A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

Vietnam’s invasion had a humanitarian consequence but was not motivated by humanitarian concerns. Indeed, for a long time Vietnam and its Soviet backer had blocked investigation into the atrocities committed by their former partner in revolution. In 1978, however, as KR incursions into Vietnam escalated, Vietnam had begun detailing KR massacres. Vietnamese officials used excerpts from Ponchaud’s book, Year Zero, as radio propoganda. They called on Cambodians to “rise up for the struggle to overthrow the Pol Pot and Ieng Sary clique” who were “more barbarous…than the Hitlerite fascists.” Vietnam also began reindoctrinating and training Khmer Rouge defectors and Cambodian prisoners seized in territory taken from Cambodia. It crept ever closer to the Soviet Union, joining the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), signing a twenty-five-year treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Soviets, and receiving ever larger military shipments from them. The Soviet Union joined Vietnam’s anti-KR campaign, condemning the KR “policy of genocide.”

For the previous year, the United States had been flirting with restoring relations with Vietnam but was not keen on seeing it overrun its neighbor.

(#litres_trial_promo) From the U.S. embassy in Bangkok, Ambassador Morton Abramowitz wrote in a secret August 1978 cable to the State Department: “Neither the Khmers nor the world would miss Pol Pot. Nonetheless, the independence of Kampuchea, particularly its freedom from a significant Hanoi presence or complete Hanoi domination, is a matter of importance to us.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Far from encouraging the overthrow of the KR, as Neou and others would have hoped, U.S. officials urged the Vietnamese to think twice. In November 1978 Secretary of State Vance sent a message to the Vietnamese: “Don’t you see what lies ahead if you invade Cambodia? This is not the way to bring peace to the area. Can’t we try some UN instrument, use the UN in some way?”

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The United States had its own reasons for frowning upon a Vietnamese triumph. It planned to restore diplomatic relations with China on January 1, 1979. China’s hostility toward Vietnam and its Soviet military and political sponsor greatly influenced the U.S. reaction to the invasion. For neither the first nor the last time, geopolitics trumped genocide. Interests trumped indignation.

Aware of the Khmer Rouge’s isolation and unpopularity in the West, Hanoi thought it would earn praise if it overthrew Pol Pot. It also concluded that regardless of the outside world’s opinion, it could not afford to allow continued KR encroachments into the Mekong Delta. By December 22, 1978, Vietnamese planes had begun flying forty to fifty sorties per day over Cambodia. And on December 25, 1978, twelve Vietnamese divisions, or some 100, 000 Vietnamese troops, retaliated against KR attacks by land. Teaming up with an estimated 20, 000 Cambodian insurgents, they rolled swiftly through the Cambodian countryside. Despite U.S. intelligence predictions that the KR would constitute a potent military foe, McGovern’s earlier forecast of rapid collapse turned out to be prescient. Lacking popular support, the Khmer Rouge and its leaders fled almost immediately to the northern jungle of Cambodia and across the Thai border.

The Vietnamese completed their lightning-speed victory with the seizure of Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979.

Skulls, Bones, and Photos

Upon seizing the country, the Vietnamese found evidence of mass murder everywhere. They were sure this proof would strengthen the legitimacy of their intervention and their puppet rule. In the months and years immediately after the overthrow, journalists who trickled into Cambodia were bombarded by tales of horror. Every neighborhood seemed to unfurl a mass grave of its own. Bones could still be seen protruding from the earth. Anguished citizens personalized the blame. “Pol Pot killed my husband,” or “Pol Pot destroyed the temple,” they said. Rough numerical estimates of deaths emerged quickly. All told, in the three-and-a-half-year rule of the Khmer Rouge, some 2 million Cambodians out of a populace of 7 million were either executed or starved to death.

(#litres_trial_promo) National minorities were special targets of the regime. The Vietnamese minority was completely wiped out. Of the 500, 000 Muslim Cham who lived in Cambodia before Pol Pot’s victory, some 200, 000 survived. Of 60, 000 Buddhist monks, all but a thousand perished.

The Tuol Sleng Examination Center in Phnom Penh, which was code-named Office S-21, quickly became the most notorious emblem of the terror.

