A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  Becker’s description proved too bold for most American Cambodia observers. Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times faulted her for running a story without ever having toured KR territory. Since it was the KR that denied access, she said she could not ignore the horror stories simply because she could not see for herself. She told Schanberg, “We have to publish what we can find out.” Back in the United States, she was severely criticized by both the right and left. U.S. government officials said she had been duped into believing the KR were not Vietnamese puppets, whereas leftist intellectuals chided her for falling for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) warnings of an imminent KR-induced bloodbath. Much more serious than any of these criticisms was another consequence of the research: Her close friend and colleague Ishiyama Koki followed up his story on Sarin’s diary by attempting to become the first journalist to visit the KR side. “It was strange,” Becker recalls. “The sum result of my learning more about the Khmer Rouge was that I knew I never wanted to see these guys up close. The sum result for Koki was that he wanted to meet them and learn more.” Koki vanished behind KR lines, as did another of Becker’s Japanese colleagues shortly thereafter.

  For the remainder of 1974 and into 1975, journalists attempted to shed light upon the KR leadership, but Pol Pot and his leading associates, Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary, operated behind the scenes in complete isolation. With the KR resolutely unknowable, their mystery received almost as much attention as the misery they inflicted upon Cambodians. Even Lon Nol’s government had no idea with whom it was dealing. In April 1974, when the Khmer Rouge’s Khieu Samphan visited New York, Becker’s reports focused not on what Samphan had to say at the United Nations but on whether he was in fact Samphan, who was rumored to have been executed by Prince Sihanouk. Becker wrote: “Some Cambodians say he is too fat in the photos, his voice is too high, and that he gave only one speech in French in Pyongyang, which they find suspicious since he holds a doctorate in economics from Paris.”24 The sternly secretive Khmer Rouge bewildered even the most informed Cambodia observers.

  The presence of the soothing Sihanouk at the head of the KR front also continued to throw people off. As one Western diplomat put it, “They know it is Sihanouk’s army out there and they think once that army gets inside everything will be all milk and honey—or rice and dried fish if you will—again.”25 In 1974 Sihanouk sent several Democrats in the U.S. Congress a letter in which he described rumors of an imminent Khmer Rouge massacre of Lon Nol and his supporters as “absurd.” Sihanouk assured the legislators that the KR front would not establish a socialist republic upon taking power, “but a Swedish type of kingdom.”26 His was the public face of the coalition, but it was difficult to judge whether the public face had influence over the private soul of the movement.

  However worrying the rumors that swirled before the KR victory, few Cambodia watchers grasped what lay ahead before it was too late.

  Wishful Thinking

  As foreigners collected their impressions of the Khmer Rouge, they deferred, as foreigners do, to the instincts of their local friends and colleagues. If anybody had the grounds to anticipate systematic brutality, it seems logical that it would be those most immediately endangered. Yet those with the most at stake are in fact often the least prone to recognize their peril. The Cambodian people were frightened by the reports of atrocities in the KR-occupied countryside, but they retained resilient hope.

  François Ponchaud was a French Jesuit priest who spoke Khmer and lived among the Cambodians. He heard the chilling local gossip that preceded the KR’s capture of Phnom Penh. “They kill any soldiers they capture, and their families too,” Cambodians said. “They take people away to the forest,” they warned. But in the mental duel that was fought in each and every Cambodian’s mind, it was the concrete features of a horrifying, immediate war that won out over the more abstract fear of the unknown. The toll of the civil war on Cambodia’s civilians had been immense. Some 1 million Cambodians had been killed.27 Both sides got into the habit of taking no prisoners in combat, unless they planned to torture them to extract military intelligence. Cannibalism was widespread, as soldiers were told that eating the livers of captured enemies would confer the power of the vanquished upon the victor. The country’s rice crop had been obliterated. More than 3 million Cambodians had been displaced, causing the population of the capital to swell from 600,000 to over 2 million by 1975. The daily privations were such that Cambodians naturally preferred the idea of the KR to the reality of Lon Nol. Moreover, most assumed that the KR excesses were the product of the heat of battle, and not the result of ideology or innate callousness. The most ominous warnings about the KR were dismissed as Lon Nol propaganda. As Ponchaud later noted, “Khmers were Khmers, we thought; [the KR] would never go to such extremes with their own countrymen. Victory was within their grasp: what psychological advantage could they gain by taking wanton reprisals?”28

  The kinds of conversations that went on in Phnom Penh in the months preceding its fall resembled those that Lemkin had struck up as he toured eastern Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania as a refugee during World War II. Why would Hitler round up defenseless people? Why would he divert precious resources from the eastern front during World War II so that he could finish them off? Because the extermination of the Jews constituted its own victory, and it was the triumph for which he was sure he would be remembered. Similarly, Pol Pot would treat as discrete policy objectives the eradication of those associated with the old regime, as well as the educated, the Vietnamese, the Muslim Cham, the Buddhist monks, and other “bourgeois elements.” Violence was not an unfortunate byproduct of the revolution; it was an indispensable feature of it. But like so many targeted peoples before them, Cambodians were consoled by the presumption of reasonableness.

  As the KR rebels closed in on the capital, ordinary people dared to visualize the end of deprivation, bombs, and bullets. Once the civil war between Lon Nol and the KR ended and they were rid of foreign interference, they told themselves, they could return to their Buddhist, peaceable heritage. Since high politics was the province of the elite, most Cambodians assumed that the politicians would settle scores with the “traitorous clique” of seven senior officials in the Lon Nol government and everybody else would be left alone, free at last to resume normal life. “I have no ideas about politics,” My Vo, a twenty-nine-year-old Cambodian, was quoted as saying two weeks before Phnom Penh fell to the KR. “I am just a man in the middle. . . . If this side wins, I’ll be an office assistant. If the other wins, I’ll be an office assistant. I don’t care which side wins.”29 What mattered to Cambodians was that the fighting stop.

  Having known only conflict for five years, the Cambodians considered the KR promise of peace an appealing alternative. The Communists talked about justice to a people who had known nothing but injustice. They spoke of order to a people who knew only corruption. And they pledged a brighter future free of imperialists, whereas the Lon Nol government promised only more of the dim present. Having watched their leaders cozy up to the United States and the United States repay them by bombing and invading their country, Cambodians longed for freedom from outside interference.

  Major U.S. newspapers reflected the optimistic mood. Once the KR won the war, Schanberg wrote, “there would be no need for random acts of terror.”30 He, too, made rational calculations about what was “necessary.” He recalls:

  We knew the KR had done some very brutal things. Many reporters went missing and didn’t come back. But we all came to the conclusion—it wasn’t a conclusion, it was more like wishful thinking—that when the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh, they’d have no need to be so brutal. There’d be some executions—of those on the Khmer Rouge’s “Seven Traitors List”—but that was it. We were talking to people—talking to our Cambodian friends who want to believe the best. Nobody believes they will get slaughtered. It is unthinkable and you don’t wrap your mind around it.

  Schanberg, Times photographer Al Rockoff, and British reporter Jon
Swain were so incapable of “wrapping their minds around” what lay ahead that they chose to remain in Cambodia after the U.S. embassy had evacuated its citizens. They stayed to report on the “transition” to postwar peace.31 Hope and curiosity outweighed fear.

  A Bloodbath?

  Alarming reports of atrocities are typically met with skepticism. Usually, though, it is the refugees, journalists, and relief workers who report the abuses and U.S. government decision-makers who resist belief. Some cannot imagine. Others do not want to act or hope to defer acting and thus either downplay the reports or place them in a broader “context” that helps to subsume their horror. In Cambodia atrocity warnings were again minimized, but it was not officials in the U.S. government who dismissed them as fanciful.

