Our government has failed to denounce atrocities . . . while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak[istan] dominated government. . . . We have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent.
The cable was signed by twenty U.S. diplomats in Bangladesh and nine South Asia hands back in the State Department.59 “Thirty years separate the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the Asian sub-continent,” Proxmire noted, “but the body counts are not so far apart. Those who felt that genocide was a crime of the past had a rude awakening during the Pakistani occupation of Bangladesh.”60 Only the Indian army’s invasion, combined with Bengali resistance, halted Pakistan’s genocide and gave rise to the establishment of an independent Bangladesh. Archer Blood was recalled from his post.
In Burundi in the spring and summer of 1972, after a violent Hutu-led rebellion, members of the ruling Tutsi minority hunted down and killed tens of thousands of Hutu.61 The rate of slaughter reached 1,000 per day, and, in their cables back to Washington, U.S. ambassador Thomas Patrick Melady and his deputy, Michael Hoyt, routinely reported “extermination,” a “vast bloodbath of Hutu,” and “thousands” of executions (some by “sledgehammer”). Embassy officials also supplied a running tally of the burial pits being dug and filled nightly near the airport. In one confidential cable in May 1972, for instance, Hoyt noted:
In Bujumbira we were able to see [when] shouting men surrounded Hutus and clubbed them to death in the streets. The army throughout the land and revolutionary youth groups arrested and executed educated Hutus, including secondary school students. After a month we can assume only a relative handful of educated Hutus . . . are still alive. The [killing] toll may be above tens of thousands. . . . Trucks ply the road to the airport every night with a fresh contribution to the mass grave.62
Despite these graphic reports, neither Ambassador Melady nor his superiors in Washington believed the United States should condemn the killings. And although the United States was the world’s main purchaser of the country’s coffee, which accounted for 65 percent of Burundi’s commercial revenue, the State Department opposed any suspension of commerce.63 Melady assured Washington that his response had been “to follow our strict policy of noninvolvement in the internal affairs and to associate ourselves with urgent relief efforts.”64 Secretary of State William Rogers cabled that embassy officials were right to “avoid any indication [the] USG [was] taking sides in [the] current tragic problem.”65 One State Department official met a junior official’s appeal for action by asking, “Do you know of any official whose career has been advanced because he spoke out for human rights?”66
U.S. policymakers placed their hope in the Organization for African Unity (OAU) and the UN. “Our general prescription is that Africans should settle African problems,”67 Melady wrote. But the OAU pledged “total solidarity” with the genocidal Burundian government; the UN mustered only an ineffectual fact-finding mission; and the killings continued unimpeded. “So far, we have been able to maintain our two primary interests, that of not becoming involved and in protecting our citizens,” Melady reported, adding, “We cannot at this time say how many people have died . . . but figures of 100,000 no longer make us incredulous.”68 In fact, somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 Burundian Hutu were murdered between April and September 1972.
While the executive branch refrained from much public comment, Senator Proxmire criticized the OAU and the UN for failing to investigate and denounce the slaughter, and he called on the United States to do more to stop it. He noted that the genocide convention made clear that such a crime was not merely a matter of internal concern but a violation of international law that demanded international attention. “The United States has for too long blithely ignored the issues of genocide,” Proxmire said. “Evidence that genocide is going on in the 1970s should shake our complacency.”69
Proxmire had no shortage of grim news pegs on which to hang his appeal. His staff drew upon a range of sources, but their creative juices sometimes dried up. Even the lugubrious Lemkin with his file folders on medieval slaughter would have struggled to devise a novel speech each day. One evening an enterprising intern in Proxmire’s office was struggling to prepare the next morning’s speech when a pest control team arrived to sanitize the senator’s quarters. The next morning Proxmire rose on the Senate floor and heard himself declare that the late-night visit of exterminators to his office “reminds me, once again, Mr. President, of the importance of ratifying the genocide convention.” As taxing as it sometimes was to diversify the ratification pitch, nobody on Proxmire’s staff considered slipping an old speech into Proxmire’s floor folder in the hopes he would not remember having seen it before. “Prox had a hawk-like memory, the sharpest mind I ever came across,” says Proxmire’s convention expert Larry Patton, “I never had the guts to try.”
Proxmire used his daily soliloquy to rebut common American misperceptions that had persisted since Lemkin’s day. Powerful right-wing isolationist groups would never come around. But most Americans, the senator believed, did not really oppose ratification; they were just misinformed. “The true opponents to ratification in this case are not groups or individuals,” Proxmire noted in one of 199 speeches he gave on the convention in 1967. “They are the most lethal pair of foes for human rights everywhere in the world—ignorance and indifference.”70 He used the speeches to educate. As critics picked apart the treaty and highlighted its shortcomings, he responded, “I do not dismiss this criticism or skepticism. But if the U.S. Senate waited for the perfect law without any flaw. . . the legislative record of any Congress would be a total blank. I am amazed that men who daily see that the enactment of any legislation is the art of the possible can captiously nit pick an international covenant on the outlawing of genocide.”71
Proxmire believed the United States could be doing far more in the court of public opinion to impact state and individual behavior. “The United States is the greatest country in the world,” he said. “The pressures of the greatest country in the world could make a potential wrongdoer think before committing genocide.”72 But the United States neither ratified the UN genocide convention nor denounced regimes committing genocide. U.S. military intervention was not even considered.
Initially, Proxmire thought it might take a year or two at most to secure passage. “I couldn’t think of a more outrageous crime than genocide,” he recalls. “Of all the laws pending before Congress, this seemed a no-brainer.” On the floor he listed other treaties that the Senate had endorsed in the period it had allowed the convention to languish:
Included among the hundred-plus treaties are a Tuna Convention with Costa Rica, a bridge across the Rainy River, a Halibut Convention with Canada, a Road Traffic Convention allowing licensed American drivers to drive on European highways, a Shrimp Convention with Cuba . . . a treaty of amity with Muscat and Oman, and even a most colorful and appetizing treaty entitled the “Pink Salmon Protocol.” I do not mean to suggest that any of these treaties should not have been ratified. . . . But every one . . . has as its objective the promotion of either profit or pleasure.73
The genocide convention, by contrast, dealt with people. Because it did not promote profit or pleasure for Americans, it did not easily garner active support. Opponents of the treaty were more numerous, more vocal, and in the end more successful than Proxmire could have dreamed. Undeterred by failure, Proxmire would continue his campaign into the next decade. Indeed, nineteen years and 3,211 speeches after casually pledging in 1967 to speak daily, Proxmire would still be rising in an empty Senate chamber, dressed in his trademark tweed blazers and his Ivy League ties, insisting that ratification would advance America’s interests and its most cherished values.
Samantha Power
Photo of a Cambodian woman
and her child, taken at the Tuol Sleng torture center, shortly before they were murdered.
Chapter 6
Cambodia: “Helpless Giant”
On April 17, 1975, eight years after Proxmire began his campaign to get the United States to commit itself to prevent genocide, the Khmer Rouge (KR) turned back Cambodian clocks to year zero. After a five-year civil war, the radical Communist revolutionaries entered the capital city of Phnom Penh, triumphant. They had just defeated the U.S.-backed Lon Nol government.
Still hoping for a “peaceful transition,” the defeated government welcomed the Communist rebels by ordering the placement of white flags and banners on every building in the city. But it did not take long for all in the capital to gather that the Khmer Rouge had not come to talk. After several days of monotonous military music interspersed with such tunes as “Marching Through Georgia” and “Old Folks at Home,” the old regime delivered its last broadcast at noontime on the 17th.1 The government announcer said talks between the two sides had begun, but before he could finish, a KR official in the booth harshly interrupted him: “We enter Phnom Penh not for negotiation, but as conquerors.”2
The sullen conquerors, dressed in their trademark black uniforms, with their red-and-white-checkered scarves and their Ho Chi Minh sandals cut out of old rubber tires, marched single file into the Cambodian capital. The soldiers had the look of a weary band that had fought a savage battle for control of the country and its people. They carried guns. They gathered material goods, like television sets, refrigerators, and cars, and piled them on top of one another in the center of the street to create a pyre. Influenced by the thinking of Mao Zedong, the Khmer Rouge leadership had recruited into their army those they deemed, in Mao’s words, “poor and blank,” rather than those with schooling. “A sheet of blank paper carries no burden,” Mao had noted, “and the most beautiful characters can be written on it, the most beautiful pictures painted.”3
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 upper-middle-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.”4 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 president 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.”5 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 emot
ionally 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 “undesirables.” 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 Vietcong Tet 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 defoliants and napalm.7 American lives were being lost in Vietnam, American honor was being soiled, and North Vietnam was winning the war.
A Problem From Hell Page 13
