I RETURNED TO Cambodia in October 1992, in time for Ron Podlaski’s wedding. After the monks had left and everyone had been garlanded in jasmine, Ron and Bo Pha, his Khmer bride, stood in the narrow street most of the day and night, clasping hands with hundreds of people. Many were guests; many were street people. All were invited. I shall not easily forget them.
At a table of honour were six young men, none of them more than twenty-one years old, who had lost one or both legs in Cambodia’s minefields. Recognising each other, we raised our beers in a boisterous toast; I had met them a few days earlier at Kien Khlang, on the banks of the Mekong, where Ron runs the Vietnam Project’s Limb Centre. One of them, a cherubic boy of eighteen, had strapped on to his uneven stumps two new legs, made from beaten tin and rubber, and heaved himself on to the parallel bars. He walked for the first time since a small ‘anti-personnel’ mine had left him a bleeding ruin.
He walked at his first try, with the other amputees encouraging him in the soft, tonal lilt of the Khmer language. The next day he set off without the aid of the bars. ‘Didn’t you fall down at all?’ I asked him at the wedding. ‘No, not once,’ he said; and when I asked him why he and his friends had not worn their new legs, he said, ‘Tonight we intend to drink a lot of beer. Legs aren’t necessary for that; they get in the way.’ The interpreter could barely tell me this over their laughter. They had come from Kien Khlang on a fleet of motorcycles, riding pillion, each with bouquets of gifts for Ron and Bo Pha.
To walk the streets of Phnom Penh now was to run a gauntlet of limbless people, phantoms they seemed at night, some of them in threadbare uniforms, many of them children. One night a teenager without hands came at me from a doorway. He had touched a mine.
It is this that makes the work of Ron Podlaski and the other American Vietnam veterans who run the limb centre such an important counterweight, however small, to the foreign forces that still beleaguer this nation. At the very least they provide a glimpse of the human resources, both Khmer and foreign, that could begin to restore Cambodia. There is another connection. Cambodia is, according to some of Washington’s ideologues, ‘the last battle of America’s war in Vietnam’. Ron Podlaski, Dave Evans, Bobby Muller and Ed Miles see themselves on the other side of this battle – ‘this time on the right side’, says Ron.
Ron is a big, rumbustious man in his forties who was hauled before a judge in New York in 1968 and told he was a ‘menace to civilisation’. ‘I had hit a cop on the head,’ he said. ‘This was normal behaviour where I grew up. The judge said, “I’ll give you a choice: Vietnam or jail.” I said, “Where’s Vietnam?” He said, “Across the George Washington bridge.”’
Ron joined the Special Forces, running secret missions into Laos and Cambodia. ‘We were told to use amphetamines to keep from falling asleep,’ he said, ‘because we couldn’t trust the local people not to kill us in our beds. These were the people we were meant to be fighting for. They hated us. I learned quickly.’
Like many veterans, Ron came home an addict and angry, believing he had been conned. I didn’t meet him at the Lincoln Memorial in 1971 when he and other veterans threw back their medals; but I think I remember his larger-than-life presence. I certainly remember Bobby Muller at the Republican Party’s convention in Miami the following year. I remember his booming eloquence reaching the candidate, Richard Nixon, over the cat-calls of the faithful. He shouted to Nixon that he was lying when he promised ‘peace with honour’ to Indo-China. For that, he was thrown out in his wheelchair.
Bobby was a marine who had been shot in the spine, losing the use of his legs. He and Ron and Ed Miles and others formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War, bringing to America a political awareness that could not be ignored; for they were ordained American heroes. Ed Miles is a double amputee who stepped on a mine during an ambush. Years later he went back to the Vietnamese village where he fell and did not recognise it. A woman, however, recognised him: not his face, just as the young American who had lost his legs. She remembered, because the next day other Americans came and razed the village.
