A Problem From Hell

by Samantha Power

  With the policy decided and the tilt toward China firm, Secretary of State Vance called immediately for the Vietnamese to “remove their forces from Cambodia.” Far from applauding the KR ouster, the United States began loudly condemning Vietnam. In choosing between a genocidal state and a country hostile to the United States, the Carter administration chose what it thought to be the lesser evil, though there could hardly have been a greater one.

  The new government in Phnom Penh was led by Heng Samrin and Hun Sen, two former Khmer Rouge officials who had defected to Vietnam in 1977. Meanwhile, the KR regrouped at the border, thanks to military and medical aid from Thailand, China, Singapore, Britain, and the United States.158 With the Soviet Union arming Vietnam and the Heng Samrin government, China opened up the Deng Xiaoping Trail for Chinese arms deliveries to the KR guerrillas through Thailand.159 Brzezinski told Becker: “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the [Khmer Rouge]. . . . Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him but China could.”160 The military and political conflict took on the flavor of a Sino-Soviet proxy war. Vietnam and the states that made up the Soviet bloc argued that the will of the Cambodian people had been gratified and it was absurd to support a genocidal regime. On the other side were China, most members of ASEAN, and the jilted Khmer Rouge officials themselves, who argued that whatever the abuses of the past regime, nothing could excuse a foreign invasion.

  The Khmer Rouge did their part, launching an image campaign of sorts. Khieu Samphan replaced Pol Pot as prime minister in December 1979 and invited journalists to hear his version of events. Rejecting charges of genocide, he said, “To talk about systematic murder is odious. If we had really killed at that rate, we would have no one to fight the Vietnamese.”161 Yet now that the evidence of the horrors had surfaced, Samphan could not deny abuse outright. He shrewdly acknowledged some 10,000 executions under Pol Pot, and admitted “mistakes” and “shortcomings.” Samphan swore that if the KR returned to power, they would not again evacuate the cities, restrict movement and religion, or eliminate currency. In pursuit of U.S. help, he also brushed aside mention of America’s prior sins. “These things are in the past,” he said, referring to Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, “and should not be brought up.”162 Well aware that it was American hostility toward Vietnam rather than any love of the KR that earned the KR U.S. support, he warned that without U.S. help and with the backing of Moscow, “The Vietnamese will go further—toward the rest of Southeast Asia, the Malacca Strait, toward control of the South Pacific and Indian oceans.”163 He spoke the fashionable language of falling dominoes.

  The Carter administration’s policy choice was made easier because at home no voices cried out to support Vietnam. America’s most ardent anti-Communists were still angry at Vietnam for the U.S. defeat. American leftists were mostly disengaged. Die-hard Communists were befuddled by the seemingly sudden division of Southeast Asia into two rival and bitterly contested Communist camps. The mass protests in the United States in the 1960s were a reaction against American imperialism and the loss of American lives. With neither at stake in the 1979 Vietnam-Cambodia conflict, the activists who had once made it to the mainstream did not resurface. The administration was able to reduce its policy calculus to pure geopolitics without rousing dissent.

  The issue was not simple. Cambodians themselves were elated to be rid of the KR but opposed to the Vietnamese occupation. The Vietnamese had brought about a liberation from hell, but they did not usher in the freedom for which Cambodians longed. Vietnam’s claims to have invaded simply to stop atrocity and to defend its borders from Cambodian attacks were proven more hollow with the passage of time. Some 200,000 Vietnamese troops patrolled the Cambodian countryside, and Vietnamese advisers clogged the Cambodian governmental ministries. The Vietnamese-backed regime earned further criticism because of its mishandling of a potential famine. It initially dismissed as Western propaganda reports that Cambodians faced imminent starvation because of disruption of planting and poor cultivation. Then, when outside aid was clearly needed, the regime was more intent on using food as a political weapon than ensuring Cambodians were fed. Kassie Neou, the former English teacher who had long fantasized about rescue, remembers his reaction to the Vietnamese invasion: “My first response was raw. It was a simple, ‘Phew, we survived.’ My second thought, upon understanding that our land was occupied, was, ‘Uh-oh.’ Basically, the Vietnamese saved us from sure death, and they deserved our thanks for that. But years later, we felt like saying, ‘We already said thank you. So why are you still here?’”

