Distant Voices (58 page)

Ironically, in seeking to redeem the West, he denies not only recent history – such as the killing of more than half a million Cambodian peasants by American bombs
⁸⁵
– but also the undisputed message of his own book,
Sideshow
: that the bombing provided a catalyst for the rise of the Khmer Rouge. In
The Quality of Mercy
he appeared to go out of his way to invest one of those indirectly involved with the US bombing campaign, Colonel Michael Eiland, with humane motives. Acknowledging that Eiland had previously ‘taken part in
secret, illegal intelligence-gathering missions into Cambodia', Shawcross wrote, ‘Inevitably, his work made some journalists and relief officials suspicious of his new task on Cambodia's west flank' (that is, running KEG). ‘Others', wrote Shawcross, ‘found him a diligent and effective official concerned above all with the efficacy of the relief operation. Eiland himself later said that his work and his views during the 1979–80 Cambodia crisis were dominated . . . by his first posting in the US Army – to a base near Dachau. In 1983 he returned to the Pentagon to work in the Defense Intelligence Agency.'
⁸⁶
Such apologetics help to explain Shawcross's attacks on those who identify the other side of America's ‘humanitarian motives', its complicity with and restoration of the genocidists.

In his paper,
The Cambodian Genocide, 1975–1979: A Critical Review,
Ben Kiernan, the world-renowned Khmer-speaking scholar at Yale, who has worked with Shawcross, wrote,

Not a single Western country has ever voted against the right of the Khmer Rouge government-in-exile to represent its former victims in international forums. International commentators often followed suit. An interesting example is the British journalist William Shawcross [who] chose to hang the label of ‘genocide' on the Khmer Rouge's
opponents.
He alleged that Hanoi's invasion to topple Pol Pot meant ‘subtle genocide' by enforced starvation . . . Fortunately, he was very wrong . . . but he remains preoccupied with opponents of the Khmer Rouge.
⁸⁷

In an article published in the
Observer
on the day I was to receive the Richard Dimbleby Award (Headline: ‘The Trouble with John Pilger'), Shawcross wrote, ‘Cambodia's travails arouse passions'.
⁸⁸
Indeed. But the reason he gave for writing the piece was erroneous; he claimed to object to my receiving the award for
Cambodia: The Betrayal
when, in fact, it was awarded to me for a lifetime in broadcast journalism,
spanning some thirty-six documentary films. The rest of his article echoed familiar official denials, including the foreign secretary's. He complained that I had ‘constantly compared' the Khmer Rouge with Hitler's Nazis while ignoring the historical examples of communism. This too was false. I had likened Pol Pot's reign both to Maoism and to ‘Stalin's terror'
⁸⁹
and had described the Khmer Rouge as ‘the most fanatical, extreme left-wing regime'.
⁹⁰
I pointed these out to Shawcross, but the inaccuracies remain uncorrected and are constantly recycled. Clearly, to deny the historical truth is to cut one of Cambodia's lifelines.

The year Shawcross completed
Sideshow
, 1979, was the year of the defeat of Pol Pot by the Vietnamese. Those of us who went there and reported at first hand the suffering of the Khmer people and the part played by our own governments in prolonging their suffering, found to our surprise significant parts of our eye-witness accounts contradicted by Shawcross – who had not been to see for himself. Writing from London and Washington, Shawcross endorsed and promoted a series of hearsay stories that the Vietnamese were committing ‘subtle genocide' in Cambodia. In the
Washington Post
he wrote that ‘one-half of all the international aid reaching the port of Kompong Som [in Cambodia] . . . was being trucked into Vietnam'. His sources for this damaging and, as it turned out, entirely false charge was a ‘defector' who had been immediately shipped off to Paris and ‘put under wraps'.
⁹¹
In a sensational and widely quoted article entitled ‘The End of Cambodia', Shawcross gave credence to an unsubstantiated story that the Vietnamese were behaving in a barbarous way in Cambodia: mining ricefields and shooting farmers.

