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

by Joel Brinkley

  Before the subcommittee Porter said simply that it was “a myth that between 1 million and 2 million Cambodians have been the victims of a regime led by genocidal maniacs.” This falsehood, he added, grew out of self-serving government statements and irresponsible reporting in recent newspaper articles and books.2

  A few weeks earlier Noam Chomsky, an author and academic, offered an article in the Nation that conflated the American bombing and the Khmer Rouge horrors and made the same broad argument as the other apologists. He cited “highly qualified specialists” whom he did not name, but “who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands.” He also claimed that “these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing. These reports also emphasize both the extraordinary brutality on both sides during the civil war (provoked by the American attacks) and repeated discoveries that massacre reports were false. They also testify to the extreme unreliability of refugee reports, and the need to treat them with great caution.”

  Reflecting on the hearing, Twining said, “It was easy to tell them what I knew but impossible to tell them what to do about it. I felt helpless.” Despite Porter’s testimony, Solarz said the hearing had helped him convince the House to pass a resolution “calling on the Carter administration to coordinate with other nations to free the Cambodian people. But of course it had no effect.”

  In February 1978, almost three years into the reign of the Khmer Rouge, the Washington Post’s Lewis Simons wrote a news analysis summing up his experience as a Southeast Asia correspondent. He conceded, first of all, that neither he nor anyone else really knew what was happening in Cambodia. If that is so, he wrote, “Why do most Americans assume that the Cambodian Communists run the most brutal regime since the Nazis? Is the answer, as the Cambodians and their tiny handful of foreign friends allege, that Western governments and news media are guilty of ‘distortions and wild fabrications?’” Not necessarily, he concluded. But in that case, “Why is it that the United States, with its vast intelligence network, should know so little about events in Cambodia? The answer seems to be that Cambodia no longer counts for anything in the U.S. scheme of things. At least that’s what the officials say. ‘All of Indochina, as an intelligence target, is of very, very low priority now. And Cambodia is so low as to be almost nonexistent,’ said one official.”

  Nobody knew, nobody cared. Less than a year later, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and deposed the Khmer Rouge regime, Washington demonstrated that same indifference in spades.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Khmer Rouge, like most Cambodians, hated the Vietnamese. And from the beginning of their reign the two states had skirmished along the border. Finally, by the end of 1978, Vietnam had had enough. Thousands of troops poured over the border, and in short order they deposed the Khmer Rouge.

  Millions of Cambodians quietly cheered as their historical enemy swept through the nation. Three years, eight months, and twenty days after they seized power, the Khmer Rouge slipped furtively into the night. For decades to come, Cambodians, with little prompting, would affirm that the Vietnamese saved their lives.

  Skeletal, sick, and traumatized, hundreds of thousands stumbled toward Thailand for sanctuary, eating leaves, roots, and bugs along the way. Many died of starvation en route, or stepped on land mines, for Khmer Rouge soldiers had laid mines almost everywhere along the western border, to prevent their victims from fleeing. Those who made it to Thailand brought malaria, typhoid, cholera, and a host of other illnesses into the camps. Human-rights groups estimated that about 650,000 more people died in the year following the fall of the Khmer Rouge.

  Waiting for the refugees in Aranyaprathet was Cindy Coleman. “As soon as the country opened up, I went,” she said. She arrived in February, just a few weeks after the Khmer Rouge fell from power, armed with photos of the former military officers she had cared for. She stayed in that hotel with an empty lock hasp on the door and a straw mattress for a bed. “It was my first encounter with a Thai toilet,” she said, laughing. “A hole in the floor and a bucket of water.”

  For three weeks she and an embassy aide who helped her wandered around the camps, searching. “We followed Thai relief trucks around,” she said. “The Cambodians were parked in open fields. They still wore their black uniforms and red scarves. All of them. They were undernourished, very thin. No expressions on their faces, just dead-eyed stares. Their clothes were soiled. I passed around pictures. I also put up pictures on bulletin boards set up in Aranya. The boards were already full of pictures and letters. Lots of people were doing what I was doing. I showed the pictures to aid workers in camps—to anybody.” But “not a soul” had seen or heard of her men.

