When the War Was Over (89 page)

Inside Cambodia, progress was minimal. The Vietnamese retained overall control of the government through advisors. Vietnam was directly in charge of the military, with Vietnamese troops providing the bulwark of defense. Economically, Vietnam and its allies had little to offer. The embargo choked off all serious efforts to repair and revive the country. In the mid-1980s Cambodia fell behind in a region and an era where growth rates were in the double digits. While Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia were
broadening and modernizing their economies with new technologies and better public education, Cambodia was literally lost in a stone age trying to raise enough crops to feed its population dominated by widows and children. Their major enterprises were digging wells, irrigating fields, and resurrecting something resembling normal life with markets, schools, and family homes.

The seriousness of the Khmer Rouge legacy finally broke into public consciousness in 1984 with the release of the film
The Killing Fields
. It depicted the Cambodian War and the Khmer Rouge revolution through the story of a Cambodian journalist named Dith Pran and his friendship with a
New York Times
reporter, Sydney Schanberg. With admirable fidelity to the true story, the filmmakers David Putnam and Roland Joffé were able to translate the complicated history into an understandable personal tragedy. In a matter of months
The Killing Fields
catapulted Cambodia from cold war politics to mass culture. Black-pajamaed Khmer Rouge joined the brownshirted Nazis as recognizable villains of the twentieth century. The term killing fields became part of the American vocabulary.

The small group of critics of American policy toward Cambodia hoped that this sudden recognition of the murderous Khmer Rouge legacy would force the United States to cut the Khmer Rouge out of the resistance coalition.

Public opinion, however, never focused on such an arcane policy issue. In the United States, the heightened revulsion against the Khmer Rouge made Cambodian refugees a more popular cause but little else. Charity groups were able to raise millions of dollars for them, and Washington policymakers used the greater attention to promote their cause of forcing Vietnam out of that country.

Stephen Solarz, who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, had made Cambodia his issue. During the Khmer Rouge period he had drawn the comparison between Pol Pot and the Nazis and had championed action to intervene. After his release from Cambodia in 1979, Prince Sihanouk had struck up a friendship with Solarz, knowing of his interest and his influence over Cambodian affairs in Washington. The prince invited the Brooklyn Democrat to dinners at the United Nations and on a later occasion threw a birthday dinner for Solarz's wife, Nina, when they were visiting Beijing. As enamored of the spotlight and gamesmanship of diplomacy as Sihanouk, Solarz became one of the prince's greatest champions in Washington.

In 1985, despite the insistence of the Reagan administration that it was entirely unnecessary, Solarz single-handedly championed the first overt military aid to the non-communist resistance. In testimony before Solarz's own
subcommittee, Paul D. Wolfowitz, then assistant secretary of state for East Asia, said the non-communist resistance didn't need any more arms. “As far as we can tell, they are able to get support, and we do a lot to encourage that to happen.”

In other words, ASEAN and China were giving those small noncommunist armies all the weapons they could handle. Their problems had more to do with talent and training. In the Vietnamese offensive they had lost all their bases in western Cambodia and were stuck again on the Thai border, largely due to their own ineptness. By opposing military aid, the Reagan administration had come to the same conclusion as the humanitarian critics—the United States should be promoting a political solution to the conflict, not fueling a hopeless military campaign.

In the end, Solarz won a compromise of sending “non-lethal” military assistance to the resistance, a program of some $3.5 million that included uniforms and logistical support. He won over the administration and then Congress by arguing that a stronger non-communist resistance was also insurance against the return of the Khmer Rouge. That point was lost on his critics in Congress and more neutral experts like fellow Democrat and former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, who described the Solarz program as “highly irresponsible in terms of its impact on the people involved, and it still raises in my mind deep moral questions about connections with the Khmer Rouge.”