On their return home these veterans spoke about atrocities that were not reported. They described how half of those who had carried America’s battle colours were now unemployed or beset by drugs and alcohol. As many servicemen, they said, had come home and killed themselves as had died in the war. They proposed that such an adventure never happen again, anywhere.
In 1978, they formed the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and have since devoted themselves to preventing a repeat of such an adventure. They have funded a curriculum for schools and colleges on the Vietnam war, seeking to end the ‘historical amnesia’ that has allowed the same people in Washington to pursue ‘other Vietnams’. They have initiated projects in Vietnam for children orphaned by the war. In Cambodia they have produced their most remarkable achievement.
At their prosthetics centre at Kien Khlang they use the ‘Jaipur limb’, a simple aluminium leg with a latex foot that requires no high-tech components. The foot moves almost naturally from side to side and using the limb requires minimal training, because of the confidence it gives.
The prosthetist is Dave Evans who went to Vietnam at the age of eighteen and lost both his legs before his nineteenth birthday. Back home, he retrained as a nurse and went to El Salvador where he became the director of a prosthetics programme helping the Frente Farabundo Martí Liberación Nacional, the FMLN. ‘When I came to Indo-China as a US marine,’ he said, ‘we were told we were “ambassadors in green”. I believed that junk. I guess I was determined to come back as another kind of ambassador; and here I am.’ He walks and runs like a very fit man. The centre employs three Indian trainers from the Jaipur centre and soon Khmer trainers, most of them amputees, will begin to take over. They fit some 150 limbs a month.
The United Nations now deployed seven military units to train Khmers to clear mines. In one area of Kompong Thom province, fewer than 52 out of 4,000 mines were cleared in six months. In Battambang province not a single mine was cleared. Instead, the people were clearing the mines: farmers with spades, children with sling shots; and by stepping on them. ‘We have done virtually nothing,’ a UN Dutch army mine clearer told me. ‘What are we here for?’
At Ron Podlaski’s wedding, the Khmer band played rock’n’ roll; and the Indian trainers from the limb centre – Roddy, Than and Abdul – danced to the sitar; and Bo Pha wore several magnificent dresses of incandescent brightness. Like most Khmers who knew the Pol Pot era, her eyes have a wistfulness, a distance and a deep sadness. Bo Pha’s father, two brothers and brother-in-law were all murdered by the Khmer Rouge. ‘I have a boat and weapons ready,’ said Ron, ‘if they look like coming back. We’ll get everybody out that we have to . . .’
The day after the wedding Ron, Dave, Bobby and Ed were at Phnom Penh airport, on their way to Vietnam where they plan another limbs centre. It is one of their many current projects, including a worldwide campaign to ban the use and production of land mines. Watching the four of them cross the tarmac to the aircraft – only one of them, Ron, has the use of his legs – I recalled Martha Gellhorn’s tribute to that ‘life-saving minority of Americans who judge their government in moral terms, who are the people with a wakeful conscience and can be counted upon . . . they are always there.’186
A month later Ron was captured by Khmer Rouge troops while on a river journey to a new project in the north-east. They discussed in front of him whether or not to kill him, deciding finally to let him go. ‘We’ll kill you next time,’ they told him.
I had not been to Cambodia for two years and was not prepared for the astonishing transformation. Two years earlier the sun had beaten down on a languid Phnom Penh decaying after fifteen years of international isolation. There was no ‘peace process’ then; there were no UN blue berets and white vehicles. This was a city of gentle anarchy, of bicycles and mopeds and silhouettes strolling at night down the centre of a road, backlit by a single headlight.
Now the streets were a cataract of white vehicles, jeeps with flashing lights, Mercedes with brocade seat covers, Suzukis with whores on call, bicycles with filing cabinets on delivery, elephants announcing Cambodia’s first takeaway pizza and, at the margin, the limbless like crabs awaiting their chance.
