by John Pilger
Few dissenting voices were heard above this. In Britain, one of the most informed and courageous voices belonged to Oxfam, which in 1979 defied Government pressure and went to help stricken Cambodia. That was the year Margaret Thatcher came to power and one of her first acts as prime minister was to join the American boycott of Vietnam and suspend all food aid there, specifically powdered milk for Vietnamese children. She gave Vietnam’s ‘invasion’ of Cambodia as the reason.
In June 1979 representatives of the main British voluntary agencies were called to the Foreign Office, where they were told that the British boycott of Vietnam now applied to Cambodia. They were warned that the Vietnamese were ‘obstructing’ aid and that if they attempted to fly into Phnom Penh, they might be fired upon. This was official deception on a grand scale, setting the tone for British policy to the present day.
At the meeting was Jim Howard, an engineer and Oxfam’s senior ‘fireman’, a veteran of disaster relief in Biafra, India, the Sahel, Latin America and Asia. Howard embodies Oxfam, which was set up in 1942 by Quakers with the aim of arousing public interest in the suffering of civilians in Europe, especially children, who were denied food because of the Allied blockade. What struck me about Jim Howard when we first met in Phnom Penh, was that he saw every problem he was sent to solve unfailingly from the point of view of the people in need.
Oxfam ignored the Foreign Office ‘warning’. Howard flew to Paris with £20,000 in cash and got in touch with an air charter company, based in Luxembourg, whose Icelandic and Danish pilots had a reputation for flying ‘anything anywhere’. They were prepared to fly a DC8 to Phnom Penh; Howard set about loading it with drugs, vitamins and powdered milk. On August 19 he sent his passport to the Vietnamese embassy in Paris, where it was stamped and returned to him that afternoon. A few hours later he was airborne.
When the aircraft landed at Bangkok to refuel, a source of obstruction which the Foreign Office had neglected to mention, the Thai regime refused to allow it to fly on to Phnom Penh. ‘We told them “OK”,’ said Howard, ‘“We’ll fly somewhere else; we’ll fly to Saigon instead.” So they finally let us take off and we circled out over the South China Sea and indeed flew overhead Saigon, before heading for Phnom Penh. The pilot couldn’t believe his eyes. There was nothing at Phnom Penh airport. We did one low run and went in. There wasn’t even a fork lift. We lifted the supplies down by hand. All the skilled people were dead, or in hiding. But there was willingness and gratitude. We landed at eleven in the morning; by four o’clock that afternoon, the milk and antibiotics were being given to the children.’
Jim Howard’s aircraft was only the second Western relief aircraft to arrive in Cambodia in the eight months since the end of Asia’s holocaust.
I was already in Phnom Penh, working by candle-light in my room at the old Hotel Royale. The afternoon monsoon had been so insistent that rain had poured through the louvres of the french windows and two rats scampered to and fro, across the puddles. When Jim Howard walked in, I was endeavouring to compile a list of urgently needed items – the very things he had brought – which I intended to give to the Australian ambassador in Bangkok. To illustrate the enormity of what had happened, I told him that, down the road, one man was struggling to care for fifty starving orphans. ‘Where do I start?’ he said: words that would make for him, and others at Oxfam, a fitting epitaph.
The following day his first cable to Oxford read: ‘50 to 80 per cent human material destruction is the terrible reality. One hundred tons of milk per week needed by air and sea for the next two months starting now, repeat now.’ So began one of the boldest rescue operations in history. Shortly afterwards, a barge left Singapore, sailing into the north-eastern monsoon, with 1,500 tons of Oxfam seed on board. Guy Stringer had put the whole remarkable venture together in a few weeks and with just £50,000.
Like Jim Howard, he had already navigated his way through a political storm. Singapore was, and still is, supporting those allied with Pol Pot. Back in London, Oxfam’s director, Brian Walker, stood his ground calmly against press charges of ‘aiding communists’. Indeed, Oxfam’s strength has been not to be deterred. But its very presence in Cambodia and the success of its schemes have made it enemies from London to Washington to Bangkok. An American ambassador in Bangkok would berate visitors with his views on ‘those communists at Oxfam’.
