A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  Too many people in and out of government had staked their reputations, their careers, and their own self-esteem on the positions they took during the [Vietnam] war. Each side wanted the postwar era to shore up those old positions and prove them correct. News was [seen] . . . as potential ammunition against old American opponents, as proof of America’s guilt or honor.92

  Certainly, it is impossible to overstate the importance of the historical context in dictating America’s response to atrocities in Cambodia. Neither President Ford nor President Carter, who took office in January 1977, was going to consider sending U.S. troops back to Southeast Asia. But it is still striking that so many Americans concluded that nothing at all could be done. Even the “soft” response options that were available to the United States were passed up.

  The United States barely denounced the massacres. The Ford administration had initially done so, but official U.S. reprimands proved short-lived, as Washington tuned out. Twining, the designated Cambodia watcher at the U.S. embassy in Bangkok, continued collecting and passing along hefty and chilling refugee accounts.93 But these reports led only to a lowkey U.S. government request to Amnesty International to begin investigations. A confidential June 8, 1976, policy paper on human rights from the State Department to embassy posts contained the following press guidance:

  We share the concern about reported conditions in Cambodia. . . . We are prepared to support any effective action that might be taken to inquire further into the question of violations of human rights in Cambodia. . . . Reports of conditions in Cambodia are . . . difficult to verify. Information available to the [U.S. government] is not significantly different from that obtained by journalists and comes primarily from refugees. Nevertheless, these reports are too numerous to ignore and sufficient information certainly exists for further inquiry by appropriate international or private humanitarian organizations.

  . . .We have already urged Amnesty International to investigate the situation in Cambodia but have avoided any public actions which would give the appearance of leading a campaign against Cambodia or would lend credence to Cambodian allegations that we are behind reports of their transgressions.94

  Apart from casual appeals for “further inquiry,” the United States did not itself launch its own determined inquiry or act upon the facts already acquired.

  U.S. officials could have publicly branded Pol Pot’s killings as genocide. But they did not do so. Indeed, I have not found a U.S. official who remembers even reading the genocide convention to see if events in Cambodia met its requirements. Because the treaty excluded political groups and so many of the KR murders were committed against perceived political enemies, it was actually a harder fit than one would expect. But even though many killings met the law’s terms, no faction emerged inside the Carter administration arguing for any change in U.S. policy toward Cambodia. Thus, it is not surprising that nobody thought to ask the State Department legal adviser’s office to issue a legal finding of genocide. Such a finding would have been moot in the face of the “reality” of U.S. nonengagement. And since the United States was not a party to the convention, a genocide proclamation would have created no legal obligation to act.

  The United States could have urged its allies to file genocide charges at the International Court of Justice. The court could not weigh in on individual criminal guilt and had no enforcement powers to ensure its rulings were heeded. But if it had determined that genocide was under way, the ICJ could have issued a declaratory judgment on Cambodia’s responsibility and demanded that provisional measures be taken. This would have signaled to Cambodians that at least one institution was prepared to judge the KR slaughter.

  Proxmire hoped that the United States might turn to the ICJ for a genocide finding, but he knew U.S. ratification of the genocide convention had to come first. By the beginning of 1977, it had been a decade since he had started delivering his daily speech urging ratification. In ten years he had stood up 1,761 times, drawing frequently upon the “textbook case of genocide” being committed by the Khmer Rouge.95 In 1977 and 1978 Proxmire ratcheted up his attention to the KR. “The destruction of 2 million Cambodians is the numerical equivalent of murdering every man, woman, and child in the entire state of Colorado,” he declared. “Every human being in Boston, Massachusetts. Every person in Washington, DC—and that includes you and me.” The numbers of victims was still disputed, but he knew he would be better off estimating than waiting. “As we leave the Senate tonight, the Khmer Rouge will be awakening for another bloody day’s business,” he said. “The noose of genocide will tighten with a jerk around the necks of another 1,577 Cambodian peasants.”96 Even those countries that had ratified the convention deferred to diplomatic niceties among states; other countries resisted and refused to challenge a fellow member of the club of nations in court. Cambodia, which itself had ratified the genocide treaty in 1951, never had to answer to genocide charges.

