by John Pilger
Pol Pot’s public face, Khieu Samphan – who was his president during the genocide, and who in pinstriped suit has since smiled his way around the world at the ‘peace conferences’ that have been crucial to the tactic of delay – dropped in on one of these briefing sessions. ‘I am so busy I have no time to eat,’ he said, ‘because the outside world keeps demanding a political end to the war in Kampuchea. I could end the war now if I wanted, because the outside world is waiting for me, but I am buying time to give you comrades the opportunity to carry out all your [military] tasks.’
At this point Pol Pot interrupted and said that ‘to end the war politically’ would make his ‘movement fade away’ and ‘we must prevent this from happening. . . . We shall push a liberal capitalist line,’ he said, ‘but we are not changing our true nature.’6
This ‘true nature’ was demonstrated during Pol Pot’s reign when, in pursuit of a ‘pure, agrarian nation’, he wiped out more than a million-and-a-half people, including 15 per cent of the rural population whose interests he glorified.7 The Khmer Rouge slogan was: ‘Preserve them – no profit. Exterminate them – no loss. We will burn the old grass and the new will grow.’ When Khieu Samphan was asked what ‘mistakes’ the Khmer Rouge had made, he replied, ‘We were too slow to move against our enemies.’8 That is, they failed to kill enough people. Ben Kiernan, associate professor of South-East Asian history at Yale, has examined the Normand papers as part of his study of Pol Pot’s preparations for the reconquest of Cambodia. ‘Pol Pot’, he says, ‘is playing the international community for suckers.’9
The United Nations has provided Pol Pot’s vehicle of return. Although the Khmer Rouge government ceased to exist in January 1979, its representatives continued to occupy Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations. Their right to do so was defended and promoted by the United States as part of their new alliance with China (Pol Pot’s principal underwriter and Vietnam’s ancient foe), their cold war with the Soviet Union and their revenge on Vietnam. In 1981 President Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said, ‘I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot.’ The United States, he added, ‘winked publicly’ as China sent arms to the Khmer Rouge through Thailand.10
By January 1980, the United States had begun secretly funding Pol Pot. The extent of this support – $85 million from 1980 to 1986 – was revealed six years later in correspondence between Congressional lawyer Jonathan Winer, counsel to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. Winer said the information had come from the Congressional Research Service. When copies of his letter were circulated the Reagan Administration was furious. Then, without adequately explaining why, Winer repudiated the statistics, while not disputing that they had come from the Congressional Research Service. However, in a second letter to Noam Chomsky, Winer repeated the original charge, which, he told me, was ‘absolutely correct’.11
As a cover for its secret war against Cambodia, Washington set up the Kampuchean Emergency Group, known as KEG, in the American embassy in Bangkok and on the border. KEG’s job was to ‘monitor’ the distribution of Western humanitarian supplies sent to the refugee camps in Thailand and to ensure that Khmer Rouge bases were fed. Although ostensibly a State Department operation, its principals were intelligence officers with long experience in Indo-China.
Two American relief aid workers, Linda Mason and Roger Brown, later wrote, ‘The US Government insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed . . . the US preferred that the Khmer Rouge operation benefit from the credibility of an internationally known relief operation.’12 Under American pressure, the World Food Programme handed over $12 million worth of food to the Thai Army to pass on to the Khmer Rouge. ‘20,000 to 40,000 Pol Pot guerrillas benefited,’ according to former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke.13
I witnessed this. In 1980 a film crew and I travelled in a UN convoy of forty trucks, seventeen loaded with food, seventeen with seed and the rest with ‘goodies’, which was the term UN people used for their assorted largesse. We headed for Phnom Chat, a Khmer Rouge operations base set in forest just inside Cambodia and bunkered with land-mines. The UN official leading the convoy, Phyllis Gestrin, a University of Texas psychology professor, was worried and clearly disliked what she was doing. ‘I don’t want to think what this aid is doing,’ she said. ‘I don’t trust these blackshirts.’ She could barely suppress her fear and demonstrated it by driving her Land Rover across a suspected minefield and into a tree. ‘Oh man,’ she said, ‘this place gives me the creeps. Let’s get it over with.’ At that, she turned the Land Rover around and pointed it back along the track. ‘We always position it so we can get out fast,’ she said.
