by John Pilger
At the first Cambodian ‘peace conference’ in Paris in August 1989, American delegates demonstrated their desire to rehabilitate China and, if necessary, its Khmer Rouge client. American and other Western diplomats entertained Chinese and Khmer Rouge representatives in private; and it was in this atmosphere that the word ‘genocide’ was declared ‘impolitic’. In a briefing document bearing the handwriting of the Australian minister for foreign affairs, Gareth Evans, a ‘specific stumbling block’ is ‘identified’ as ‘whether it is appropriate or not to refer specifically to the non-return of the “genocidal” practices of the past’.48
It is difficult to imagine Herbert Vere Evatt, Australia’s minister for external affairs at the birth of the United Nations, similarly wondering whether or not it was ‘appropriate’ to refer to the ‘genocidal practice’ of Hitler’s Third Reich. Evatt was the first president of the United Nations and played a significant part in the formation of the world body, which arose from the commitment of all nations that ‘never again’ would the Holocaust be allowed to happen. But it did happen again, in Asia; and it could happen yet again.
The attitude of the Australian Government was salutary. In announcing his ‘UN plan’ for Cambodia in November 1989, Senator Evans said his aim was to exclude the Khmer Rouge. And yet the plan called on the Hun Sen Government to step aside. Evans described this as ‘even-handed’.49 In its 153 pages the Australian Government’s ‘working paper’ made no mention of Khmer Rouge atrocities, which were all but dismissed as ‘human rights abuses of a recent past’.50
In the UN General Assembly, the Australian representative, Peter Wilenski, used this euphemism to describe the killing of more than a million-and-a-half people, or a fifth of Cambodia’s population.51 As Ben Kiernan has pointed out, ‘The plan soon degenerated into a refusal to take any action without Khmer Rouge acceptance – not at all a means to exclude them.’52 As for bringing Pol Pot before the ‘Nuremberg’ proposed by President Bush for Saddam Hussein, this was proposed in 1988 by Gareth Evans’s predecessor, Bill Hayden, and rejected by US Secretary of State George Schultz.53
The lesson for Saddam Hussein here was patience. Just as Pol Pot has been restored, if not completely absolved, so the Iraqi ‘Hitler’ could reasonably expect to be left alone. And just as those who have politically and militarily opposed the return to power of Pol Pot have been undermined by Western governments and the United Nations, so have those, like the Kurds, who have fought Saddam. This is the order of the world, both old and new.
The UN ‘peace plan’ for Cambodia, part of which grew out of the Evans plan, was an essential part of this order. Few such documents, proclaiming peace as its aim, have been as vague and sinister. The new, cleansing jargon was deployed throughout; the Khmer Rouge were reclassified as a ‘faction’ and given equity with the three other ‘factions’. Their distinction as genocidists was not considered relevant. Each ‘faction’ was to regroup in ‘cantonments’ where 70 per cent of their weapons would be surrendered ‘under UN supervision’. Disarming the conventional Phnom Penh Army would be relatively simple; disarming the Khmer Rouge would be virtually impossible, as most of their arms flowed across the Thai border and were held in secret caches.
The Khmer Rouge, said the plan, ‘will have the same rights, freedoms and opportunities to take part in the electoral process’ as any other Cambodians and specifically to ‘prohibit the retroactive application of criminal law’. So not only did the mass murderers have the same rights as those who survived the pogroms but they were granted immunity from prosecution. There would be ‘free and fair elections’, regardless of the fear and coercion that were Pol Pot’s stated strategy in a country that had never known elections. Never mind, said the UN plan, a ‘neutral political environment’ was the way forward. Here the informed reader struggled not to break into demonic laughter. Proportional representation, the chosen electoral method, would apparently produce a ‘neutral’ coalition, headed by Prince Sihanouk.54
Norodom Sihanouk is much romanticised by Westerners, who describe his rule as la belle époque. On his throne Sihanouk knew how to patronise and manipulate foreigners; he was the reassuring face of feudal colonialism, a colourful relic of the French Empire, a ‘god-king’ who was his country’s leading jazz musician, film director and football coach.
