20 minute read
Braestrup's Big Story: Some "Freedom House Exclusives"
ately terminated. Sources close to the U.S. government predicted a million deaths in Cambodia if U.S. aid were to cease. AWestern doctor working in Phnom Penh in 1974-75 reported that
This generation is going to be a lost generation of children. Malnutrition is going to affect their numbers and their mental capacities. So, as well as knocking offageneration ofyoung men, the war is knocking off a generation of children.
Advertisement
The V.S. embassy estimated that available rice in Phnom Penh would suffice for at most a few weeks. The final V.S. AID report observed that the country faced famine in 1975, with 75 percent of its draft animals destroyed by the war, and that rice planting for the next harvest, eight months hence, would have to be done "by the hard labor of seriously malnourished people." The report predicted "widespread starvation" and "Slave labor and starvation rations for halfthe nation's people" for the coming year, and "general deprivation and suffering ... over the next two or three years before Cambodia can get back to rice selfsufficiency."33
There is also the matter of the effect of the U.S. bombing on the Khmer Rouge and the peasant society that provided their social base, a factor noted by all serious analysts. Cambodia specialist Milton Osborne concludes that Communist terror was "surely a reaction to the terrible bombing of Communist-held regions" by the U,S. Air Force. Another Cambodia scholar, David Chandler, comments that the bombing turned "thousands of young Cambodians into participants in an anti-American crusade," as it "destroyed a good deal of the fabric of prewar Cambodian society and provided the CPK (Khmer Rouge] with the psychological ingredients of a violent, vengeful, and unrelenting social revolution," a "class warfare between the 'base people: who had been bombed, and the 'new people' who had taken refuge from the bombing and thus had taken sides, in CPK thinking, with the United States." «French intransigence had turned nationalists into Communists," Philip Windsor observes, while "American ruthlessness now turned Communists into totalitarian fanatics."34 One may debate the weight that should be assigned to this factor in determining Khmer Rouge policies, embittering the peasant society of "base people," and impelling them to force those they perceived as collaborators in their destruction to endure the lives of poor peasants or worse. But that it was a factor can hardly be doubted.
Assessing these various elements, it seems fair to describe the re-t
sponsibility of the United States and Pol Pot for atrocities during "the decade of the genocide" as being roughly in the same range.
Little is known about phase I of "the genocide." There was little interest in ascertaining the facts, at the time or since. The Finnish Inquiry Commission Report devotes three cursory pages to the topic, because the information available is so meager. The second phase has been far mOre intensively studied, and by now substantial evidence is available about what took place. David Chandler and Ben Kiernan observe that as a result of the intense interest in phase II, "we know a great deal more about the texture of daily life in Democratic Kampuchea, supposedly a 'hermit' regime, than we do about the ostensibly open regimes of the Khmer Republic (1970-1975) or the Sihanouk era (1954-1970) which preceded it."35 Despite this already large imbalance in knowledge, the Cambodia Documentation Center in New York City concentrates on phase II of the genocide. The dramatic difference in the information available for the two phases, and the focus of the ongoing research effort, are readily explicable in terms of a propaganda model.
Outside ofmarginal Maoist circles, there was virtually no doubt from early on that the Khmer Rouge regime under the emerging leader Pol Pot was responsible for gruesome atrocities. But there were differing assessments of the scale and character of these crimes.
