The Cambodian holocaust has not stopped. There is so much more to tell. The camps; the expulsion from Thailand of more than 40,000 refugees, their forced march down the high escarpment of the Dang Rek Mountains near Preah Vihear into the maw of the Viet Namese army; the suicides caused by callous U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officers; the incredible purposeful continuation of the starvation which killed an estimated 600,000 Khmer in the first year of Hanoi’s occupation; the occupation and colonialization of the Socialist Republic of Kampuchea by the hegemonic Hanoi warlords bowing before their own new emperor, the Soviets. That is history, not the story of Cahuom Chhuon’s family.
Knowing that does not let me sleep. What is story, what is history?
The accelerated killings of late 1978 are well documented. They include the slaughter of thousands of Khmer Krahom cadre at the “security and interrogation” center of Tuol Sleng in the heart of Phnom Penh and the mass decapitation of 22,000 people at Prey Vong. For at least two months Angkar Leou knew a PAVN assault was imminent. By November 1978 the Viet Namese had massed 120,000 troops along the Viet Nam-Cambodia border plus 40,000 along the Laos-Cambodia border. In the interior the Khmer leadership began its frantic scrambling for scapegoats which set off the final wave of mass executions. In December Ieng Sary told Elizabeth Becker, “Frankly speaking, about the so-called slaughters, the massacres, ‘we could not avoid the killings.’ ”
On 8 December 1978 (some accounts say 3 December)—only a few months after Viet Nam’s prime minister, Pham Van Dong, completed a goodwill tour of noncommunist Southeast Asian nations and only a month after the USSR and Viet Nam signed a major friendship treaty (was this why on 8 January 1978 the PAVN ceased their offensive against Democratic Kampuchea—a bargaining chip for more military and financial aid from the Soviets in the Sino-Soviet dispute?)—the PAVN launched a seven-pronged blitzkrieg. Immediately the Viet Namese broke through and bypassed the heavy border fortifications. Using thousands of Soviet tanks, American- and Soviet-made fighter-bombers and heavy self-propelled artillery, Hanoi’s troops (12 to 14 divisions) led Heng Samrin’s new Khmer Viet Minh units (about the equivalent of one division) to topple the eastern third of the country. One should note the Communist tactic, used again with success, of “talking while fighting, fighting while talking.” Norodom Sihanouk fled Phnom Penh, via China, bound for the United Nations in New York City. Hundreds of thousands of rag-cloaked slaves streamed west from every area of the country. For the second time in a year Ratanakiri, Mondolkiri and eastern Stung Treng fell. Then Kompong Cham and Kratie, Neak Luong, Takeo and Bokor. The launching points were all familiar: Duc Co, Bu Ntoll, Mimot-Krek, Svay Rieng and Chiau Doc. Within days PAVN troops controlled Kompong Som, Cambodia’s only deep-water port.
At the United Nations, Norodom Sihanouk assailed the Viet Namese for attacking your “brother and comrade-in-arms during the war against the imperialists.” He continued, blaming Moscow for Viet Nam’s successes: “The Soviets methodically helped the Viet Namese make their preparations to topple Pol Pot.” (Recall the November signing of the Soviet-Viet Namese friendship treaty which was followed by a major augmentation of Soviet advisors.) Then followed Sihanouk’s request to the United States for military assistance for Pol Pot. Perhaps it is no wonder there is U.S. apathy. But isn’t that caused by our looking at the governments and not seeing the people? En route to New York, Sihanouk had told correspondents, “I do not know why [Pol Pot’s regime] imposed such a terrible policy....They say this is genuine Communism and it must be so. But I am a Buddhist, and I will never understand Communism.”
By 4 January ten of nineteen empty provincial capitals were in PAVN hands; five days later the blitzkrieg rolled through Phnom Penh and headed northwest up Highway 5 to Kompong Chhnang, Pursat and Battambang, and up 6 to Skoun, Pa Kham, Baray, Kompong Thom, Siem Reap and finally Sisophon. It is interesting to note, amongst the numerous pockets of resistance, that Cheon Ksar, near Preah Vihear and within twenty-five miles of Nang’s cliff, held out until 17 January, perhaps longer. Also of interest to note (again): America’s attention span (measured again by Newsweek magazine articles). Within two weeks of the fall of Phnom Penh (the week that Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran), stories about Cambodia ceased. By the 5 February issue the story had been reduced to two letters to the editor. One (from C. R. Lotts, of Harrisonburg, Virginia) proclaimed that the local factions are not motivated “by outside international forces” and continues, “Fortunately, this time U.S. dollars and blood were not prostituted to either side.”
