A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (21 page)

"Enemies" were eliminated. Pol Pot saw two sets of enemies-the external and the internal. External enemies opposed KR-style socialism; they included "imperialists" and "fascists" like the United States as well as "revisionists" and "hegemonists" like the Soviet Union and Vietnam. Internal enemies were those deemed disloyal." Early on the Khmer Rouge had instructed all military and civilian officials from the Lon Nol regime to gather at central meeting posts and had murdered them without exception. Another child, Savuth Penn, who was eleven years old when the evacuation was ordered, recalled:

They shipped my father and the rest of the military officers to a remote area northwest of the city ... then they mass executed them, without any blindfolds, with machine guns, rifles, and grenades.... My father was buried underneath all the dead bodies. Fortunately, only one bullet went through his arm and two bullets stuck in his skull.The bullets that stuck in his skull lost momentum after passing through the other bodies. My father stayed motionless underneath the dead bodies until dark, then he tried to walk to his hometown during the night .... The Khmer Rouge threatened that if anyone was hiding the enemy, the whole family would be executed. My father's relatives were very nervous. They tried to find a solution for my family. They discussed either poisoning my father, hiding him underground, or giving us an ox cart to try to get to Thailand.... The final solution was reached by my father's brother-in-law. He informed the Khmer Rouge soldiers where my father was.... A couple of soldiers climbed up with their flashlights and found hint hiding in the corner of our cabin.... The soldiers then placed my father in the middle of the rice field, pointed flashlights, and shot him."'

This was the kind of killing that journalists and U.S. embassy officials in Phnom Penh had expected-political revenge against those the Khmer Rouge called the traitors. What was unexpected was the single-mindedness with which the regime turned upon ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese, Muslim Chains, and Buddhist monks, grouping them all traitors. Xenophobia was not new in Cambodia; the Vietnamese, Chinese, and (non-Khmer) Cham had long been discriminated against. But it was Pol Pot who set out to destroy these groups entirely. Buddhist monks were an unexpected target, as Buddhism had been the official state religion and the "soul" of Cambodia. Yet the KR branded it "reactionary." The revolutionaries prohibited all religious practice, burned monks' libraries, and destroyed temples, turning some into prisons and killing sites. Monks who refused to disrobe were executed.

More stunning still in its breadth, as Twining had gathered at the border, the Khmer Rouge were wiping out "class enemies," which meant all "intellectuals," or those who had completed seventh grade. Paranoid about the trustworthiness of even the devout radicals, the KR also began targeting their own supporters, killing anybody suspected of even momentary disloyalty. Given the misery in which Cambodians were living at the time, this covered almost everyone. As a witness against Pol Pot later testified, Brother Number One (as Pol Pot was known) saw "enemies surrounding, enemies in front, enemies behind, enemies to the north, enemies to the south, enemies to the west, enemies to the east, enemies in all eight directions, enemies coming from all nine directions, closing in, leaving no space for breath."" Citizens lived in daily fear of chap teuv, or what people in Latin America call being "disappeared" Bullets were too precious and had to be spared; the handles of farming implements were preferred.

The key ideological premise that lay behind the KR revolution was that to keep you is no gain; to kill you is no loss."" Liberal societies preach a commitment to individual liberty embodied in the mantra, "Better ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted." Khmer Rouge revolutionary society was predicated on the irrelevance of the individual. The KR even propagated the adage, "It is better to arrest ten people by mistake than to let one guilty person go free." It was far more forgivable to kill ten innocent men than to leave one guilty man alive, even if he was "guilty" simply of being less than overjoyed by the terms of service to Annkar.