State Department Cambodia specialists were skeptical of the allegations that had received wide publicity by 1977-rightly, so subsequent inquiry revealed. The Far Eastern Economic Review based its January 1979 conclusion that the population had actually risen during the Pol Pot period on CIA sources, and its very knowledgeable correspondent Nayan Chanda, discussing the background for the Vietnamese invasion, reported that "some observers are convinced that had the Cambodian regime got a year's reprieve, its internal and international image would have been improved enough to make any Vietnamese drive difficult if not impossible."36
Differing assessments persisted even after the abundant evidence provided by the flow of refugees to Thailand in 1979 and visits to Cambodia, which also provided the first significant information about the years 1977-78. At one extreme, Pol Pot continued to be described as having forged new patterns of genocide comparable to the worst excesses ofHitler and Stalin. At the other extreme, we have the postwar evaluation by U.S. government specialist Douglas Pike, now head ofthe University of California Indochina Archives, the "independentminded" scholar lauded by Freedom House and the exemplar of the
new, nonideological scholarship much admired by the New York Times. Pike described Pol Pot in November 1979 as the "charismatic" leader of a "bloody but successful peasant revolution with a substantial residue of popular support," under which "on a statistical basis, most of them [peasants] ... did not experience much in the way of brutality."37 The 1980 CIA demographic study assigns the Pol Pot--era executions to the period ending in January 1977, and for 1977-78 merely says that "living conditions most likely did not vary during these two years from the conditions during 1976." although as was known when the CIA study was undertaken, these later yearswere the worst, by far. in the context of internal purges and the escalating conflict with Vietnam at a time when the United States was beginning its "tilt" toward China and Pol Pot. The CIA concludes that among the "old people," the "rural population" who were "the foundation for the new Khmer Rouge revolutionary society." there was a slight increase in population through the DK period. A still more muted assessment is provided by the close U.S. ally Deng Xiaoping, who emerged as "party strongman" in China in December 1978 and soon implemented his p1a.n to "punish Vietnam," and who remained the main supporter ofPol Pot. He bitterly opposed attempts to remove the Khmer Rouge from their leading role in the DK coalition in 1984. stating in a rage that "I do not understand why some people want to remove Pol Pot. It is true that he made some mistakes in the past but now he is leading the fight against the Vietnamese aggressors."38 Deng has been backed in this stance by the Reagan administration (see "Phase III in Indochina," p. 285).38
In addition to such real examples of less harsh interpretations of the Pol Pot period, there are also mythical ones to which we return.
6.2.3. The "not-so-gentle" land: some relevant history Part ofthe illusory story constructed about Cambodia during the 1970S and since is that this "gentle land" with its "smiling people" had known little suffering before the country was drawn into the Indochina war and then subjected to Pol Pot "autogenocide." The reality is different. Behind the famous "Khmer smile," as Prince Sihanouk's French adviser Charles Meyer observed. lies ample bitterness and violence.39 Vickery observes that earlierchronicles "are filled with references toj public executions, ambushes, torture, village-burnings and forced emi- .1 gration," with the destruction of villages and landscapes, torture, and
killing a matter ofcourse, and few institutional restraints on terror. The peasantry of inner Cambodia, largely unknown to Western scholarship or to the urban population, appear to have lived under conditions of extreme violence and hatred for the oppressors from outside the village.
During the French war of reconquest in the late I940s, up to "perhaps one million rural inhabitants ... were forcibly 'regrouped.' " The huge flow of refugees to Phnom Penh during phase r of the "decade of the genocide" was not the first massive dislocation in recent history, Vickery continues, adding that it is, furthermore, "a strange kind of history" that regards the displacement of people fleeing from U.S. bombs and savage fighting "as somehow less abhorrent or more 'normal' than the reverse movement of1975," the forcible evacuation when the peasant army of the Khmer Rouge conquered the city. Leaders of the anti-French resistance after World War II describe horrifying atrocities conducted with obvious pleasure as a "normal" part of "Khmer mores." In the same years, government forces led by Lon N01, who was to head the U.S.-backed client government in the early I970s, carried out wholesale massacres in villages as the French withdrew, induding such "individual tests ofstrength" as "grasping infants by the legs and pulling them apart," actions that "had probably not been forgonen by the men of that area who survived to become the Khmer Rouge troops" whose later atrocities in this "gentle land" aroused such outrage in the West. "Thus for the rural 8o-go percent of the Cambodian people," Vickery concludes, "arb.itrary justice, sudden violent death, political oppression, exploitative use of religion and anti-religious reaction, both violent and quiescent, were common facts of life long before the war and revolution of the 1970s." These conditions elicited no interest in the West. "The creations of Pol Pot-ism were all there in embryo," Vickery continues, to be "directed first of all at the urban population" after a war which was in large measure "a war between town and countryside in which the town's battle was increasingly for the sole purpose of preserving its privileges while the rural areas suffered.'-'40
It is superfluous to observe that the United States deployed its ample means ofviolence in defense of urban privilege. But, in fact, these tasks were only ofsecondary importance. For the United States, the destruction ofrural Cambodia was ancillary to the goal ofmaintaining in power the client regime in South Vietnam.