Perhaps the second, from Ward A. Holcomb, of Quantico, Virginia, comes closest to what I see as the most common attitude in America: “The conquest of Cambodia by Vietnam affords a rare opportunity for America. It is a chance to keep our politicians silent, our money in the bank and our uniformed sons at home. Let Southeast Asia stew in its own juice!” (My emphasis.)
And stew it did. Without us. And were it only the Pol Pots or the Pham Van Dongs, I too would cheer. But it was not and is not. It is the Vathanas. It is the Chhuons. You must see that. Don’t be duped by bread and circuses, by stone-washed (oops! now it’s ice-washed) dungarees and video entertainment systems. Don’t be so overentertained that you don’t take the time to analyze our, your, world—to be skeptical, questioning, to help solve its problems, to feel its pain and help it heal!
By 1980, 500,000 Khmer had fled to the relative security of the Thai border region—perhaps twenty percent crossing to enter refugee camps for potential processing for shipment to third nations. Those who remained in Thailand—people without a land, listless, restless—will they become the new Palestinians?
Many world agencies responded to the famine in Cambodia in 1979. They asked for help, asked for 108,000 tons of rice or wheat flour, for oil and sugar, for trucks to help dispense the foodstuffs. Of four million surviving Khmers, it was estimated that fifty-five percent were threatened with starvation. But, by policy, the new regime blocked much of the distribution: “...We never received this aid. It went to Viet Nam at night by truck.” (Prak Savath, Battambang district chief, 1980-1983, quoted from To Bear Any Burden, by Al Santoli.)
Again, secret, purposeful, government-sponsored starvation. While Viet Namese troops looted and pillaged the remnants of Khmer family culture, the United States, under the leadership of the Carter administration, generally took the attitude that as long as Communists are killing Communists, as long as the factions’ respective patrons, China and the USSR, are bickering, it is in America’s best interest. Yet even if one were to forget that the pawns were being trampled, the long-term results of political destabilization are not in America’s best interest.
Truong Nhu Tang, in his book A Vietcong Memoir, noted this about earlier American mentalities:
Along with their political forebears both Nixon and Kissinger suffered from a fundamental inability to enter into the mental world of their enemy and so to formulate policies that would effectively frustrate the strategies arrayed against them, the strategies of a people’s war.
Do we, the people, of this representative democratic nation, still suffer from that very same fundamental inability—the inability to enter not only the mental world of our adversaries and thus effectively frustrate the strategies arrayed against us, but also the mental world of our friends and thus fail to formulate policies of mutual interest? Do we, the people, then instill those inabilities in our leaders—either by selection or by the pressure of public opinion?
Under Heng Samrin (ex-Khmer Krahom cadre “constitute the majority [eighty percent, says Douglas Pike] within the apparatus of the [new] party and state,” as reported in Indochina Report in October 1984) the Viet Namization of Kampuchea has been a continuing model of the efficient extermination of a race. At first the new leaders decreed that everyone should return home. On the surface this matched the desires of the people. In reality it set off a new mass deportation without sustenance, a new disruption of the main crop as paddies were abandoned or
left fallow. Thousands soon starved to death. Thousands more starved slowly. Then the new repression began. The new collective masters (the Khmer Viet Minh) invited people to form anti-Pol Pot associations, anti-Viet Namese associations, new leadership associations, ex-military men associations, and so on. Then the new association leaders were systematically rounded up and shipped for reeducation. Most simply disappeared. Schools were reopened. All teaching (the materials and content prepared in Viet Nam and approved in Hanoi) is conducted in Viet Namese. There are now a million Viet Namese civilians in Cambodia. Viet Namese “advisors,” 12,000 strong, stand behind the Khmer puppet government at every level. “Behind them, even more discreetly...are the Soviet advisors,” says French Red Cross worker (1984-1986) Doctor Esmeralda Luciolli. Doctor Luciolli further describes the Viet Namese Occupation Army’s military plan SB-1785 (a.k.a. K-5), which forcibly conscripted 1.5 million Cambodians to build a fortified barrier and no-man’s-land along the entire Thailand-Cambodia border: “a jungle equivalent of the communist-built Berlin Wall,” according to the Southeast Asia and Afghanistan Review. The horror story goes on. Old torture centers were reopened, new ones built. Amnesty International and the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights both labeled the new regime as a human rights violator that rivaled the Khmer Rouge. Amnesty International further noted the role of the Viet Namese advisory “experts” in the detention and torture centers.