Watching them reminded me of the dream-like quality of Cambodia, a society whose very fabric was torn apart and never repaired, whose trauma endures just beneath the surface. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason, the traffic swelled like an engulfing wave, spilling on to the pavement, a clutch of motorcycles and Toyotas abreast, sweeping aside pedestrians and vendors. One of the human crabs was struck by a bicycle and raised his only fist. Someone screamed. Open in their sorrow, the Cambodian people are often oblique in their fear; it is this internal bleeding that foreigners cannot see.
On my first day back, I walked to the Khmer Rouge compound, just behind the Royal Palace. Surrounded by a high wall, it had air-conditioned flats and offices, including a boardroom with comfortable sofas where UN officials, diplomats and journalists waited their turn to see Pol Pot’s men. I met a man called Chhorn Hay, who had a fixed smile and opaque eyes and spoke perfect English. Lining up with others, I found myself shaking hands and regretting it. ‘So nice to see you again,’ he said to us all. ‘Yes, of course, we shall consider your request for an interview. Please leave your hotel room number in the visitors’ book . . . thank you so much for coming to see us.’ As we left, their grey Mercedes was being dusted down. Chhorn Hay called out, ‘Be careful. You may need an umbrella. Bye, bye, bonsoir!’
Did this happen? Were the Khmer Rouge really here, wearing suits and saying ‘Bye, bye, bonsoir’? For me, standing at their gates, all the disingenuous semantic games and the contortions of intellect and morality that have tried to give them respectability and make the ‘peace process’ appear to work took on a vivid obscenity. I realised I had walked down this road on the day I arrived in Phnom Penh in 1979, in the aftermath of the holocaust.
There is a grassy area in front of the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, where people gather on Sundays to look at the Mekong, have their photograph taken and watch their children play in safety. I have often come here to catch the breeze and enjoy the normality. When the UN chose to hold a military parade here, it did more than disturb the peace. Ordinary Cambodians were barred from attending: that is, until a UN official was reminded that some might be necessary for the purposes of public relations. ‘Get a few of those people over here,’ he said into the public address system. A few dozen were pushed to the edge of a crowd of foreigners in time to hear a Ghanaian band strike up ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. Prince Sihanouk arrived with his North Korean bodyguards and was met by the Head of the UN mission, Yasushi Akashi, and the UN military commander, General Sanderson. Beside them as a guest of honour stood a smiling Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot’s man.
I had never seen him in the flesh and I was struck by his relaxed, almost jovial demeanour and by my own reaction. The sense of nightmare returned. Here was the Khmer Goebbels standing to attention as the ‘Christian soldiers’ marched by: the British, the Australians, the Americans. Here he was being feted by other ‘dignitaries’. A senior UN officer bowed his head to him. And when an international choir sang some mawkish rubbish about saving the world, he clapped, and he clapped. ‘Thank you all for coming,’ said the voice on the public address: ‘and a reminder about the fun run tomorrow. The winner gets $200 in cash!’
The next day I interviewed General Sanderson and I asked him how he felt to be in such company. He replied that he was ‘neutral’. I asked him how you went about creating a ‘neutral political environment’ when one of the ‘factions’ was guilty of genocide. ‘They are your words,’ he said. I quoted to him the report of the UN Special Rapporteur who described the Khmer Rouge as guilty of genocide ‘even under the most restricted definition’. I said, ‘General, he was speaking for the body you represent and he described them as genocidists.’