Nothing changed. Official policy remained solidly behind the resistance coalition including the Khmer Rouge. The United States continued to block all routes to establishing an international tribunal to investigate and try the Khmer Rouge for war crimes and to avoid using the term genocide for the Khmer Rouge crimes because the United States feared it would lead to the exclusion of the Khmer Rouge from the coalition.

Finally, Cambodia became entangled in the emotionally fraught issue of American soldiers still unaccounted for in the Vietnam War. The POWMIA issue that had thwarted President Carter's efforts to have normal relations with Vietnam reemerged under President Reagan.

In separate, often disparate ways, the American public was coming to terms with the legacy of the Vietnam War. On Veterans Day, 1982, a Vietnam War memorial was dedicated in a ceremony led by veterans in wheelchairs but without President Reagan. It was the beginning of an acknowledgment of the veterans' service that had been a long time coming. Two years earlier, Vietnam veterans had watched in amazement as the United States celebrated the return of the fifty-two American hostages freed
from the American embassy in Tehran. On January 25, 1981, the city of Chicago released 10,000 yellow balloons in the air. New York City organized a ticker-tape parade, and Los Angeles relit the flame at its Olympic stadium. Furious that they had never been honored with national parades or welcomes, Vietnam veterans staged their own march in Indianapolis a week later, and a movement began. Donations poured into veterans groups. Bobby Muller of the Vietnam Veterans of America reported an overnight shift. “For the first time,” he said, “Americans were given the emotional opportunity to deal with Vietnam.”

Also on the receiving end of this new climate was the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund started by Jan Scruggs, a veteran who thought up the idea of a memorial and started it rolling with $2,500 he raised by selling his own land in Maryland.

The memorial was stunning. Made up of two, simple, low black marble walls, it started in a “V” and then receded into the ground in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial. The names of more than 57,000 soldiers who died or were missing in the war were inscribed on its glistening dark surfaces. More than 150,000 veterans gathered in Washington for the November 1982 dedication, crying at the sight of the wall and touching the names of their missing comrades. Thereafter the Vietnam Memorial became the most visited memorial in the capital, a wailing wall Americans treated with religious sanctity. Flowers were left at its base, along with mementos and photographs of the dead. Visitors made impressions of the engraved names and framed them for their homes.

Conservative critics hated the wall, most prominently veteran James Webb, Jr., author of the popular novel
Fields of Fire,
who resigned in protest from the fund's committee, predicting that the memorial would become “a wailing wall for future anti-war demonstrations.” He couldn't have been more off the mark. Instead of supporting pacifist causes, the memorial became an outpost of the powerful lobby of the POW-MIA groups. Liberal groups like Muller's Vietnam Veterans of America promoting improved relations with Vietnam to put the war behind the United States got nowhere. The MIA-POW groups prospered the most from this improved climate for the Vietnam veteran. Their black flags with the white profile of a veteran began flying over state capitols where local legislators demanded a better accounting for Americans missing in action. Movies, too, added to the clamor with Sylvester Stallone in
Rambo
blazing across movie screens rescuing live American prisoners abandoned in Vietnam. Jane Fonda, the movie actress who traveled to Hanoi during the war and broadcast an open
protest against her own country's military, made a turnaround and offered a public apology to American veterans.

A new ethic was replacing the old anti-war sentiments in Reagan's America. Without debating the merits of the war—the American public remained convinced it had been a mistake—the dead and missing in Vietnam were transformed into a cause célèbre. With an instinct as old as civilization, the public accepted the elevation of the POW-MIA issue as a chance to claim some honor from the country's longest war and its worst foreign defeat.

The Reagan administration decided that these dead heroes had to be literally represented at its policy meetings. By 1983 the POW-MIA lobby was an integral part of its entire Indochina strategy. Ann Mills Griffith, president of the National League of Families of POW-MIA, was given top secret clearance and became a part of the inner circle of officials from the Departments of State and Defense as well as the National Security Council that determined American policy toward Vietnam and Cambodia. “We made it clear,” Ms. Griffith said, “that there would be no high level deal between the United States and Vietnam without the POW/MIA families' agreement.”

