A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

(#litres_trial_promo) His antiwar credentials were unimpeachable.

But McGovern had come to the conclusion that events in Cambodia amounted to genocide, and for him this carried steep and unavoidable consequences. McGovern felt such a diagnosis meant first that the United States had to condemn the KR, which it had done hardly at all since the terror began. But it also meant that the United States had to contribute its military might to stopping the horrors. In August 1978 Senator McGovern publicly urged the Carter administration to consider deploying an international military force to launch a humanitarian intervention. It was time for the United States and its allies to ask, “Do we sit on the sidelines and watch an entire people be slaughtered, or do we marshal military forces and move in quietly to put an end to it?”

(#litres_trial_promo) The press corps darted for the telephones. “They thought this was big news,” he recalls. “They wondered, ‘How could this dove have become a raving hawk?’” A Wall Street Journal editorial lambasted McGovern for his “truly mind-boggling” stance. For the next several weeks, he deployed three staff aides to answer the phones, which rang off the hook. Some Americans called to denounce him for his opposition to the war in Vietnam and to blame Cambodia’s misery on the U.S. withdrawal from the region. But most telephoned either to applaud him for his proposal or, in the case of old friends, to ask, somewhat shyly, for clarification.

McGovern saw the duty to oust the Khmer Rouge as an outgrowth of, not a challenge to, the United States’ duty to get and stay out of Vietnam. The American role in the war in Vietnam only heightened U.S. responsibility, as he believed the rise of the Khmer Rouge was one of the greatest single costs of U.S. involvement in Indochina. McGovern understood the apparent irony of his position. But at the hearings, he, too, alluded to the parallel to the Holocaust:

I am the last person to be enthusiastic about military intervention except under the most extreme circumstances, but it does seem to me that these are the most extreme I have heard of. If anything close to 2.5 million people have been killed in a few years’ time out of a population of seven million, percentage-wise that makes Hitler’s oppressions look rather tame.

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McGovern argued that the United States should take the lead politically and militarily. To him Vietnam and Cambodia had little, apart from geography, in common.In Vietnam U.S.forces had squared off against an indigenous independence movement headed by a popularly backed leader, Ho Chi Minh. In Cambodia, by contrast, Pol Pot and a “handful of fanatics” were imposing their vision on millions of Cambodians. In light of Pol Pot’s “bloodthirsty” rule, his victimized populace could not possibly support him; indeed, McGovern believed the Cambodians would welcome rescue from the “murderous, slaughtering regime.”

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McGovern was not the first American to make such a proposal. The previous year conservative essayist William F. Buckley Jr., perhaps the least likely of all of McGovern’s possible bedfellows, made a similar recommendation in the Los Angeles Times. “I am quite serious,” Buckley wrote. “Why doesn’t Congress authorize the necessary money to finance an international military force to overrun Cambodia?” The force, he argued, should be composed of Asian units from Malaysia, thailand, Japan, the Philippines, and even Vietnam. The troops did not have to establish a democratic state. They simply had to “go there and take power away from one, two, three, perhaps as many as a half-dozen sadistic madmen who have brought on their country the worst suffering, the worst conditions brought on any country in this bloody century.”

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The McGovern-Buckley premise—that a barbarous, beatable small clan of murderers could be quickly vanquished—was challenged by the State Department. Douglas Pike, a foreign service officer and Indochina expert who testified at the 1978 Senate hearings, agreed that the Pol Pot regime was savage. But he said Cambodian troops loyal to the Khmer Rouge were fighting extremely effectively against their one-time allies, the Vietnamese. “If the regime is as bad as it is portrayed,” Pike asked, “why do the people fight?” He insisted that international forces would face tough resistance:“I think we should not entertain the idea that a quick indochop in Phnom Penh could put things right,” Pike testified. “To control Cambodia and the government, you would have to control the villages, all of them. You would have to put forces into the villages. The idea of just trying to take off the head in Phnom Penh sounds good…but it isn’t.”