(#litres_trial_promo) A pair of Vietnamese journalists discovered the center nestled in a part of the capital known as Tuol Svay Prey, or “hillock of the wild mango.” While roaming the neighborhood with Vietnamese troops the day after they had seized the capital, they smelled what they thought was rotting flesh and poked their heads into the lush compound that had once served as a girls’ high school. They quickly discovered that of the 16, 000 Cambodians who had arrived there, only five had departed alive.

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The Tuol Sleng complex consists of four triple-story, whitewashed concrete buildings, lined on the top floor by a Motel 6– like balcony-corridor and overlooking identical grassy courtyards, once playgrounds for the young schoolgirls. A single-floor wooden building divides the compound in two. Some time in late 1975, Kang Keck Ieu (known as “Duch” ), a former schoolteacher, took over the management of the facility and helped turn a seat of innocence into a seat of inhumanity. Most of the instruments found in Tuol Sleng were primitive, “dual-use” garden implements. Building A, which contained individual prison cells, was divided into small rooms, each containing a metal bed frame, an ammunition box to collect the prisoners’ feces, and garden shears, lead pipes, and hoes. When the Vietnamese journalists first entered these rooms in 1979, they found these tools beside bloodied victims whose cadavers lay shackled to the bed posts. The prisoners’ throats had been slit, and their blood still dripped slowly from the beds onto the mustard-and-white-tiled floors.

When the Vietnamese wandered around the ravaged compound, they found other adornments, including bulkier torture implements and busts of Pol Pot. They also rummaged through surrounding houses and came across thousands of documents, notebooks, and photos. Years later this paper trail would be used to spur prosecution of the aging former KR leaders for genocide and crimes against humanity.

Like the Nazis, those who ran the extermination center were bureaucratically precise. A prisoner’s time at Tuol Sleng consisted of four basic activities. The prisoners were photographed, either upon arrival or upon death. They were tortured, often electrocuted as they hung by their feet, their heads submerged in jars of water. They were forced to sign confessions affirming their status as CIA or Vietnamese agents and to prepare lists of their “networks of traitors.” Then they were murdered. Low-ranking prisoners were usually disposed of quickly, whereas more senior inmates were typically kept alive for protracted torture sessions. The highest daily tally was May 27, 1978, when 582 people were executed. A day’s targets were often clustered according to their affiliation. For example, on July 22, 1977, the KR “smashed” those from the Ministry of Public Works.

(#litres_trial_promo) The photos and confessions of four Americans were also found. The men had disappeared in 1978 while sailing yachts off the coast of Cambodia. Hoping to convince their brutal torturers to relent, the men wrote detailed, bizarre accounts of their elaborate CIA plots to destabilize Cambodia.

If ever there was a document that captured the regimental tenor and terror of the KR regime, it was the set of instructions for inmates that had been posted at the Tuol Sleng interrogation center. It read in part:

1 You must answer in conformity with the questions I asked you. Don’t try to turn away my questions.

2 Don’t try to escape by making pretexts according to your hypocritical ideas.

3 Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dares to thwart the revolution.

4 You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect…

5 During the bastinado or the electrification you must not cry loudly.

6 Do sit down quietly. Wait for the orders. If there are no orders, do nothing. If I ask you to do something, you must immediately do so without protesting…

7 If you disobey [any] point of my regulations you will get either ten strokes of the whip or five shocks of electric discharge.

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An “interrogator’s manual” was another of the many damning documents left behind. A forty-two-page guide for Tuol Sleng torturers, it reminded them they should use both political pressure and torture on prisoners. “Prisoners,” the guide said, “cannot escape from torture. The only difference is whether there will be a lot of it or a little…We must hurt them so that they respond quickly. Don’t be so bloodthirsty that you cause their death quickly.You won’t get the needed information.”