Cambodia had a profound influence on the way Oxfam saw its responsibilities. Many Oxfam workers believed it was no longer enough to dispense ‘Band Aid charity’ and that the organisation should take more literally its stated obligation ‘to educate the public concerning the nature, causes and effects of poverty, distress and suffering’.
In 1988 Oxfam published Punishing the Poor: The International Isolation of Kampuchea, by Eva Mysliwiec, Oxfam’s American chief representative in Phnom Penh and the doyenne of voluntary aid workers in Cambodia.133 Marshalling her facts, most of them gained at first hand, she presented a picture of a people who had suffered more than most and were now being punished by so-called civilised governments for being on the ‘wrong side’; she identified the roots of their suffering in the American invasion of Indo-China. Her book was distributed throughout the world.
The reaction became an assault in 1990. An American-funded extreme right-wing lobby group, the International Freedom Foundation, presented an ‘Oxfam file’ to the Charity Commission in London. Its author was a young Tory activist, Marc Gordon, who had made his name a few years earlier by ‘joining’ the Nicaraguan Contras. His complaint of ‘political bias’ was supported by several back-bench Conservative MPs. Gordon told me, ‘All the incidents we cited in our submission to the inquiry were upheld.’ I asked an official at the Commission if this was true and he would neither confirm nor deny it. ‘A fact is a fact,’ he said boldly. Oxfam was never told officially who its accusers were, or the precise nature of the evidence against them.
In 1991 the Charity Commission censured Oxfam for having ‘prosecuted with too much vigour’ its public education campaign about Pol Pot’s return. Threatened with a loss of its charity status, Oxfam no longer speaks out as it used to and has withdrawn from sale a number of its most popular publications, including Punishing the Poor.
It seemed to me that those who were meant to keep the record straight had two choices. They could blow the whistle and alert the world to the betrayal of Cambodia, as Oxfam did, and risk incurring a penalty, be it smear or sanction. Or they could follow the advice of Son Sen’s wife, Yun Yat, who was minister of information during the years of genocide. In boasting that Buddhism had been virtually eradicated from Cambodia and that the monks had ‘stopped believing’ (most of them had been murdered), she said, ‘The problem becomes extinguished. Hence there is no problem.’134
August 1979 to June 1992
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fn1 In his 1980 report to Oxfam, Jim Howard, who began Oxfam’s Cambodia operation, wrote, ‘It was made clear by Pilger that they wished to film where they liked on the aid programmes and the general situation, and they would not work to a pre-planned schedule as this was too limiting and they would decide daily what to film and where. The arrangement was partly . . . to avoid “set pieces” arranged by the authorities.’77
A FAUSTIAN PACT
AS EACH OF the principal speakers rose from his chair in the ornate Quai d’Orsay, a silver-headed man a dozen feet away watched them carefully. His face remained unchanged; he wore a fixed, almost petrified smile. When Secretary of State James Baker declared that Cambodia should never again return to ‘the policies and practices of the past’, the silver head nodded. When Prince Sihanouk acknowledged the role of Western governments in the ‘accords’, the silver head nodded. Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot’s face to the world, is a statesman now, a peacemaker; and this was as much his moment as Sihanouk’s; for without his agreement – that is, Pol Pot’s agreement – there would be no ‘accords’. When a French official offered him his hand, the statesman stood, respectful, fluent in diplomatic small-talk and eff
usive in his gratitude – the same gratitude he had expressed in the two letters he had written to Douglas Hurd congratulating the British Government on its policy on Cambodia.135 It was Khieu Samphan who, at one of Pol Pot’s briefing sessions for his military commanders in Thailand, described his diplomatic role as ‘buying time in order to give you comrades the opportunity to carry out all your [military] tasks’.136 In Paris, on October 23, 1991, he had the look of a man who could not believe his luck.
Some 6,000 miles away, on the Thai side of the border with Cambodia, the Khmer people of Site 8 had a different view of the world being shaped for them. Although supplied by the United Nations Border Relief Operation (UNBRO), this camp had long been a Khmer Rouge operations base and, since 1988, had been made into a showcase by Pol Pot. Its leadership was elected; the Red Cross and selected journalists were allowed in. Whisky was produced. Faces smiled, much as Khieu Samphan smiled. The object of this image-building exercise was clear: to persuade Western governments that the Khmer Rouge have ‘changed’, are now following a ‘liberal capitalist line’ and could be legitimised as part of a ‘comprehensive settlement’.
