A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

Economist Albert Hirschman observed that those who do not want to act cite the futility, perversity, and jeopardy of proposed measures. The United States and its allies defended their reticence on the grounds that speaking out or applying soft sanctions to such a reclusive regime would be futile. Normal diplomatic demarches, symbolic acts, and criticisms were unlikely to affect radical revolutionaries who were committing atrocity on this scale. In testimony on Capitol Hill, foreign service officer Twining noted, “I am not sure that the Cambodian leadership would care a hoot about what we…say.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Because the United States gave the KR regime no support, it could not suspend trade or military aid.

Bilateral denunciations by the United States may well have had little effect on the Khmer Rouge’s internal practices. Unfortunately, because so few U.S. officials spoke out publicly against the genocide, we cannot know. But contrary to American claims, the Khmer Rouge were not completely oblivious to outside commentary. Isolated though they were, KR leaders still piped up to refute allegations made by foreign powers. When the British raised the issue of Cambodian human rights violations at the UN Commission in Geneva, the KR responded by claiming that British citizens enjoyed only the right to be slaves, thieves, prostitutes, or unemployed. In April 1978 the KR’s Ieng Sary submitted a letter to the UN, denouncing the “propaganda machine of the imperialists, the expansionists, annexationists” who charged them with mass killing. He made a logical argument about why the KR could never kill on the scale suggested:“There is no reason for the [KR] to reduce the population or to maintain it at its current level,” he wrote, “since today’s population of 8 million is well below the potential of the country, which needs more than 20 million.”

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U.S. policymakers also cited the possibly perverse results of taking a more outspoken approach. Public rebukes would likely anger the Khmer Rouge, causing them to intensify their violence against innocents or withdraw even further into darkness. Diplomats fell into the trap of believing (because they hoped) that the KR were on the verge of emerging from their isolation.

(#litres_trial_promo) It is of course possible that outside expressions of interest in the KR’s treatment of its citizens would have made the regime more barbarous and xenophobic, but it is hard to imagine how much worse the regime could have become. Often choosing a policy of isolation can deprive a concerned state of its only means of influencing a violent regime. But in this case the United States had nothing to risk losing by speaking the truth. A far steadier stream of condemnations could conceivably have convinced those educated KR officials who maintained covert radio links to the outside world to press for a more humane policy or even to revolt against Pol Pot and his clan.

The United States might also have pressured China, the KR’s main backer, to use its considerable leverage to deter the KR from its murderousness. But the Carter administration was determined not to jeopardize its burgeoning relationships with either of the KR’s regional allies: Thailand and China. Thailand was anti-Communist, but it maintained civil relations with the Khmer Rouge because its top priority was containing Vietnam. And China, which viewed the Khmer Rouge as a natural and ideological ally, had occupied center-stage in U.S. foreign policy circles since Nixon’s 1972 trip to Beijing. The Chinese had long been supplying the KR with military advisers, light arms, and ammunition. In early 1978 Chinese military aid to the Khmer Rouge reportedly increased to include 100 light tanks, 200 antitank missiles, a number of long-range 122- and 130-millimeter guns, and more than a dozen fighter aircraft. Despite the gruesome reports of KR terror, the United States did not protest the transaction.

(#litres_trial_promo) In May 1977 President Carter called the U.S.-Chinese relationship “a central element of our global policy” and China a “key for global peace.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Although China was the state most likely able to affect KR behavior, the Carter administration was not about to risk normalization by carping about the KR’s human rights abuses.

Analogy and Advocacy

U.S. policy toward Cambodia was not contested within the executive branch. Nothing could be done, State Department and White House officials assumed, and virtually nothing was done. It took a handful of members of Congress to begin demanding that the United States take a more expansive view of the land of the possible. Stephen Solarz was a Democratic House member from New York who had won election in 1974 on an antiwar platform and had earlier helped block further U.S. funding to the Lon Nol regime. Unlike most of his colleagues, Solarz had not lost interest in the region with the cutoff of U.S. funds. In August 1975 he had traveled with a House delegation to Thailand, where he had taken a helicopter ride with the embassy’s Twining to Aranyaprathet. There, the man who would become known as the “Marco Polo” of Congress for all his foreign travel, heard tales that reminded him of the forced deportation of Jews in World War II. As a Jew and as a politician—his district contained more Holocaust survivors than any other in the country—he became incensed. “They were killing anyone who wore glasses,” Solarz remembers, “because if they wore glasses, it suggested they knew how to read, and if they knew how to read, it suggested they had been infected with the bourgeois virus. It was a Great Leap Forward that made the Great Leap Forward under Mao look like a tentative half-step.”

In 1976, despite reports of nearly a million dead, no congressional hearings had been held specifically on human rights abuses in Cambodia. Solarz and a few other avid legislators had settled for including the grim press articles in the Congressional Record and occasionally condemning the KR in floor debates. Senator Claiborne Pell, who partnered with Proxmire in pushing the genocide convention and who would later do more than any other senator to try to punish Saddam Hussein for gassing Iraqi Kurds, took a parallel interest in Cambodia. On the floor of the Senate in 1976, he declared:

[If estimates of 1 million killed are] true, approximately one-fifth of the Cambodian population has been annihilated—a record of barbarous butchery which is surpassed in recent history only by the Nazi atrocities against the Jews during World War II…I am amazed that so little has been done to investigate and condemn what is happening in Cambodia. The UN Human Rights Commission has so far ignored the situation in that country.

