Soon, the United Nations had to decide who would occupy Cambodia’s seat at the UN then held by the Khmer Rouge. As with all UN debates, the United States had an outsized voice. Would the deposed Khmer Rouge regime keep the seat, or would the UN give it to the puppet government Vietnam had installed in Phnom Penh? Here were a rock and a hard place: Recognize a genocidal former government—or a Communist nation, an ally of the Soviet Union, and the only state that had ever won a war against the United States. “Thug number one, or thug number two,” as one senior State Department official put it then.
Surprisingly, the United Nations chose to reseat the Khmer Rouge instead of “those puppets,” as Washington referred to the government in Phnom Penh. To the State Department, giving a seat to Vietnam’s government was effectively giving Moscow another vote in the General Assembly. And although the Khmer Rouge were butchers, they were out of power now, living in the jungle—and allied with China, Washington’s new friend.
Washington’s policy was even more cynical than the UN’s. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security adviser, told journalist and author Elizabeth Becker, “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot.” He “was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could”—and so they did, for the next thirteen years.
After the UN vote, Robert Rosenstock, the lawyer who represented the United States on the UN Credentials Committee, found himself shaking hands with Ieng Sary, the former Khmer Rouge foreign minister. The man was beaming with gratitude. Rosenstock wanted to go wash his hands. “I realized enough at the time to feel there was something disgusting about shaking Ieng Sary’s hand,” he told author Samantha Powers. Khieu Samphan, the Khmer Rouge premier, said: “We thank the U.S. warmly.”
When Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, he resolutely refused to recognize Cambodia’s quisling government. UN aid agencies were forbidden to set foot in Cambodia. No one was to have anything to do with the stooges Hanoi had installed in Phnom Penh. As for the Cambodian people, victims of genocide and famine, well, no one spent much if any time thinking about them.
4
Vietnam appointed Heng Samrin, a longtime member of the Cambodian Communist Party, as prime minister. He had served as a Khmer Rouge division commander. Like many Khmer Rouge officers, Heng had feared Pol Pot would turn on him, so he deserted to Vietnam. In 1978 the Vietnamese military had chosen him to command a small group of Khmer Rouge deserters who would “lead” the invasion of Cambodia, to give it an indigenous face.
Once in office, Heng Samrin and the government’s other leaders took direction from Hanoi. Vietnamese administrators sat in every government ministry and provincial office, and they worked to remake Cambodia as a Marxist-Leninist state. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the schools. Vietnam renovated existing schools and built some new ones, hanging pictures of Heng Samrin, Joseph Stalin, and Ho Chi Minh in the classrooms. The curriculum included mandatory courses on socialist solidarity and economic theory as
well as Marxism-Leninism. Students were told they were being taught to be useful “new socialist workers.”
None of this should have been a great leap for the government in Phnom Penh. Its leaders were former Khmer Rouge officers, and the Khmer Rouge was, after all, the unofficial name for the Communist Party of Cambodia. So is it any wonder that the Reagan administration disparaged this government, a proxy of Vietnam, a nation that was itself a proxy of the Soviet Union, President Reagan’s “evil empire”?
In 1985 Heng Samrin stepped aside, and in his place Vietnam installed Hun Sen, a wily thirty-three-year-old former Khmer Rouge division commander. He had joined the Khmer Rouge cause in 1970, after he heard Prince Sihanouk on the radio urging Cambodians to enlist so they could fight Lon Nol. In 1977, when the Khmer Rouge leadership appeared to be turning on him, he fled to Vietnam. There, he became an officer of the small indigenous military force the Vietnamese sent across the border in late 1978. Since the Vietnamese occupation he had been serving as foreign minister.
In Washington Solarz found himself one of the only members of the U.S. government who spent any time thinking about the true victims, the Cambodian people. His worst fear, a new Holocaust, had actually come true. He pushed the Reagan administration to admit thousands of Cambodians as refugees, then sponsored a bill to provide aid to what he and others called “the noncommunist resistance” in Cambodia—two small military forces in the countryside aligned with Sihanouk. Unless Hun Sen and his Communist cohorts were thrown from office, Solarz realized, the United States could not send aid to the long-suffering Cambodian people.
Hun Sen became the focal point of Washington’s ire, the Communist stooge in Phnom Penh who did Vietnam’s bidding. “I thought of him, basically, as a thug,” Solarz said. But Richard Bush, a senior aid to Solarz, noted that his boss looked at the situation through a different prism. While the rest of Washington saw Hun Sen and the others
as Communist puppets of Vietnam, “Steve was concerned that the Cambodian
people
were being ruled by former Khmer Rouge leaders.”
Over time charges made the rounds that some of the American aid, $215 million so far, was finding its way to the Khmer Rouge. Congress demanded an investigation, and Tom Fingar, who was in charge of the relevant division in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, dispatched investigators to have a look. Sure enough, they found some leakage—including sharing of ammunition, joint defense of a bridge, and using one truck to transport both “noncommunist” and Khmer Rouge fighters to a fight. But Fingar saw this whole enterprise as a typical Washington fury about nothing, an “epi-phenomenon in a flea circus.” His investigators, he said, “were trying to sort out exactly what was happening,” while he and others “were also asking: Isn’t the larger objective here defeating the Vietnamese puppets in Phnom Penh? Why are we providing aid? Isn’t it to defeat Hun Sen?”
Cambodia was stuck in a mire, occupied by its mortal enemy, represented before the United Nations and the world by its former genocidal government, governed by Communist dictators despised in the West, locked out of any significant assistance or aid. Cambodia had 7.7 million people in April 1975. Left when the Khmer Rouge fell from power were fewer than 5 million of them, and they were hungry, sick, and alone.
At the time nobody in Cambodia understood the import of what was happening, but the first hint of a break came in March 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow. The Soviet Union was broke, and almost right away Gorbachev cut aid to many of the nation’s allies, including Vietnam. Without that aid Vietnam was in trouble—so much so that the next year the Sixth Party Congress took a radical step. It launched a program called Doi Moi, or economic renovation, an attempt to introduce a free-market economy, to “free the entrepreneurial spirit in Vietnam,” the Party Congress said. Over time that decision worked miracles for Vietnam’s economy. But it would take years, and in the meantime Vietnam was forced to reassess its
own foreign adventures. The government was overstretched. Loath as they were to do it, in 1988 and 1989 the Vietnamese army withdrew from Cambodia—leaving Hun Sen’s puppet Communist government in charge.
This was at least partly expected. For years, anticipating Vietnam’s eventual withdrawal, Australia, Indonesia, and Japan, among others, had been holding occasional informal meetings in Jakarta in search of a compromise that could break the stalemate between the four competing Cambodian factions—the Hun Sen government; the Khmer Rouge; the royalist guerrilla group led by Prince Norodom Ranariddh, Sihanouk’s son; and another led by Son Sann, an aging politician who had once been foreign minister when Sihanouk was king.
None of that amounted to much. But the Vietnamese withdrawal changed everything. All of a sudden, people began to ask: With the Vietnamese army gone, what’s to stop the Khmer Rouge from marching back into Phnom Penh?
Mey Meakk was Pol Pot’s personal secretary. He took notes at Brother No. 1’s staff meetings, typed his memos and directives, broadcast his messages on Khmer Rouge radio. As he tells it, the man who ordered the murders of 2 million of his countrymen was living quite comfortably in the jungles of northeastern Cambodia. “He had a lot of money,” Mey Meakk said, and photos of that time showed Pol Pot growing fat.
Henry Kamm, a
New York Times
reporter and author, visited him and wrote of the accommodations Pol Pot offered. “The Khmer Rouge guest house was the very latest in jungle luxury. It was clearly modeled on the sumptuous hunting lodges to which French planters of the past invited guests for weekend shoots. ... Plates of fruit brought from Bangkok were renewed each day. The best Thai beer, Johnny Walker Black Label scotch, American soft drinks and Thai bottled water was served.”
The Khmer Rouge leadership was besotted with copious aid from China, plus their men were cutting down vast forests and selling the tropical wood to Thai generals at the border. But when it was clear that the Vietnamese had truly pulled out, Pol Pot roused himself. “He
wanted to take advantage of the situation and retake Phnom Penh by the end of 1989,” Mey Meakk said. “He wanted to prepare the troops, aggressively organize.” But his commanders resisted. “The troops were very tired. Some of them had been fighting for 20 years. The commanders were tired, too. They offered no encouragement. They didn’t want to do it.” So Pol Pot dropped that idea. But no one in the West knew that.
The French government appeared to be particularly excited about the Khmer Rouge threat. As the months passed, Paris issued increasingly urgent warnings. “But my impression was that the French motivation was the belief that they could engineer a renaissance of their role in Southeast Asia,” said Quinn, who was then the deputy assistant secretary of state for the region. That was the common view at Foggy Bottom. His boss, Richard Solomon, the assistant secretary of state, was one of several State Department officials who remarked that “the French were said to be rummaging around in government warehouses, looking for Sihanouk’s throne.” France invited all the players to a conference on Cambodia, in Paris, during August 1989. The French spared no expense and hosted the event at the Kleber International Conference Center, an elegant venue. American delegates marveled at the dramatic mirrored bathrooms.
President George H. W. Bush had taken office in January 1989, and his secretary of state, James Baker, attended the conference, as did foreign ministers from two dozen other countries. Leaders of the four Cambodian factions were also present. John Bolton, then an assistant secretary of state, was with Baker when they first met Prime Minister Hun Sen—whom, of course, they disdained. “He was sitting in a chair, rocking back and forth, when suddenly he pitched over backwards,” Bolton said, smiling and slowly shaking his head. “He got up and looked dazed. We both thought he must be drunk, or hung over.”
The meeting’s purpose was to find a compromise that the four Cambodian factions and the world powers could accept. China insisted that Hun Sen’s government be disbanded; Moscow, of course, refused even to consider that. Even then the Russians remained loyal to Vietnam and its appointed government in Cambodia. The four
Cambodian groups’ positions were mirrors of their patrons’ views. The conference failed.
Back in western Cambodia, Pol Pot decided that if he could not retake Phnom Penh, at least he would try to capture Pailin, the provincial capital a few miles from the Thai border—but also the headquarters of Cambodia’s rich gem-mining region. His military commanders leaped at that idea. They captured the town quickly and decisively, allowing the commanders to further enrich themselves. The ensuing gem and timber sales are estimated to have earned tens of millions of dollars a year that slipped directly into the pockets of Pol Pot and his henchmen.
In Paris, London, and Washington the Khmer Rouge’s 1989 offensive in Pailin reaffirmed the conviction that Hun Sen’s army was no match for Pol Pot’s forces. The French were particularly distressed: What was to stop Pol Pot from retaking Phnom Penh? Now, Washington was listening. “It sounded reasonable to me,” Bolton said. “The Vietnamese had pulled out. Surely Hun Sen could not serve on. He didn’t have the capacity to stand up to the Khmer Rouge.”
Just then, once again, the ground shifted under the city of Washington. In the first months of 1989, just after Bush took office, China brutally repressed pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square. It had already briefly invaded northern Vietnam, to punish the state for unseating Beijing’s allies, the Khmer Rouge. American officials had to ask themselves: Could China still be Washington’s new best friend? In November the Berlin Wall fell. The cold war was over. The Soviet Union and China established normal relations. Policy makers faced a brave new world. The State Department had long argued that Hun Sen was “an illegitimate puppet of an expansionist Soviet-backed, Vietnamese government.” Now every element of that description was out-of-date.
As ever, Cambodia was not Washington’s first priority, or even its fifth. Still, beginning in 1990 Congress grew ever more distressed about the Khmer Rouge. The threat remains, warned George Mitchell, the Senate majority leader, that the Khmer Rouge could again turn Cambodia into a “vast killing field.” A dozen senators began drafting a letter
to President Bush saying, “The Khmer Rouge represents an unacceptable threat to the people of Cambodia, and that American policy should be based, first and foremost, upon preventing the return of the Khmer Rouge.”
Finally, on July 18, 1990, Secretary of State Baker announced a change in American policy—a complete reversal. The United States would end its political and tacit military support of the Khmer Rouge more than eleven years after they had fallen from power, a decade after it had become perfectly clear that Pol Pot and his minions had murdered “at least 1.7 million” people, 25 percent of Cambodia’s population. At a news conference in Paris, Baker said Washington had “achieved one of its policy goals,” the withdrawal of Vietnam from Cambodian territory. “Another policy goal was to prevent the return of the Khmer Rouge. We’ve not been able to achieve that goal and, in fact, it would appear that the risks are greater as we move forward that that might occur. So we want to do everything we can to prevent a return of the Khmer Rouge to power.” Toward that end, he said the United States would resume “humanitarian assistance” to Cambodia, reverse its policy on the UN seat—and talk to Vietnam.