  The fighting continued for several months and prevented farmers from harvesting their rice. The timing could not have been worse—a famine on top of three and one-half years of starvation. If Charles Twining’s airgrams had gotten little circulation, now news reporting from the border exploded. Only people who willfully closed their eyes and ears could have pretended not to know of the Khmer Rouge horrors. President Jimmy Carter called the Khmer Rouge “the world’s worst human rights violators,” something of an understatement. Yet in response to the Vietnamese invasion, the White House merely slapped more sanctions on Vietnam. Nothing was done for the 5 million Khmer Rouge victims, most of whom still had no food. And then Carter’s focus, and much of the world’s, quickly turned away.

  In July 1979 tens of thousands of Vietnamese “boat people” fled their nation. For Americans this was in some ways pleasing news. By the thousands citizens were running from America’s enemy, the Vietnamese Communists. So the boat people monopolized news coverage from the region.

  Then, on November 4, 1979, students seized the American Embassy in Tehran and took about fifty Americans captive, setting off the Iranian hostage crisis that captivated the world for more than a year. The next month the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. As the United States slouched into the 1980 presidential campaign, the American hostages in Iran were the primary foreign-policy subject of debate. Cambodia was effectively invisible.

  In January 1979 the Vietnamese discovered Tuol Sleng, a former high school in central Phnom Penh that the Khmer Rouge had turned into a torture and death house. Vietnamese journalists and soldiers first walked in to find rotting corpses still in shackles. Gruesome torture implements lay about, and in an outbuilding the soldiers found thousands of pages of records, including photographs of the victims. At least 15,000 Cambodians had been taken there, tortured until they confessed to being an enemy agent, and then killed—whacked on the back of the head with an iron pole.

  That and all of the other evidence of the Khmer Rouge horror received wide public attention.3 But for most people in Washington the news from Cambodia wasn’t the Khmer Rouge’s crimes against humanity. No, American officials seemed capable of hearing only one thing: Vietnam, the United States’ bitter enemy, had conquered Cambodia. Did the Communist soldiers make up or exaggerate the Tuol Sleng business to justify their invasion? Would Vietnam invade Thailand next? Was the domino theory actually in play?

  At a White House press conference, President Carter issued a warning “to both the Vietnamese and the Soviets who supply them” not to carry the fight into Thailand. In the following months, however, Vietnamese troops did spill over into Thailand more than once, chasing Khmer Rouge fighters. America had lost the Vietnam War. Were the worst fears of the politicians who started it now coming true?

  Soon, the United Nations had to decide who would occupy Cambodia’s seat at the UN then held by the Khmer Rouge. As with all UN debates, the United States had an outsized voice. Would the deposed Khmer Rouge regime keep the seat, or would the UN give it to the puppet government Vietnam had installed in Phnom Penh? Here were a rock and a hard place: Recognize
a genocidal former government—or a Communist nation, an ally of the Soviet Union, and the only state that had ever won a war against the United States. “Thug number one, or thug number two,” as one senior State Department official put it then.

  Surprisingly, the United Nations chose to reseat the Khmer Rouge instead of “those puppets,” as Washington referred to the government in Phnom Penh. To the State Department, giving a seat to Vietnam’s government was effectively giving Moscow another vote in the General Assembly. And although the Khmer Rouge were butchers, they were out of power now, living in the jungle—and allied with China, Washington’s new friend.

  Washington’s policy was even more cynical than the UN’s. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security adviser, told journalist and author Elizabeth Becker, “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot.” He “was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could”—and so they did, for the next thirteen years.

  After the UN vote, Robert Rosenstock, the lawyer who represented the United States on the UN Credentials Committee, found himself shaking hands with Ieng Sary, the former Khmer Rouge foreign minister. The man was beaming with gratitude. Rosenstock wanted to go wash his hands. “I realized enough at the time to feel there was something disgusting about shaking Ieng Sary’s hand,” he told author Samantha Powers. Khieu Samphan, the Khmer Rouge premier, said: “We thank the U.S. warmly.”