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The Vietnameseinstalled regime was savvy enough to create a Tuol Sleng Museum almost as soon as it had solidified control of the capital city. The new leaders turned the snapshots of murdered prisoners into perhaps the most vivid visual indictment of evil in the second half of the twentieth century. The photos had been taken of boys and girls and men and women of all shapes, shades, and sizes. Some have been beaten; others seem clean-shaven and calm. Some look crazed, others resigned. As in the German concentration camps, all wear numbers. And all display a last gasp of individuality in their eyes. It is with these eyes that they interrogate the interrogator. That they plead. That they grovel. That they accuse. That they accost. That they mock. And for those who visit, that they remind. It is in their eyes, much more than in the stacks of skulls gathered in villages throughout Cambodia, that visitors are prodded to confront the extremity of the victims’ last days. With their eyes, most of the Cambodians signal that they remained very much alive and that they hoped to stay that way.

U.S. Policy: Choosing the Lesser Evil

The existence of the torture center testified to the depravity of the KR regime.

(#litres_trial_promo) Cambodia was not widely visited immediately following the KR overthrow, but enough evidence of KR brutality emerged for many Americans to know that they should celebrate their defeat. Senator McGovern, the new humanitarian hawk, learned of the Vietnamese victory and thought it offered the real irony. “After all those years of predictions of dominos falling and Communist conspiracies,” he remembers, “it was Vietnam that went in and stopped Pol Pot’s slaughter. Whatever their motivation, the Vietnamese were the ones who supplied the military force to stop the genocide. They should have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize.” Foreign service officer Charles Twining, who by then had been transferred to the Australia–New Zealand desk at the State Department, was overjoyed at reports of the Vietnamese victory. He recalls, “I didn’t see how else change would have happened. Those of us who knew about the Khmer Rouge cheered, but we quickly realized that everyone else just heard it as ‘Vietnam, our enemy, has taken over Cambodia.’” Some prominent U.S. officials confessed publicly to being torn. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, told reporters in New York: “I almost always think it’s always wrong for a country to transgress the borders of another country, but in the case of Cambodia I’m not terribly upset…It is a country that has killed so many of its own people, I don’t know if any American can have a clear opinion of it…It’s such a terribly ambiguous moral situation.”

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But rational, interest-based calculations led the United States to different official conclusions, which quickly overtook these isolated bursts of relief among Cambodia watchers. The Vietnamese victory presented President Carter with a difficult moral and political choice. Which was the lesser evil, a regime that had slaughtered some 2 million Cambodians or a Communist regime backed by the Soviet Union that had flagrantly violated an international border and that now occupied a neighboring state? After weighing the politics of the choice, Carter sided with the dislodged Khmer Rouge regime. The United States had obvious reasons for opposing the expansion of Vietnamese (and, by proxy, Soviet) influence in the region. It also said it had an interest in deterring cross-border aggression anywhere in the world. But this principle was applied selectively. In 1975, when its ally, the oil-producing, anti-Communist Indonesia, invaded East Timor, killing between 100, 000 and 200, 000 civilians, the United States looked away.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the Cambodia case perhaps the most important factor behind Carter’s choice was U.S. fondness for China, which remained the prime military and economic backer of Pol Pot’s ousted government. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski saw the problem through the Sino-Soviet prism. Since U.S. interests lay with China, they lay, indirectly, with the Khmer Rouge. Slamming the KR might jeopardize the United States’ new bond with China. Slamming the Vietnamese would cost the United States nothing.

With the policy decided and the tilt toward China firm, Secretary of State Vance called immediately for the Vietnamese to “remove their forces from Cambodia.” Far from applauding the KR ouster, the United States began loudly condemning Vietnam. In choosing between a genocidal state and a country hostile to the United States, the Carter administration chose what it thought to be the lesser evil, though there could hardly have been a greater one.

The new government in Phnom Penh was led by Heng Samrin and Hun Sen, two former Khmer Rouge officials who had defected to Vietnam in 1977. Meanwhile, the KR regrouped at the border, thanks to military and medical aid from Thailand, China, Singapore, Britain, and the United States.

(#litres_trial_promo) With the Soviet Union arming Vietnam and the Heng Samrin government, China opened up the Deng Xiaoping Trail for Chinese arms deliveries to the KR guerrillas through Thailand.

(#litres_trial_promo) Brzezinski told Becker: “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the [Khmer Rouge].…Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him but China could.”

