A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  With so much confusion about the precise nature of the KR reign, apathy became justified by what journalist William Shawcross later called “propaganda, the fear of propaganda and the excuse of propaganda.”77 Those who believed refugees argued that the sameness of their accounts revealed a pattern of abuses across Cambodia. Yet for those who wanted to turn away or who were unsure of the utility of turning toward Cambodia, this very sameness offered proof of scripting.

  “This Is Not 1942”

  Many came around once they had personal contact with the traumatized refugees. Charles Twining was a thirty-three-year-old foreign service officer who had served in Vietnam and—to the bemusement of his State Department colleagues—had spent 1974 diligently learning the Khmer language. In June 1975 he was posted to the U.S. embassy in Bangkok, and within a week of his arrival his new-found language skill proved all too useful. He was dispatched to the Thai-Cambodian border to interview refugees who were arriving exhausted, emaciated, and petrified. Twining initially could not bring himself to trust the stories he heard. “The refugees were telling tales that you could only describe as unbelievable,” he remembers. “I kept saying to myself, ‘This can’t be possible in this day and age. This is not 1942. This is 1975.’ I really thought that those days, those acts, were behind us.”78 After his first trip Twining did not even file a report because he found the refugees’ recollections literally “inconceivable” and felt he would be laughed at back in Washington. But every time he took the four-hour car journey to the border, he found it harder to deny the reality of the atrocities. The Cambodians had heard the howls of their starving infants. They had watched KR cadres use plastic bags to suffocate Buddhist monks. They had seen their loved ones murdered by teenage warriors who mechanically delivered the blow of a hoe to the back of the neck.

  Twining pointed to a small milk can and asked the refugees to indicate the amount of rice the Khmer Rouge fed them each day. They said that they had been given rice that would have filled about half of this palm-sized implement. When Twining argued that they would not have been able to live on such portions, they agreed but told him that anybody who complained was dragged away to what the KR called Angkar Loeu. Angkar was the nameless and faceless “organization on high,” which prided itself on never erring and on having “as many eyes as a pineapple.”79 At first most Cambodians believed that those who disappeared were being taken to Angkar for reeducation or extra training and study. Despite the agony of daily life and the rumors of daily death, they had again hoped for the best. Often the truth became clear only when they stumbled upon a huge pile of bones in the forest. After encountering these concrete artifacts of evil, most accepted that a summons by Angkar meant certain death, a realization that was enough to cause only some to risk flight.

  One refugee, Seath K. Teng, was only four years old when she was separated from her family. She later remembered fierce hunger pain as the KR forced four children to share one rice porridge bowl. “Whoever could eat the fastest got more to eat,” she recalled:

  We worked seven days a week without a break. The only time we got off work was to see someone get killed, which served as an example for us. . . . In the center of the meeting place was one woman who had both of her hands tied behind her. She was pregnant and her stomach bulged out. Before her stood a little boy who was about six years old and holding an ax. In his shrill voice he yelled for us to look at what he was going to do. He said that if we didn’t look, we would be the next to be killed. I guess we all looked, because the woman was the only one killed that day. The little boy was like a demon from hell. His eyes were red and he didn’t look human at all. He used the back of his ax and slammed it hard on the poor woman’s body until she dropped to the ground. He kept beating her until he was too tired to continue.80

  By August 1975 Twining had heard enough of these stories to become a convert:

  I remember there was one moment. I was in a place in Thailand called Chantha Buri, a province that borders the Cambodian town of Pailin. I was sitting in this little dark house on the border, and suddenly twenty or thirty Cambodians appeared like ghosts out of the forest. They told me stories of such hardship and horror that it just hit me. Somebody afterwards said to me, “you know they rehearsed their stories.” But these Cambodians had just arrived from weeks on the road. They were lean, tanned. They had been wearing the same clothes for days. They were smelly, if I dare say it. And the one thing I knew was that they were genuine. Genuine. From that point on, I believed. . . .