  When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, he resolutely refused to recognize Cambodia’s quisling government. UN aid agencies were forbidden to set foot in Cambodia. No one was to have anything to do with the stooges Hanoi had installed in Phnom Penh. As for the Cambodian people, victims of genocide and famine, well, no one spent much if any time thinking about them.4

  Vietnam appointed Heng Samrin, a longtime member of the Cambodian Communist Party, as prime minister. He had served as a Khmer Rouge division commander. Like many Khmer Rouge officers, Heng had feared Pol Pot would turn on him, so he deserted to Vietnam. In 1978 the Vietnamese military had chosen him to command a small group of Khmer Rouge deserters who would “lead” the invasion of Cambodia, to give it an indigenous face.

  Once in office, Heng Samrin and the government’s other leaders took direction from Hanoi. Vietnamese administrators sat in every government ministry and provincial office, and they worked to remake Cambodia as a Marxist-Leninist state. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the schools. Vietnam renovated existing schools and built some new ones, hanging pictures of Heng Samrin, Joseph Stalin, and Ho Chi Minh in the classrooms. The curriculum included mandatory courses on socialist solidarity and economic theory as well as Marxism-Leninism. Students were told they were being taught to be useful “new socialist workers.”

  None of this should have been a great leap for the government in Phnom Penh. Its leaders were former Khmer Rouge officers, and the Khmer Rouge was, after all, the unofficial name for the Communist Party of Cambodia. So is it any wonder that the Reagan administration disparaged this government, a proxy of Vietnam, a nation that was itself a proxy of the Soviet Union, President Reagan’s “evil empire”?

  In 1985 Heng Samrin stepped aside, and in his place Vietnam installed Hun Sen, a wily thirty-three-year-old former Khmer Rouge division commander. He had joined the Khmer Rouge cause in 1970, after he heard Prince Sihanouk on the radio urging Cambodians to enlist so they could fight Lon Nol. In 1977, when the Khmer Rouge leadership appeared to be turning on him, he fled to Vietnam. There, he became an officer of the small indigenous military force the Vietnamese sent across the border in late 1978. Since the Vietnamese occupation he had been serving as foreign minister.

  In Washington Solarz found himself one of the only members of the U.S. government who spent any time thinking about the true victims, the Cambodian people. His worst fear, a new Holocaust, had actually come true. He pushed the Reagan administration to admit thousands of Cambodians as refugees, then sponsored a bill to provide aid to what he and others called “the noncommunist resistance” in Cambodia—two small military forces in the countryside aligned with Sihanouk. Unless Hun Sen and his Communist cohorts were thrown from office, Solarz realized, the United States could not send aid to the long-suffering Cambodian people.

  Hun Sen became the focal point of Washington’s ire, the Communist stooge in Phnom Penh who did Vietnam’s bidding. “I thought of him, basically, as a thug,” Solarz said. But Richard Bush, a senior aid to Solarz, noted that his boss looked at the situation through a different prism. While the rest of Washington saw Hun Sen and the others as Communist puppets of Vietnam, “Steve was concerned that the Cambodian people were being ruled by former Khmer Rouge leaders.”

  Over time charges made the rounds that some of the American aid, $215 million so far, was finding its way to the Khmer Rouge. Congress demanded an investigation, and Tom Fingar, who was in charge of the relevant division in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, dispatched investigators to have a look. Sure enough, they found some leakage—including sharing of ammunition, joint defense of a bridge, and using one truck to transport both “noncommunist” and Khmer Rouge fighters to a fight. But Fingar saw this whole enterprise as a typical Washington fury about nothing, an “epi-phenomenon in a flea circus.” His investigators, he said, “were trying to sort out exactly what was happening,” while he and others “were also asking: Isn’t the larger objective here defeating the Vietnamese puppets in Phnom Penh? Why are we providing aid? Isn’t it to defeat Hun Sen?”