The effect of Shawcross's ‘exposé' was to blur the difference between Cambodia under Pol Pot and Cambodia liberated by the Vietnamese: a difference of night and day. Shawcross wrote that ‘it seemed possible that they [the Vietnamese] were a lesser enemy of the Cambodian people than the Khmer Rouge. Now the awful possibility arises that they may not be. Indeed, there have been reports that they are
treating the Cambodians with almost as much contempt as the previous regime did . . . if there is a famine in Cambodia today it is principally the Vietnamese that must bear the immediate responsibility.'
⁹²

More puzzling than this allegation was its similarity to the message coming from official Washington sources. On January 8, 1980 John Gittings reported in the
Guardian
that State Department sources had revealed ‘their intention of mounting an international propaganda offensive to spread atrocity stories about Vietnamese behaviour in Kampuchea. Within days, presumably on White House instructions, US journalists in Bangkok and Singapore were shown the appropriate ‘refugee stories . . .'

They were also shown ‘the latest US intelligence report', which claimed that humanitarian aid was being diverted ‘into the hands of pro-Soviet Vietnamese and the Heng Samrin military'.
⁹³
At that time the UN under-secretary general in charge of the humanitarian operations in Cambodia and Thailand was Sir Robert Jackson, a distinguished civil servant and veteran of many disaster emergencies. When asked about the stories of diversion of aid, he replied, ‘In terms of the Vietnamese Army living in, say, Kampuchea, we have never had one complaint from anywhere nor have any of our people. There's been all these allegations . . . and we've said, “Look, for heaven's sake, will you give us the time, date and place and we'll follow through.” We've never had one response when we've asked that question.'
⁹⁴

Journalists in Cambodia in 1979 and 1980, at the height of the emergency, found nothing to confirm the ‘subtle genocide' story. Jim Laurie, the prize-winning producer of American ABC News, who travelled extensively in Cambodia, wrote in the
Far Eastern Economic Review
:

At no time during 26 days in Kampuchea did this correspondent find any indication of wilful obstruction in the delivery of international relief supplies. Nor did there appear to be any basis for allegations that food was being diverted to either Vietnam or Vietnamese
troops . . . Interviews revealed no complaints of Vietnamese troops preventing the harvest of rice as alleged in some Bangkok reports.
⁹⁵

In reply to a letter I wrote to Shawcross in 1983 he retracted the ‘genocide' story. He wrote that the retraction had already been published and he gave me a reference, which proved inaccurate.
⁹⁶
If this was a professional difficulty for one journalist, it was a human disaster for the people of Cambodia. That most emotive and evocative of words, ‘genocide', united conservatives and liberals in America. Communists could be damned and lumped together again – Pol Pot with Ho Chi Minh. And now that there was ‘evidence' that the Vietnamese communists were practising ‘genocide' (the ‘subtle' soon fell away), surely America's war against them had been justified.

During these rites of absolution, the truth about Cambodia expired in the United States. The documentary films David Munro and I had made,
Year Zero
and
Year One
, were shown throughout the world, but not in America where they were virtually banned. An assistant to the director of news and current affairs programming at the Public Broadcast Service (PBS), Wayne Godwin, explained, ‘John, we're into difficult political days in Washington. Your films would have given us problems with the Reagan Administration. Sorry.'
⁹⁷

With the Vietnamese now demonised as marauding invaders, the United States reinforced its total blockade against Cambodia, a country with which it had no quarrel. Like Vietnam, Cambodia now bore a ‘Category Z' in the US Commerce Department, which meant that not even parts of water pumps supplied by the foreign subsidiaries of US corporations could be exported. In the United Nations the Khmer Rouge were soon concealed behind the façade of a ‘coalition', invented by the US and China, while Pol Pot's red and yellow flag continued to fly in United Nations Plaza.

On June 25, 1991 the British Government admitted that the SAS had been secretly training the allies of Pol Pot since 1983.
⁹⁸
For almost two years ministers had denied the allegations that Simon O'Dwyer-Russell, David Munro and I had made in films and articles. Twice in the
Spectator
Derek Tonkin had categorically denied that Britain was training Khmer terrorists. ‘I deny it,' he replied, when challenged by Chris Mullin, MP.
⁹⁹
The Government had never before made such an admission. On questions about the SAS and the security services, ministers either issued a blanket denial or refused to comment. The Cambodia operation involved both the SAS and MI6. What made it different was the risk of the whole truth coming out in court.

