Pol Pot (87 page)

quiet, introverted

person, whose opinions were never listened to before, but who now speaks out unexpectedly and passionately’.

The Khmers Rouges leapt the gulf from diffidence to mass murder.

The violent ideology in whose name they acted was bequeathed to them by the French Revolution, by Stalin and by Lenin. But the peculiarly abominable form it took came from pre-existing Khmer cultural models.

Every atrocity the Khmers Rouges ever committed, and many they did not, can be found depicted on the stone friezes of Angkor, in paintings of the Buddhist hells or, in more recent times, in the conduct of the Issaraks — just as Mao drew on Chinese antecedents.

Yos Hut Khemcaro

, the head of the Khmer Buddhist Foundation, asserts: ‘The Khmer Rouge was born out of Cambodian society, it is the child of Cambodia.’

The harshness of Pol Pot’s regime can be ascribed in part to the sheer weight of Cambodian history. Even now, when the Khmer Rouge whirlwind and the wars that preceded and followed it are past, rural life in much of Cambodia is not essentially different from what it was five centuries ago. In the 1970s, the strait-jacket of feudal tradition was stronger. Sihanouk had been unable to smash the invisible shackles of patronage and corruption that prevented Cambodia from becoming a prosperous, modern state. To Pol and his colleagues it must have seemed that, without extreme methods, change was impossible. The perception that Cambodia’s survival was at stake stiffened their resolve still more. Like a cornered animal, which turns instinctively to confront pursuing predators, Pol viewed policy in terms of a fight to the death. The alternative was to be devoured.

A multitude of other factors was also at work. In Cambodia, institutional restraints against wrongdoing are weak. Law was, and remains, whatever the power holders say it is. The impersonal fatalism of Theravada Buddhism erects fewer barriers against evil than the anthropomorphic God of Christianity or Islam who sits in judgement and threatens sinners with hell-fire. The attraction of power played its part too. Pol was seduced by the prospect of remaking Cambodia and reforging the minds of its people in accordance with a vision all his own. Khmer society has always been based on the principle of unquestioning obedience — of woman to man, of subject to ruler. Under the Khmers Rouges, orders were carried out unhesitatingly, regardless of whether they made sense. From the Head of State, Khieu Samphân, down to the humblest soldier in the ranks, people were not expected to ask themselves questions and in general they did not do so.

All that is true, but it is also a little too pat.

It is too simple, too comforting, to blame Khmer Rouge atrocities on the peculiar feudal culture of an exotic tropical land, just as it is to attribute them to the individual perversity of a handful of warped leaders. State-sponsored evil flourishes wherever democratic checks and balances are absent. Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China and Stalin’s Russia all illustrate the point.

But while democracy offers protection against moral collapse, it is not foolproof. France was a democracy when its troops carried out mass

murder in Algeria. So was the United States when it condoned slavery. American slave-owners may have treated their chattels less cruelly than Pol Pot treated his, but the principle was the same.

Sadly — and inconveniently — evil is not a discrete condition that can be isolated and set apart. It is part of a sliding scale of values, the negative counterpart of good, with a vast grey area between.

That is one reason why the United States and other Western countries have sought to use the charge of genocide to label the Pol Pot regime a special case requiring a special kind of justice. That Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphçn and other Khmer Rouge leaders committed crimes is beyond dispute. But if they are to be put on trial it should be for crimes against humanity, of which they are guilty and for which they may legitimately be convicted, not for genocide, of which they are innocent. The Khmers Rouges did not set out to exterminate a ‘national, ethnic, racial or religious group’, whether their own, the Vietnamese, the Chams or any other. They conspired to enslave a people. That they did so believing that their ends were noble is irrelevant. Such an undertaking, carried out on so grand a scale and with such unrelenting savagery, is by definition, if words have any meaning, a ‘crime against humanity’.

