Cambodia's Curse (9 page)

Twining knew just where to take Solarz. Together, they walked through a teeming refugee camp. The congressman was appalled. “There were eight to ten thousand people there—wretched, desperate. I heard incredible stories. For example, they killed everyone who had eyeglasses. Monks, they killed them by putting plastic bags over their heads.” And he heard the infamous Khmer Rouge slogan, the justification for each killing: “Keeping you is no profit; losing you is no loss.” Right next to Solarz, as he was recalling this venture, on the side table beside his armchair, sat the book
Surviving Treblinka
. A bookmark suggested he had already read more than half of it. “This was my first direct encounter with anything like this, and it immediately evoked impressions of what happened to the Jews. It resonated with me as a great moral challenge.”

 

Back in Washington, Solarz managed to convince a colleague to stage a congressional hearing on the situation in Cambodia. Unfortunately, with the ‘76 election fast approaching and other more important congressional priorities (and in truth, to most members of Congress almost anything was more important), the hearing was not held until July 1977.

Twining testified. In his most recent report from the field he had written about a malaria epidemic that was killing hundreds if not thousands of people, largely because the Khmer Rouge had no medicine. Medical aides were injecting patients with Pepsi or coconut milk. Speaking to the subcommittee, Twining said, “Most reports are that executions continue,” but now “the number who are dying from disease or malnutrition is greater than from executions.”

Richard Holbrooke, the assistant secretary of state and Twining’s boss, was more direct—the first time a senior government official had spoken out. “Some journalists and scholars guess that between half a
million and 1.2 million have died since 1975,” Holbrooke said, but he was unable to confirm that or any other number. Nonetheless, Holbrooke did say, “Based on all the evidence available to us, we have concluded that Cambodian authorities have flagrantly and systemically violated the most basic human rights. They have ordered or permitted extensive killings, forcibly relocated the urban population, brutally treated supporters of the previous government, and suppressed personal and political freedoms. My guess,” Holbrooke added, “is that for every person executed, several have died of disease or malnutrition or other factors, which were avoidable if the government itself had not followed this kind of policy, which seeks to completely transform a society by applying purely draconian measures.”

This was mid-1977. The Khmer Rouge had been in power for more than two years. Twining had filed hundreds of pages of refugee accounts. Journalists had by now written dozens of stories offering the same refugee testimony along with other reporting. Two important books offering even more detailed accounts were in bookstores; one of them was even excerpted in
Reader’s Digest
.

Jimmy Carter was now president, and for the first time in American history, his administration had made human rights a central tenet of his foreign policy. Even so, the United States was still unwilling to accept as a probable fact that the Khmer Rouge were guilty of crimes against humanity. One reason was the loud, public declarations of people like Gareth Porter, codirector of an independent organization called the Indochina Resource Center in Washington. Porter was also invited to testify at that congressional hearing. Given the willful uncertainty that prevailed at the time, the subcommittee believed that, to be fair, he should be heard, too.

At that time, Porter was one of the most prominent Khmer Rouge champions in the United States. In Europe, meantime, Khmer Rouge apologists easily outnumbered those who believed a tragedy was under way. These people had been vociferous opponents of the Vietnam War—particularly the bombing of Cambodia. One certainty united
most of them. The bombing, more than anything else, had inevitably led to the state of affairs in Cambodia. And to them, whatever the U.S. government had to say now was per force a lie. If the regime in Phnom Penh was anti-American, it could only be worthy of admiration.

The climate of distrust surrounding the Vietnam War had spread to Cambodia. Porter later explained that as a student journalist, “I uncovered a series of instances when government officials were propagandizing” on the Vietnam War. “They were lying.” If government officials had been so dishonest about Vietnam, why should anyone believe anything they had to say about Cambodia?

Elsewhere at the time, Porter claimed in public that Twining and others in the Bangkok embassy “had predicted that millions of people would starve to death once the United States pulled out of Cambodia. When the regime clearly averted mass starvation, these people would have lost face. So they created the genocide claim.” At about this time, Ieng Sary, Cambodia’s foreign minister, told an Italian interviewer that “the Khmer revolution has no precedents,” and those who claimed that Cambodia had executed hundreds of thousands of people “are crazy. Only hardened criminals have been sentenced.”

Before the subcommittee Porter said simply that it was “a myth that between 1 million and 2 million Cambodians have been the victims of a regime led by genocidal maniacs.” This falsehood, he added, grew out of self-serving government statements and irresponsible reporting in recent newspaper articles and books.
²

A few weeks earlier Noam Chomsky, an author and academic, offered an article in the
Nation
that conflated the American bombing and the Khmer Rouge horrors and made the same broad argument
as the other apologists. He cited “highly qualified specialists” whom he did not name, but “who have studied the full range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at most in the thousands.” He also claimed that “these were localized in areas of limited Khmer Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American destruction and killing. These reports also emphasize both the extraordinary brutality on both sides during the civil war (provoked by the American attacks) and repeated discoveries that massacre reports were false. They also testify to the extreme unreliability of refugee reports, and the need to treat them with great caution.”

Reflecting on the hearing, Twining said, “It was easy to tell them what I knew but impossible to tell them what to do about it. I felt helpless.” Despite Porter’s testimony, Solarz said the hearing had helped him convince the House to pass a resolution “calling on the Carter administration to coordinate with other nations to free the Cambodian people. But of course it had no effect.”

