by John Pilger
I had never seen him in the flesh and I was struck by his relaxed, almost jovial demeanour and by my own reaction. The sense of nightmare returned. Here was the Khmer Goebbels standing to attention as the ‘Christian soldiers’ marched by: the British, the Australians, the Americans. Here he was being feted by other ‘dignitaries’. A senior UN officer bowed his head to him. And when an international choir sang some mawkish rubbish about saving the world, he clapped, and he clapped. ‘Thank you all for coming,’ said the voice on the public address: ‘and a reminder about the fun run tomorrow. The winner gets $200 in cash!’
The next day I interviewed General Sanderson and I asked him how he felt to be in such company. He replied that he was ‘neutral’. I asked him how you went about creating a ‘neutral political environment’ when one of the ‘factions’ was guilty of genocide. ‘They are your words,’ he said. I quoted to him the report of the UN Special Rapporteur who described the Khmer Rouge as guilty of genocide ‘even under the most restricted definition’. I said, ‘General, he was speaking for the body you represent and he described them as genocidists.’
‘He may well have, but I’m not going to.’187
The UN spokesman, Eric Falt, a Frenchman, was more to the point. ‘The peace process’, he told me, with a fixed smile, ‘was aimed at allowing [the Khmer Rouge] to gain respectability.’188 UN officials were now reluctant to use the term ‘Khmer Rouge’, preferring the acronym, NADK, for National Army of Democratic Kampuchea. On a visit to Pol Pot’s heartland in the north-west, Australian foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans pinned a gold kangaroo on the uniform of a Khmer Rouge soldier. ‘Congratulations,’ he said, shaking the incredulous man’s hand. When asked about this, Evans said, ‘The young Khmer Rouge cannot be blamed for what happened in the mid-1970s.’189
The 21,000 UN troops and officials, their 8,000 vehicles, their villas and their camp followers gave me a sense of déjà vu. Was this the honky-tonk Phnom Penh of the early 1970s, just before the Khmer Rouge took power? According to a report by the UN Children’s Fund, there were 20,000 child prostitutes, and 3,000 UN personnel had contracted sexually transmitted diseases.190 Before the UN arrived, Aids was unknown; now 14 per cent of prostitutes were believed to be HIV-positive. A memo distributed to UN personnel said, ‘Please try not to park your Landcruiser outside brothels.’191
UN personnel had their own generators and clean water, while nothing was done about the water supply, which was fed by the sewers and left tens of thousands of children dying from intestinal diseases. (Drugs are available, but only at a price, on the ‘free market’.) There was little work for people who could not serve foreigners. Young men were blinded with flash burns from welding iron gates for UN villas. They lay on bamboo mats in agony, with damp rags on their faces, until their next shift.
Every UN ‘peacekeeper’ received a ‘hardship fee’ of $145 a day on top of salary and perks. This was more than most Cambodians earned in a year and twice the monthly wage of a Cambodian risking his life to clear the landmines that many UN personnel would not touch. Such was the process of recolonisation, which was evident even among the voluntary aid agencies. I visited an aid official in his air-conditioned office, which was cold and obsessively tidy; the only sound was that of his computer printer. We could have been in London or Los Angeles; and I was struck by the distance between him and the precarious life outside the tinted windows. He spoke about ‘data’, ‘mechanisms’ and ‘impacting’ and used the sanitising terms that are a lingua franca among foreigners. The Khmer Rouge, to him, were now a ‘faction’ with political and moral equity with the other ‘factions’.
At the Cambodiana Hotel, a ‘luxurious’ monstrosity on the banks of the Mekong, opened since I was last there, this distancing was complete. Ordinary Cambodians were not allowed in. The Austrian manager was fastidious; no beer cans on the table, please. There were photographs of dignitaries in the foyer, including Lord Caithness, former Minister of State at the Foreign Office and promoter of the Khmer Rouge’s place in the ‘peace process’. A man from the International Monetary Fund had set up an office in one of the rooms. True to its skills, the IMF had unearthed a ‘debt’ of $65 million incurred by the Lon Nol regime in 1971. Interest had apparently been ticking over for twenty-two years. A foreign ‘consortium’ would pay this off, I was assured unofficially, in return for the ‘appropriate trade concessions’. At a cocktail party, overlooking the pool, the talk was about the corruption that is ‘a way of life here’. No irony was noted.
