‘IT IS MY duty’, wrote the correspondent of The Times at the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Belsen, ‘to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind.’ That was how I felt in the summer of 1979. During twenty-two years as a journalist, most of them spent in transit at places of uncertainty and upheaval, I had not seen anything to compare with what I saw then in Cambodia.1
My aircraft flew low, following the unravelling of the Mekong River west from Vietnam. Once over Cambodia, there appeared to be no one, no movement, not even an animal, as if the great population of Asia had stopped at the border. Nothing seemed to have been planted nor was growing, except the forest, and mangrove, and lines of tall wild grass. On the edge of towns this grass would follow straight lines, as though planned. Fertilised by human compost – by the remains of thousands upon thousands of men, women and children – these lines marked common graves in a nation where as many as a million-and-a-half people, one-fifth of the population, were ‘missing’.
We made our approach into what had been the international airport at Phnom Penh. At the edge of the forest there appeared a pyramid of rusting cars like objects in a mirage. The pile included ambulances, a fire engine, police cars, refrigerators, washing-machines, generators, television sets, telephones and typewriters. ‘Here lies the modern age,’ a headstone might have read, ‘abandoned April 17, 1975, Year Zero.’ From that date, anybody who had owned such ‘luxuries’, anybody who had lived in a city or town, anybody with more than a basic education or who had acquired a modern skill, anybody who knew or worked for foreigners, was in danger. Many would die.
Year Zero was the dawn of an age in which, in extremis, there would be no families, no sentiment, no expression of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music: only work and death. ‘If our people can build Angkor Wat,’ said Pol Pot in 1977, ‘they can do anything.’2 In that year he killed probably more of his people than during all of his reign. Xenophobic and racist, he might have modelled himself on one of the despotic kings who ruled Angkor, the Khmer empire, between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. He was an admirer of Mao Tse-tung and the Gang of Four; and it is not improbable that much as Mao had seen himself as the greatest emperor of China, so Pol Pot saw himself as another Mao, directing his own red guard to purify all elites, subversives and revisionists. In the end he created little more than a slave state.
In my first hours in Phnom Penh I took no photographs; incredulity saw to that. I had no sense of people, of even the remnants of a population; the few human shapes I glimpsed seemed incoherent images, detached from the city itself. On catching sight of me, they would flit into the refuge of a courtyard or a cinema or a filling station. Only when I pursued several, and watched them forage, did I see that they were children. One child about ten years old – although age was difficult to judge – ran into a wardrobe lying on its side which was his or her shelter. In an abandoned Esso station an old woman and three emaciated children squatted around a pot containing a mixture of roots and leaves, which bubbled over a fire fuelled with paper money: thousands of snapping, crackling, brand-new banknotes lay in the gutters, sluiced there by the afternoon rains, from the destroyed Bank of Cambodia.
During the coming weeks one sound remained in my consciousness day and night: the soft, almost lilting sound of starving, sick children approaching death. In the eight months since the Vietnamese liberation, only three relief planes had come from the West – none had been sent by Western governments, the International Red Cross or the United Nations – in spite of appeals from the new regime in Phnom Penh. By the end of October, the tenth month, UNICEF and the Red Cross had sent 100 tons of relief; or as the Red Cross in Geneva preferred to call it, ‘more than’ 100 tons. In effect, nothing. Few geopolitical games have been as cynical and bereft of civilised behaviour as that which isolated and punished the people of Cambodia, and continues to do so in 1992. It is a game that beckons a second holocaust in Asia.
David Munro and I go back to Cambodia as often as we can. David and I have together made five documentary films about Cambodia; and our long friendship is committed to telling Cambodia’s story until the world repays its blood debt, and there is peace. During each visit I sleep only a few hours every night. Lying bathed in sweat, waiting for sunrise, listening to the hammer blows of rain, I fall in and out of a dream-state which has assumed an unwelcome familiarity. In the passageway outside there is the sound of something being dragged on flagstones, like a bundle. This is followed by the urgent flip-flop of rubber sandals and by indistinct voices, as if conferring; then by the sound of a voice that soon becomes recognisable as the rise and fall of sobbing. The dream moves on to a setting in the countryside, which is lush and green as the sun burns away skeins of mist, revealing pieces of cloth fluttering from earth that is speckled white.
