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 effusive 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, somebody 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?
From Gareth Evans we at least could understand the scale of risk being taken in the name of the Cambodian people by those who came and went. No doubt to demonstrate its faith in Evans’s certainties, the Australian Government committed itself to sending back terrified Cambodian refugees. In 1992 Evans was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Congressman Solarz, who had been largely responsible for maintaining the Khmer Rouge’s position at the centre of US policy. Indeed, it was Solarz who had ensured that the US plan for Cambodia was largely concealed behind the façade of the ‘Evans Plan’. Not for the first time was an Australian foreign affairs minister successfully used by Washington, and Australian ‘initiatives’ defined by Washington.
‘If Cambodia’s peace process remains on course’, wrote Colin Smith in the Observer, ‘ . . . it will be because of Khmer Rouge restraint’.151 In January 1992 the Khmer Rouge launched a major offensive, attacking government positions in Kompong Thom, in the hinterland around Kampot and Siem Reap. What was striking about these attacks was their smooth co-ordination and the fact that troops appeared to materialise from base camps the UN inspectors knew nothing about and to bring up firepower – including artillery – from a network of secret dumps. All of this was in violation of the ‘accords’.
When a clearly marked UN helicopter flew over the area, it was attacked and an Australian UN commander wounded. ‘You must realise’, said the Khmer Rouge commander in Pailin, ‘the country is still at war.’152 The absurdity of the UN position was demonstrated by the fact that UN personnel were barred from moving more than 400 yards from Khmer Rouge military headquarters in Pailin, while the UN commander, Lieutenant-General John Sanderson, confirmed that UN forces had ‘prevented the Phnom Penh army from significantly building up the counter-offensive’.153
Indeed, some accused the UN of having ‘two sets of rules’. While the Phnom Penh Government opened its territory and prisons to the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), as agreed at Paris, the Khmer Rouge would not even talk about it. While the UN intervened in Phnom Penh to stop a law limiting press freedom, it did nothing to stop the restriction of a whole range of freedoms in Khmer Rouge zones. While the UN allowed the Khmer Rouge to build its headquarters in Phnom Penh, next to the Royal Palace and surrounded by a high security fence, it never authorised the Phnom Penh Government to open offices in any of the Khmer Rouge towns. And while the UN began to disarm the Phnom Penh Army, it stood by while the Khmer Rouge fortified their positions and conducted a pogrom against the ethnic Vietnamese population.
According to the Cambodia specialist Raoul Jennar, the Khmer Rouge were given ‘the perfect ally . . . time’. ‘They are not prisoners of a calendar they would impose on themselves,’ he wrote. ‘They have succeeded in eight months of “peace” in reinforcing their military positions without having conceded anything, while the other parties, respecting their promise [at Paris], have begun a process which puts them, a little more each day, in a position of weakness. This is, to date, the real result of the UN operation in Cambodia.’154 As Jennar and others pointed out, those running the UN operation in Cambodia were so committed to the ‘peace plan’ working, they ‘hide the truth’.155
The truth is that the Paris agreement gave the Khmer Rouge a long-term advantage, having already caused ‘Lebanonisation’ of the country. Although a principal sponsor of the ‘accords’, the United States continued to give unilateral aid to the so-called ‘non-communist’ factions. The US government aid agency, USAID, spent several million dollars building a strategic road and facilities across the Thai border into the KPNLF headquarters at Thmar Pouk.156 The Thai Army were, as ever, zealous collaborators in such ventures. At one crossing, Thai soldiers escorted Thais to work in the gem mines controlled by the Khmer Rouge: the source of great wealth for both the Khmer Rouge and the Thai generals.
In Phnom Penh under the UN unreality persisted. Echoing Neville Chamberlain, the head of UNTAC, Japanese diplomat Yasushi Akashi, ‘publicly rebuked’ the Khmer Rouge for their lack of co-operation.157 General Sanderson said, ‘It’s outrageous . . . them stopping our people’.158 One of his officers, a Dutch colonel, complained about dealing with the Khmer Rouge, ‘One day a nobody is a somebody,’ he said, ‘then a somebody is a nobody. A corporal becomes a colonel. They are friendly one day and unfriendly the next.’159 A Western diplomat said he ‘hoped’ the Khmer Rouge ‘will take a pragmatic approach’.160
In the meantime, the Khmer Rouge stepped up their attacks. During the first half of 1992 their immediate aim was to gain control of two strategic highways leading to Phnom Penh and so cut off the northern provinces from the capital. But Khmer Rouge commanders were also securing and expanding their ‘zones’. They did this by laying minefields around villages so as to deter people from leaving the areas they control. This is known as ‘population control’. People who try to escape or stray into a mine-infested paddy, as children frequently do, become a ‘strategic drain on the community’: that is, a burden on the Government in Phnom Penh.