At a special UN conference in Tokyo in 1992 the world community pledged $880 million to ‘rehabilitate services’ in Cambodia. This was hailed as the ‘foundation’ of the ‘peace process’. The aid would be delivered as an ‘emergency’. Flicking on his air conditioner with a remote control, the Phnom Penh representative of the UN Development Fund, Edouard Wattez, assured me, ‘The money is coming in quite significantly.’ I asked him which government had given the most. ‘The United States,’ he said. ‘They have pledged $60 million.’ I asked him how much of this had arrived. ‘Two million,’ he winced, ‘for road repair.’ And this ‘road repair’ has, in fact, restored a network of strategic highways from Thailand into Cambodia along which the Khmer Rouge mount checkpoints and move ammunition and supplies.
The Cambodia specialist Raoul Jennar has described the commitment of UN resources to Cambodia as a deception, ‘a real myth’. The real figure was not $880 million, he says, but $660 million, of which most is not ‘new money’ and only 20 per cent will be distributed in the foreseeable future.192
Although the United Nations operation was given an international face in Cambodia, only those who adhered to ‘Western’ (i.e. American) policy were given key positions. The UN financial adviser, Roger Lawrence, a US official, ran the Central Bank of Cambodia and ‘represented’ Cambodia at meetings of the Washington-dominated World Bank and the IMF. Thus, Cambodia was being eased into the world of ‘structural adjustment programmes’ (SAPS), which would ensure that it had a deregulated, low wage ‘growth’ economy favouring foreign investors, such as the Thais, Singaporeans and, of course, Japanese, who were already ‘investing’ in the country with the finesse of pirates falling on buried treasure.
The UN ‘information and education department’ in Phnom Penh was given to Timothy Carney, described by his friend William Shawcross as ‘a dedicated and skilled American diplomat’.193 Indeed Carney was an important official in the US embassy in Phnom Penh in the 1970s when his government was devastating Cambodia. He is the author of books that mention the bombing only in passing; like most from that era, he has never expressed public regret for his service to an administration that killed and maimed perhaps 500,000 Cambodians. Carney went on to become Asia Director of the National Security Council, America’s top policy-making body, based in the White House. He was one of those largely responsible for US insistence that the Khmer Rouge be part of the ‘peace process’. Not surprisingly, he then turned up in a top UN job in Cambodia, effectively running propaganda.
Stephen Heder was appointed Carney’s deputy. Heder is an American researcher who used to sympathise with the Khmer Rouge.194 In 1979 he went to work for the US State Department in Thailand – an unexplained switch of loyalties. In his UN job, he produced a number of reports damning the Hun Sen Government which were publicised, but nothing on the Khmer Rouge infiltration of the US-backed royalists.
According to the Cambodian writer Chanthou Boua, who lost all her family in the holocaust, UN Khmer staff were used to investigate the family backgrounds of the Hun Sen leadership, looking for Vietnamese antecedents. The aim of this ‘was to appease the Khmer Rouge’. UN staff, she said, were also being directed ‘to comb the villages looking for ethnic Vietnamese. Those subject to allegations of illegal immigration which are proved “correct” are deported within 24 hours. Ethnic cleansing is not mentioned in the Paris Agreement.’195 The UN also made public the names of three former Vietnamese soldiers. This was picked up by the media as
‘evidence’ that Vietnamese troops remained in Cambodia – a long discredited claim that the Khmer Rouge have used as effective propaganda. One of the Vietnamese turned out to be an ethnic Khmer from southern Vietnam; the others were demobilised veterans who had married local women. Pol Pot would have approved this tactic. ‘We must focus attention on the Vietnamese,’ he told his cadres in 1988, ‘and divert attention from our past mistakes.’196
Media propaganda played a vital part in imposing the essentially American ‘peace process’. In the run-up to the elections in early 1993 the UN was generally depicted as an oasis of order in a country where mass killing was somehow unique to and congenital in the Cambodian race. ‘Imagine a country where people have been killing each other without mercy for 20 years and more . . .’ wrote Robert McCrum in the Guardian magazine.197 Imagine ‘a country that does not have a national will for peace’ (the Independent).198 ‘You see,’ Yasushi Akashi, UN chief in Cambodia, told the BBC, ‘violence is deep-rooted in the Cambodian tradition’. And this from a Japanese!