But there was another Cambodia beneath the lotus-eating surface of which foreigners were either unaware or chose to ignore. Sihanouk was a capricious autocrat whose thugs dispensed arbitrary terror. His dictatorial ways contributed to the growth of the communist party, which he called the Khmer Rouge. His own ‘Popular Socialist Community’ had nothing to do with socialism and everything to do with creating suitably benign conditions for the spread and enrichment of a corrupt and powerful mandarinate in the towns and of ethnic Chinese usurers in the countryside.
It was at first puzzling that the United States should now see in Sihanouk ‘the hopes for a decent and democratic Cambodia’,55 because the Cambodia he ran was anything but democratic. The prince regarded himself as semi-divine and the people as his ‘children’. Members of the Cambodian Parliament were chosen by him, or their seats were bought and sold. There was no freedom to challenge him. His secret police were feared and ubiquitous; and when an organised opposition arose seeking an end to corruption and poverty, many of its leading members were forced to flee for their lives into the jungle, from which cauldron emerged Pol Pot and his revolutionaries.56
Although a number of his relatives were murdered by the Khmer Rouge, Sihanouk retains the distinction of being one of the first to support them and one of the last to condemn them. After he was overthrown in 1970 and replaced by General Lon Nol, he called on his people to join Pol Pot’s maquis. During this time he was said to be a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh. Yet, during his ‘imprisonment’, he flew to New York and addressed the United Nations General Assembly as Pol Pot’s head of state. He misled the world about the true nature of the Khmer Rouge, saying that ‘a genuinely popular democracy and a new society have been born in Kampuchea – a society without the exploitation of man by man . . .’57 This inspired many expatriate Cambodians to return to a fate of torture and death.
Sihanouk’s closeness to the Khmer Rouge provided a challenge for his Western backers. In 1979 the British journalist William Shawcross, a personal friend of Sihanouk, claimed the prince had ‘roundly denounced the brutality of the Khmer Rouge’ from exile in Peking. As the transcript of Sihanouk’s press conference showed, he said nothing of the kind, referring only vaguely to ‘violations of human rights’. In fact, he gushed with praise for the Khmer Rouge regime: ‘The whole country [was] well-fed,’ he said, ‘ . . . the conditions were good . . . Our people . . . had more than enough to eat. And suppose there is a reign of terror. How could they laugh? How could they sing? And how could they be gay? And they are very gay.’ Sihanouk went on to say that his people were so ‘happy’ that ‘my conscience is in tranquility . . . it seems [there was] better social justice . . . I confess that the people seem to be quite happy with Pol Pot.’58
In 1990 Sihanouk said he ‘would agree to anything the Khmer Rouge wanted’.59 He was equally blunt on American television: ‘The Khmer Rouge’, he said, ‘are not criminals. They are true patriots.’60 He told the American journalist T. D. Allman, who has known him for many years, that he personally was not opposed to genocide.61 To some observers of the ‘mercurial’ prince, he is unstable; to others he is a fox. A former Foreign Office diplomat, John Pedler, who has known Sihanouk since the 1960s, believes the prince remains in awe of his former jailer during the Pol Pot years, the Khmer Rouge leader, Khieu Samphan. ‘It is a psychological attachment,’ wrote Pedler in 1989. ‘They are like the rabbit and the snake. One of his actual jailers, Chhorn Hay, a hardcore Khmer Rouge who oversaw his imprisonment in the Royal Palace, is often among his entourage, a constant reminder to him that his life is still in the hands of “Angkar” [Pol Pot’s mythical organisation]. The West – and indeed, h
e himself – still has not recognised how much of what he purveys is Khmer Rouge propaganda.’62
One of Sihanouk’s most ardent promoters in the United States was Congressman Stephen Solarz, chair of the House of Representatives’ Asia and Pacific Affairs Committee. In 1989, out of 535 Senators and representatives, only Solarz had visited Cambodia since the overthrow of Pol Pot. This indicated the depth of understanding about a country upon which the United States has rained the greatest tonnage of bombs in the history of aerial bombardment. Solarz was responsible for building support for the Bush Administration’s backdoor support for the Khmer Rouge, which he called ‘covert lethal aid’ to the ‘non-communist resistance’.63
Solarz’s claim – that ‘non-communist resistance forces do not train or fight with the Khmer Rouge and are not even in close proximity with them’ – was breathtaking.64 There was abundant evidence to the contrary, including film of Sihanoukists and Khmer Rouge troops attacking a village and looting it, even videotaping each other in the act.65 There was voluminous detail of their joint operations in The Cambodia Report on Collaborative Battles.66 ‘Sihanouk’s forces carry out joint military operations with the Khmer Rouge,’ wrote John Pedler in 1991, ‘as I was personally able to confirm when I visited Kompong Thom in central Cambodia. I was in that province when the last remnant of the Sihanoukist forces involved in a joint operation with the Khmer Rouge against the provincial capital were ousted from their positions in Pre Satalan.’67
On February 28, 1991 the White House issued a statement on Cambodia which it clearly hoped would be ignored or lost by a media overwhelmed by the day’s other news: ‘victory’ in the Gulf. President Bush, it said, had admitted to Congress that there had been ‘tactical military co-operation’ between the ‘non-communist’ Cambodian forces and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.68 The statement was a condition demanded by Congress for its final approval of $20 million for the ‘non-communists’.