I
n February 1978, almost three years into the reign of the Khmer Rouge, the
Washington Post
’s Lewis Simons wrote a news analysis summing up his experience as a Southeast Asia correspondent. He conceded, first of all, that neither he nor anyone else really knew what was happening in Cambodia. If that is so, he wrote, “Why do most Americans assume that the Cambodian Communists run the most brutal regime since the Nazis? Is the answer, as the Cambodians and their tiny handful of foreign friends allege, that Western governments and news media are guilty of ‘distortions and wild fabrications?’” Not necessarily, he concluded. But in that case, “Why is it that the United States, with its vast intelligence network, should know so little about events in Cambodia? The answer seems to be that Cambodia
no longer counts for anything in the U.S. scheme of things. At least that’s what the officials say. ‘All of Indochina, as an intelligence target, is of very, very low priority now. And Cambodia is so low as to be almost nonexistent,’ said one official.”

Nobody knew, nobody cared. Less than a year later, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and deposed the Khmer Rouge regime, Washington demonstrated that same indifference in spades.

T
he Khmer Rouge, like most Cambodians, hated the Vietnamese. And from the beginning of their reign the two states had skirmished along the border. Finally, by the end of 1978, Vietnam had had enough. Thousands of troops poured over the border, and in short order they deposed the Khmer Rouge.

Millions of Cambodians quietly cheered as their historical enemy swept through the nation. Three years, eight months, and twenty days after they seized power, the Khmer Rouge slipped furtively into the night. For decades to come, Cambodians, with little prompting, would affirm that the Vietnamese saved their lives.

Skeletal, sick, and traumatized, hundreds of thousands stumbled toward Thailand for sanctuary, eating leaves, roots, and bugs along the way. Many died of starvation en route, or stepped on land mines, for Khmer Rouge soldiers had laid mines almost everywhere along the western border, to prevent their victims from fleeing. Those who made it to Thailand brought malaria, typhoid, cholera, and a host of other illnesses into the camps. Human-rights groups estimated that about 650,000 more people died in the year following the fall of the Khmer Rouge.

Waiting for the refugees in Aranyaprathet was Cindy Coleman. “As soon as the country opened up, I went,” she said. She arrived in February, just a few weeks after the Khmer Rouge fell from power, armed with photos of the former military officers she had cared for. She stayed in that hotel with an empty lock hasp on the door and a straw mattress for a bed. “It was my first encounter with a Thai toilet,” she said, laughing. “A hole in the floor and a bucket of water.”

For three weeks she and an embassy aide who helped her wandered around the camps, searching. “We followed Thai relief trucks around,” she said. “The Cambodians were parked in open fields. They still wore their black uniforms and red scarves. All of them. They were undernourished, very thin. No expressions on their faces, just dead-eyed stares. Their clothes were soiled. I passed around pictures. I also put up pictures on bulletin boards set up in Aranya. The boards were already full of pictures and letters. Lots of people were doing what I was doing. I showed the pictures to aid workers in camps—to anybody.” But “not a soul” had seen or heard of her men.

 

The fighting continued for several months and prevented farmers from harvesting their rice. The timing could not have been worse—a famine on top of three and one-half years of starvation. If Charles Twining’s airgrams had gotten little circulation, now news reporting from the border exploded. Only people who willfully closed their eyes and ears could have pretended not to know of the Khmer Rouge horrors. President Jimmy Carter called the Khmer Rouge “the world’s worst human rights violators,” something of an understatement. Yet in response to the Vietnamese invasion, the White House merely slapped more sanctions on Vietnam. Nothing was done for the 5 million Khmer Rouge victims, most of whom still had no food. And then Carter’s focus, and much of the world’s, quickly turned away.

In July 1979 tens of thousands of Vietnamese “boat people” fled their nation. For Americans this was in some ways pleasing news. By the thousands citizens were running from America’s enemy, the Vietnamese
Communists. So the boat people monopolized news coverage from the region.

Then, on November 4, 1979, students seized the American Embassy in Tehran and took about fifty Americans captive, setting off the Iranian hostage crisis that captivated the world for more than a year. The next month the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. As the United States slouched into the 1980 presidential campaign, the American hostages in Iran were the primary foreign-policy subject of debate. Cambodia was effectively invisible.

In January 1979 the Vietnamese discovered Tuol Sleng, a former high school in central Phnom Penh that the Khmer Rouge had turned into a torture and death house. Vietnamese journalists and soldiers first walked in to find rotting corpses still in shackles. Gruesome torture implements lay about, and in an outbuilding the soldiers found thousands of pages of records, including photographs of the victims. At least 15,000 Cambodians had been taken there, tortured until they confessed to being an enemy agent, and then killed—whacked on the back of the head with an iron pole.

That and all of the other evidence of the Khmer Rouge horror received wide public attention.
³
But for most people in Washington the news from Cambodia wasn’t the Khmer Rouge’s crimes against humanity. No, American officials seemed capable of hearing only one thing: Vietnam, the United States’ bitter enemy, had conquered Cambodia. Did the Communist soldiers make up or exaggerate the Tuol Sleng business to justify their invasion? Would Vietnam invade Thailand next? Was the domino theory actually in play?

At a White House press conference, President Carter issued a warning “to both the Vietnamese and the Soviets who supply them” not to
carry the fight into Thailand. In the following months, however, Vietnamese troops did spill over into Thailand more than once, chasing Khmer Rouge fighters. America had lost the Vietnam War. Were the worst fears of the politicians who started it now coming true?