Trying the genocidaires. posted by Richard Seymour

According to the BBC , the Cambodians are finally to get a chance to try the perpetrators of mass murder in their country. Not Henry Kissinger, dears, but the "leaders of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime". This is excellent news, tempered by only one piece of information that the BBC provides but does not explain:

It still needs to be approved by the Senate and King Norodom Sihanouk, although these are expected to be formalities.

King Norodum Sihanouk? Wasn't he at one time a Prince ? The same Prince, in fact, who both collaborated with the Khmer Rouge in power, and when they were fighting - backed by the United States - to regain power?

When Sihanouk was overthrown by the CIA and replaced with the even more brutal General Lon Nol, he called on his "children" to join Pol Pot's maquis. While he was alleged to be the "prisoner" of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh when they took power, he was able as prisoner to catch a plane to New York and address himself to the UN General Assembly as Pol Pot's head of state. He told the UN that "a genuinely popular democracy" had been born in Cambodia, "a society without exploitation of man by man". (Official Records, UN General Assembly, 13th Session, 6th October 1975).

As an extra favour to the world's most loved mass murderers, he knocked out a few precious encomiasms in press conferences:

"The whole country is well fed... And they are very gay... I confess that the people seem to be quite happy with Pol Pot." (Press Conference, 7th January, 1979, cited in Ben Kiernan, "The Cambodian Genocide..." op cit.)

When the Vietnamese invasion ousted the Khmer Rouge regime, the US moved to back the Khmer Rouge (KR) and what was called the "non-communist resistance" (NCR). The argument from Washington has been that the aid went to Sihanouk et al, and that there was no evidence of any collaboration between the KR and the NCR.

It is, however, impossible to take this seriously. According to James Pringle of the Far Eastern Economic Review, "[b]oth Sihanouk's army and Son Sann's KPNLF are completely discounted in Phnom Penh... 'All they do is sit drinking coca-cola on the border' said one well-informed Soviet-bloc dissident."

Meanwhile,

"[t]rucks loaded with men and boys, 150 or 200 at a time, pull away from settlements controlled by the Khmer Rouge and rumble into Cambodia". Supplies were "brought into the Cambodian interior to stockpile supplies for the Khmer Rouge".

Holbrooke was certain that US aid would "end up going to Pol Pot and his people".

According to two US relief workers, Linda Mason and Roger Brown,

"[t]he United States government insisted the Khmer Rouge be fed ... the US preferred that the Khmer Rouge operation benefit from the credibility of an internationally known relief organisation". (Linda Mason and Roger Brown, "Rice, Rivalry and Politics: Managing Cambodian Relief", 1983).

In 1980, Dr Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the CIA and then foreign-policy adviser to president-elect Ronald Reagan, secretly visited Khmer Rouge bases in Thailand. Within a year, 50 CIA agents were in Thailand running the Cambodian operation. The connection between "relief efforts" and support for the Khmer Rouge was "made plain" at a meeting with staff members of the US Senate Intelligence Committee on February 10th, 1990, according to a former British Foreign Office official who had been there. Specifically, it was revealed that a Defense Intelligence Agency colonel, who functioned as a "security liaison officer" between the UN Border Relief Operation and the Displaced Persons Protection Unit, was a key link between the US government and the Khmer Rouge.

Dith Pran, upon whom "The Killing Fields" was based, protested that US policy was "like putting gasoline on a fire", while the State Department insisted that the Khmer Rouge coalition had to be supported because of its "continuity" with the Pol Pot regime. (Pringle, FEER, 25th February, 1988; Barbara Crossette, New York Times, 2nd April 1988; Elizabeth Becker, Washington Post, 22nd May 1983; see also David Hawk's letter to the FEER, 2nd August 1984, which is accompanied by a picture of Alexander Haig "meeting, drink in hand, a smiling Ieng Sang" in New York; John Holdridge, State Department, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, 97th Congress, 2nd session, 14th September 1982).

Apart from the above, we have film evidence showing Sihanoukists and Khmer Rouge troops attacking a village, looting it, and even filming themselves doing it. (John Pilger, "Cambodia, Year Ten", Central Television, 1989).

John Pedler, a UK Foreign Office official, swore an affidavit in Rome, 14th June 1991, which told anyone interested that:

"Sihanouk's forces carry out joint operations with the Khmer Rouge, as I was personally able to confirm when I visited Kompong Thom in central Cambodia. I was in that province when the last remnant of the Sihanoukist forces involved in a joint operation with the Khmer Rouge..."

On 28th February, 1991, the Whitehouse dropped the egg. Bush admitted to Congress that theree had been "tactical military cooperation" between "non-communist" Cambodian forces and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. (Washington Post, 28th February, 1991).


In 1990, Sihanouk assured US viewers that "[t]he Khmer Rouge are not criminals. They are patriots." (Peter Jennings Reporting, ABC News, 26th April, 1990). He was also kind enough to inform his journalist friend TD Smallman that he personally was not opposed to genocide. (Vanity Fair, April 1990).

And indeed, the Khmer Rouge were very grateful for this support for "the non-communist resistance". Flushed, Khien Samphan wrote two letters to Douglas Hurd congratulating him on his government's policy toward Cambodia. (Letter from J. Wilkins, South East Asia Department, Foreign Office, to C. Preece, 9th July 1991).

Prince Sihanouk, similarly overjoyed, told the press that "Cambodians were forced by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council ... to accept the return of the Khmer Rouge" who "in their hearts ... remain very cruel ... " (Reuter, 16th November, 1991; The Guardian, 20th November, 1991).

The reaction of the Cambodians to the "accords" which allowed for the return of Prince Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge is exemplified in the fate of Khiem Samphan. Samphan, returning to Cambodia, was beseiged at the top floor of his villa by a mob of angry Cambodians, some of whom had lost relatives to his regime's genocidal policies. They inflicted a head wound upon him, which sent him scampering to the bottom of a cupboard where he crouched, pouring blood on the floor, as they tore up his house chanting "Kill him! Kill him!".

How overjoyed the Cambodians must be to have this preening autocrat as their King, and to have him decide who is to be tried for complicity in mass murder. They may as well have had Hitler's remaining henchmen put to trial by Goebbels.