  Prince Sihanouk, once the nominal leader of the KR front, had been placed under house arrest soon after the KR seized Phnom Penh. In the course of Pol Pot’s rule, he had lost three daughters, two sons, and fifteen grandchildren. Sensing yet another political opening, he emerged from the shadows after the KR’s ouster to criticize both the KR and the Vietnamese. “It is a nightmare,” he said. “The Vietnamese, they are like a man who has a very delicious piece of cake in his mouth—Cambodia—and all that man can do is swallow the cake.”164 For many Cambodians, the occupation by the Vietnamese quickly came to feel like a “liberation” similar to that of Poland by the Soviets after Nazi rule.

  A Regime Less “Stinky”?

  The UN Credentials Committee, an obscure nine-member body based at UN headquarters in New York, became the unlikely forum for the international debate on what to do about Cambodia. The Credentials Committee routinely met twice a year to determine whether states had the “credentials” to occupy their UN seats. In September 1979, when the committee convened, both the vanquished KR regime and the victorious Vietnamese-backed regime submitted applications. UN delegates from the Communist and non-Communist worlds sparred over which regime should be recognized and which violation of international law was more egregious.

  Three layers of geopolitics made it unlikely that the U.S. representative was going to favor stripping the Khmer Rouge of their UN seat. First, of course, the United States was determined not to condone the Vietnamese invasion. Second, it wanted to please China. And third, as a matter of standing policy, the United States wanted the Credentials Committee to remain a pro forma paperwork clearinghouse rather than a political body that would weigh in on the relative “goodness” or “badness” of a regime. If the committee moved away from ritual rubber-stamping and began judging the merits and demerits of member states, the United States feared, the committee might next strip UN credentials from Israel.

  Robert Rosenstock was the lawyer who represented the United States on the Credentials Committee. The Secretariat tried to select people who would treat the granting of credentials as a technical issue, not a substantive one. They wanted people, he says, who would not “start carrying on if a government was obnoxious.” Rosenstock did not find the Cambodia vote especially difficult:

  We at the Credentials Committee . . . don’t make waves. . . . For us to go against our long-standing mode of operating, somebody in Washington would have had to call us up, and say, “Listen these Khmer Rouge guys really stink and the new guys, the Vietnamese, stink a little less so let’s take away the credentials of the stinkier regime.” That didn’t happen. Washington looked at it as, “They all stink, so let’s support the status quo.”

  Rosenstock duly argued that what was at issue was not the conduct of a government toward its own nationals. Since the KR credentials had been accepted at the 1978 session of the General Assembly, they should be accepted again. The committee had a “technical” task to perform and not a political one.

  On September 19, 1979, after some heated debate and despite the submission by Congo of a compromise proposal that would have left Cambodia’s UN seat open, the committee voted 6–3 to award UN credentials to the KR regime. The committee did not even review the credentials of the Vietnamese-backed Heng Samrin government.165

  “I was told to engineer the result on the Credentials Committee,” says Rosenstock, “so I engineered the result.
” The happiest and most surprised man in New York on the day of the vote was the KR’s Ieng Sary.166 He came bounding up to Rosenstock after the tally and extended his hand. “Thank you so much for everything you have done for us,” Ieng said. Rosenstock instinctively shook the extended hand and then muttered to a colleague, “I think I now know how Pontius Pilate must have felt.”

