by Adam Fifield
Maybe it was because Grant was, in many ways, like a kid himself—giddy, hyper, implausibly hopeful. That youthful exuberance would serve him well in his first year, as he encountered his biggest test yet: the calamitous aftermath of Cambodia’s Killing Fields.
Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge had murdered as many as two million people in a countrywide paroxysm of brutality. UNICEF and other aid agencies had been kicked out when the ultra-Maoist regime took over in April 1975. They completely sealed off Cambodia from the outside world, emptied cities, forced most of the country into spartan work collectives, and unleashed a reign of terror that lasted for nearly four years. They employed a particularly vicious, primitive form of oppression, beating captives with clubs, pulling out fingernails, cutting off fingers, slashing throats with serrated palm tree branches, impaling victims on bamboo stakes, smashing babies against trees. They forced children to kill their own parents and then turned them into child soldiers. They made family members watch as loved ones were raped and hacked to death and forbade witnesses to show emotion.
The genocide finally ended in January 1979, shortly after Vietnam invaded Cambodia. During the Vietnam War and before, the North Vietnamese had supported the Khmer Rouge, their fellow Communist insurgents. But after the deranged Cambodian Maoists decided to launch military incursions against their former patron, Vietnam responded with a full-scale offensive in December 1978. It quickly toppled Pol Pot’s regime and began occupying the country. The nightmare was over, but its nasty residue stubbornly clung to the country. Much of the landscape was ravaged and desolate. Sick, starving and frail, survivors searched desperately for food and for lost family members. Children wandered alone through decimated villages, looking for their parents or siblings or aunts or uncles—or anybody they knew. To escape ongoing fighting, hundreds of thousands fled toward Thailand. Some were barely alive as they staggered across the border. They had already beaten death once, and UNICEF and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) were trying to make sure death did not get a second chance. One unsettling reality: mingled with the victims were many of the killers. Khmer Rouge cadres joined the groups of refugees spilling over the border. Some Khmer Rouge leaders would eventually, in essence, run their own refugee camps. Their presence would become a monstrous quandary.
The international relief effort, which began before Grant took office, had become one of the biggest humanitarian operations in the world and the most complex one UNICEF had ever undertaken. Because of its mandate (to help all children regardless of politics) and reputation for neutrality during times of conflict, UNICEF had been designated the lead UN agency in 1979. This responsibility required circumnavigating treacherous political hazards.
Cambodia had become a pawn in a tortuous Cold War rivalry. Since it was still reeling from the Vietnam War, the United States had supported the enemy of its enemy: the Khmer Rouge. Not only had America failed to stop the mass killers, it actively backed the pernicious group after it had been routed by the Vietnamese. In 1979, the Carter administration voted in favor of a Khmer Rouge bid to represent Cambodia at the UN General Assembly. This was a kick to the stomach for Khmer Rouge victims—the murderers, it seemed, were being rewarded for their crimes.
The US government went even further, subsidizing a political coalition that included the Khmer Rouge. The Americans also enforced a trade embargo against the new Vietnam-backed government that had been set up in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh. The hope was that Pol Pot’s forces could be strengthened enough to dislodge the Vietnamese from Cambodia. And if successful, what if the Khmer Rouge resumed their bloodbath? As far as the United States was concerned, that possibility was ostensibly worth the risk.
US culpability in Cambodia actually predates the genocide: in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in an attempt to destroy North Vietnamese bases inside the country, the Johnson and Nixon administrations dropped a total of 2.7 million tons of bombs on eastern Cambodia. The massive and, at times, indiscriminate devastation claimed hundreds of thousands of innocent Cambodian lives and may have emboldened the Khmer Rouge. The United States also backed incompetent Cambodian general Lon Nol, who had ousted the country’s influential leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk in March 1970. The coup—followed shortly thereafter by a US ground invasion of Cambodia in April that was ordered by President Nixon to flush out the North Vietnamese—drew neutral Cambodia further into the Vietnam War. Sihanouk responded by lending his legitimacy to the ragtag Khmer Rouge rebels, who were then allied with the North Vietnamese. All of these developments strengthened Pol Pot’s forces and helped them to defeat Lon Nol in 1975. The worst, of course, was yet to come.
China was Pol Pot’s biggest and most loyal sponsor, while the Soviets threw their weight behind Vietnam. Following the genocide and overthrow of the murderous regime in 1979, the Vietnamese apparatus in Cambodia emerged as a patently corrupt puppet state that included several Khmer Rouge defectors. Its primary agenda was its own political survival, not the well-being of millions of suffering Cambodians. Even so, it was obviously better than what it had replaced. Thailand also aided Pol Pot and treated the refugees with violent disdain; in one appalling incident, Thai soldiers forced 42,000 Cambodians over a steep mountainside at gun point, and as many as several thousand perished in the heavily land-mined terrain below. Vietnam, in turn, was angry that Thailand was allowing the Khmer Rouge to operate from its territory and purposefully hindered the delivery of relief.
As a result of these schisms, the humanitarian response split into two different aid operations: one inside Cambodia (allied with Vietnam and the Soviets) and one on the border (allied with Thailand, China, and the West). UNICEF and the ICRC worked on both sides, in a gloomy, disorienting fog of suspicion and mistrust. It was in the midst of this bloody diplomatic briar patch that Jim Grant found himself.
Southeast Asia was not new to him. From 1967 to 1969, Grant had served as the USAID assistant administrator for Vietnam, helping to run “the other war”—nation building. This included the American “pacification” program, a campaign to win Vietnamese hearts and minds. In January 1969, Grant wrote a sanguine memo entitled “Vietnam—Progress Despite the War,” proclaiming that the notoriously corrupt South Vietnamese government “is more effective and has more popular support than any government since the 1950s.” The memo also stated that “the buildup of American troops saved the day,” but added that it had also caused inflationary pressures and economic disruptions. He would later rarely speak publicly of his time in Vietnam, but would tell his close friend and UNICEF colleague Dr. Jon Rohde that sending men into harm’s way had haunted him. Now, in Cambodia, the fallout from America’s involvement in Vietnam cropped up as a boulder-sized obstacle in his path.
Grant’s predecessor, Henry Labouisse, had already worked assiduously (along with the ICRC) to appease all sides in order to start delivering aid. The negotiating skills of UNICEF’s intrepid envoy Jacques Beaumont had proved particularly critical in securing the grudging cooperation of the Vietnam-backed government.
But in early 1980, conditions remained acutely precarious, as the threat of famine grimly stalked those on both sides of the border. The Khmer Rouge used the camps to consolidate their power, and Vietnamese forces attacked their positions. The concussive sound of shelling was constant. Other armed groups sprouted among the refugees and started to steal aid and sell it for monetary gain.
Keeping the border operation from dissolving into outright mayhem was the job of a stocky, young, indefatigable Swedish man named Ulf Kristoffersson, who had been dispatched to the area by UNICEF in 1979 (he had worked for UNICEF in Phnom Penh in the early 1970s, before the Khmer Rouge had taken over). The challenge he had faced was stupefying. “People just came across the border and died,” he says. “You didn’t even know where to start.”
The resourceful Swede became accustomed to extreme situations. A drunk, maniacal Thai colonel once put a gun to his head. Kristoffersson, himself a military veteran, patiently talked his
way out of the standoff and then drank cognac with the colonel.
By the time Grant arrived, the effort Kristoffersson had put together was feeding more than a half million people. The ICRC supplied medical care; the UN’s World Food Program provided some of the food. UNICEF delivered a variety of aid and ran the whole show. Dozens of NGOs also offered assistance. There was heroism and sacrifice, and there was also bickering and infighting, as agendas and personalities clashed like cars in a demolition derby.
