Chapter 6.3

Chandler elaborated on these observations in an article in Commonweal.¹ Here he stressed again how one-sided is the information available from refugees—by definition, those disaffected with the regime. Again he points out that the worst reports are from the Northwest, “where radical politics before liberation were weak, rural class differences especially pronounced, and agricultural production higher than elsewhere in the country. For these reasons the liberating forces there seem to have been especially vengeful and undisciplined.” He then adds the qualification already cited in note 199.

Chandler makes some important and generally forgotten historical observations. Peasants, he writes, “have been ‘outside history’ for many years”:

we know very little, in a quantitative or political terms, about the mass of Cambodian society, many of whom, for most of their history, appear to have been slaves of one sort or another. The frequency of locally-led rebellions in the nineteenth century—against the Thai, the Vietnamese, the French and local officials—suggests that Cambodian peasants were not as peaceable as their own mythology, reinforced by the French, would lead us to believe.

The French were not concerned with the peasantry, “preferring to reconstruct Cambodia’s ancient temples, nurture a small elite, and modernize the economy to provide surpluses of rice and rubber.” Little is known of what actually went on in earlier history, the colonial period, or the “early independence period” (1953-1970).²

Lack of familiarity with the historical experience of the Khmer peasants makes it difficult to comprehend what lies behind the violence of the post-revolutionary period, though the atrocities of the civil war were reported at the time,³ along with the impact of the U.S. war.⁴ Citing Sophi, Chandler speaks of the “uncontrollable hatred” that led to early postwar atrocities in Battambang. He discusses the revolutionary ideology in terms similar to those already outlined. Continuing, Chandler comments:

Collective self-reliance or autarky, as preached by the regime, contrasts sharply with what might be called the slave mentality that suffused pre-revolutionary Cambodia and made it so “peaceful” and “charming” to the elite and to most outsiders—for perhaps two thousand years…In the Cambodian case, in 1976, autarky makes sense, both in terms of recent experience—American intervention, and what is seen as the Western-induced corruption of previous regimes—and in terms of Cambodia’s long history of conflict with Vietnam…Self-reliance also explains turning away from Cambodia’s past to make a society where there are “no rich and no poor, no exploiters and no exploited.”⁵

Chandler asks: “Is the price for liberation, in human terms, too high?” On this question, he says, “we Americans with our squalid record in Cambodia should be ‘cautiously optimistic’ about the new regime, ‘or else shut up’” (citing a friend), though he adds that the closed character of the regime (not to speak of refugee reports) raises serious doubts about such cautious optimism.

It would be incorrect to say that such relatively positive, though tempered comments on the revolutionary regime do not appear in the critical literature concerning Cambodia. It would be correct to say, however, that where they did appear, they were ignored as the story filtered through to a mass audience. Ponchaud, for example, describes the brutality of the civil war and the destructiveness of the U.S. attack, and a major theme of his book—though one could hardly know this from reviews and press comment—is his discussion of the “genuine egalitarian revolution” in Cambodia, where there is a new “spirit of responsibility” and “inventiveness” that “represents a revolution in the traditional mentality”: with their vast construction projects, “the people of Kampuchea are now making a thousand-year-old dream come true” and both men and women find new pride in driving trucks and other constructive work.⁶ Where this important theme of his book is mentioned at all, it is offered as evidence of “destruction of a culture.” Ponchaud, clearly, feels that the price was far too high, and perhaps he is right; but it is important to stress that contrary to the second-hand impression of reviews and press commentary, he did focus attention on these aspects of the new regime, which were as little noted or understood in the media as the impact of the U.S war.⁷

The real conditions of Cambodian peasant life are of little concern in the West. The brutality of the civil war and the U.S. attack, though dramatic and unquestionable facts of very recent history, are rapidly passing out of memory. Note that Ponchaud, while not guilty of the outrageous deception of Barron-Paul and others like them who excise the Western role and responsibility from history, nevertheless downplays it; U.S. bombers did not merely strike rubber plantations, nor did the French simply bring “order and peace.”⁸

When we move from the mainstream of commentary that reaches a mass audience to studies by people who know and care about Cambodia, the picture changes. Ponchaud’s book, as already noted, is quite different from most of the media comment it elicited. Chandler’s article is another case in point. One of the small group of scholars concerned with Cambodia, Michael Vickery, reviewed the course of recent Cambodian history in an effort to explain why the revolution evolved “in a manner so contrary to all predictions”:

For all wise old Indochina hands believed that after the war had been won by the revolutionary forces—and there was no doubt by 1972, at the latest, that they would win—it would be the Vietnamese who would engage in the most radical and brutal break with the past. In Cambodia it was expected that both sides, except for a few of the most notorious leaders, would be reconciled and some sort of mild, tolerant socialism would be instituted…Among the Indochina countries only Laos has come out of the war true to form, while Vietnam and Cambodia have behaved in ways nearly the opposite of what had been expected. What this means first of all, of course, is that the Vietnamese and Cambodians were misunderstood and that the facets of their culture and history which might have revealed an unexpected capacity for tolerance in the one and vindictiveness in the other were missed.⁹

He examines what was missed; notably in Cambodia, “in spite of its heady atmosphere as the last exotic Asian paradise, it was rent by political, economic, and class conflicts.” The war that seemed to explode in 1970 “proceeded naturally from trends in the country’s political history over the preceding twenty-five years, a period characterized by intense efforts of the traditional elite to frustrate any moves toward political, economic or social modernization which would threaten its position.”

Vickery suggests a degree of caution in assessing the postwar situation: “A blackout on information has been imposed by the new government, what the refugees, the only first-hand source of news, say is contradictory, and contributions from other sources, principally the Cambodian community in Paris, alternate between the trivial and the absurd.”¹⁰

Vickery gives a detailed account of how Sihanouk and his right wing supporters proceeded to “rule alone,” with ample resort to repression. Lon Nol, later premier after the March, 1970 coup, “established himself solidly as a power figure” in Battambang Province bordering Thailand, assuming command of the region with the rank of colonel after the withdrawal of French military forces in 1952: “During the next two years this area was the scene of operations by government forces against Issaraks¹¹ and Viet Minh characterized by gratuitous brutality.” Recall that this is one of the areas where the worst atrocities were later recorded. Vickery continues:

As related to me by a participant, [government forces] would move into villages, kill the men and women who had not already fled and then engage in individual tests of strength which consisted of grasping infants by the legs and pulling them apart. These events had probably not been forgotten by the men of that area who survived to become the Khmer Rouge troops occupying Battambang in 1975 and whose reported actions have stirred up so much comment abroad

—where, we may add, they are attributed to “Marxism,” a much more convenient origin for the purposes of Western ideology, however dubious in the case of Cambodian peasants who had lived through such experiences in their “gentle land.”

The “conservative ideology” of Sihanouk’s Sangkum party, which effectively ruled after 1955, was clear at once, Vickery continues. In accordance with its “authoritarian philosophy,” “natural leaders should rule,” namely, “the rich and powerful who enjoyed such a situation in the present because of virtuous conduct in previous lives…The poor and unfortunate should accept their lot and try for an improved situation in the next life through virtuous conduct in the present.” As we have noted, a major theme of Ponchaud’s book, cited if at all with the implication that the beautiful traditional culture is being obliterated by savage monsters, is that these conceptions were being replaced by a new egalitarianism and emphasis on peasant self-reliance.

From the election of 1955, won by Sangkum by a resort to repression and deceit, power “remained solidly in the hands of the old right”; the elite wasted the country’s wealth through “conspicuous consumption,” “expensive foreign products,” “frequent trips abroad, [and] hard currency bank accounts.” Meanwhile foreigners were mesmerized by the famous Khmer smile. “Skeptics might wish to ask why the system didn’t break down…In fact, it did break down, and that is why Cambodia passed through a war and revolution.”

The Issaraks were the inheritors of the tradition of warfare of the colonial period, turning themselves into “fighters for independence against the French.” “For all but a tiny minority who had truly absorbed European intellectual values, modernization meant the type of growth exemplified by Bangkok and Saigon—lots of chrome and concrete, streets clogged by cars, a plethora of luxurious bars, and everyone dressed in western clothes.” It was this tiny minority who, together with the forgotten peasants of inner Cambodia, later brought the old era crashing to the ground with bitterness and violence. Meanwhile the United States, while remaining the chief supplier for the Cambodian army, often mistook Sihanouk for a “communist” in the grip of their “Dullesian hysteria.”

The political and economic situation worsened through the 1960s as the right consolidated its power and repression and corruption increased, and with it, discontent among the peasants and some urban intellectuals:

The discontent was accompanied by repression, the secret police were omnipresent, people mysteriously disappeared, and by 1966 Cambodia, though still smiling and pleasant for the casual visitor, was a country in which everyone lived in fear.

“The first large peasant revolt broke out in western Battambang province in the spring of 1967 and was suppressed with bloodshed which was reminiscent of the 1950s and prefigured that of 1975.” There were further revolts and disappearances and by 1969 insurgency was widespread though scattered.¹² The coup of 1970 that overthrew Sihanouk was led by men who “had always been among the big guns of the Cambodian right who had sabotaged democracy, opposed the Geneva Accords, organized the Sangkum, and helped maintain Sihanouk’s absolute rule from 1955.” In the subsequent war, they lost to a large extent “out of sheer greed and incompetence.”

The outright U.S. intervention sharply intensified the conflict, particularly, with the escalation of U.S. bombardment of the countryside in 1973:

Particularly during the severe U.S. bombing which lasted throughout the first eight months of 1973, and which produced no reaction in Phnom Penh¹³ other than relief, it must have seemed to FUNK [the guerrillas] that their urban compatriots were quite willing to see the entire countryside destroyed and plastered over with concrete as long as they could enjoy a parasitical existence as U.S. clients. It is certain that FUNK policy became much harsher after the bombing. Whereas in 1971-1972 they showed considerable efforts at conciliation and in general Cambodian villagers did not fear them, from 1973-4, with all allowance for government propaganda there are authentic accounts of brutal imposition of new policies without ideological preparation of the population.¹⁴

Vickery points out that the Kissinger-Nixon policy during the last two years of the war was “a major mystery,” for which he suggests an explanation that appears to us quite plausible. Referring to the “Sonnenfeldt Doctrine,” which holds that “pluralistic and libertarian Communist regimes will breed leftist ferment in the West,” he suggests that “when it became clear [to U.S. leaders] that they could not win in Cambodia, they preferred to do everything possible to insure that the post-war revolutionary government be extremely brutal, doctrinaire, and frightening to its neighbors, rather than a moderate socialism to which the Thai, for example, might look with envy.” In short, though it was understood that the United States had lost the war in Cambodia (even though it was, quite clearly, still trying to win it in Vietnam¹⁵), destruction of rural Cambodia, by imposing the harshest possible conditions on the eventual victors, would serve the two classic ends: retarding social and economic progress, and maximizing the brutality of the eventual victors. Then the aggressors would at least be able to reap a propaganda victory from the misery they had sown.¹⁶ This explanation for the insistence on battering Cambodia to dust after the war was lost seems particularly reasonable against the background of the basic rationale for the U.S. war in Indochina, namely, the rational variant of the “domino theory” which held that social and economic successes in countries that extricated themselves from the U.S.-dominated global system might cause “the rot to spread” to other areas, with severe long-term consequences for U.S. power and privilege. Unable to retain control over Indochina, the United States could at least reduce the terrifying prospects that viable societies might emerge from the wreckage.¹⁷

Vickery points out that “the success of this policy [in Cambodia] may perhaps be seen in the [^ch06-fn1976] Thai elections, in which the defeat of the socialist parties has been attributed in large measure to fear of a regime like that in Cambodia.”

Writing of the Nixon-Kissinger bombing policy of 1973 at the time, Laura Summers pointed out that it followed the Nixon administration’s refusal “to accept Prince Sihanouk’s invitation for negotiations in January and February, 1973.” U.S. B-52s “pounded Cambodia for 160 consecutive days, dropping more than 240,000 short tons of bombs on rice fields, water buffalo, villages (particularly along the Mekong river) and on such troop positions as the guerrillas might maintain,” a tonnage that “represents 50 per cent more than the conventional explosives dropped on Japan during World War II.” In spite of the enormous destruction, ’’the bombing had little effect on the military capacity of the Cambodian guerrillas.” She concludes, surely accurately, that “American policy and American bombing have placed a small country’s physical and political survival in escrow for many years to come, not for the benefit of the people who live there nor in defense of any laudable ideal.”¹⁸

The fact that the Khmer Rouge ideology and practice became harsher in 1973 as a direct result of the intensified bombing was also noted by David Chandler in his congressional testimony.¹⁹ The interpretation just suggested apparently seems credible to Cambodians. Summers remarks that “in 1973, Khmers loyal to the resistance believed the major purpose of Nixon’s six-month bombing campaign was to destroy the emerging productive potential and the social security of the liberated zone …”²⁰ We suspect that the goal of increasing the harshness of the Khmer Rouge, a predictable consequence, was also quite probably an intended one.

The study of the revolutionary movement in Cambodia from 1970-1974 by Kenneth Quinn of the National Security Council is quite revealing in this regard.²¹ Quinn was resident in a South Vietnamese province bordering Cambodia from 1972-1974 studying refugees arriving from Cambodia. He reports that from early 1973—that is, from the time that the extraordinarily heavy bombing attack began—

the Khmer Communists drastically accelerated and intensified their program to radically alter society. Included in this effort were mass relocations of the population, purges of lenient cadres, the use of terror, and extensive remodeling of the economic system…events occurred within Cambodia which sent the first group of refugees fleeing into South Vietnam [beginning in 1973].

We have already discussed his comments on the measures undertaken by the Khmer Communists at that time. What is now relevant is the timing. Nowhere in his article does Quinn mention the bombing among the “events [that] occurred within Cambodia” from early 1973, or its possible significance for understanding the sharp modification of policy that he describes. The omission is as interesting as the timing he indicates, from his well-placed vantage point.

Stephen Heder has suggested (personal communication) that the radicalization of 1973 in response to the U.S. bombing might well have been motivated by a desire to win popular support and encourage willingness to sacrifice on the part of the poor majority of the population, who would bear the brunt of the attacks and would also stand to gain the most from these policies, as is sufficiently clear even from the hostile account by Quinn cited above.²²

Whatever the explanation may be for the fierce bombing of 1973, the available facts lead to one clear conclusion: every bomb dropped added its contribution to the postwar record of revenge by the battered peasant society. Meanwhile the perpetrators—who remain beyond the reach of retribution—receive awards for their humanitarian contributions²³ as they denounce the unaccountable savagery of the Khmer Rouge.

Turning to the policies of the new regime, Vickery remarks that

they may be usefully compared with the recommendations of a “Blueprint for the Future” prepared by an anonymous group of western and Thai social scientists and published in the conservative Bangkok Post [in February 1976]. Their suggestions, in order for Thailand to avoid a breakdown of its society and a revolution, were that people should be taken out of the cities and put back on the land, decentralization should give more power to local authorities, much more investment should go into agriculture, and the old elite should lose some of its wealth and political power. Now this is precisely what Cambodia has done, though of course on a much more massive scale than envisioned by “Blueprint,” but it illustrates that the basic policies are considered by “bourgeois” economists and political scientists to be rational and practicable for a country with problems similar to those of Cambodia.

Of course, there is also a major dissimilarity: Cambodia had been savaged by U.S. terror, and faced imminent disaster with the termination of the U.S. dole for the millions of people who had been subjected, in their turn, to the “forced-draft urbanization and modernization” that so entranced U.S. ideologists of the period.

Vickery was cautious in assessing the current situation though relatively pessimistic, and was willing to hazard few predictions. The postwar Khmer Rouge regime, he observed, “will certainly have no trouble teaching their people that Cambodian suffering was mainly due to foreign intervention”—we may add, from our different perspective, that the propaganda organs of the West have been busily at work convincing their people that any such charge is a “simple-minded myth” or a case of wallowing in “the politics of guilt.”²⁴ He concludes finally:

Although one may legitimately ask whether the new egalitarian society could not have been established with less deliberate destruction of the old, there are ample reasons why the new leadership might answer in the negative.

Vickery’s analysis of the backgrounds of the war and the sources for the harshness of the new regime was as foreign to the media as was his skeptical caution with regard to the developing situation. But it has not been uncommon in commentary by people whose concern is with the facts rather than with fanning hysteria in the West about the dangers of “socialism” or “Marxism”—we stress again the absurdity of the major theme of press propaganda: that the atrocities committed by Khmer peasants simply flow from “Marxism” or “atheism,” as dire consequences of liberation from the grip of Western benevolence.²⁵

A rather similar perception is expressed in the prepared remarks by Charles Meyer at the April, 1978 Hearings on Cambodia in Oslo.²⁶ Meyer, conservative and anti-Communist, is the author of scholarly studies on Cambodian history and contemporary Cambodia. His writings, based on long residence in Cambodia and intimate knowledge, have been ignored in the United States.²⁷ Discussing the evidence presented at the Hearings, Meyer concludes that it suffices to show that “Democratic Kampuchea has been the stage of hasty executions” and that its people live under a regime that violates the International Declaration of Human Rights. But he adds some significant words of caution:

One knows that the colonial powers have often used the argument of “wildness” in order to impose their domination and their “civilizing mission.” They have today successors, who are pushed by the same ambitions. It is only the vocabulary that has changed.²⁸

As for the “wildness” of the Cambodian leaders, he has this to say:

Today, like yesterday, whether they are monarchists, republicans or revolutionaries, the Khmers have an extreme susceptibility, which makes relations with them often difficult. Our Cambodian friends who are present here will not contradict me. Those who at present govern Cambodia have not escaped from this national characteristic. But they are not mad people nor monsters demanding blood—I have known several among them. Most of them sons of peasants, more or less formed in the French Marxist school, rebelling against a system which has remained feudal, they have the sentiment among the people of the countryside to have received a veritable illumination and found the road to the new. Perhaps I will shock many among you. But I believe that these Red Khmer leaders incarnate really a part of the peasants, who recognize themselves in them.²⁹

These leaders, Meyer argues, “maintain the tradition of their predecessors just before them” and in their “immoderation” reflect deep-seated currents in Cambodian history and culture, though again he urges caution: “In reality the records re Cambodia are not so simple and many pieces are missing.” As in his book, he observes that “it is important to destroy the picture in the West that the Cambodians are non-violent by nature and filled with Buddhistic benevolence.” On the contrary, “behind that smile violence is slumbering and…it is dangerous to wake it up,” as happened in 1967 with the “brutal repression of a rising of peasants in the region of Battambang and the revolt of the minorities in the region of Rattanakiri.” Furthermore:

The American airforce gave the [military regime calling itself republican] its support by destroying the Cambodian plains through heavy bombing without for this being accused of genocide. The following events should not let us forget this. [As] regards the fratricid[al] fights with ties from one side as well as from the other to Vietnam in periods, they were without mercy, [as] is usual in all civil wars.

Today, as previously, “one should be extremely careful in one’s analysis of the politics” of the victors, considering “the weight of the past, the ideology of the leaders, the menaces from outside, and, naturally, the psychological factors as well as the economical, religious and other ones”—a perception foreign to the mass media.

The summary executions of officials of the old regime “is in reality the application of the Cambodian penal code of 1877,” including the brutal means employed: “This punishment was used between 1965 and 1970 for ‘Red Khmers’ who were caught and would have been used still more systematically, if the government had won the victory.” Furthermore, “it seems to me that we should accept with reservations the balance in figures of the victims…[and]…admit that any estimation at present is impossible.” He insists that “there are no simple explanations or clear and evident ones and that peremptory affirmations should always be avoided.” He sees the war as a rising of the peasants against the cities, the symbol of corruption and repression: “One must further know that Cambodian city-dwellers were in reality Western colonials and Chinese [traders].”

Meyer is highly critical of the “radicalism and the excesses” of the revolutionaries. His concern to explain the postwar events in terms of Cambodian history and tradition is, however, in striking contrast to Western fulminations, though not uncommon among specialists on Cambodia, as is his attention to the factors that “contributed to harden the [internal] politics of the revolutionary leaders.”

We learn still more about these factors in a paper by Laura Summers cited earlier.³⁰ She discusses the destructive impact of French colonialism, which violated the “corporate integrity” of the Khmer people: “its indigenous legal system, pattern of land possession and national administration were dismantled.” During the national uprising of 1885-1886, “French authorities with the aid of Vietnamese infantrymen succeeded in reducing the Khmer population of the Protectorat du Cambodge by 195,000 (20% of the entire Khmer population).”³¹ “The French displayed little remorse over the fate of this people whom they believed doomed to extinction,” as they brought a form of what Ponchaud calls “order and peace” to the land in fulfillment of their “colonial mission.” The impact on the countryside was particularly destructive. While most peasants owned some land, vast numbers of family holdings were insufficient for subsistence requirements by the early 1950s. Yields were among the lowest in the world “and barely met the subsistence requirements of the rural population in 1965, 1966 and (especially) 1967.”³² At that time, annual rates of interest for loans ranged from 100% to 200%; “the total effect of the credit structure in agrarian economy was to make the peasant worse than a tenant on his own property” while village and urban elites lived in luxury. Sihanouk’s attempts at some social reform had little impact. Particularly scandalous was the lack of medical care and the practice of charging exorbitant fees to peasants or denying them services or hospital treatment. The judiciary was no less corrupt and urban-based civil servants with no interest in peasant affairs enjoyed the amenities offered the rich by the colonial system while the mass of peasants sank deeper into poverty and suffering. “It is…not surprising that the revolution was violent for in addition to the human destruction heaped upon the community by intensive American bombing, there were profound social grievances and scores to be settled.” In an accompanying demographic analysis, Summers estimates the number of “postwar deaths from exhaustion, disease and execution in the range of two hundred thousand, an estimate which is based on an extremely difficult to determine status quo ante bellum.”

It is quite evident that to understand the events in the aftermath of the war it is necessary to pay attention to the historical background of the peasant revolution, which was further inflamed and deeply embittered by the U.S. attack culminating in the bombing of 1973, that Meyer hints might be considered genocidal in character. The sensational press accounts of atrocities that entirely ignore that background, while at the same time relying on highly dubious or sometimes fabricated evidence, may be useful contributions to the revival of imperial ideology; but they are of little value in conveying any understanding of the postwar situation.

We have already mentioned the peasant rebellions in Battambang in the west and the tribal provinces of the northeast in the late 1960s. The sources of these revolts in peasant discontent resulting from penury, oppression and corruption under the increasingly right wing central government have been explored by the Australian scholar Ben Kiernan.³³ These revolts were no small affair; Sihanouk cited a figure of 10,000 deaths (a figure which he may well have exaggerated for rhetorical effect), and it is estimated that about 4,000 peasants fled their homes in June 1967 “in the wake of severe army repression of their protest against harsh local conditions,” as “aircraft bombed and strafed villages and jungle hideouts” and villages were burned to the ground and surrounded by troops, their inhabitants massacred. By the time that Sihanouk was overthrown in the March 1970 coup, there was “a sophisticated, powerful and indigenous resistance movement well entrenched in many parts of Cambodia.” After the coup, there were peasant uprisings interpreted in the West as indicating support for Sihanouk. In an analysis of the locale and character of these protests, which were brutally suppressed by military force (including Khmer troops trained by the CIA in South Vietnam), Kiernan concludes that they reflect in part the ongoing anti-government rebellion, though loyalty to Sihanouk was no doubt a factor as well.³⁴

In several studies, Kiernan suggested a picture of early postwar events in Cambodia that is rather different from what has been featured by the press.³⁵ Specifically, he took issue with horror stories published in Time (26 April, 1976), which alleged that 500-600,000 people had died under the rule of the Khmer Rouge, “one of the most brutally murderous regimes in the world” which rules Cambodia by “a chilling form of mindless terror.” Like others, he notes that most of the atrocity stories come from areas of little Khmer Rouge strength, where orders to stop reprisals were disobeyed by soldiers wreaking vengeance, often drawn from the poorest sections of the peasantry. He discusses the fake photographs,³⁶ and gives examples of fabrication of atrocity stories by refugees “in order to persuade the Thai border police to admit them.” He also deals with other fabrications that have appeared in the Western press. He suggests that, “untrained and vengeful, and at times leaderless, some soldiers in the northwest of Cambodia have terrorized soldiers, city dwellers, and peasants. This has been aggravated by the threat of widespread starvation, and actual starvation in some parts.” He questions the assumption that there was central direction for atrocities as well as the assumption that the stories from specific areas where, in fact, the Khmer Rouge had little control, can be freely extrapolated to the country as a whole. His conclusions are based in part on interviews with refugees in Thai camps and in Bangkok, and like Vickery in Thailand and Fraser in Vietnam, he reports quite a range of refugee judgments on the nature of the regime. He also gives an analysis of the class background and region of the refugee flow, relating these factors to the social and economic situation that had prevailed.

Kiernan’s detailed conclusions suggest why attending to these questions might be useful, at least for those whose concern is truth. Consider his analysis of the composition of Cambodian refugees in Thailand in August 1976. Note that this date is well after what Ponchaud describes as the worst period of terror, and that these refugees form a substantial part of the population sampled by Barron-Paul and Ponchaud.³⁷ Kiernan concludes:

There were 10,200 Cambodian refugees in Thailand in August 1976. A tiny handful of these belong to that category of over half the population who, at the end of the war, had lived in Khmer Rouge areas for several years. The great majority of the refugees can be divided into three groups: former Lon Nol soldiers, former urban dwellers, and farmers from Battambang and Siemreap provinces.³⁸

Unsurprisingly, over a third of the 3,000 refugees in the Aranyaprathet camp in Thailand are former Lon Nol soldiers, and many of the refugees are former Khmer Serei, commandos trained and financed by the CIA.

In Battambang, Kiernan writes, the “thin and undernourished” Khmer Rouge troops headed directly to the airport and broke up four T-28 bombers into pieces,³⁹ “remembering the agony in the trenches, the hunger in the countryside because the paddy fields were full of bomb craters, and their terrible fear of asphyxiation bombs.”⁴⁰ “For many months after that,” he continues, “refugees reported that Lon Nol soldiers were hunted down, particularly in northwest Cambodia—a few refugees were eyewitnesses to executions.”

Kiernan believes there is little evidence that the government planned and approved a systematic large-scale purge. The evidence indicates, he believes, that “apart from the execution of high-ranking army officers and officials, the killing reported by refugees from the northwest after April 1975 was instigated by untrained and vengeful local Khmer Rouge soldiers, despite orders to the contrary from Phnom Penh.” “Most of the brutality shown by local Khmer Rouge soldiers is attributable to lack of training and the difficulty of forging a disciplined organisation in the Cambodian countryside, especially after the bombing of 1973,” though “it is also quite probable that some Khmer Rouge local cadres harbour the…conception of the priorities for Cambodia’s survival…[with]…the emphasis on hard work, sacrifice, and asceticism which this dynamic form of Khmer nationalism entails” and which “has dismayed some Cambodians,” among them some cadres “who ensure peasant co-operation with their policies through force.” The killings were concentrated in “exceptional” areas where living conditions were harshest (he cites concurring judgments by Patrice de Beer of Le Monde and Ponchaud), regions where the Khmer Rouge were “organisationally and numerically weak.” He feels that “it is little wonder that several thousand peasants have fled from northwest Cambodia” (his emphasis), whereas “very few peasants, if any, have fled to Thailand from other parts of Cambodia, while soldiers and former city dwellers have arrived in Thailand from eastern and central Cambodia as well as from the northwest.” The reason is that “at the end of the war, farmers in the northwest were in for a very difficult period” because of the drastic shortage of food, exacerbated by the flow of refugees to the towns. In contrast, in areas that had been administered by the Khmer Rouge, canals and dams had been built enabling two crops to be brought in, and some rice had been stockpiled, a subject analyzed by Hildebrand and Porter, to whom he refers. Furthermore, these regions were unique in the inequity and exploitation of the poor: “With class divisions as stark as this, and after a brutal war, equally brutal revenge was taken by poor peasants” many of whom had joined the Khmer Rouge (though many bandits “passed themselves off as Khmer Rouge” as well, not an unusual phenomenon in comparable situations). He quotes one Khmer refugee who said that in Battambang the rich were being “persecuted” while the poor were better off than before, and adds that “where the Khmer Rouge were better organised, ‘persecution’ of the rich was much less violent.”

This analysis covers the period of the worst terror according to Ponchaud, the period that provides much of the basis for the best-publicized accounts (Barron-Paul, Ponchaud, and reviews and references to Ponchaud).⁴¹ Therefore the situation that Kiernan describes is crucially significant for an analysis of the response in the West to postwar events in Cambodia. We know of no comparable analysis from a later period, though this in any event would not be relevant to our major concern—the workings of the Western propaganda system.⁴²

The Southeast Asia correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review, Nayan Chanda, presented his assessment of the situation at about the same time in several articles.⁴³ In the FEER, he estimated that in the 18 months of postwar bloodletting, which according to refugee reports and “most observers” was largely over, “possibly thousands of people died,” including not only the top figures of the Lon Nol regime but also “large numbers of lower-strata civilian and military personnel of the former administration [who] have been executed in the Khmer Rouge’s cleansing process.”⁴⁴ But the actual numbers are “impossible to calculate.” The estimate of “possibly thousands” presumably refers to those killed, not the victims of starvation or disease or unexploded ordnance. In his May, 1977 article, Chanda discussed the “human cost” of what the regime had so far accomplished in these terms:

One will probably never know exactly how many human lives have been cut down by political execution, starvation and disease. The tendency of refugees to exaggerate their troubles to attract sympathy, the active presence of the intelligence services in the refugee camps and the Bangkok press—the most important source of information about the massacres—and the contradictory testimony of the last foreigners present in liberated Phnom Penh make a precise evaluation impossible.⁴⁵ But the consistency of refugee stories in Thailand and Vietnam and the testimony from socialist sources leaves no doubt: the number of deaths has been terribly high.

On the necessity for the evacuation of Phnom Penh and the question whether the executions were a result of deliberate policy or local initiative, Chanda comments that opinions vary and takes no explicit stand himself (Le Monde diplomatique), though he suggests a point of view not unlike Kiernan’s. Chanda quotes a diplomat who spent four years in Cambodia until the Khmer Rouge victory and who attributes the massacres in part to the bitterness of the war and in part to “the action of the have-nots against the haves.” Chanda adds that the 1970-1975 war “was probably the most savage in Indochina, with soldiers of both sides giving no quarter” (FEER):

To the thirst for vengeance must probably be added the relative numerical weakness, political inexperience, and lack of organization of the Khmer Rouge, who suddenly became the rulers of a land ravaged by the war. In the absence of political work and a clandestine organization among the population controlled by Lon Nol, force more than persuasion was naturally used as the method of government. Suspicion, indeed profound hatred on the part of the Khmer soldiers—young peasants many of whom had lost their homes and families under the bombs—towards an urban population that was richer and more numerous also seems to have played a role (Le Monde Diplomatique).

Fear of sabotage was also an element.⁴⁶ “The elimination of the former regime’s officials and the dispersal into the countryside of the educated urban middle class has created a vertical power structure,” with a “tiny group of French-educated elite…at the top dictating policy, while young and often illiterate farm boys—the grassroots cadres—are expected to implement the decisions. It is hardly surprising that these cadres rely on disciplinary action rather than persuasion or ideological motivation.”⁴⁷

As for the postwar dead, who are listed simply as Khmer Rouge victims in the mainstream Western media, Chanda comments that disease was an extremely serious problem during the war (including a million suffering from malaria in 1972) and that the massive U.S. rice shipments which were the sole sustenance of the cities swollen with refugees did not suffice even then for more than a part of the population. He cites a source close to the U.S. government who predicted a million deaths from starvation in Cambodia in the event of a Khmer Rouge victory—approximately the number of deaths later reported by Ponchaud and many others on the basis of alleged estimates from U.S. government and other Western sources.⁴⁸ Recall that these numbers, often inflated by imaginative reporters and congressmen, are consistently attributed to the barbarism of the Khmer Rouge, who allegedly “boast” about these deaths.

Chanda quotes one observer who says: “If you consider the sheer magnitude of the problem faced by the Khmer Rouge in April 1975 and the dire prediction from Washington that 1 million Cambodians could die of starvation, this is no mean achievement.”⁴⁹ He also describes the economic and development programs undertaken by the new regime and the beginnings of trade and foreign contacts,⁵⁰ the obsessive self-reliance and the conversion of the country into a labor army. His own view is evidently along the lines indicated by an observer whom he quotes: “They might have read a lot of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but the ideology of the present leadership is virulent Khmer nationalism” (FEER).

In commenting on the contradictory testimony of the last foreigners to leave Phnom Penh, Chanda cited a letter by W. J. Sampson,⁵¹ an economist and statistician in Phnom Penh who is the author of a number of technical reports on the Cambodian economy and who worked in close contact with the government’s central statistics office until March 1975, and was thus well-placed to comment on events of the period. Both the contents and the subsequent history of this communication are interesting. Sampson cites a UN estimate that the population of Cambodia in mid-1974 was 7.89 million, which agrees with his independent estimate.⁵² He further believes that the figures offered of war casualties are much inflated, estimating civilian killings at “perhaps in tens of thousands.” Turning to the postwar situation, Sampson finds the figure of 2.2 million dead mentioned in the press “questionable.”⁵³ After leaving Cambodia, he writes, he visited refugee camps and kept in touch with Khmers. “A European friend who cycled around Phnom Penh for many days after its fall saw and heard of no other executions” beyond the shooting of some prominent politicians and “the lynching of hated bomber pilots in Phnom Penh.” As far as he could determine, refugees offered no first-hand evidence of elimination of collaborators. He believes that “such executions could be numbered in the hundreds or thousands rather than in hundreds of thousands,” though in addition there was “a big death toll from sickness” and there were food shortages.

This communication, from what seems a credible source, appeared just at the time that the Barron-Paul book and Lacouture’s review of Ponchaud were causing a great sensation in the media about the murder of 1-2 million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge. The letter was specifically brought to the attention of journalists who cited Lacouture’s statement that the Khmer Rouge had “boasted” of having killed a quarter of the population: 2 million people.⁵⁴ With one exception they were unwilling to cite it.⁵⁵ Porter mentioned Sampson’s letter in congressional testimony when challenged by Rep. Solarz on his skepticism about the Famiglia Cristiana “interview.”⁵⁶ Solarz dismissed this by saying: “So, for all you know, this fellow could be a psychotic, right?” No such question was raised about unknown priests or reporters who circulated faked photographs and interviews from such sources as Famiglia Cristiana, or who drew conclusions from interviews with prisoners in Thai police cages.

Solarz’s question and Porter’s correct response (“theoretically, yes”) were cited by William Shawcross in a context that is even more remarkable than his willingness to cite this disreputable insinuation.⁵⁷ Shawcross argues that both sides of the “propaganda battle” have failed to examine their evidence carefully. The two sides are Barron-Paul, condemning the new Cambodian regime, and Hildebrand-Porter, defending it (the latter book, he writes, is “in some ways…a mirror image” of Barron-Paul). In this context, he alleges that “Hildebrand and Porter’s use of evidence can be seriously questioned.” As his sole evidence to substantiate this charge he offers the fact that Porter cited the Sampson letter, with its estimate of casualties, as “documentation” in the Congressional hearings when asked why he was skeptical about charges leveled at postwar Cambodia. But, Shawcross continues, “Porter had to agree with Congressman Solarz that Sampson could in theory be ‘a psychotic.’” Shawcross then reports that he spoke to Sampson by telephone to inquire into his views. He quotes Sampson as having “said that altogether ‘deaths over and above the normal death rate would not be more than half a million.’” Shawcross interprets this as an estimate of victims of the Khmer Rouge, concluding: “Mr. Sampson thus seems an unconvinced and unconvincing witness on behalf of Khmer Rouge moderation. Neither side of the propaganda battle has carefully examined all of the sources that it wishes to exploit.”

