Distant Voices (65 page)

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‘like many other crises' with ‘quick-fix clichés [such as] piles of skulls and “Asian Hitlers” overlaid in the outdated rhetoric of the Vietnam war'.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'.
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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 . . .'
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‘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.
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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.'
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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.'
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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.
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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.'
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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'.
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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'.
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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.'
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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'
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for the takeover of the royalists. In 1988, Pol Pot said: ‘The fruit remains the same; only the skin has changed.'
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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'.
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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.
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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'.
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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.'
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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 . . .'
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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.”'
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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.'
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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.'
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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.'
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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'.
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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.'
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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.'
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The simple truth is that no peace was ever built on unrepudiated genocide; and the words ‘Never again' remain the cry of civilisation.