Grant’s first priority was to keep donors engaged and money coming in. He had already started doing this before joining UNICEF. As the president of the Overseas Development Council (ODC), a progressive international think tank, Grant had spearheaded an effort to pressure President Carter into dramatically increasing the US contribution to help Cambodia. On a Sunday night in October 1979, Grant had called the ODC’s board chair, Father Ted Hesburgh. The idealistic, imperturbable president of Notre Dame University, Hesburgh was a respected voice on international affairs and a longtime friend of Grant’s.
“We’ve got to do something,” Grant had insisted.
The priest had demurred. “It’s a big world, Jim.”
Grant’s reply: “Don’t give me that.”
He then had instructed Hesburgh to send a telegram to a group of several dozen religious and NGO leaders and ask them to come to the ODC offices the next day to draft a letter to President Carter. All but one showed up, according to Hesburgh, and the letter had gone immediately to the White House. It worked: within hours, Carter invited them to a meeting in the cabinet room. The president had previously pledged $7 million for Cambodian relief. Now they were asking him for $60 million. The survival of an entire country was at stake, they had told him. Grant had recognized that the source of the request was as important as the request itself. One of his signature strategies: demonstrate an overwhelming unanimity across a diverse spectrum of interests. Carter might have been able to say no to Hesburgh or even to the man he had recently nominated to run UNICEF. But saying no to a varied coalition of NGOs and clergy from several major faiths—representing tens of millions of constituents—would be more difficult.
After the meeting, the president had announced the US government would contribute $69 million to help stop a tragedy “of genocidal proportions.” (Never mind that genocide had already taken place in Cambodia, and that the Carter administration was supporting the very people who had caused it.) Some of the money pledged by Carter went to support the effort Kristoffersson was building on the Thai-Cambodian border.
Grant saw that effort for himself shortly after taking the helm at UNICEF. He met with Kristoffersson at the operational headquarters in Aranyaprathet, Thailand, and was immediately impressed by the alacrity of UNICEF staff, who were working around the clock in austere conditions and ceaseless, smothering heat. Grant asked to visit the camps, but Kristoffersson warned him it was unsafe.
“Are you going?” Grant said.
“Yes,” Kristoffersson replied.
“Then I’m going.”
Grant threaded his way into dense crowds of Cambodian refugees. They barraged him with stories and complaints and pleas. As an interpreter relayed it all, he assiduously took notes.
Buoyed by the visit, Grant started putting pressure on governments all over the world to contribute. Often accompanied by the secretary general’s representative, a formidable Aussie and esteemed UN veteran named Sir Robert Jackson, he canvassed the globe. The two men drummed up money and awareness and studiously avoided taking sides. As accusations swooped from every direction about corruption and misappropriation of aid, Grant made a point to praise everyone. He thanked Thailand for hosting the refugees, commended the Russians for their support of efforts inside Cambodia, and extolled a decision by the Vietnam-backed government to allow peasants to keep rice they had grown.
As of mid-February, it looked as though they had won a reprieve from further devastation. “Disaster has been averted,” Grant told the UNICEF executive board on February 14. He also noted that the Cambodia effort had drained UNICEF’s resources and had taken up “well over a third of my own time.” This concern would nibble, and then gnaw, at him over the next year, especially as new emergencies proliferated in Africa.