Vietnam's ability to satisfy the demands for accounting for Americans missing in action became entwined with America's attitude toward the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. The United States refused to discuss Cambodia with the Vietnamese until they came up with a full accounting of the missing American servicemen. It was an unprecedented opportunity for a small civilian group to exert influence on a major cold war policy. To Vietnam's Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach, the policy was emotional blackmail, a cynical way for the United States to avoid normalizing relations with Vietnam and keep up pressure to force them out of Cambodia without any promise that the Khmer Rouge would be prevented from returning.

Yet Thach dutifully met with Ms. Griffith at the UN in 1983. He tried to explain to her how nearly impossible it would be for his government to come up with the remains and specific details of every American who was missing. Vietnam, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the war ended, had neither the money nor the expertise to undertake such an operation. The Americans volunteered both but Thach countered that Vietnam was hardly anxious to allow the United States, with its current position regarding Vietnam and Cambodia, free access in the country. His pleas to strike a bargain and, in the spirit of cooperation, improve U.S.-Vietnamese relations fell on deaf ears. Thach, one of the most debonair communist statesmen since Zhou Enlai, had staked his reputation on improving relations
with the United States rather than China, and he could not believe the United States would pass up this opportunity.

Instead, Ms. Griffith testified before Congress that year that her POWMIA organization “does not feel the U.S. should move forward on any of the broader policy issues of concern to the Vietnamese, such as normalization of relations, until there is satisfactory resolution of this humanitarian matter.”

By 1985 the world powers were still stubbornly entangled in the Cambodia stalemate. China, the United States, and ASEAN refused to admit any problem other than the Vietnamese occupation. Activists continued lobbying for change in Washington, London, and Paris, looking for a middle ground that demanded a Vietnamese withdrawal and a tribunal for the Khmer Rouge but to no avail. In the end, the breakthrough came not from the West but the East with the election of Mikhail Gorbachev as the new head of the Soviet communist party and the new leader of the Soviet Union.

 

When Gorbachev took the reins of the communist party, the Soviet Union had just suffered a remarkable series of political disasters: It had invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and begun the Soviet occupation that was already described as the Vietnam War of the Soviets; the satellite nations of Eastern Europe had started their revolts against the Soviet Union, beginning with the 1980 strike at the Gdansk shipyard in Poland led by Lech Walesa; the Soviet air force had shot down the Korean Airlines Flight 007 over Sakhalin Island in 1983, killing 269 innocent civilians; and, above all, the Soviets had grossly underestimated the Reagan administration's determination to counter what it saw as Soviet military superiority in an arms race that would bankrupt the Soviet economy. Because of that military spending spree, roughly from 1979 to 1985, the Soviet economy had ceased to grow.

Only fifty-four years old when he came to power, Gorbachev made a full-scale attack on the country's policies introducing slogans that promised radical change:
glasnost
(openness),
perestroika
(restructuring),
demokratizatsiia
(democratization), and
novoe myshlenie
(new thinking). It was “new thinking” that provided the carte blanche for revising the Soviet Union's foreign relations.

Soviet prestige had hit rock bottom, especially with both China and the United States. The year before, in 1984, the official Tass news agency reported that relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were worse than they had ever been in Soviet history. Relations with China were equally abysmal, topped by the dispute over Cambodia that represented
the accumulated battles the two had fought—literally and figuratively—over the past twenty years.

Gorbachev moved immediately. In August 1985, he sent a trade mission to Beijing—the first in twenty years—and in November he held a summit meeting with President Reagan in Geneva.

He turned to his friend Eduard Shevardnadze, whom he had appointed the new Soviet minister of foreign relations despite his nearly complete lack of experience in that field. Shevardnadze, in turn, put Igor Rogachev in charge of Asia. The pieces were finally in place. Rogachev was now the head of Asian affairs, working for a foreign minister who put improved relations with China and the United States at the forefront of the Soviet Union's agenda.