‘He may well have, but I’m not going to.’187
The UN spokesman, Eric Falt, a Frenchman, was more to the point. ‘The peace process’, he told me, with a fixed smile, ‘was aimed at allowing [the Khmer Rouge] to gain respectability.’188 UN officials were now reluctant to use the term ‘Khmer Rouge’, preferring the acronym, NADK, for National Army of Democratic Kampuchea. On a visit to Pol Pot’s heartland in the north-west, Australian foreign affairs minister Gareth Evans pinned a gold kangaroo on the uniform of a Khmer Rouge soldier. ‘Congratulations,’ he said, shaking the incredulous man’s hand. When asked about this, Evans said, ‘The young Khmer Rouge cannot be blamed for what happened in the mid-1970s.’189
The 21,000 UN troops and officials, their 8,000 vehicles, their villas and their camp followers gave me a sense of déjà vu. Was this the honky-tonk Phnom Penh of the early 1970s, just before the Khmer Rouge took power? According to a report by the UN Children’s Fund, there were 20,000 child prostitutes, and 3,000 UN personnel had contracted sexually transmitted diseases.190 Before the UN arrived, Aids was unknown; now 14 per cent of prostitutes were believed to be HIV-positive. A memo distributed to UN personnel said, ‘Please try not to park your Landcruiser outside brothels.’191
UN personnel had their own generators and clean water, while nothing was done about the water supply, which was fed by the sewers and left tens of thousands of children dying from intestinal diseases. (Drugs are available, but only at a price, on the ‘free market’.) There was little work for people who could not serve foreigners. Young men were blinded with flash burns from welding iron gates for UN villas. They lay on bamboo mats in agony, with damp rags on their faces, until their next shift.
Every UN ‘peacekeeper’ received a ‘hardship fee’ of $145 a day on top of salary and perks. This was more than most Cambodians earned in a year and twice the monthly wage of a Cambodian risking his life to clear the landmines that many UN personnel would not touch. Such was the process of recolonisation, which was evident even among the voluntary aid agencies. I visited an aid official in his air-conditioned office, which was cold and obsessively tidy; the only sound was that of his computer printer. We could have been in London or Los Angeles; and I was struck by the distance between him and the precarious life outside the tinted windows. He spoke about ‘data’, ‘mechanisms’ and ‘impacting’ and used the sanitising terms that are a lingua franca among foreigners. The Khmer Rouge, to him, were now a ‘faction’ with political and moral equity with the other ‘factions’.
At the Cambodiana Hotel, a ‘luxurious’ monstrosity on the banks of the Mekong, opened since I was last there, this distancing was complete. Ordinary Cambodians were not allowed in. The Austrian manager was fastidious; no beer cans on the table, please. There were photographs of dignitaries in the foyer, including Lord Caithness, former Minister of State at the Foreign Office and promoter of the Khmer Rouge’s place in the ‘peace process’. A man from the International Monetary Fund had set up an office in one of the rooms. True to its skills, the IMF had unearthed a ‘debt’ of $65 million incurred by the Lon Nol regime in 1971. Interest had apparently been ticking over for twenty-two years. A foreign ‘consortium’ would pay this off, I was assured unofficially, in return for the ‘appropriate trade concessions’. At a cocktail party, overlooking the pool, the talk was about the corruption that is ‘a way of life here’. No irony was noted.
At a special UN conference in Tokyo in 1992 the world community pledged $880 million to ‘rehabilitate services’ in Cambodia. This was hailed as the ‘foundation’ of the ‘peace process’. The aid would be delivered as an ‘emergency’. Flicking on his air conditioner with a remote control, the Phnom Penh representative of the UN Development Fund, Edouard Wattez, assured me, ‘The money is coming in quite significantly.’ I asked him which government had given the most. ‘The United States,’ he said. ‘They have pledged $60 million.’ I asked him how much of this had arrived. ‘Two million,’ he winced, ‘for road repair.’ And this ‘road repair’ has, in fact, restored a network of strategic highways from Thailand into Cambodia along which the Khmer Rouge mount checkpoints and move ammunition and supplies.
