zenpundit.com

It was the “left” wing, to be precise communist, governments of Vietnam

and China that armed, trained and supported the rise to power of the

Khmers Rouges. The “left” government of Vietnam continued to support the

Khmers Rouges politically until 1977 and the “left” Chinese and North

Koreans supported them politically, economically and materially until

1993. The radical left in academia supported Pol Pot during most of his

time in power. The political “right” in the democratic west gave the

most limited and qualified political support, in the form of supporting

continued UN recognition to the Khmers Rouges guerrilla movement only

after it lost power, and even then it did so in order not to restore the

Khmers Rouges to power, but to find a way to reverse the Vietnamese

communist occupation, which China was determined to do regardless of

western policy, and to facilitate a noncommunist alternative for

Cambodia. No western government gave military aid to the Khmers Rouges.

One cannot base one’s knowledge of recent Cambodian history, as Mr

Stokes seems to have done, upon the writings of a notoriously unreliable

journalist named John Pilger (most of his print journalism is for the

English tabloid Daily Mirror newspaper). To get a sense of Pilger’s

credibility, one should recall that he recently described the United

States under George Bush as being like Nazi Germany. This is par for the

course. Pilger is an agit prop specialist, not a balanced analyst nor an

objective correspondent.

To get a sense of Pilger’s intellectual deceitfulness, in the article

cited Pilger refers to UN food supplies to the Khmers Rouges. This was

food, not weapons. It was authorised by the UN, not the “right.” KR

commanders ran the camps, and their soldiers benefited from the food.

But mostly civilians lived in the camps. Similarly UN food supplies went

to the larger refugee camps controlled by the noncommunist resistance.

It was all humanitarian aid. The UN responsibility was feeding

civilians, who would otherwise have starved, even if soldiers who

controlled them also were fed.

To make his case by sleight of hand, Pilger lumps together the

noncommunist resistance with the Khmers Rouges, despite their

organisational separation. There was a political alliance against the

Vietnamese occupation regime from 1982 on, imposed upon them by ASEAN to

enable ASEAN and others to help the noncommunists, because the UN in the

pre-Yugoslavia era of the “primacy of national sovereignty,” had

recognized the KR regime overthrown by Vietnam’s invasion as the

legitimate rulers of Cambodia, and an unsavory coalition with them was

the only way to give the noncommunists a role in Cambodia’s future.

Although the KR and the noncommunist resistance did occasionally

cooperate in battles against the Vietnamese and the regime that Hanoi

had installed, the noncommunists did not take military orders from the

Khmer Rouges, and mostly operated separately. Sometimes the KR attacked

the noncommunists, despite their political alliance. There was no

functioning common high command. Later, when the UN peace plan was put

into practice in 1992, the noncommunists completely separated from the

KR, and ran in the 1993 elections that the KR boycotted.

I have studied the international and domestic politics of Cambodia for

two decades, and as a producer-correspondent for CBS News in 1983 spent

several weeks with a cameraman in the jungle guerrilla strongholds of

the Khmers Rouges and the noncommunist resistance. I can state quite

categorically that all of the supply of arms to the Khmers Rouges came

from China, not from Britain or the United States. John Pilger is

telling falsehoods when he claims the contrary. The noncommunist

resistance received most of its arms overtly from the ASEAN countries,

some from China, and perhaps some assistance covertly from the CIA,

though I cannot be sure of the latter. The USA was backing the

noncommunist resistance (NCR) to win power in Cambodia through a

political settlement, and that was the reason it supported the tactical

political alliance the noncommunists had undertaken with the Khmers

Rouges.

For the record, I was a strong public advocate of the west, especially

the United States, arming the NCR, and was the only western academic to

publicly do so (first in the New York Times in December 1982 and then

most fully in The Atlantic Monthly January 1985, and also in various

other newspaper articles). In the 1980s I publicly berated the Reagan

Administration, for not doing more. From 1989 I interacted informally

with the then powerful and highly respected US Democratic Congressman

Stephen Solarz to achieve the UN mandate to take over and run an

election in Cambodia. (Solarz, it should be noted, though sneeringly

dismissed by Pilger as a “cold warrior,” is a liberal Democrat who holds

the high moral ground on Cambodia. He had held the first hearings on the

Khmers Rouges holocaust in May 1977, at a time when Pilger’s moralizing

tabloid journalism never expressed a moment’s concern for the Cambodian

victims of Pol Pot. At that forum Solarz also denounced the Institute

for Policy Studies witness Gareth Porter for his pro-KR testimony).

That the limited western support for the noncommunist resistance was

morally justified can be seen in the outcome of the UN sponsored 1993

elections in Cambodia. Despite the fact that the playing field was

tilted against the noncommunist parties (the ruling communist faction,

led by Hun Sen, carried out large scale intimidation, including murder,

of its opponents), the noncommunists won a majority of the vote.

Tragically the UN peacekeepers did not stand by the election outcome,

and allowed the losers (Hun Sen’s ruling faction) to be given a role in

the government after they threatened a civil war. How and why that

happened is another long and sad story.

Subsequently the Hun Sen regime, led by former Khmers Rouges commissars

launched a full scale coup d’etat in 1997, and welcomed the vast

majority of surviving Khmers Rouges back into Cambodian life, giving

some of the mass murderers posts in the Cambodian armed forces, and

engaging in lucrative business deals with others. Little wonder that Hun

Sen has opposed a full scale international tribunal to try and punish

the Khmers Rouges for crimes against humanity.

No western government ever endorsed the Khmers Rouges while they were in

power, nor did any western government, “right” or “left,” want them to

return to power. However a number of “left” western academics did

endorse the Khmers Rouges regime while it was in power, and either

denied the numerous published refugee and journalists reports of massive

atrocities by the regime, or else claimed that these atrocities were not

the fault of the central authorities but rather spontaneous expressions

of anger by poor peasants. Most notably the Americans Gareth Porter,

George Hildebrand, George McT. Kahin, and Michael Vickery, the

Englishman Malcolm Caldwell, the Frenchman Serge Thion (who also denied

the Nazi Holocaust, and was recently fired from his tenured academic

posting in Paris) and Thion’s sometime coauthor, the Australian Ben

Kiernan. Though all of these academic authors eventually ceased

supporting Pol Pot’s communist regime — but only after the KR split

with Hanoi became open in 1978 — they never apologised for misleading

the academic community and their own societies more generally about the

Cambodian holocaust, nor explained how they could have been responsible

for such bad scholarship. Perhaps they could use the forum of H-Diplo to

do so now.

I have documented most of the charges made in the last paragraph above,

in my article “Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and Cornell,” published in The

National Interest, Summer 1989, and in “The Wrong Man to Investigate

Cambodia,” published in The Wall Street Journal, April 17, 1995. Full

citations are available there.