A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (16 page)

Upon arrival, the only burden the KR cadres carried was that of swiftly executing orders from their higher-ups, who were removed from sight. Over the radio and mobile megaphones, they began blasting their demand that citizens leave the capital immediately. As a rationale, the militant newcomers claimed that American B-52 bombers were about to "raze the city." The KR insisted that only a citywide exodus would guarantee citizens' safety. Purposeful Communist soldiers filed into the city on one side of Phnom Penh's leafy boulevards, while on the other side hundreds of thousands of ashen-faced Cambodian civilians tripped over one another to obey the KR's inflexible orders. Over the next few days, more than 2 million people were herded onto the road. KR soldiers slashed the tires of cars around the capital, and citizens trundled along on foot, moving no quicker than a half a mile an hour. In scenes reminiscent of the Turkish deportation of the Armenians in 1915, unwieldy crowds clogged the roads, leaving in their wake stray sandals, clothing, and in some cases expired bodies. The first sign for most Cambodians and foreigners that this revolution would be like no other was the sight of the city's main Calmette Hospital being emptied at gunpoint. Scattered among the anxious citizenry were patients dressed in wispy hospital gowns, wheeling their own IVs, carrying fellow patients in their arms, or being pushed in their hospital beds by their trembling loved ones. The infirm collapsed for lack of water, babies were born at the side of the road, heat-struck children squealed for maternal succor, and fathers and husbands cowed before the guns in command. Some Cambodians made their way to the French embassy and pleaded for asylum, hurling themselves against the barbed wire that ringed the compound and flinging their suitcases and even their children over the walls. But most Cambodians meekly trudged away from their homes.

Although the symptoms of the Khmer Rouge evacuation of Phnom Penh bore a superficial resemblance to the symptoms of what we now know as "ethnic cleansing," the KR did not really discriminate on ethnic grounds.The entire capital was to be emptied.

All but a few American citizens had already departed. One week before, on April 12, 1975, as the KR closed in on the capital, U.S. ambassador John Gunther Dean had led the evacuation of the embassy staff and American nationals. Lon Nol, the U.S.-backed head of state, fled with a tidy sum of U.S. money in his pocket for "retirement" and bought a home in an uppermiddle-class suburb east of Honolulu. Prince Sirik Matak, a former Lon Nol ally and premier who had recently been placed under house arrest because of his criticisms of the corrupt Cambodian regime, was released and tapped to become the official head of state. At 7 a.m. on the morning of the evacuation, Ambassador Dean offered Matak a place on a departing U.S. helicopter. Matak, whose apartment was decorated with photographs of President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, idolized the United States. At 9 a.m. Dean received a handwritten note from Cambodia's new leader, who thanked Dean for his offer of transport but said,"I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion" The letter continued: "As for you and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would [abandon] a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection and we can do nothing about it.... If I shall die here on this spot in my country that I love ... I have only committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans"° Dean, himself a childhood refugee from Hitler's Germany, boarded a helicopter carrying the U.S. flag folded under his arm. Matak took shelter at the French embassy, where foreigners had already begun to gather, and hoped for the best.

On April 20 and 21, 1975, as the final hours of the foreign presence in Cambodia ticked away, the Cambodians at the French embassy were turned out into the street. French vice-consul jean Dyrac had fought in Spain in the International Brigade against Francisco Franco and in the French Resistance against the Nazis, who captured and tortured him.The KR now told him that the 1,300 people gathered in the compound would be deprived of food and water if the Cambodians among them did not leave. The departures were wrenching, as parents and children, husbands and wives, and close friends were separated. The Cambodians who had hoped for reprieve at the embassy no longer stood any chance of disappearing into the thicket of evacuees and burying their past identities. They were alone to meet fates worsened by the taint of their association with the capitalist West. Senior Cambodian government officials stood no chance, and vice-consul Dyrac accompanied several members of the toppled regime to the gate. Premier Sirik Matak walked out proudly, but former national assembly pres ident Hong Boun Hor, who carried a suitcase of U.S. dollars, was so agitated that he had to be sedated with an injection. As Dyrac turned the men over to the Khmer Rouge, he leaned his head against a pillar and, with tears streaming down his face, repeated again and again,"We are no longer men." The officials, including Sirik Matak, who had trusted earlier American assurances, were taken away in the back of a sanitation truck and executed.

