Last month, when two Khmer Rouge leaders came out of the Cambodian jungle, the United States State Department expressed outrage at the possibility the pair might not be tried for genocide. It appeared Washington was taking a forthright stand for human rights, properly advocating justice for mass murderers.
Indeed, who could oppose such trials? In the late 1970s, the Maoist-inspired Khmer Rouge killed as many as two million Cambodians by execution, starvation and overwork. Surely their leaders must answer for these deaths.
Yet Washington’s new-found sanctimony on the subject masks some disturbing history: from 1979 to 1991, the US leaned on the Khmer Rouge as an instrument of foreign policy, using the remnants of the guerrilla force to oppose the government installed in Cambodia by communist Vietnam. In those days, USenmity toward Hanoi trumped the shame of backing those responsible for the Cambodian genocide. But now that Cambodia is largely irrelevant to USinterests, the US hypocritically lectures about the need to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice.
Pursuing national self-interest through venal alliances is hardly new. Neither is indulging in moral tones once such relationships shed their utility. One need only look to the Philippines, where the US government backed Ferdinand Marcos for decades even as he plundered his country and ran roughshod over basic citizens’ rights, only to abandon him in the name of democracy. And Manuel Noriega used to be their man in Panama.
But the recent outrage at the prospect of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen granting amnesty to the newly surfaced Khmer Rouge commanders was a reminder of the unsurpassed cynicism of the US’s Cambodia policy over the past three decades. Were it not for USintervention, the Khmer Rouge might well have met justice long ago, on the battlefield or perhaps before an international tribunal.
Cambodians first felt the impact of USinterests in 1969, courtesy of the Richard Nixon administration’s secret bombing campaign during the Vietnam War. Vietnamese troops fighting the US- backed government in Saigon were taking sanctuary inside Cambodia; the US responded by carpet bombing the technically neutral country. Amid the resulting food shortages and tides of refugees, the Khmer Rouge guerrillas thrived, taking Phnom Penh, in April 1975, two weeks before Saigon fell.
The years that followed were as cruel as any in human history. In theory, the Khmer Rouge pursued a utopian agrarian experiment. In deed, they presided over slaughter.
This reign of terror ended in 1979, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and chased the Khmer Rouge into eastern Thailand. The Vietnam-installed government, while corrupt and clearly under Hanoi’s thumb, also managed to craft functioning schools and health clinics. Cambodia began a tentative recovery.
The US, fresh from its humiliating defeat in Vietnam, could not sit quietly as Hanoi extended its reach. Direct US support was out of the question; only China offered the Khmer Rouge overt military backing. Instead, Washington sent arms to the so-called “non-communist alliance” made up of two other rebel armies – one led by former Cambodian prime minister Son Sann, and the other by Prince Norodom Sihanouk.
But neither Sihanouk nor Son Sann controlled many troops, and neither army did much fighting, as was clear to me and other reporters covering Cambodia in the early 1990s. Both forces passed on many of their US- supplied weapons to the Khmer Rouge, who attacked villages nightly, killing people and making off with rice and cattle before melting back into the jungle.
Privately, in Phnom Penh’s cafs, Western diplomats dropped the pretense and acknowledged the unmistakable: support for Sihanouk and Son Sann was support for the Khmer Rouge by other means.
In United Nations-supervised camps in Thailand, the international community nurtured the Khmer Rouge with “humanitarian assistance”: food, medicine, clothing – everything, short of weapons, needed to fight a war. Meanwhile, on the international stage, the US pressured its allies to deny aid and recognition to the Phnom Penh government and supported Chinese demands that the Khmer Rouge continue to control Cambodia’s seat in the UN.
More than a decade after the fall of Saigon, the Vietnam War was rolling on, fought by proxy forces. As one reporter put it, the US was fighting Vietnam to the last Cambodian.
But by the late 1980s, outside powers began losing interest in Cambodia. Vietnam withdrew its forces in 1989, seeking to gain Washington’s recognition. With the Cold War ending, the US and China were inclined to settle their differences.
In 1991, the great powers convened with the warring Cambodian parties around a conference table in Paris, striking an agreement for the deployment of UN peacekeeping forces and, later, for an election. The Vietnamese-installed government headed by Hun Sen resisted Khmer Rouge participation in the elections. But China insisted they be included, and the George Bush administration agreed. At the time, relations with Beijing took precedence over considerations of genocide.
The Khmer Rouge quickly soured on the accords and withdrew; civil war between the guerrillas and HunESen’s government continued. Though Hun Sen’s party lost in elections held in 1993, he clung to power by violence and intimidation.
Last month, as part of his ongoing effort to consolidate power, Hun Sen engineered the defections of Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea from the tattered remnants of the Khmer Rouge, presumably in exchange for a promise of amnesty. The US State Department, unencumbered by irony, struck a posture of outrage, asserting that “justice in Cambodia has long been delayed, but must not now be denied”. Under international fire, Hun Sen reversed himself, calling for trials of Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, who promptly retreated to a Khmer Rouge stronghold.
The reversal is welcome. Best to confront history, with all its pain and awkwardness. It’s a sentiment the US ought to follow, rather than excise the critical role it played in the anguish that is modern Cambodian history. – The Washington Post
Peter Goodman was a reporter in Cambodia in the early 1990s. Letter from the North will be back next week