A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  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 administration. 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.8 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 expanded 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.9

  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 of America—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.10 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.”11

  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 with Vietnam. U.S. officials believed Lon 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 Mam 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 anti-Communist. 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.13 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.”14

  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.15 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 soldiers, 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.

  U.S. interest in Cambodia during the civil war was completely derivative of U.S. designs on Vietnam. So when U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam in January 1973, the bombing of Cambodia became harder to justify. In August 1973 Congress finally stepped in to ban the air campaign. President Nixon was furious. He blamed Congress for weakening regional security and “raising doubts in the mind of both friends and adversaries” about U.S. “resolve.” All told, between March 1969 and August 1973, U.S. planes dropped 540,000 tons of bombs onto the Cambodian countryside.16 The United States continued to supply military and financial assistance to Lon Nol, warning that a “bloodbath” would ensue if the KR were allowed to triumph.

  The U.S. B-52 raids killed tens of thousands of civilians.17 Villagers who happened to be away from home returned to find nothing but dust and mud mixed with seared and bloody body parts. Lon Nol’s ground forces used massive heavy artillery barrages to pacify areas or villages where some enemy activity was suspected. By 1973, inflation in Cambodia topped 275 percent, and 40 percent of roads and one-third of all bridges had been rendered unusable.18 With the local economy dysfunctional, U.S. aid came to count for 95 percent of all of Lon Nol’s income.

  The U.S. bombing did little to weaken the Vietnamese or the Cambodian Communists. Instead, it probably had the opposite effect. Cambodians who resented America’s demolition derby were captive both to the promise of peace and the anti-Americanism of the Khmer Rouge. British journalist William Shawcross and others have argued that the Khmer Rouge ranks swelled primarily because of the U.S. intervention. Chhit Do, a Khmer Rouge leader from northern Cambodia who later defected, described the effect of U.S. bombing:

  Every time after there had been bombing, they would take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see how the earth had been gouged out and scorched. . . . The ordinary people . . . sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came. . . . Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told. . . . That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over. . . . It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on cooperating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer R
ouge, sending their children off to go with them.19

  Prince Sirik Matak, once a Lon Nol ally, warned U.S. officials not to back the unpopular Lon Nol regime. “If the United States continues to support such a regime,” he warned, “you help the Communists.”20 American intervention in Cambodia did tremendous damage in its own right, but it also indirectly helped give rise to a monstrous regime.

  The Unknowable Unknown

  Before it begins, genocide is not easy to wrap one’s mind around. A genocidal regime’s intent to destroy a group is so hideous and the scale of its atrocities so enormous that outsiders who know enough to forecast brutality can rarely bring themselves to imagine genocide. This was true of many of the diplomats, journalists, and European Jews who observed Hitler throughout the 1930s, and it was certainly true of diplomats, journalists, and Cambodians who speculated about the Khmer Rouge before they seized power. The omens of imminent, mass violence were omnipresent but largely dismissed.

  Before the fall of Phnom Penh in April 1975, Cambodia’s Communists were well enough known to cause some Americans alarm. In June 1973 Kenneth Quinn, a thirty-two-year-old U.S. foreign service officer, was introduced to the Khmer Rouge quite by accident. For six years, he had worked in Vietnam as an American provincial adviser, and he had spent his last two years posted in Chou Doc, the Vietnamese province bordering Cambodia on the Mekong River. One day, Quinn hiked up a mountain outside Chou Doc that allowed him to survey the terrain for 10 miles around. In scanning the Cambodian horizon, he encountered a scene that both stunned and chilled him. “The villages in Cambodia are clustered in circles,” Quinn recalls. “When I looked out, I saw that every one of these clusters was in flames and there was black smoke rising from each one. I didn’t know what was going on. All I knew was that as far as the eye could see, every single village in Cambodia was on fire.”

  Confused, Quinn hand-wrote a description of the scene, stuffed it into an envelope, and put it on the plane that flew to the nearest U.S. consular headquarters, where it was typed up and sent back to the United States as a spot report. He also set out to learn more about Cambodia’s internal divisions. In the subsequent weeks he interviewed dozens of Cambodian refugees who had fled to Vietnam, including a former KR official. The refugees described such brutality and the visual image of the burning horizon was so memorable that Quinn had what he calls a “eureka moment.” He concluded that although the Khmer Rouge may have been well-behaved “boy scout revolutionaries” when they began their military campaign in 1970, in June 1973 they had launched a far more radical program designed to communalize the entire Cambodian society overnight. The KR were deporting people from their ancestral homes to new communes and were burning the old villages to enforce the policy.

  In February 1974 he sent to Washington a forty-five-page classified report, “The Khmer Krahom [Rouge] Program to Create a Communist Society in Southern Cambodia.” Quinn wrote: “The Khmer Krahom’s programs have much in common with those of totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, particularly regarding efforts to psychologically reconstruct individual members of society.” He described KR attacks on religion and on parental and monastic authority as well as the widespread use of terror. “Usually people are arrested and simply never show up again, or are given six months in jail and then die there,” he reported. The “crimes” that “merited” this treatment were fleeing KR territory and questioning KR policies.21 Today Quinn’s voice still betrays shock at the bloodiness of the KR approach to social transformation: “They were forcing everybody to leave their homes and build new collectivized living communities. They were setting fires to everything the people owned so they would have nothing to go back to. They were separating children from parents, defrocking monks, killing those who disobeyed and creating an irrevocable living arrangement.”

  Quinn’s reporting stood out from that of his State Department colleagues because at that time U.S. government officials rarely interviewed refugees. Instead they relied almost exclusively on official, government-to-government sources. But Quinn also urged his superiors to begin distinguishing between Communists in Cambodia and those in Vietnam. Vietnam had certainly supplied the KR with weapons, military advisers, and direct combat and logistical help in the past, but the two groups had begun to feud. Quinn sent detailed accounts of the KR’s purge of Vietnamese civilians from Cambodia and their disruption of Vietnamese supply lines. Quinn’s analysis was at complete odds with the prevailing view in Washington, which held that the Khmer Rouge were simply an extension of the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. Quinn’s reports were never heeded. Quinn recalls his rude awakening:

  It was of course disappointing to me. I was young and didn’t know how government worked. I thought I would write this huge report and everybody would read it, but it was just another piece of paper. When I got back to Washington, people were still analyzing Cambodia in the old way, as if it were run by Hanoi. People would hear me out, and then just say, “Yeah, but . . . .”

  Although the American press, too, occasionally mentioned “infighting” among the different Communist “factions,” the myth of monolithic communism died hard. U.S. involvement in Cambodia was justifiable because the various Communist forces were joined in revolution. The KR rebels had shrouded their leadership in a thick cloak of mystery, and Quinn’s hilltop survey was not going to sway Americans who assumed all Communists were in cahoots.

  But others were beginning to stop lumping the two neighbors together. Elizabeth Becker became a “stringer” for the Washington Post in 1972. She was twenty-five when she arrived, and with her short blond hair, petite frame, and unending inquisitiveness, she might have been mistaken for a teenager. Most of the eager young correspondents had flocked to neighboring Vietnam to make their professional fortunes, but Becker had chosen to cover Cambodia, the sideshow. Permanently based in Phnom Penh, she did not depart for mini-sabbaticals or alternate assignments. Unlike her more senior, established colleagues, she lived among the Cambodian people and was thus better positioned to pick up stray gossip.

  By the time Becker arrived in Cambodia, only 25,000 U.S. troops were left in Vietnam, and U.S. correspondents from the major news outlets were heading home. Initially, Becker joined her other American colleagues in defining the rebels according to the regime they opposed (as “anti–Lon Nol insurgents”) or by the generic ideology they pursued (“Cambodian Communists” or “indigenous Communist rebels,” to distinguish them from the North Vietnamese rebels who were presumed to direct them). The reporters used shorthand references that gave no hint of the aims or the character of the revolutionary force.

  In early 1974, around the time Quinn was circulating his detailed report, Becker had begun to notice that Cambodians in Phnom Penh were becoming increasingly alarmed by what they learned about the mysterious rebels storming across Cambodia. The KR already occupied 85 percent of the country, and they seemed certain to take the rest. Becker saw that pedicab drivers, riverboat captains, and politicians alike were devouring the contents of a small book distinguishable by its cover, which depicted Cambodia shaped like a heart torn in two by the Mekong River. The book, Regrets of the Khmer Soul, was the published diary of Ith Sarin, a former Phnom Penh schoolteacher who had traveled through KR territory for nine months in 1972 and 1973, interviewing KR soldiers and peasants. Becker and Ishiyama Koki, a Japanese friend and colleague, paid to have Sarin’s diary translated. Becker thought it time to ask a question that no American reporter to date had posed. She wrote a story for the Post entitled “Who Are the Khmer Rouge?” and answered the question in a way that few afterward would believe.

  Becker’s long feature, to which the Post gave a full-page spread in March 1974, drew heavily on Cambodian government and Western diplomatic sources, as well as Ith Sarin’s diary. In her exposé, Becker quoted Sarin’s description of the KR’s appealing discipline and daunting severity. “I paid attention to the great help the Khmer Rouge gave to the people; building dikes, harvesting crops, bui
lding houses and digging bunkers,” Sarin noted. “I also saw them force all people to wear black clothes, forbid idle chatter and severely punish any violations of their orders.”22

  Becker also quoted Cambodians who had defected from KR zones to the dwindling patch of territory controlled by the government. Becker’s article was the first to mention Pol Pot, who was then still known by his given name of Saloth Sar. It was the first to note that relations between the KR and the Vietnamese Communists were strained. And it was the first to describe the cruelty of KR rule.

  But if Becker depicted life under the KR as spartan, she did not depict it as savage. And if she described their rule as clinically disciplined, they did not come across as criminally disposed. In places Becker herself seemed taken with the egalitarian premises of the organization, which attracted Cambodians and foreigners alike. When the disreputable Lon Nol government captured KR women soldiers, Becker wrote, the government generals were appalled by the women’s self-possession. Becker quoted one diplomat as saying, “They complained of the audacity of these virgins who had the nerve to look a man straight in the eye and who didn’t shuffle their feet demurely like good women.” Becker did not suggest that life under KR rule would be fun. But she also did not imply that life would not be permitted.23