A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Samantha Power
earlier, authoritarian rule. Under the leadership of Saloth Sar, who later assumed the pseudonym Pol Pot, they had left Cambodia’s cities in the 1960s to plot revolution from the Cambodian and Vietnamese countryside.13 It had been Sihanouk’s tyranny that drove them to arms, but when Lon Nol seized power in the 1970 coup, the KR began fighting Lon Nol’s government forces instead and made their former nemesis Prince Sihanouk the figurehead leader of an unlikely coalition. This earned them support from the millions of Cambodians who trusted Sihanouk, the likable man who had brought them independence. Although doubts emerged in 1973 and 1974 about whether the more moderate Sihanouk spoke for the KR, Cambodians trusted his judgment. “I do not like the Khmer Rouge and they probably do not like me,” the prince said in 1973. “But they are pure patriots…Though I am a Buddhist, I prefer a red Cambodia which is honest and patriotic than a Buddhist Cambodia under Lon Nol, which is corrupt and a puppet of the Americans.”14
Even backed by the United States, the Lon Nol regime did not stand much of a chance in battle. Its forces were equipped for parades, not warfare.15 In 1972 Lon Nol famously had airplanes sprinkle blessed sand around Phnom Penh’s perimeters to ward off his ungodly Communist enemies. Lon Nol’s officers exaggerated Cambodian army troop strength, listing phantom troops and using U.S. aid to pad their pockets, stuff foreign bank accounts, and build themselves glamorous homes. Regular army soldiers, by contrast, frequently went unpaid and deserted. And though the Cambodian army enjoyed a huge numerical edge over the rebels, many were unenthusiastic about fighting on behalf of Lon Nol. Those who did fight were dependent on U.S. bombing and, later, U.S. military aid.
U.S. interest in Cambodia during the civil war was completely derivative of U.S. designs on Vietnam. So when U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam in January 1973, the bombing of Cambodia became harder to justify. In August 1973 Congress finally stepped in to ban the air campaign. President Nixon was furious. He blamed Congress for weakening regional security and “raising doubts in the mind of both friends and adversaries” about U.S. “resolve.” All told, between March 1969 and August 1973, U.S. planes dropped 540,000 tons of bombs onto the Cambodian countryside.16 The United States continued to supply military and financial assistance to Lon Nol, warning that a “bloodbath” would ensue if the KR were allowed to triumph.
The U.S. B-52 raids killed tens of thousands of civilians.17 Villagers who happened to be away from home returned to find nothing but dust and mud mixed with seared and bloody body parts. Lon Nol’s ground forces used massive heavy artillery barrages to pacify areas or villages where some enemy activity was suspected. By 1973, inflation in Cambodia topped 275 percent, and 40 percent of roads and one-third of all bridges had been rendered unusable.18 With the local economy dysfunctional, U.S. aid came to count for 95 percent of all of Lon Nol’s income.
The U.S. bombing did little to weaken the Vietnamese or the Cambodian Communists. Instead, it probably had the opposite effect. Cambodians who resented America’s demolition derby were captive both to the promise of peace and the anti-Americanism of the Khmer Rouge. British journalist William Shawcross and others have argued that the Khmer Rouge ranks swelled primarily because of the U.S. intervention. Chhit Do, a Khmer Rouge leader from northern Cambodia who later defected, described the effect of U.S. bombing:
Every time after there had been bombing, they would take the people to see the craters, to see how big and deep the craters were, to see how the earth had been gouged out and scorched…The ordinary people…sometimes literally shit in their pants when the big bombs and shells came…Their minds just froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told…That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over…It was because of their dissatisfaction with the bombing that they kept on cooperating with the Khmer Rouge, joining up with the Khmer Rouge, sending their children off to go with them.19
Prince Sirik Matak, once a Lon Nol ally, warned U.S. officials not to back the unpopular Lon Nol regime. “If the United States continues to support such a regime,” he warned, “you help the Communists.”20 American intervention in Cambodia did tremendous damage in its own right, but it also indirectly helped give rise to a monstrous regime.
The Unknowable Unknown
Before it begins, genocide is not easy to wrap one’s mind around. A genocidal regime’s intent to destroy a group is so hideous and the scale of its atrocities so enormous that outsiders who know enough to forecast brutality can rarely bring themselves to imagine genocide. This was true of many of the diplomats, journalists, and European Jews who observed Hitler throughout the 1930s, and it was certainly true of diplomats, journalists, and Cambodians who speculated about the Khmer Rouge before they seized power. The omens of imminent, mass violence were omnipresent but largely dismissed.
Before the fall of Phnom Penh in April 1975, Cambodia’s Communists were well enough known to cause some Americans alarm. In June 1973 Kenneth Quinn, a thirty-two-year-old U.S. foreign service officer, was introduced to the Khmer Rouge quite by accident. For six years, he had worked in Vietnam as an American provincial adviser, and he had spent his last two years posted in Chou Doc, the Vietnamese province bordering Cambodia on the Mekong River. One day, Quinn hiked up a mountain outside Chou Doc that allowed him to survey the terrain for 10 miles around. In scanning the Cambodian horizon, he encountered a scene that both stunned and chilled him. “The villages in Cambodia are clustered in circles,”Quinn recalls. “When I looked out, I saw that every one of these clusters was in flames and there was black smoke rising from each one. I didn’t know what was going on. All I knew was that as far as the eye could see, every single village in Cambodia was on fire.”
Confused, Quinn hand-wrote a description of the scene, stuffed it into an envelope, and put it on the plane that flew to the nearest U.S. consular headquarters, where it was typed up and sent back to the United States as a spot report. He also set out to learn more about Cambodia’s internal divisions. In the subsequent weeks he interviewed dozens of Cambodian refugees who had fled to Vietnam, including a former KR official. The refugees described such brutality and the visual image of the burning horizon was so memorable that Quinn had what he calls a “eureka moment.” He concluded that although the Khmer Rouge may have been wellbehaved “boy scout revolutionaries” when they began their military campaign in 1970, in June 1973 they had launched a far more radical program designed to communalize the entire Cambodian society overnight. The KR were deporting people from their ancestral homes to new communes and were burning the old villages to enforce the policy.
In February 1974 he sent to Washington a forty-five-page classified report, “The Khmer Krahom [Rouge] Program to Create a Communist Society in Southern Cambodia.” Quinn wrote: “The Khmer Krahom’s programs have much in common with those of totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, particularly regarding efforts to psychologically reconstruct individual members of society.” He described KR attacks on religion and on parental and monastic authority as well as the widespread use of terror. “Usually people are arrested and simply never show up again, or are given six months in jail and then die there,” he reported. The “crimes” that “merited” this treatment were fleeing KR territory and questioning KR policies.21 Today Quinn’s voice still betrays shock at the bloodiness of the KR approach to social transformation: “They were forcing everybody to leave their homes and build new collectivized living communities. They were setting fires to everything the people owned so they would have nothing to go back to. They were separating children from parents, defrocking monks, killing those who disobeyed and creating an irrevocable living arrangement.”
Quinn’s reporting stood out from that of his State Department colleagues because at that time U.S. government officials rarely interviewed refugees.