Contrary to the arrangements in Laos and Vietnam, the Geneva Accords afforded no recognition lo lhe anti-French resistance in Cambodia, a source of much binerness. The country was ruled by Prince Sihanouk until March 1970, when he was overthrown in a coup sup-
ported by the United States.41 Throughout this period, Sihanouk attempted a difficult balancing act both internally and externally. Within Cambodia, he repressed the left and peasant uprisings and attempted to hold off the right, although power largely remained in the hands of right-wing urban elites throughout. Externally, he tried to preserve a measure of neutrality against the background of the expanding Indochina war, which, he expected, would end in a Communist victory.42
Sihanouk's neutralist efforts were unappreciated by the United States and its allies. Diem's troops attacked border regions from 1957, and there were also Thai provocations. A coup attempt in 1959, probably backed by the CIA, as generally assumed in Cambodia, was foiled; this should be seen in the context of general U.S. subversion in the region in the post-Geneva period, induding a CIA-backed coup and invasion aimed at overthrowing Sukarno in Indonesia in 1958, subversion ofthe elected government of Laos in the same year, and the efforts to destroy the anti-French resistance within South Vietnam and to consolidate the Diem dictatorship while undermining the political arrangements at Geneva. By 1963, CIA-backed Khmer Serei forces frequently attacked Cambodia from South Vietnamese and Thai bases at a time when the United States was intensifying its clandestine operations in Laos and maneuvering, with increasing violence, to block a political settlement in South Vietnam. By 1966, the Khmer Serei "declared war on Cambodia and claimed responsibilityfor incursions across the border."43
Attacks by U.S. and Saigon anny forces against border posts and villages in Cambodia intensified from the early 1960s, causing hundreds of casualties a year. Later, Vietnamese peasants and guerrillas fled for refuge to border areas in Cambodia, particularly after the murderous U.S. military operations in South Vietnam in early 1967, giving rise to cynical charges from Washington, echoed in the media, about Communist encroachment into neutral Cambodia. By the time ofthe 1970 coup that overthrew Sihanouk, Vietnamese were scattered along border areas to a maximum depth ofabout twenty-five kilometers, according to most sources. The first evidence of Vietnamese encampments in Cambodia was discovered in late 1967, close to the unmarked border. While there was much outrage in the United States about "North Vietnamese aggression," the internal view in Washington was considerably more nuanced. From the Pentagon Papers we learn that as late as May 1967well after the U.S. operations that caused cross-border flight-high Pentagon officials believed that Cambodia was "becoming more and more imponant as a supply base-now offood and medicines, perhaps ammunition later." Ayear earlier, an American study team investigated
specific charges by the U.S. government on the scene and found them without substance although they did come across the site of a recent U.S. helicopter-gunship attack on a Cambodian village (one of many, according to the local population), first denied by the U.S. government, then conceded, since American eyewitnesses (including CBS-TV) were present-the usual pattern.
The Cambodian government reported many such incidents. Thus Cambodia complained to the United Nations that on February 24, 1967, "a large number of armed forces elements consisting of Americans, South Vietnamese and South Koreans entered Cambodian territory and fired heavily on the Khmer village of Chrak Kranh ... [which1was then invaded and burnt by the United States-South Vietnamese troops" who occupied the village until March 3. By April 1969, rubber plantations were subjected to defoliation by air attack. In January 1970, an official Cambodian government White Paper reported thousands of such incidents with many deaths, giving pictures, dates, and other details, and also noting that not a single Viet Cong body had ever been found after U.S.-Saigon bombardments or ground attacks.
Virtually none of this was ever reported in the United States-even the official White Paper-although the information was readily available in official documents and reputable foreign sources, and in easily ignored peace-movement literature.44 The agency ofviolence was once again the wrong one.
The occasional media reaction to these incursions was instructive. On March 25, 1964, New York Times correspondent Max Frankel, now executive editor, reported a Saigon army (ARVN) attack on the Cambodian village of Chantrea with armored cars and bombers, leaving many villagers killed and wounded. The ARVN forces were accompanied by U.S. advisers, including a U.S.army pilot "dragged from the wreckage" of an observer plane "shot down in the action." Diplomats on the scene confirmed that "at least one troop-carrying helicopter had landed at Chantrea with three Americans on board." Frankel was outraged-at Cambodia, which had the gall to demand reparations, leaving Washington "alarmed and saddened, but confused." The headline reads: "Stomping on U.S. Toes: Cambodia Typical of Many Small Nations Putting Strain on a Policy of Patience." Cambodia has "borrowed a leaffrom Fidel Castro's book," Frankel stormed, by requesting compensation for this U.S. atrocity: "It is open season again for the weaker nations to stomp on the toes of big ones.... Leading the pack in big-power baiting these days is one of the smallest of nations, the Southeast Asian kingdom of Cambodia" with its "clever, headstrong, erratic leader," whom Washington finds "lacking some ofthe talent and
temperament for the job," although "the Administration's instinct has been to try to save a wayward young nation's independence in spite of itselfand, at times, despite its own leaders." Washington is also alarmed by "Cambodia's current effort to force the United States into a major conference that would embarrass its Thai and Vietnamese friends," Frankel continues, an effort that will "be resisted"-referring to a conference that would settle border questions and guarantee Cambodia's neutrality at a time when the United States was desperately seeking to undermine international efforts to neutralize South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia so as to avert the major war toward which the United States was driving because of its political weakness in Indochina.
