A Problem from Hell

The dropoff in U.S. press coverage of Cambodia was dramatic. During Cambodia’s civil war between 1970 and 1975, while the United States was still actively engaged in Southeast Asia, the Washington Post and New York Times had published more than 700 stories on Cambodia each year. In the single month of April 1975, when the KR approached Phnom Penh, the two papers ran a combined 272 stories on Cambodia. But in December 1975, after foreigners had left, that figure plummeted to eight stories altogether.61 In the entire year of 1976, while the Khmer Rouge went about destroying its populace, the two papers published a combined 126 stories; in 1977 they ran 118.62 And these figures actually exaggerate the extent of American attention to the plight of Cambodians. Most of the stories in this period were short, appeared in the back of the international news section, and focused on the geopolitical ramification of Cambodia’s Communist rule rather than on the suffering of Cambodians. Only two or three stories a year focused on the human rights situation under the Khmer Rouge.63 In July 1975 the Times ran a powerful editorial asking “what, if anything” the outside world could do “to alter the genocidal policies” and “barbarous cruelty” of the KR. The editorial argued that U.S. officials who had rightly criticized Lon Nol now had a “special obligation to speak up,” as “silence certainly will not move” Pol Pot.64 But the same editorial board that called on the United States to break the silence did not itself speak again on the subject for another three years.

Cambodia received even less play on television. Between April and June 1975, when one might have expected curiosity to be high, the three major networks combined gave Cambodia just under two and a half minutes of airtime. During the entire three and a half years of KR rule, the network devoted less than sixty minutes to Cambodia, which averaged less than thirty seconds per month per network. ABC carried one human rights story about Cambodia in 1976 and did not return to the subject for two years.65

American editors and producers were simply not interested, and in the absence of photographs, video images, personal narratives that could grab readers’ or viewers’ attention, or public protests in the United States about the outrages, they were unlikely to become interested. Of course, the public was unlikely to become outraged if the horrors were not reported.

Plausible Deniability: “Propaganda, the Fear of Propaganda, and the Excuse of Propaganda”

Some of the guilt that Americans might have had over ignoring the terror behind KR lines was eased by a vocal group of atrocity skeptics who questioned the authenticity of refugee claims. They were skeptical for many of the usual reasons. They clung to the few public statements of senior KR officials, who consistently refuted bloodbath claims and confirmed observers’ hopes that only the elite from the last regime had reason to fear. “You should not believe the refugees who came to Thailand,” said Ieng Sary, deputy premier in charge of foreign affairs, in November 1975, while visiting Bangkok, “because these people have committed crimes.” He urged the refugees in Thailand to return to Cambodia, where they would be welcomed.66 In September 1977 Pol Pot said in Phnom Penh that “only the smallest possible number” out of the “1 or 2 percent” of Cambodians who opposed the revolution had been “eradicated.” Conceding some killings gave the KR a greater credibility than if they had denied atrocities outright, and many observers were taken in by these concessions.67

Another factor that blunted understanding of the evil of the regime was that many Cambodians died of starvation and malnutrition, which outsiders associated with “natural” economic and climatic forces. This probably helped obscure the human causes of the disaster. In addition, refugees who told horror stories were presumed to be affiliated with the old regime. International relief workers in Thailand were said to be politically motivated as well because many were funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development or were thought to be anti-Communist.68

Leading voices on the American left, a constituency that in other circumstances might have been the most prone to shame the U.S. government into at least denouncing the KR, ridiculed the early atrocity claims as conservative “mythmaking.” They pursued the speculative bloodbath debate that had preceded the KR victory with even greater ferocity. The directors of the antiwar Indochina Resource Center, George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter, released a study in September 1975 that challenged claims that the evacuation of Phnom Penh had been an “atrocity” causing famine. Instead they said it was a response to Cambodians’ “urgent and fundamental needs” and “it was carried out only after careful planning for provision of food, water, rest and medical care.” 69 The following year they published the widely read Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. Without ever having visited the country, they rejected atrocity reports. The city evacuations, they argued, would improve the welfare of Cambodians, whose livelihoods had been devastated by the Nixon years. They were convinced that American and European media, governments, and anti-Communists were colluding to exaggerate KR sins for Cold War propaganda purposes. This account was read widely at the State Department and received backing from Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, who, in an article in the Nation, “Distortions at Fourth Hand,” praised Hildebrand and Porter. As the title of their article indicates, Chomsky and Herman faulted reporters for their third- and fourth-hand sourcing.70