Writing in New York’s Newsday, the former Indo-China war correspondent Sidney Schanberg (whose epic story was dramatised in the film The Killing Fields) scornfully referred to the ‘disingenuous semantic game’ that ‘Solarz and his White House pals have played with life and death in Cambodia’. This ‘magnificently weasel-worded’ announcement, he wrote, was confirmation that the White House had been lying on Cambodia.69
August 1979 to June 1992
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fn1 Association of South-East Asian Nations
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
ALTHOUGH THERE ARE several close contenders, the Sunday Times can justifiably claim to be Britain’s premier newspaper of smear. Since Rupert Murdoch was permitted by his friend, Margaret Thatcher, to buy Times Newspapers without regard to the rules restricting monopoly ownership, smear has been almost as regular a feature of the Sunday Times as the vacuities of ‘style’ journalism that bring in much of its profitable advertising.70 Unlike the unpretentious Sun, with which it shares offices in the Murdoch fortress at Wapping, East London, the Sunday Times suggests to its readers that it is a ‘quality’ newspaper; and from time to time it does publish work of a proper professional standard. But the smearing and pillorying of its ‘enemies’, together with the crude promotion of the interests of its owner and of sections of the British establishment – notably the Ministry of Defence and the security services – now characterise and distinguish the paper.
The Sunday Times’s attacks on British television are famous. These spring from Murdoch’s original alliance with Thatcher, which deepened following his ‘victory’ over the print unions at Wapping in 1986. ‘Wapping’ was crucial to Thatcher’s strategy to emasculate the trade unions and to further her ideological aims of ‘deregulating’ British society. Three years later Murdoch was rewarded when the Government’s deregulation of broadcasting allowed him to launch Britain’s first satellite television network, Sky Channel. Murdoch had long used the editorial pages of his papers to attack and undermine the BBC and ITV, which he saw as obstacles to his own expansion in television.
Thatcher shared his view of these institutions – it is fair to say she loathed them – and devoted herself as prime minister to trying to break them up. These efforts resulted in the 1991 Broadcasting Act, which sought to end the ‘cartel’ of ITV, but instead produced a farcical ‘auction’ that cost the industry heavily in resources while leaving most of the network in place. It did, however, achieve one goal dear to Thatcher’s heart: it got rid of Thames Television, whose franchise is not to be renewed in 1993.
Just as the Sunday Times faithfully expressed Thatcher’s spleen against television, so it played by few rules when attacking her opponents. In 1988 the paper conducted a smear campaign against Thames and the producers of its current affairs investigation, Death on the Rock. This report was significant in television journalism because it lifted a veil on the British secret state and revealed something of its ruthlessness – specifically, its willingness to use death squads abroad. The report described how an SAS team had gone to Gibraltar and carefully assassinated an IRA sabotage squad.
The Sunday Times attack on Death on the Rock served to marshal the Thatcher forces against Thames – from the usual vocal backbench Tories to the then foreign secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, and Thatcher herself; and, of course, numerous ‘government sources’. One of the Sunday Times reporters assigned to the Thames story, Rosie Waterhouse, accused her own paper of being ‘wide open to accusations that we had set out to prove one point of view and misrepresented and misquoted interviews to fit – the very accusations we were levelling at Thames’.71 She later resigned. An enquiry conducted by a former Tory minister, Lord Windlesham, vindicated the programme’s accuracy and integrity. The Sunday Times branch of the National Union of Journalists called for an enquiry into the paper’s role in the affair. There was none.
