Cambodia's other madmen
HOWEVER MONSTROUS POL POT'S ACTIONS, HE IS NOT THE
ONLY ONE TO HAVE TURNED THE COUNTRY INTO A LIVING
HELL.
BY JUDITH COBURN AND JOSHUA PHILLIPS
Just as it seemed Pol
Pot's old international
allies were conspiring
to snatch him and put
him on trial, the ailing
mass murderer turns up dead in his jungle redoubt.
"Natural causes," claim his former comrades in the
Khmer Rouge, burning his remains on a pyre
before an autopsy could be performed. They say
their former leader had been under house arrest for
ordering the assassination of his own defense
minister and 12 members of his family, including
his grandchildren.
But nothing will ever seem "natural" about the
terror Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge rained on
Cambodia. And while the near 20-year search for
the elusive Saloth Sar ("Pol Pot" was his nom de
guerre) could make for a great Hollywood
journalist-in-action movie, it presents a false,
celebrity-style view of history. The millions of
Cambodians who died beginning in 1970 -- and
continue to die today -- did not perish simply
because a single madman seized power in their
country.
If Pol Pot had been tried in an international war
crime tribunal, as the United States wanted, would
he have stood alone in the dock? His most recent
captors, the high-level leaders who held out with
him in the jungle after the overthrow of the Khmer
Rouge, men like Ieng Sary, Khieu Sampan and the
guerrilla commander Ta Mok -- known to
Cambodians as "the butcher" -- certainly should
have been co-defendants.
And what about the high-level officials of the Hun
Sen government? Most of them were powerful
Khmer Rouge leaders themselves until they
mutinied against Pol Pot's purges in 1976-78. Yet
they helped carry out the brutal march back in
history that emptied Cambodia's towns, wrecked its
agricultural economy and medical system and
turned the country into a mass labor camp so that
hundreds of thousands died from malnutrition,
disease and overwork.
Thousands more were killed in a labor-intensive
bloodletting by Khmer Rouge cadres wielding clubs
-- bullets were scarce. Should those cadres, many
of them in their teens at the time, be tried?
What about King Norodom Sihanouk, who threw
his royal lot in with the Khmer Rouge after he was
overthrown in 1970 by Gen. Lon Nol.
What about those who created the political vacuum
that permitted a group of marginal jungle fighters to
seize power? The Vietnamese communist leaders
who undermined Sihanouk by using Cambodia as a
staging area for their war to unify Vietnam? The
Americans who encouraged Sihanouk's overthrow
and drove Cambodian peasants into the arms of the
Khmer Rouge by one of the most intense bombing
campaigns ever recorded -- and then invaded the
country in 1970? Should Richard Nixon's ghost,
Nobel Prize-winner Henry Kissinger and the late
U.S. diplomat Thomas Enders, who chose targets
for the bombing, join the ghost of Pol Pot before a
war crimes tribunal?
And what of those who sustained the Khmer Rouge
after the Vietnamese invasion in 1978 -- the Thais
who gave them sanctuary, the Chinese who armed
them, the U.S. officials who encouraged the Thais
and Chinese and the U.N. members who voted to
keep the Khmer Rouge as Cambodia's
representatives in the United Nations?
Pol Pot may be dead, but his legacy lives on.
Former Khmer Rouge comrades led by Hun Sen
still rule Cambodia with an iron fist, routinely killing
political opponents, newspaper reporters and labor
activists. Hundreds of candidates were killed in the
U.N.-supervised 1993 elections while observers and
journalists -- desperate to herald the arrival of
democracy -- looked the other way.
Four years later, the jerry-built coalition
government was vanquished in a coup. Opposition
parties and a budding labor movement are being
repressed. This July's elections promise to be
violent.
A "great madman" theory of Cambodia's history
can hardly do justice to what has happened to these
people and their country. "Killing Fields" are not
built in a day. Neither is democracy. Both take
many, many hands.
SALON | APRIL 24, 1998
Judith Coburn covered the war in Cambodia from 1970 to
1973 and has reported from there regularly since then. Joshua
Phillips, a freelance journalist, reported for the Pnomh Penh
Post in 1997.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 13:07:51 PDT