As Khieu Samphan raised his glass in Paris, a nightmare began for the people of Site 8. The gates were closed, and foreigners told to stay away. A few days earlier the camp’s leaders had been called to a ‘meeting’ with senior Khmer Rouge officials and were not seen again. The camp library, central to the showpiece, was closed and people were told they must no longer be ‘poisoned by foreign ideas’ as they prepared to return to the ‘zones’. From here and in the ‘closed camps’ run by the Khmer Rouge along the border, the forcible, secret repatriation of hundreds, perhaps thousands of refugees had begun.
They crossed minefields at night and were herded into ‘zones of free Kampuchea’ in malarial jungles without UN protection, food or medicine. Even as the UN High Commission for Refugees announced that an orderly return of all 370,000 refugees was underway, there were as many as 100,000 refugees in Khmer Rouge border camps and more were trapped in the ‘zones’, to which UN inspectors had only limited access or none at all.
If the ‘peace process’ was proving a theatre of the macabre, Prince Sihanouk provided his own theatre of the absurd. As decided in Paris, he returned to Phnom Penh in November 1991 to head the transitional ‘supreme national council’, made up of representatives of his followers, the KPNLF, the Hun Sen Government and the Khmer Rouge. ‘I am returning to protect my children,’ he said. ‘There is joie de vivre again. Nightclubs have reopened with taxi dancers. I am sure soon there will be massage parlours. It is our way of life: it is a good life.’137 He brought with him four chefs, supplies of pâté de foie gras hurriedly acquired from Fauchon, one of Paris’s most famous gourmet shops, a caravan of bodyguards and hangers-on, including two sons with dynastic ambitions. (With their father ensconced in his old palace, Prince Ranariddh and Prince Chakrapong have set their private armies on each other. ‘Anyway,’ said Ranariddh, ‘my brother has run out of troops.’ Prince Sihanouk described this as ‘just a small clash . . . they are good boys, but as brothers there is bickering. They never got on as children.’138)
Many Cambodians were pleased to see the ‘god-king’, and the elderly struggled to kiss his hand. It seemed the world had again located Cambodia on the map. The cry, ‘Sihanouk is back’ seemed to signal a return to the days before the inferno of the American bombing and the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk’s presence even suggested to some that the Khmer Rouge had surrendered. For them the Paris ‘accords’ meant that the United Nations would protect them. They could be pardoned for failing to comprehend the perversity of an agreement which empowered the United Nations to protect the right of the genocidists to roam the cities and countryside free from harm and retribution, and which had appointed two of Pol Pot’s henchmen to a body, the Supreme National Council, on which they could not be outvoted. This was described by Congressman Chet Atkins, one of the few American politicians to speak for the Cambodian people, as ‘the consequence of a Faustian pact’ with Pol Pot.139
At one of his many press conferences, Sihanouk was asked about the Khmer Rouge. ‘In their hearts’, he said, ‘they remain very cruel, very Maoist, very Cultural Revolution, very Robespierre, very French Revolution, very bloody revolution. They are monsters, it is true . . . but since they decided to behave as normal human beings, we have to accept them . . . naughty dogs and naughty Khmer Rouge, they need to be caressed.’ At this, he laughed, and most of the foreign press laughed with him. His most important statement, however, caused hardly a ripple. ‘Cambodians’, he said, ‘were forced by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council . . . to accept the return of the Khmer Rouge’.140
The following day Khieu Samphan arrived to join the prince on the Supreme National Council. Suddenly, the gap between private pain and public fury closed, and the people of Phnom Penh broke their silence.141 The near-lynching of Khieu Samphan might have been influenced by the Hun Sen Government, but there could be no doubt that it was heartfelt. Within a few hours of landing at Pochentong Airport, Pol Pot’s emissary was besieged on the top floor of his villa. Crouched in a cupboard, with blood streaming from a head wound, he listened to hundreds of people shouting, ‘Kill him, kill him, kill him.’ They smashed down the doors and advanced up the stairs, armed with hatchets. Many of them had lost members of their families during the years that he was in power, at Pol Pot’s side. One woman called out the names of her dead children, her dead sister, her dead mother – all of them murdered by the Khmer Rouge. The mob dispersed after Hun Sen arrived and spoke to them. Khieu Samphan and Son Sen (who had escaped the attack) were bundled into an armoured personnel carrier and taken to the airport, and flown back to Bangkok.