Yet should we be surprised? There is a PAVN occupation headquarters at Siem Reap. It is in the same locale as the old A-40 Office of the Central Office for Kampuchean Affairs (COKA). Indeed, COKA is alive and well and headed by the same Viet Namese warlords who were at its head in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But some things have changed. Le Duc Anh, who headed COKA and answered to Le Duc Tho of the Hanoi Politburo’s Central Kampuchean Affairs Commission, is now a full Politburo member as vice-minister of the Department of Defense.
American reaction still remains disgustingly minute. The looking-out-for-number-one generation has yet to throw a (oh God!) rock concert “to raise awareness” and perhaps money. (I’m not suggesting a rock concert would alleviate the suffering—there are times when only firepower works! In retrospect the time and opportunity to provide relief was in 1970 when instead of bombers Cambodia needed advisors to train a capable and honest defense force. Are we in our 1970 position anywhere in the world today?)
I would like to quote a thought from Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance: “One surmises that mankind has outgrown human sacrifice, human slavery and duelling, and thus shall or should outgrow war—particularly in light of the modern world’s incredible destructive capabilities.” Wouk writes about the end of World War two. But mankind has not outgrown human sacrifice—the sacrifice has only become institutionalized on a grander scale. Nor has humanity outgrown slavery. That humanity shall outgrow war in our time, though a beautiful thought, is, I fear, a sentimental and overoptimistic idea. As imbecilic and abhorrent as war is, unopposed war is unquestionably more horrible: At the very least—and it is little—war brings hope that evil might be defeated. Appeasement equals hopelessness.
And yet, in the next breath, I say, evil cannot defeat evil. Evil can only multiply evil. Only good can defeat evil. Usually it doesn’t. But it never loses either. Good and evil are weights on a scale. With each other they obey the laws of addition and subtraction; alone, each obeys the law of multiplication.
John Healey, executive director of Amnesty International, writes, “You and I and all decent people of this world must stand up as one and cry out: ‘No one, anywhere, should ever be tortured by anybody.’ I hope when you hear of torture...you want to cry out, ‘How dare they!’ ” Elie Wiesel says, “The worst enemy of humankind is indifference.”
And yet I feel a general malaise, an indifference, has settled over a large percentage of our population. It is as if America is in a depression, not economic but spiritual; as if its morale is terribly fragile. We are in a battle for our minds, a battle for history. When a person or a nation is depressed it selectively seeks out and concentrates on all its past errors and present faults and it ignores its present strengths and past achievements. It is as if it wants to believe the worst about itself. It becomes a sucker for other people’s propaganda. Snap out of it, America! There is something much worse than war and that is unopposed genocide! And the genocide goes on!
There is so much more—what the Hanoi despots have done in the North as well as the South brings another flood of pain...
I’m so sickened with what I now know, what I refused to learn thirteen years ago...I want to tell her that...I want to say, “Vathana, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t know not knowing could hurt you. Did hurt you. Hurt your people so.”
The aerogram from Bangkok. Mr. Pradesh has handed it to me and left. The parchment is thin.
John,
Confirmed. Nang now secretary People’s Republic
Kampuchea, Eastern Zone, Neak Luong., A.k.a. Hnong Kieng. Voen found in Thai camp, Khao I Dang. Has Su Livanh. Is with Mey and Mey’s sister, Ton, plus two children, plus Amara’s son given to Vathana. Samnang or other d/d boy, reported in or near Battambang. To be checked out. Tran Van Le in Cambodia leading resistance unit. Vathana’s uncle, Sam, ill, at Camp Site 7. Vathana rumored in camp north of Preah Vihear. I will continue search, struggle. Come at once. Or set up there a basecamp for refugees. Rita. PS: Conklin is great help. Many thanks.