  After he was jolted into belief by the smell of the distraught survivors, Twining filtered future testimony through the prism of the Holocaust. “My mind wanted, needed, some way of framing the thing,” he recalls, “and the Holocaust was the closest thing I had. This sounded to me like extermination—you wipe out a whole class of people, anyone with glasses, anyone with a high school education, anyone who is Buddhist. I mean, the link was natural.” Although there were similarities between the Nazis and the KR, he and others at the border gradually assembled an understanding of the specifics of KR brutality. They learned that in the new Cambodia freedom had become undesirable, dissent intolerable, and joy invisible. All facets of life had been mandated by Angkar, which made the rules. By the end of 1975, those who had once known enough to fear but had hoped enough to deny had come to accept the contours of the hell that had befallen Cambodia.

  Refugees told them:

  •Citizens could not move. Travel passes were required even to cross town. Cities were evacuated at gunpoint.

  •They could not feed themselves. In most areas the state supplied a tin or less of rice each day.

  •They could not learn what they chose. Only KR tracts were permitted. Libraries were ravaged. And speaking foreign languages signaled “contamination” and earned many who dared to do so a death sentence.

  •They could not reminisce. Memories of the past life were banned. Families were separated. Children were “reeducated” and induced to inform on parents who might be attempting to mask their “bourgeois” pasts. “Cambodia,” a colonial term, was replaced by “Democratic Kampuchea.”

  •They could not flirt. Only Angkar could authorize sexual relationships. The pairings for weddings were announced en masse at the commune assemblies.

  •They could not pray. Chapels and temples were pillaged. Devout Muslims were often forced to eat pork. Buddhist monks were defrocked, their pagodas converted into grain silos.

  •They could not own private property. All money and property were abolished. The national bank was blown up. Radios, telephones, televisions, cars, and books gathered in the central squares were burned.

  •And they could not make contact with the outside world. Foreign embassies were closed; telephone, telegraph, and mail service suspended.

  Work was prized to a deadly extent. Cambodians were sent to the countryside, where an average day involved planting from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m., 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., and then again from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Communist cadres transported annual harvests to central storage sites but refused to distribute the fruits of the harvests to those who had done the reaping. Health was superfluous to the national project, and starvation and disease quickly engulfed the country. Upon taking power, the Khmer Rouge terminated almost all foreign trade and rejected offers of humanitarian aid.

  “Enemies” were eliminated. Pol Pot saw two sets of enemies—the external and the internal. External enemies opposed KR-style socialism; they included “imperialists” and “fascists” like the United States as well as “revisionists” and “hegemonists” like the Soviet Union and Vietnam. Internal enemies were those deemed disloyal.81 Early on the Khmer Rouge had instructed all military and civilian officials from the Lon Nol regime to gather at central meeting posts and had murdered them without exception. Another child, Savuth Penn, who was eleven years old when the evacuation was ordered, recalled:

  They shipped my father and the rest of the military officers to a remote area northwest of the city . . . then they
mass executed them, without any blindfolds, with machine guns, rifles, and grenades. . . . My father was buried underneath all the dead bodies. Fortunately, only one bullet went through his arm and two bullets stuck in his skull. The bullets that stuck in his skull lost momentum after passing through the other bodies. My father stayed motionless underneath the dead bodies until dark, then he tried to walk to his hometown during the night. . . . The Khmer Rouge threatened that if anyone was hiding the enemy, the whole family would be executed. My father’s relatives were very nervous. They tried to find a solution for my family. They discussed either poisoning my father, hiding him underground, or giving us an ox cart to try to get to Thailand. . . . The final solution was reached by my father’s brother-in-law. He informed the Khmer Rouge soldiers where my father was. . . . A couple of soldiers climbed up with their flashlights and found him hiding in the corner of our cabin. . . . The soldiers then placed my father in the middle of the rice field, pointed flashlights, and shot him.82