Devaluing the truth of the past – that no society had been so brutalised by foreigners – was essential. Cambodia, lamented William Shawcross, who had supported the inclusion of the Khmer Rouge in the Paris ‘accords’, was too often described ‘like many other crises’ with ‘quick-fix clichés [such as] piles of skulls and “Asian Hitlers” overlaid in the outdated rhetoric of the Vietnam war’. This was a country that was little more, than an ‘amoral state’ which the Paris accords offered ‘a chance to change’.199
The ‘good news’ was that the Khmer Rouge were ‘isolated’ and ‘finished’. Nate Thayer of the Associated Press wrote that, according to ‘analysts’, the Khmer Rouge were waiting for the ‘final blow’ that would ‘destroy or marginalise the group’. Buried at the end of Thayer’s piece was this: ‘Large areas of the countryside remain firmly under Khmer Rouge control, including areas rich in rice, gems and safe supply lines . . .’200
‘And what of the Khmer Rouge?’ asked William Shawcross in the New York Times. ‘For them, the election was like holding a Crucifix to Dracula.’ In December 1992, Shawcross wrote that there were 27,000 Khmer Rouge; seven months later he had reduced this to 10,000 – which meant that half of Pol Pot’s army had miraculously disappeared.201 Before the Paris ‘accords’ Western ‘intelligence analysts’ estimated there were as many as 30,000 Khmer Rouge troops in the field. Clearly, argued Western governments, they were so strong they could not be excluded from the ‘peace process’. Now the figure was put at half that, with the same ‘analysts’ contending that the Khmer Rouge were so weak they could now be dismissed and the UN operation declared an ‘historic success’.
The opposite was true. In the three and a half years from the signing of the ‘peace accords’ to the elections in May 1993, Pol Pot had actually quadrupled his area of operation and was in a more commanding position than at any time since the 1970s.
The Khmer Rouge now represented a pincer movement extending from the south to the east and north along the borders with Thailand and Laos, all the way east to Vietnam. One of the pincers was less than fifty miles from Phnom Penh. The UN almost disclosed the gravity of these Khmer Rouge gains when its own evacuation orders leaked out shortly before the elections. UN officials quickly rescinded them, so as to ‘lessen any unnecessary climate of fear.’202
Shortly before the elections, the Washington Cambodia specialist Craig Etcheson secretly photographed UN military situation maps in battalion headquarters across the country. ‘Some people might argue,’ Etcheson said, ‘that the term “operation” doesn’t mean that the Khmer Rouge completely control these areas, but that’s hardly relevant if you happen to be a villager living there, who is under Khmer Rouge coercion and forced to pay them taxes. In many of these villages, Khmer Rouge cadres are actually present – this means control. The UN maps show that the Khmer Rouge operate with varying degrees of impunity in 25 per cent of the country; and in another 25 per cent of the country they are operating freely by day and in control by night. That’s half of Cambodia in which they have a military advantage they did not have before the UN arrived in October 1991.’203
The elections were won by the Funcinpec party, commonly known as the ‘royalists’. Their leader is Prince Norodom Ranariddh, Sihanouk’s son. He won 58 seats in a constituent assembly, and the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), the former Hun Sen Government, won 52 seats. This ‘triumph for democracy’ was in fact a triumph for the United States, similar to the American ‘win’ in the Nicaraguan elections in 1990 that got rid of the Sandinistas.
Like the UNO coalition that won in Nicaragua, the Cambodian royalists were part of a coalition built and nurtured by US intelligence agencies while a US-led economic boycott impoverished the government.204 The Khmer Rouge, while not wanted as a regime, were used to achieve this. They dominated the coalition and today remain Cambodia’s hidden hand of power. In a comparative article about Angola, the New York Times quoted a senior State Department official as saying, ‘UNITA is exactly like the Khmer Rouge. Elections and negotiations are just one more method of fighting a war. Power is all.’205
As the Indo-China writer Paul Shannon has observed, the elections were a ‘victory for racism, taking place in an atmosphere in which racial hatred was stirred up against ethnic Vietnamese citizens of Cambodia [by] both right-wing and Khmer Rouge political forces . . . Funcinpec encouraged and benefited from this [and from] UN policies of disarming ethnic Vietnamese [which] made some of these atrocities possible’.206 Such was the UN’s ‘neutral political environment’ that was its own prerequisite for ‘free and fair’ elections.