Soon after the fall of Phnom Penh, Henry Kamm of the Neu,York Times visited three refugee camps at the Thai border, none of which was in contact with the others. He wrote a long piece in July 1975, which the paper accompanied with an editorial that compared the Khmer Rouge practices to the "Soviet extermination of kulaks or ... the Gulag Archipelago.""' In February 1976 the Post's David Greenway filed a front-page story describing the harsh conditions. "For Westerners to interpret what is going on is like the proverb of the blind men trying to describe an elephant," Greenway wrote. "Skepticism about atrocity stories is necessary especially when talking to refugees who tend to paint as black a picture as they can, but too many told the same stories in too much detail to doubt that, at least in some areas, reprisals occurred."'- Collectively, although all were slow to believe and none gave the terror the attention it deserved, diplomats, nongovernmental workers, and journalists did gather ghastly accounts of death marches, starvation, and disease in 1975 and 1976. The media did not lead with these reports, and the politicians did not respond to them, but the stories did appear.

The most detailed and eventually the most influential examination of KR brutality was prepared by the French priest Francois Ponchaud. Ponchaud, a Khmer speaker, had lived in Cambodia for ten years before he was evacuated from the French embassy in early May 1975. He debriefed refugees at the Thai border and then later in Paris, and he translated Cambodian radio reports. In February 1976, less than a year after the Khmer Rouge seized power, Le Monde published his findings, which said some 800,000 had been killed since April 1975.' For Elizabeth Becker, then a metro reporter in Washington, this was enough. "As soon as his stories came out, I believed," she recalls. "You have to know your shepherds. In Cambodia the French clerics had lived the Khmer life, not the foreigners' life. It took Ponchaud to wake the world up" Soon thereafter, a former KR official came forward in Paris claiming to have helped execute some 5,000 people by pickax. He estimated that 600,000 had already been killed." In April 1976, a year into the Khmer Rouge reign, Time ran a story, soon followed by other accounts, that included graphic drawings of the executions and described Cambodia as the "Indochinese Gulag Archipelago." "A year after the takeover, Cambodia is still cocooned in silence-a silence, it is becoming increasingly clear, of the grave," Time wrote. "There is now little doubt that the Cambodian government is one of the most brutal, backward, and xenophobic regimes in the world

Even when the diplomats, journalists, and relief workers no longer assumed the Cambodians were exaggerating, it was another step entirely for them to move along the continuum toward understanding. One need only recall the exchange during World War II between Polish witness Jan Karski and U.S. Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter in which Frankfurter told the eyewitness,"I do not mean that you are lying. I simply said I cannot believe you." Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has spoken of the difference between "information" and "knowledge." In Cambodia observers had initially resisted certifying the refugee accounts even as "information" The words were available, describing death marches, roadside executions, and the murder of the rich, the intellectuals, and even office assistants. But the first photos were not smuggled out of Cambodia until April 1977, and they depicted harsh, forced labor conditions but not the systematic elimination of whole ethnic groups and classes."' With the country sealed tight, statesmen and citizens could take shelter in the fog of plausible deniability. But even once they accepted the information, the moral implications of that information did not really sink in. For those back in Washington, 10,000 miles from the refugee camps at the Thai border, it would take years to promote the raw, unconfirmed data to the status of knowledge.

Response

Options Ignored; Futility, Perversity, Jeopardy

Those who argued that the number of Cambodians killed was in the hundreds of thousands or those who tried to generate press coverage of the horrors did so assuming that establishing the facts would empower the United States and other Western governments to act. Normally, in a time of genocide, op-ed writers, policymakers, and reporters root for a distinct outcome or urge a specific U.S. military, economic, legal, humanitarian, or diplomatic response. Implicit indeed in many cables and news articles, and explicit in most editorials, is an underlying message, a sort of "if I were czar, I would do X orY." But in the first three years of KR rule, even the Americans most concerned about Cambodia-Twining, Quinn, and Becker among theminternalized the constraints of the day and the system. They knew that drawing attention to the slaughter in Cambodia would have reminded America of its past sins, reopened wounds that had not yet healed at hone, and invited questions about what the United States planned to do to curb the terror. They were neither surprised nor agitated by U.S. apathy. They accepted U.S. noninvolvement as an established background condition. Once U.S. troops had withdrawn from Vietnam in 1973,Americans deemed all of Southeast Asia unspeakable, unwatchable, and from a policy perspective, unfixable. "There could have been two genocides in Cambodia and nobody would have cared," remembers Morton Abramowitz, who at the time was an Asia specialist at the Pentagon and in 1978 became U.S. ambassador to Thailand. During the Khmer Rouge period, he remembers, "people just wanted to forget about the place. They wanted it off the radar"

From the mountains of Vietnam, foreign service officer Ken Quinn had spotted early indicators of the Khmer Rouge's brutality back in 1974 and had since been rotated back to the United States, where he served as the Indochina analyst at the National Security Council. Quinn remembers the impossibility of generating constructive ideas after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam:

The country was in a state of shock. There was a great sense that we were powerless. We were out. We were done. We had left. It was painful, but it was over.... Vietnam had been such an emotional, wrenching, painful experience that there was just a huge national relief and a sense the country needed to be put back together. Our country.

Those who retained curiosity about the region continued to do so with the aim, in military parlance, of "fighting the last war." Most observers remained unable or unwilling to look at events as they transpired or to see Cambodia as anything other than a stepchild of Vietnam.They interpreted events on the ground accordingly. As Becker later wrote:

Too many people in and out of government had staked their reputations, their careers, and their own self-esteem on the positions they took during the [Vietnam] war. Each side wanted the postwar era to shore up those old positions and prove them correct. News was [seen] ... as potential ammunition against old American opponents, as proof of America's guilt or honor.'

Certainly, it is impossible to overstate the importance of the historical context in dictating America's response to atrocities in Cambodia. Neither President Ford nor President Carter, who took office in January 1977, was going to consider sending U.S. troops back to Southeast Asia. But it is still striking that so many Americans concluded that nothing at all could be done. Even the "soft" response options that were available to the United States were passed up.

The United States barely denounced the massacres. The Ford administration had initially done so, but official U.S. reprimands proved shortlived, as Washington tuned out. Twining, the designated Cambodia watcher at the U.S. embassy in Bangkok, continued collecting and passing along hefty and chilling refugee accounts.' But these reports led only to a lowkey U.S. government request to Amnesty International to begin investigations. A confidential June 8, 1976, policy paper on human rights from the State Department to embassy posts contained the following press guidance:

We share the concern about reported conditions in Cambodia.... We are prepared to support any effective action that might be taken to inquire further into the question of violations of human rights in Cambodia.... Reports of conditions in Cambodia are ... difficult to verify. Information available to the [U.S. government] is not significantly different from that obtained by journalists and comes primarily from refugees. Nevertheless, these reports are too numerous to ignore and sufficient information certainly exists for further inquiry by appropriate international or private humanitarian organizations.

... We have already urged Amnesty International to investigate the situation in Cambodia but have avoided any public actions which would give the appearance of leading a campaign against Cambodia or would lend credence to Cambodian allegations that we are behind reports of their transgressions."

Apart from casual appeals for "further inquiry;' the United States did not itself launch its own determined inquiry or act upon the facts already acquired.

U.S. officials could have publicly branded Pol Pot's killings as genocide. But they did not do so. Indeed, I have not found a U.S. official who remembers even reading the genocide convention to see if events in Cambodia met its requirements. Because the treaty excluded political groups and so many of the KR murders were committed against perceived political enemies, it was actually a harder fit than one would expect. But even though many killings met the law's terms, no faction emerged inside the Carter administration arguing for any change in U.S. policy toward Cambodia. Thus, it is not surprising that nobody thought to ask the State Department legal adviser's office to issue a legal finding of genocide. Such a finding would have been moot in the face of the "reality" of U.S. nonengagement. And since the United States was not a party to the convention, a genocide proclamation would have created no legal obligation to act.

The United States could have urged its allies to file genocide charges at the International Court of Justice. The court could not weigh in on individual criminal guilt and had no enforcement powers to ensure its rulings were heeded. But if it had determined that genocide was under way, the ICJ could have issued a declaratory judgment on Cambodia's responsibility and demanded that provisional measures be taken. This would have signaled to Cambodians that at least one institution was prepared to judge the KR slaughter.