The motives of the skeptics varied. A few leftists were so eager to see an egalitarian band of Communist revolutionaries taking control of yet another Southeast Asian state that they paid little attention to reports of terror. But many who in fact cared about the welfare of Cambodians were relieved that the corrupt, abusive Lon Nol had been deposed. Most had learned to doubt any claim that emerged from a U.S. government source. But above all, politics and recent history aside, they possessed a natural, human incapacity to take their imaginations where the refugees demanded they go.

Within a decade and a half, human rights organizations would gather refugee testimony and shame governments that committed abuses, as well as the outside powers that ignored them. At the time of the Cambodian genocide, however, Amnesty International, the largest human rights organization in the world, was not yet oriented to respond forcefully. Founded in 1961 with a budget of $19,000, it had increased its annual expenditures to about $660,000. As a letter-writing organization best suited to getting political prisoners freed from jail, the organization’s reporting from the 1970s tended to focus on a small number of specific victims whose names were known; it had never before responded to systematic, large-scale slaughter like that alleged in Cambodia. The organization did not dispatch monitors to the Thai-Cambodian border but instead relied mainly upon tentative press reports. A September 1975 Amnesty report stated that “allegations of mass executions were impossible to substantiate.” Amnesty’s research department noted that a number of allegations were based on “flimsy evidence and second-hand accounts.” 71 The following year the organization’s annual report devoted a little over one page to Cambodia. It noted “allegations of large scale executions” but added that “few refugees seem to have actually witnessed executions.”72

An internal policy document sent in March 1977 from Amnesty’s London headquarters to national chapters explained the organization’s reticence. Amnesty was mistrustful of “conservative opinions” and refugee testimony alike. “Allegations made by refugees must be examined with care in view of their possible partiality and the fact that they often give only fragmentary information and have a tendency to generalize,” the document said.73 Of course, the dead had not lived to tell their tales, and the living, the refugees, could describe only the abuses they had suffered, which were often “lesser” crimes, or those that they had witnessed but could not substantiate.

Even when they had reliable evidence in hand, Amnesty officials operated very much like the committees the United Nations had established to monitor human rights: They avoided public shaming when possible and approached governments directly. Amnesty’s 1977 policy report described its tactics:“In view of the existing international attention and of the polemical aspects of the public debate on Cambodia,” it would be better to establish private contact with the KR than to embarrass them publicly.74 Each year the organization sent letters to the regime requesting further information on specific reports of torture and disappearances. When the Pol Pot regime failed to respond, Amnesty ritually included a complaint about its unresponsiveness in the following year’s annual report. Only in 1978, three years after the killing and starvation campaign had begun, did the organization finally accept refugee claims and seek avenues for more public shaming.

Other atrocity skeptics concentrated on the impossibility of resolving debates over the number of Cambodians killed. They insisted, accurately, that the estimates of dead and wounded were arbitrary. Ben Kiernan, a young Australian historian who later became a prominent critic of the Khmer Rouge, objected to the lack of “evidence to support anything like the figures quoted,” saying that “huge figures have been plucked out of the air for numbers of victims.”75 Journalists joined the numbers debate by noting shifts in estimates, sometimes in a self-satisfied tone. In the Washington Post Lewis Simons observed in July 1977 that the estimates of deaths had dropped dramatically. Once, he wrote, “it was popular to say that anywhere between 800,000 and 1.4 million Cambodians had been executed by vengeful Communist rulers,” but suddenly Western observers had begun “talking in terms of several hundred thousand deaths from all causes.”76 Observers of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979 did pass figures and anecdotes from one account to the next. And often these figures were unconfirmed, but circumstances also rendered them unconfirmable. Because Cambodia was completely inaccessible, analysts could give only their best guess of the scale of the violence, and those guesses tended to vary wildly.

