The Foreign Policy Institute<\/a>. I can say I learned some things from it while admiring the comprehensively thorough rejection of the poster’s argument. Here it is in it’s entirety:<\/p>\nSome myths about Indochina die hard, even in academia. Doug Stokes is
\n
completely wrong about “the right” (i.e. the British and US governments
\n
of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan) supporting Pol Pot more than
\n
“the left.”<\/p>\n
It was the “left” wing, to be precise communist, governments of Vietnam
\n
and China that armed, trained and supported the rise to power of the
\n
Khmers Rouges. The “left” government of Vietnam continued to support the
\n
Khmers Rouges politically until 1977 and the “left” Chinese and North
\n
Koreans supported them politically, economically and materially until
\n
1993. The radical left in academia supported Pol Pot during most of his
\n
time in power. The political “right” in the democratic west gave the
\n
most limited and qualified political support, in the form of supporting
\n
continued UN recognition to the Khmers Rouges guerrilla movement only
\n
after it lost power, and even then it did so in order not to restore the
\n
Khmers Rouges to power, but to find a way to reverse the Vietnamese
\n
communist occupation, which China was determined to do regardless of
\n
western policy, and to facilitate a noncommunist alternative for
\n
Cambodia. No western government gave military aid to the Khmers Rouges.<\/p>\n
One cannot base one’s knowledge of recent Cambodian history, as Mr
\n
Stokes seems to have done, upon the writings of a notoriously unreliable
\n
journalist named John Pilger (most of his print journalism is for the
\n
English tabloid Daily Mirror newspaper). To get a sense of Pilger’s
\n
credibility, one should recall that he recently described the United
\n
States under George Bush as being like Nazi Germany. This is par for the
\n
course. Pilger is an agit prop specialist, not a balanced analyst nor an
\n
objective correspondent.<\/p>\n
To get a sense of Pilger’s intellectual deceitfulness, in the article
\n
cited Pilger refers to UN food supplies to the Khmers Rouges. This was
\n
food, not weapons. It was authorised by the UN, not the “right.” KR
\n
commanders ran the camps, and their soldiers benefited from the food.
\n
But mostly civilians lived in the camps. Similarly UN food supplies went
\n
to the larger refugee camps controlled by the noncommunist resistance.
\n
It was all humanitarian aid. The UN responsibility was feeding
\n
civilians, who would otherwise have starved, even if soldiers who
\n
controlled them also were fed.<\/p>\n
To make his case by sleight of hand, Pilger lumps together the
\n
noncommunist resistance with the Khmers Rouges, despite their
\n
organisational separation. There was a political alliance against the
\n
Vietnamese occupation regime from 1982 on, imposed upon them by ASEAN to
\n
enable ASEAN and others to help the noncommunists, because the UN in the
\n
pre-Yugoslavia era of the “primacy of national sovereignty,” had
\n
recognized the KR regime overthrown by Vietnam’s invasion as the
\n
legitimate rulers of Cambodia, and an unsavory coalition with them was
\n
the only way to give the noncommunists a role in Cambodia’s future.
\n
Although the KR and the noncommunist resistance did occasionally
\n
cooperate in battles against the Vietnamese and the regime that Hanoi
\n
had installed, the noncommunists did not take military orders from the
\n
Khmer Rouges, and mostly operated separately. Sometimes the KR attacked
\n
the noncommunists, despite their political alliance. There was no
\n
functioning common high command. Later, when the UN peace plan was put
\n
into practice in 1992, the noncommunists completely separated from the
\n
KR, and ran in the 1993 elections that the KR boycotted.<\/p>\n
I have studied the international and domestic politics of Cambodia for
\n
two decades, and as a producer-correspondent for CBS News in 1983 spent
\n
several weeks with a cameraman in the jungle guerrilla strongholds of
\n
the Khmers Rouges and the noncommunist resistance. I can state quite
\n
categorically that all of the supply of arms to the Khmers Rouges came
\n
from China, not from Britain or the United States. John Pilger is
\n
telling falsehoods when he claims the contrary. The noncommunist
\n
resistance received most of its arms overtly from the ASEAN countries,
\n
some from China, and perhaps some assistance covertly from the CIA,
\n
though I cannot be sure of the latter. The USA was backing the
\n
noncommunist resistance (NCR) to win power in Cambodia through a
\n
political settlement, and that was the reason it supported the tactical
\n
political alliance the noncommunists had undertaken with the Khmers
\n
Rouges.<\/p>\n
For the record, I was a strong public advocate of the west, especially
\n
the United States, arming the NCR, and was the only western academic to
\n
publicly do so (first in the New York Times in December 1982 and then
\n
most fully in The Atlantic Monthly January 1985, and also in various
\n
other newspaper articles). In the 1980s I publicly berated the Reagan
\n
Administration, for not doing more. From 1989 I interacted informally
\n
with the then powerful and highly respected US Democratic Congressman
\n
Stephen Solarz to achieve the UN mandate to take over and run an
\n
election in Cambodia. (Solarz, it should be noted, though sneeringly
\n
dismissed by Pilger as a “cold warrior,” is a liberal Democrat who holds
\n
the high moral ground on Cambodia. He had held the first hearings on the
\n
Khmers Rouges holocaust in May 1977, at a time when Pilger’s moralizing
\n
tabloid journalism never expressed a moment’s concern for the Cambodian
\n
victims of Pol Pot. At that forum Solarz also denounced the Institute
\n
for Policy Studies witness Gareth Porter for his pro-KR testimony).<\/p>\n
That the limited western support for the noncommunist resistance was
\n
morally justified can be seen in the outcome of the UN sponsored 1993
\n
elections in Cambodia. Despite the fact that the playing field was
\n
tilted against the noncommunist parties (the ruling communist faction,
\n
led by Hun Sen, carried out large scale intimidation, including murder,
\n
of its opponents), the noncommunists won a majority of the vote.
\n
Tragically the UN peacekeepers did not stand by the election outcome,
\n
and allowed the losers (Hun Sen’s ruling faction) to be given a role in
\n
the government after they threatened a civil war. How and why that
\n
happened is another long and sad story.<\/p>\n
Subsequently the Hun Sen regime, led by former Khmers Rouges commissars
\n
launched a full scale coup d’etat in 1997, and welcomed the vast
\n
majority of surviving Khmers Rouges back into Cambodian life, giving
\n
some of the mass murderers posts in the Cambodian armed forces, and
\n
engaging in lucrative business deals with others. Little wonder that Hun
\n
Sen has opposed a full scale international tribunal to try and punish
\n
the Khmers Rouges for crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n
No western government ever endorsed the Khmers Rouges while they were in
\n
power, nor did any western government, “right” or “left,” want them to
\n
return to power. However a number of “left” western academics did
\n
endorse the Khmers Rouges regime while it was in power, and either
\n
denied the numerous published refugee and journalists reports of massive
\n
atrocities by the regime, or else claimed that these atrocities were not
\n
the fault of the central authorities but rather spontaneous expressions
\n
of anger by poor peasants. Most notably the Americans Gareth Porter,
\n
George Hildebrand, George McT. Kahin, and Michael Vickery, the
\n
Englishman Malcolm Caldwell, the Frenchman Serge Thion (who also denied
\n
the Nazi Holocaust, and was recently fired from his tenured academic
\n
posting in Paris) and Thion’s sometime coauthor, the Australian Ben
\n
Kiernan. Though all of these academic authors eventually ceased
\n
supporting Pol Pot’s communist regime — but only after the KR split
\n
with Hanoi became open in 1978 — they never apologised for misleading
\n
the academic community and their own societies more generally about the
\n
Cambodian holocaust, nor explained how they could have been responsible
\n
for such bad scholarship. Perhaps they could use the forum of H-Diplo to
\n
do so now.<\/p>\n
I have documented most of the charges made in the last paragraph above,
\n
in my article “Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and Cornell,” published in The
\n
National Interest, Summer 1989, and in “The Wrong Man to Investigate
\n
Cambodia,” published in The Wall Street Journal, April 17, 1995. Full
\n
citations are available there.<\/p>\n
Stephen J. Morris.
\n
Fellow.
\n
The Foreign Policy Institute.
\n
SAIS
\n
Johns Hopkins University.
\n
Washington DC<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
DEMOLISHING THE OLD CANARD OF ” MORAL EQUIVALENCE “ It is often the case that when two parties are in a dispute a temptation arises on the part of observers to resolve the question in their own minds by blaming both sides equally. Generally, this temptation is strongest when judging the merits of the argument […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}