  The battle was not yet won, as the debate over the two regimes’ competing moral and legal claims simply shifted from the Credentials Committee to the General Assembly two days later. Here multiple critics spoke out against the Credentials Committee’s recommendation that the KR regime be recognized. UN delegates, mainly from the Soviet bloc, argued that the KR’s brutality was of such magnitude that they had forfeited their claim to sovereignty. These UN representatives contended that the new regime controlled Cambodia’s territory, represented the people’s will, and therefore earned the rank of legitimate sovereign. Some pointed to the Holocaust. The Grenada representative compared the Vietnamese liberators to the Allied liberators who administered Germany after defeating it. The Soviet and Byelorussian delegates cited the terms of the genocide convention, which they said required withholding recognition from the genocidal regime. Far from deserving to occupy the UN seat, they said, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, who had fled to the Thai border, should be extradited back to Cambodia to be tried for genocide under the convention.

  The debate was highly charged, as blistering condemnations of the old and new regimes were traded across the floor. Although the majority of the speakers supported the U.S. and Chinese view that Vietnam’s invasion should not be recognized, none contested the atrocities committed by Pol Pot. Indeed, all were quick to preface their support for maintaining recognition of the KR with disclaimers that they “held no brief” for the Pol Pot regime, “did not condone their human rights record,” and “did not excuse their abominable crimes.” Their votes to seat the KR government, they stressed, “did not mean agreement with the past policies of its leaders.”167

  The United States carried Rosenstock’s arguments from the Credentials Committee to the General Assembly. “For three years,” U.S. representative Richard Petree said, “we have been in the forefront of international efforts to effect fundamental changes in these practices and policies by peaceful means.” In the absence of a “superior claim,” however, the regime seated by the previous General Assembly should be seated again.168 Moral values were at stake—a commitment to peace, stability, order, and the rule of law, as well as the insistence that states carry out their obligations under the UN charter. The UN charter had made noninterference in sovereign states a sacred principle. No doctrine of humanitarian intervention had yet emerged to challenge it.

  Most of the arguments made by those who voted for seating the KR were internally contradictory. They first insisted that recognizing the Vietnamese-installed regime would mean condoning external intervention and licensing foreign invasions by big powers into small states, thus making the world a “more dangerous place.” Yet they next claimed that maintaining recognition of the Pol Pot government would not mean condoning genocide or licensing dictators elsewhere to believe they could treat their citizens as abusively as they chose.

  Nonetheless, the U.S. position prevailed. The first debate of many, on September 21, 1979, lasted six and a half hours, and the assembly voted 71–35 (34 abstentions, 12 absences) to endorse the Credentials Committee resolution. The KR’s Khieu Samphan was quoted later on the front page of the Washington Post, saying, “This is a just and clear-sighted stand, and we thank the U.S. warmly.”169

  Although it would take years for Pol Pot to enter the ranks of the maniacs of our century, where he is ritually placed now, even by 1979 many grasped the depth of his terror. Those who visited were able to tour Tuol Sleng, witness the skeletal remains that lay stubbornly scattered throughout the country, tabulate death counts, and speak with their Cambodian friends, who would often simply burst into tears without a moment’s notice. Rosenstock remembers, “I realized enough at the time to feel that there was something disgusting about shaking Ieng Sary’s hand. I wasn’t in the habit of comparing myself to Pontius Pilate. I mean, I felt like throwing up when the guy shoved his hand in my face. Oooh, it was awful.” Yet not so awful as to cause him or his more senior colleagues to challenge U.S. policy, which was driven by U.S. distaste for Vietnam and its interest in pleasing China.

  Even with the 1979 vote behind the United States, the presence of KR officials at the UN continued to upset many Americans. In advance of the Credentials Committee vote in 1980, ten U.S. senators signed a letter calling for the United States to abstain on the vote in order to “stand apart from both” brutal regimes. A Washington Post editorial urged the United States to hold the seat open, as nothing about the U.S. policy of recognizing the KR was working. “Geopolitically, it has brought the United States no evident gains,” the editorial said. “Politically, it has been used by Hanoi to justify both its support of Heng Samrin and its suspicion of U.N. relief efforts. Morally, it is beyond characterization.”170 A subsequent editorial, entitled “Hold-Your-Nose Diplomacy,” noted, “There are many close calls in foreign policy, but this is not one of them.”171 Yet no American lobby really pressed the empty-seat solution and, on the other side of the issue, the five ambassadors from the ASEAN countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines) urged the White House to stand its ground. In an effort to win support for the Khmer Rouge claim to the UN seat, they also held a secret meeting with members of the House Asian and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee.172 After a brief period of suspense, Secretary of State Edmund Muskie announced that since Vietnam continued to refuse to withdraw from Cambodia, the United States would again support the seating of Pol Pot’s government. He stressed that the U.S. decision “in no way implies any support or recognition” of the Khmer Rouge regime. “We abhor and condemn the regime’s human rights record,” Muskie said.173 The General Assembly voted 74–35, with 32 abstentions. By the following year, the debate over whether to recognize the KR had become pro forma.174