On reading a book on the episode by Roger Bolton, the Thames executive producer, I recognised much of my own experience and feelings during the orchestrated attack on my documentary film, Cambodia: The Betrayal.72 In its issue of March 24, 1991 the Sunday Times brought to a climax its smear campaign against the film and myself. Occupying much of a broadsheet page was a huge photograph of me holding the Richard Dimbleby Award presented to me the previous Sunday by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) for a lifetime’s work as a broadcast journalist. In place of the BAFTA gold mask was my head with the eyes taken out. Phillip Knightley, who twice won Journalist of the Year for the Sunday Times, described this as one of the most ‘shocking things’ he had seen in a newspaper.73
Under a black banner headline, the illustration and article covered the whole page: the sort of treatment a major Mafia figure might expect. I was represented as a disreputable person, who had no right to the numerous professional awards my colleagues had given me over a quarter of a century in journalism. I was certainly not worthy of the ‘Oscar’ which the full council of BAFTA had voted to award me.
The smear was malicious and almost all the ‘facts’ were wrong, right down to the trivia. Joe Haines, Robert Maxwell’s hagiographer, was quoted as the source of an assessment of my worth during my ‘early days’ on the Daily Mirror. In the 1960s, he recalled, I had ‘long got up the noses’ of those working near me. Haines was not on the Mirror during the 1960s; he was Harold Wilson’s press secretary until the mid 1970s. There was much else like that.
The attack was a model of McCarthyism. I was not a journalist, I was not even a polemicist; I simply falsified. No evidence was produced to justify this grave charge. Worse, I covered for communists. Three examples were given.
First, I had reported in 1979 that the only substantial relief reaching Cambodia in the first nine months following the defeat of Pol Pot came from communist Vietnam. This was wholly true, if unpalatable. Up until August of that year Vietnam had sent to Cambodia 30,000 tons of rice and rice seed and 5,000 tons of other goods, such as condensed milk. With others, I witnessed and filmed the Vietnamese convoys arriving from Saigon. In striking contrast, th
e International Red Cross and UNICEF had sent to Cambodia 100 tons of relief during all of ten months.74
Second, I had not reported ‘as other journalists reported, [that] Vietnam had placed huge obstacles in the way of an international relief programme’. I had not reported it because it was false. It was propaganda that had originated in a bogus CIA report which, as the Guardian reported, was central to ‘an international propaganda offensive’ conducted by the White House and the State Department to spread derogatory stories about Vietnamese behaviour in Cambodia.75 The campaign was propagated by US Government officials and journalists based in Washington, London and Bangkok. Western journalists who did go to Cambodia specifically refuted the stories about ‘obstacles’.76 Even the American ambassador to Thailand refuted them.77
Third, I was a dupe, because I had been ‘invited’ to Cambodia by the Vietnamese Government. I have never accepted an invitation from any government of any stripe: I got into Cambodia, as others did, by journalistic nous and with the help and encouragement of a number of indefatigable individuals who care about helping the Cambodian people.fn1
Indeed, so vile had been my reporting from Cambodia, according to the Sunday Times, that I had even failed to recognise America’s ‘humanitarian motives’ in Indo-China and the ‘tireless work’ of the American ambassador in Bangkok on behalf of the Cambodian people. This ‘tireless work’ was apparently undertaken in 1980, the year the Kampuchean Emergency Group (KEG) was set up in the US embassy in Bangkok, from where it tirelessly ensured that humanitarian supplies reached the Khmer Rouge.
Here the serious purpose of the smear was made clear. My crime was to have accused the West of aiding the Khmer Rouge and the British Government of secretly contributing to Cambodia’s suffering. For this the Sunday Times produced one of its principal informants, another Western ambassador who had ‘worked tirelessly’ for Cambodia. It was none other than Derek Tonkin, HM Ambassador to Thailand during the build-up of SAS trainers in that country, where they taught Cambodians to lay mines that blew off the limbs of countless people. The Sunday Times did not mention this fact at all. The article presented Tonkin as an aggrieved ‘retired diplomat’. This is an excerpt: