A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Samantha Power
to begin distinguishing between Communists in Cambodia and those in Vietnam. Vietnam had certainly supplied the KR with weapons, military advisers, and direct combat and logistical help in the past, but the two groups had begun to feud. Quinn sent detailed accounts of the KR’s purge of Vietnamese civilians from Cambodia and their disruption of Vietnamese supply lines. Quinn’s analysis was at complete odds with the prevailing view in Washington, which held that the Khmer Rouge were simply an extension of the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. Quinn’s reports were never heeded. Quinn recalls his rude awakening:
It was of course disappointing to me. I was young and didn’t know how government worked. I thought I would write this huge report and everybody would read it, but it was just another piece of paper. When I got back to Washington, people were still analyzing Cambodia in the old way, as if it were run by Hanoi. People would hear me out, and then just say, “Yeah, but…”
Although the American press, too, occasionally mentioned “infighting” among the different Communist “factions,” the myth of monolithic communism died hard. U.S. involvement in Cambodia was justifiable because the various Communist forces were joined in revolution. The KR rebels had shrouded their leadership in a thick cloak of mystery, and Quinn’s hilltop survey was not going to sway Americans who assumed all Communists were in cahoots.
But others were beginning to stop lumping the two neighbors together. Elizabeth Becker became a “stringer” for the Washington Post in 1972. She was twenty-five when she arrived, and with her short blond hair, petite frame, and unending inquisitiveness, she might have been mistaken for a teenager. Most of the eager young correspondents had flocked to neighboring Vietnam to make their professional fortunes, but Becker had chosen to cover Cambodia, the sideshow. Permanently based in Phnom Penh, she did not depart for mini-sabbaticals or alternate assignments. Unlike her more senior, established colleagues, she lived among the Cambodian people and was thus better positioned to pick up stray gossip.
By the time Becker arrived in Cambodia, only 25,000 U.S. troops were left in Vietnam, and U.S. correspondents from the major news outlets were heading home. Initially, Becker joined her other American colleagues in defining the rebels according to the regime they opposed (as “anti–Lon Nol insurgents”) or by the generic ideology they pursued (“Cambodian Communists” or “indigenous Communist rebels,” to distinguish them from the North Vietnamese rebels who were presumed to direct them). The reporters used shorthand references that gave no hint of the aims or the character of the revolutionary force.
In early 1974, around the time Quinn was circulating his detailed report, Becker had begun to notice that Cambodians in Phnom Penh were becoming increasingly alarmed by what they learned about the mysterious rebels storming across Cambodia. The KR already occupied 85 percent of the country, and they seemed certain to take the rest. Becker saw that pedicab drivers, riverboat captains, and politicians alike were devouring the contents of a small book distinguishable by its cover, which depicted Cambodia shaped like a heart torn in two by the Mekong River. The book, Regrets of the Khmer Soul, was the published diary of Ith Sarin, a former Phnom Penh schoolteacher who had traveled through KR territory for nine months in 1972 and 1973, interviewing KR soldiers and peasants. Becker and Ishiyama Koki, a Japanese friend and colleague, paid to have Sarin’s diary translated. Becker thought it time to ask a question that no American reporter to date had posed. She wrote a story for the Post entitled “Who Are the Khmer Rouge?” and answered the question in a way that few afterward would believe.
Becker’s long feature, to which the Post gave a full-page spread in March 1974, drew heavily on Cambodian government and Western diplomatic sources, as well as Ith Sarin’s diary. In her exposée, Becker quoted Sarin’s description of the KR’s appealing discipline and daunting severity. “I paid attention to the great help the Khmer Rouge gave to the people; building dikes, harvesting crops, building houses and digging bunkers,” Sarin noted. “I also saw them force all people to wear black clothes, forbid idle chatter and severely punish any violations of their orders.”22
Becker also quoted Cambodians who had defected from KR zones to the dwindling patch of territory controlled by the government. Becker’s article was the first to mention Pol Pot, who was then still known by his given name of Saloth Sar. It was the first to note that relations between the KR and the Vietnamese Communists were strained. And it was the first to describe the cruelty of KR rule.
But if Becker depicted life under the KR as spartan, she did not depict it as savage. And if she described their rule as clinically disciplined, they did not come across as criminally disposed. In places Becker herself seemed taken with the egalitarian premises of the organization, which attracted Cambodians and foreigners alike. When the disreputable Lon Nol government captured KR women soldiers, Becker wrote, the government generals were appalled by the women’s self-possession. Becker quoted one diplomat as saying, “They complained of the audacity of these virgins who had the nerve to look a man straight in the eye and who didn’t shuffle their feet demurely like good women.” Becker did not suggest that life under KR rule would be fun. But she also did not imply that life would not be permitted.23
Becker’s description proved too bold for most American Cambodia observers. Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times faulted her for running a story without ever having toured KR territory. Since it was the KR that denied access, she said she could not ignore the horror stories simply because she could not see for herself. She told Schanberg, “We have to publish what we can find out.” Back in the United States, she was severely criticized by both the right and left. U.S. government officials said she had been duped into believing the KR were not Vietnamese puppets, whereas leftist intellectuals chided her for falling for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) warnings of an imminent KR-induced bloodbath. Much more serious than any of these criticisms was another consequence of the research: Her close friend and colleague Ishiyama Koki followed up his story on Sarin’s diary by attempting to become the first journalist to visit the KR side. “It was strange,”Becker recalls. “The sum result of my learning more about the Khmer Rouge was that I knew I never wanted to see these guys up close. The sum result for Koki was that he wanted to meet them and learn more.” Koki vanished behind KR lines, as did another of Becker’s Japanese colleagues shortly thereafter.
For the remainder of 1974 and into 1975, journalists attempted to shed light upon the KR leadership, but Pol Pot and his leading associates, Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary, operated behind the scenes in complete isolation. With the KR resolutely unknowable, their mystery received almost as much attention as the misery they inflicted upon Cambodians. Even Lon Nol’s government had no idea with whom it was dealing. In April 1974, when the Khmer Rouge’s Khieu Samphan visited New York, Becker’s reports focused not on what Samphan had to say at the United Nations but on whether he was in fact Samphan, who was rumored to have been executed by Prince Sihanouk. Becker wrote:“Some Cambodians say he is too fat in the photos, his voice is too high, and that he gave only one speech in French in Pyongyang, which they find suspicious since he holds a doctorate in economics from Paris.”24 The sternly secretive Khmer Rouge bewildered even the most informed Cambodia observers.
The presence of the soothing Sihanouk at the head of the KR front also continued to throw people off. As one Western diplomat put it, “They know it is Sihanouk’s army out there and they think once that army gets inside everything will be all milk and honey—or rice and dried fish if you will—again.”25 In 1974 Sihanouk sent several Democrats in the U.S. Congress a letter in which he described rumors of an imminent Khmer Rouge massacre of Lon Nol and his supporters as “absurd.” Sihanouk assured the legislators that the KR front would not establish a socialist republic upon taking power, “but a Swedish type of kingdom.”26 His was the public face of the coalition, but it was difficult to judge whether the public face had influence over the private soul of the movement.
However worrying the rumors that swirled before the KR victory, few Cambodia watchers grasped what lay ahead before it was too late.
Wishful