  In 1982, under ASEAN pressure, the Khmer Rouge joined in a formal coalition that included the non-Communist forces, the so-called National Army of Sihanouk, and the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front under Son Sann. This coalition shared the UN seat. At the request of the United States, China supplied Sihanouk and Son Sann with arms, and in 1982 the United States began to provide nonlethal covert assistance. Estimated initially at $5 million a year, this funding grew to $12 million by 1985, when Congress authorized up to $5 million in overt aid.

  The Khmer Rouge coalition continued to occupy the UN seat as its guerrillas battled the Heng Samrin regime from the countryside. KR tactics changed little. KR soldiers captured and executed foreign tourists and inflicted terror upon those Cambodians who had the misfortune to live under KR control.175 The consequences of international recognition were significant. The legitimate KR coalition received international financial and humanitarian support, whereas the illegitimate Vietnam-installed regime in Phnom Penh was treated like a pariah. The Cambodian people who had so recently been isolated by the paranoid KR were now isolated by the United States and its allies.176

  Ignoring all the evidence available in Cambodia and their commitments to punish genocide, UN member states continued to refuse to invoke the genocide convention to file genocide charges at the International Court of Justice against the Cambodian government. Indeed, official UN bodies still refrained even from condemning the genocide. Only in 1985 were bureaucratic inertia and political divides briefly overcome so that a UN investigation could finally be conducted. By then, because it had emerged that the Khmer Rouge had killed huge percentages of Muslim Chams, Buddhist monks, and Vietnamese as such, it proved relatively easy to show that the regime was guilty of genocide against distinct ethnic, national, and religious groups. Once the UN chair of the Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities had thoroughly documented the crimes,
the 1985 final report described the atrocities as “the most serious that had occurred anywhere in the world since Nazism.” The subcommission noted that the horrors were carried out against political enemies as well as ethnic and religious minorities but found that this did not disqualify the use of the term “genocide.” Indeed, in the words of Ben Whitaker, the UN special rapporteur on genocide, the KR had carried out genocide “even under the most restricted definition.”177

  Yet nothing changed as a result of the declaration. The Khmer Rouge flag continued to fly outside the United Nations, and KR foreign minister Ieng Sary continued to represent Cambodia at the UN as if the KR terror had never happened. Only with the thawing of the Cold War and the visit of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to former arch-enemy China in May 1989 did Cambodia cease to be a pawn on the superpowers’ chess-board. With the Chinese and the Soviets no longer interested in fighting a proxy war through the KR and the Vietnamese, the United States had no reason to maintain support for the KR. Not until July 1990 did Secretary of State James Baker write a letter to Senate majority leader George Mitchell laying out a new U.S. policy toward the KR at the UN. Henceforth, the United States would vote against the KR coalition at the United Nations and at last support the flow of humanitarian aid into Vietnam and Cambodia.178 Still, during negotiations in Paris aimed at brokering a peace deal among the rival factions, the United States sided with China and the KR in opposing the word “genocide” in the Paris peace accords. This led to an embarrassing moment in the midst of an all-night negotiation in which, according to U.S. officials present, Prince Sihanouk stood up and said, “I am for genocide, I am for genocide, I am for genocide.” Because the U.S. position again prevailed, the accords referred not to genocide, but to “the universally condemned policies and practices of the past.”179