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Robert Oakley, deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, was present when McGovern made his appeal for intervention. He was dumbstruck. So far as the Carter administration was concerned, Oakley testified, multilateral military intervention was not a “live option.” The United States would not consider generating or participating in an invasion. In reading Oakley’s testimony today, one can hear the loss of confidence in the U.S. capacity to shape the world or even accurately to diagnose its developments. “We don’t have the sort of intelligence on that that we sometimes in the past told ourselves that we had,” Oakley said, reminding the committee members, “We have learned a lot about the degree of appropriate U.S. involvement in the internal affairs of other countries, as well as an ability to influence them.”

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McGovern was puzzled. He had heard a great deal about why the situation was more complicated than it seemed, about how difficult it would be to dislodge Khmer Rouge cadres at the village level. And he could find nobody at all prepared to use outside force to end the slaughter. McGovern did not mention the genocide convention. For him, it was not the law but the atrocities that necessitated acts aimed at suppressing the crime:

It just strikes me that we ought not to dismiss out of hand the responsibility of the international community to stop this kind of indiscriminate slaughter. I realize it is a long way from home. These are people with different colored skins and so on. But nevertheless, one would think that the international community would at least be considering the possibility of intervening in what seems to be a clear case of genocide.

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Two political dissidents facing trial in the Soviet Union were then being celebrated, their imprisonment denounced. Yet, he observed, Americans were ignoring the killing of at least a million Cambodians. Instead of fighting the “last war,” McGovern believed, the United States should pay attention to the current genocide. “I hate needless and ill-conceived military ventures,” he said. “That is why I opposed our military intervention…in Vietnam. But to hate a needless and foolish intervention that served no good purpose does not give us the excuse to do nothing to stop mass murder in another time and place under vastly different circumstances.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Later he remembered the glee with which some of his former adversaries greeted his alleged “reversal” and the grief he got at the time:

Dean Rusk was by then out of office, but I remember he gave a public statement after he heard I had called for military intervention in which he said, “Now there is irony.” The implication of Rusk’s statement was that I had finally come around. Of course I’ve never been a pacifist. I always thought there was a time when military intervention was necessary. I never regretted for one minute my time as a bomber pilot in World War II. Fighting genocide is one cause worth fighting for.

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McGovern’s proposal went nowhere. The State Department issued a statement that the Carter administration was focusing attention on the “monstrous” situation in Cambodia but that it had no intention of resolving “the terrible situation in Kampuchea by military force.”It added, “Nor are we aware of any international support for [such] a plan.”

(#litres_trial_promo) In truth McGovern had not expected that states would rush to respond to his summons, but he had hoped the “old shock technique” would at least spark a discussion of the horrors that the Carter administration, the general public, and the international community had resisted to date.

(#litres_trial_promo) The appeal did cause a ripple effect in certain quarters, as even the KR, who so many had argued did not care about the opinion of outsiders, felt compelled to respond. On August 26, 1978, McGovern received a letter from the radical regime, slamming him for his “wanton and shameless attacks” and rebutting the genocide charge with the claim that it was the United States that had committed genocide in Cambodia.

In October 1978 McGovern did succeed in getting most of his fellow senators to sign on to a letter to Secretary of State Vance.

(#litres_trial_promo) Eighty senators called for international action to halt the Cambodian genocide, urged the secretary to introduce the issue immediately at the UN Security Council, and criticized the Carter administration’s lethargy. In August 1978 the United States had finally submitted to the UN Human Rights Commission a 667-page report on the atrocities based on refugee testimony, but the senators noted that this belated, written submission “seems to be a rather low-key approach in light of the enormity of the crimes being committed in Cambodia.”

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The First Visit

By 1978 the Khmer Rouge were feeling more vulnerable to the outside world. They had moved from scapegoating their own citizens to scapegoating their neighbors. The KR had begun trying to infiltrate and occupy southern Vietnam in 1977, and border skirmishes had intensified.In early December 1977,Vietnam, fed-up with Pol Pot’s attacks and backed by the Soviet Union, had sent some 60,000 troops just inside the Cambodian border.