I have talked to my friend, Chay Song Heng, about this. Heng spent three and a half years as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, pretending to be an idiot so that the guards would not suspect him of being educated and kill him. Confined to a rice-growing ‘co-operative’ and banned from speaking all but compliances, he imagined he was ‘a friend of the moon’. He studied the lunar phases and kept a mental record of the hours, days, months and years. ‘When liberation came on December 25, 1978,’ he said, ‘can you imagine, I was only two days wrong!’
Heng is a translator and interpreter of English. His weekly government salary is enough to buy one can of Coca-Cola, so he takes classes in one of Phnom Penh’s ‘England-language streets’. He is a diminutive man, who walks with a bounce, although I have now and then seen him tremble and his eyes reflect acute anxiety. ‘In the Pol Pot years,’ he said, ‘I used to walk to the corner of the paddy in the evening. There I would practise my English. I would say to myself – well, mumble actually, in case I was overheard – “Good morning, Heng, and how are you this morning?” and I’d reply, “I’m quite well, thank you, apart from the difficulty of living. I am a captive in my own country, and I am condemned for nothing. But they have neither my brain, nor my soul.” By the way, do you know “The Cat and the Moon” by W. B. Yeats? I recited that to myself many times.’
The cat went here and there
and the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up . . .
On my return in 1989, I drove into Phnom Penh with Heng. Every bridge leading into the city had been destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, except one which is now the city’s artery and its monument to Year Zero. ‘On the morning of April 17, 1975,’ said Heng, ‘the Khmer Rouge came down our street, banging on the doors, ordering us to get out. The whole city was being evacuated, pushed out. My mother, father and I got to the bridge at five o’clock, and it took us two hours to cross it with guns in our backs. During the night a woman gave birth to twins; when the guards told us to get up and move on, the new babies were left in the grass to die. The mother died later, I was told.’
Heng is one of the few people to have retained his real name. Most people have a number of aliases, or entirely new identities. Everybody remembers the moment when a list of names was read out by the Khmer Rouge. You waited for your name, and to hear it was to prepare for death. Heng is a government servant. As we spoke, he had just heard the news that fifty people had been taken off two trains by the Khmer Rouge. A list was compiled on the spot and government servants were shot dead.
Fear is a presence in Cambodia. Once, as I set out from London for Cambodia, I was told that Vietnamese intelligence had intercepted a Khmer Rouge death list and that my name was on it. Three weeks later, returning on an empty road to Phnom Penh, David and I ran into a Khmer Rouge ambush. We narrowly escaped, and the snapshot I carry in my mind is that of armed men in black lying on their bellies, motionless beneath a truck, aiming point blank at us.
It was a glimpse, no more, of what people in Cambodia continually live with; and it is contagious. Addressing the puzzle of my dream as we sat together in the frayed foyer of the Monorom Hotel, Heng said, ‘You are beginning to dream as we do. You are touched by what we fear is coming. You see, we are a people walking around like sleepwalkers in a world shaped by the shadows of the past and by forces from outside, never by ourselves.’ Visitors are often struck by the apparent normality of Phnom Penh, the spectacle of people trading, building and repairing, thronging at a cinema, waiting for a bus. But this, too, is part of the dream-state. Watch the eddies of panic when masonry falls from a building denied renovation since the first American bomb fell twenty-one years ago; or people immobilised when a burst of automatic fire is heard in the distance; or the traffic stopped by legless people demonstrating for food.
In Cambodia the surreal and the real merge. A few miles from Phnom Penh are the green hillocks of my dream, in which the bodies of as many as 20,000 people were dumped after they had been tortured and murdered, usually by skull fracture. Many were photographed at the point of death by members of Pol Pot’s gestapo, S-21. Many were small children. It is their bone fragments that speckle the earth white.
Further east is Kandal Stung, a market town that was ‘carpet-bombed’, where protruding stone foundations resemble an excavation of antiquity. There is nobody there now. At the provincial hospital at Kampong Cham, where children die because an international embargo proscribes life-saving equipment and drugs, one ward appears about to collapse. According to a doctor, it was hit by an American bomb in the early 1970s.