The Cambodia specialist Raoul Jennar has described the commitment of UN resources to Cambodia as a deception, ‘a real myth’. The real figure was not $880 million, he says, but $660 million, of which most is not ‘new money’ and only 20 per cent will be distributed in the foreseeable future.192
Although the United Nations operation was given an international face in Cambodia, only those who adhered to ‘Western’ (i.e. American) policy were given key positions. The UN financial adviser, Roger Lawrence, a US official, ran the Central Bank of Cambodia and ‘represented’ Cambodia at meetings of the Washington-dominated World Bank and the IMF. Thus, Cambodia was being eased into the world of ‘structural adjustment programmes’ (SAPS), which would ensure that it had a deregulated, low wage ‘growth’ economy favouring foreign investors, such as the Thais, Singaporeans and, of course, Japanese, who were already ‘investing’ in the country with the finesse of pirates falling on buried treasure.
The UN ‘information and education department’ in Phnom Penh was given to Timothy Carney, described by his friend William Shawcross as ‘a dedicated and skilled American diplomat’.193 Indeed Carney was an important official in the US embassy in Phnom Penh in the 1970s when his government was devastating Cambodia. He is the author of books that mention the bombing only in passing; like most from that era, he has never expressed public regret for his service to an administration that killed and maimed perhaps 500,000 Cambodians. Carney went on to become Asia Director of the National Security Council, America’s top policy-making body, based in the White House. He was one of those largely responsible for US insistence that the Khmer Rouge be part of the ‘peace process’. Not surprisingly, he then turned up in a top UN job in Cambodia, effectively running propaganda.
Stephen Heder was appointed Carney’s deputy. Heder is an American researcher who used to sympathise with the Khmer Rouge.194 In 1979 he went to work for the US State Department in Thailand – an unexplained switch of loyalties. In his UN job, he produced a number of reports damning the Hun Sen Government which were publicised, but nothing on the Khmer Rouge infiltration of the US-backed royalists.
According to the Cambodian writer Chanthou Boua, who lost all her family in the holocaust, UN Khmer staff were used to investigate the family backgrounds of the Hun Sen leadership, looking for Vietnamese antecedents. The aim of this ‘was to appease the Khmer Rouge’. UN staff, she said, were also being directed ‘to comb the villages looking for ethnic Vietnamese. Those subject to allegations of illegal immigration which are proved “correct” are deported within 24 hours. Ethnic cleansing is not mentioned in the Paris Agreement.’195 The UN also made public the names of three former Vietnamese soldiers. This was picked up by the media as ‘evidence’ that Vietnamese troops remained in Cambodia – a long discredited claim that the Khmer Rouge have used as effective propaganda. One of the Vietnamese turned out to be an ethnic Khmer from southern Vietnam; the others were demobilised veterans who had married local women. Pol Pot would have approved this tactic. ‘We must focus attention on the Vietnamese,’ he told his cadres in 1988, ‘and divert attention from our past mistakes.’196
Media propaganda played a vital part in imposing the essentially American ‘peace process’. In the run-up to the elections in early 1993 the UN was generally depicted as an oasis of order in a country where mass killing was somehow unique to and congenital in the Cambodian race. ‘Imagine a country where people have been killing each other without mercy for 20 years and more . . .’ wrote Robert McCrum in the Guardian magazine.197 Imagine ‘a country that does not have a national will for peace’ (the Independent).198 ‘You see,’ Yasushi Akashi, UN chief in Cambodia, told the BBC, ‘violence is deep-rooted in the Cambodian tradition’. And this from a Japanese!