New famine fears in Cambodia unfurled in March, after harvest failures, and the case for even more money had to be made. In The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience—a detailed and critical look at the relief effort—William Shawcross contends that the threat of famine had earlier (in 1979) been “overestimated” by the Vietnamese government and others. Grant may have himself overstated the severity of the situation when he warned in March, according to the New York Times, that Cambodia was facing “the equivalent of a Holocaust.” A master of messaging, Grant would not hesitate to use hyperbole (though, as Shawcross points out, the Holocaust analogy was used by many “with as much imprecision as passion”). Exaggeration or not, Cambodians were still badly malnourished—as Ulf Kristoffersson saw firsthand, day in and day out. And Grant had to spark attention, especially as the world’s gaze drifted to other news: the Iran hostage crisis, the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador, and, not least, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Cold War bias ultimately skewed the relief effort disproportionately toward the border operation. Shawcross notes the “obvious preference” of Western donors to fund relief inside Thailand and cites funding estimates indicating that as much as eight times more was spent on each refugee on the border compared to what was spent on Cambodians inside Cambodia (though he cautions that these figures “are at best imprecise, at worst tendentious”). Kristoffersson and others were able to minimize the stark Cold War aid disparity by supporting an unofficial relief system known as the “land bridge” that funneled aid from Thailand into Cambodia and that may have made a crucial difference. Cambodians would cross the Thai border, get food and rice seed from UNICEF and the World Food Program, and bring the supplies back into Cambodia via oxcart. “Jim was convinced that [the land bridge] saved Cambodia,” says Kristoffersson.
Grant had always believed that the United Nations high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) should be running the border camps. After Thailand announced an “open door” policy in January 1979, welcoming Cambodian refugees across its border, the UN refugee agency was allowed to set up officially sanctioned refugee “holding centers” inside Thailand proper. But after a scant three months, Thailand reversed course and abruptly shut its border and announced that the holding centers were now closed to new arrivals. The refugees kept coming, with nowhere to go. The UNHCR washed its hands of the growing crisis at the border. UNICEF and the Red Cross were left holding the bag—and that included the morally vexing question of what to do about the Khmer Rouge.
Kristoffersson was rattled after his first encounter with Pol Pot’s henchmen. “It’s very difficult to explain the turbulence that you went on emotionally when you drove back from meeting with these bastards,” he says. “They’re standing there, smiling at you, and you knew what [crimes] they had committed. It was horrible.”
The nauseating prospect of “feeding the butchers” tormented many at UNICEF.
The United States and China had a vested interest in keeping the killers well fed: they wanted to maintain a robust resistance to Vietnam’s occupation. Grant’s relationships extended deep within both the US and Chinese governments—how he felt about helping them to sustain one of the most evil regimes of the latter twentieth century was not a topic he openly discussed. He seems to have alluded to the brewing controversy in his February speech to the UNICEF board, noting that there was “an element of risk to UNICEF’s good name … we are obviously caught in the pocket of geopolitical pressures.”
Whatever he felt, he and UNICEF had little choice in the matter. On a diplomatic level, the Khmer Rouge regime was a recognized member state of the United Nations. How can a member state be refused assistance? At the same time, according to Shawcross, the UN l
egal department had ruled that feeding the Khmer Rouge was unacceptable. An effort was temporarily made to halt food deliveries to “Pol Pot areas”—one immediate consequence, says Kristoffersson, was a sharp uptick in reports of malnutrition among refugees. There were innocent children in these camps. Starving the butchers, Kristoffersson and others realized, would also starve their victims. The conscientious Swede recommended that food deliveries to Khmer Rouge camps resume.
In late July, Grant told the Associated Press that “Cambodia remains one step ahead in its race with disaster.” UNICEF, the ICRC, and others kept that disaster at bay—but Grant was growing restless.
He had dubbed Cambodia a “loud emergency,” in that it drew a consistent stream of news coverage. His first priority was, and would always be, the global “silent emergency”: the deaths of tens of thousands of children every day from common illnesses, from malnutrition, from poverty. This quiet calamity did not make the news. The deaths took place far from cameras or headlines. He wanted to shine a light into the dark and dismal corners, to show the world that there were children there. As Cambodia continued to sap UNICEF’s resources, he became determined to limit his agency’s involvement in “loud” emergencies and big humanitarian endeavors. It would be a stubborn struggle.
The first real glimpse of Grant’s stratospheric designs came at the secluded Sterling Forest conference center in Tuxedo, New York, in September 1980. The long, low-slung building with floor-to-ceiling windows and a big stone fireplace lay snug against a wall of tall evergreen trees. About one hundred yards away, the surface of a small lake shimmered softly. Inside, the mood was less tranquil.