Note carefully the reasoning. First, whatever Porter might have said in the May 1977 Hearings, it can hardly be offered in support of the charge that “Hildebrand and Porter’s use of evidence can be seriously questioned” in their 1976 book (worse still, as the sole support for this charge). Sampson’s letter was published subsequent to the book and obviously not mentioned in it. Secondly, Sampson’s letter is, most definitely, “documentation,” however one chooses to evaluate it. Furthermore, Shawcross does not question that Porter quoted it quite accurately and appropriately. As for Porter’s being compelled to agree that Sampson could in theory be a psychotic, Shawcross’s willingness to cite Solarz’s absurd question is remarkable; Porter would—or should—have responded in the same way if asked whether Ponchaud, or Shawcross, or the authors of this book, etc., might be psychotics: “Theoretically, yes.” Furthermore, consider Shawcross’s inquiry concerning Sampson’s views. He argues that since Sampson has allegedly changed his mind in a telephone call subsequent to Porter’s correct citation of his views, that shows that Hildebrand and Porter’s book (which makes no mention of Sampson) is unscholarly and that their “use of evidence can be seriously questioned.” The logic is mindboggling.

But putting logic to the side, did Sampson in fact change his views, thus showing himself to be an “unconvinced and unconvincing witness?’’ The answer to the question depends on how we interpret the telephone statement by Sampson that Shawcross quotes. Given Sampson’s known views on the general tendency to inflate figures, it might be supposed that his figure of deaths altogether above the normal is a reference to the total number of deaths throughout the war and the postwar period. In fact, in response to a query, Sampson stated quite explicitly in a letter dated March 6, 1978 that this was exactly his intent.⁵⁸ This letter was immediately transmitted to Porter, Shawcross and the editor of the New York Review. Aware of these facts, Porter in response to Shawcross wrote correctly that Sampson had intended to refer to all deaths—wartime and afterwards—when citing the half-million figure.⁵⁹ Equally aware of the facts, Shawcross responded by repeating his claim that Sampson had offered the figure for deaths”since the end of the war.” This is, surely, a rather curious “use of evidence.”

There is much more evidence from sources that seem to deserve a hearing but have been ignored by the media. We have noted the selectivity in choice of refugee reports. We will mention two additional examples of eyewitness reports that were available to the media, in addition to those already cited, but that they chose to disregard. Liberation News Service (New York) carried a dispatch from George Hildebrand (one of the co-authors of the Hildebrand-Porter study) reporting an interview with “one of the few people in the U.S. today who can speak from direct experience,” namely, a Cambodian refugee named Khoun Sakhon who “spent the better part of a year traveling through Cambodia’s populous central provinces and working in a number of rural areas in the developing western region of Cambodia,” after having lived both in Phnom Penh and in liberated zones in earlier years. He also witnessed the evacuation of Phnom Penh in April, 1975.⁶⁰ Sakhon “saw no massacres or abandonment of sick and elderly people” during the evacuation of Phnom Penh and claims that what the Reader’s Digest described as “looting’’ was in fact”the soldiers’ opening luxury shops and rice stores to the people.”⁶¹ He states further that during the evacuation, “trucks distributed rice and medicine to the people and the people were free to join the cooperatives they passed or to move on.” He lived in a commune, with, he claims, an 8-hour work schedule, adequate food and medical services, and generally fair treatment. His account of the “revolutionary culture” and the conditions of life and work is generally favorable, and he expresses regret that he joined a group of urban young men who escaped, saying: “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I feel I belong back there.” A press concerned to determine the facts about postwar Cambodia might have chosen to explore this lead.

Another example that would appear to merit attention is a lengthy and detailed account of the evacuation of Phnom Penh by Chou Meng and Shane Tarr.⁶² The forced evacuation of Phnom Penh has served as proof of the near-genocidal intent and practice of the Khmer Rouge ever since it was graphically reported by journalists at the time.⁶³ It is featured in the books by Barron-Paul and Ponchaud and by many others. According to these accounts, based on refugee reports and what journalists observed largely from their confinement in the French embassy in Phnom Penh, the evacuation was a hideous atrocity. Hildebrand and Porter cite eyewitness accounts by Westerners that paint a different picture, but their book has been ignored, along with the published sources they cite. The account by the Tarrs, which is the only published account by participants that provides substantial detail, to our knowledge, tends to corroborate the sources cited by Hildebrand-Porter. Shane Tarr is from New Zealand; his wife, Chou Meng, is Cambodian. Both joined the mass evacuation to the countryside on April 18, returned to Phnom Penh on April 21, and then travelled through the countryside with the convoy of journalists and others on their way to Thailand. They write that they attempted to contact the media on their return to New Zealand to present their story, “but generally speaking news editors were not interested in hearing what we had to say unless we denounced communism in general and ‘painted a picture’ of Khmer Rouge atrocities in particular.” Several articles of theirs nevertheless appeared, but apart from the left wing press, all were “heavily censored so as to make our articles unintelligible and contradictory,” they allege.

The Tarrs claim that people were told that they would have to leave Phnom Penh because there was insufficient food. “Refugees we talked to were happy at the prospect of returning to their homes” though “city-dwellers were far less enthusiastic,” at least those who had some food (the very poor were “quick to leave …”). The initial orders were polite; subsequently they “became more like demands than requests,” though they saw no sign of force. After comparing notes with other evacuees, they conclude “that force was used only on isolated occasions.” They report that prior to liberation, they had visited the hospitals and found that only one (Calmette) was functioning properly, and that “the revolutionary forces continued to operate it after they took over” though most of the medical personnel had fled.⁶⁴ They believe that patients were evacuated to “more hygienic surroundings,” a belief that cannot be dismissed out of hand in the light of the eyewitness account by Swain and others. They continue with a virtually hour-by-hour account of their trip to the countryside with the evacuees, then back to Phnom Penh where they joined other foreigners at the French embassy. They report many friendly contacts with villagers, refugees, cadres, and soldiers and say that they “witnessed no executions or other atrocities, and saw no attempts to intimidate people with weapons.”

On their return to the French embassy on April 21, the Tarrs report, they were questioned for several hours by journalists who had been there since the 17th of April. “But when it became clear that we had no sensational stories to tell of mass executions, rape, pillage and suicides many of these journalists became quite disappointed.” Specifically, they contend that Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times (who later won the Pulitzer Prize for his report of these days) dismissed their positive

account with sarcasm; it did not enter his subsequent reports, including a long story (9 May 1975) on foreigners at the French embassy. With a few exceptions, the Tarrs report, “for most of the time we spent in the French embassy we were the object of abuse and fear by those who had nothing but contempt for the Kampuchean people.”

Although Schanberg does not mention the Tarrs or their experiences during their participation in the evacuation, Swain does refer to them. He writes that Shane Tarr is so contemptible that “we—who have abandoned our Cambodian friends—do not wish to pass the time of day” with him. “He is full of nauseating revolutionary rhetoric” and he and his wife “fraternise with the Khmer Rouge guards over the walls.” Shane Tarr “has a low opinion of us members of the capitalist press, we of his hypocrisy. He is shunned.” Swain also apparently has a low opinion of the experiences of the Tarrs during the evacuation; these are never mentioned. We will see in a moment how “scholarship” deals with the account by the Tarrs.

The Tarrs then describe their evacuation to Thailand. They describe the tremendous destruction in the countryside and conversations with villagers. They claim to have seen no signs of coercion, but rather people working “according to their capabilities and the needs of the group.”

We quote their conclusions:

From our observations and understanding of the events of Kampuchea from 17th April, when we evacuated Phnom Penh, to our arrival in Poipet on 3rd of May, we can make the following points:

1. We saw no organised executions, massacres, or the results of such like. We saw about fifteen bodies in Phnom Penh, of soldiers killed in the fighting.

2. There was very little intimidation of Phnom Penh’s population by the revolutionary army. Many saw it not as an occupier but as a liberator.

3. We can refute the claims of the imperialist media that the liberation army indulged in a mass orgy of looting and destruction.

4. The march to the countryside was slow and well organised. People who had no relatives to stay with were put up by other villagers in the liberated areas, until they were assigned elsewhere. They were provided with food.

5. The aged and the ill were not expected to join in the march. We saw very few who were old or sick on the road; those that we met elsewhere told us that the revolutionary organisation catered for their needs.

We saw the destruction of five years of war and of intense U.S. bombing. But we also saw dams, irrigation canals, rice paddies, and people who, while having to struggle very hard, were proud to have liberated Kampuchea from imperialism and were now the masters of their destiny.

Again, we may ask why the eyewitness report of Chou Meng and Shane Tarr does not enter the record, as shaped by the selective hand of the media and mainstream scholarship?

The question deserves a closer look. The account by the Tarrs of their evacuation in the convoy from the French embassy to Thailand is not unique; many reporters were present and wrote extensively about this trip. But their account of their participation in the earlier evacuation from Phnom Penh is indeed unusual. As we have seen, journalists simply ignored it, though at the time this was virtually the only direct evidence concerning what was happening beyond the view from the embassy. There is also apparently a conflict of opinion—represented by the Tarrs on the one hand and Swain and Schanberg on the other—about the situation inside the embassy where foreigners and some Cambodians were confined. The Tarrs are, incidentally, not alone in their view. Richard Boyle of Pacific News Service is a correspondent with considerable experience in Vietnam, and author of an important but unread book.⁶⁵ On reaching Thailand he filed a report from Bangkok published in the New York Guardian that did not appear in the mainstream press in the United States, to our knowledge. Boyle reports that he was asked by AP to take over their bureau and file for them as well as PNS after the U.S. departure:

I reported what the Cambodian staff reported to me: that the “Khmer Rouge” troops told Phnom Penh government soldiers that they were “brothers” and that they did not want to kill them. There were eyewitness accounts by Cambodian AP staffers of “Khmer Rouge” and Phnom Penh troops embracing on the battlefield, yet when I filed this it was censored by AP. After that the story was killed. AP reported that the liberators burned down refugee huts two days before the fall of Phnom Penh, yet the Cambodian AP staffers who visited the front all day could not confirm the report.⁶⁶

Boyle states that “stories of a bloodbath, as reported by other news agencies, cannot be verified and there is every indication that the accounts are lies.” He cites as an example an AP report “that French women were raped and brutalized,” though he asserts that French doctors and nurses “never saw any rape victims.”⁶⁷ He also says that French mercenaries and Americans with CIA and DIA connections were permitted to take refuge in the embassy and to leave in safety, though they were regarded by the Khmer Rouge as war criminals. One of them, Douglas Sapper, a former Green Beret, “publicly boasted he was planning to take a Swedish submachine gun…and raise the American flag at the U.S. embassy killing as many ‘commies as I can.’” Yet he “was one of the first Americans to seek refuge in the embassy” and was permitted to leave, along with other journalists rumored to be working with intelligence, though the Khmer Rouge knew of these threats (Schanberg refers fondly to Sapper as one of those who “performed constructive roles” in the embassy; Barron and Paul cite him simply as an “American businessman”). Boyle questions the atrocity reports and gives a positive account of the occupation and evacuation, adding that the French prevented fraternization with Khmer Rouge troops who wanted to visit journalists. His account of the situation in Phnom Penh and within the embassy is similar to that of the Tarrs.

Returning to the theory of the Free Press, we see that there are conflicting reports of all these events. Swain and Schanberg present their view in the London Sunday Times and New York Times; the Tarrs and Boyle give their conflicting account in News from Kampuchea (international circulation 500) and the left wing New York Guardian, also with a tiny reading public. The detailed participant account by the Tarrs of the actual evacuation from Phnom Penh as they perceived it, which is quite unique, is not so much as mentioned in the mass media; their reports appeared without distortion, they claim, only in tiny left wing journals in New Zealand. Boyle reports that AP refused to publish his stories when he had taken over their bureau, choosing instead accounts of atrocities that neither he, nor French doctors or nurses, nor Cambodian AP staffers could verify. But there is no censorship in the Free Press, such as we find in totalitarian states.