(#litres_trial_promo)The military and political conflict took on the flavor of a Sino-Soviet proxy war. Vietnam and the states that made up the Soviet bloc argued that the will of the Cambodian people had been gratified and it was absurd to support a genocidal regime. On the other side were China, most members of ASEAN, and the jilted Khmer Rouge officials themselves, who argued that whatever the abuses of the past regime, nothing could excuse a foreign invasion.

The Khmer Rouge did their part, launching an image campaign of sorts. Khieu Samphan replaced Pol Pot as prime minister in December 1979 and invited journalists to hear his version of events. Rejecting charges of genocide, he said, “To talk about systematic murder is odious. If we had really killed at that rate, we would have no one to fight the Vietnamese.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Yet now that the evidence of the horrors had surfaced, Samphan could not deny abuse outright. He shrewdly acknowledged some 10, 000 executions under Pol Pot, and admitted “mistakes” and “shortcomings.” Samphan swore that if the KR returned to power, they would not again evacuate the cities, restrict movement and religion, or eliminate currency. In pursuit of U.S. help, he also brushed aside mention of America’s prior sins. “These things are in the past,” he said, referring to Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, “and should not be brought up.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Well aware that it was American hostility toward Vietnam rather than any love of the KR that earned the KR U.S. support, he warned that without U.S. help and with the backing of Moscow, “The Vietnamese will go further—toward the rest of Southeast Asia, the Malacca Strait, toward control of the South Pacific and Indian oceans.”

(#litres_trial_promo) He spoke the fashionable language of falling dominoes.

The Carter administration’s policy choice was made easier because at home no voices cried out to supportVietnam. America’s most ardent anti-Communists were still angry at Vietnam for the U.S. defeat. American leftists were mostly disengaged. Die-hard Communists were befuddled by the seemingly sudden division of Southeast Asia into two rival and bitterly contested Communist camps. The mass protests in the United States in the 1960s were a reaction against American imperialism and the loss of American lives. With neither at stake in the 1979 Vietnam-Cambodia conflict, the activists who had once made it to the mainstream did not resurface. The administration was able to reduce its policy calculus to pure geopolitics without rousing dissent.

The issue was not simple. Cambodians themselves were elated to be rid of the KR but opposed to the Vietnamese occupation. The Vietnamese had brought about a liberation from hell, but they did not usher in the freedom for which Cambodians longed. Vietnam’s claims to have invaded simply to stop atrocity and to defend its borders from Cambodian attacks were proven more hollow with the passage of time. Some 200, 000 Vietnamese troops patrolled the Cambodian countryside, and Vietnamese advisers clogged the Cambodian governmental ministries. The Vietnamese-backed regime earned further criticism because of its mishandling of a potential famine. It initially dismissed as Western propaganda reports that Cambodians faced imminent starvation because of disruption of planting and poor cultivation. Then, when outside aid was clearly needed, the regime was more intent on using food as a political weapon than ensuring Cambodians were fed. Kassie Neou, the former English teacher who had long fantasized about rescue, remembers his reaction to the Vietnamese invasion: “My first response was raw. It was a simple, ‘Phew, we survived.’ My second thought, upon understanding that our land was occupied, was, ‘Uh-oh.’ Basically, the Vietnamese saved us from sure death, and they deserved our thanks for that. But years later, we felt like saying, ‘We already said thank you. So why are you still here?’”

Prince Sihanouk, once the nominal leader of the KR front, had been placed under house arrest soon after the KR seized Phnom Penh. In the course of Pol Pot’s rule, he had lost three daughters, two sons, and fifteen grandchildren. Sensing yet another political opening, he emerged from the shadows after the KR’s ouster to criticize both the KR and the Vietnamese. “It is a nightmare,” he said. “The Vietnamese, they are like a man who has a very delicious piece of cake in his mouth—Cambodia—and all that man can do is swallow the cake.”

(#litres_trial_promo) For many Cambodians, the occupation by the Vietnamese quickly came to feel like a “liberation” similar to that of Poland by the Soviets after Nazi rule.

A Regime Less “Stinky”?