ADDITIONAL READINGS
THE AUTHOR PARTICULARLY WISHES to recommend and acknowledge the following books and articles:
David A. Ablin and Marlowe Hood, editors. The Cambodian Agony. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1987.
The Amnesty International Report—1985. London, England: Amnesty International Publications, 1985.
Elizabeth Becker. When the War Was Over: Cambodia’s Revolution and the Voices of Its People. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.
John S. Bowman, general editor. The Vietnam War: An Almanac. New York: World Almanac Publications, 1985.
David P. Chandler. The Land and People of Cambodia. New York: Lippincott, 1972.
David P. Chandler and Ben Kiernan, editors. Revolution and Its Aftermath in Kampuchea: Eight Essays. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.
David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai. Portrait of the Enemy. New York: Random House, 1986.
Georges Condominas. We Have Eaten the Forest: The Story of a Montagnard Village in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. (Translated by Adrienne Foulke.) New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. (French edition, 1957.)
Tom Dooley. Dr. Tom Dooley’s Three Great Books: Deliver Us from Evil [1956]: The Edge of Tomorrow [1958]: The Night They Burned the Mountain [I960]. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy.
William Faulkner. The Unvanguished. New York: Vintage Books (Random House), 1934.
Bruce Grant. The Boat People, An “AGE” Investigation. Ringwood, Victoria, Australia: Penguin Books, 1979.
Haing Ngor, with Roger Warner. A Cambodian Odyssey. New York: Macmillan, 1987.
Stuart A. Herrington. Silence Was a Weapon: The Vietnam War in the Villages. Novato, California: Presidio Press, 1982.
Martin F. Herz, assisted by Leslie Rider. The Prestige Press and the Christmas Bombing, 1972: Images and Reality in Vietnam. Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1980.
Arnold R. Isaacs. Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.
Ben Kiernan. How Pol Pot Came to Power: A History of Communism in Kampuchea, 1930-1975. London, England: Verso, 1985.
Arthur Kleinman and Byron Good, editors. Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Jim Morris. War Story. Boulder, Colorado: Sycamore Island Books, 1979.
Nayan Chanda. Brother Enemy: The War After the War. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.
Nhat Tien, Duong Phuc, and Vu Thanh Thuy. Pirates
on the Gulf of Siam. San Diego: The Boat People S.O.S. Committee, 1981.
Pham Kim Vinh. Vietnam After 1975: Bamboo Gulags and Subtle Genocide. San Diego: PKV Publications, 1982.
Pham Kim Vinh. In Their Defense: U.S. Soldiers in the Vietnam War. Phoenix: Sphinx Publishing, 1985.
Douglas Pike. PAVN: People’s Army of Vietnam. Novato, California: Presidio Press, 1986.
Pin Yathay, with John Man. Stay Alive, My Son. New York: Free Press, 1987.
François Ponchaud. Cambodia: Year Zero. (Translated by Nancy Amphoux.) New York; Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978.
George C. Hildebrand and Gareth Porter. Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. New York: Monthly Review Press. 1976.
Kenneth M. Quinn. “Political Change in Wartime: The Khmer Krahom Revolution in Southern Cambodia, 1970-1974.” Naval War College Review, 1976.
Al Santoli. To Bear Any Burden: The Vietnam War and Its Aftermath in the Words of Americans and Southeast Asians. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1985.
Sidney H. Schanberg. The Death and Life of Dith Pran. New York: Viking, 1985.
Robert Shaplen. Bitter Victory. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
William Shawcross. Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979.
William Shawcross. The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.
Norodom Sihanouk. My War with the CIA: The Memoirs of Norodom Sihanouk. (As related to Wilfred Burchett.) New York: Pantheon Books, 1973.
Norodom Sihanouk. War and Hope: The Case for Cambodia. (Translated by Mary Feeney.) New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
Someth May. Cambodian Witness: The Autobiography of Someth May. (Edited by James Fenton). New York: Random House, 1986.
For the Sake of All Living Things Page 101