After the trucks had dropped their ‘goodies’ in a clearing Phyllis solicited the signature of a man who had watched in bemused silence from a thatched shelter. ‘Well, I guess what I’ve got here is a receipt,’ she said, with a nervous laugh. ‘Not bad, from a butcher like him . . .’ The ‘butcher’ was the base commander, who demanded that the foreign aid people address him as ‘Monsieur le Président’. They also knew him as ‘Pol Pot’s Himmler’.
In 1979 I had seen in Siem Reap province the mass grave of several thousand people shortly after it was unearthed. Many of the corpses had been beaten to death, as their splintered skulls clearly showed. Now, smiling before me was Pol Pot’s governor of the province at the time of that mass murder. His name, he told me, was Nam Phann, which was a military alias. He was eager to confirm that Western aid had nourished and restored the Khmer Rouge. ‘Thank you very much,’ he said, ‘and we wish for more.’ I asked him whom he regarded as his allies in the world. ‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘China, the ASEANfn1 nations . . . and the United States.’
The Kampuchean Emergency Group maintained close contact with bases like Phnom Chat. Working through ‘Task Force 80’ of the Thai Army, which has liaison officers with the Khmer Rouge, the Americans ensured a constant flow of UN supplies. KEG was run by Michael Eiland, whose career underscored the continuity of American intervention in Indo-China. In 1969–70 he was operations officer of a clandestine Special Forces group code-named ‘Daniel Boone’, which was responsible for the reconnaissance of the American bombing of Cambodia.14 By 1980 Colonel Eiland was running KEG from the American embassy in Bangkok, where it was described as a ‘humanitarian’ organisation. He was also responsible for interpreting satellite surveillance pictures of Cambodia and in that capacity was a valued informant of a number of resident members of Bangkok’s Western press corps, who referred to him in their reports as a ‘Western analyst’. Eiland’s ‘humanitarian’ duties led to his appointment as Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) chief in charge of the South-east Asia Region, one of the most important positions in American espionage.
In November 1980 direct contact was made between the Reagan White House and the Khmer Rouge when Dr Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the CIA, made a secret visit to a Khmer Rouge operational headquarters inside Cambodia. Cline was then a foreign policy adviser on President-elect Reagan’s transitional team. Within a year, according to Washington sources, fifty CIA agents were running America’s Cambodia operation from Thailand.
The dividing line between the international relief operation and the American war became more and more confused. For example, a Defense Intelligence Agency colonel was appointed ‘security liaison officer’ between the United Nations Border Relief Operation (UNBRO) and the Displaced Persons Protection Unit (DPPU). In Washington he was revealed as a link between the US Government and the Khmer Rouge.15
By 1981 a number of governments had become decidedly uneasy about the charade of the United Nations’ continued recognition of Pol Pot. This was dramatically demonstrated when a colleague of mine, Nicholas Claxton, entered a bar at the United Nations in New York with Thaoun Prasith, Pol Pot’s representative. ‘Within minutes,’ said Claxton, ‘the bar had emptied.’
Clearly, something had to be done. In 1982 the United States and China,
supported by Singapore, invented the Coalition of the Democratic Government of Kampuchea, which was, as Ben Kiernan pointed out, neither a coalition, nor democratic, nor a government, nor in Kampuchea.16 It was what the CIA calls ‘a master illusion’. Prince Norodom Sihanouk was appointed its head; otherwise little had changed. The two ‘non-communist’ members, the Sihanoukists and the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF), were dominated by the Khmer Rouge. The urbane Thaoun Prasith – a personal friend of Pol Pot, he had called on Khmer expatriates to return home in 1975, whereupon many of them ‘disappeared’ – continued to speak for Cambodia.