  Apart from bilaterally denouncing the KR for its terror or attempting to get an ally to file a genocide case in the World Court, the United States might have condemned the crime in the UN General Assembly, the Security Council, or one of the multiple committees at the UN that had sprung up since Lemkin’s day. Neither the United States nor its European allies did this. Israel became the first country to raise the issue of Cambodia at the United Nations. Representative Chaim Herzog, knowing that much of the violence was Khmer on Khmer, warned of “auto-genocide.”97 And finally, in March 1978, Britain’s UN representative responded to popular pressure from the main churches of England by raising the subject before the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR). He called for the appointment of a special human rights rapporteur to investigate.98 The Khmer Rouge dismissed the Human Rights Commission as an imperialist, partisan body of which it would make “mincemeat.”99 And true to form, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Syria teamed up to block even this rhetorical route, delaying consideration of Cambodia’s human rights record for another full year. By three years into the genocide, no official UN body had condemned the slaughter.

  Economist Albert Hirschman observed that those who do not want to act cite the futility, perversity, and jeopardy of proposed measures. The United States and its allies defended their reticence on the grounds that speaking out or applying soft sanctions to such a reclusive regime would be futile. Normal diplomatic demarches, symbolic acts, and criticisms were unlikely to affect radical revolutionaries who were committing atrocity on this scale. In testimony on Capitol Hill, foreign service officer Twining noted, “I am not sure that the Cambodian leadership would care a hoot about what we . . . say.”100 Because the United States gave the KR regime no support, it could not suspend trade or military aid.

  Bilateral denunciations by the United States may well have had little effect on the Khmer Rouge’s internal practices. Unfortunately, because so few U.S. officials spoke out publicly against the genocide, we cannot know. But contrary to American claims, the Khmer Rouge were not completely oblivious to outside commentary. Isolated though they were, KR leaders still piped up to refute allegations made by foreign powers. When the British raised the issue of Cambodian human rights violations at the UN Commission in Geneva, the KR responded by claiming that British citizens enjoyed only the right to be slaves, thieves, prostitutes, or unemployed. In April 1978 the KR’s Ieng Sary submitted a letter to the UN, denouncing the “propaganda machine of the imperialists, the expansionists, annexationists” who charged them with mass killing. He made a logical argument about why the KR could never kill on the scale suggested: “There is no reason for the [KR] to reduce the population or to maintain it at its current level,” he wrote, “since today’s population of 8 million is well below the potential of the country, which needs more than 20 million.”101

  U.S. policymakers also cited the possibly perverse results of taking a more outspoken approach. Public rebukes would likely anger the Khmer Rouge, causing them to intensify their violence against innocents or withdraw even further into darkness. D
iplomats fell into the trap of believing (because they hoped) that the KR were on the verge of emerging from their isolation.102 It is of course possible that outside expressions of interest in the KR’s treatment of its citizens would have made the regime more barbarous and xenophobic, but it is hard to imagine how much worse the regime could have become. Often choosing a policy of isolation can deprive a concerned state of its only means of influencing a violent regime. But in this case the United States had nothing to risk losing by speaking the truth. A far steadier stream of condemnations could conceivably have convinced those educated KR officials who maintained covert radio links to the outside world to press for a more humane policy or even to revolt against Pol Pot and his clan.

  The United States might also have pressured China, the KR’s main backer, to use its considerable leverage to deter the KR from its murderousness. But the Carter administration was determined not to jeopardize its burgeoning relationships with either of the KR’s regional allies: Thailand and China. Thailand was anti-Communist, but it maintained civil relations with the Khmer Rouge because its top priority was containing Vietnam. And China, which viewed the Khmer Rouge as a natural and ideological ally, had occupied center-stage in U.S. foreign policy circles since Nixon’s 1972 trip to Beijing. The Chinese had long been supplying the KR with military advisers, light arms, and ammunition. In early 1978 Chinese military aid to the Khmer Rouge reportedly increased to include 100 light tanks, 200 antitank missiles, a number of long-range 122- and 130-millimeter guns, and more than a dozen fighter aircraft. Despite the gruesome reports of KR terror, the United States did not protest the transaction.103 In May 1977 President Carter called the U.S.-Chinese relationship “a central element of our global policy” and China a “key for global peace.”104 Although China was the state most likely able to affect KR behavior, the Carter administration was not about to risk normalization by carping about the KR’s human rights abuses.