That term, however, is exceedingly broad. The West has skeletons in its cupboard too. The US Army’s conduct in Iraq (as earlier in Vietnam) merely lengthens the catalogue of inhumanities perpetrated in the service of democratic ideals. The United States, whose allergy to supranational justice is so highly developed that it rejects it out of hand for American citizens, is not alone in believing that the jurisdiction of international tribunals should be limited to exceptional crimes such as genocide and not allowed to spill over into areas where the

actions of ‘normal’ governments

might come under scrutiny.

If the term ‘genocide’ has been widely accepted in Cambodia’s case, it is because the enormity of what was done in this small Asian country seems beyond the power of ordinary words to convey. Yet from the very start there has been a political subtext. The term was first used by the Vietnamese in the spring of 1979, when they were turning the Tuol Sleng interrogation centre into a museum cleverly designed to recall images of Belsen. It touched a chord of guilt and horror in the Western subconscious that was politically extremely rewarding. The US, too, found ‘genocide’ to its advantage. The equation, ‘No Vietnam war, no Khmers Rouges’, is simplistic, but it reflects an undeniable truth. America’s role in Indochina in the 1960s and ‘70s was instrumental in bringing Pol Pot to power and its support for the anti-Vietnamese resistance in the 1980s helped him to endure. For fifty years, ever since John Foster Dulles started taking an interest in Cambodian

affairs, America’s relationship with Cambodia has been an unhappy story. To officials like Madeleine Albright, President Clinton’s Secretary of State, who launched the American effort to bring the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders to trial, their condemnation for genocide, the most heinous of crimes, would allow the US to turn the page with honour and regain the moral high ground.

That should not be seen as mere posturing. There has always been a strong moral component in US foreign policy. America sees itself as ‘the shining city on the hill’, the upholder of universal truths, bringing light to less fortunate peoples, just as Britain did, when it was the sole superpower, a century earlier.

But the end result has been to make genocide a political commodity, to be exploited by each outside institution, each outside power, in whichever way best fits its own interests.

For Cambodians, this is nothing new.

For centuries their country’s fate has been determined by the whims of foreign powers. The one ruler who rejected that logic, Pol Pot, brought even worse disaster. That the international community should look to its own needs, rather than those of Cambodia, in its efforts to make the crime fit the punishment, is merely what they have learnt to expect. Nor is there any sign that this will change. When Hun Sen’s coup in 1997 sounded the death knell for parliamentary democracy in Cambodia, the outside world acquiesced because, as Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lee Kwan Yew, remarked drily, ‘No country wanted to spend US$2 billion for another UN operation.’ Since then, Western embassies in Phnom Penh have been under instructions not to make waves. That the present system is utterly corrupt, that what is left of the country’s natural wealth is being plundered by those in power, that hundreds of millions of dollars creamed from foreign contracts end up in their private bank accounts, that there is a

culture of impunity

— applying not merely to ministers’ wives who disfigure their husbands’ mistresses by pouring acid over their bodies, but at every level of society — is seen as regrettable, but unavoidable. Impunity may start at home, but foreign governments do nothing to discourage it. Every year that aid donors gather and pledge another five or six hundred million dollars for Cambodia’s development is another year that Hun Sen need not worry about cleaning up his act.

In such circumstances, trying the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders for past crimes offers an alibi for doing nothing about present ones.

There are multiple reasons for this stance. Maintaining the status quo is always the easiest option. The international community’s attention is limited. Cambodia has already had more than its fair share. At least some foreign

help gets past the grasping hands of Cambodian politicians and trickles down into projects which might actually benefit the people. And there is the claim, so often used to justify propping up rotten governments, that if we do not do so, others will.

For there should be no illusion: the present Cambodian government is rotten.

The two most powerful men in the country, Hun Sen and Chea Sim, the President of the Senate, are both former Khmers Rouges. Lee Kwan Yew, not the most sentimental of men, has described them as ‘

utterly merciless

and ruthless, without humane feelings’. Neither has repudiated his Khmer Rouge past. Prince Ranariddh has been pardoned and serves as window-dressing. Sihanouk has become an impotent symbol. In any case, the King’s own democratic convictions have been less than constant and are of recent date. Hun Sen has been described as his ‘best pupil’ for the way that he has used intimidation and murder to manipulate elections, techniques which to many older Cambodians recall Sihanouk’s own cavalier treatment of the parliamentary process. Hun Sen’s rule is certainly preferable to the horror that enveloped Cambodia in Pol Pot’s time. But the authoritarian mind-set remains essentially the same.