At the ferry town of Neak Loeung the main street is comprised almost entirely of façades, although people have come back. The bombing of Neak Loeung was described by the US Defense Department as a ‘mistake’. To rectify it the then American ambassador to Cambodia, Emory Swank, drove to the ruins in a large car and passed out $100 bills to relatives of the dead and missing: that sum apparently being the going rate in Washington for a Cambodian life.3
New evidence from US government documents, declassified in 1987, leaves no doubt that the bombing of Cambodia caused such widespread death and devastation that it was critical in Pol Pot’s drive for power. ‘They are using damage caused by B52 strikes as the main theme of their propaganda,’ the CIA director of operations reported on May 2, 1973. ‘This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of a number of young men. Residents [ . . . ] say the propaganda campaign has been effective with refugees in areas that have been subject to B52 strikes.’4 What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot completed.
Thousands of those who had survived the bombing were force-marched west. They were singled out as ‘Vietnamese in Khmer bodies’ – because they lived in the eastern zone, close to Vietnam. Like the Jews who were made to wear yellow stars, they had to wear special blue scarves and became known as the ‘blue-scarves people’. Like the Jews they were decimated.5
Svay Toeu is one of the poorest villages, where people live in houses of mud and straw. Several led me to a cigar-shaped object the length of a man, on which children were playing. It was a bomb from a B52, which had lain there for sixteen years with only its detonator removed. Beyond it a necklace of craters extended to the horizon. At dusk we walked back through the village to a shrine made entirely with human skulls. About five hundred were arranged in wooden tiers, and there was a separate pile of tiny skulls. The moonlight caught a line of watching faces, as still and silent as the trees in which there are no birds. They were children and women; in areas such as this, where the killing was unrelenting, up to 70 per cent of adults are women.
Many of the widows still describe, obsessively, their husbands’ violent deaths and the cries of their smallest children denied food; and how they were then forced to marry a man they did not know. Such traumas are said to have caused an epidemic of genital herpes and stopped menstruation.
I first visited Kompong Speu in 1979, as famine swept much of Cambodia. Since then the hospital has been rebuilt and schools reopened; and there are pictures of tranquillity, as saffron-robed monks stroll along the edge of a paddy, past playing children and their bullock. And yet, in the great shadows that follow the afternoon rain, the ‘men in black’ are back; and the night is theirs for the taking.
Here people who have resisted have had their villages burned down. Others now live in ‘zones of free Kampuchea’, where men and women are separated and forced into marriage, and the able-bodied are marched to Thailand and back, carrying boxes of ammunition. Those who have tried to escape have been shot. Others have stepped on land-mines. Beside the road, old men dig First World War-style trenches. They stop and watch, standing shoulder-deep, as if marking their own graves.
I know of no one in Cambodia who has doubts about what Pol Pot will do if, or when, he returns in the Trojan Horse the West, and the United Nations, is building for him. What he commands is not significant support, as some commentators have suggested, but significant fear. Certainly, as Western diplomacy has worked to accommodate the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot has been laying his plans in his secret enclave in southern Thailand. We hear little about his strategy, which is surprising as most of the reporting of Indo-China originates in Thailand. It is as if the phantom persona the Khmer Rouge have contrived for the ‘Great Master’ has been accepted by the outside world, especially its media.
Roger Normand, fieldwork editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal, has interviewed numerous senior Khmer Rouge cadre and battlefield commanders. Thanks to his patient researches, it is possible to understand the essence of Pol Pot’s strategy; this is, above all, to fool Western governments and to take power in whatever guise and however long it takes. In 1990 Normand obtained the briefing notes of Pol Pot’s clandestine speeches and lectures to his leadership, in the barracks of Zone 87. They show Pol Pot’s conscious use of the veto the West has given him over the ‘peace process’. In one speech he outlined his plans to ‘delay the elections’ until his forces controlled the countryside, and he warned of the danger of accepting a political settlement before his cadre had ‘prepared’ the people and could ‘lead the balloting’.