  Analogy and Advocacy

  U.S. policy toward Cambodia was not contested within the executive branch. Nothing could be done, State Department and White House officials assumed, and virtually nothing was done. It took a handful of members of Congress to begin demanding that the United States take a more expansive view of the land of the possible. Stephen Solarz was a Democratic House member from New York who had won election in 1974 on an antiwar platform and had earlier helped block further U.S. funding to the Lon Nol regime. Unlike most of his colleagues, Solarz had not lost interest in the region with the cutoff of U.S. funds. In August 1975 he had traveled with a House delegation to Thailand, where he had taken a helicopter ride with the embassy’s Twining to Aranyaprathet. There, the man who would become known as the “Marco Polo” of Congress for all his foreign travel, heard tales that reminded him of the forced deportation of Jews in World War II. As a Jew and as a politician—his district contained more Holocaust survivors than any other in the country—he became incensed. “They were killing anyone who wore glasses,” Solarz remembers, “because if they wore glasses, it suggested they knew how to read, and if they knew how to read, it suggested they had been infected with the bourgeois virus. It was a Great Leap Forward that made the Great Leap Forward under Mao look like a tentative half-step.”

  In 1976, despite reports of nearly a million dead, no congressional hearings had been held specifically on human rights abuses in Cambodia. Solarz and a few other avid legislators had settled for including the grim press articles in the Congressional Record and occasionally condemning the KR in floor debates. Senator Claiborne Pell, who partnered with Proxmire in pushing the genocide convention and who would later do more than any other senator to try to punish Saddam Hussein for gassing Iraqi Kurds, took a parallel interest in Cambodia. On the floor of the Senate in 1976, he declared:

  [If estimates of 1 million killed are] true, approximately one-fifth of the Cambodian population has been annihilated—a record of barbarous butchery which is surpassed in recent history only by the Nazi atrocities against the Jews during World War II. . . . I am amazed that so little has been done to investigate and condemn what is happening in Cambodia. The UN Human Rights Commission has so far ignored the situation in that country.105

  By 1977, Solarz, Pell, and others had finally generated enough interest to stage hearings on Capitol Hill devoted exclusively to Cambodian atrocities. In one of those hearings, much of Solarz’s frustration over the U.S. policy of silence and the ongoing squabbles over numbers of dead burst forth. Indochina specialist Gareth Porter testified, again denouncing the “wild exaggeration and wholesale falsehood” of allegations of KR terror. Porter insisted that it was a “myth” that “one-to-two million Cambodians [had] been the victims of a regime led by genocidal maniacs.” Solarz exploded. “It is beyond belief to me that anyone could seriously argue that this hasn’t been going on,” he exclaimed.106 For the next year and a half, Solarz attempted to get the House to pass a resolution calling on President Carter to turn his attention to curbing the killings.

  Solarz was one of several Americans who, in drawing attention to the KR horrors, linked his advocacy to the Holocaust. Seated more than two decades later in a study lined with shelves filled with 123 books on the Holocaust and another fifty-two on Hitler and Nazi Germany, Solarz reflects, “The Holocaust is the key to the whole thing. It is the Rosetta stone. For me, the Holocaust was the central fact of the twentieth century and has had more of an influence on my view of the world and America’s role in it than anything else.”

  By the mid- and late-1970s, Hitler’s destruction of the Jews was at last becoming the subject of scholarly and public focus. The term “Holocaust” had not entered into popular usage until the late 1960s, but in 1970 two books analyzed the U.S. indifference to the Holocaust for the first time: Arthur Morse’s While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy and Henry Feingold’s Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration, 1939–1945. One of the most pivotal instruments for “popularizing” the Final Solution was the four-part, nine-and-a-half-hour television dramatization Holocaust, starring James Woods and Meryl Streep, which some 120 million viewers watched in 1978. The same year President Carter appointed a special commission on Holocaust remembrance and education and decided to build a monument to the horror on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

  By 1977, because it had become widely accepted that a bloodbath was indeed taking place in Cambodia, advocates of U.S. engagement tried to jar decisionmakers and ordinary citizens by likening Pol Pot’s atrocities to those of Hitler. Syndicated columnists Jack Anderson and Les Whitten published a total of fifteen opinion pieces on Cambodia, most of which invoked the Holocaust.107 On July 21, 1977, they wrote, “The uproar over human rights has ignored the world’s most brutal dictatorship. Adolf Hitler at his worst was not as oppressive as the Communist rulers of tiny Cambodia.”108 Several months later, Anderson and Whitten called the KR terror “the greatest atrocity since the Nazis herded Jews into the gas chambers.”109 When the Holocaust docudrama aired in 1978, Anderson noted that “another Holocaust story, every bit as stark as the recent TV saga” was ongoing. The Nazis had disguised their crimes with euphemisms such as “resettlement,” “removal,” and “special action,” Anderson wrote. So, too, the Khmer Rouge had introduced a sanitized language. “The Khmer word for ‘kill, assassinate, execute’ was never spoken when the annihilation policy was discussed,” he noted. “The Khmer term used was ‘baoh, caol,’ literally ‘sweep, throw out’ or ‘sweep, discard.’”110 The next day Anderson penned another column, entitled “Cambodia: A Modern-Day Holocaust,” in which he condemned President Carter for averting his gaze from the extermination of Cambodians.111

  Others chimed in, also adopting the analogy. The Economist described “brutality that would make Hitler cringe.”112 In an April 1978 New York Times editorial, “Silence is Guilt,” William Safire also referred to the Holocaust miniseries and asked why the world was doing nothing. “In terms of numbers of people killed,” Safire wrote, “this generation�
��s rival to Adolf Hitler is the leader of Communist Cambodia, Pol Pot.”113 Leo Cherne of the International Rescue Committee and Freedom House wrote in the Wall Street Journal on May 10, 1978, that “the ruthlessness in each country has come about in service to an ideal—of racial purity in Nazi Germany, of political purity in Democratic Kampuchea.” A May 1978 front-page New York Times story said that refugees in Thailand “recall concentration camp survivors in Europe of 1945.”

  As the months passed, Capitol Hill became more engaged. Senator Bob Dole (R.–Kans.) was moved by the story of a Cambodian refugee who had visited him. He compared the Cambodian crisis to “the death camps in Nazi Germany, and the excesses of Stalinist Russia.”114 Pleading as always for the ratification of the genocide convention and denouncing the KR, Proxmire noted the parallels with the destruction of the Jews: “This is no ordinary genocide. There are no concentration camps and gas chambers disguised as showers. This is genocide without technology.”115

  Donald Fraser (D.–Minn.), the Hill’s most vocal human rights advocate, chaired a House International Relations Subcommittee hearing in July 1977. Ken Quinn, who in 1977 was tapped as special assistant to the new assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs, Richard Holbrooke, told his boss, “This is a chance to go public with all we know.” Holbrooke and Twining appeared on Capitol Hill and ended the State Department’s two-year policy of silence. Holbrooke noted that “journalists and scholars guess that between half a million and 1.2 million have died since 1975.” U.S. intelligence indicated that “for every person executed several have died of disease, malnutrition, or other factors, which would have been avoidable if the Government itself had not followed . . . a policy which seeks to completely transform the society by the most Draconian measures possible.”116 Holbrooke concluded that “we should speak out,” even though, as he admitted, he was unsure “what the impact of our words” would be.117 This was the first time Twining had been publicly summoned to relay his graphic findings. The U.S. government had detailed knowledge of Pol Pot’s atrocities. A February 13, 1978, State Department cable reported plainly, “A renewed emphasis was placed on completely eliminating all vestiges of the former government and completing the executions of all people who were not from the poor farmer-working class.”118 Still, Twining recalls his attitude at the time of the hearing. “It was easy to come before Congress because I was so sure about what was going on,” he says. “When it came to ‘what to do,’ though, I just had this overwhelming feeling of helplessness.”