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By 1977, Solarz, Pell, and others had finally generated enough interest to stage hearings on Capitol Hill devoted exclusively to Cambodian atrocities. In one of those hearings, much of Solarz’s frustration over the U.S. policy of silence and the ongoing squabbles over numbers of dead burst forth. Indochina specialist Gareth Porter testified, again denouncing the “wild exaggeration and wholesale falsehood” of allegations of KR terror. Porter insisted that it was a “myth” that “one-to-two million Cambodians [had] been the victims of a regime led by genocidal maniacs.” Solarz exploded. “It is beyond belief to me that anyone could seriously argue that this hasn’t been going on,” he exclaimed.

(#litres_trial_promo) For the next year and a half, Solarz attempted to get the House to pass a resolution calling on President Carter to turn his attention to curbing the killings.

Solarz was one of several Americans who, in drawing attention to the KR horrors, linked his advocacy to the Holocaust. Seated more than two decades later in a study lined with shelves filled with 123 books on the Holocaust and another fifty-two on Hitler and Nazi Germany, Solarz reflects, “The Holocaust is the key to the whole thing. It is the Rosetta stone. For me, the Holocaust was the central fact of the twentieth century and has had more of an influence on my view of the world and America’s role in it than anything else.”

By the mid- and late-1970s, Hitler’s destruction of the Jews was at last becoming the subject of scholarly and public focus. The term “Holocaust” had not entered into popular usage until the late 1960s, but in 1970 two books analyzed the U.S. indifference to the Holocaust for the first time: Arthur Morse’s While Six Million Died:A Chronicle of American Apathy and Henry Feingold’s Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration, 1939– 1945. One of the most pivotal instruments for “popularizing” the Final Solution was the four-part, nine-and-a-half-hour television dramatization Holocaust, starring James Woods and Meryl Streep, which some 120 million viewers watched in 1978. The same year President Carter appointed a special commission on Holocaust remembrance and education and decided to build a monument to the horror on the National Mall in Washington,D.C.

By 1977, because it had become widely accepted that a bloodbath was indeed taking place in Cambodia, advocates of U.S. engagement tried to jar decisionmakers and ordinary citizens by likening Pol Pot’s atrocities to those of Hitler. Syndicated columnists Jack Anderson and Les Whitten published a total of fifteen opinion pieces on Cambodia, most of which invoked the Holocaust.

(#litres_trial_promo) On July 21, 1977, they wrote, “The uproar over human rights has ignored the world’s most brutal dictatorship. Adolf Hitler at his worst was not as oppressive as the Communist rulers of tiny Cambodia.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Several months later, Anderson and Whitten called the KR terror “the greatest atrocity since the Nazis herded Jews into the gas chambers.”

(#litres_trial_promo)When the Holocaust docudrama aired in 1978, Anderson noted that “another Holocaust story, every bit as stark as the recent TV saga” was ongoing. The Nazis had disguised their crimes with euphemisms such as “resettlement,”“removal,” and “special action,” Anderson wrote. So, too, the Khmer Rouge had introduced a sanitized language. “The Khmer word for ‘kill, assassinate, execute’ was never spoken when the annihilation policy was discussed,” he noted. “The Khmer term used was ‘baoh, caol,’literally ‘sweep, throw out’ or ‘sweep, discard.’”

(#litres_trial_promo) The next day Anderson penned another column, entitled “Cambodia: A Modern-Day Holocaust,” in which he condemned President Carter for averting his gaze from the extermination of Cambodians.

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Others chimed in, also adopting the analogy. The Economist described “brutality that would make Hitler cringe.”

(#litres_trial_promo) In an April 1978 New York Times editorial, “Silence is Guilt,” William Safire also referred to the Holocaust miniseries and asked why the world was doing nothing. “In terms of numbers of people killed,”Safire wrote, “this generation’s rival to Adolf Hitler is the leader of Communist Cambodia, Pol Pot.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Leo Cherne of the International Rescue Committee and Freedom House wrote in the Wall Street Journal on May 10, 1978, that “the ruthlessness in each country has come about in service to an ideal—of racial purity in Nazi Germany, of political purity in Democratic Kampuchea.” A May 1978 front-page New York Times story said that refugees in Thailand “recall concentration camp survivors in Europe of 1945.”

As the months passed, Capitol Hill became more engaged. Senator Bob Dole (R.–Kans.) was moved by the story of a Cambodian refugee who had visited him. He compared the Cambodian crisis to “the death camps in Nazi Germany, and the excesses of Stalinist Russia.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Pleading as always for the ratification of the genocide convention and denouncing the KR, Proxmire noted the parallels with the destruction of the Jews:“This is no ordinary genocide. There are no concentration camps and gas chambers disguised as showers. This is genocide without technology.”

