scarce, but after talking to people from Koh Kong Province, in southwestern Cambodia, “one concludes that, in that province at least, it is possible to survive.”

  By December, nine months after the fall of Phnom Penh, Twining was beginning to hear stories so terrible he wasn’t sure he believed them. Two Cambodians who had worked for the Catholic Relief Service in Phnom Penh before the Khmer Rouge came to power made it to the border. Their observations, Twining wrote, “are the best we have heard in recent months.” The two told him about a village work camp in Sisphon, in the Northwest. “New arrivals,” the former CRS worker said, “were strictly separated by sex in both the fields and at night. Sexual relations or talk of marriage was punished by public execution, the two claimed. As justification, the Khmer Communists said everyone must devote himself to strengthening the economy instead of thinking
of raising a family. The death rate among children was extremely high. On the worst day, 30 died, primarily of malaria, and they were buried in a common grave. With a general shortage of food, stealing food was punished with public execution, usually by rifle or pistol.”

  Over the following months his reports grew darker. Twining began to think, “This can’t be possible in this day and age. This is not 1942. This is 1975.” Across the country, he wrote, work hours were long, typically from 5:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. In Siem Reap, “one hears regularly that people are hooked up to plows” since most oxen and other farm animals had already starved to death. Executions were commonplace; freedom was nonexistent. “As 1975 advanced and continued into 1976,” he wrote in March 1976, “an increasing number of Cambodian farmers” are “complaining that the amount of work they were forced to do, with little food to eat, was inhuman.”

  Twining’s reports went straight to the State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs—the same bureau that was trying to decide what to do with the 114 Cambodians in Philadelphia. Into 1976 the bureau was “telling us they didn’t have any hard information on Cambodia,” Coleman said.

  Meanwhile, at the YMCA, the refugees quickly fell into a classic Cambodian hierarchical structure. The senior officers demanded their own desks in the project office. Junior officers would not tell Coleman even what they wanted for lunch without asking their supervisors. And so the civilians, most of them illiterate rice farmers, “spent a lot of time looking confused.” But all of them still wanted to go home.

  State Department officials were telling Coleman she should try to encourage them to stay in the United States, “but they weren’t saying that out loud” to the refugees, Coleman said—nor were they saying what they knew about conditions there. “We would dangle out the possibility” of staying, “but that always brought resounding boos. One of the guys told me he would self-immolate if he couldn’t go home.” Coleman wanted them to stay—“I grew close to these guys,” she said. But neither she nor her clients really knew what awaited them if they went back home.

  With every passing month, Twining’s reports were growing more dire. On March 31 he wrote that Cambodia offered “a Spartan, miserable existence for people constantly living in fear, under strict control. Disease and executions have become commonplace.... Usually people are taken quietly outside a village, often on some pretext, and killed. The rest of the family will often be led away separately to die.”

  In April the State Department helped the refugees find a way to fly home, through Paris. The group’s commanding officer, Maj. Kim Phuoc Tung, stepped out the day before he left to buy himself a new suit. When he came back to the YMCA, resplendent in his new outfit, Coleman told him, “You’re going to look great in the rice paddy.” He just smiled and said, “I have a wife and four children at home.”

  The last of the refugees boarded a plane for Paris, and then on to Phnom Penh, on April 16, 1976. Coleman hugged each one and cried. Some called her from Paris, in between planes. On the phone she started to cry again and pleaded with them, “Don’t go. Don’t go!” That day she vowed to find out what happened to each one of them. That became her crusade.

  In the fall of 1976 Representative Stephen Solarz, a first-term congressman from New York, was visiting Thailand with eight of his House colleagues. It was one of his first “codels,” as congressional delegations abroad are known. Solarz and the others were members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and their role on the codel was to attend meetings with government officials and others. But Solarz had another aim: He wanted to go to the Cambodian border and talk to refugees. “Of course, we knew about Lon Nol and the triumph of Khmer Rouge,” Solarz said. “We knew that they had evacuated Phnom Penh and other cities. But that’s about all we knew.”

  That wasn’t entirely true—Twining had been sending refugee reports to the State Department for almost eighteen months. As he learned more, the tenor of them grew ever more gruesome and alarming. People were being fed only thin rice gruel, mostly water, maybe with some banana leaves mixed in, he wrote. Thousands were dying of disease and starvation. “Refugees told stories of people simply collapsing and dying while working in a field.” But Solarz had seen none of these reports. Neither had anyone else outside the administration.

  One afternoon, an American Embassy officer led Solarz up to Twining’s office. The congressman told Twining what he wanted to do, and the next day they drove to Aranyaprathet. None of the other congressmen wanted to go; the drive was long, hot, and uncomfortable. And who really cared? Of all of them, why was Solarz alone so interested in this?