  Cambodia was stuck in a mire, occupied by its mortal enemy, represented before the United Nations and the world by its former genocidal government, governed by Communist dictators despised in the West, locked out of any significant assistance or aid. Cambodia had 7.7 million people in April 1975. Left when the Khmer Rouge fell from power were fewer than 5 million of them, and they were hungry, sick, and alone.

  At the time nobody in Cambodia understood the import of what was happening, but the first hint of a break came in March 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow. The Soviet Union was broke, and almost right away Gorbachev cut aid to many of the nation’s allies, including Vietnam. Without that aid Vietnam was in trouble—so much so that the next year the Sixth Party Congress took a radical step. It launched a program called Doi Moi, or economic renovation, an attempt to introduce a free-market economy, to “free the entrepreneurial spirit in Vietnam,” the Party Congress said. Over time that decision worked miracles for Vietnam’s economy. But it would take years, and in the meantime Vietnam was forced to reassess its own foreign adventures. The government was overstretched. Loath as they were to do it, in 1988 and 1989 the Vietnamese army withdrew from Cambodia—leaving Hun Sen’s puppet Communist government in charge.

  This was at least partly expected. For years, anticipating Vietnam’s eventual withdrawal, Australia, Indonesia, and Japan, among others, had been holding occasional informal meetings in Jakarta in search of a compromise that could break the stalemate between the four competing Cambodian factions—the Hun Sen government; the Khmer Rouge; the royalist guerrilla group led by Prince Norodom Ranariddh, Sihanouk’s son; and another led by Son Sann, an aging politician who had once been foreign minister when Sihanouk was king.

  None of that amounted to much. But the Vietnamese withdrawal changed everything. All of a sudden, people began to ask: With the Vietnamese army gone, what’s to stop the Khmer Rouge from marching back into Phnom Penh?

  Mey Meakk was Pol Pot’s personal secretary. He took notes at Brother No. 1’s staff meetings, typed his memos and directives, broadcast his messages on Khmer Rouge radio. As he tells it, the man who ordered the murders of 2 million of his countrymen was living quite comfortably in the jungles of northeastern Cambodia. “He had a lot of money,” Mey Meakk said, and photos of that time showed Pol Pot growing fat.

  Henry Kamm, a New York Times reporter and author, visited him and wrote of the accommodations Pol Pot offered. “The Khmer Rouge guest house was the very latest in jungle luxury. It w
as clearly modeled on the sumptuous hunting lodges to which French planters of the past invited guests for weekend shoots. ... Plates of fruit brought from Bangkok were renewed each day. The best Thai beer, Johnny Walker Black Label scotch, American soft drinks and Thai bottled water was served.”

  The Khmer Rouge leadership was besotted with copious aid from China, plus their men were cutting down vast forests and selling the tropical wood to Thai generals at the border. But when it was clear that the Vietnamese had truly pulled out, Pol Pot roused himself. “He wanted to take advantage of the situation and retake Phnom Penh by the end of 1989,” Mey Meakk said. “He wanted to prepare the troops, aggressively organize.” But his commanders resisted. “The troops were very tired. Some of them had been fighting for 20 years. The commanders were tired, too. They offered no encouragement. They didn’t want to do it.” So Pol Pot dropped that idea. But no one in the West knew that.

  The French government appeared to be particularly excited about the Khmer Rouge threat. As the months passed, Paris issued increasingly urgent warnings. “But my impression was that the French motivation was the belief that they could engineer a renaissance of their role in Southeast Asia,” said Quinn, who was then the deputy assistant secretary of state for the region. That was the common view at Foggy Bottom. His boss, Richard Solomon, the assistant secretary of state, was one of several State Department officials who remarked that “the French were said to be rummaging around in government warehouses, looking for Sihanouk’s throne.” France invited all the players to a conference on Cambodia, in Paris, during August 1989. The French spared no expense and hosted the event at the Kleber International Conference Center, an elegant venue. American delegates marveled at the dramatic mirrored bathrooms.