Devaluing the truth of the past – that no society had been so brutalised by foreigners – was essential. Cambodia, lamented William Shawcross, who had supported the inclusion of the Khmer Rouge in the Paris ‘accords’, was too often described ‘like many other crises’ with ‘quick-fix clichés [such as] piles of skulls and “Asian Hitlers” overlaid in the outdated rhetoric of the Vietnam war’. This was a country that was little more, than an ‘amoral state’ which the Paris accords offered ‘a chance to change’.199
The ‘good news’ was that the Khmer Rouge were ‘isolated’ and ‘finished’. Nate Thayer of the Associated Press wrote that, according to ‘analysts’, the Khmer Rouge were waiting for the ‘final blow’ that would ‘destroy or marginalise the group’. Buried at the end of Thayer’s piece was this: ‘Large areas of the countryside remain firmly under Khmer Rouge control, including areas rich in rice, gems and safe supply lines . . .’200
‘And what of the Khmer Rouge?’ asked William Shawcross in the New York Times. ‘For them, the election was like holding a Crucifix to Dracula.’ In December 1992, Shawcross wrote that there were 27,000 Khmer Rouge; seven months later he had reduced this to 10,000 – which meant that half of Pol Pot’s army had miraculously disappeared.201 Before the Paris ‘accords’ Western ‘intelligence analysts’ estimated there were as many as 30,000 Khmer Rouge troops in the field. Clearly, argued Western governments, they were so strong they could not be excluded from the ‘peace process’. Now the figure was put at half that, with the same ‘analysts’ contending that the Khmer Rouge were so weak they could now be dismissed and the UN operation declared an ‘historic success’.
The opposite was true. In the three and a half years from the signing of the ‘peace accords’ to the elections in May 1993, Pol Pot had actually quadrupled his area of operation and was in a more commanding position than at any time since the 1970s.
The Khmer Rouge now represented a pincer movement extending from the south to the east and north along the borders with Thailand and Laos, all the way east to Vietnam. One of the pincers was less than fifty miles from Phnom Penh. The UN almost disclosed the gravity of these Khmer Rouge gains when its own evacuation orders leaked out shortly before the elections. UN officials quickly rescinded them, so as to ‘lessen any unnecessary climate of fear.’202
Shortly before the elections, the Washington Cambodia specialist Craig Etcheson secretly photographed UN military situation maps in battalion headquarters across the country. ‘Some people might argue,’ Etcheson said, ‘that the term “operation” doesn’t mean that the Khmer Rouge completely control these areas, but that’s hardly relevant if you happen to be a villager living there, who is under Khmer Rouge coercion and forced to pay them taxes. In many of these villages, Khmer Rouge cadres are actually present – this means control. The UN maps show that the Khmer Rouge operate with varying degrees of impunity in 25 per cent of the country; and in another 25 per cent of the country they are operating freely by day and in control by night. That’s half of Cambodia in which they have a military advantage they did not have before the UN arrived in October 1991.’203
The elections were won by the Funcinpec party, commonly known as the ‘royalists’. Their leader is Prince Norodom Ranariddh, Sihanouk’s son. He won 58 seats in a constituent assembly, and the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), the former Hun Sen Government, won 52 seats. This ‘triumph for democracy’ was in fact a triumph for the United States, similar to the American ‘win’ in the Nicaraguan elections in 1990 that got rid of the Sandinistas.
Like the UNO coalition that won in Nicaragua, the Cambodian royalists were part of a coalition built and nurtured by US intelligence agencies while a US-led economic boycott impoverished the government.204 The Khmer Rouge, while not wanted as a regime, were used to achieve this. They dominated the coalition and today remain Cambodia’s hidden hand of power. In a comparative article about Angola, the New York Times quoted a senior State Department official as saying, ‘UNITA is exactly like the Khmer Rouge. Elections and negotiations are just one more method of fighting a war. Power is all.’205
As the Indo-China writer Paul Shannon has observed, the elections were a ‘victory for racism, taking place in an atmosphere in which racial hatred was stirred up against ethnic Vietnamese citizens of Cambodia [by] both right-wing and Khmer Rouge political forces . . . Funcinpec encouraged and benefited from this [and from] UN policies of disarming ethnic Vietnamese [which] made some of these atrocities possible’.206 Such was the UN’s ‘neutral political environment’ that was its own prerequisite for ‘free and fair’ elections.