The United Nations was now the instrument of Cambodia’s punishment. Not only was the government in Phnom Penh denied the UN seat, but Cambodia was barred from all international agreements on trade and communications, even from the World Health Organisation. The United Nations has withheld development aid from only one Third World country: Cambodia. In the United States, religious groups were refused export licences for books and toys for orphans. A law dating from the First World War, the Trading with the Enemy Act, was applied to Cambodia and, of course, Vietnam. Not even Cuba and the Soviet Union were treated in this way.
By 1987 KEG had been reincarnated as the Kampuchea Working Group, run by the same Colonel Eiland of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The Working Group’s brief was to provide battle plans, war material and satellite intelligence to the so-called ‘non-communist’ members of the ‘resistance forces’. The non-communist fig leaf allowed Congress, spurred on by an anti-Vietnamese zealot, Stephen Solarz, to approve both ‘overt’ and ‘covert’ aid estimated at $24 million to the ‘resistance’. Until 1990 Congress accepted Solarz’s specious argument that US aid did not end up with or even help Pol Pot and that the mass murderer’s American-supplied allies ‘are not even in close proximity with them [the Khmer Rouge]’.17
While Washington has paid the bills and the Thai Army provided logistics support, Singapore, as middle man, has been the main ‘conduit’ for Western arms. Former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew is a major backer of American and Chinese insistence that the Khmer Rouge be part of a settlement in Cambodia. ‘It is journalists’, he said, ‘who have made them into demons.’
Weapons from Germany, the United States and Sweden are passed on directly by Singapore or made under licence by Chartered Industries, which is owned by the Singapore Government. The same weapons have been captured from the Khmer Rouge. The Singapore connection has allowed the Bush administration to continue its secret aid to the ‘resistance’, even though this breaks a law passed by Congress in 1989 banning even indirect ‘lethal aid’ to Pol Pot.18 In August 1990, a former member of the US Special Forces disclosed that he had been ordered to destroy records that showed American munitions in Thailand ending up with the Khmer Rouge. The records, he said, implicated the National Security Council, the President’s advisory body.19
Until 1989 the British role in Cambodia remained secret. The first reports appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, written by their diplomatic and defence correspondent, Simon O’Dwyer-Russell, who had close professional and family contacts with the highly secretive Special Air Services, the SAS. O’Dwyer-Russell disclosed that the SAS were training Cambodian guerrillas allied to Pol Pot.20 Oddly, for such a major story, it was buried in the paper. ‘I could never understand why,’ O’Dwyer-Russell told me. ‘When I filed the copy, I had the clear impression I had a page one lead. I never received an adequate explanation.’ Shortly afterwards, Jane’s Defence Weekly, the ‘military bible’, published a long article alleging that Britain had been training Cambodian guerrillas ‘at secret bases in Thailand for more than four years’. The instructors were from the SAS, ‘ . . . all serving military personnel, all veterans of the Falklands conflict, led by a captain’.
One result of the British training, reported Jane’s, was ‘the creation of a 250-man KPNLF sabotage battalion [whose] members were taught how to attack installations such as bridges, railway lines, power lines and sub-stations. Their first operations were conducted in Cambodia’s Siem Reap province in August, 1986.’21
Other diplomatic correspondents were able to confirm the Jane’s report; but little appeared in print. In November 1989, after the showing of Cambodia Year Ten, a film made by David Munro and myself, British complicity in Cambodia’s international isolation and civil war became a public issue.22 Some 16,000 people wrote to Prime Minister Thatcher, seeking an explanation.
The film repeated the allegations about the SAS and drew attention to an interview the Prime Minister had given shortly before Christmas 1988 to the BBC children’s programme, Blue Peter (which had raised large sums for Cambodia). Thatcher was asked what her government could do to help stop Pol Pot coming back to power. ‘Most people agree’, she said, ‘that Pol Pot himself could not go back, nor some of his supporters, who were very active in some of the terrible things that happened.’ She then said, ‘Some of the Khmer Rouge of course are very different. I think there are probably two parts to the Khmer Rouge: those who supported Pol Pot and then there is a much, much more reasonable group with the Khmer Rouge.’