With so much confusion about the precise nature of the KR reign, apathy became justified by what journalist William Shawcross later called “propaganda, the fear of propaganda and the excuse of propaganda.”77 Those who believed refugees argued that the sameness of their accounts revealed a pattern of abuses across Cambodia. Yet for those who wanted to turn away or who were unsure of the utility of turning toward Cambodia, this very sameness offered proof of scripting.

“This Is Not 1942”

Many came around once they had personal contact with the traumatized refugees. Charles Twining was a thirty-three-year-old foreign service officer who had served in Vietnam and—to the bemusement of his State Department colleagues—had spent 1974 diligently learning the Khmer language. In June 1975 he was posted to the U.S. embassy in Bangkok, and within a week of his arrival his new-found language skill proved all too useful. He was dispatched to the Thai-Cambodian border to interview refugees who were arriving exhausted, emaciated, and petrified. Twining initially could not bring himself to trust the stories he heard. “The refugees were telling tales that you could only describe as unbelievable,” he remembers. “I kept saying to myself, ‘ This can’t be possible in this day and age. This is not 1942. This is 1975.’ I really thought that those days, those acts, were behind us.”78 After his first trip Twining did not even file a report because he found the refugees’ recollections literally “inconceivable” and felt he would be laughed at back in Washington. But every time he took the four-hour car journey to the border, he found it harder to deny the reality of the atrocities. The Cambodians had heard the howls of their starving infants. They had watched KR cadres use plastic bags to suffocate Buddhist monks. They had seen their loved ones murdered by teenage warriors who mechanically delivered the blow of a hoe to the back of the neck.

Twining pointed to a small milk can and asked the refugees to indicate the amount of rice the Khmer Rouge fed them each day. They said that they had been given rice that would have filled about half of this palmsized implement. When Twining argued that they would not have been able to live on such portions, they agreed but told him that anybody who complained was dragged away to what the KR called Angkar Loeu. Angkar was the nameless and faceless “organization on high,” which prided itself on never erring and on having “as many eyes as a pineapple.”79 At first most Cambodians believed that those who disappeared were being taken to Angkar for reeducation or extra training and study. Despite the agony of daily life and the rumors of daily death, they had again hoped for the best. Often the truth became clear only when they stumbled upon a huge pile of bones in the forest. After encountering these concrete artifacts of evil, most accepted that a summons by Angkar meant certain death, a realization that was enough to cause only some to risk flight.

One refugee, Seath K. Teng, was only four years old when she was separated from her family. She later remembered fierce hunger pain as the KR forced four children to share one rice porridge bowl. “Whoever could eat the fastest got more to eat,” she recalled:

We worked seven days a week without a break. The only time we got off work was to see someone get killed, which served as an example for us…In the center of the meeting place was one woman who had both of her hands tied behind her. She was pregnant and her stomach bulged out. Before her stood a little boy who was about six years old and holding an ax. In his shrill voice he yelled for us to look at what he was going to do. He said that if we didn’t look, we would be the next to be killed. I guess we all looked, because the woman was the only one killed that day. The little boy was like a demon from hell. His eyes were red and he didn’t look human at all. He used the back of his ax and slammed it hard on the poor woman’s body until she dropped to the ground. He kept beating her until he was too tired to continue.80

By August 1975 Twining had heard enough of these stories to become a convert:

I remember there was one moment.I was in a place in Thailand called Chantha Buri, a province that borders the Cambodian town of Pailin. I was sitting in this little dark house on the border, and suddenly twenty or thirty Cambodians appeared like ghosts out of the forest. They told me stories of such hardship and horror that it just hit me. Somebody afterwards said to me, “you know they rehearsed their stories.” But these Cambodians had just arrived from weeks on the road. They were lean, tanned. They had been wearing the same clothes for days. They were smelly, if I dare say it. And the one thing I knew was that they were genuine. Genuine. From that point on, I believed…

After he was jolted into belief by the smell of the distraught survivors, Twining filtered future testimony through the prism of the Holocaust. “My mind wanted, needed, some way of framing the thing,” he recalls, “and the Holocaust was the closest thing I had. This sounded to me like extermination—you wipe out a whole class of people, anyone with glasses, anyone with a high school education, anyone who is Buddhist. I mean, the link was natural.” Although there were similarities between the Nazis and the KR, he and others at the border gradually assembled an understanding of the specifics of KR brutality. They learned that in the new Cambodia freedom had become undesirable, dissent intolerable, and joy invisible. All facets of life had been mandated by Angkar, which made the rules. By the end of 1975, those who had once known enough to fear but had hoped enough to deny had come to accept the contours of the hell that had befallen Cambodia.

Refugees told them:

 Citizens could not move. Travel passes were required even to cross town. Cities were evacuated at gunpoint.

 They could not feed themselves. In most areas the state supplied a tin or less of rice each day.

 They could not learn what they chose. Only KR tracts were permitted. Libraries were ravaged. And speaking foreign languages signaled “contamination” and earned many who dared to do so a death sentence.

 They could not reminisce. Memories of the past life were banned. Families were separated. Children were “reeducated” and induced to inform on parents who might be attempting to mask their “bourgeois” pasts. “Cambodia,” a colonial term, was replaced by “Democratic Kampuchea.”

 They could not flirt. Only Angkar could authorize sexual relationships. The pairings for weddings were announced en masse at the commune assemblies.

 They could not pray. Chapels and temples were pillaged. Devout Muslims were often forced to eat pork. Buddhist monks were defrocked, their pagodas converted into grain silos.

 They could not own private property. All money and property were abolished. The national bank was blown up. Radios, telephones televisions, cars, and books gathered in the central squares were burned.

 And they could not make contact with the outside world. Foreign embassies were closed; telephone, telegraph, and mail service suspended.

Work was prized to a deadly extent. Cambodians were sent to the countryside, where an average day involved planting from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m., 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., and then again from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Communist cadres transported annual harvests to central storage sites but refused to distribute the fruits of the harvests to those who had done the reaping. Health was superfluous to the national project, and starvation and disease quickly engulfed the country. Upon taking power, the Khmer Rouge terminated almost all foreign trade and rejected offers of humanitarian aid.

“Enemies” were eliminated. Pol Pot saw two sets of enemies—the external and the internal. External enemies opposed KR-style socialism; they included “imperialists” and “fascists” like the United States as well as “revisionists” and “hegemonists” like the Soviet Union and Vietnam. Internal enemies were those deemed disloyal.81 Early on the Khmer Rouge had instructed all military and civilian officials from the Lon Nol regime to gather at central meeting posts and had murdered them without exception. Another child, Savuth Penn, who was eleven years old when the evacuation was ordered, recalled:

They shipped my father and the rest of the military officers to a remote area northwest of the city…then they mass executed them, without any blindfolds, with machine guns, rifles, and grenades…My father was buried underneath all the dead bodies. Fortunately, only one bullet went through his arm and two bullets stuck in his skull. The bullets that stuck in his skull lost momentum after passing through the other bodies. My father stayed motionless underneath the dead bodies until dark, then he tried to walk to his hometown during the night…The Khmer Rouge threatened that if anyone was hiding the enemy, the whole family would be executed. My father’s relatives were very nervous. They tried to find a solution for my family. They discussed either poisoning my father, hiding him underground, or giving us an ox cart to try to get to Thailand…The final solution was reached by my father’s brother-in-law. He informed the Khmer Rouge soldiers where my father was…A couple of soldiers climbed up with their flashlights and found him hiding in the corner of our cabin…The soldiers then placed my father in the middle of the rice field, pointed flashlights, and shot him.82

This was the kind of killing that journalists and U.S. embassy officials in Phnom Penh had expected—political revenge against those the Khmer Rouge called the traitors. What was unexpected was the single-mindedness with which the regime turned upon ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese, Muslim Chams, and Buddhist monks, grouping them all traitors. Xenophobia was not new in Cambodia; the Vietnamese, Chinese, and (non-Khmer) Cham had long been discriminated against. But it was Pol Pot who set out to destroy these groups entirely. Buddhist monks were an unexpected target, as Buddhism had been the official state religion and the “soul” of Cambodia. Yet the KR branded it “reactionary.” The revolutionaries prohibited all religious practice, burned monks’ libraries, and destroyed temples, turning some into prisons and killing sites. Monks who refused to disrobe were executed.

More stunning still in its breadth, as Twining had gathered at the border, the Khmer Rouge were wiping out “class enemies,” which meant all “intellectuals,” or those who had completed seventh grade. Paranoid about the trustworthiness of even the devout radicals, the KR also began targeting their own supporters, killing anybody suspected of even momentary disloyalty. Given the misery in which Cambodians were living at the time, this covered almost everyone. As a witness against Pol Pot later testified, Brother Number One (as Pol Pot was known) saw “enemies surrounding, enemies in front, enemies behind, enemies to the north, enemies to the south, enemies to the west, enemies to the east, enemies in all eight directions, enemies coming from all nine directions, closing in, leaving no space for breath.”83 Citizens lived in daily fear of chap teuv, or what people in Latin America call being “disappeared.” Bullets were too precious and had to be spared; the handles of farming implements were preferred.

The key ideological premise that lay behind the KR revolution was that “to keep you is no gain; to kill you is no loss.”84 Liberal societies preach a commitment to individual liberty embodied in the mantra, “Better ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted.” Khmer Rouge revolutionary society was predicated on the irrelevance of the individual. The KR even propagated the adage, “It is better to arrest ten people by mistake than to let one guilty person go free.”85 It was far more forgivable to kill ten innocent men than to leave one guilty man alive, even if he was “guilty” simply of being less than overjoyed by the terms of service to Angkar.

Soon after the fall of Phnom Penh, Henry Kamm of the New York Times visited three refugee camps at the Thai border, none of which was in contact with the others. He wrote a long piece in July 1975, which the paper accompanied with an editorial that compared the Khmer Rouge practices to the “Soviet extermination of kulaks or…the Gulag Archipelago.”86 In February 1976 the Post’s David Greenway filed a front-page story describing the harsh conditions. “For Westerners to interpret what is going on is like the proverb of the blind men trying to describe an elephant,” Greenway wrote. “Skepticism about atrocity stories is necessary especially when talking to refugees who tend to paint as black a picture as they can, but too many told the same stories in too much detail to doubt that, at least in some areas, reprisals occurred.”87 Collectively, although all were slow to believe and none gave the terror the attention it deserved, diplomats, nongovernmental workers, and journalists did gather ghastly accounts of death marches, starvation, and disease in 1975 and 1976. The media did not lead with these reports, and the politicians did not respond to them, but the stories did appear.

The most detailed and eventually the most influential examination of KR brutality was prepared by the French priest François Ponchaud. Ponchaud, a Khmer speaker, had lived in Cambodia for ten years before he was evacuated from the French embassy in early May 1975. He debriefed refugees at the Thai border and then later in Paris, and he translated Cambodian radio reports. In February 1976, less than a year after the Khmer Rouge seized power, Le Monde published his findings, which said some 800,000 had been killed since April 1975.88 For Elizabeth Becker, then a metro reporter in Washington, this was enough. “As soon as his stories came out, I believed,”she recalls. “You have to know your shepherds. In Cambodia the French clerics had lived the Khmer life, not the foreigners’ life. It took Ponchaud to wake the world up.” Soon thereafter, a former KR official came forward in Paris claiming to have helped execute some 5,000 people by pickax. He estimated that 600,000 had already been killed.89 In April 1976, a year into the Khmer Rouge reign, Time ran a story, soon followed by other accounts, that included graphic drawings of the executions and described Cambodia as the “Indochinese Gulag Archipelago.” “A year after the takeover, Cambodia is still cocooned in silence—a silence, it is becoming increasingly clear, of the grave,” Time wrote. “There is now little doubt that the Cambodian government is one of the most brutal, backward, and xenophobic regimes in the world.”90