At first, the Khmer Rouge called the elections a ‘theatrical farce’. Then they appeared to change course. The masters of deception now campaigned for Prince Ranariddh’s party. According to foreign electoral observers, many Cambodians thought they were voting for Prince Sihanouk, who still commanded loyalty. Few were aware that Sihanouk had described his son’s ‘royalists’ as infiltrated by ‘a large number of Khmer Rouge . . . tasked with eliminating true royalists’. Pol Pot’s men, said Sihanouk, held the ‘important positions’ and had become ‘chiefs of bureaus, heads of provincial organisations’. The Khmer Rouge takeover of Funcinpec, he said, was ‘almost complete’.207 Shortly before the elections almost the entire royalist military command defected to the Phnom Penh Government. One of them, General Kim Hang, said, ‘The Khmer Rouge have been employing [the royalists] only for a cosmetic.’208
This will not surprise those who have read recent Cambodian history. Pol Pot did not come to power suddenly. On the contrary, he did as he is doing now; and the echo today is of the early 1970s, when he built a united front of the Khmer Rouge and Cambodian royalty. Over the following years, Khmer Rouge agents infiltrated, liquidated and replaced the majority royalists. By 1975, ‘Year Zero’, Pol Pot had complete power.
A captured Khmer Rouge document, dated January 10, 1992, indicated that a similar process was under way. It said, ‘We must concentrate first on accelerating the infiltration of category one forces in order to gradually establish in advance the prerequisites’209 for the takeover of the royalists. In 1988, Pol Pot said: ‘The fruit remains the same; only the skin has changed.’210
The UN’s undoubted achievement was the work of its electoral volunteers; and the spectacle of the Cambodian people voting was moving. But the ‘democracy’ this represented was undermined long before people went to the polls by the advantage the Western powers gave to the Khmer Rouge. During the pomp that saw Norodom Sihanouk crowned king in September 1993, little was said about the ethnocentric, secretive regime over which he now holds sweeping powers – just as he did in the 1960s when his volatile, dictatorial ways led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Since then, he has had a relationship with the Khmer Rouge, described by his friend, John Pedler, as that of ‘a rabbit with a snake’.211 This is why the Khmer Rouge supported the royalists during the election, demanding that Sihanouk be given ‘full power as the king’. Only Sihanouk, they said, would enjoy the support of Pol Pot’s ‘military might’: and only he could resolve the issue of ‘national reconciliation’. By that, they meant a subversive foothold in the regime. In October 1993, Sihanouk announced an ‘advisory role’ for the Khmer Rouge in the new government. The Khmer Rouge replied by demanding a role for themselves in the army.212
Prince Ranariddh has played this down, appearing even to ‘overrule’ his father. However, in December 1993 the Sydney Morning Herald disclosed that ‘secret talks are being arranged to negotiate a controversial plan’ to bring the Khmer Rouge into the government. One of the promoters of this is China, which, according to the accredited ‘good news’, long ago abandoned its former client, Pol Pot. At the ‘secret talks’ the Chinese are expected to offer sanctuary to Pol Pot and his principal cohorts while ‘allowing the more acceptable members to go to Phnom Penh’.213
In the same week that these machinations saw light, the New York Times documented, from classified diplomatic messages, the clandestine alliance of the Khmer Rouge and the Thai military – who between them make some $500 million a year in timber and gems. Chinese weapons for Pol Pot’s army fill Thai military warehouses. Thai military units transport arms and escort Khmer Rouge troops. In August 1993 Thai troops looked on while the Khmer Rouge held twenty-one UN officials hostage on Thai soil. ‘The Thais remain the lifeline for the Khmer Rouge,’ reported a Western diplomat, stationed in Phnom Penh. ‘Unless the Thais shut them off, the Khmer Rouge could be around forever.’214
Anything is possible now that the greatest obstacles to Pol Pot’s return have been swept away. In early 1994 the Western press made much of Khmer Rouge ‘defectors’, many of whom turned out to be boys recently recruited, and of the ‘fall’ of Pailin, the Khmer Rouge ‘headquarters’. In fact, Pailin never fell; the Khmer Rouge withdrew and surrounded the government forces. ‘The Khmer Rouge are in the midst of their biggest offensive for five years,’ reported the Mines Advisory Group from Battambang in April, 1994. ‘Government forces are collapsing in the face of this onslaught . . .’215
Indeed, wrote Craig Etcheson in the Phnom Penh Post, ‘Pol Pot is better positioned today than at any time since 1979. The Vietnamese are gone. The “puppet regime” is defeated, replaced by an unstable conglomeration. Pol Pot still has his army and still has highly placed friends in China and Thailand. He is wealthy. He has hugely expanded his territory and population. He has deeply infiltrated the opposing parties, and once again he has both overt and covert operatives in Phnom Penh. And he has convinced most of the world that the Khmer Rouge threat is no more. Nearly 3,000 years ago, the Chinese General Sun Tzu wrote in his classic treatise, The Art of War: “All warfare is based on deception . . . He who lacks foresight and underestimates his enemy will surely be captured by him.”’216
On the eve of the elections the Khmer Rouge slaughtered thirty-three ethnic Vietnamese in a village south of Siem Reap. Among the dead were eight children. It was an indication that the killing fields had returned; and the US chief of mission, Charles Twining, said he was worried history might repeat itself. Khieu Samphan replied by threatening a pogrom. ‘Twining’s nightmare’, he said, ‘might repeat itself.’217 The writer Chanthou Boua described the fear of speaking out among Cambodians embroiled in the ‘peace process’. And yet, she wrote, ‘the UN should take responsibility for such atrocities, because it is the UN Security Council that legitimised the Khmer Rouge.’218
She is right and those who believed in a Faustian pact with the Khmer Rouge were wrong, and have been proven wrong. The Western-imposed ‘peace process’ has been, to paraphrase the Vietnamese independence fighter Huu Ngon, ‘a silver bullet, more deadly than the real one. It does not kill you instantly, but step by step’. If the pro-Washington urban-dominated coalition does not survive, and Pol Pot appears some time in the future, those responsible ought not to be allowed to wash their hands and say they tried their best to bring peace to this ‘impossible country’.
‘The main thing’, says Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Gareth Evans, one of the architects, ‘is to accentuate the positive . . . to keep our fingers crossed.’219 No, the main thing is to tear down completely the Berlin Wall that the West built around Cambodia; and Thailand should be cast as an international pariah if its military continues to back Pol Pot.
Of course only the Cambodians can beat Pol Pot on the battlefield; and their national army should not want for the kind of resources that were so generously provided to the genocidists and their allies.
In the meantime, the leaders of the Khmer Rouge should be tried in absentia before a special commission of the International Court of Justice. In this way their crimes can be fully acknowledged, making appeasement a crime. If the United Nations Secretary-General can agree to set up an ‘international criminal court’ in the Balkans to try those accused of crimes ‘reminiscent of genocide’, he can do the same for a country where genocide, according to the UN’s Special Rapporteur, has already happened ‘ . . . even under the most restricted definition’.220 Among those Western governments that are signatories to the Genocide Convention, there must be one prepared to summon the skills of its jurists, if not the moral force of its public opinion, and take the overdue action.
But they should hurry. While Cambodia is declared ‘solved’ and slips back into media oblivion, the Khmer Rouge demand that King Sihanouk close the Tuol Sleng extermination centre in Phnom Penh, which has stood, like the edifice at Auschwitz, as a reminder of the thousands of men, women and children who were tortured and died there. ‘Not only is this the symbol of the evil of the Khmer Rouge,’ as Chet Atkins wrote, ‘it is also a repository for records and evidence to be used for an eventual prosecution.’221 Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, Son Sen and the others are looking ahead, as they tend to do, and thinking what can be done now to destroy the evidence.
‘If understanding is impossible,’ wrote Primo Levi of the Nazi holocaust, ‘knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again.’222 The simple truth is that no peace was ever built on unrepudiated genocide; and the words ‘Never again’ remain the cry of civilisation.
August 1979 to April 1994