At this, the interviewer was taken aback. ‘Do you really think so?’ she asked, to which Thatcher replied, ‘Well, that is what I am assured by people who know . . . so that you will find that the more reasonable ones in the Khmer Rouge will have to play some part in a future government . . .’23
This raised urgent questions, several of which I put to a Foreign Office minister, Lord Brabazon of Tara, in a filmed interview for Year Ten. I asked him to explain Thatcher’s statement that there were ‘reasonable’ Khmer Rouge. Who were they? I asked. ‘Um,’ he replied, ‘the ones that Prince Sihanouk can work with.’ When I asked for their names, a Foreign Office minder stepped in and said, ‘Stop this now. This is not the way that we were led to believe the line of questioning would go.’
The minder, Ian Whitehead, had earlier taken me aside and urged me to ‘go easy on him’. Now he refused to allow the interview to proceed until he had approved the questions. As for the minister, he had left the interviewing chair and could not be persuaded to return. The head of the Foreign Office News Department later claimed that David Munro had given an ‘assurance’ that Whitehead’s intervention in front of the camera would not be shown. No such assurance had ever been given. This was a taste of Foreign Office disinformation, of which a great deal more was to come. What the episode demonstrated was that the government was keenly aware that its policy on Cambodia was indefensible.
British special military forces have been in South-east Asia since the Second World War. Britain has supplied advisers to the Royal Thai Army since the 1970s, along with the Americans, in what is known as Operation Badge Torch. In 1982, when the American, Chinese and ASEAN governments contrived the ‘coalition’ that enabled Pol Pot to retain Cambodia’s UN seat, the United States set about training and equipping the ‘non-communist’ factions in the ‘resistance’ army. These were the followers of Prince Sihanouk and his former minister, Son Sann, the leader of the KPNLF, who were mostly irregulars and bandits. The resistance was nothing without Pol Pot’s 25,000 well-trained, armed and motivated guerrillas, whose leadership was acknowledged by Prince Sihanouk’s military commander, his son, Norodom Ranariddh. ‘The Khmer Rouge’, he said, are the ‘major attacking forces’ whose victories were ‘celebrated as our own’.24
The guerrillas’ tactic, like the Contras in Nicaragua, was to terrorise the countryside by setting up ambushes and the seeding of minefields. In this way the government in Phnom Penh would be destabilised and the Vietnamese trapped in an untenable war: their own ‘Vietnam’. For the Americans, in Bangkok and Washington, the fate of Cambodia was tied to a war they had technically lost seven years earlier. ‘Bleeding the Vietnamese white on the battlefields of Cambodia’ was an expression popular with the US policy-making establishment. Of course, overturning the government in Hanoi was the ultimate goal.
The British provided jungle training camps in Mala
ysia and in Thailand; one of them, in Phitsanulok province, is known as ‘Falklands camp’. In 1991 David Munro and I filmed an interview with a Cambodian guerrilla who had been trained by the British in Malaysia. Although a member of the KPNLF, he had worked under cover as a Khmer Rouge. He described a journey by train and covered truck from Thailand to an unknown destination. He was one among troops from all three Cambodian groups, including the Khmer Rouge. ‘The Khmer Rouge were much more experienced and older,’ he said. ‘We eventually arrived in a camp in Malaysia, run by the Malaysian Army, where the instructors were British and Americans in uniform. Although we slept and ate separately from the Khmer Rouge, we wore the same uniforms and trained together with the same equipment as one army. We were all taught exactly the same. The British taught us about laying mines and setting booby traps.’
The Cambodian training became an exclusively British operation after the ‘Irangate’ arms-for-hostages scandal broke in Washington in 1986. ‘If Congress had found out that Americans were mixed up in clandestine training in Indo-China, let alone with Pol Pot,’ a Whitehall source told Simon O’Dwyer-Russell, ‘the balloon would have gone right up. It was one of those classic Thatcher-Reagan arrangements. It was put to her that the SAS should take over the Cambodia show, and she agreed.’
Shortly after seven-man SAS teams arrived from Hong Kong and the SAS base in Hereford, a new British ambassador took up his post in Bangkok. This was Derek Tonkin, who had previously been at the embassy in Hanoi. During his time as ambassador the British operation in Thailand remained secret.