A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (17 page)

U.S. interest in Cambodia during the civil war was completely derivative of U.S. designs on Vietnam. So when U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam in January 1973, the bombing of Cambodia became harder to justify. In August 1973 Congress finally stepped in to ban the air campaign. President Nixon was furious. He blamed Congress for weakening regional security and "raising doubts in the mind of both friends and adversaries" about U.S. "resolve" All told, between March 1969 and August 1973, U.S. planes dropped 540,000 tons of bombs onto the Cambodian countryside."' The United States continued to supply military and financial assistance to Lon Not, warning that a "bloodbath" would ensue if the KR were allowed to triumph.

The U.S. B-52 raids killed tens of thousands of civilians.' Villagers who happened to be away from home returned to find nothing but dust and mud mixed with seared and bloody body parts. Lon Nol's ground forces used massive heavy artillery barrages to pacify areas or villages where some enemy activity was suspected. By 1973, inflation in Cambodia topped 275 percent, and 40 percent of roads and one-third of all bridges had been rendered unusable.' With the local economy dysfunctional, U.S. aid came to count for 95 percent of all of Lon Nol's income.

The U.S. bombing did little to weaken the Vietnamese or the Cambodian Communists. Instead, it probably had the opposite effect. Cambodians who resented America's demolition derby were captive both to the promise of peace and the anti-Americanism of the Khmer Rouge. British journalist William Shawcross and others have argued that the Khmer Rouge ranks swelled primarily because of the U.S. intervention. Chhit l)o, a Khmer Rouge leader from northern Cambodia who later defected, described the effect of U.S. bombing:

Every time after there had been bombing, they would take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see how the earth had been gouged out and scorched.... The ordinary people ... sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came .... Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days.Terrified and half-crazy, the peo ple were ready to believe what they were told.... That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over.... It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on cooperating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them."

Prince Sirik Matak, once a Lon Nol ally, warned U.S. officials not to back the unpopular Lon Nol regime. "If the United States continues to support such a regime," he warned, "you help the Communists. "° American intervention in Cambodia did tremendous damage in its own right, but it also indirectly helped give rise to a monstrous regime.

The Unknowable Unknown

Before it begins, genocide is not easy to wrap one's mind around. A genocidal regime's intent to destroy a group is so hideous and the scale of its atrocities so enormous that outsiders who know enough to forecast brutality can rarely bring themselves to imagine genocide. This was true of many of the diplomats, journalists, and European Jews who observed Hitler throughout the 1930s, and it was certainly true of diplomats, journalists, and Cambodians who speculated about the Khmer Rouge before they seized power. The omens of imminent, mass violence were omnipresent but largely dismissed.

Before the fall of Phnom Penh in April 1975, Cambodia's Communists were well enough known to cause some Americans alarm. In June 1973 Kenneth Quinn, a thirty-two-year-old U.S. foreign service officer, was introduced to the Khmer Rouge quite by accident. For six years, he had worked in Vietnam as an American provincial adviser, and he had spent his last two years posted in Chou Doc, the Vietnamese province bordering Cambodia on the Mekong River. One day, Quinn hiked up a mountain outside Chou Doc that allowed him to survey the terrain for 10 miles around. In scanning the Cambodian horizon, he encountered a scene that both stunned and chilled him. "The villages in Cambodia are clustered in circles," Quinn recalls. "When I looked out, I saw that every one of these clusters was in flames and there was black smoke rising from each one. I didn't know what was going on. All I knew was that as far as the eye could see, every single village in Cambodia was on fire."

Confused, Quinn hand-wrote a description of the scene, stuffed it into an envelope, and put it on the plane that flew to the nearest U.S. consular headquarters, where it was typed up and sent back to the United States as a spot report. He also set out to learn more about Cambodia's internal divisions. In the subsequent weeks he interviewed dozens of Cambodian refugees who had fled to Vietnam, including a former KR official. The refugees described such brutality and the visual image of the burning horizon was so memorable that Quinn had what he calls a "eureka moment." He concluded that although the Khmer Rouge may have been wellbehaved "boy scout revolutionaries" when they began their military campaign in 1970, in June 1973 they had launched a far more radical program designed to communalize the entire Cambodian society overnight. The KR were deporting people from their ancestral homes to new communes and were burning the old villages to enforce the policy.