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Donald Fraser (D.–Minn.), the Hill’s most vocal human rights advocate, chaired a House International Relations Subcommittee hearing in July 1977. Ken Quinn, who in 1977 was tapped as special assistant to the new assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs, Richard Holbrooke, told his boss, “This is a chance to go public with all we know.” Holbrooke and Twining appeared on Capitol Hill and ended the State Department’s two-year policy of silence. Holbrooke noted that “journalists and scholars guess that between half a million and 1.2 million have died since 1975.” U.S. intelligence indicated that “for every person executed several have died of disease, malnutrition, or other factors, which would have been avoidable if the Government itself had not followed…a policy which seeks to completely transform the society by the most Draconian measures possible.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Holbrooke concluded that “we should speak out,” even though, as he admitted, he was unsure “what the impact of our words” would be.

(#litres_trial_promo) This was the first time Twining had been publicly summoned to relay his graphic findings. The U.S. government had detailed knowledge of Pol Pot’s atrocities. A February 13, 1978, State Department cable reported plainly, “A renewed emphasis was placed on completely eliminating all vestiges of the former government and completing the executions of all people who were not from the poor farmer-working class.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Still, twining recalls his attitude at the time of the hearing. “It was easy to come before Congress because I was so sure about what was going on,” he says. “When it came to ‘what to do,’ though, I just had this overwhelming feeling of helplessness.”

With American editorial writers weighing in on the subject with some frequency in 1978, and with congressional pressure mounting, the daily press coverage of human rights abuses finally expanded. In the summer of 1978, the Washington Post and New York Times began running two to three news stories a month on human rights in Cambodia, still a small number but far more than the two or three per year they had run in 1975, 1976, and 1977. By late 1978 death estimates that had earlier been referred to as “reports of mass death” became “hundreds of thousands, possibly 2 1/2 million” and “one to three million killed.”

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Not until 1978 did nongovernmental actors urge that trying and failing to influence the KR would be preferable to making no effort at all. “One may not be able to triumph over evil, but one need not remain silent in its presence,” syndicated columnist Smith Hempstone wrote in the Washington Post in May 1978. “President Carter might speak up more than once on the subject. He might instruct Andrew Young to walk out of the United Nations General Assembly whenever the representative of ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ rises to speak. At every time and in every available forum, those who speak for the United States could call on the conscience of the world to condemn those who commit such atrocities.”

(#litres_trial_promo) None of these steps were taken.

President Carter’s first firm public denunciation came in April 1978 when he sent a message to an independent commission examining the atrocity reports in Oslo:

America cannot avoid the responsibility to speak out in condemnation of the Cambodian government, the worst violator of human rights in the world today. Thousands of refugees have accused their government of inflicting death on hundreds of thousands of Cambodian people through the genocidal policies it has implemented over the past three years…It is an obligation of every member of the international community to protest the policies of this or any nation which cruelly and systematically violates the right of its people to enjoy life and basic human dignities.

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Sixteen months had passed since his inauguration and three years since the fall of Phnom Penh.

In early June 1978, a group calling itself United People for Human Rights in Cambodia fasted and protested in front of the White House, and Freedom House convened a colloquium in Washington, “Cambodia: What Can America Do?” Amnesty International appealed more adamantly for scrutiny of Cambodia’s record. Its 1977–1978 report removed many of its earlier disclaimers. The report cited Ponchaud’s claim that 100,000 was the absolute minimum number of Cambodians executed and said it was possible that “two or three times as many” had been murdered.

(#litres_trial_promo) Rather than simply writing privately to the KR, Amnesty called upon the regime to allow independent investigators to deploy to Cambodia and made its own submission to the UN Human Rights Commission.

(#litres_trial_promo) Citing refugee and press accounts, the submission stated that although many allegations remained “uncorroborated,” their number and consistency “give cause for great concern.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Public and political groups were finally taking notice of a people in dire need.

Although elite opinion had concluded “something had to be done,” the “something” remained narrowly defined. Behind the scenes, U.S. ambassador Andrew Young urged United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to visit Cambodia, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance instructed U.S. embassies to discuss with host countries the possibility of raising the issue of Cambodia in the UN General Assembly. Warren Christopher, Carter’s deputy secretary of state, criticized the KR for its massive human rights abuses but pledged only to support “international efforts to call attention to this egregious situation.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The U.S. foreign policy establishment remained persistently passive, issuing only a handful of public statements and never investing its political capital in a serious attempt to alter KR behavior.

Military What? George Who?

As press coverage steadily picked up and as the U.S. legislature responded with hearings, one lonely American official argued that an outside military force should intervene in Cambodia to dislodge the Khmer Rouge. That person was a Democratic senator from South Dakota named George McGovern—the same George McGovern who had captured the Democratic Party’s nomination in the 1972 presidential election and run on a platform of opposition to the Vietnam War. McGovern had spearheaded congressional efforts to proscribe funding for U.S. military operations in Indochina, and he had initiated the passage of the War Powers Act. He said he carried Vietnam “in my stomach and heart and mind for ten years above any other concern in public life.”