On April 17, 1975, the first day of Year Zero, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh and marched the entire population into the countryside, many of them to their death. Generally, people did as they were told. The sick and wounded were dragged at gunpoint from their hospital beds; surgeons were forced to leave patients in mid-operation. On the road, a procession of mobile beds could be seen, with their drip-bottles swinging at the bedposts. The old and crippled soon fell away and their families were forced to go on. Ill and dying children were carried in plastic bags. Women barely out of childbirth staggered forward, supported by parents. Orphaned babies, forty-one by one estimate, were left in their cradles at the National Paediatric Hospital without anyone to care for them. The Khmer Rouge said that the Americans were about to bomb the city. Many believed this, but even among those who did not, defeatism, fear and exhaustion seemed to make them powerless. The haemorrhage of people lasted two days and two nights, then Cambodia fell into shadow.
What happened to Khieu Samphan more than sixteen years later, in the streets he helped to terrorise and empty, was a catharsis, and only the beginning.
Now, when Khieu Samphan and Son Sen were in Phnom Penh, their stays were brief and secret, and they were guarded behind the walls of a UN compound, ‘the protected wards of the international community’, as Chet Atkins has described them.142 Western ambassadors presented their credentials to Prince Sihanouk. The French ambassador was first; Cambodia, after all, used to be theirs, and they look forward once more to the fruits of ‘trade’. The American ambassador, Charles H. Twining Jr, followed. ‘It seems to me’, he announced, ‘that if we [that is, the United States] neglect the countryside, then the Khmer Rouge can come back again.’ The ambassador assured the people of Cambodia that he and his staff would refuse to meet any Khmer Rouge official. ‘We’ll refuse even to shake hands with them,’ he said. ‘That’s the bottom line.’143
His remarks brought to mind a meeting of the UN Credentials Committee in September 1979. The United States strongly supported a Chinese motion that Pol Pot’s defunct regime continue to be recognised as the only government of Cambodia and to occupy Cambodia’s seat in the General Assembly. As the American representative, Robert Rosen-stock, gathered his papers after voting for Pol Pot, som
ebody grabbed his hand and congratulated him. ‘I looked up,’ he recalled, ‘and saw it was leng Sary [Pol Pot’s foreign minister]. I felt like washing my hands.’144
The people of Phnom Penh now saw a procession of Western notables, among them those who pointedly did not visit the country following their liberation from Pol Pot, not even to pay respect at the shrines to the victims of their holocaust. Lord Caithness of the Foreign Office has been through, lauding the peace plan and telling Cambodians: ‘Look here, it’s now up to you.’145 (Lord Caithness later gave his private view to an ex-aid agency official. ‘It’s falling apart,’ he said.)146
One visiting notable to receive much media attention was Gareth Evans, the Australian foreign affairs minister credited with thinking up the ‘peace plan’ and who promised to be ‘even handed’ in his treatment of the Khmer Rouge.’147 Evans had made a series of assertions which left little room for doubt about the future. ‘I think it’s pretty well obviously clearly decided’, he said, ‘that [the Khmer Rouge] has no military future . . .’ Indeed, the danger of the Khmer Rouge regaining power was ‘negligible’.148
Evans apparently based this confidence on ‘personal assurances’ given to him by the Beijing regime. He said that when he told the Chinese foreign minister that the Khmer Rouge would be ‘totally internationally isolated’ if they caused the peace plan to break down, the foreign minister ‘agreed absolutely’.149 Remarkably, Evans then declared the ‘genocide issue and all the emotion that’s associated with that’ over and done with and ‘resolved’.150 One wondered if he had asked ordinary Cambodians during his visit if the ‘genocide issue and all the emotion associated with that’ was ‘resolved’. And had he considered that the regime handing out ‘reassurances’ was the same regime that had reassured the world that it was no longer arming Pol Pot when it was, and the same regime that had massacred hundreds of Chinese students when it said it wouldn’t? And how did he explain China’s ‘two approaches’ to Cambodia – seeking international respectability by backing the UN plan, while its ambassador in Phnom Penh secretly sided with Pol Pot?