In February 1974 he sent to Washington a forty-five-page classified report, "The Khmer Krahom [Rouge] Program to Create a Communist Society in Southern Cambodia." Quinn wrote: "The Khmer Krahom's programs have much in common with those of totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, particularly regarding efforts to psychologically reconstruct individual members of society." He described KR attacks on religion and on parental and monastic authority as well as the widespread use of terror. "Usually people are arrested and simply never show up again, or are given six months in jail and then die there," he reported. The "crimes" that "merited" this treatment were fleeing KR territory and questioning KR policies .2' Today Quinn's voice still betrays shock at the bloodiness of the KR approach to social transformation: "They were forcing everybody to leave their homes and build new collectivized living communities. They were setting fires to everything the people owned so they would have nothing to go back to. They were separating children from parents, defrocking monks, killing those who disobeyed and creating an irrevocable living arrangement:"

Quinn's reporting stood out from that of his State Department colleagues because at that time U.S. government officials rarely interviewed refugees. Instead they relied almost exclusively on official, government-togovernment sources. But Quinn also urged his superiors to begin distinguishing between Communists in Cambodia and those in Vietnam. Vietnam had certainly supplied the KR with weapons, military advisers, and direct combat and logistical help in the past, but the two groups had begun to feud. Quinn sent detailed accounts of the KR's purge of Vietnamese civilians from Cambodia and their disruption of Vietnamese supply lines. Quinn's analysis was at complete odds with the prevailing view in Washington, which held that the Khmer Rouge were simply an extension of the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. Quinn's reports were never heeded. Quinn recalls his rude awakening:

It was of course disappointing to me. I was young and didn't know how government worked. I thought I would write this huge report and everybody would read it, but it was just another piece of paper. When I got back to Washington, people were still analyzing Cambodia in the old way, as if it were run by Hanoi. People would hear me out, and then just say, "Yeah, but ......

Although the American press, too, occasionally mentioned "infighting" among the different Communist "factions," the myth of monolithic communism died hard. U.S. involvement in Cambodia was justifiable because the various Communist forces were joined in revolution. The KR rebels had shrouded their leadership in a thick cloak of mystery, and Quinn's hilltop survey was not going to sway Americans who assumed all Communists were in cahoots.

But others were beginning to stop lumping the two neighbors together. Elizabeth Becker became a "stringer" for the Washington Post in 1972. She was twenty-five when she arrived, and with her short blond hair, petite frame, and unending inquisitiveness, she might have been mistaken for a teenager. Most of the eager young correspondents had flocked to neighboring Vietnam to make their professional fortunes, but Becker had chosen to cover Cambodia, the sideshow. Permanently based in Phnom Penh, she did not depart for mini-sabbaticals or alternate assignments. Unlike her more senior, established colleagues, she lived among the Cambodian people and was thus better positioned to pick up stray gossip.

By the time Becker arrived in Cambodia, only 25,000 U.S. troops were left in Vietnam, and U.S. correspondents from the major news outlets were heading home. Initially, Becker joined her other American colleagues in defining the rebels according to the regime they opposed (as "anti-Lon Nol insurgents") or by the generic ideology they pursued ("Cambodian Communists" or "indigenous Communist rebels," to distinguish them from the North Vietnamese rebels who were presumed to direct them). The reporters used shorthand references that gave no hint of the aims or the character of the revolutionary force.

In early 1974, around the time Quinn was circulating his detailed report, Becker had begun to notice that Cambodians in Phnom Penh were becoming increasingly alarmed by what they learned about the mysterious rebels storming across Cambodia. The KR already occupied 85 percent of the country, and they seemed certain to take the rest. Becker saw that pedicab drivers, riverboat captains, and politicians alike were devouring the contents of a small book distinguishable by its cover, which depicted Cambodia shaped like a heart torn in two by the Mekong River. The book, Regrets of the Khmer Soul, was the published diary of Ith Sarin, a former Phnom Penh schoolteacher who had traveled through KR territory for nine months in 1972 and 1973, interviewing KR soldiers and peasants. Becker and Ishiyama Koki, a Japanese friend and colleague, paid to have Sarin's diary translated. Becker thought it time to ask a question that no American reporter to date had posed. She wrote a story for the Post entitled "Who Are the Khmer Rouge?" and answered the question in a way that few afterward would believe.