(#litres_trial_promo) A propaganda war between the two sides had ensued, publicly confirming Ken Quinn’s 1974 conclusion that no Communist monolith existed in Indochina. On December 31, 1977, the Cambodian Foreign Ministry, which had kept past clashes with Vietnam silent, denounced Vietnam’s “ferocious and barbarous” aggression, comparing it to Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia. Pol Pot severed relations with Vietnam. Throughout 1978 the Khmer Rouge took measures aimed at improving their public image, inviting diplomatic visitors and friendship delegations, pledging reforms, and quietly relaxing their xenophobic stance toward the outside world. In March 1978 Pol Pot announced that Cambodia was “open to our friends…We invite them to visit our country.”

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Elizabeth Becker, the Washington Post metro reporter, had been clamoring to get back into Cambodia since she left in 1974. She had written more than a dozen letters paying what she remembers as “disgusting”homage to the KR’s “glorious revolution” in the hopes of winning a visa. Whenever Ieng Sary visited the United Nations for the annual General Assembly session, Becker trekked up to New York to appeal to him in person. In November 1978 she received a telegram from the KR (postmarked from Beijing) inviting her to Cambodia. She was one of three Western guests chosen.

Becker did not hesitate for a second. All of the fears that had driven her from the country in 1974 had been overtaken by a desperate desire to peer behind the Khmer curtain. She felt as if she had been “put in a coffin” since the KR sealed the country. She remembers:

I hadn’t guessed they would isolate themselves like they did. I mean, the idea that you could go to an airport and it would never say “Phnom Penh” on the departures board—that broke my heart. I had to go back to see what was happening. Since the KR were busy killing their own people, I didn’t think they would make time for us. Nobody said, “Don’t go.”

Becker and Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch became the first American journalists to enter the country since the Khmer Rouge had seized Phnom Penh in April 1975. Joined by Scottish academic Malcolm Caldwell, a leftist sympathizer with the KR regime, they arrived on a biweekly flight from China, the only country that retained landing rights in Cambodia. For the next ten days, Becker, Dudman, and Caldwell were given an “incubated tour of the revolution” that included immaculate parks, harangues about Vietnamese aggression, and screenings of propaganda films.

(#litres_trial_promo) Throughout their stay, the three foreigners were forbidden from independently exploring. They spoke only with those who had been handpicked by Angkar to represent the KR, and even these meetings were steered by a guide who was present at all times. Nothing Becker’s group saw resembled either what she remembered or what the refugees at the Thai border had described. Fishermen, rubber plantation workers, weavers, all were wheeled out to speak of the joys of the revolution and the bounty of their productivity.

Only when Becker sneaked out of her compound did she get a sense of what lay behind the Potemkin village. If Phnom Penh’s main Monivong Boulevard was clean-shaven for the consumption of visitors, the surrounding streets were littered with stubble. Shops and homes had been weeded over. Furniture and appliances were stacked haphazardly. Just as many religious shrines in Bosnia would later be reduced to rubble overnight, so, too, the French cathedral and the picturesque pagodas had vanished without a trace. Even when she participated in the KR’s regimented activities, Becker observed a country that was missing everything that signaled life. She later recalled, “There were no food-stalls,no families,no young people playing sports, even sidewalk games, no one out on a walk, not even dogs or cats playing in alleyways.”

(#litres_trial_promo) When she spotted people out in the countryside, they were working joylessly, furiously, without contemplating rest. The country’s stunning Buddhist temples had been converted into granaries.

It is difficult to imagine how confused Becker and the others must have been at that time. They had heard refugee reports of massacres and starvation. They suspected the number killed was in the hundreds of thousands. But they knew virtually nothing specific about the bloody Pol Pot regime. Becker was unable to muster the practical or moral imagination needed to envision the depths of what was happening behind the pristine and cheery front presented. She recalled:

We were the original three blind men trying to figure out the elephant. At that time no one understood the inner workings of the regime—how the zones operated; how the party controlled the country; how the secret police worked; that torture and extermination centers…even existed; the depth of the misery and death…We had the tail, the ears, the feet of the monster but no idea of its overall shape…

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By the time the two-week trip began winding down, the luster of being the first to visit had long since worn off. On December 22, 1978, the group’s last full day in the country, Becker became the first American journalist ever to interview the famed Pol Pot. Although she had heard of Brother Number One’s charisma, his smile was far more endearing and his manner more polished than she had predicted. But it was not long before he turned off his charm, treating Becker and colleague Dudman as if he had granted them an audience, not an interview. Pol Pot delivered a onehour stinging and paranoid indictment of Vietnam, forecasting a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact over Cambodia. He warned: “A Kampuchea that is a satellite of Vietnam is a threat and a danger for Southeast Asia and the world…for Vietnam is already a satellite of the Soviet Union and is carrying out Soviet strategy in Southeast Asia.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Ironically, as American decisionmakers formed their policy in the coming months, they operated on assumptions that mirrored Pol Pot’s.

Caldwell, the Scottish Marxist, was granted a separate interview with the supreme revolutionary leader. When he later traded notes with Becker, he delighted in describing Pol Pot’s mastery of revolutionary economic theory. Before retiring for the evening, Becker sparred with her zealous colleague one last time about the veracity of refugee accounts, which he still refused to believe, and the worthiness of the revolution, in which he refused to abandon belief. She was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of tumult and gunfire outside her room. A half dozen or more shots were fired, and an hour and a half of the longest, most terrifying silence of Becker’s life passed. When she finally heard the voice of her KR guide, she emerged trembling into the hall. Dudman was fine, she was told. Caldwell, the true believer, had been murdered.

Becker did not know why Caldwell had been killed, but she suspected that one faction wanted either to embarrass another or to plug the crack of an opening to the outside world before it widened. A murder would deter meddlesome foreigners from visiting again. On December 23, 1978, Becker and Dudman arrived in Beijing with the wooden casket containing Caldwell’s body. Two days later Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia.

Aftermath

“Humanitarian” Rescue

Kassie Neou, one of Cambodia’s leading human rights advocates today, survived Pol Pot’s madness and the outside world’s indifference. An English teacher before the genocide, he posed as a taxi driver, shedding his eyeglasses and working around the clock to develop a “taxidriver manner.” He had to make the KR believe that he had not been educated. Captured nonetheless, Neou was tortured five times and spent six months in a KR prison with thirty-six other inmates. Of the thirty-seven who were bound together with iron clasps, only Neou’s hope of survival was rewarded. The young guards executed the others but spared him because they had grown fond of the Aesop’s fables he told them as bedtime stories. When Neou discusses the terror today, he lifts up his trouser leg and displays the whitened, rough skin around his ankle where a manacle held him in place. The revolutionaries’ crimes were so incomprehensible that some part of him seems relieved to be left with tangible proof of his experience.

During his imprisonment, though he had been highly critical of the earlier U.S. involvement in Cambodia, Neou was one of many Cambodians who could not help but dream that the United States would rescue his people. “When you are suffering like we suffered, you simply cannot imagine that nobody will come along to stop the pain,” he remembers. “Everyday, you would wake up and tell yourself, ‘somebody will come, something is going to happen.’ If you stop hoping for rescue, you stop hoping. And hope is all that can keep you alive.” Survivors of terror usually recall maintaining similar, necessary illusions. Without them, they say, the temptation to choose death over despair would overwhelm.

Neou had fantasized that the United States would spare him certain death, but it was Vietnam, the enemy of the United States, that in January 1979 finally dislodged the bloody Communist radicals. In response, the United States, which in 1978 had at last begun to condemn the KR, reversed itself, siding with the Cambodian perpetrators of genocide against the Vietnamese aggressors.