Distant Voices (55 page)

Thailand is run by a paddle wheel of beribboned generals. Although untested in battle (apart from ‘battles' against unarmed students) they have made a multi-million-dollar ‘killing' out of the international aid programme for Cambodian refugees. This is an extension of the graft that consumes much of the Thai economy, whose staples are child labour and tourism based on prostitution. For many years this subject was taboo. For apologetic Western eyes – investors, bankers and journalists – its vast underbelly did not exist; Thailand was ‘booming', an ‘economic tiger' and a ‘model' for the rest of Asia.

Cambodia Year Ten
was shown in thirty-six countries in 1989. The Swedish foreign minister phoned me to say that such was the public response in Sweden that his Government would change its stance at the forthcoming vote on Cambodia at the United Nations. ‘We shall no longer support the seating of the coalition,' he said. (Sweden abstained.) The day after the film was shown in Australia, the Hawke Government abandoned its support for a direct Khmer Rouge role in a future Cambodian government and announced an Australian plan to have the United Nations temporarily administer Cambodia and hold elections. This became the United Nations ‘peace plan'.
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In Britain the Government told Parliament that British diplomats would visit Cambodia for the first time in fifteen years and promised £250,000 in humanitarian aid. This significant movement in Western policy-making came as historic changes were taking place in the communist world. In September 1989 the Vietnamese withdrew unconditionally from Cambodia.

The revelation of Britain's training of Pol Pot's allies caused an uproar in Parliament and the Government's embarrassment was acute. Copies of a parliamentary statement by Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd were sent to people who wrote to the prime minister or to their MP. ‘We have never given', it said, ‘and will never give support of any kind to the Khmer Rouge.'
²⁹
This was false. From 1979 to 1982 the British Government voted in the United Nations for Pol Pot's defunct regime to occupy Cambodia's seat. Moreover, Britain voted with the Khmer Rouge in the agencies of the UN, and not once did it challenge the credentials of Pol Pot's representative.

The Hurd statement failed to satisfy a great many people and caused one of those curious disturbances in the House of Commons when Tory MPs have to deal with postbags overflowing with letters on a subject they wish would go away. Several debates on Cambodia ensued, minister after minister denied that Britain was indirectly backing the Khmer Rouge – until William Waldegrave, then a Foreign Office minister, made a slip and gave what the opposition interpreted as a ‘tacit admission' that the SAS were indeed in Cambodia.
³⁰

Labour MPs now demanded the government withdraw the SAS, and threatened to identify the Secret Intelligence Service (M16) official who ran the British operation from the embassy in Bangkok. He was assigned to Thailand around the time that Derek Tonkin was appointed ambassador.

As a result of publicity, and the parliamentary exposure, the SAS operation was hurriedly invested with greater secrecy or, as they say in Whitehall, given ‘total deniability'. The official at the embassy was withdrawn (he was a close friend and tennis partner of Tonkin) and the training was ‘privatised'; that is, the instructors were no longer to be serving personnel. In operational terms that made no difference whatsoever, as SAS personnel normally ‘disappear' from army records whenever they go on secret missions. What was important was that the Government could now deny that British servicemen were involved. ‘Britain', announced
Foreign Office minister Tim Sainsbury, ‘does not give military aid
in any form
to the Cambodian factions'.
³¹
‘I confirm', Margaret Thatcher wrote to Neil Kinnock, ‘that there is no British Government involvement of any kind in training, equipping or co-operating with Khmer Rouge forces
or those allied to them
.'
³²
(My italics.) Parliament and the British people were misled, repeatedly.

There is a curiously fervent edge to the expression of Britain's Cambodia policy. This is perhaps surprising as Cambodia belongs to a part of the world that the empire did not reach. Much of this passion flowed from the civil servant responsible, David Colvin, the long-serving head of the South-east Asia Department at the Foreign Office. Until his transfer in late 1991 Colvin was in complete command, writing and overseeing pronouncements of the secretary of state, as well as keeping a close eye on the Bertie Wooster figures who come and go as Foreign Office ministers – those like Lord Brabazon and his successor, the Earl of Caithness, whose signatures appear on Commons written replies and standard fob-off letters sent to the public.

Colvin served at the British embassy in Thailand during the American war in Vietnam. He was strongly pro-Washington and could be observed at public meetings on Cambodia, displaying his impatience with speakers who opposed British policy. Once, during a Commons debate, he made his objections from the public gallery so obvious that he was identified by Chris Mullin, MP.
³³
His scribbled handwriting – ‘rubbish' and ‘fatuous' – appears on the pages of a study by the Cambodia specialist, Raoul Jennar, who has argued against the inclusion of the Khmer Rouge in the peace process.
³⁴
In the margin next to where Jennar warns against giving advantage to Pol Pot, Colvin has scrawled that Jennar ‘must be a socialist'.
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Colvin made clear he wanted the Khmer Rouge included.
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‘When I met Mr Colvin,' the former foreign policy adviser to the Thai prime minister, Kraisak Choonhaven, told me, ‘I informed him that supporting the so-called non-communists in the coalition was the same as
supporting Pol Pot. I got the distinct impression he did not believe this.'
³⁷

For most of 1990 David Munro and I – together with Simon O'Dwyer-Russell of the
Sunday Telegraph
– pursued an investigation into Western support for the Khmer Rouge in Europe, the United States and South-east Asia. By the summer we believed we had accumulated sound evidence that the SAS was directly training the Khmer Rouge. Our sources were in the Ministry of Defence and in ‘R' (reserve) Squadron of the SAS. One of them, himself a former SAS trainer in Thailand, told us,

We first went to Thailand in 1984. Since then we have worked in teams of four and eight and have been attached to the Thai Army. The Yanks [Special Forces] and us worked together; we're close like brothers. We trained the Khmer Rouge in a lot of technical stuff – a lot about mines. We used mines that came originally from Royal Ordnance in Britain, which we got by way of Egypt, with markings changed. They are the latest; one type goes up in a rocket and comes down on a parachute and hangs in the bushes until someone brushes it. Then it can blow their head off, or an arm. We trained them in Mark 5 rocket launchers and all sorts of weapons. We even gave them psychological training. At first they wanted to go into the villages and just chop people up. We told them how to go easy . . .

Some of us went up to 100 miles inside Cambodia with them on missions. There are about 250 of us on the border at any one time and a lot of those would change sides given half the chance. That's how pissed off we are. We hate being mixed up with Pol Pot. I tell you: we are soldiers, not child murderers. It costs half a million quid to train one of us. Putting us in the service of a lunatic like Pol Pot makes no sense. There is no insurgency in Cambodia that threatens us.

O'Dwyer-Russell interviewed two SAS trainers whose
military background he knew well. They described in detail how they had taught Khmer Rouge troops mine-laying and mines technology. None could be interviewed on film; the Official Secrets Act – ‘reformed' by Douglas Hurd when he was home secretary – prevented them from speaking publicly and Central Television from broadcasting their words. In any case, the SAS is a small, tight regiment and dissenters are not welcomed. O'Dwyer-Russell proposed that he speak on behalf of the men.

I didn't have to remind him that, as a senior correspondent of a high Tory newspaper, he was risking not only his relationship with Whitehall, upon which his present job largely depended, but also his career. ‘That's not the point,' he said curtly, unravelling to his full six feet six and a half inches. ‘The point is, this whole thing has gone too damn far. We're training bloody mass murderers. And that's not what the British Army should be about. And those of us who know should speak out,
regardless
!'

Simon O'Dwyer-Russell appeared to have been carved out of the British establishment. He wore a navy-blue blazer, usually a bright polka-dot silk tie with glittering tie-pin and highly polished size-15 brogues, custom made. His voice boomed. He enjoyed the social life around hunting, while disapproving of the sport itself. He came from a service family – his father was a senior RAF officer and his brother a Harrier pilot – and he went to King's College, London, where he took a degree in war studies.

Although his own military career was limited to the Territorials, Simon had many close friends in the elite regiments, and rode regularly in Hyde Park on horses of the Household Cavalry. He had especially strong personal and family contacts in the SAS. A senior colleague on the
Sunday Telegraph
wrote that he had achieved ‘unrivalled access to both the Armed Forces and the security services at all levels', which enabled him to produce ‘a series of notable exclusives' along with ‘apoplexy at the Ministry of Defence'.
³⁸

During 1989 and 1990 David Munro and I got to know Simon well and to regard him as a maverick whose
professional honesty was matched by a sense of moral outrage, and courage. He had three conditions for appearing in our film. He would need the approval of his principal informants, as he would be speaking for them and there was a risk that they might be identified by their association with him. He would require the permission of his editor, Trevor Grove; and his paper should publish the story first on the Sunday prior to transmission. David and I agreed. On the morning after meeting Grove, he phoned to say that he had been given the go-ahead.

The following is part of the interview I conducted with Simon, which was broadcast in David's and my film
Cambodia: The Betrayal
on October 9, 1990. He used ‘my understanding' as the words agreed with his informants in the Ministry of Defence.

JP: ‘What is the nature of British assistance to the Khmer Rouge now?'

SO-R: ‘Well my understanding is that following the row that erupted last autumn as a result of partly your programme, and partly because of my own newspaper, the government put the word out that support from that date onward was to be very much more covert in its nature, so that it was passed very clearly to being an M16 operation. The result of that has been that there are a number of former SAS people who are now out of the service and who are private individuals but that are working to some form of contract to provide training and mines technology to the Khmer Rouge.'

JP: ‘What exactly do you mean by mines technology?'

SO-R: ‘One can lay anti-personnel and off-route mines which can be detonated automatically by the sound of people moving along the track. There are an increasing number of anti-personnel mines which fire thousands of pellets into the air and once they bed themselves in people's bodies are incredibly difficult to find, for doctors working with fairly rudimentary field equipment.'

JP: ‘So these are the kind of mines that are being supplied by the British?'

SO-R: ‘My understanding is that the British are still involved in supplying those sorts of mines, yes.'

JP: ‘Are they British-made mines?'

SO-R: ‘The mines themselves need not necessarily be British because there are a series of licensing agreements that obviously exist worldwide, bringing with it the element of deniability . . . We are not laying mines with “Made in the UK” on them.'

The British Government's response was swift. In the
Independent
of October 12, a front-page headline said, ‘Hurd rejects Pilger's Cambodia allegations'. Inside, half a page was devoted to a long riposte under Hurd's name, an unusual step for a foreign secretary. ‘The brutality and murder of the Pol Pot regime shocked the world,' wrote Hurd. ‘The British Government took the lead in denouncing it at the UN.'

In fact, the opposite was true. The government of which Hurd was a foreign office minister took the lead in
supporting
Pol Pot's claim on Cambodia's seat at the United Nations. ‘Interestingly enough,' wrote Hurd, ‘some of those who are now loudest in denouncing the Khmer Rouge, at the time acted as their apologists.'

Nothing was offered to substantiate this slur. My stated admiration for Noam Chomsky was cited and Chomsky was also smeared as one who had ‘condemned reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities as Western, anti-communist, propaganda'. Considering its baselessness, this was a remarkable claim for a serving foreign secretary to make and one which reflected the government's anxiety that the cover on its most secret military adventure had been lifted. In a letter to the
Independent
on October 22, Chomsky refuted Hurd's smear with reference to his own condemnation of the Khmer Rouge for ‘major atrocities and oppression' and ‘a grisly record of barbarity'.
³⁹

The rest of Hurd's article was a blanket denial of any British link with the Khmer Rouge. He dismissed O'Dwyer-Russell's disclosures as ‘ruminations', and praised the Government's ‘commitment' to bringing peace to Cambodia. He also lauded the ‘effectiveness' of British ‘humanitarian' aid to Cambodia: an astonishing remark.

The day after the Hurd article appeared a dismayed senior official of the Overseas Development Ministry disclosed that a request for British funding specifically for the repair of a water filtration plant in Cambodia had been turned down ‘on ministerial direction' because it was regarded as ‘developing aid' that might assist Phnom Penh.
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Cambodia has one of the highest death rates in the world from preventable water-borne diseases.