It is difficult to imagine how confused Becker and the others must have been at that time. They had heard refugee reports of massacres and starvation. They suspected the number killed was in the hundreds of thousands. But they knew virtually nothing specific about the bloody Pol Pot regime. Becker was unable to muster the practical or moral imagination needed to envision the depths of what was happening behind the pristine and cheery front presented. She recalled:
We were the original three blind men trying to figure out the elephant. At that time no one understood the inner workings of the regime—how the zones operated; how the party controlled the country; how the secret police worked; that torture and extermination centers . . .even existed; the depth of the misery and death. . . . We had the tail, the ears, the feet of the monster but no idea of its overall shape. . . .144
By the time the two-week trip began winding down, the luster of being the first to visit had long since worn off. On December 22, 1978, the group’s last full day in the country, Becker became the first American journalist ever to interview the famed Pol Pot. Although she had heard of Brother Number One’s charisma, his smile was far more endearing and his manner more polished than she had predicted. But it was not long before he turned off his charm, treating Becker and colleague Dudman as if he had granted them an audience, not an interview. Pol Pot delivered a one-hour stinging and paranoid indictment of Vietnam, forecasting a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact over Cambodia. He warned: “A Kampuchea that is a satellite of Vietnam is a threat and a danger for Southeast Asia and the world . . . for Vietnam is already a satellite of the Soviet Union and is carrying out Soviet strategy in Southeast Asia.”145 Ironically, as American decisionmakers formed their policy in the coming months, they operated on assumptions that mirrored Pol Pot’s.
Caldwell, the Scottish Marxist, was granted a separate interview with the supreme revolutionary leader. When he later traded notes with Becker, he delighted in describing Pol Pot’s mastery of revolutionary economic theory. Before retiring for the evening, Becker sparred with her zealous colleague one last time about the veracity of refugee accounts, which he still refused to believe, and the worthiness of the revolution, in which he refused to abandon belief. She was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of tumult and gunfire outside her room. A half dozen or more shots were fired, and an hour and a half of the longest, most terrifying silence of Becker’s life passed. When she finally heard the voice of her KR guide, she emerged trembling into the hall. Dudman was fine, she was told. Caldwell, the true believer, had been murdered.
Becker did not know why Caldwell had been killed, but she suspected that one faction wanted either to embarrass another or to plug the crack of an opening to the outside world before it widened. A murder would deter meddlesome foreigners from visiting again. On December 23, 1978, Becker and Dudman arrived in Beijing with the wooden casket containing Caldwell’s body. Two days later Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia.
Aftermath
“Humanitarian” Rescue
Kassie Neou, one of Cambodia’s leading human rights advocates today, survived Pol Pot’s madness and the outside world’s indifference. An English teacher before the genocide, he posed as a taxi driver, shedding his eyeglasses and working around the clock to develop a “taxi-driver manner.” He had to make the KR believe that he had not been educated. Captured nonetheless, Neou was tortured five times and spent six months in a KR prison with thirty-six other inmates. Of the thirty-seven who were bound together with iron clasps, only Neou’s hope of survival was rewarded. The young guards executed the others but spared him because they had grown fond of the Aesop’s fables he told them as bedtime stories. When Neou discusses the terror today, he lifts up his trouser leg and displays the whitened, rough skin around his ankle where a manacle held him in place. The revolutionaries’ crimes were so incomprehensible that some part of him seems relieved to be left with tangible proof of his experience.
During his imprisonment, though he had been highly critical of the earlier U.S. involvement in Cambodia, Neou was one of many Cambodians who could not help but dream that the United States would rescue his people. “When you are suffering like we suffered, you simply cannot imagine that nobody will come along to stop the pain,” he remembers. “Everyday, you would wake up and tell yourself, ‘somebody will come, something is going to happen.’ If you stop hoping for rescue, you stop hoping. And hope is all that can keep you alive.” Survivors of terror usually recall maintaining similar, necessary illusions. Without them, they say, the temptation to choose death over despair would overwhelm.
Neou had fantasized that the United States would spare him certain death, but it was Vietnam, the enemy of the United States, that in January 1979 finally dislodged the bloody Communist radicals. In response, the United States, which in 1978 had at last begun to condemn the KR, reversed itself, siding with the Cambodian perpetrators of genocide against the Vietnamese aggressors.
Vietnam’s invasion had a humanitarian consequence but was not motivated by humanitarian concerns. Indeed, for a long time Vietnam and its Soviet backer had blocked investigation into the atrocities committed by their former partner in revolution. In 1978, however, as KR incursions into Vietnam escalated, Vietnam had begun detailing KR massacres. Vietnamese officials used excerpts from Ponchaud’s book, Year Zero, as radio propoganda. They called on Cambodians to “rise up for the struggle to overthrow the Pol Pot and Ieng Sary clique” who were “more barbarous . . . than the Hitlerite fascists.” Vietnam also began reindoctrinating and training Khmer Rouge defectors and Cambodian prisoners seized in territory taken from Cambodia. It crept ever closer to the Soviet Union, joining the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), signing a twenty-five-year treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Soviets, and receiving ever larger military shipments from them. The Soviet Union joined Vietnam’s anti-KR campaign, condemning the KR “policy of genocide.”
For the previous year, the United States had been flirting with restoring relations with Vietnam but was not keen on seeing it overrun its neighbor.146 From the U.S. embassy in Bangkok, Ambassador Morton Abramowitz wrote in a secret August 1978 cable to the State Department: “Neither the Khmers nor the world would miss Pol Pot. Nonetheless, the independence of Kampuchea, particularly its freedom from a significant Hanoi presence or complete Hanoi domination, is a matter of importance to us.”147 Far from encouraging the overthrow of the KR, as Neou and others would have hoped, U.S. officials urged the Vietnamese to think twice. In November 1978 Secretary of State Vance sent a message to the Vietnamese: “Don’t you see what lies ahead if you invade Cambodia? This is not the way to bring peace to the area. Can’t we try some UN instrument, use the UN in some way?”148
The United States had its own reasons for frowning upon a Vietnamese triumph. It planned to restore diplomatic relations with China on January 1, 1979. China’s hostility toward Vietnam and its Soviet military and political sponsor greatly influenced the U.S. reaction to the invasion. For neither the first nor the last time, geopolitics trumped genocide. Interests trumped indignation.
Aware of the Khmer Rouge’s isolation and unpopularity in the West, Hanoi thought it would earn praise if it overthrew Pol Pot. It also concluded that regardless of the outside world’s opinion, it could not afford to allow continued KR encroachments into the Mekong Delta. By December 22, 1978, Vietnamese planes had begun flying forty to fifty sorties per day over Cambodia. And on December 25, 1978, twelve Vietnamese divisions, or some 100,000 Vietnamese troops, retaliated against KR attacks by land. Teaming up with an estimated 20,000 Cambodian insurgents, they rolled swiftly through the Cambodian countryside. Despite U.S. intelligence predictions that the KR would constitute a potent military foe, McGovern’s earlier forecast of rapid collapse turned out to be prescient. Lacking popular support, the Khmer Rouge and its leaders fled almost immediately to the northern jungle of Cambodia and across the Thai border.
The Vietnamese compl
eted their lightning-speed victory with the seizure of Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979.
Skulls, Bones, and Photos
Upon seizing the country, the Vietnamese found evidence of mass murder everywhere. They were sure this proof would strengthen the legitimacy of their intervention and their puppet rule. In the months and years immediately after the overthrow, journalists who trickled into Cambodia were bombarded by tales of horror. Every neighborhood seemed to unfurl a mass grave of its own. Bones could still be seen protruding from the earth. Anguished citizens personalized the blame. “Pol Pot killed my husband,” or “Pol Pot destroyed the temple,” they said. Rough numerical estimates of deaths emerged quickly. All told, in the three-and-a-half-year rule of the Khmer Rouge, some 2 million Cambodians out of a populace of 7 million were either executed or starved to death.149 National minorities were special targets of the regime. The Vietnamese minority was completely wiped out. Of the 500,000 Muslim Cham who lived in Cambodia before Pol Pot’s victory, some 200,000 survived. Of 60,000 Buddhist monks, all but a thousand perished.