We are aware of only one reference to the report by the Tarrs in the mainstream media in the West. It is worth reviewing as an indication of how academic scholarship deals with evidence that departs from the prevailing line. The well-known Cambodia specialist Michael Leifer reviewed Barron-Paul in the Times Literary Supplement.⁶⁸ In a letter commenting on this review,⁶⁹ Torben Retbøll noted that Leifer “seems to accept, somewhat uncritically, the charges put forward in the book” despite serious questions about its accuracy and selective treatment of available data—questions that are quite pertinent, as we shall see. Specifically, Retbøll cited eyewitness reports that question the Barron-Paul account of the evacuation of Phnom Phenh, including that of the Tarrs. Leifer responded rather haughtily that by “eyewitness” Retbøll “presumably…means foreigners who sheltered in the compound of the French embassy. He does not confirm whether any of these so-called eyewitnesses had actual experience of participation” in the evacuation.⁷⁰ Evidently, Leifer was unaware of the fact that the account by the Tarrs—published six months earlier—made quite explicit that they were direct participants in the evacuation prior to being sheltered in the embassy on their return to Phnom Penh. Retbøll then reported the Tarrs’ account correctly, quoting the conclusions just given, in a letter which furthermore gave the citation to their report in News from Kampuchea.⁷¹ In response, Leifer asks whether Retbøll “is aware of the fact that Tarr and his wife were among those confined to the compound of the French embassy in Phnom Penh”—which of course he was, though the relevant point is that prior to this they participated in the evacuation. Leifer then cites Swain’s account of how the Tarrs were evacuated from the embassy concluding that “on the basis of this experience, it would seem impossible for the Tarrs to have compiled a report at first hand.” He says that “at one stage, there was every prospect that Mrs Tarr would be separated from her husband because of her nationality and dispatched out of the capital on foot,” but “the weeping couple” were smuggled on board a convoy by a French diplomat (citing Swain).⁷² Nowhere does Leifer mention the fact that the Tarrs participated in the evacuation on foot before they returned to Phnom Penh and the French embassy from which they were evacuated, and had published a detailed report of this experience. Leifer’s first letter indicates that he was simply unaware of their account. His second letter cannot be explained on this basis; rather, it reveals that he was simply unwilling to look into it, preferring to insinuate that their detailed story must have been invented out of whole cloth, evidently in complete ignorance of what they had reported. At this point he knew exactly where their account appeared. A striking example of careful and dispassionate scholarship. Retbøll’s response correcting the factual record was not published.

In citing Swain’s contemptuous account of the Tarrs and the alleged circumstances of their evacuation, Leifer simply presents it as fact, never mentioning that their own account differs radically. Typically, an insulting account of the Tarrs reaches a mass audience, while their own version of events in which they were involved—including their participation in the evacuation and their relations to journalists—is not permitted to enter the public record. In this case scholarship surpasses journalism in deceit. The journalists simply did not refer to the Tarrs’ experiences, while condemning them for their “nauseating revolutionary rhetoric” and contemptible efforts to fraternize with the Khmer Rouge. The Cambodia scholar goes a step further, pretending that their account does not exist even when he knows precisely where it is to be found.⁷³

To complete the story, we turn finally to the major sources of information that have reached the general public, the books by Barron-Paul and Ponchaud.

As already noted, the Barron-Paul book and their earlier Reader’s Digest article have reached tens of millions of readers in the United States and abroad and are undoubtedly the major source of information for the general public. They have also been widely and generally quite favorably reviewed and have been the subject of extensive comment apart from reviews, also to a mass audience, ranging from a front-page horror story in the Wall Street Journal to an article in TV Guide⁷⁴ (circulation more then 19 million) by Ernest Lefever, a foreign policy specialist who is otherwise known for his argument before congress that we should be more tolerant of the “mistakes” of the Chilean junta “in attempting to clear away the devastation of the Allende period” and his discovery of the “remarkable freedom of expression” enjoyed by critics of the military regime.⁷⁵ The book has been described as “impeccably-documented”⁷⁶; the authors “deserve substantial credit, however, for the exhaustiveness and meticulousness of their research.”⁷⁷ The London Economist wrote that “the methods and documentation” of the authors “will convince any save the most dedicated sceptics that at least 1m people have died since the fall of Cambodia as a direct result of the excesses of the Angka Loeu”; “It may be the best book there ever will be” on this subject.⁷⁸ In the United States, the press response in editorials and commentary was also substantial and largely unquestioning.⁷⁹

Not all reviewers have been completely uncritical.⁸⁰ Martin Woollacott noted that the estimates of dead are “guesswork” and that their sample of refugees “is disproportionately drawn from the middle-class and the north-west of the country.”⁸¹ William Shawcross commented that their figure of dead “is that of the Carter Administration.”⁸² Elizabeth Becker objects that they “pepper their book with facile polemics,” turning it “into a Cold War propaganda piece.”⁸³ A number of reviewers have remarked on their infantile discussion of Khieu Samphan’s alleged impotence and its significance as well as their failure to refer to the U.S. role; when they speak of ’’the murder of a gentle land,” they are not referring to B-52 attacks on villages or the systematic bombing and murderous ground sweeps by U.S. troops or forces organized and supplied by the United States, in a land that had been largely removed from the Indochina conflict prior to the U.S. attack. But in general, their conclusions have been taken as overwhelmingly persuasive, if not definitive.

To evaluate the Barron-Paul account in a serious way, one must first consider its credibility where verifiable. Their case is largely built, as it must be, on refugee accounts. How much faith we place in their rendition of these accounts and the conclusions they draw from the samples they present will be determined by their credibility where what they say is subject to check. We stress again the importance of avoiding a gross but common error of reasoning: since the refugee accounts far outweigh in significance the supporting documentation, one might erroneously conclude that even if the latter collapses the main charges remain intact. The error is transparent; it is only the independently verifiable material that gives some indication of the trustworthiness of their account of what they claim to have heard and found.

We have already seen several examples of their exhaustive, meticulous, and impeccable scholarship, including their reliance on the Famiglia Cristiana “interview” and their uncritical handling of the edict allegedly put forth by a Khmer Rouge commander; they are not, of course, to be faulted for the fact that their source, Ponchaud, has since modified and then silently withdrawn this “quote,” though for the reasons we reviewed, there was ample reason for skepticism about this and other sources that they cite—quite selectively, as we shall see, as fits their purposes. We have also mentioned their method of finding “promising” subjects under the “guidance” of Thai ministry officials and “elected” camp commanders, a critical admission as to methodology that should have at once alerted reviewers and commentators that this study is hardly to be taken too seriously.

In fact, this reliance—whether naive or cynical—on the guidance of Thai authorities is typical of their research. In his preface, Barron reviews the “diverse sources” that “all” assured him that “the communist conquerors of Cambodia had…put virtually everybody to work tilling the soil under deathly conditions.” These “diverse sources” are, in toto: specialists at the State and Defense Departments, the National Security Council, and three unnamed foreign embassies in Washington.⁸⁴ The Acknowledgements supplement these remarkably diverse sources as follows: a representative of the Thai Ministry of the Interior, whose “knowledge and advice additionally provided us with invaluable guidance”; Cambodian specialists in the U.S. Department of State, the National Security Council, and the U.S. Army General Staff, who “made available large quantities of their own data, guided us to other sources, answered innumerable questions and favored us with authoritative criticism”; and Ponchaud, who “put at our disposal his immense store of knowledge about Cambodia, generously shared with us the results of his own research, saved us from errors through scholarly criticism⁸⁵ and on several occasions assisted Ursula Naccache as an interpreter in the conduct of important interviews.”⁸⁶ Can one imagine a researcher limiting himself to comparable sources on the other side of the fence for a critical study of U.S. imperial violence, then to be lauded for his meticulous and exhaustive scholarship? The same concept of “diverse sources” also sets the limits of their “impeccable documentation,” to which we return.

No less remarkable than their search for “promising” interviewees and their concept of “diverse sources” is the short shrift they give to pre-1975 Cambodia. They explain that they “have referred to [events prior to April 17, 1975] only to the extent we thought such references were necessary to an understanding of what has transpired since then,”⁸⁷ reasonable enough until we see what they omit as unnecessary to such understanding. The U.S. role, for example—surely known to them if they read the journalistic sources they cite and hardly a great secret to readers of the daily press—is off the agenda as irrelevant to subsequent events.⁸⁸ Also unnecessary to the understanding of postwar Cambodia in their view are such minor matters as the backgrounds of the revolutionary movement in peasant society and social conflict. That a study of postwar Cambodia resting on such a historical vacuum can be regarded as an outstanding work of scholarship or even a useful study of current Cambodia is remarkable indeed. The framework that they set reveals with crystal clarity that their story, where unverifiable, is to be taken about as seriously as an account of the U.S. war in Vietnam produced by the World Peace Council. Correspondingly, it is treated as seriously by the Free Press as WPC studies are on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

There is, of course, method in the Barron-Paul research methodology; it is not as stupid as it looks at first glance. If Cambodian history, internal social conflict, the nature of peasant society, French colonialism, and U.S. intervention are all excluded by fiat as unnecessary for the understanding of what has transpired since April 1975, then the stage is fully set to blame everything on the evil Communist leaders: revenge killings, disease, starvation, overwork, unexploded ordnance, the B-52 craters that have “churned up…the entire countryside” (Swain), everything. Given their framework, we hardly need inquire into the details to predict the conclusions that these scholars will reach. All deaths in Cambodia in the postwar period, all penury and suffering and strife, will necessarily be attributed to the sole factor that is not eliminated from consideration a priori: the Khmer Rouge leadership. And of course that is exactly what the authors conclude. The absurdity of this procedure apparently has not been perceived by the many commentators who take this transparent propaganda exercise seriously.

The methodology for estimating postwar deaths, which has so impressed the editors of the London Economist and other ideologists, is hardly more than a joke; one does not have to be a “dedicated sceptic” to question their basis for concluding that “at least 1m people have died since the fall of Cambodia as a direct result of the excesses of the Angka Loeu” (our emphasis); mere rationality suffices, since all other factors were eliminated as irrelevant. What of the numbers? These are determined on the basis of such notable sources as Khieu Samphan’s alleged admission that “roughly a million Cambodians died,”⁸⁹ and beyond that, estimates offered with no stated basis by various named and unnamed “Western observers,” various guesses based on no cited evidence about the proportion of “educated people’’ massacred, other guesses about deaths from starvation and disease, and so on.⁹⁰

By such routes Barron and Paul concoct their estimate that “at the very minimum, more than 1,200,000 men, women, and children died in Cambodia between April 17, 1975, and January 1, 1977, as a consequence of the actions of Angka Loeu.”⁹¹ The breakdown of numbers includes “100,000 or more in massacres and by execution” and most of the rest—roughly a million—from disease and starvation.⁹²

The “dedicated sceptic” might, at this point, raise eyebrows over the fact that 1.2 million is the figure allegedly produced by the U.S. embassy in Bangkok, since repeated widely in the press.⁹³ And the figure of a million deaths from disease and starvation happens to correspond to the prediction by U.S. government sources of the numbers who would starve to death after the Khmer Rouge victory, as we have seen⁹⁴—an estimate based on an assessment of the ravages of the war, specifically, the destruction of the economy by the United States.

Very little in the Barron-Paul book is subject to possible verification. Therefore an assessment of the credibility of their primary evidence (refugee reports) rests very largely on the accuracy of their brief historical remarks. Several reviewers have commented on the striking inadequacies of these remarks, failing to draw the obvious conclusion, however: if what can be checked turns out to be false or misleading, what are we to conclude about claims that are subject to no verification? Turning to their version of history, we find the standard clichés about this “once happy country” now devastated by Khmer Rouge atrocities, the “faithful, kindly believers in Theravada Buddhism” who produced annual rice surpluses in the plentiful land “without overly exerting themselves,” the “Phnom Penh residents, who had been known for their spontaneity and gaiety, their uninhibited curiosity and friendliness,” etc.⁹⁵; compare the accounts of peasant life, the exploitative existence of the Phnom Penh elite, and the history of violence in Cambodia mentioned earlier, which pass here without notice. Barron and Paul, unlike every serious commentator, make no effort to find out what lies behind the “Khmer smile,” and they do not seem intrigued by the fact that the very reporters they cite speak of the surprise of urban residents when dark-skinned country boys in traditional garb looking like creatures from another planet entered Phnom Penh in April, 1975.

Turning to the Khmer Rouge, Barron and Paul claim that “there is no evidence that the communists ever enjoyed the voluntary support of more than a small minority of Cambodians, in either the countryside or the cities” (a standard propaganda cliché of the Vietnam War applied to the NLF, although known to be false by official experts).⁹⁶ Rather, the Khmer Rouge programs “alienated the peasantry affected” so that families “fled to the cities” in a “mass migration”—not from the U.S. bombing but rather from Khmer Rouge cruelty. Their “mute and phlegmatic” soldiers include children “impressed into the revolutionary army at age ten or eleven when the communists had overrun their villages.”⁹⁷ On the assumption that these remarks accurately characterize the Khmer Rouge relation to the peasantry, the “difficult question” of how they now maintain control becomes an imponderable mystery, not to speak of their rise from a tiny movement to a substantial army under the most horrendous conditions and their success in defeating the Lon Nol army backed by massive U.S. force. But no such problems trouble these thinkers. The Khmer Rouge succeeded by skillful propaganda, exploiting the U.S. “limited incursion” and the B-52 raids directed against the North Vietnamese and Vietcong sanctuaries.⁹⁸ The Khmer Rouge, they explain,

had new opportunities. To escape the spreading fighting, people started swarming from the countryside into the cities, spawning economic and social problems for the Lon Nol government. The American intervention and B-52 raids (the latter continued until August 1973) enabled the communists somewhat more convincingly to depict the North Vietnamese as “our teachers,”⁹⁹ the United States as the “imperialist aggressor” and the Lon Nol government as “a lackey of the imperialists.” The Far Eastern Economic Review observed: “From being widely regarded as the dogmatic disciples of a Marxist ideology alien to Khmer national traditions and culture, the Khmer Rouge became patriots.”¹⁰⁰

The exact history and character of the Cambodian revolutionary movement and its antecedents is the subject of controversy that we will not attempt to review. Laura Summers informs us (personal communication) that the Issarak movement was supported by the Thai resistance opposing the Japanese in World War II (the allies refused assistance, fearing their reformist social programs). Based in the Thai-occupied provinces of the northwest, it was officially recognized by the Thai resistance government in 1944 and received support from both Siamese and Vietnamese. “Prior to joining the Independence movement most Khmer Issarak were peasants, monks or intellectuals (teachers).” Summers further comments that Lon Nol had been involved in Battambang politics in earlier years, having been appointed to reestablish the local Khmer administration in the region in 1946 and serving as Provincial Governor of Battambang from 1947 to 1949. As for the scale of the military activity of the 1953-54 period, Summers informs us that there were 10,000 armed guerrillas operating in Cambodia in January 1953, 8,000 of them Issaraks divided into several tendencies, less than 2,000 Viet Minh.

On Meyer’s own reaction to the hearings, see Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm), 23 April 1978 (translated in FBIS, 27 April 1978, Cambodia, H2), where he is quoted as saying: “I know I have been lured into a trap here in Oslo. It has been a question of judging and condemning the new Cambodia and not of trying to understand what has happened there.” Of the various participants, Meyer was undoubtedly the one most familiar with Cambodian history, society and culture, in fact the only one to have written on Cambodia apart from the war and postwar period, to our knowledge.

See also Virginia Thompson, French Indo-china (Macmillan, 1942). She comments on the misery of the Khmers despite the country’s potential and actual wealth, the decimation of the population by foreign and internal strife, the indebtedness and lack of credit facilities other than usury for the small proprietors, and the fact that “the population is ever on the edge of starvation” (pp. 338ff.). See also Ben Kiernan, “Peasant life and society in Kampuchea before 1970,” mimeographed, Monash University (Australia), 1978. He reports that the official termination of slavery in 1897 had little impact in some districts and that even for peasants who were free, the majority throughout the period were at a subsistence level, with low yields, frequent hunger and even starvation, and a sharp decline in landholdings for about 80% of farmers from 1930 to 1950. In short, hardly a picture of “order and peace” in a land without “any major social or agrarian problems” (Ponchaud) for the “fun-loving, easy-going Cambodians” (Donald Wise), or a land that had never known hunger until it fell into the hands of the evil Communists (Henry Kamm), a “gentle land” of “happy smiles” as depicted by many Western journalists and casual visitors.

We hope that further comment is unnecessary on the significance of Kiernan’s analysis for investigation of the workings of the Western propaganda system with regard to Cambodia. Later events and discoveries, whatever they may be, quite plainly—as a simple point of logic—have no bearing on an evaluation of what the media have been churning out on the basis of research in 1976.

Subsequent analysis of the later period, should it be undertaken, would have to consider the impact of a two-front war that was particularly violent on the Vietnamese side in 1977 and involved continued attacks by the CIA-trained Khmer Serei on the Thai side (cf. R.-P. Paringaux, Le Monde, 28-29 August 1977). For a skeptical view about events on the Thai border, see Norman Peagam, Far Eastern Economic Review, 11 February 1977; for an eyewitness account of Cambodian atrocities on the Vietnamese side of the border see Nayan Chanda, FEER, 31 March 1978, and for a prescient analysis of “the seriousness of Cambodia’s predicament” in a highly unequal battle see Chanda, FEER, 11 August 1978. The border conflicts undoubtedly had a severe impact within Cambodia. It is quite senseless to exclude them from consideration in interpreting internal events in Cambodia in the postwar period, as is not uncommon. See Heder’s papers cited earlier for extensive discussion.

Swain’s lengthy and horrifying account contrasts with the brief mention by his companion, Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times, who describes the evacuation vividly and notes that many of the miserable patients forcefully evacuated will have little chance of survival, but of the situation in Phnom Penh he says only that “many of the wounded were dying for lack of care” (New York Times, 9 May 1975; in an accompanying dispatch headed “American’s Brief Brush With Arrest and Death,” he writes: “Doctors and surgeons, out of fear, had failed to come to work and the wounded were bleeding to death in the corridors”). He believes that the Khmer Rouge who threatened him and his companions as they left the hospital may have been angry because “they wanted no foreign witnesses” to the evacuation, though a reading of Swain’s account of the same visit raises questions about the alternatives.

In conformity with the standard line, Woollacott alleges that Cambodian atrocities had previously been disregarded. “The American Right did not want to examine at all closely the kind of fate to which they had abandoned ‘their’ Cambodians. The whole array of Left-wing and liberal groups in the United States, France, and Britain, who had supported the Khmer Rouge cause, after some sophistry about the evacuation of the cities and some suggestions that the stories of executions were CIA ‘plants,’ more or less dropped Cambodia.” He does not refer us to sources for “the whole array of Left-wing and liberal groups” who took this stand, or explain how the regular condemnations of Cambodian genocide from mid-1975 in the mainstream press (New York Times, Time, etc.) comport with this version of the facts. He also states that “only when a figure as impressive as Jean Lacouture spoke out, as he did earlier this year, did a few Left-wingers timidly follow,” referring to the article by Lacouture that condemned Cambodian “autogenocide” on the basis of gross misrepresentation of Ponchaud. This paragraph was dropped by the Boston Globe, who were aware of the facts; see note 348, below. Woollacott also expresses his astonishment that the Cambodian revolutionaries had not “picked up…the essential humaneness of French life and thought,” as exemplified in Indochina for so many years, or in Algeria at the time when they were studying in Paris.

The absurdity of their assumption about the irrelevance of history was noted by William Shawcross (New York Review of Books, 4 March 1976), referring to their book then under preparation, evidently, with little effect.

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1. David P. Chandler, “Transformation in Cambodia,” Commonweal, 1 April 1977. See also his comments in the May Hearings (in part cited above, p. 176-77), where this article appears as a supplement.

2. The French also continually readjusted the border in a manner prejudicial to Cambodia. See the preface to this volume, note 20. On the vicious and barbaric French colonial impact on Vietnam, see the references cited in chapter 4, note 40; also note 67. Matters were little different in Cambodia. Chandler’s comments on the mythic “happiness” of the Cambodian peasants as seen by imperial interpreters can be supplemented by the studies cited in notes 2, 18; also Malcolm Caldwell and Lek Hor Tan, Cambodia, Monthly Review Press, 1973, and sources cited there, particularly Milton E. Osborne, The French Presence in Cochinchina and Cambodia, Cornell, 1969. Ponchaud, in contrast, writes that “to any Western visitor Cambodia was a land of smiles” (the standard cliché; see Meyer, op. cit.): “There did not seem to be any major social or agrarian problems” and “French colonization brought order and peace” though there were injustices that could be “exploited” by “an intelligent propaganda campaign,” Cambodia: Year Zero, pp. 140f.)

3. Ponchaud writes: “During the reign of Sihanouk and then under Lon Nol, methods used by the government forces in dealing with their Khmer Rouge enemies were no less savage than those subsequently employed by Democratic Kampuchea: between 1968 and 1970 prisoners from Samlaut or Dambar, the cradles of the Khmer revolution, were bound to trees with their stomachs cut open and left to die; others, hurled off the cliffs of Bokor, agonized for days: enemy villages were razed and the villagers clubbed to death by local peasants who had been set against them.” Ibid., 140. This account is corroborated from other sources. The events elicited no reaction in the West, and are now generally dismissed or ignored (by Ponchaud as well as others) as a possible reason for subsequent savagery.

4. See the references of notes 2, 45, 202. For a review of press reports, see Chomsky, At War With Asia, chapter 3.

5. Recall Elizabeth Becker’s puzzlement over the lack of any “philosophical basis” for the policies of autarky, self-reliance, egalitarianism and decentralization. On these matters, see Laura Summers, “Democratic Kampuchea,” in Bogdan Szajkowski, Marxist Governments: A World Survey, Macmillan, London, forthcoming. Also her introduction to her translation of Khieu Samphan, Cambodia’s Economy and Industrial Development, Cornell 1979, and the text itself, written in Paris in 1959 for a Doctorat in economics. See also Malcolm Caldwell, “Cambodia—Rationale for a Rural Policy,” a five-part study presented at the Seminar “Underdevelopment and Subsistence Reproduction in Southeast Asia,” University of Bielefeld, 21-23 April 1978. This is a preliminary draft, never completed, which we hope will be published with Caldwell’s papers. See also the report on Thailand cited by Michael Vickery, p. 253, below. Also Denzil Peiris, “The student principles,” Far Eastern Economic Review, 2 June 1978, explaining how the “economic restructuring” of Cambodia had been following Khieu Samphan’s ideas in his thesis, and also outlining these ideas.

6. Cambodia: Year Zero, pp. 75-82, 112-21, and elsewhere.

7. On this matter, Ponchaud writes: “The economy inherited by Democratic Kampuchea had been totally devastated by the war.” The South Vietnamese “unhesitatingly demolished a large part of the economic infrastructure of the Cambodian territory,” and the United States bombed the rubber plantations, while the soldiers of the Lon Nol regime, “following their instructors’ example, buried their own country under their bombs and shells” and the Khmer Rouge “razed everything in their path that could in any way be connected with the West.” ibid., p. 85.

8. See notes 202, 207, above. Ponchaud’s reference to “their instructors’ example” is more accurate.

9. Michael Vickery, “Looking Back at Cambodia,” Westerly, December 1976. Citations below are from the original manuscript, dated 10 August 1976.

10. Vickery’s observation on the contradictory character of refugee stories reflects his personal experience in refugee camps; see above, p. 168. The contradictory character will naturally not emerge from accounts by reporters who proceed in the manner we have described. Note that when Vickery wrote in August 1976, refugee stories were, as he says, “the only first-hand source of news,” though the situation was gradually to change, as we have seen. It should also be noted that the “blackout on information” followed years of censorship under the Lon Nol government.

11. “Anti-French maquis cum bandits, who controlled much of the countryside and in some cases probably had contact with the Viet Minh.”

12. On political violence perpetrated by the Sihanouk regime, see Heder’s forthcoming article in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (cited in the preface, note 19) where he describes, for example, a speech by Sihanouk in August 1968 “in which he claimed to have put to death over 1,500 communists since 1967 and stated that, if necessary, he would persist in such a policy of merciless extermination until the [Communist Party] submitted” (we quote from the manuscript). This statement, and others like it, aroused no more outcry in the West than the violent repression carried out by the regime.

13. The reference, clearly, is to the leadership in Phnom Penh and their supporters, not to the peasants driven into the city by the war. T.D. Allman had described Phnom Penh as a city “shared by two separate nations: the poor, the refugees, the ordinary people, their lives torn and complicated by the war beyond imagination; and the political elite for whom the war has meant promotions and a revived sense of their own importance …” (“Forever Khmer,” Far Eastern Economic Review, 4 September 1971).

14. Timothy Carney notes that “sometime in 1973 the party apparently decided to accelerate its program to alter Khmer society…,” for no cited reason. Carney, ed., op. cit., p. 21. The most interesting material in this collection is a translation of Ith Sarin, “Nine months with the maquis,” excerpted from a 1973 book written in an effort to rally opposition to the Khmer Rouge. It gives some insight, from a very hostile source, into the success of the Khmer Rouge in gaining popular support by conscientiously following the maxims of “serve the people,” “study from the people in order to be like the people,” etc. We have been informed that the sections of Ith Sarin’s book that do not appear in Carney’s excerpts give a rather favorable description of Communist social and economic programs and that the book was banned by the Lon Nol government as being more harmful than beneficial to its cause.

15. Kissinger succeeded in duping the compliant media into believing that he was simply seeking a “decent interval” after the U.S. departure from Vietnam, but some attention to his actual statements as well as to the unfolding events reveals quite clearly that the aim was military victory in defiance of the Paris Agreements of January 1973, as was pointed out at once, though generally ignored by the press. See the references of chapter 1, note 1.

16. A secondary goal was no doubt to eliminate a rear base for the resistance in Vietnam. According to Snepp, intelligence gathered in 1970 revealed that nearly 80% of the supplies for Communist forces in the southern half of South Vietnam were sent through Cambodia. Op. cit., p. 20.

17. See chapter 1, section 2.

18. Laura Summers, “Cambodia: Model of the Nixon doctrine,” Current History, December 1973. For more information on the Nixon-Kissinger rejection of a possible settlement in Cambodia at the time of the Paris agreements of January 1973 and thereafter, see Laura Summers and D. Gareth Porter, “Cambodia: Was there an Understanding?,” submitted to supplement testimony at the Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, on S. 1443, ninety-third Congress, first session, 1973, pp. 457-63.

19. May Hearings, p. 14. See the citations on pp. 176-77, above.

20. Laura Summers, “Consolidating the Cambodian Revolution,” Current History, December 1975.

21. See note 60 of this chapter.

22. Personal communication.

23. See p. 16, above.

24. Wall Street Journal, editorials, 31 August 1978, 16 April 1976.

25. On this matter, Vickery writes (personal communication): “I am convinced, however, that a good bit of Cambodian policy since the end of the war has been inspired by good old-fashioned vengeance and that the revolution could have been carried out more gently. This possibly gratuitous violence would have no connection with a ‘Communist,’ or ‘Marxist,’ or ‘Maoist’ orientation of the new leaders, but, I believe, would be well within the limits of traditional Cambodian personality and culture as I came to understand them during a residence of five years there.” Cf. Meyer, op. cit., (see note 2) for an analysis of Cambodia that lends support to this interpretation, which, however, is unhelpful for the needs of current propaganda.

26. We quote from the transcript, for which we are indebted to Torben Retbøll, who is preparing a study of the Hearings. We have changed only spelling, punctuation and some obvious misprints and grammatical errors.

27. See note 2. In a review of Meyer’s book in the Journal of the Siam Society (January 1973, volume 61, Part I, pp. 310-25), Laura Summers describes him as “one of Sihanouk’s closest associates” and “without doubt the most prominent of [Sihanouk’s large contingent of French advisors] because of his enormous influence in all areas of foreign and domestic policy making and notably in domestic economic planning…By 1961, it was widely acknowledged that he was almost as powerful as Sihanouk.” Summers raises serious questions about Meyer’s interpretation of the Khmer peasantry and in particular “his psychologizing of essentially social phenomena [which] prevents him from fully understanding the emergence of leftist movements …” She notes particularly his avoidance of “any implication of French colonialism” and the “colonial bias” of his account, and his implicit rejection of the possibility that the Khmer peasants might have been capable of making rational decisions for themselves on the basis of their perception of social reality. We need hardly add that it is not because of these characteristics of his writing that Meyer’s book and the statement to which we turn have been ignored in the United States. In fact, like Sihanouk himself, Meyer was regarded as a dangerous radical by U.S. officials, we have been informed.

28. Context suggests that he has in mind the Vietnamese. He writes: “However, it must not be so that the accusations against the regime in Cambodia—even if they to a certain extent are justified—become the pretext of a Vietnamese intervention for a pretended liberation of the Khmer people.” On this warning and the failure to heed it, see the preface to this volume.

29. Compare Ambassador Bjork’s reactions, cited above, p. 215.

30. “Human Rights in Cambodia,” see note 18.

31. About this event, Ponchaud writes only that “until recently the general tone of relations between Khmers and French was one of mutual friendship. With one exception: the measures adopted by Charles Thomson in 1884, during the Jules Ferry government, which made the Khmers very angry. The effect of the measures was to deprive the sovereign of all but symbolic power, and this led to a full-scale rebellion.” That seems a little thin for the massacre of 20% of the population. Cambodia: Year Zero, p. 145.

32. Elsewhere, she points out that yields were considerably lower than those of Cambodia’s Southeast Asian neighbors before the war. “Consolidating the Cambodian Revolution.”

33. Ben Kiernan, “The Samlaut Rebellion and its Aftermath, 1967-70: the Origins of Cambodia’s Liberation Movement,” Working Papers of the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, nos. 4 and 5 (undated; apparently 1976).

34. Ben Kiernan, “The 1970 Peasant Uprisings in Kampuchea,” unpublished ms., 1978. Ponchaud writes that “with the support of the Khmer revolutionaries, [the Vietcong and North Vietnamese] incited the frontier peasants to march on Phnom Penh and overthrow the Lon Nol regime” (op. cit., p. 166).

35. “Cambodia in the News: 1975-76,” Melbourne Journal of Politics, volume 8, 1975-76; “Social Cohesion in Revolutionary Cambodia,” Australian Outlook, December, 1976.

36. Note that this exposure of the fakery was long before the international publicity afforded these fabrications, which still continues unaffected by fact, as we have seen.

37. Barron and Paul visited refugee camps in October and November, and also interviewed refugees elsewhere. See above, p. 162, on their mode of access to refugees. Ponchaud’s interviews with refugees were also from the same period. Ponchaud based his book, he writes, on written accounts by 94 Khmer refugees, 77 in Thailand and 17 in Vietnam, and interviews with hundreds of illiterate refugees, mostly from the “laboring classes.” He identifies only the 94 literate refugees: all middle or upper class with the possible exception of “seven ordinary soldiers,” “four Khmer Rouge,” “three bonzes,” “two fishermen,” “a provincial guard,” “a truck driver,” “a warehouseman.” Cambodia: Year Zero, p. x.

38. He notes that Western and Thai journalists in Bangkok as well as U.S. officials in the refugee camps concur with this analysis.

39. Sophi’s account; see above, p. 243.

40. Ponchaud writes that in some areas agricultural work was dangerous after the war “because of the unexploded bombs and shells lurking in the grass or brush.” In one region northwest of Phnom Penh, “a day never went by without several villagers being injured or killed by explosions.” Cambodia: Year Zero, p. 56. These deaths and injuries, like those from starvation, disease, and overwork caused by the killing of draught animals, are included among “Khmer Rouge atrocities” in the fanciful tabulations offered by the Western media. When he was evacuated from Phnom Penh in May, 1975, Ponchaud passed through villages where he saw “vestiges of the dreadful American air warfare.” In conversation, villagers referred to T-28 bombing (including napalm) as the most terrible part of the war, worse than the B-52s. He also passed “a huge cemetery where thousands of revolutionary fighters were buried,” a testimony to the nature of the war. Ibid., pp. 37-38. Such observations rarely found their way to commentary on the book.

41. Recall that Ponchaud’s book is known primarily through second- or third-hand accounts. Much of Kiernan’s article in Australian Outlook is based on interviews with refugees in Bangkok and camps in Thailand from December 1975 to February 1976. As noted above, there were 10,200 Cambodian refugees in Thailand in August 1976; the January 1976 figure was about 9,300 (Kiernan, personal communication).

42. There is unlikely to be a serious and comprehensive study of refugees, in part because of Thai refusal to permit serious scholars to conduct research among refugees (see p. 168, above), in part because of the changed situation after the Vietnamese invasion.

43. Nayan Chanda, “When the killing has to stop,” FEER, 29 October 1976; “Cambodge: Après deux ans d’isolement complet, Premiers signes d’une timide ouverture au monde extérieur,” Le Monde diplomatique, May 1977. See also the FEER Asia Yearbook, 1977.

44. Note that his estimate is at the lower end of Twining’s estimated “thousands or hundreds of thousands. Recall also the estimates by Carney and Holbrooke cited above as well as those by Cambodia watchers cited by Simons (p. 182).

45. Here there is a footnote reference to a communication by W.J. Sampson to which we return.

46. See note 80, this chapter.

47. FEER. Whether Chanda is correct in attributing the use of force to uneducated peasants, we are not qualified to say. We should remark, however, that modern history offers little basis for the belief that uneducated peasants are more given to savagery, violence or terror than sophisticated Western intellectuals. Quite the contrary. Similarly, we wonder whether there is any source of peasant origin that offers justification for massacre and annihilation in the manner, say, of Guenter Lewy’s highly praised America in Vietnam, on which we have commented several times. For further discussion, see our review of this book in Inquiry, 19 March 1979.

48. See notes 82 and 293, this chapter.

49. For more on these matters see the ignored study by Hildebrand and Porter, cited in note 9, this chapter.

50. For more on these matters, briefly noted in the revised English translation of Ponchaud’s book, see also Far Eastern Economic Review, December 1976, 7 October 1977, and 2 June 1977; and the articles by Summers in Current History cited above, notes 63, 220.

51. W.J. Sampson, letter, London Economist, 26 March 1977; reprinted in May Hearings, as an Appendix.

52. Recall Barron’s attempt to defend his 5 million figure; note 117, above. In an unpublished paper, Sampson arrives at an estimate of about 8.4 million for the population at the end of 1978, noting many uncertainties. The FEER Asia 1979 Yearbook estimates the population at 8.2 million.

53. This figure presumably includes wartime deaths.

54. See his review of Ponchaud and the “corrections,” where the charge is withdrawn. See notes 17, 48.

55. See note 348, below.

56. May Hearings, p. 37.

57. William Shawcross, “Third Indochina War,” New York Review of Books, 6 April 1978.

58. Note that this communication is subsequent to Shawcross’s phone call.

59. “An Exchange on Cambodia,” New York Review of Books, 20 July 1978.

60. George C. Hildebrand, “Kampuchean refugee challenges terror stories circulated in U.S.A.,” News from Kampuchea, June 1977; also Guardian (New York), 30 March 1977. In the same report, Hildebrand states that he “spoke personally with Cambodians who were approached by U.S. agents seeking to recruit them into…armed bands [that ”raided Cambodia from bases in neighboring Thailand”] during 1975.”

61. Cf. the eyewitness account by Sydney H. Schanberg (New York Times, 9 May 1975): the Khmer Rouge were “peasant boys, pure and simple—darker skinned than their city brethren, with gold in their front teeth. To them the city is a curiosity, an oddity, a carnival, where you visit but do not live…When they looted jewelry shops, they kept only one watch for themselves and gave the rest to their colleagues or passersby.” On the peasant army, see also the comments by Peang Sophi and by Jean-Jacques Cazaux, cited below, p. 331-32. On how apparent efforts to prevent looting have been transmuted by the international press into looting, savage repression, brutality and revenge, see note 101, above.

62. Chou Meng Tarr, “Our experiences during the liberation of Phnom Penh, April 1975, Part I,” News from Kampuchea, volume 1, no. 1, April 1977; Chou Meng Tarr and Shane Tarr, “Part II,” ibid., volume 1, no. 2, June 1977.

63. Methods aside, most observers believe it to have been a necessity. See, e.g., the comments by Poole (p. 176) and many others. See also notes 273, 313, and p. 191.

64. Their observations are corroborated by other sources; see Hildebrand and Porter, op. cit., pp. 50f. See also the eyewitness report of the situation in the hospitals at the time of the Khmer Rouge takeover by Jon Swain, Sunday Times (London), 11 May 1975: “Hundreds of people were being subjected to a hideous death” at a hospital where doctors “had not reported for work for two days, and there was no one to treat the two thousand wounded.” People were bleeding to death in the corridors or in wards caked with blood and thick with flies. A nurse explained that the doctors simply stayed away, while “the dead and dying lay in pools of their own blood,” including a Khmer Rouge “who had somehow been brought there for treatment.” In dismay, Swain and his journalist colleagues “sloshed our way through the blood to the exit.” Reports by Swain and others indicate that the subsequent Khmer Rouge evacuation of the hospitals was a brutal affair, but perhaps the scene they observed is relevant to understanding the evacuation policy.

65. Richard Boyle, Flower of the Dragon, Ramparts Press, 1972. Boyle filed a story on the exodus from Phnom Penh for Pacific News Service (30 June 1975). In it he reports having seen the Calmette hospital “now administered by the Khmer Rouge,” “relay station and rest stops along the road out of Phnom Phenh, where Khmer Rouge troops—mostly women—and Buddhist monks supplied refugees with food and water” and “an orderly exodus, in which refugees moved at a leisurely pace on bicycles, ox-carts and on foot.” He states that “not one of the 1100 foreign nationals, including about 20 journalists, who left on the two convoys provided by the Khmer Rouge ever witnessed any bodies abandoned on the roadside,” contradicting a White House intelligence memo cited by Jack Anderson, Washington Post, 23 June 1975. He believes the evacuation to have been justified by horrendous conditions in Phnom Penh, which he describes: squalid refugee camps, severe malnutrition and disease, patients in hospitals dying from gangrene and suffering from lack of treatment unless they were wealthy, lack of doctors (who fled), destruction of water filtration plants and power lines by “secret police agents” (“By the evening of 17 April, there was no power in many parts of the city, and the water supply was running out”), “a dwindling food supply.” French medical doctors at Calmette, the only functioning hospital, told him that they “feared an epidemic of bubonic plague, or even worse, cholera or typhoid.” He claims further that the Khmer doctors who remained treated patients “too sick to make the journey into the countryside” and that the evacuation was “systematic and well-planned” so far as he could see. He questions the charge in Newsweek by its photographer Dennis Cameron that the Khmer Rouge mistreated civilians, noting that “the magazine failed to produce a single photo from Cameron to substantiate his charge.” Boyle’s account did not appear in the national media, or elsewhere in the press, to our knowledge. Other reports from European journalists giving a similar account of the evacuation are cited by Retbøll (“Kampuchea and ‘the Reader’s Digest’”), who notes that given the resources of the Reader’s Digest, their omission of evidence inconsistent with the Barron-Paul report “is not a matter of inadvertence but rather a conscious attempt to suppress evidence which might disprove or modify their own conclusions.” Retbøll also cites a statement by Lim Pech Kuon, one of the witnesses at the Oslo Hearings, who challenged Anthony Paul from the floor, saying “it is obvious that Paul does not know anything at all about Cambodia. Therefore it is not up to him to judge this country.”

66. Guardian (New York) (28 May 1975). Barron and Paul report the story that Boyle asserts was censored by AP, op. cit., p. 10.

67. Reporters quoted Dr. Bernard Piquart, chief surgeon at the Calmette Hospital, as having “seen hundreds of bodies with their throats cut in the central market” and having “affirmed that he had been forced to operate on wounded Communist soldiers at gunpoint and that he had cared for French women who had been raped.” When he crossed the Cambodian border to Thailand with the convoy from the French Embassy, however, Piquart “seemed embarrassed over the wide publicity given to his reports” and “said he had talked too much and had never seen all of that.” AFP, New York Times (10 May 1978).

68. 7 October 1977.

69. TLS, 28 October 1977.

70. Ibid., 4 November 1974.

71. Ibid., 25 November 1977.

72. Ibid., 2 December 1977.

73. It is not easy to reconcile Leifer’s praise for the Barron-Paul book with his own observations and scholarly work. See, for example, his “Economic Survey” of Cambodia in The Far East and Australasia, Europa, 1976, pp. 431f., in which he observes that “the onset of war in Cambodia completely disrupted the economy…By April 1975, there was not a Cambodian economy, only the importation of foodstuffs financed by the United States government.” Thus the “first priority” for the Khmer Rouge “was declared to be the restoration of the national economy. Partly to this end, the urban centres, including the capital, were cleared of their inhabitants who were driven into the rural areas to work on the land and in other tasks of economic reconstruction. The initial rigours of the collectivization of agriculture were sustained at human cost but a good first harvest and the virtual rehabilitation of Cambodia’s small industrial sector, with Chinese technical assistance, placed the economy in a viable condition.” Given these facts, how can one give a favorable review to a book that excises from history all that precedes April 1975 and attributes the Draconian measures then instituted solely to Communist villainy?

74. 30 April 1977.

75. Phil Gailey, “Don’t Withhold Aid from Chile Junta Because of ‘Mistakes,’ Panel Is Told,” Miami Herald (6 August 1974). His TV Guide article, based largely on Barron-Paul, is entitled “The Cambodian Blood Bath and The Great Silence.” The major theme is the “appalling” refusal of the media to take seriously “the murder of a million innocent people,’’ to be explained by the tendency of the media to overlook crimes that”are inflicted in the name of revolution.” Dr. Lefever “directs the Ethics and Public Policy Program of the Kennedy Institute of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and teaches international politics there,” TV Guide informs us. It should be borne in mind, difficult as it is to imagine, that material of this sort not only inundates a mass audience but is also taken seriously in allegedly “sophisticated” circles in the United States.

76. Donald Wise, Far Eastern Economic Review, 23 September 1977. This is the review already cited, which began with the probably fabricated Famiglia Cristiana interview and ended with the “quote” about one million people being enough to build the new Cambodia; each example forms part of the impeccable documentation in the Barron-Paul book. Wise also cites with approval Barron-Paul’s explanation of the more extreme policies as a consequence of Khieu Samphan’s alleged “impotence,” and other deep remarks.

77. Paul Grimes, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 31 August 1977. The word “however” refers to the Barron-Paul subtitle, “the untold story of Communist genocide in Cambodia.” The story “hasn’t been untold at all,” Grimes correctly observes, referring to a July 1975 story by Henry Kamm in the New York Times, one of the innumerably many since. See also the review in the New York Times Book Review, 11 September 1977, by Jean Lacouture, which again makes this point.

78. Economist, 10 September 1977.

79. For one of many examples, see Editorial, Christian Science Monitor, 26 January 1977, reporting the Barron-Paul conclusions with no question as to their authenticity, while deploring the “indifference in America and elsewhere to the fate of freedom under what appears to be one of the most brutal and concentrated onslaughts in history…in the lovely land and among the engaging people of Cambodia.” Like the authors of the book, the editors have conveniently forgotten an earlier onslaught on this lovely land. Their earlier concern for “the fate of freedom” for Cambodian peasants remains a closely-guarded secret.

80. In the Nation, 25 June 1977, we commented on some of the more obvious inadequacies of the book.

81. Manchester Guardian Weekly, 18 September 1977. Excerpts from the longer Guardian article appear in the Boston Globe (2 October 1977).

82. New Statesman, 23 September 1977. Shawcross is impressed by the consistency of refugee reports, without, however, inquiring into the extent to which this is an artifact based on the selection process, not a small matter, as we have seen, particularly in the case of the book under review.

83. Manchester Guardian Weekly (30 July 1978), reprinted from the Washington Post.

84. Op. cit., p. viii.

85. This scholarly criticism did not extend to the citations from his own work, as we have seen. Cf. pp. 203ff., above.

86. Op. cit. pp. 211-212.

87. Ibid., p. xiv.

88. For example, Jon Swain’s comments, cited below. Barron and Paul refer in passing to the “fratricidal war” in which civilians were “caught up in the crossfire between government and insurgent battalions or killed by bombings” (p. 6). Now here is there any indication that the United States had anything to do with the destruction of the countryside. Equally scandalous is the reference to the U.S. “limited incursion” and the “devastating B-52 raids” which they depict, in accordance with government propaganda, as directed against North Vietnamese and Vietcong sanctuaries (p. 54). Missing from their “impeccable documentation, to cite only one relevant example, are the eyewitness reports by several U.S. correspondents (e.g., Richard Dudman, then a Khmer Rouge captive) of the impact of the U.S.”incursion” and aerial attack on Cambodian civilians. Nor do they take note of the subsequent destruction caused by the United States, or of course, the earlier U.S. interventions, military and otherwise, in Cambodia. See the references cited in notes 2, 45, 202, 204, for ample detail.

89. Op. cit., p. 203.

90. In striking contrast with their freewheeling estimates about deaths in the postwar period (by definition, at the hands of Angka), they are properly skeptical about the figures of wartime casualties, which, they sternly admonish, are offered with no stated basis (p. 6n). To appreciate the humor of this remark, one must read through the “methodology” they offer for counting postwar casualties on pp. 203f. Carney, for what it is worth, takes the figure of one million to be a “close” estimate of wartime “killed or wounded.” July Hearings, p. 22.

91. Our emphasis. Op. cit., p. 206.

92. To be precise, their numbers are 430,000 or more from disease and starvation in the latter half of 1975 and 250,000 or more in 1976, plus 400,000 or more “during the first exodus,” presumably from disease and starvation.

93. See Ponchaud, Cambodia: Year Zero, p. 71, citing “American Embassy sources,” which, he privately informs us, means the Bangkok Embassy. We write “allegedly produced” because no qualified person at the U.S. Embassy ever produced that figure, so we are informed. Charles Twining, who was the Indochina watcher at the U.S. embassy in Bangkok from 1975 to 1977, writes that there was never any “Embassy figure” of 1.2 million “or of any other dimension” and that although people in Bangkok naturally tried to arrive at estimates in their own minds as to the number of Cambodians who died from execution, or from disease or malnutrition, “these were purely private, and mostly short-lived, attempts.” Letter, 20 November 1978.

94. See note 82.

95. Op. cit., pp. 6, 28, 208.

96. Perhaps the percentage of the population that voluntarily supported the Communists was as small as the minority that supported the American rebels in 1776-1783; see chapter 2, section 2.

97. Op. cit., pp. 3-4.

98. On this matter see note 418, below.

99. That the Communists depicted the North Vietnamese as “our teachers” seems hardly likely, given their constant emphasis on independence and self-reliance and the long history of conflict between Cambodian and Vietnamese Communists. On the development of Cambodian Communist policy during this period, see Heder’s papers cited in the preface, note 19.

100. Op. cit., pp. 54-55.