This classic of colonialist paternalism reflects quite accurately the general mood of the day-as does the refusal to report such trivial matters as the regular V.S.-ARVN attacks on Cambodia, which have largely passed from history in the United States, apart from the dissident literature.
6.2.4. Phase I: The U.S. destruction of Cambodia
On March 18, 1969, the notorious "secret bombings" began. One week later, on March 26, the Cambodian government publicly condemned the bombing and strafing of "the Cambodian population living in the border regions ... almost daily by U.S. aircraft," with increasing killing and destruction, alleging that these attacks were directed against "peaceful Cambodian farmers" and demanding that "these criminal attacks must immediately and definitively stop.... " Prince Sihanouk called a press conference on March 28 in which he emphatically denied reports circulating in the United States that he "would not oppose U.S. bombings of communist targets within my frontiers." "Unarmed and innocent people have been victims of U.S. bombs," including "the latest bombing, the victims ofwhich were Khmer peasants, women and children in particular." He then issued an appeal to the international press: "I appeal to you to publicize abroad this very clear stand of Cambodia-that is, I will in any case oppose all bombings on Cambodian territory under whatever pretext."45
It will come as no surprise that his appeal went unanswered. Furthermore, this material has been suppressed up to the present time, apart from the dissident literature.'"' The standard position within the main-
stream, adopted by defenders ofthe bombing and critics as well, is that "Sihanouk did not protest" (William Shawcross). When the "secret bombings" became public knowledge in 1973, it was claimed that Sihanouk had privately authorized bombing of Vietnamese bases near the border areas. True or false, that is irrelevant to the suppression of Sihanouk's impassioned appeals, which referred to the bombing of Khmer peasants. Furthermore, as we observed in earlier discussion, "while commentators and media analysts may draw whatever conclusions they please from the conflicting evidence available, this does not entitle them to suppress what is, by any standards, crucial evidence, in this case, Sihanouk's attempt to arouse international protest over the U.S. bombing of the civilian society."47
Reviewing this period in his Cambodia Year Zero, Franc;ois Ponchaud remarks that Sihanouk called the U.S. bombings of "Vietcong bases" a "scandal and a crime over Radio Phnom Penh, but nobody was deceived." Ponchaud and his readers, however, are deceived: Sihanouk publicly denounced the bombing and other attacks on Khmer peasants, and not only over Radio Phnom Penh but in quite public documents and appeals to the international press. In his Sideshow, Shawcross says only that Cambodia "continued to denounce" American air and artillery attacks through 1969, but "made no public protest that specifically mentioned B-52 attacks" (p. 94}-true, but irrelevant for the reasons repeated in the last paragraph.48
In May 1969, William Beecher reported B-52 raids on "Vietcong and North Vietnamese supply dumps and base camps in Cambodia," citing U.S. sources. Beecher stated that "Cambodia has not made any protest," disregarding Sihanouk's appeals and his protest against the murder of "Khmer peasants, women and children in particular," not Vietnamese military bases. Beecher also commented that "in the past, American and South Vietnamese forces had occasionally fired across the bOrder and even called in fighters or helicopter gunships to counter fire they received from enemy units there," ignoring the somewhat more important fact that U.S. aircraft and U.S.-ARVN-South Korean forces had been attacking Cambodian villages, according to the "friendly" government of Cambodia. The headline for his article states falsely: "Raids in Cambodia by U.S. Unprotested." Beecher's article caused consternation in Washington, setting off the first stage of what later became the Watergate scandaL As we have commented elsewhere, "It is remarkable that Beecher's unique though quite inadequate account is now held up as evidence that the press maintained its honor throughout this period, despite the crimes of Richard Nixon."49
Once again, the U.S. escalation of the war against Cambodia in 1969
coincided with similar efforts in Laos and Vietnam. The general reaction was similar throughout, and remains so. The post-Tet accelerated pacification campaign, which thoroughly demolished the civilian base of the NLF, was regarded as so uninteresting that it is passed over in virtual silence in the popular retrospectives. As for the wars in Laos and Cambodia, Elterman comments,after reviewing the major media coverage, that apart from the "alternativepress," they were virtually "invisible" in the press in 1969 when they were expanding to new heights as the U.S. Air Force was shifted from North Vietnam to Laos and Cambodia after the "bombing halt."50
In March 1970, Cambodia was drawn irrevocably into the camage sweeping Indochina. On March 18, Sihanouk was overthrown in "an upper-class coup, not a revolution," carried out for "interests ofdomestic and political expedience," and with at least "indirect U.S. support," if not more.;']. Two days later, ARVN ground and air operations began in Svay Rieng Province, at the Vietnamese border, continuing through April and leading to the U.S.-ARVN invasion on April 29, conducted with an extreme brutality sometimes vividly depicted in the media, which were particularly appalled by the behavior ofthe ARVN forces. Much of the enormous civilian toll, however, resulted from air power, including U.S. bombing strikes that leveled or severely damaged towns and villages.52 One effect of the invasion was to drive the Vietnamese forces away from the border and deeper into Cambodia, where they began to support the growing peasant resistance against the coup leaders. A second effect, as described by U.S. correspondent Richard Dudman, who witnessed these events at first hand after his capture by the Cambodian resistance, was that "the bombing and shooting was radicalizing the people of rural Cambodia and was turning the countryside into a massive, dedicated, and effective revolutionary base."B Cambodia was now plunged into civil war, with increasing savagery on both sides.
U.S. bombing continued at a high level after the withdrawal ofU.S. forces from Cambodia. By late 1971, an investigating team of the General Accounting Office concluded that U.S. and Saigon army bombing is "a very significant cause of refugees and civilian casualties," estimating that almost a third ofthe seven-million population may be refugees. U.S. intelligence reported that "what the villagers feared most was the possibility of indiscriminate artillery and air strikes," and refugee reports and other sources confirm that these were the major cause of civilian casualties and the flight of refugees.54
Information about what was happening in the peasant society of Cambodia in the early 1970S was limited but not unavailable. There
were, first of all, many refugees with stories to tell, although the media were not interested. There was also an eyewitness account by French Southeast Asia specialist Serge Thion, who spent two weeks in regions controlled by the Cambodian guerrillas. His reports were offered to the Washington Post, but rejected.55 They were ofno more interest than the reports of life under the bombing in Laos, or similar questions regarding Vietnam throughout the war and in the retrospectives.
As in Laos, the escalating war remained largely "invisible" in the media. Surveying a five-month period in early 1972 in the national press, Elterman found that "In terms of war casualties, the focus in The New York Times and Time was on military-related deaths and almost always only those that occurred in Vietnam, ignoring also the civilian deaths and refugees in that country too.... During the winter and spring of 1972, the war in Cambodia and Laos was ignored more than usually with most of the Indo-China news coverage given to the North Vietnamese offensive into South Vietnam and the United States bombing ofHanoi and Haiphong.... Time, in fact, had more coverage on civilian casualties in Northern Ireland during the first half of 1972 than it did on the Indo-China War."56
Meanwhile, Cambodia was being systematically demolished, and the Khmer Rouge, hitherto a marginal element, were becominga significant force with substantial peasant support in inner Cambodia, increasingly victimized by U.S. terror. As for the U.S.-backed Lon Nol regime, Michael Vickery points out that their "client mentality" and subsequent "dependency led them to acquiesce in, or even encourage, the devastation of their own country by one of the worst aggressive onslaughts in modern warfare, and thereforeto appear as traitors to a victorious peasant army which had broken with old patron-client relationships and had been self-consciously organized and indoctrinated for individual, group, and national self-reliance."S7
In early 1973, U.S. bombing increased to a scale that might truly merit the term "genocidal" used by the Finnish Inquiry Commission. In the period after the signing of the Paris peace accords, the bombing matched the level ofthe preceding three years,58 and it was to continue at that level until Congress forced a halt in Augustalthough bombing and shelling of the countryside by armies of the U.S.-backed regime were to continue on a substantial scale, with U.S. guidance and supply, until the war's end. Over a million refugees fled to Phnom Penh, which became a horror chamber while the countryside was laid waste, including B-S2 bombing targeted "on the most heavily populated areas of Cambodia," where U.S. Air Force maps showed "thousands of square miles of densely populated, fertile areas ...