Shortly after
Cambodia: The Betrayal
was transmitted in October 1990, two former British Army officers, Christopher Mackenzie Geidt and Anthony de Normann sued Central Television and myself for libel. The two men were named in the film as witnesses to the final withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia in September 1989. Also in Phnom Penh, as a British parliamentary observer, was the shadow overseas development minister, Ann Clwyd, who was surprised to find the men officially listed as representatives of the Ministry of Defence.

To my astonishment, the two men claimed the film had accused them of training the Khmer Rouge to lay mines. My initial response was straightforward: nowhere in the film was there any such accusation, nor was any intended; and I was prepared to say so. But libel actions are not that simple.

At a preliminary hearing, counsel for both sides put the legal argument about whether or not the film could be construed as defamatory. In other words, could it be interpreted to mean something it was not intended to mean? The judge decided that only a jury could decide, and it was put down for trial. In more than thirty years as an investigative journalist this was the first time I had been sued: a record, I believe, with few equals.

As we accepted that the two men had
not
trained Khmer Rouge guerrillas, or indeed any Cambodian guerrillas, we
obviously could not justify an allegation we did not intend to make and did not believe we had made. The basis of our case was that the words I had used did not carry the meaning the plaintiffs put on them and that, in any event, the film was honestly commenting on a matter of public interest, namely British Government intervention in Cambodia. Our defence had crucial questions to put to three ministers – Mark Lennox-Boyd of the Foreign Office, William Waldegrave, formerly of the Foreign Office, and Archie Hamilton of the Ministry of Defence – all of whom had made misleading statements to Parliament about the SAS operation in Cambodia. We subpoenaed these ministers. We also subpoenaed the commanding officer of the SAS, Lieutenant-Colonel John Holmes, and his predecessor, Brigadier Cedric Delves. Both of them had a great deal to tell the court about Britain's ‘non-existent' support for those in alliance with Pol Pot.

Most important for our case, our questions to them would be based on information we had been receiving from a ‘Deep Throat' source within the British intelligence world. David and I had numerous meetings with this person, who cannot be described in any way. What he told us proved highly reliable. He supplied precise details, which we were able to confirm with official and other sources. He informed us that the SAS operation had not ceased in 1989, as the Government had claimed; on the contrary, it had become ‘the principal direct Western military involvement in Indo-China'.

On June 25, the Government delivered a bundle of government documents to our solicitors. These were covered by a letter from the Treasury solicitor, J. A. D. Jackson, who wrote, ‘Let me say at once that it is not the desire nor the intention of HM Government to interfere with a fair and proper hearing of the issues in the present litigation. Nevertheless the Crown, and indeed the court itself, has an obligation to consider the public interest in relation to the disclosure of information falling within certain categories.' He went on to say that this ‘public interest' demanded that ‘only certain information be disclosed in court'.

The threat was close behind. The Government, he warned,
‘is prepared to intervene in the proceedings at any stage . . . in respect of documents and/or oral evidence from
any
witness'. Attached to this was a statement by Archie Hamilton, in the form of a written parliamentary reply to a stooge question in which the Government admitted for the first time that which he and his ministerial colleagues had worked so hard to suppress: the existence of an SAS Cambodia operation.

As a damage-control measure, it was neat. Training had ended in 1989, according to Hamilton, and its purpose had been ‘to strengthen the position of those forces [the Sihanoukists and the KPNLF] in relation to the more powerful forces of the Khmer Rouge and in their struggle against the Vietnamese-imposed regime in Phnom Penh'. No mention was made that the Khmer Rouge effectively led this noble ‘struggle'. Neither were we told anything about the excluded information, which fell into these ‘certain categories'.
¹⁰⁰
Could this be that the training was still going on? Could it be that the Khmer Rouge were the direct beneficiaries?