At first, the Khmer Rouge called the elections a ‘theatrical farce’. Then they appeared to change course. The masters of deception now campaigned for Prince Ranariddh’s party. According to foreign electoral observers, many Cambodians thought they were voting for Prince Sihanouk, who still commanded loyalty. Few were aware that Sihanouk had described his son’s ‘royalists’ as infiltrated by ‘a large number of Khmer Rouge . . . tasked with eliminating true royalists’. Pol Pot’s men, said Sihanouk, held the ‘important positions’ and had become ‘chiefs of bureaus, heads of provincial organisations’. The Khmer Rouge takeover of Funcinpec, he said, was ‘almost complete’.207 Shortly before the elections almost the entire royalist military command defected to the Phnom Penh Government. One of them, General Kim Hang, said, ‘The Khmer Rouge have been employing [the royalists] only for a cosmetic.’208
This will not surprise those who have read recent Cambodian history. Pol Pot did not come to power suddenly. On the contrary, he did as he is doing now; and the echo today is of the early 1970s, when he built a united front of the Khmer Rouge and Cambodian royalty. Over the following years, Khmer Rouge agents infiltrated, liquidated and replaced the majority royalists. By 1975, ‘Year Zero’, Pol Pot had complete power.
A captured Khmer Rouge document, dated January 10, 1992, indicated that a similar process was under way. It said, ‘We must concentrate first on accelerating the infiltration of category one forces in order to gradually establish in advance the prerequisites’209 for the takeover of the royalists. In 1988, Pol Pot said: ‘The fruit remains the same; only the skin has changed.’210
The UN’s undoubted achievement was the work of its electoral volunteers; and the spectacle of the Cambodian people voting was moving. But the ‘democracy’ this represented was undermined long before people went to the polls by the advantage the Western powers gave to the Khmer Rouge. During the pomp that saw Norodom Sihanouk crowned king in September 1993, little was said about the ethnocentric, secretive regime over which he now holds sweeping powers – just as he did in the 1960s when his volatile, dictatorial ways led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Since then, he has had a relationship with the Khmer Rouge, described by his friend, John Pedler, as that of ‘a rabbit with a snake’.211 This is why the Khmer Rouge supported the royalists during the election, demanding that Sihanouk be given ‘full power as the
king’. Only Sihanouk, they said, would enjoy the support of Pol Pot’s ‘military might’: and only he could resolve the issue of ‘national reconciliation’. By that, they meant a subversive foothold in the regime. In October 1993, Sihanouk announced an ‘advisory role’ for the Khmer Rouge in the new government. The Khmer Rouge replied by demanding a role for themselves in the army.212
Prince Ranariddh has played this down, appearing even to ‘overrule’ his father. However, in December 1993 the Sydney Morning Herald disclosed that ‘secret talks are being arranged to negotiate a controversial plan’ to bring the Khmer Rouge into the government. One of the promoters of this is China, which, according to the accredited ‘good news’, long ago abandoned its former client, Pol Pot. At the ‘secret talks’ the Chinese are expected to offer sanctuary to Pol Pot and his principal cohorts while ‘allowing the more acceptable members to go to Phnom Penh’.213
In the same week that these machinations saw light, the New York Times documented, from classified diplomatic messages, the clandestine alliance of the Khmer Rouge and the Thai military – who between them make some $500 million a year in timber and gems. Chinese weapons for Pol Pot’s army fill Thai military warehouses. Thai military units transport arms and escort Khmer Rouge troops. In August 1993 Thai troops looked on while the Khmer Rouge held twenty-one UN officials hostage on Thai soil. ‘The Thais remain the lifeline for the Khmer Rouge,’ reported a Western diplomat, stationed in Phnom Penh. ‘Unless the Thais shut them off, the Khmer Rouge could be around forever.’214
Anything is possible now that the greatest obstacles to Pol Pot’s return have been swept away. In early 1994 the Western press made much of Khmer Rouge ‘defectors’, many of whom turned out to be boys recently recruited, and of the ‘fall’ of Pailin, the Khmer Rouge ‘headquarters’. In fact, Pailin never fell; the Khmer Rouge withdrew and surrounded the government forces. ‘The Khmer Rouge are in the midst of their biggest offensive for five years,’ reported the Mines Advisory Group from Battambang in April, 1994. ‘Government forces are collapsing in the face of this onslaught . . .’215