The Tuol Sleng Examination Center in Phnom Penh, which was code-named Office S-21, quickly became the most notorious emblem of the terror.150 A pair of Vietnamese journalists discovered the center nestled in a part of the capital known as Tuol Svay Prey, or “hillock of the wild mango.” While roaming the neighborhood with Vietnamese troops the day after they had seized the capital, they smelled what they thought was rotting flesh and poked their heads into the lush compound that had once served as a girls’ high school. They quickly discovered that of the 16,000 Cambodians who had arrived there, only five had departed alive.151
The Tuol Sleng complex consists of four triple-story, whitewashed concrete buildings, lined on the top floor by a Motel 6–like balcony-corridor and overlooking identical grassy courtyards, once playgrounds for the young schoolgirls. A single-floor wooden building divides the compound in two. Some time in late 1975, Kang Keck Ieu (known as “Duch”), a former schoolteacher, took over the management of the facility and helped turn a seat of innocence into a seat of inhumanity. Most of the instruments found in Tuol Sleng were primitive, “dual-use” garden implements. Building A, which contained individual prison cells, was divided into small rooms, each containing a metal bed frame, an ammunition box to collect the prisoners’ feces, and garden shears, lead pipes, and hoes. When the Vietnamese journalists first entered these rooms in 1979, they found these tools beside bloodied victims whose cadavers lay shackled to the bed posts. The prisoners’ throats had been slit, and their blood still dripped slowly from the beds onto the mustard-and-white-tiled floors.
When the Vietnamese wandered around the ravaged compound, they found other adornments, including bulkier torture implements and busts of Pol Pot. They also rummaged through surrounding houses and came across thousands of documents, notebooks, and photos. Years later this paper trail would be used to spur prosecution of the aging former KR leaders for genocide and crimes against humanity.
Like the Nazis, those who ran the extermination center were bureaucratically precise. A prisoner’s time at Tuol Sleng consisted of four basic activities. The prisoners were photographed, either upon arrival or upon death. They were tortured, often electrocuted as they hung by their feet, their heads submerged in jars of water. They were forced to sign confessions affirming their status as CIA or Vietnamese agents and to prepare lists of their “networks of traitors.” Then they were murdered. Low-ranking prisoners were usually disposed of quickly, whereas more senior inmates were typically kept alive for protracted torture sessions. The highest daily tally was May 27, 1978, when 582 people were executed. A day’s targets were often clustered according to their affiliation. For example, on July 22, 1977, the KR “smashed” those from the Ministry of Public Works.152 The photos and confessions of four Americans were also found. The men had disappeared in 1978 while sailing yachts off the coast of Cambodia. Hoping to convince their brutal torturers to relent, the men wrote detailed, bizarre accounts of their elaborate CIA plots to destabilize Cambodia.
Stephen Solarz
Rep. Stephen Solarz (D.–N.Y.) with Joel Pritchard (R.–Wash.) at the Tuol Sleng Museum in Phnom Penh in 1981.
If ever there was a document that captured the regimental tenor and terror of the KR regime, it was the set of instructions for inmates that had been posted at the Tuol Sleng interrogation center. It read in part:
1) You must answer in conformity with the questions I asked you. Don’t try to turn away my questions.
2) Don’t try to escape by making pretexts according to your hypocritical ideas.
3) Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dares to thwart the revolution.
4) You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect. . . .
6) During the bastinado or the electrification you must not cry loudly.
7) Do sit down quietly. Wait for the orders. If there are no orders, do nothing. If I ask you to do something, you must immediately do so without protesting. . . .
9) If you disobey [any] point of my regulations you will get either ten strokes of the whip or five shocks of electric discharge.153
An “interrogator’s manual” was another of the many damning documents left behind. A forty-two-page guide for Tuol Sleng torturers, it reminded them they should use both political pressure and torture on prisoners. “Prisoners,” the guide said, “cannot escape from torture. The only difference is whether there will be a lot of it or a little. . . . We must hurt them so that they respond quickly. Don’t be so bloodthirsty that you cause their death quickly. You won’t get the needed information.”154
The Vietnamese-installed regime was savvy enough to create a Tuol Sleng Museum almost as soon as it had solidified control of the capital city. The new leaders turned the snapshots of murdered prisoners into perhaps the most vivid visual indictment of evil in the second half of the twentieth century. The photos had been taken of boys and girls and men and women of all shapes, shades, and sizes. Some have been beaten; others seem clean-shaven and calm. Some look crazed, others resigned. As in the German concentration camps, all wear numbers. And all display a last gasp of individuality in their eyes. It is with these eyes that they interrogate the interrogator. That they plead. That they grovel. That they accuse. That they accost. That they mock. And for those who visit, that they remind. It is in their eyes, much more than in the stacks of skulls gathered in villages throughout Cambodia, that visitors are prodded to confront the extremity of the victims’ last days. With their eyes, most of the Cambodians signal that they remained very much alive and that they hoped to stay that way.
U.S. Policy: Choosing the Lesser Evil
The existence of the torture center testified to the depravity of the KR regime.155 Cambodia was not widely visited immediately following the KR overthrow, but enough evidence of KR brutality emerged for many Americans to know that they should celebrate their defeat. Senator McGovern, the new humanitarian hawk, learned of the Vietnamese victory and thought it offered the real irony. “After all those years of predictions of dominos falling and Communist conspiracies,” he remembers, “it was Vietnam that went in and stopped Pol Pot’s slaughter. Whatever their motivation, the Vietnamese were the ones who supplied the military force to stop the genocide. They should have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize.” Foreign service officer Charles Twining, who by then had been transferred to the Australia–New Zealand desk at the State Department, was overjoyed at reports of the Vietnamese victory. He recalls, “I didn’t see how else change would have happened. Those of us who knew about the Khmer Rouge cheered, but we quickly realized that everyone else just heard it as ‘Vietnam, our enemy, has taken over Cambodia.’” Some prominent U.S. officials confessed publicly to being torn. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, told reporters in New York: “I almost always think it’s always wrong for a country to transgress the borders of another country, but in the case of Cambodia I’m not terribly upset. . . . It is a country that
has killed so many of its own people, I don’t know if any American can have a clear opinion of it. . . . It’s such a terribly ambiguous moral situation.”156
But rational, interest-based calculations led the United States to different official conclusions, which quickly overtook these isolated bursts of relief among Cambodia watchers. The Vietnamese victory presented President Carter with a difficult moral and political choice. Which was the lesser evil, a regime that had slaughtered some 2 million Cambodians or a Communist regime backed by the Soviet Union that had flagrantly violated an international border and that now occupied a neighboring state? After weighing the politics of the choice, Carter sided with the dislodged Khmer Rouge regime. The United States had obvious reasons for opposing the expansion of Vietnamese (and, by proxy, Soviet) influence in the region. It also said it had an interest in deterring cross-border aggression anywhere in the world. But this principle was applied selectively. In 1975, when its ally, the oil-producing, anti-Communist Indonesia, invaded East Timor, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians, the United States looked away.157 In the Cambodia case perhaps the most important factor behind Carter’s choice was U.S. fondness for China, which remained the prime military and economic backer of Pol Pot’s ousted government. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski saw the problem through the Sino-Soviet prism. Since U.S. interests lay with China, they lay, indirectly, with the Khmer Rouge. Slamming the KR might jeopardize the United States’ new bond with China. Slamming the Vietnamese would cost the United States nothing.
A Problem From Hell Page 20