  Explaining his motivations years later, sitting in his study at home, Solarz simply smiled and waved his hand toward a bookshelf on a far wall. There, almost from floor to ceiling, was his vast library on Hitler, Stalin, and the Holocaust—perhaps every English-language book that had ever been published. Cambodia, he said, “looked to me like another Holocaust.” It also happened that Solarz’s congressional district, in New York, was home to more Holocaust survivors than any other in the nation.

  Twining knew just where to take Solarz. Together, they walked through a teeming refugee camp. The congressman was appalled. “There were eight to ten thousand people there—wretched, desperate. I heard incredible stories. For example, they killed everyone who had eyeglasses. Monks, they killed them by putting plastic bags over their heads.” And he heard the infamous Khmer Rouge slogan, the justification for each killing: “Keeping you is no profit; losing you is no loss.” Right next to Solarz, as he was recalling this venture, on the side table beside his armchair, sat the book Surviving Treblinka. A bookmark suggested he had already read more than half of it. “This was my first direct encounter with anything like this, and it immediately evoked impressions of what happened to the Jews. It resonated with me as a great moral challenge.”

  Back in Washington, Solarz managed to convince a colleague to stage a congressional hearing on the situation in Cambodia. Unfortunately, with the ‘76 election fast approaching and other more important congressional priorities (and in truth, to most members of Congress almost anything was more important), the hearing was not held until July 1977.

  Twining testified. In his most recent report from the field he had written about a malaria epidemic that was killing hundreds if not thousands of people, largely because the Khmer Rouge had no medicine. Medical aides were injecting patients with Pepsi or coconut milk. Speaking to the subcommittee, Twining said, “Most reports are that executions continue,” but now “the number who are dying from disease or malnutrition is greater than from executions.”

  Richard Holbrooke, the assistant secretary of state and Twining’s boss, was more direct—the first time a senior government official had spoken out. “Some journalists and scholars guess that between half a million and 1.2 million have died since 1975,” Holbrooke said, but he was unable to confirm that or any other number. Nonetheless, Holbrooke did say, “Based on all the evidence available to us, we have concluded that Cambodian authorities have flagrantly and systemically violated the most basic human rights. They have ordered or permitted extensive killings, forcibly relocated the urban population, brutally treated supporters of the previous government, and suppressed personal and political freedoms. My guess,” Holbrooke added, “is that for every person executed, several have died of disease or malnutrition or other factors, which were avoidable if the government itself had not followed this kind of policy, which seeks to completely transform a society by applying purely draconian measures.”

  This was mid-1977. The Khmer Rouge had been in power for more than two years. Twining had filed hundreds of pages of refugee accounts. Journalists had by now written dozens of stories offering the same refugee testimony along with other reporting. Two important books offering even more detailed accounts were in bookstores; one of them was even excerpted in Reader’s Digest.

  Jimmy Carter was now president, and for the first time in American history, his administrati
on had made human rights a central tenet of his foreign policy. Even so, the United States was still unwilling to accept as a probable fact that the Khmer Rouge were guilty of crimes against humanity. One reason was the loud, public declarations of people like Gareth Porter, codirector of an independent organization called the Indochina Resource Center in Washington. Porter was also invited to testify at that congressional hearing. Given the willful uncertainty that prevailed at the time, the subcommittee believed that, to be fair, he should be heard, too.

  At that time, Porter was one of the most prominent Khmer Rouge champions in the United States. In Europe, meantime, Khmer Rouge apologists easily outnumbered those who believed a tragedy was under way. These people had been vociferous opponents of the Vietnam War—particularly the bombing of Cambodia. One certainty united most of them. The bombing, more than anything else, had inevitably led to the state of affairs in Cambodia. And to them, whatever the U.S. government had to say now was per force a lie. If the regime in Phnom Penh was anti-American, it could only be worthy of admiration.

  The climate of distrust surrounding the Vietnam War had spread to Cambodia. Porter later explained that as a student journalist, “I uncovered a series of instances when government officials were propagandizing” on the Vietnam War. “They were lying.” If government officials had been so dishonest about Vietnam, why should anyone believe anything they had to say about Cambodia?

  Elsewhere at the time, Porter claimed in public that Twining and others in the Bangkok embassy “had predicted that millions of people would starve to death once the United States pulled out of Cambodia. When the regime clearly averted mass starvation, these people would have lost face. So they created the genocide claim.” At about this time, Ieng Sary, Cambodia’s foreign minister, told an Italian interviewer that “the Khmer revolution has no precedents,” and those who claimed that Cambodia had executed hundreds of thousands of people “are crazy. Only hardened criminals have been sentenced.”