Cambodia has long been a war of mines; all sides use them, and refer to them as ‘eternal sentinels, never sleeping, always ready to attack’. In September 1991 the leading American human rights organisation, Asia Watch, published a report entitled ‘Land Mines in Cambodia: The Coward’s War’. Even for those who have known Cambodia’s suffering it is a shocking document – all the more so for its expert attention to the aims and techniques of mine-laying and its effect on an impoverished peasant people.
One of the authors is Rae McGrath, a former British serviceman who is director of the Mines Advisory Group. What McGrath and his colleagues found was ‘the highest percentage of physically disabled inhabitants of any country in the world . . . the highest percentage of mine amputees of any country . . . Surgeons in Cambodia perform between 300 and 700 amputations a month because of mine injuries . . . for every victim who makes it to hospital, another will die in the fields.’ ‘These grim statistics’, says their report, ‘mean that the Cambodian war may be the first in history in which land mines have gained more victims than any other weapons.’161
I have seen many of the victims. They are usually civilians, such as 23-year-old Rong, a beautiful young woman lying in the hospital at Kompong Spen with her three-year-old infant beside her. When she stepped on a mine she fell into water and lay for three hours, bleeding. When her father found her, he applied a tourniquet, carried her to the road and flagged down a motorcycle taxi. He took her to a first-aid post; it was seven hours before she reached hospital. In Cambodia direct transport is always difficult to come by; a twenty-mile excursion by bicycle, motorcycle taxi and horse may take a day. The mine that Rong stepped on had driven dirt and bacteria deep into the wound, causing infection to spread fast. The blood vessels had coagulated and there was thrombosis high up her leg. Had she been able to get to the hospital quickly, her leg might have been saved. ‘I knew there were mines around,’ she said. ‘Every day I was in fear of them. But the work has to be done.’
Her story is typical. There is little hope for her future. Describing the after-effects of amputation, the Asia Watch researchers wrote:
Nearly every aspect of a Cambodian’s life is set to the rhythm of rice cultivation – the flooding, the planting, the re-planting and harvesting. It is very labour intensive . . . And a person who is physically disabled can become a burden. There are no rehabilitation centres, and Cambodia has no laws to protect amputees against discrimination or exploitation. Female amputees are less desirable as wives because they cannot work in the fields, and male amputees are now allowed to become Buddhist monks. Many amputees drift to Phnom Penh and become beggars or petty criminals.162
The laying of mines in Cambodia, said Colonel Alan Beaver, the first UN officer responsible for mines clearance, ‘is probably one of the worst modern, man-made environmental disasters of the century’.163 The United Nations repatriated tens of thousands of refugees back to countryside made uninhabitable by mines and without even a strategy for a major mine-clearing operation. The Khmer Rouge refused to allow UN cartographers to assess the extent of their minefields, and the UN said it could not begin large-scale mine clearance ‘until the necessary cash resources become available’. In 1991–2 the UN was $800 million in arrears, half of which was owed by the United States. Cambodia would be cleared of mines, said the sceptics, by people stepping on them.
This attitude was not reflected in the work of certain American and other Western volunteers in Cambodia. ‘NGOs’ (Non-Government Organisations) were the country’s lifeline, their work cherished by Cambodians, not least that of the American Quakers and Mennonites and, more recently, a group of Vietnam War veterans. Encouraged by our 1989 film, Cambodia Year Ten, they set up a prosthetics programme which for the first two months of 1992 fitted 300 ‘Jaipur limbs’ to the amputee victims of mines. This is the simple, aluminium limb developed by Dr P. K. Sethi in Jaipur in India, specifically for Third World conditions. Ron Podlaski, a big, rumbustious, endearing man, who carries his wounds from the American war in Indo-China, runs the project in Phnom Penh, picking up the pieces of lives devastated by governments that now balk at spending a fraction of what they spent on backing war.fn1
In its report Asia Watch named two foreign powers that ‘are or have been involved in training Cambodian resistance factions in the use of mines and explosives against civilian as well as military targets’. They are China and Britain. Coming three months after the British Government’s admission that it had trained the allies of the Khmer Rouge, the Asia Watch study provided evidence of the terrorist techniques on offer from the British instructors. The SAS, said Asia Watch, taught ‘mines warfare’ and ‘the use of improvised explosive devices, booby traps and the manufacture and use of time-delay fuses’. The training ‘was conducted in strict secrecy: students were not told where they were being taken and were only allowed outside the camp during training exercises’.
Although the report did not say the British were involved directly with the Khmer Rouge, it revealed that many of the mines and other terror weapons in the SAS training programme were standardised among all three resistance groups. For example: the Five-way Switch – a booby trap that rips off legs – is used by the Sihanoukists and the Khmer Rouge. The British trainers, the report noted, carried sidearms and wore the ‘winged dagger’, the SAS cloth badge, and the SAS fawn-coloured beret.
Such a swashbuckling image of Her Majesty’s special forces must be set against the impact of their work. The SAS trained the KPNLF. On February 19, 1991, said Asia Watch, the KPNLF attacked a displaced persons’ camp at Sala Kran, killing nine civilians, including two children aged four and ten, a pregnant woman and a 75-year-old man. Days after the raid, ‘camp residents, terrified that their attackers would return, sent a young boy back to their village to see if it was safe to return. But he stepped on a mine and was killed. When residents learned of the boy’s fate, they dispatched two older boys to the village. They, two, were killed by land mines’ – mines laid presumably with skills passed on by British soldiers wearing winged-dagger patches.164
In January 1992 Amnesty International published its report, Repression Trade UK Limited: How the UK Makes Torture and Death its Business.165 Amnesty used as one of its main examples the secret training of Cambodian terrorists by the SAS. When asked about the Amnesty report, Lord Caithness said, ‘Oh, that’s old hat. We didn’t lay any mines.’166 In a letter to the Guardian, Rae McGrath of the Mines Advisory Group wrote,
Claims by Lord Caithness or anyone else that Cambodians were not taught to lay mines are simply untrue. They were not only taught how to lay mines, but also how to booby-trap them. In addition, they were shown where to lay mines in such a manner that ensured, in the context of Cambodia, maximum casualties among rural farmers and their families. It is important to recognise that these were, as one would expect from the SAS, high-calibre courses lasting six months with fifty students of platoon to company commander level. Three of those months were devoted exclusively to training in the use and manufacture of explosives . . . and the use and dissemination of landmines . . . the SAS training was a criminally irresponsible and cynical policy.167
On March 5, 1992 former ambassador Derek Tonkin disclosed that he was one of the principals of a company, the Vietnam Trading Corporation, that was ‘very anxious to assist’ in clearing mines in Cambodia.168 Tonkin later revealed that his partner, Neil Shrimpton, was negotiating with Royal Ordnance for a mine-clearing contract in Cambodia. ‘I like to keep my hand in,’ said Tonkin.169 The senior British representative in Thailand at the time British troops were teaching Cambodians to lay mines was now hoping to be in business clearing them.
From 1979 to 1992 UN Development Programme (UNDP) in New York withheld development aid from Cambodia as a result of pressure from the United States, China, Britain and Singapore. Development aid comes in the form of tools, materials and expertise, with which poor countries can make a start at developing themselves. It provides such essentials as a clean water supply and decent sanitation. Cambodia has neither. Jim Howard of Oxfam estimated that less than 5 per cent of the country’s drinking water was uncontaminated. In 1988 Thames Water sent a team to Phnom Penh and found that as the level of water in the city’s pipes rose and fell, it spilled into the streets and drew in drainage and raw sewage. They recommended that an entirely new system be installed urgently. This has not happened, of course. There are still no resources and most of Cambodia’s engineers were killed. In any other Third World country, the UNDP would fund such a priority project.fn2
In 1988 a senior diplomat at the British embassy in Bangkok told Oxfam’s Eva Mysliwiec: ‘Cambodia is a country of about seven million people. It’s of no real strategic value. As far as Britain is concerned, it’s expendable.’170 Cambodia’s expendability, and punishment, are exemplified by its children. Whenever I went back, I visited the National Paediatrics Hospital in Phnom Penh, the most modern hospital in the country, and I invariably found seriously ill children lying on the floors of corridors so narrow there was barely room to step over them. A relative would hold a drip; if the child was lucky, he or she would have a straw mat. Most of them suffered from, and many would die from, common diarrhoea and other intestinal ailments carried by parasites in the water supply. In hospital after hospital children died like that, needlessly and for political reasons; and they are still dying.
The international embargo ensured that hospital drug cupboards were depleted or bare; there were no vaccines; sterilisation equipment was broken; X-ray film unobtainable. At Battambang Hospital in the north-west I watched the death of an eleven-month-old baby, while her mother looked on. ‘Her name is Ratanak,’ she cried. Had there been a respirator and plasma, the child would have lived. A light was kept shining on her face to keep her temperature up. Then the hospital’s power went down and she died.fn3
In the north-west most of the children fall prey to epidemics of mosquito-carried diseases – cerebral malaria, Japanese encephalitis and dengue fever. ‘Our particular tragedy’, Dr Choun Noothorl, director of Battambang Hospital, told me, ‘is that we had malaria beaten here before 1975. In the 1970s the World Health Organisation assisted us with training, medicines and funding. I remember the statistics for April 1975; we had only a handful of malaria cases; it was a triumph.’
In April 1975, when Pol Pot came to power, Battambang Hospital was abandoned, its equipment and research files destroyed and most of its staff murdered. When the Vietnamese drove out the Khmer Rouge, the World Health Organisation refused to return to Cambodia. Malaria and dengue fever did return, along with new strains which the few surviving Cambodian doctors were unable to identify because they no longer had laboratories. Today two-and-a-half million people, or a quarter of the population, are believed to have malaria. The same estimate applies to tuberculosis, which was also beaten in 1975. Most are children.171
During the 1980s former senior Foreign Office official John Pedler met many of the world’s foreign-policy makers in his capacity as representative of the Cambodia Trust. He later wrote to me: ‘Specifically, I was told in Washington at the top career level that “the President has made it clear that the US will not accept the Hun Sen Government” and “we are working for a messy sort of situation with a non-Hun Sen government, but without the Khmer Rouge, who will continue to lurk in the jungles” i.e. for a state of affairs which will favour the destabilisation of Hanoi.’172 This is the ‘better result’ that Washington’s ideologues have sought in Indo-China.
Their hope is Sihanouk, who can no longer afford to trust his own people and moves among them behind a phalanx of ten North Korean bodyguards. It is Sihanouk who personifies the gap between extreme rural poverty and the better-off in the towns. As Catherine Lumby reported, ‘It is a class distinction which the Khmer Rouge has traditionally been quick to exploit – paying the peasants double for their rice crop and often feeding villages in return for shelter during the civil war.’173
According to William Shawcross, only Sihanouk and ‘a huge foreign presence and dollars in the countryside’ can provide ‘the best guarantee’ against the return of the Khmer Rouge to power.174 But what will happen when there is no longer a foreign presence? Who will catch the fluttering dollars as they fall upon the villages and hamlets? And how will the dollars get further than other, deeper pockets? Such an exquisite colonial solution brings to mind again Emory Swank, the American ambassador who passed out $100 bills to relatives of those killed by American bombs – $100 then being the going rate for a Cambodian life.175
These days, the Khmer Rouge would not object to such a raw show of capitalism. After all, they now advocate a ‘liberal capitalist line’. Neither are they insincere, according to the historian Michael Vickery. ‘They consider it [free-market capitalism],’ he wrote, ‘the fastest route to the type of destabilisation which will most favour their return to power.’176
As for Sihanouk, now astride the Trojan Horse, he is seventy-one years old; if necessary the Khmer Rouge will wait for him to die on his throne, or dispose of him quietly. They are not rushed. Everything is going to plan. Pol Pot has told his commanders to ‘remain in the jungle’ until they ‘control all the country’. And then they will be ready.177
All of this was preventable. Had the great powers kept their distance following the defeat of Pol Pot in 1978, there is little doubt that a solution could have been found in the region. In 1980 the Indonesian and Malaysian Governments – fearful of Pol Pot’s chief backer, China – acknowledged that the Vietnamese had ‘legitimate concerns’ about the return of Pol Pot and the threat from China. In 1985 Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Hayden was told by Hun Sen, ‘We are ready to make concessions to Prince Sihanouk and other people if they agree to join with us to eliminate Pol Pot.’178 Four years later, reported The Economist from Paris, a Sihanouk-Hun Sen alliance against the Khmer Rouge was ‘torpedoed’ by the US State Department.179
Perhaps the most alluring promise of peace came when Thailand’s elected prime minister, Chatichai Choonhaven, invited Hun Sen to Bangkok, and Thai officials secretly visited Phnom Penh with offers of development aid and trade. Defying their own generals, the reformist Thais proposed a regional conference that would exclude the great powers. Prime Minister Chatichai’s son and chief policy adviser, Kraisak Choonhaven, told me in 1990, ‘We want to see the Khmer Rouge kicked out of their bases on Thai soil.’ He called on ‘all Western powers and China to stop arming the Cambodian guerrillas’.180
This represented an extraordinary about-turn for America’s most reliable client in South-east Asia. In response, Washington warned the Chatichai Government that if it persisted with its new policy it would ‘have to pay a price’ and threatened to withdraw Thailand’s trade privileges under the Generalised Special Preferences.181 The regional conference never took place. In March 1991 the Chatichai Government was overthrown and the new military strongman in Bangkok, Suchinda Krapayoon, described Pol Pot as a ‘nice guy’, who should be treated ‘fairly’.182 (It was Suchinda who turned the army on pro-democracy demonstrators in Bangkok, killing hundreds. He was forced to resign.)
At the same time Japan proposed that the United Nations exclude from a settlement any group that violated a ceasefire. Japan also proposed the establishment of a special commission to investigate the crimes of the Khmer Rouge.183 US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Solomon rejected the proposals as ‘likely to introduce confusion in international peace efforts’.184
‘Listen,’ said David Munro as we drove into Phnom Penh in June 1980, the year after the end of the holocaust. The tinkling of bells on hundreds of pony traps carrying people and food and goods was a new, rich sound. Compared with the emptiness of the year before, Phnom Penh was a city transformed. There were two bus routes, restaurants, raucous markets, reopened pagodas, telephones, a jazz band, a football team and currency. And there were freedoms, uncoerced labour, freedom of movement and freedom of worship. I had never seen so many weddings, neither had I ever received as many wedding invitations – four in one day. Marriage had become a mark of resilience, of freedom restored, and was celebrated with as much extravagance as was possible in the circumstances, with long skirts and brocade tops and hair piled high with flowers, and the men bearing gifts of precious food arranged on leaves, their necks craning from unaccustomed collars and ties. There were electricity and reopened factories – some of them paid for by the British viewers of our film Year Zero. An estimated 900,000 children had been enrolled in rudimentary schools and 19,000 new teachers given a two-month crash course: an historic achievement.
The tenuous nature of this ‘normality’ was demonstrated to me during a ‘disco night’ I attended one Saturday at the Monorom Hotel. The women and children sat on one side of the room, palais-style, the men on the other. It was a lot of fun, especially when a competing jazz band next door struck up with ‘Stompin’ at the Savoy’. But when a cassette of the much-loved Khmer singer, Sin Sisamouth, was played, people stopped dancing and walked to the windows and wept. He had been forced to dig his own grave and to sing the Khmer Rouge anthem, which is about blood and death. After that, he was beaten to death. It brought home to me that the efforts of the Cambodian people to recover from their nightmare of bombs and genocide ought to be the object of our lasting admiration; at the very least the willingness of our representatives to help them, not hurt them.
By any standards the efforts of the regime led by 42-year-old Hun Sen were remarkable. It attempted to secure and reconstruct a country without the basic means and skills which in Britain would be considered essential to run a local council. In the late 1980s the nation was self-sufficient in rice, and the riel, the currency, was stabilised by basing its worth on a national resource: the cotton that makes the scarves everyone wears. In its relationship with Vietnam, the Hun Sen Government was not unlike the West German Government after the Second World War. Just as the Federal Republic outgrew the tutelage by the Allies, Phnom Penh shed its subservience to Hanoi. Although described as communist, it was a government of Khmer nationalists: of survivors. Despite disinformation that sought to smear them as ‘Pol Potists’, only a minority were defectors from the Khmer Rouge and these came mostly from a dissident group that bore comparison with the 1944 Movement in the German Army that sought to overthrow Hitler.185
However, the isolation and privations had their effect. Corruption became a cancer, especially during the time of uncertainty and precarious transition. While Hun Sen was forced to disband the 200,000 militia because there was no public money to pay their wages, a number of his top officials grew wealthy by selling public properties to foreigners. The issue caused anger and dismay among people who were prepared to go into the streets and stand up to the Khmer Rouge. Having failed for a decade to overthrow the Hun Sen Government by force, its enemies now pinned their hopes on the United Nations to dismantle it and on intolerable internal pressures to destroy it.
August 1979 to April 1994
fn1 The limb programme is run by the Indo-China Project, an offshoot of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. Donations can be sent to Suite 740, 2001 ‘S’ Street NW, Washington DC 20009, USA. Phone: (202) 483 9222.
fn2 In June 1992 an international conference in Tokyo ‘pledged’ $880 million towards reconstruction of Cambodia. The largest pledge of $200 million came from Japan.
fn3 After seeing Ratanak’s death in our film, Cambodia Year Ten, Brian McConaghy, a forensics expert with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, established a network of health centres throughout Cambodia. He called it ‘The Ratanak Project’.