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 Malaysia 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.
This was extraordinary, but not surprising. Western correspondents based in Bangkok have long relied upon ‘intelligence sources’ and ‘Western analysts’ for stories about communist Indo-China, and have accepted the constraints of official advice. This partly explains why so much reporting of Indo-China has reflected the attitudes of Western governments or, more precisely, of Washington. Bangkok is a convivial place for cold warriors and for those seeking what the journalist Paul Quinn Judge once described as a ‘better result in Indochina’.25 It is also a ‘place of mirrors’, as a Thai friend calls it, in which an ostensibly free press is tolerated within a fixed ‘consensus’. Journalists who step outside this are intimidated or even murdered, and transgressing foreigners are often told quietly to leave.26 The bloody events that stripped away Thailand’s mask in May 1992 left a number of journalists among the dead and injured.
For whatever reason, there was little reporting of the activities of KEG and the true nature of its successor, the Working Group. The fact that British soldiers were training Cambodians to kill and maim each other was not known, or covered up. Similarly, Operation Badge Torch was not considered newsworthy. Neither was Pol Pot himself, who could commute from his headquarters at Trat to his beach house at Bang Saen without hindrance from curious Western journalists. The military hospital in Bangkok where he was treated regularly for haemorrhoids was but a few minutes from the bar of the Foreign Correspondents Club. When Pol Pot slipped into the beach resort of Pattaya in June 1991, to direct the Khmer Rouge delegation attending a major peace conference, his presence was not reported until much later.27
Thailand is run by a paddle wheel of beribboned generals. Although untested in battle (apart from ‘battles’ against unarmed students) they have made a multi-million-dollar ‘killing’ out of the international aid programme for Cambodian refugees. This is an extension of the graft that consumes much of the Thai economy, whose staples are child labour and tourism based on prostitution. For many years this subject was taboo. For apologetic Western eyes – investors, bankers and journalists – its vast underbelly did not exist; Thailand was ‘booming’, an ‘economic tiger’ and a ‘model’ for the rest of Asia.
Cambodia Year Ten was shown in thirty-six countries in 1989. The Swedish foreign minister phoned me to say that such was the public response in Sweden that his Government would change its stance at the forthcoming vote on Cambodia at the United Nations. ‘We shall no longer support the seating of the coalition,’ he said. (Sweden abstained.) The day after the film was shown in Australia, the Hawke Government abandoned its support for a direct Khmer Rouge role in a future Cambodian government and announced an Australian plan to have the United Nations temporarily administer Cambodia and hold elections. This became the United Nations ‘peace plan’.28 In Britain the Government told Parliament that British diplomats would visit Cambodia for the first time in fifteen years and promised £250,000 in humanitarian aid. This significant movement in Western policy-making came as historic changes were taking place in the communist world. In September 1989 the Vietnamese withdrew unconditionally from Cambodia.
The revelation of Britain’s training of Pol Pot’s allies caused an uproar in Parliament and the Government’s embarrassment was acute. Copies of a parliamentary statement by Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd were sent to people who wrote to the prime minister or to their MP. ‘We have never given’, it said, ‘and will never give support of any kind to the Khmer Rouge.’29 This was false. From 1979 to 1982 the British Government voted in the United Nations for Pol Pot’s defunct regime to occupy Cambodia’s seat. Moreover, Britain voted with the Khmer Rouge in the agencies of the UN, and not once did it challenge the credentials of Pol Pot’s representative.
The Hurd statement failed to satisfy a great many people and caused one of those curious disturbances in the House of Commons when Tory MPs have to deal with postbags overflowing with letters on a subject they wish would go away. Several debates on Cambodia ensued, minister after minister denied that Britain was indirectly backing the Khmer Rouge – until William Waldegrave, then a Foreign Office minister, made a slip and gave what the opposition interpreted as a ‘tacit admission’ that the SAS were indeed in Cambodia.30
Labour MPs now demanded the government withdraw the SAS, and threatened to identify the Secret Intelligence Service (M16) official who ran the British operation from the embassy in Bangkok. He was assigned to Thailand around the time that Derek Tonkin was appointed ambassador.
As a result of publicity, and the parliamentary exposure, the SAS operation was hurriedly invested with greater secrecy or, as they say in Whitehall, given ‘total deniability’. The official at the embassy was withdrawn (he was a close friend and tennis partner of Tonkin) and the training was ‘privatised’; that is, the instructors were no longer to be serving personnel. In operational terms that made no difference whatsoever, as SAS personnel normally ‘disappear’ from army records whenever they go on secret missions. What was important was that the Government could now deny that British servicemen were involved. ‘Britain’, announced Foreign Office minister Tim Sainsbury, ‘does not give military aid in any form to the Cambodian factions’.31 ‘I confirm’, Margaret Thatcher wrote to Neil Kinnock, ‘that there is no British Government involvement of any kind in training, equipping or co-operating with Khmer Rouge forces or those allied to them.’32 (My italics.) Parliament and the British people were misled, repeatedly.
There is a curiously fervent edge to the expression of Britain’s Cambodia policy. This is perhaps surprising as Cambodia belongs to a part of the world that the empire did not reach. Much of this passion flowed from the civil servant responsible, David Colvin, the long-serving head of the South-east Asia Department at the Foreign Office. Until his transfer in late 1991 Colvin was in complete command, writing and overseeing pronouncements of the secretary of state, as well as keeping a close eye on the Bertie Wooster figures who come and go as Foreign Office ministers – those like Lord Brabazon and his successor, the Earl of Caithness, whose signatures appear on Commons written replies and standard fob-off letters sent to the public.
Colvin served at the British embassy in Thailand during the American war in Vietnam. He was strongly pro-Washington and could be observed at public meetings on Cambodia, displaying his impatience with speakers who opposed British policy. Once, during a Commons debate, he made his objections from the public gallery so obvious that he was identified by Chris Mullin, MP.33 His scribbled handwriting – ‘rubbish’ and ‘fatuous’ – appears on the pages of a study by the Cambodia specialist, Raoul Jennar, who has argued against the inclusion of the Khmer Rouge in the peace process.34 In the margin next to where Jennar warns against giving advantage to Pol Pot, Colvin has scrawled that Jennar ‘must be a socialist’.35 Colvin made clear he wanted the Khmer Rouge included.36 ‘When I met Mr Colvin,’ the former foreign policy adviser to the Thai prime minister, Kraisak Choonhaven, told me, ‘I informed him that supporting the so-called non-communists in the coalition was the same as supporting Pol Pot. I got the distinct impression he did not believe this.’37
For most of 1990 David Munro and I – together with Simon O’Dwyer-Russell of the Sunday Telegraph – pursued an investigation into Western support for the Khmer Rouge in Europe, the United States and South-east Asia. By the summer we believed we had accumulated sound evidence that the SAS was directly training the Khmer Rouge. Our sources were in the Ministry of Defence and in ‘R’ (reserve) Squadron of the SAS. One of them, himself a former SAS trainer in Thailand, told us,
We first went to Thailand in 1984. Since then we have worked in teams of four and eight and have been attached to the Thai Army. The Yanks [Special Forces] and us worked together; we’re close like brothers. We trained the Khmer Rouge in a lot of technical stuff – a lot about mines. We used mines that came originally from Royal Ordnance in Britain, which we got by way of Egypt, with markings changed. They are the latest; one type goes up in a rocket and comes down on a parachute and hangs in the bushes until someone brushes it. Then it can blow their head off, or an arm. We trained them in Mark 5 rocket launchers and all sorts of weapons. We even gave them psychological training. At first they wanted to go into the villages and just chop people up. We told them how to go easy . . .
Some of us went up to 100 miles inside Cambodia with them on missions. There are about 250 of us on the border at any one time and a lot of those would change sides given half the chance. That’s how pissed off we are. We hate being mixed up with Pol Pot. I tell you: we are soldiers, not child murderers. It costs half a million quid to train one of us. Putting us in the service of a lunatic like Pol Pot makes no sense. There is no insurgency in Cambodia that threatens us.
O’Dwyer-Russell interviewed two SAS trainers whose military background he knew well. They described in detail how they had taught Khmer Rouge troops mine-laying and mines technology. None could be interviewed on film; the Official Secrets Act – ‘reformed’ by Douglas Hurd when he was home secretary – prevented them from speaking publicly and Central Television from broadcasting their words. In any case, the SAS is a small, tight regiment and dissenters are not welcomed. O’Dwyer-Russell proposed that he speak on behalf of the men.
I didn’t have to remind him that, as a senior correspondent of a high Tory newspaper, he was risking not only his relationship with Whitehall, upon which his present job largely depended, but also his career. ‘That’s not the point,’ he said curtly, unravelling to his full six feet six and a half inches. ‘The point is, this whole thing has gone too damn far. We’re training bloody mass murderers. And that’s not what the British Army should be about. And those of us who know should speak out, regardless!’
Simon O’Dwyer-Russell appeared to have been carved out of the British establishment. He wore a navy-blue blazer, usually a bright polka-dot silk tie with glittering tie-pin and highly polished size-15 brogues, custom made. His voice boomed. He enjoyed the social life around hunting, while disapproving of the sport itself. He came from a service family – his father was a senior RAF officer and his brother a Harrier pilot – and he went to King’s College, London, where he took a degree in war studies.
Although his own military career was limited to the Territorials, Simon had many close friends in the elite regiments, and rode regularly in Hyde Park on horses of the Household Cavalry. He had especially strong personal and family contacts in the SAS. A senior colleague on the Sunday Telegraph wrote that he had achieved ‘unrivalled access to both the Armed Forces and the security services at all levels’, which enabled him to produce ‘a series of notable exclusives’ along with ‘apoplexy at the Ministry of Defence’.38
During 1989 and 1990 David Munro and I got to know Simon well and to regard him as a maverick whose professional honesty was matched by a sense of moral outrage, and courage. He had three conditions for appearing in our film. He would need the approval of his principal informants, as he would be speaking for them and there was a risk that they might be identified by their association with him. He would require the permission of his editor, Trevor Grove; and his paper should publish the story first on the Sunday prior to transmission. David and I agreed. On the morning after meeting Grove, he phoned to say that he had been given the go-ahead.
The following is part of the interview I conducted with Simon, which was broadcast in David’s and my film Cambodia: The Betrayal on October 9, 1990. He used ‘my understanding’ as the words agreed with his informants in the Ministry of Defence.
JP: ‘What is the nature of British assistance to the Khmer Rouge now?’
SO-R: ‘Well my understanding is that following the row that erupted last autumn as a result of partly your programme, and partly because of my own newspaper, the government put the word out that support from that date onward was to be very much more covert in its nature, so that it was passed very clearly to being an M16 operation. The result of that has been that there are a number of former SAS people who are now out of the service and who are private individuals but that are working to some form of contract to provide training and mines technology to the Khmer Rouge.’
JP: ‘What exactly do you mean by mines technology?’
SO-R: ‘One can lay anti-personnel and off-route mines which can be detonated automatically by the sound of people moving along the track. There are an increasing number of anti-personnel mines which fire thousands of pellets into the air and once they bed themselves in people’s bodies are incredibly difficult to find, for doctors working with fairly rudimentary field equipment.’
JP: ‘So these are the kind of mines that are being supplied by the British?’
SO-R: ‘My understanding is that the British are still involved in supplying those sorts of mines, yes.’
JP: ‘Are they British-made mines?’
SO-R: ‘The mines themselves need not necessarily be British because there are a series of licensing agreements that obviously exist worldwide, bringing with it the element of deniability . . . We are not laying mines with “Made in the UK” on them.’
The British Government’s response was swift. In the Independent of October 12, a front-page headline said, ‘Hurd rejects Pilger’s Cambodia allegations’. Inside, half a page was devoted to a long riposte under Hurd’s name, an unusual step for a foreign secretary. ‘The brutality and murder of the Pol Pot regime shocked the world,’ wrote Hurd. ‘The British Government took the lead in denouncing it at the UN.’
In fact, the opposite was true. The government of which Hurd was a foreign office minister took the lead in supporting Pol Pot’s claim on Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations. ‘Interestingly enough,’ wrote Hurd, ‘some of those who are now loudest in denouncing the Khmer Rouge, at the time acted as their apologists.’
Nothing was offered to substantiate this slur. My stated admiration for Noam Chomsky was cited and Chomsky was also smeared as one who had ‘condemned reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities as Western, anti-communist, propaganda’. Considering its baselessness, this was a remarkable claim for a serving foreign secretary to make and one which reflected the government’s anxiety that the cover on its most secret military adventure had been lifted. In a letter to the Independent on October 22, Chomsky refuted Hurd’s smear with reference to his own condemnation of the Khmer Rouge for ‘major atrocities and oppression’ and ‘a grisly record of barbarity’.39
The rest of Hurd’s article was a blanket denial of any British link with the Khmer Rouge. He dismissed O’Dwyer-Russell’s disclosures as ‘ruminations’, and praised the Government’s ‘commitment’ to bringing peace to Cambodia. He also lauded the ‘effectiveness’ of British ‘humanitarian’ aid to Cambodia: an astonishing remark.
The day after the Hurd article appeared a dismayed senior official of the Overseas Development Ministry disclosed that a request for British funding specifically for the repair of a water filtration plant in Cambodia had been turned down ‘on ministerial direction’ because it was regarded as ‘developing aid’ that might assist Phnom Penh.40 Cambodia has one of the highest death rates in the world from preventable water-borne diseases.
Following Hurd’s denial, Chris Mullin, MP tabled a written parliamentary question asking Defence Secretary Tom King, ‘if British servicemen or any other employees of his Department have been involved in providing military training for Cambodians in Malaysia, Thailand, or Singapore . . .’ The question was returned to Mullin by the Commons Table Office, which refused to accept it. The Table Office clerk had written the word ‘blocked’ on it.41
Shortly after the start of the Gulf War in January 1991 President Bush described Saddam Hussein as ‘Adolf Hitler revisited’.42 Bush also expressed his support for ‘another Nuremberg’; and the call to try Saddam Hussein under the Genocide Convention was echoed in Congress and across the Atlantic in Whitehall.
This was an ironic distraction. Since the original Hitler expired in his bunker, the United States has maintained a network of dictators with Hitlerian tendencies – from Saddam Hussein to Suharto in Indonesia, Mobutu in Zaire and a variety of Latin American mobsters, many of them graduates of an American school of terrorism in the US-run Canal Zone in Panama. But only one has been identified by the world community as a genuine ‘Adolf Hitler revisited’, whose crimes are documented in a 1979 report of the UN Human Rights Commission as ‘the worst to have occurred anywhere in the world since Nazism’.43 He is, of course, Pol Pot, who must surely wonder at his good fortune. Not only is he cosseted, his troops fed, supplied and trained, his envoys afforded all diplomatic privileges, but – unlike Saddam Hussein – he has been assured by his patrons that he will never be brought to justice for his crimes.
These assurances were given publicly in 1991 when the UN Human Rights Sub-commission dropped from its agenda a draft resolution on Cambodia that referred to ‘the atrocities reaching the level of genocide committed in particular during the period of Khmer Rouge rule’.44 No more, the UN body decided, should member governments seek to ‘detect, arrest, extradite or bring to trial those who have been responsible for crimes against humanity in Cambodia’. No more are governments called upon to ‘prevent the return to government positions of those who were responsible for genocidal actions during the period 1975 to 1978’.45
These assurances were also given as part of the UN ‘peace plan’ which was drafted by the permanent members of the Security Council: that is, by the United States. So as not to offend Pol Pot’s principal backers, the Chinese, the plan has dropped all mention of ‘genocide’, replacing it with the euphemism: ‘policies and practices of the recent past’.46 On this, Henry Kissinger, who played a leading part in the mass bombing of Cambodia in the early 1970s, has been an important influence; it was Kissinger who in July 1989 urged Bush to give the Peking regime ‘most favoured nation’ trading status in spite of the bloody events in Tiananmen Square only weeks earlier. Kissinger regards the Chinese leadership as a moderating influence in South-East Asia and supports China’s ‘present course’.47
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, he 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
fn1 Association of South-East Asian Nations