Be Careful or Your Body May Disappear: Part 2

The politics of mass murder

1979

In his January 15, 1979 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch entitled “Cambodia: A land in turmoil,” Richard Dudman wrote:

It seemed evident throughout this reporter’s visit to Cambodia before the recent Vietnamese attack that the new Cambodia's version of Communism had no place in it for anyone who wanted to read, write, or even think independently, or for anyone who wanted to own more than a bare minimum of personal property.

At the same time, the physical conditions of life may well have improved for many peasants and former urban dwellers—possibly for the vast majority of the population, as the regime claimed.

In contrast with Elizabeth Becker’s cautious approach, Dudman cast doubt on the claims of refugees fleeing a murderous regime: “I did not find the grim picture painted by the thousands of refugees who couldn’t take the new order and fled to Thailand or Vietnam,” he concluded. Unlike Becker, Dudman did not add caveats that the accounts from refugees may have been true; instead, he relied solely on what he had witnessed on the trip to draw conclusions. Becker could not believe that between their two accounts of Cambodia, the a segment of the left sided with Dudman. “The Khmer Rouge had the sympathies of some American activists still incensed over the Vietnam War,” she later explained. “Noam Chomsky dismissed my work and said Dudman was the more reliable reporter. Incredibly, even the U.S. government took Dudman’s side.”

Just before the publication of Dudman’s article, on January 7, 1979, Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia. Pol Pot having provoked a border war with Cambodia for years, this provided Vietnam with a self-interest in overthrowing the Khmer Rouge regime. This action nonetheless put an end to the most murderous time period in Cambodia’s history, with Pol Pot and his cadre forced to flee to the Thai border. Becker later recalled how the Khmer Rouge brought about their own demise: “As the Khmer Rouge revolution of course failed because it was a crazy revolution, the Khmer Rouge kept looking for scapegoats. They would turn against each other and that's one of the reasons Tuol Sleng had so many people killed. And they also in the end turned against Vietnam. When in doubt, turn against your historic enemy.”

China’s view was that Vietnam needed to be punished and the U.S. agreed. With the Soviet Union aligned with Vietnam, they began installing a new government in Cambodia while maintaining a military presence. “Cambodia was, is, nothing if not the victim of big-power politics,” Becker concluded. “Conversely, it is a victim of its leaders’ radical attempts to protect the country from the big powers.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, later explained the U.S. position as conveyed to his counterparts in an interview with Becker: “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the D.K. [Democratic Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge regime]. The question was how to help the Cambodian people. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him but China could.” Despite the lack of a logical link between these disparate thoughts, the U.S. “winked, semi-publicly,” according to Brzezinski by encouraging China and Thailand to provide aid to the Khmer Rouge in opposition to the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. 

While the major powers played realpolitik, Russia aligned with Vietnam, China aligned with the Khmer Rouge, and the U.S. bolstering the latter through its anti-Vietnam stance, it is worth reflecting on how this support failed to “help the Cambodian people,” as sanctions were immediately placed on Cambodia and Vietnam. In addition, the actions made a mockery of U.S.-stated positions: opposition to Communism (the Khmer Rouge having implemented perhaps the most extreme version of communism in history), belief in the Domino Theory (here the U.S. was supporting a communist resistance movement), and support for human rights (the Carter administration claimed to have placed on emphasis on human rights in their foreign policy, while in this case supporting one of the greatest mass murderers of the 20th century).

The first of many confirmations of U.S. public support for the Khmer Rouge came at the United Nations in September 1979, when the United States U.N. delegate voted in favor of Pol Pot’s government as the sole representative of Cambodia. “I was told to engineer the results of the Credentials Committee, so I engineered the results,” delegate Robert Rosenstock admitted. He was approached after the successful vote that kept the Cambodian seat in the hands of the Khmer Rouge by their lead representative. “Thank you so much for everything you have done for us,” Ieng Sary said, shaking his hand. Rosenstock confided to a colleague, “I think I know how Pontius Pilate must have felt.” To mitigate the poor optics this support, the U.S. delegation later banned handshakes with the Khmer Rouge and adopted a practice of walking out on their speeches in the United Nations. The behind-the-scenes policy remained the same, however, as the U.S. worked to convince governments to back the Khmer Rouge. “China could never have persuaded right-wing African countries like Kenya and Malawi to vote for Pol Pot, still less to receive a Khmer Rouge Ambassador. The United States could and did,” wrote Philip Short in Anatomy of a Nightmare. Simultaneously, the U.S. supported new governments of overthrown dictators in other countries, such as the removal of Idi Amin from power in Uganda in 1979, thus revealing that other factors were at play.

1980-1990

While the Cambodian Genocide Program several decades later estimated the Khmer Rouge death toll at 1.7 million people or 21% of the population, the CIA estimated as early as 1980 that “the savagery of that regime caused an actual drop of between 1.2 million and 1.8 million people” from 1975-1979. Despite this knowledge, the decade saw a decade of support for the Khmer Rouge by the U.S. and the international community. The U.S. in particular, during the years of the Reagan administration, maintained its support for the Khmer Rouge at the U.N. throughout the decade and kept up pressure on the current government in Cambodia. This included an embargo on trade and aid to the country, as well as blocking non-governmental organizations from providing assistance.

In 1984, the release of the film The Killing Fields marked a turning point in the U.S. public’s awareness and views of the Khmer Rouge. Winner of three Academy Awards, the film showed the past decade in Cambodia through the eyes of two journalists present at the start of the Khmer Rouge regime: Cambodian photojournalist Dith Pran and American New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg. Becker served as a consultant on the film and recalled her time with Pran working as journalists in Cambodia during the Cambodian Civil War: “When the work was done, Pran and I would go off on our mopeds to watch the American bombers blow up the landscape.” She praised the film’s accurate depiction of the Khmer Rouge and scenes in Cambodia, but felt that it oversimplified the U.S. role as being solely to blame, believing that Vietnam and Cambodia itself shared some of the responsibility. Dith Pran was played by Haing S. Ngor, a doctor and first-time actor who also survived the Khmer Rouge years. Becker commented on his experiences in a review of his memoir, A Cambodian Odyssey:

Ngor’s father was caught “stealing” scraps from a communal rice pot — a crime punishable by death. Ngor witnessed his father's arrest. “I froze,” he wrote. “My father turned his face and looked sadly into mine . . . He wanted my help.” There was nothing Ngor could do; his father signaled him to go away. “Numbly I obeyed,” he writes; he never saw his father again.

The worst death was the last. Ngor’s wife was expecting their first child. During her seventh month of pregnancy she went into early labor. Ngor, a gynecologist, realized his wife needed a caesarean delivery, which he could perform. But he had already been tortured hideously three times by Khmer Rouge determined to force him to admit to being a doctor.

He decided he could not deliver the baby himself. “If I [did] the neighbors would know, the [spies] would find out and that would be the end of me.” He searched out a trusted midwife who told him to perform a caesarean. Ngor whispered, “Cannot.” His wife implored him, “Save my life. Please save my life.” She died in Ngor’s arms, their baby died in her womb.

Could there be a worse torture than this?

Becker concluded there were two sets of victims of the Khmer Rouge: those that died and those that lived on with their memories. Ngor, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, was pleased with the film and how it portrayed the suffering of the Cambodian people: “I wanted to show the world how deep starvation is in Cambodia, how many people die under communist regime [sic],” he said. “My heart is satisfied. I have done something perfect.”

Vietnam withdrew the vast majority of its forces from Cambodia on September 26, 1989. The last excuse for U.S. embargo had evaporated and what was left was continued support for Pol Pot. A week later, Dith Pran testified before the U.S. Senate. Haing Ngor, also present, outlined the reasons why the Khmer Rouge had not reformed and could not be trusted to be part of a future Cambodian government. Pran led with his opening statement, laying out the current state of affairs and having to argue the basic position that a mass murderer should not be supported by the United States and allowed back into power:

Since the Vietnamese troops left Cambodia last week, the Cambodian civil war is already in effect. All armies are pressing under-age youths into their armies. All sides are sending their troops to crush the enemy—which are all Cambodians. Cambodians are being forced by their leaders to go to the killing fields again.

The international community must use its influence immediately to stop it and pressure the Cambodians to come to the table again. My suggestion is that I would like to see the two non-Communist groups separate themselves from the Khmer Rouge and receive full diplomatic support from the democratic countries.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to see the United States not go along with the idea of trying to bring the Khmer Rouge back to the future coalition government in Phnom Penh. I did not hear that Presidents Roosevelt and Truman wanted high members of the Nazis joining the new German Government.

The high Nazi leaders were put on trial for their crimes against humanity. Why not the Khmer Rouge high command? Is this because the Second World War Holocaust was European and we are from a small country in Asia?