A Khmer curtain quickly descended. For the next three and a half years, the Khmer Rouge rendered Cambodia a black hole that outsiders could not enter and some 2 million Cambodians would not survive.

The U.S. response followed a familiar pattern. In advance of the KR seizure of Phnom Penh, prolific early warnings of the organization's brutality were matched by boundless wishful thinking on the part of American observers and Cambodian citizens. By sealing the country after their victory, the KR delayed and initially muddied outside diagnosis of the depths of their savagery. But even when the facts had emerged, the American policy of nonengagement, noncondemnation, and noninterest went virtually unchallenged. With the United States smothering under the legacy of the Vietnam War, which had just ended, no Lemkin figure emerged, no U.S. official owned the issue day in and day out, and no individual or organization convinced U.S. decisionmakers that the deaths of Cambodians mattered enough to Americans to warrant their attention. Thus, while analogies to the Holocaust were invoked and isolated appeals made, in three years of systematic terror, a U.S. policy of silence was never seriously contested. It would have been politically unthinkable to intervene militarily and emotionally unpleasant to pay close heed to the horrors unfolding, but it was cost-free to look away. And this was what two U.S. presidents and most lawmakers, diplomats, journalists, and citizens did, before, during, and after the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror.

Warning

Background: U.S. Policy Before Pol Pot

As Lemkin noted, war and genocide are almost always connected. The Ottomans killed more than 1 million Armenians during World War I, and the Germans exterminated 6 million Jews and 5 million Poles, Roma, homosexuals, political opponents, and others during World War II. Iraq later targeted its Kurdish minority during the Iran-Iraq war; Bosnian Serbs set out to destroy Muslims and Croats during a Balkan civil war; and Rwandan Hutu nationalists exterminated some 800,000 Tutsi while the Rwandan army also fought a more conventional civil war against a Tutsi rebel force. History is replete with conflicts between regular armed forces that unleash and fuel the passions that give rise to campaigns to eliminate certain "unde- sirables."War legitimates such extreme violence that it can make aggrieved or opportunistic citizens feel licensed to target their neighbors. For outsiders, war between armies can also mask genocide, making it initially difficult to discern eliminationist campaigns against civilians and inviting customary diplomatic efforts. In Cambodia two wars preceded the genocide: the U.S. war in Vietnam and a civil war in Cambodia. These wars earned the Khmer Rouge converts to their cause, and they also helped obscure the savagery of the new Communist movement.

American reticence in the face of the Cambodian horrors between 1975 and 1979 is tightly intertwined with the U.S. role in the region in the previous decade. The American war in Vietnam was intended to prevent South Vietnam, another "domino," from becoming Communist. The U.S. troop presence in Vietnam peaked at 550,000 in early 1968.The same year the stunning VietcongTet offensive against all the main U.S. bases in South Vietnam left some 4,000 Americans dead and strengthened American domestic opposition to the war.6 This restiveness on the home front only intensified with coverage of the 1968 My Lai massacre and the outrage over American use of napalm, defoliants, and poison gases.' American lives were being lost in Vietnam, American honor was being soiled, and North Vietnam was winning the war.

Richard Nixon became president in 1969. Although he had pledged to end the Vietnam War, Nixon in fact expanded it into Cambodia. Because North Vietnamese units were taking sanctuary in neighboring Cambodia, the country became a "sideshow" of some importance to the new adminis- tration.The United States invested heavily in the idea that the two bands of Communists, the Cambodians and the Vietnamese, were united. In March 1969 Nixon ordered American B-52s to begin bombing Cambodia." Code-named "Operation Breakfast" for the setting in which National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and U.S. military advisers drafted their bombing plans, the mission was kept top secret for fear of domestic protest. When the bombers failed to locate the Communists' bases, Nixon expand ed the mission. He authorized secret attacks on other sanctuaries and followed up Operation Breakfast with further unappetizing missions, named Operations Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Dessert, and Supper. In the first phase of the bombing campaign, which lasted fourteen months and was known as Menu, U.S. bombers flew 3,875 sorties."

President Nixon did not stop there. In April 1970, frustrated by the elusiveness of the North Vietnamese, he ordered U.S. ground troops to "clean out" North Vietnamese strongholds in Cambodia. Nixon warned, "If, when the chips are down, the world's most powerful nation-the United States ofAmerica-acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world." Some 31,000 American and 43,000 South Vietnamese forces surged into Cambodia, ostensibly to prevent the Communists there from staging "massive attacks" on U.S. troops in Vietnam.' ' The invasion, which Nixon insisted was only an "incursion," had nothing to do with the Cambodians and everything to do with the U.S. war with Vietnam. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger later testified to Congress, "The value of Cambodia's survival derives from its importance to the survival of South Vietnam"''

The month before the U.S. ground attack on Cambodia, the United States had welcomed a coup by the pro-American prime minister, Lon Nol, against Cambodia's longtime ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Sihanouk, the father of independent Cambodia, had acquired the aura of an ancient Angkor deva-raj, or god-king, since he had assumed the throne in 1941. A bon vivant, Sihanouk was a movie director, a gourmet, and a womanizer, as well as a popular head of state. But he had alienated the United States by striking up a friendship with China, America's foe at the time. He had also irritated President Nixon by trying to keep Cambodia neutral in the U.S. war withVietnani. U.S. officials believed [.on Nol would be far more malleable to American designs.

But the United States had backed a loser. Lon Nol was pro-American, but like many U.S.-sponsored dictators of the period, he was also corrupt, repressive, and incompetent. He secluded himself in his villa in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh and remained woefully out of touch with the affairs of his state. He depended on the mystical advice of a visionary monk named Main Prum Moni, or "Great Intellectual of Pure Glory."The only assertive moves Lon Nol made were those designed to increase his own power. He stripped citizens of basic freedoms, suspended parliament, and announced in October 1971 that it was time to end "the sterile game of outmoded liberal democracy." In 1972 he declared himself president, prime minister, defense minister, and marshal of the armed forces. The United States cared only that Lon Nol was a staunch antiCommunist. The United States spent some $1.85 billion between 1970 and 1975 propping up his regime-evidence, in President Nixon's words, of "the Nixon Doctrine in its purest form.."12

The U.S. ground invasion of April 1970 occurred at the beginning of Cambodia's five-year civil war, a merciless war that the genocidal Khmer Rouge would win. On one side were Lon Nol and the United States. On the other side stood the Vietnamese Communists and the small, mysterious group of radical Cambodian Communist revolutionaries. The leaders of the Khmer Rouge, or Red Khmer, had been educated in Paris, studied Maoist thought, and received extensive political and military support from China. They were youths who had been driven to Communist resistance out of frustration with Prince Sihanouk's earlier, authoritarian rule. Under the leadership of Saloth Sar, who later assumed the pseudonym Pol Pot, they had left Cambodia's cities in the 1960s to plot revolution from the Cambodian and Vietnamese countryside." It had been Sihanouk's tyranny that drove them to arms, but when Lon Nol seized power in the 1970 coup, the KR began fighting Lon Nol's government forces instead and made their former nemesis Prince Sihanouk the figurehead leader of an unlikely coalition. This earned them support from the millions of Cambodians who trusted Sihanouk, the likable man who had brought them independence. Although doubts emerged in 1973 and 1974 about whether the more moderate Sihanouk spoke for the KR, Cambodians trusted his judgment. "I do not like the Khmer Rouge and they probably do not like me," the prince said in 1973. " But they are pure patriots.... Though I am a Buddhist, I prefer a red Cambodia which is honest and patriotic than a Buddhist Cambodia under Lon Nol, which is corrupt and a puppet of the Americans.""

Even backed by the United States, the Lon Nol regime did not stand much of a chance in battle. Its forces were equipped for parades, not warfare.'" In 1972 Lon Nol famously had airplanes sprinkle blessed sand around Phnom Penh's perimeters to ward off his ungodly Communist enemies. Lon Nol's officers exaggerated Cambodian army troop strength, listing phantom troops and using U.S. aid to pad their pockets, stuff foreign bank accounts, and build themselves glamorous homes. Regular army sol diers, by contrast, frequently went unpaid and deserted. And though the Cambodian army enjoyed a huge numerical edge over the rebels, many were unenthusiastic about fighting on behalf of Lon Nol.Those who did fight were dependent on U.S. bombing and, later, U.S. military aid.