Becker's long feature, to which the Post gave a full-page spread in March 1974, drew heavily on Cambodian government and Western diplomatic sources, as well as Ith Sarin's diary. In her expose, Becker quoted Sarin's description of the KR's appealing discipline and daunting severity. "I paid attention to the great help the Khmer Rouge gave to the people; building dikes, harvesting crops, building houses and digging bunkers," Sarin noted. "I also saw them force all people to wear black clothes, forbid idle chatter and severely punish any violations of their orders "

Becker also quoted Cambodians who had defected from KR zones to the dwindling patch of territory controlled by the government. Becker's article was the first to mention Pol Pot, who was then still known by his given name of Saloth Sar. It was the first to note that relations between the KR and the Vietnamese Communists were strained. And it was the first to describe the cruelty of KR rule.

But if Becker depicted life under the KR as spartan, she did not depict it as savage. And if she described their rule as clinically disciplined, they did not come across as criminally disposed. In places Becker herself seemed taken with the egalitarian premises of the organization, which attracted Cambodians and foreigners alike. When the disreputable Lon Nol government captured KR women soldiers, Becker wrote, the government generals were appalled by the womens self-possession. Becker quoted one diplomat as say- ing,"They complained of the audacity of these virgins who had the nerve to look a man straight in the eye and who didn't shuffle their feet demurely like good women" Becker did not suggest that life under KR rule would be fun. But she also did not imply that life would not be permitted."

Becker's description proved too bold for most American Cambodia observers. Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times faulted her for running a story without ever having toured KR territory. Since it was the KR that denied access, she said she could not ignore the horror stories simply because she could not see for herself. She told Schanberg, "We have to publish what we can find out." Back in the United States, she was severely criticized by both the right and left. U.S. government officials said she had been duped into believing the KR were not Vietnamese puppets, whereas leftist intellectuals chided her for falling for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) warnings of an imminent KR-induced bloodbath. Much more serious than any of these criticisms was another consequence of the research: Her close friend and colleague Ishiyama Koki followed up his story on Sarin's diary by attempting to become the first journalist to visit the KR side." It was strange," Becker recalls. "The sum result of my learning more about the Khmer Rouge was that I knew I never wanted to see these guys up close. The suns result for Koki was that he wanted to meet them and learn more" Koki vanished behind KR lines, as did another of Becker's Japanese colleagues shortly thereafter.

For the remainder of 1974 and into 1975, journalists attempted to shed light upon the KR leadership, but Pol Pot and his leading associates, Khieu Samphan and leng Sary, operated behind the scenes in complete isolation. With the KR resolutely unknowable, their mystery received almost as much attention as the misery they inflicted upon Cambodians. Even Lon Nol's government had no idea with whom it was dealing. In April 1974, when the Khmer Rouge's Khieu Samphan visited New York, Becker's reports focused not on what Samphan had to say at the United Nations but on whether he was in fact Samphan, who was rumored to have been executed by Prince Sihanouk. Becker wrote: "Some Cambodians say he is too fat in the photos, his voice is too high, and that he gave only one speech in French in Pyongyang, which they find suspicious since he holds a doctorate in economics from Paris. "a The sternly secretive Khmer Rouge bewildered even the most informed Cambodia observers.

The presence of the soothing Sihanouk at the head of the KR front also continued to throw people off. As one Western diplomat put it, "They know it is Sihanouk's army out there and they think once that army gets inside everything will be all milk and honey-or rice and dried fish if you will-again.'12' In 1974 Sihanouk sent several Democrats in the U.S. Congress a letter in which he described rumors of an imminent Khmer Rouge massacre of Lon Nol and his supporters as "absurd." Sihanouk assured the legislators that the KR front would not establish a socialist republic upon taking power, "but a Swedish type of kingdom"'' His was the public face of the coalition, but it was difficult to judge whether the public face had influence over the private soul of the movement.