I still do not understand why the United Nations General Assembly does not pass a resolution providing that those who are responsible for the Cambodian genocide should not be returned to political or state power. The Khmer Rouge flag has been flying outside the United Nations for 14 years now. Why does no one want to deal with this?

I do not believe that the world would let the Nazi swastika fly outside the United Nations. Why does the world let the highest ranking Rouge like Khieu Samphan, the chairman of the Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea under Khmer Rouge rule, come to the United Nations in New York?

All I can do is speak out and hope and pray that all Cambodian soldiers, including Khmer Rouge, will refuse to fight and will stop killing each other. Mr. Chairman, please help bring peace for the Cambodian people.

Congressman Chester Atkins, saying the quiet part out loud, confirmed the context of U.S. support for the Khmer Rouge on U.S. television: “We’re still fighting the Vietnam War and this is the last battle of that war and if we have to use the Khmer Rouge as a pawn in that we’ll use them. We don't appreciate we’re being used by the Khmer Rouge rather than the other way around.”

To demonstrate the power the U.S. held all along throughout the conflict, an abrupt change in policy in July 1990 soon deflated the fighting and international support for the Khmer Rouge. Secretary of State James Baker announced support for talks with Vietnam and for shunning of the Khmer Rouge. “We want to do everything we can to prevent a return of the Khmer Rouge to power,” he told the press. With that, other countries involved in the conflict began withholding arms and the support fueling the war came to an end. “There’s no more war because no country will support it any longer,” said Igor Rogachev, a Russian diplomat. “That’s it. No matter what the Cambodians do to each other you’ll be able to take a direct flight from Bangkok to Phnom Penh. It’s over.”

Prince Sihanouk, leader of Cambodia in the decades prior, rebuked the U.S. for their decade of support for the Khmer Rouge: “All you [Americans] had to do was to let Pol Pot die. [In 1979] Pol Pot was dying, but you brought him back to life...and sent him into battle to kill and kill and kill...But now you say the Khmers Rouges are unacceptable. What hypocrisy! What hypocrisy!”

At this late date, Dudman made the incredible move of coming out of retirement to denounce the direction of U.S. policy, defend Pol Pot’s record, and attack Vietnam as the true culprit. Becker in 1986 had previously released a book documenting her research on Cambodia entitled When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution. The book documented the “cycle of sadism and revenge that rivaled the Nazi death camps or Stalin’s gulag. The American part of the story is here, too, and it is not one that would make any of us proud,” wrote one reviewer of the original edition.

Having apparently never read the book, Dudman, who had retired in 1981 as Washington Bureau Chief at the Post-Dispatch, published an op-ed in the New York Times in August 1990 which an editor entitled: “Pol Pot: Brutal, Yes, but no Mass Murderer.” This came a year after Becker’s paper had posted an op-ed criticizing the U.S. government for supporting the Khmer Rouge and being “On the Side of Genocide.” The most surprising element of Dudman’s article besides the Pol Pot apologia was how he treated the subject as if no further research had been done since his 1978 visit. Since he had been unable to validate with his own eyes what a CIA officer had told him in advance of the trip, the Khmer Rouge therefore were not the fanatical group of killers the public believed them to be, according to Dudman: “what about the ‘killing fields’ and the stacks of skulls? The remains of a few hundred victims are undeniable evidence of mass executions, but they have no bearing on the question of how many were slain and certainly do not prove genocide.”

Becker could not believe her former colleague on the trip would write this at such a late date. “I disagree with it,” she later said. “By 1990, when it was published, all of the Tuol Sleng records had been…opened for years, the evidence was clear and Dick had retired. He’d never gone back to Cambodia since December ‘78, and I like and admire Dick and I was sorry to see that he wrote that because the evidence was the contrary…His ideas are entirely out of date that he doesn’t even mention all of the archives that were uncovered after the Vietnamese invasion…I’m very sorry to see he wrote that, because the evidence is: it was an incompetent murderous regime.” The New York Times editor was unperturbed by the careless work, telling Dudman at the time of publication, “We accepted your piece and who knows, you might even be right.” Dudman years later reflected on the essay, saying with a chuckle that he may have been alone in his views. He seemed to revel in the contrarianism, chalking up the death counts to journalistic inflation, while acknowledging the blowback: “Different people like Ben Kiernan denounced my views and felt it was terrible.” Becker later recounted with some bitterness how Dudman won the “the Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting and a George Polk Award” in 1979 and 1993, respectively, in contrast to her “honorable mention from the Overseas Press Club” for her attempts at documenting the human rights abuses of the Khmer Rouge.