If foreign powers have their part of responsibility for the Cambodian nightmare, the principal roles were taken by local actors.

Pol Pot was the supreme architect of his country’s desolation. But he and his colleagues did not act alone. In the words of the Buddhist leader Yos Hut Khemcaro, ‘

Millions of Cambodians

, including Buddhist clergy, worked with [them]’. Most of the best and brightest of the country’s intellectual elite bought into the vision that Pol held out. Sihanouk shares the blame for having closed off the possibility of legal political opposition during his years in power. Later, fired by the desire for revenge and the restoration of the monarchy, he allied himself with Pol Pot twice: in 1970, when Khmer Rouge goals were still concealed, and again ten years later, when their crimes were known to all.

That, too, is a Cambodian tradition. All through history, Khmer monarchs have allied themselves with their enemies, usually Thais or Vietnamese, disregarding atrocities committed against their own people, in order to topple domestic rivals.

The Cambodian sociologist Ros Chantrabot has written that ‘

since the fall of Angkor

, the Khmers have been caught in an ineluctable spiral of self-destruction, of self-suicide . . . We know the vectors of this process, the struggles of princes . . . who appeal to neighbouring [powers] for help . . . We are still at this stage today. But what is worse is that the process of self-destruction is now so much a part of Khmer being that it sucks

us in, it dictates to us the most aberrant forms of behaviour . . . The Khmers are like a man about to drown, whose struggles merely hasten his drowning.’

That judgement is too bleak. Over the last few decades, Cambodians have shown a resilience equal to their suffering, a will to survive equal to the threats against them. But

like a porcelain vase

, shattered into a thousand fragments and then restored, the country is fragile. It is too weak to make more trouble.

The fire next time will be somewhere else.

Saloth Sâr (1925–98), alias Pol Pot, Pol, Pouk, Hay, Grand-Uncle, First Brother, ‘87’, Phem and ‘99’:

1st marriage  = Khieu Ponnary (b. 1920; m. 1956; d. 2003)

2nd marriage = Meas (b. 1962; m. 1985) ch. Sitha (b. 1986)

(b. 1942), real name, Kaing Khek lev: Schoolteacher. Imprisoned for two years by Sihanouk. Entered the maquis in 1970. From 1975 to 1979, director of S-21, the Khmer Rouge torture centre at Tuol Sleng. After the Vietnamese invasion, worked for Radio China International in Beijing. Converted to Christianity in the 1990s. In detention awaiting trial since 1999.

(1940–96): Cambodian medical doctor who won an Oscar for his role as a Khmer journalist in the film

Having survived the Khmer Rouge regime, he was murdered at his home in Los Angeles while resisting a robbery by three drug addicts.

(b. 1934): Joined the communists as a messenger in 1959, rising to become a Khmer Rouge divisional commander in the Eastern Zone. Fled to Vietnam in 1978. Head of State of the Vietnamese-installed People’s Republic of Kampuchea, 1979–91. After the mid-1980s lost power to Hun Sen.

(1930–76): Member of the Cercle Marxiste in Paris, where he obtained a PhD in economics. Member of parliament and junior minister under Sihanouk after 1958. Fled to the maquis with Khieu Samphân in 1967. Subsequently Minister of the Interior of the GRUNC. An outspoken critic of the excessive radicalism of the policies of Pol Pot, to whom he was none the less personally loyal. Under house arrest after 1975. Died in unexplained circumstances.

(1932–77), alias Phoas: Director of Customs under Sihanouk. Elected to parliament in 1958, afterwards a junior minister. Fled to the maquis in 1967, shortly after Khieu Samphân and Hou Yuon. Minister of Information of the GRUNC and Democratic Kampuchea. Purged and killed at Tuol Sleng.