  This was the kind of killing that journalists and U.S. embassy officials in Phnom Penh had expected—political revenge against those the Khmer Rouge called the traitors. What was unexpected was the single-mindedness with which the regime turned upon ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese, Muslim Chams, and Buddhist monks, grouping them all traitors. Xenophobia was not new in Cambodia; the Vietnamese, Chinese, and (non-Khmer) Cham had long been discriminated against. But it was Pol Pot who set out to destroy these groups entirely. Buddhist monks were an unexpected target, as Buddhism had been the official state religion and the “soul” of Cambodia. Yet the KR branded it “reactionary.” The revolutionaries prohibited all religious practice, burned monks’ libraries, and destroyed temples, turning some into prisons and killing sites. Monks who refused to disrobe were executed.

  More stunning still in its breadth, as Twining had gathered at the border, the Khmer Rouge were wiping out “class enemies,” which meant all “intellectuals,” or those who had completed seventh grade. Paranoid about the trustworthiness of even the devout radicals, the KR also began targeting their own supporters, killing anybody suspected of even momentary disloyalty. Given the misery in which Cambodians were living at the time, this covered almost everyone. As a witness against Pol Pot later testified, Brother Number One (as Pol Pot was known) saw “enemies surrounding, enemies in front, enemies behind, enemies to the north, enemies to the south, enemies to the west, enemies to the east, enemies in all eight directions, enemies coming from all nine directions, closing in, leaving no space for breath.”83 Citizens lived in daily fear of chap teuv, or what people in Latin America call being “disappeared.” Bullets were too precious and had to be spared; the handles of farming implements were preferred.

  The key ideological premise that lay behind the KR revolution was that “to keep you is no gain; to kill you is no loss.”84 Liberal societies preach a commitment to individual liberty embodied in the mantra, “Better ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted.” Khmer Rouge revolutionary society was predicated on the irrelevance of the individual. The KR even propagated the adage, “It is better to arrest ten people by mistake than to let one guilty person go free.”85 It was far more forgivable to kill ten innocent men than to leave one guilty man alive, even if he was “guilty” simply of being less than overjoyed by the terms of service to Angkar.

  Soon after the fall of Phnom Penh, Henry Kamm of the New York Times visited three refugee camps at the Thai border, none of which was in contact with the others. He wrote a long piece in July 1975, which the paper accompanied with an editorial that compared the Khmer Rouge practices to the “Soviet extermination of kulaks or . . . the Gulag Archipelago.”86 In February 1976 the Post’s David Greenway filed a front-page story describing the harsh conditions. “For Westerners to interpret what is going on is like the proverb of the blind men trying to describe an elephant,” Greenway wrote. “Skepticism about atrocity stories is necessary especially when talking to refugees who tend to paint as black a picture as they can, but too many told the same stories in too much detail to doubt that, at least in some areas, reprisals occurred.”87 Collectively, although all were slow to believe and none gave the terror the attention it deserved, diplomats, nongovernmental workers, and journalists did gather ghastly accounts of death marches, starvation, and disease in 1975 and 1976. The media did not lead with these reports, and the politicians did not respond to them, but the stories did appear.

  The most detailed and eventually the most influential examination of KR brutality was prepared by the French priest François Ponchaud. Ponchaud, a Khmer speaker, had lived in Cambodia for ten years before he was evacuated from the French embassy in early May 1975. He debriefed refugees at the Thai border and then later in Paris, and he translated Cambodian radio reports. In February 1976, less than a year after the Khmer Rouge seized power, Le Monde published his findings, which said some 800,000 had been killed since April 1975.88 For Elizabeth Becker, then a metro reporter in Washington, this was enough. “As soon as his stories came out, I believed,” she recalls. “You have to know your shepherds. In Cambodia the French clerics had lived the Khmer life, not the foreigners’ life. It took Ponchaud to wake the world up.” Soon thereafter, a former KR official came forward in Paris claiming to have helped execute some 5,000 people by pickax. He estimated that 600,000 had already been killed.89 In April 1976, a year into the Khmer Rouge reign, Time ran a story, soon followed by other accounts, that included graphic drawings of the executions and described Cambodia as the “Indochinese Gulag Archipelago.” “A year after the takeover, Cambodia is still cocooned in silence—a silence, it is becoming increasingly clear, of the grave,” Time wrote. “There is now little doubt that the Cambodian government is one of the most brutal, backward, and xenophobic regimes in the world.”90

  Even when the diplomats, journalists, and relief workers no longer assumed the Cambodians were exaggerating, it was another step entirely for them to move along the continuum toward understanding. One need only recall the exchange during World War II between Polish witness Jan Karski and U.S. Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter in which Frankfurter told the eyewitness, “I do not mean that you are lying. I simply said I cannot believe you.” Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has spoken of the difference between “information” and “knowledge.” In Cambodia observers had initially resisted certifying the refugee accounts even as “information.” The words were available, describing death marches, roadside executions, and the murder of the rich, the intellectuals, and even office assistants. But the first photos were not smuggled out of Cambodia until April 1977, and they depicted harsh, forced labor conditions but not the systematic elimination of whole ethnic groups and classes.91 With the country sealed tight, statesmen and citizens could take shelter in the fog of plausible deniability. But even once they accepted the information, the moral implications of that information did not really sink in. For those back in Washington, 10,000 miles from the refugee camps at the Thai border, it would take years to promote the raw, unconfirmed data to the status of knowledge.

  Response

  Options Ignored; Futility, Perversity, Jeopardy

  Those who argued that the number of Cambodians killed was in the hundreds of thousands or those who tried to generate press coverage of the horrors did so assuming that establishing the facts would empower the United States and other Western governments to act. Normally, in a time of genocide, op-ed writers, policymakers, and reporters root for a distinct outcome or urge a specific U.S. military, economic, legal, humanitarian, or diplomatic response. Implicit indeed in many cables and news articles, and explicit in most editorials, is an underlying message, a sort of “if I were czar, I would do X or Y.” But in the first three years of KR rule, even the Americans most concerned about Cambodia—Twining, Quinn, and Becker among them—internalized the constraints of the day and the system. They knew that drawing attention to the slaughter in Cambodia would have reminded America of its past sins, reopened wounds that had not
yet healed at home, and invited questions about what the United States planned to do to curb the terror. They were neither surprised nor agitated by U.S. apathy. They accepted U.S. noninvolvement as an established background condition. Once U.S. troops had withdrawn from Vietnam in 1973, Americans deemed all of Southeast Asia unspeakable, unwatchable, and from a policy perspective, unfixable. “There could have been two genocides in Cambodia and nobody would have cared,” remembers Morton Abramowitz, who at the time was an Asia specialist at the Pentagon and in 1978 became U.S. ambassador to Thailand. During the Khmer Rouge period, he remembers, “people just wanted to forget about the place. They wanted it off the radar.”

  From the mountains of Vietnam, foreign service officer Ken Quinn had spotted early indicators of the Khmer Rouge’s brutality back in 1974 and had since been rotated back to the United States, where he served as the Indochina analyst at the National Security Council. Quinn remembers the impossibility of generating constructive ideas after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam:

  The country was in a state of shock. There was a great sense that we were powerless. We were out. We were done. We had left. It was painful, but it was over. . . . Vietnam had been such an emotional, wrenching, painful experience that there was just a huge national relief and a sense the country needed to be put back together. Our country.

  Those who retained curiosity about the region continued to do so with the aim, in military parlance, of “fighting the last war.” Most observers remained unable or unwilling to look at events as they transpired or to see Cambodia as anything other than a stepchild of Vietnam. They interpreted events on the ground accordingly. As Becker later wrote: