A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  With American editorial writers weighing in on the subject with some frequency in 1978, and with congressional pressure mounting, the daily press coverage of human rights abuses finally expanded. In the summer of 1978, the Washington Post and New York Times began running two to three news stories a month on human rights in Cambodia, still a small number but far more than the two or three per year they had run in 1975, 1976, and 1977. By late 1978 death estimates that had earlier been referred to as “reports of mass death” became “hundreds of thousands, possibly 21/2 million” and “one to three million killed.”119

  Not until 1978 did nongovernmental actors urge that trying and failing to influence the KR would be preferable to making no effort at all. “One may not be able to triumph over evil, but one need not remain silent in its presence,” syndicated columnist Smith Hempstone wrote in the Washington Post in May 1978. “President Carter might speak up more than once on the subject. He might instruct Andrew Young to walk out of the United Nations General Assembly whenever the representative of ‘Democratic Kampuchea’ rises to speak. At every time and in every available forum, those who speak for the United States could call on the conscience of the world to condemn those who commit such atrocities.”120 None of these steps were taken.

  President Carter’s first firm public denunciation came in April 1978 when he sent a message to an independent commission examining the atrocity reports in Oslo:

  America cannot avoid the responsibility to speak out in condemnation of the Cambodian government, the worst violator of human rights in the world today. Thousands of refugees have accused their government of inflicting death on hundreds of thousands of Cambodian people through the genocidal policies it has implemented over the past three years. . . . It is an obligation of every member of the international community to protest the policies of this or any nation which cruelly and systematically violates the right of its people to enjoy life and basic human dignities.121

  Sixteen months had passed since his inauguration and three years since the fall of Phnom Penh.

  In early June 1978, a group calling itself United People for Human Rights in Cambodia fasted and protested in front of the White House, and Freedom House convened a colloquium in Washington, “Cambodia: What Can America Do?” Amnesty International appealed more adamantly for scrutiny of Cambodia’s record. Its 1977–1978 report removed many of its earlier disclaimers. The report cited Ponchaud’s claim that 100,000 was the absolute minimum number of Cambodians executed and said it was possible that “two or three times as many” had been murdered.122 Rather than simply writing privately to the KR, Amnesty called upon the regime to allow independent investigators to deploy to Cambodia and made its own submission to the UN Human Rights Commission.123 Citing refugee and press accounts, the submission stated that although many allegations remained “uncorroborated,” their number and consistency “give cause for great concern.”124 Public and political groups were finally taking notice of a people in dire need.

  Although elite opinion had concluded “something had to be done,” the “something” remained narrowly defined. Behind the scenes, U.S. ambassador Andrew Young urged United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim to visit Cambodia, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance instructed U.S. embassies to discuss with host countries the possibility of raising the issue of Cambodia in the UN General Assembly. Warren Christopher, Carter’s deputy secretary of state, criticized the KR for its massive human rights abuses but pledged only to support “international efforts to call attention to this egregious situation.”125 The U.S. foreign policy establishment remained persistently passive, issuing only a handful of public statements and never investing its political capital in a serious attempt to alter KR behavior.

  Military What? George Who?

  As press coverage steadily picked up and as the U.S. legislature responded with hearings, one lonely American official argued that an outside military force should intervene in Cambodia to dislodge the Khmer Rouge. That person was a Democratic senator from South Dakota named George McGovern—the same George McGovern who had captured the Democratic Party’s nomination in the 1972 presidential election and run on a platform of opposition to the Vietnam War. McGovern had spearheaded congressional efforts to proscribe funding for U.S. military operations in Indochina, and he had initiated the passage of the War Powers Act. He said he carried Vietnam “in my stomach and heart and mind for ten years above any other concern in public life.”126 His antiwar credentials were unimpeachable.

  But McGovern had come to the conclusion that events in Cambodia amounted to genocide, and for him this carried steep and unavoidable consequences. McGovern felt such a diagnosis meant first that the United States had to condemn the KR, which it had done hardly at all since the terror began. But it also meant that the United States had to contribute its military might to stopping the horrors. In August 1978 Senator McGovern publicly urged the Carter administration to consider deploying an international military force to launch a humanitarian intervention. It was time for the United States and its allies to ask, “Do we sit on the sidelines and watch an entire people be slaughtered, or do we marshal military forces and move in quietly to put an end to it?”127 The press corps darted for the telephones. “They thought this was big news,” he recalls. “They wondered, ‘How could this dove have become a raving hawk?’” A Wall Street Journal editorial lambasted McGovern for his “truly mind-boggling” stance. For the next several weeks, he deployed three staff aides to answer the phones, which rang off the hook. Some Americans called to denounce him for his opposition to the war in Vietnam and to blame Cambodia’s misery on the U.S. withdrawal from the region. But most telephoned either to applaud him for his proposal or, in the case of old friends, to ask, somewhat shyly, for clarification.

  McGovern saw the duty to oust the Khmer Rouge as an outgrowth of, not a challenge to, the United States’ duty to get and stay out of Vietnam. The American role in the war in Vietnam only heightened U.S. responsibility, as he believed the rise of the Khmer Rouge was one of the greatest single costs of U.S. involvement in Indochina. McGovern understood the apparent irony of his position. But at the hearings, he, too, alluded to the parallel to the Holocaust:

  I am the last person to be enthusiastic about military intervention except under the most extreme circumstances, but it does seem to me that these are the most extreme I have heard of. If anything close to 2.5 million people have been killed in a few years’ time out of a population of seven million, percentage-wise that makes Hitler’s oppressions look rather tame.128

  McGovern argued that the United States should take the lead politically and militarily. To him Vietnam and Cambodia had little, apart from geography, in common. In Vietnam U.S. forces had squared off against an indigenous independence movement headed by a popularly backed leader, Ho Chi Minh. In Cambodia, by contrast, Pol Pot and a “handful of fanatics” were imposing their vision on millions of Cambodians. In light of Pol Pot’s “bloodthirsty” rule, his victimized populace could not possibly support him; indeed, McGovern believed the Cambodians would welcome rescue from the “murderous, slaughtering regime.”129

  McGovern was not the first American to make such a proposal. The previous year conservative essayist William F. Buckley Jr., perhaps the least likely of all of McGovern’s possible bedfellows, made a similar recommendation in the Los Angeles Times. “I am quite serious,” Buckley wrote. “Why doesn’t Congress authorize the necessary money to finance an international military force to overrun Cambodia?” The force, he argued, should be composed of Asian units from Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, the Philippines, and even Vietnam. The troops did not have to establish a democratic state. They simply had to “go there and take power away from one, two, three, perhaps as many as a half-dozen sadistic madmen who have brought on their country the worst suffering, the worst conditions brought on any country in this bloody century.”130

  The McGovern-Buckley premise—that a barbarous, beatable small clan of murderers could be qu
ickly vanquished—was challenged by the State Department. Douglas Pike, a foreign service officer and Indochina expert who testified at the 1978 Senate hearings, agreed that the Pol Pot regime was savage. But he said Cambodian troops loyal to the Khmer Rouge were fighting extremely effectively against their one-time allies, the Vietnamese. “If the regime is as bad as it is portrayed,” Pike asked, “why do the people fight?” He insisted that international forces would face tough resistance: “I think we should not entertain the idea that a quick indochop in Phnom Penh could put things right,” Pike testified. “To control Cambodia and the government, you would have to control the villages, all of them. You would have to put forces into the villages. The idea of just trying to take off the head in Phnom Penh sounds good . . . but it isn’t.”131

  Robert Oakley, deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, was present when McGovern made his appeal for intervention. He was dumbstruck. So far as the Carter administration was concerned, Oakley testified, multilateral military intervention was not a “live option.” The United States would not consider generating or participating in an invasion. In reading Oakley’s testimony today, one can hear the loss of confidence in the U.S. capacity to shape the world or even accurately to diagnose its developments. “We don’t have the sort of intelligence on that that we sometimes in the past told ourselves that we had,” Oakley said, reminding the committee members, “We have learned a lot about the degree of appropriate U.S. involvement in the internal affairs of other countries, as well as an ability to influence them.”132

  McGovern was puzzled. He had heard a great deal about why the situation was more complicated than it seemed, about how difficult it would be to dislodge Khmer Rouge cadres at the village level. And he could find nobody at all prepared to use outside force to end the slaughter. McGovern did not mention the genocide convention. For him, it was not the law but the atrocities that necessitated acts aimed at suppressing the crime:

  It just strikes me that we ought not to dismiss out of hand the responsibility of the international community to stop this kind of indiscriminate slaughter. I realize it is a long way from home. These are people with different colored skins and so on. But nevertheless, one would think that the international community would at least be considering the possibility of intervening in what seems to be a clear case of genocide.133

  Two political dissidents facing trial in the Soviet Union were then being celebrated, their imprisonment denounced. Yet, he observed, Americans were ignoring the killing of at least a million Cambodians. Instead of fighting the “last war,” McGovern believed, the United States should pay attention to the current genocide. “I hate needless and ill-conceived military ventures,” he said. “That is why I opposed our military intervention . . . in Vietnam. But to hate a needless and foolish intervention that served no good purpose does not give us the excuse to do nothing to stop mass murder in another time and place under vastly different circumstances.”134 Later he remembered the glee with which some of his former adversaries greeted his alleged “reversal” and the grief he got at the time:

  Dean Rusk was by then out of office, but I remember he gave a public statement after he heard I had called for military intervention in which he said, “Now there is irony.” The implication of Rusk’s statement was that I had finally come around. Of course I’ve never been a pacifist. I always thought there was a time when military intervention was necessary. I never regretted for one minute my time as a bomber pilot in World War II. Fighting genocide is one cause worth fighting for.135

  McGovern’s proposal went nowhere. The State Department issued a statement that the Carter administration was focusing attention on the “monstrous” situation in Cambodia but that it had no intention of resolving “the terrible situation in Kampuchea by military force.” It added, “Nor are we aware of any international support for [such] a plan.”136 In truth McGovern had not expected that states would rush to respond to his summons, but he had hoped the “old shock technique” would at least spark a discussion of the horrors that the Carter administration, the general public, and the international community had resisted to date.137 The appeal did cause a ripple effect in certain quarters, as even the KR, who so many had argued did not care about the opinion of outsiders, felt compelled to respond. On August 26, 1978, McGovern received a letter from the radical regime, slamming him for his “wanton and shameless attacks” and rebutting the genocide charge with the claim that it was the United States that had committed genocide in Cambodia.

  In October 1978 McGovern did succeed in getting most of his fellow senators to sign on to a letter to Secretary of State Vance.138 Eighty senators called for international action to halt the Cambodian genocide, urged the secretary to introduce the issue immediately at the UN Security Council, and criticized the Carter administration’s lethargy. In August 1978 the United States had finally submitted to the UN Human Rights Commission a 667-page report on the atrocities based on refugee testimony, but the senators noted that this belated, written submission “seems to be a rather low-key approach in light of the enormity of the crimes being committed in Cambodia.”139

  The First Visit

  By 1978 the Khmer Rouge were feeling more vulnerable to the outside world. They had moved from scapegoating their own citizens to scapegoating their neighbors. The KR had begun trying to infiltrate and occupy southern Vietnam in 1977, and border skirmishes had intensified. In early December 1977, Vietnam, fed-up with Pol Pot’s attacks and backed by the Soviet Union, had sent some 60,000 troops just inside the Cambodian border.140 A propaganda war between the two sides had ensued, publicly confirming Ken Quinn’s 1974 conclusion that no Communist monolith existed in Indochina. On December 31, 1977, the Cambodian Foreign Ministry, which had kept past clashes with Vietnam silent, denounced Vietnam’s “ferocious and barbarous” aggression, comparing it to Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia. Pol Pot severed relations with Vietnam. Throughout 1978 the Khmer Rouge took measures aimed at improving their public image, inviting diplomatic visitors and friendship delegations, pledging reforms, and quietly relaxing their xenophobic stance toward the outside world. In March 1978 Pol Pot announced that Cambodia was “open to our friends. . . . We invite them to visit our country.”141

  Elizabeth Becker, the Washington Post metro reporter, had been clamoring to get back into Cambodia since she left in 1974. She had written more than a dozen letters paying what she remembers as “disgusting” homage to the KR’s “glorious revolution” in the hopes of winning a visa. Whenever Ieng Sary visited the United Nations for the annual General Assembly session, Becker trekked up to New York to appeal to him in person. In November 1978 she received a telegram from the KR (postmarked from Beijing) inviting her to Cambodia. She was one of three Western guests chosen.

  Becker did not hesitate for a second. All of the fears that had driven her from the country in 1974 had been overtaken by a desperate desire to peer behind the Khmer curtain. She felt as if she had been “put in a coffin” since the KR sealed the country. She remembers:

  I hadn’t guessed they would isolate themselves like they did. I mean, the idea that you could go to an airport and it would never say “Phnom Penh” on the departures board—that broke my heart. I had to go back to see what was happening. Since the KR were busy killing their own people, I didn’t think they would make time for us. Nobody said, “Don’t go.”

  Becker and Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch became the first American journalists to enter the country since the Khmer Rouge had seized Phnom Penh in April 1975. Joined by Scottish academic Malcolm Caldwell, a leftist sympathizer with the KR regime, they arrived on a biweekly flight from China, the only country that retained landing rights in Cambodia. For the next ten days, Becker, Dudman, and Caldwell were given an “incubated tour of the revolution” that included immaculate parks, harangues about Vietnamese aggression, and screenings of propaganda films.142 Throughout their stay, the three foreigners were forbidden from independently ex
ploring. They spoke only with those who had been hand-picked by Angkar to represent the KR, and even these meetings were steered by a guide who was present at all times. Nothing Becker’s group saw resembled either what she remembered or what the refugees at the Thai border had described. Fishermen, rubber plantation workers, weavers, all were wheeled out to speak of the joys of the revolution and the bounty of their productivity.

  Elizabeth Becker

  From left: Elizabeth Becker, Richard Dudman, and Malcolm Caldwell at the Angkor Wat temples in December 1978.

  Only when Becker sneaked out of her compound did she get a sense of what lay behind the Potemkin village. If Phnom Penh’s main Monivong Boulevard was clean-shaven for the consumption of visitors, the surrounding streets were littered with stubble. Shops and homes had been weeded over. Furniture and appliances were stacked haphazardly. Just as many religious shrines in Bosnia would later be reduced to rubble overnight, so, too, the French cathedral and the picturesque pagodas had vanished without a trace. Even when she participated in the KR’s regimented activities, Becker observed a country that was missing everything that signaled life. She later recalled, “There were no food-stalls, no families, no young people playing sports, even sidewalk games, no one out on a walk, not even dogs or cats playing in alleyways.”143 When she spotted people out in the countryside, they were working joylessly, furiously, without contemplating rest. The country’s stunning Buddhist temples had been converted into granaries.