  In early 1975 senior U.S. policymakers in the administration of Gerald Ford reiterated earlier warnings that a bloodbath would follow a KR triumph. In March 1975 President Ford himself predicted a “massacre” if Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge.32 A National Security Council fact sheet, which was distributed to Congress and the media the same month, even invoked the Holocaust. The briefing memo warned, “The Communists are waging a total war against Cambodia’s civilian population with a degree of systematic terror perhaps unparalleled since the Nazi period—a clear precursor of the blood bath and Stalinist dictatorship they intend to impose on the Cambodian people.”33 The U.S. ambassador in Phnom Penh, Dean, said he feared an “uncontrolled and uncontrollable solution” in which the KR would kill “the army, navy, air force, government and Buddhist monks.”34

  But few trusted the warnings. The Nixon and Ford administrations had cried wolf one time too many in Southeast Asia. In addition, because the KR were so secretive, America’s warnings were by definition speculative, based mainly on rumors and secondhand accounts. To the extent that the apocalyptic warnings of U.S. government officials were sincere, many Americans believed they stemmed from the Ford administration’s anti-Communist paranoia or its desire to get congressional backing for an $82 million aid package for the Lon Nol regime. They did not believe that the administration had any tangible evidence that the Communists were murdering their own people. In the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam, Americans doubted whether any truth existed in politics.

  On April 13, 1975, on the eve of the fall of Phnom Penh, Schanberg published a dispatch titled “Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life.” “It is difficult to imagine,” he wrote, how the lives of ordinary Cambodians could be “anything but better with the Americans gone.”35

  Many members of Congress agreed. U.S. legislators felt lied to and burned by their previous credulity. To warn of a new bloodbath was no excuse to continue the bloody civil war. As Bella Abzug (D.–N.Y.), who had just returned from Cambodia, told a House hearing:

  It is argued that we must give military aid because if we do not there will be a bloodbath. One thing we did discover, there is no greater bloodbath than that which is taking place presently and can only take place with our military assistance. . . . Suppose we were asked to address either 75,000 or 100,000 of those Cambodians who may very well lose their lives or be maimed by our military assistance for the next 3-month period . . . and they said to you, “Why do I have to die?” . . . or “Why should my body be mangled?”—What would you tell them? That we are doing it in order to avoid a bloodbath?36

  Abzug suggested that if the United States would only change its policy, it could likely work with the Khmer Rouge and “arrange for an orderly transfer of power.”37 Senator George McGovern (D.–S. Dak.), a leader of the antiwar movement, trusted nothing the U.S. government said about the Cambodian Communists. He expected the KR to form a government “run by some of the best-educated, most able intellectuals in Cambodia.”38 The editorial pages of the major newspapers and the congressional opposition were united in the view, in the words of a Washington Post editorial, that “the threatened ‘bloodbath’ is less ominous than a continuation of the current bloodletting.”39 Western journalists in Phnom Penh sang a song to the tune of “She Was Poor but She Was Honest”:

  Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath

  When the Khmer Rouge come to town?

  Aye, there’ll be a dreadful bloodbath

  When the Khmer Rouge come to town.

  Becker, the young Post reporter who had offered one of the earliest depictions of the Khmer Rouge, was pessimistic. She departed Cambodia ahead of the KR capture of Phnom Penh, as she did not want to be around for what she knew would come next. Besides fearing the worst for Cambodians and her colleagues who had disappeared, Becker also sensed the impossibility of generating outside interest in the story. This was a region whose problems the world was anxious to put behind it. She predicted that she would be unable to cover the ensuing horrors, and the outside world would do nothing to stop them. She was right on both counts.

  Recognition

  From Behind a Blindfold

  Although most foreigners hoped for the best in advance of the fall of Phnom Penh, most of those with passports from non-Communist countries did not remain to test the new regime. Nearly all American and European journalists had left Phnom Penh by early April 1975. Twenty-six reporters had already gone missing.40 Most of the others had come to agree with Becker that something extremely ugly lay ahead. The U.S. embassy kept its evacuation plans secret until the morning that U.S. Marines secured a helicopter landing area in the outskirts of the capital. On April 12, in Operation Eagle Pull, diplomatic staff and most U.S. correspondents left aboard the U.S. helicopters. President Ford said that he had ordered the American departure with a “heavy heart.”

  Not all the signs from Phnom Penh were grim. Prince Sihanouk, the titular leader of the KR coalition, had sent mixed signals all along. On the one hand, he had spoken confidently of the KR’s intention to establish a democratic state. On the other hand, he had cautioned that the KR would have little use for him: “They’ll spit me out like a cherry pit,” he once said.41 But in the immediate aftermath of the KR triumph, Sihanouk was less interested in prophesying than in gloating. “We did what they said we could never do,” he boasted. “We defeated the Americans.”42 The day after the harrowing evacuation of Phnom Penh began, bewildered Western reporters led their stories by again posing the question that the Post’s Becker had posed a full year before, “Who are the Khmer Rouge?”

  A few hundred brave, foolish, or unlucky foreigners stayed in Phnom Penh. On April 17 they heard the same unforgiving commands that jolted their Cambodian friends into flight. They did not believe KR claims that American B-52s were going to bomb the town, but they attempted to offer rational explanations for the exodus. The KR would be unable to feed the swollen population in the capital, and dispersal to the countryside would move the people closer to food sources. The dislocation would make it easier for the KR to distinguish allies of the old regime from ordinary Cambodians. Or maybe the KR leaders simply wanted their pick of housing in the capital. All assumed the evacuation would be temporary. Cambodians would surely return to their homes once the new Communist government felt secure.

  Forbidden to move around the city, the remaining foreigners huddled at the French embassy, awaiting KR clearance to leave.43 The best early intelligence on the nature of the new KR regime consisted of mental snapshots that these reporters, aid workers, and diplomats had gathered before they were confined at the embassy. Most had seen the fearsome KR cadres driving trembling Cambodians out of town, but they had not witnessed killings. “There were no massacres committed in front of us,” recalls Schanberg, who was very nearly executed, along with his colleagues Rockoff and Swain, while snooping around a hospital on the day of the KR victory. “We did see these people from another planet. You had the feeling that if you did something they didn’t like they would shoot you. But we had no awareness of what was to come.”

  On May 6 a final caravan of trucks carrying Schanberg and the last Western witnesses to KR rule left Cambodia. The evacuees peered out from behind their blindfolds o
n the stifling hot journey. The KR had been in charge less than three weeks, but the signs of what we would later understand to be the beginning of genocide were already apparent. All of Cambodia’s major towns had already been emptied of their inhabitants. The rice paddies, too, were deserted. The charred remains of cars lay gathered in heaps. Saffron-robed monks had been put to work in the fields. Decomposed bodies lay by the side of the road, shot or beaten to death. KR soldiers could be spotted with their heads bowed for their morning “thought sessions.”44 The overriding impression of those who drove through a country that had bustled with life just weeks before was that the Cambodian people had disappeared.

  Once the final convoy of foreigners had been safely evacuated, the departed journalists published stark front-page accounts. They acknowledged that the situation unfolding was far more dire than they had expected. In a cover story for the New York Times, Schanberg wrote: “Everyone—Cambodians and foreigners alike—looked ahead with hopeful relief to the collapse of the city. . . . All of us were wrong. . . . That view of the future of Cambodia—as a possibly flexible place even under Communism, where changes would not be extreme and ordinary folk would be left alone—turned out to be a myth.”45 Schanberg even quoted one unnamed Western official who had observed the merciless exodus and exclaimed, “They are crazy! This is pure and simple genocide. They will kill more people this way than if there had been hand-to-hand fighting in the city.”46 That same day the Washington Post carried an evacuation story that cited fears of “genocide by natural selection” in which “only the strong will survive the march.”47

  Although Schanberg and others were clearly spooked by their chilling final experiences in Cambodia, they still did not believe that American intelligence would prove right about much. In the same article in which Schanberg admitted he had underestimated the KR’s repressiveness, he noted that official U.S. predictions had been misleading. The U.S. government had said the Communists were poorly trained, Schanberg noted, but the journalists had encountered a well-disciplined, healthy, organized force. The intelligence community had forecast the killing of “as many as 20,000 high officials and intellectuals.” But Schanberg’s limited exposure to the KR left him convinced that violence on that scale would not transpire. He wrote: