Distant Voices (60 page)

It is difficult to imagine a
New York Times
headline: ‘Hitler Brutal, Yes, But No Mass Murderer'. Inserting ‘Pol Pot' for ‘Hitler', this announced a major article which dismissed Pol Pot as ‘a bit paranoid', and claimed there was ‘no genocide'.
¹²³
(The author, Richard Dudman, had earlier credited the Khmer Rouge with ‘one of the world's great housing programmes'.
¹²⁴
) Just prior to publication of this, two Cambodia specialists, Roger Normand and Ben Kiernan, separately offered the
New York Times
articles that spelt out Pol Pot's genocidal past and plans for the future. These were rejected.
¹²⁵
The
Nation
was the only American journal to accept Normand's landmark exposé of Pol Pot's secret speeches, which made mockery of Washington's insistence that the Khmer Rouge could be included in the ‘peace process'.
¹²⁶

In Britain, the rehabilitation was similar. In June 1990, the
Independent
published a major report by its South-east Asia correspondent, Terry McCarthy, headlined: ‘Whatever the crimes committed by Pol Pot's men, they are on the road to power. The West must stop moralising and learn to deal with
them.'
¹²⁷
McCarthy called on the West to ‘reach out' to the Khmer Rouge. The ‘genocide issue', as he put it, had been ‘exploited to the full'. The point was, the Khmer Rouge had changed. They were now ‘respected' for their ‘discipline' and ‘honesty' and ‘admired' for having ‘qualities that most spheres of Cambodian society lack'. Moreover, they had ‘considerable support' in the countryside because ‘many' peasants ‘do not have particularly bad memories' of Pol Pot. He offered no real evidence of this ‘support' among a rural population of which 15 per cent had perished during the Pol Pot years. He advocated increased aid to the Khmer Rouge to ‘entice them back into the real world of human politics'. It is time, he wrote, ‘to face up to the fact that the Khmer Rouge embodies some deeply entrenched traits of the Cambodian people . . .'
¹²⁸

These mysterious ‘traits' became a popular theme in the revised explanation for Cambodia's suffering. Forget the actions of Pol Pot, Washington and Beijing; the ordinary people of Cambodia had allowed these horrors to happen because that was the way they are. According to Michael Fathers in the
Independent
, ‘Cambodians are a neurotic people with an intense persecution complex . . .'
¹²⁹

Meanwhile, reported
The Times,
Pol Pot had ordered the Khmer Rouge ‘to protect the country's wildlife'. Cambodians were ‘not to poach birds and animals, and to refrain from killing them for any reason' because they were ‘an important part of Cambodia's heritage'. And the source for this nonsense? ‘Western intelligence sources' no less, inviting us to believe that Pol Pot had ordered his most trusted general to ‘sentence' anyone found poaching rare birds. This general, according to the same disinformation, was himself ‘hot on ecology issues and protection of endangered species'. And who might this ‘green' Khmer Rouge general be? He was the notorious Mok, who between 1975 and 1979 was credited with the deaths of thousands of members of the human species. In Cambodia today he is still known as ‘The Butcher', though Western journalists prefer to call him ‘Ta Mok'.
Ta
gives him the affectionate sobriquet of ‘Grandfather'.
¹³⁰

In the same spirit,
The Times
announced: ‘Khmer Rouge asks for another chance.' (The temptation, again, is to conjure the headline: ‘Nazis ask for another chance.') The redemption seeker in this case was Mok's boss, Son Sen, who is Pol Pot's defence minister. He explained to
The Times
that he ‘did not deny the past [but] we have to think about the present and the future'.
¹³¹
Son Sen stands accused of the murder of 30,000 Vietnamese villagers in 1977. Under his authority, Tuol Sleng extermination centre in Phnom Penh tortured and murdered at least 20,000 people and, like the Gestapo, recorded all details.
¹³²

On November 28, 1991, the leader writer of the
Independent
proffered the following memorable advice to the people of Cambodia: ‘The promise of a return to respectability of the Khmer Rouge is the wormwood baked into the cake. It makes it hard to swallow for those who will always be haunted by the horrors of that regime. If Cambodia is to find peace, then swallowed it must be,
and in its entirety
.' (My italics.)

Few dissenting voices were heard above this. In Britain, one of the most informed and courageous voices belonged to Oxfam, which in 1979 defied Government pressure and went to help stricken Cambodia. That was the year Margaret Thatcher came to power and one of her first acts as prime minister was to join the American boycott of Vietnam and suspend all food aid there, specifically powdered milk for Vietnamese children. She gave Vietnam's ‘invasion' of Cambodia as the reason.

In June 1979 representatives of the main British voluntary agencies were called to the Foreign Office, where they were told that the British boycott of Vietnam now applied to Cambodia. They were warned that the Vietnamese were ‘obstructing' aid and that if they attempted to fly into Phnom Penh, they might be fired upon. This was official deception on a grand scale, setting the tone for British policy to the present day.

At the meeting was Jim Howard, an engineer and Oxfam's senior ‘fireman', a veteran of disaster relief in Biafra, India,
the Sahel, Latin America and Asia. Howard embodies Oxfam, which was set up in 1942 by Quakers with the aim of arousing public interest in the suffering of civilians in Europe, especially children, who were denied food because of the Allied blockade. What struck me about Jim Howard when we first met in Phnom Penh, was that he saw every problem he was sent to solve unfailingly from the point of view of the people in need.

Oxfam ignored the Foreign Office ‘warning'. Howard flew to Paris with £20,000 in cash and got in touch with an air charter company, based in Luxembourg, whose Icelandic and Danish pilots had a reputation for flying ‘anything anywhere'. They were prepared to fly a DC8 to Phnom Penh; Howard set about loading it with drugs, vitamins and powdered milk. On August 19 he sent his passport to the Vietnamese embassy in Paris, where it was stamped and returned to him that afternoon. A few hours later he was airborne.

When the aircraft landed at Bangkok to refuel, a source of obstruction which the Foreign Office had neglected to mention, the Thai regime refused to allow it to fly on to Phnom Penh. ‘We told them “OK”,' said Howard, ‘“We'll fly somewhere else; we'll fly to Saigon instead.” So they finally let us take off and we circled out over the South China Sea and indeed flew overhead Saigon, before heading for Phnom Penh. The pilot couldn't believe his eyes. There was nothing at Phnom Penh airport. We did one low run and went in. There wasn't even a fork lift. We lifted the supplies down by hand. All the skilled people were dead, or in hiding. But there was willingness and gratitude. We landed at eleven in the morning; by four o'clock that afternoon, the milk and antibiotics were being given to the children.'

Jim Howard's aircraft was only the second Western relief aircraft to arrive in Cambodia in the eight months since the end of Asia's holocaust.

I was already in Phnom Penh, working by candle-light in my room at the old Hotel Royale. The afternoon monsoon had been so insistent that rain had poured through the louvres of the french windows and two rats scampered to
and fro, across the puddles. When Jim Howard walked in, I was endeavouring to compile a list of urgently needed items – the very things he had brought – which I intended to give to the Australian ambassador in Bangkok. To illustrate the enormity of what had happened, I told him that, down the road, one man was struggling to care for fifty starving orphans. ‘Where do I start?' he said: words that would make for him, and others at Oxfam, a fitting epitaph.

The following day his first cable to Oxford read: ‘50 to 80 per cent human material destruction is the terrible reality. One hundred tons of milk per week needed by air and sea for the next two months starting now, repeat now.' So began one of the boldest rescue operations in history. Shortly afterwards, a barge left Singapore, sailing into the north-eastern monsoon, with 1,500 tons of Oxfam seed on board. Guy Stringer had put the whole remarkable venture together in a few weeks and with just £50,000.

Like Jim Howard, he had already navigated his way through a political storm. Singapore was, and still is, supporting those allied with Pol Pot. Back in London, Oxfam's director, Brian Walker, stood his ground calmly against press charges of ‘aiding communists'. Indeed, Oxfam's strength has been not to be deterred. But its very presence in Cambodia and the success of its schemes have made it enemies from London to Washington to Bangkok. An American ambassador in Bangkok would berate visitors with his views on ‘those communists at Oxfam'.

Cambodia had a profound influence on the way Oxfam saw its responsibilities. Many Oxfam workers believed it was no longer enough to dispense ‘Band Aid charity' and that the organisation should take more literally its stated obligation ‘to educate the public concerning the nature, causes and effects of poverty, distress and suffering'.

In 1988 Oxfam published
Punishing the Poor: The International Isolation of Kampuchea
, by Eva Mysliwiec, Oxfam's American chief representative in Phnom Penh and the doyenne of voluntary aid workers in Cambodia.
¹³³
Marshalling her facts, most of them gained at first hand, she presented a
picture of a people who had suffered more than most and were now being punished by so-called civilised governments for being on the ‘wrong side'; she identified the roots of their suffering in the American invasion of Indo-China. Her book was distributed throughout the world.

The reaction became an assault in 1990. An American-funded extreme right-wing lobby group, the International Freedom Foundation, presented an ‘Oxfam file' to the Charity Commission in London. Its author was a young Tory activist, Marc Gordon, who had made his name a few years earlier by ‘joining' the Nicaraguan Contras. His complaint of ‘political bias' was supported by several back-bench Conservative MPs. Gordon told me, ‘All the incidents we cited in our submission to the inquiry were upheld.' I asked an official at the Commission if this was true and he would neither confirm nor deny it. ‘A fact is a fact,' he said boldly. Oxfam was never told officially who its accusers were, or the precise nature of the evidence against them.

In 1991 the Charity Commission censured Oxfam for having ‘prosecuted with too much vigour' its public education campaign about Pol Pot's return. Threatened with a loss of its charity status, Oxfam no longer speaks out as it used to and has withdrawn from sale a number of its most popular publications, including
Punishing the Poor
.

It seemed to me that those who were meant to keep the record straight had two choices. They could blow the whistle and alert the world to the betrayal of Cambodia, as Oxfam did, and risk incurring a penalty, be it smear or sanction. Or they could follow the advice of Son Sen's wife, Yun Yat, who was minister of information during the years of genocide. In boasting that Buddhism had been virtually eradicated from Cambodia and that the monks had ‘stopped believing' (most of them had been murdered), she said, ‘The problem becomes extinguished. Hence there is no problem.'
¹³⁴

August 1979 to June 1992

^fn1
In his 1980 report to Oxfam, Jim Howard, who began Oxfam's Cambodia operation, wrote, ‘It was made clear by Pilger that they wished to film where they liked on the aid programmes and the general situation, and they would not work to a pre-planned schedule as this was too limiting and they would decide daily what to film and where. The arrangement was partly . . . to avoid “set pieces” arranged by the authorities.'
⁷⁷

AS EACH OF
the principal speakers rose from his chair in the ornate Quai d'Orsay, a silver-headed man a dozen feet away watched them carefully. His face remained unchanged; he wore a fixed, almost petrified smile. When Secretary of State James Baker declared that Cambodia should never again return to ‘the policies and practices of the past', the silver head nodded. When Prince Sihanouk acknowledged the role of Western governments in the ‘accords', the silver head nodded. Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot's face to the world, is a statesman now, a peacemaker; and this was as much his moment as Sihanouk's; for without his agreement – that is, Pol Pot's agreement – there would be no ‘accords'. When a French official offered him his hand, the statesman stood, respectful, fluent in diplomatic small-talk and effusive in his gratitude – the same gratitude he had expressed in the two letters he had written to Douglas Hurd congratulating the British Government on its policy on Cambodia.
¹³⁵
It was Khieu Samphan who, at one of Pol Pot's briefing sessions for his military commanders in Thailand, described his diplomatic role as ‘buying time in order to give you comrades the opportunity to carry out all your [military] tasks'.
¹³⁶
In Paris, on October 23, 1991, he had the look of a man who could not believe his luck.

Some 6,000 miles away, on the Thai side of the border with Cambodia, the Khmer people of Site 8 had a different view of the world being shaped for them. Although supplied by the United Nations Border Relief Operation (UNBRO), this camp had long been a Khmer Rouge operations base
and, since 1988, had been made into a showcase by Pol Pot. Its leadership was elected; the Red Cross and selected journalists were allowed in. Whisky was produced. Faces smiled, much as Khieu Samphan smiled. The object of this image-building exercise was clear: to persuade Western governments that the Khmer Rouge have ‘changed', are now following a ‘liberal capitalist line' and could be legitimised as part of a ‘comprehensive settlement'.