2015

Dudman, now 97 years old, was sitting with his wife in front of his fireplace at home when he received a phone call from a special court assembled in Cambodia with the assistance of the United Nations for the prosecution of Khmer Rouge war crimes. Becker was scheduled to testify for the prosecution and Dudman’s contrasting articles had caught the attention of the defense, who were keen to use his account for their purposes: here was an American reporter who had visited Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge period and could help the defense’s case of the two Khmer Rouge leaders on trial to cast doubt on the Cambodian genocide. “I happened to write articles that seemed to some to suggest that I was a bit soft on Pol Pot,” Dudman explained in a self-serving article published by his old newspaper, “Pol Pot and I.” In the piece, he conveniently left out ever having written his 1990 op-ed, pretending that his 1978 articles were his first and only statements on Cambodia. “I wonder how I would have behaved,” Dudman mused, “if I had been a correspondent in Germany during the early rise to power of Adolf Hitler. Would I first have tried to report his side of the story? How long would it have taken me to realize that he was all bad and that any sympathy or even-handedness would have been misplaced? The short answer is that I don’t know. I am glad that I escaped that assignment. I might have written some stuff that would have haunted me the rest of my life.”

Following receiving encouragement from her friend Mey Komphot, Becker testified first in the trial and was asked to explain why she should be believed over Dudman, the more experienced reporter. “It isn’t easy to politely disagree after being sworn to tell the truth in a case involving the death of two million Cambodians,” Becker wrote of her testimony. “As far as I was concerned, the matter had long since been settled. Documents and eyewitness accounts discovered and amassed for the trial show the Khmer Rouge were among the 20th century’s worst criminals.” In his three days of testimony via video link, Dudman surprised observers by recanting his previous position held since 1978: “For everything I have read since...and sources I have consulted, I think there was genocide, under the Pol Pot regime...I wouldn’t now write this article,” he testified. As a result of this reversal, his testimony was now useless for the defense. It had taken nearly four decades, but Dudman had finally come around to agree with Becker on the subject of Cambodia. He admitted she had not been as easily fooled by the regime on their trip because, after all, she was “far more experienced in Cambodia.”

The two Khmer Rouge leaders on trial, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, were found guilty of crimes against humanity and later guilty of genocide. Both were sentenced to life in prison. Becker herself was heartened by Dudman’s ability to change his mind, despite the late date: “I found his comments heartening and admirably self-deprecating. It is not enough to report what you saw. Indeed, covering a tyrannical regime that controls your every move and determines everything you hear and everyone you come in contact with requires more than skepticism. You must consider what you were not seeing, what the country was like before, and keep asking questions. Genocide is a story few people want to hear, and that those in power often don’t want told.”

Postscript

Haing Ngor was shot to death in Los Angeles on February 25, 1996 outside of his home as part of a botched robbery. His killers, members of a street gang, were convicted on April 16, 1998. Reached for comment, Dith Pran responded to news of his death: “He is like a twin with me. He is like a co-messenger and right now I am alone.” The next day, the death of Pol Pot was confirmed in the press as having taken place on April 15. Pol Pot had never returned to power in Cambodia since 1979 with a U.N. agreement being implemented in 1992 in which the Khmer Rouge refused to participate. However, Pol Pot was never brought to an international trial for his crimes. In contrast, Ieng Sary, third in command of the Khmer Rouge behind Pol Pot and Nuon Chea, was brought to trial for crimes against humanity but died in 2013 before the tribunal reached a verdict.

Mey Komphot fled Cambodia in May 1979, reaching the Thai border after a four-month journey. “My mistake was I thought I would be greeted with open arms,” he said. “That the outside world would be sympathetic to us.” He narrowly escaped being returned to Cambodia and resettled in Canada as a refugee, working as a banker.

Cambodia was left with a legacy of landmines from decades of war and unexploded ordnance from the bombs dropped by the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. From 1979 to 2021, these dangers killed an estimated 19,808 individuals and caused 45,156 injuries. “I strongly believe that the United States is morally responsible for the suffering of these people and ethically and legally bound to adequately compensate the families of those who had lost their lives or were maimed by these unexploded ordnance and landmines,” said Joseph Matthews, an academic working in Cambodia. “The United States’ double standard of peace, democracy, and human rights are not only creating chaos and turmoil in the world but also destroying peace, democracy, and human rights.”