A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Samantha Power
hardships on the march into the countryside. But none of this will apparently bear any resemblance to the mass executions that had been predicted by Westerners.48
Once the reporters had departed, the last independent sources of information dried up. Nine friendly Communist countries retained embassies in Phnom Penh, but even these personnel were restricted in movement to a street around 200 yards long and accompanied at all times by official KR “minders.”49 For the next three and a half years, the American public would piece together a picture of life behind the Khmer curtain from KR public statements, which were few; from Cambodian radio, which was propaganda; from refugee accounts, which were doubted; and from Western intelligence sources, which were scarce and suspect.
Official U.S. Intelligence, Unofficial Skepticism
When the KR first took power, U.S. officials eagerly disclosed much of what they knew. The Ford administration condemned violent abuses, reminding audiences that its earlier forecasts of a Khmer Rouge bloodbath were being borne out by fact. The day after the fall of Phnom Penh, Kissinger testified on Capitol Hill that the KR would “try to eliminate all potential opponents.”50 In early May 1975, President Ford said he had “hard intelligence,” including Cambodian radio transmissions, that eighty to ninety Cambodian officials and their spouses had been executed.51 He told Time magazine, “They killed the wives, too. They said the wives were just the same as their husbands. This is a horrible thing to report to you, but we are certain that our sources are accurate.” Newsweek quoted a U.S. official saying “thousands have already been executed” and suggested the A Khmer Rouge guerrilla orders store owners to abandon their shops in Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, the day the city fell into rebel hands. figure could rise to “tens of thousands of Cambodians loyal to the Lon Nol regime.” With intercepts of KR communications in hand, U.S. officials were adamant about the veracity of their intelligence. “I am not dealing in third-hand reports,” one intelligence analyst told Newsweek. “I am telling you what is being said by the Cambodians themselves in their own communications.”52 Syndicated columnists Jack Anderson and Les Whitten, who would regularly relay reports of atrocities over the next several years, published leaked translations of these secret KR radio transmissions in the Washington Post. “Eliminate all high-ranking military officials, government officials,”one order read. “Do this secretly. Also get provincial officers who owe the Communist Party a blood debt.”Another KR unit, relaying orders from the Communist high command, called for the “execution of all military officers from lieutenant to colonel, with their wives and their children.”53 In a press conference on May 13, Kissinger accused the KR of “atrocity of major proportions.”54 President Ford again cited “very factual evidence of the bloodbath that is in the process of taking place.”55
But the administration had little credibility. Kissinger had bloodied Cambodia and blackened his own reputation with past U.S. policy. Just as critics heard the Ford administration’s earlier predictions of bloodshed as thinly veiled pretexts for supplying the corrupt Lon Nol regime with more U.S. aid, many now assumed that American horror stories were designed to justify the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and Vietnam. Events elsewhere in Southeast Asia were only confirming the unreliability of U.S. government sources. The United States had similarly warned that the fall of Saigon would result in a slaughter, but when the city fell on April 30, 1975, the handover was far milder than expected. The American public had learned to dismiss what it deemed official rumor-mongering and anti-Communist propaganda. It would be two years before most would acknowledge that this time the bloodbath reports were true.
The U.S. government also lost reliable sources inside Cambodia. One of the side effects of the closing of U.S. embassies in times of crisis is that it ravages U.S. intelligence-gathering capabilities. Cambodia was especially cut off because journalists, too, were barred from visiting. Because the perpetrators of genocide are careful to deny observers access to their crime scenes, journalists must rely on the eyewitness or secondhand accounts of refugees who manage to escape. Reporters trained to authenticate their stories by visiting or confirming with multiple sources thus tend initially to shy away from publishing refugee accounts. When they do print them, they routinely add caveats and disclaimers: With almost every condemnation or citation of intelligence that appeared in the press about Cambodia in 1975 and 1976, reporters included reminders that they had only “unconfirmed reports,”“inconclusive accounts,”or “very fragmentary information.” This caution is warranted, but as it had done during the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust, it blurred clarity and tempered conviction. It gave those inclined to look away further excuse for doing so. “We simply don’t know the full story,”readers said. “Until we do, we cannot sensibly draw conclusions.” By waiting for the full story to emerge, however, politicians, journalists, and citizens were guaranteeing they would not get emotionally or politically involved until it was too late.
If this inaccessibility is a feature of most genocide, Cambodia was perhaps the most extreme case. The Khmer Rouge may well have run the most secretive regime of the twentieth century. They sealed the country completely. “Only through secrecy,” a senior KR official said, could the KR “win victory over the enemy who cannot find out who is who.”56 When Pol Pot emerged formally as KR leader in September 1977, journalists hypothesized out loud about his identity. “Some say he is a former laborer on a French rubber plantation, of Vietnamese origin,”AFP reported. “Others say he is actually Nuong Suon, a onetime journalist on a Communist newspaper who was arrested by Prince Norodom Sihanouk in the 1950s.”57 When Pol Pot’s photo was released by a Chinese photo news agency, analysts noted that he bore a “marked resemblance” to Saloth Sar, the former Communist Party secretary-general. The resemblance was of course not coincidental.58
The KR did have a voice. They spurred on their cadres over the radio, proclaiming, “The enemy must be utterly crushed”; “What is infected must be cut out”; “What is too long must be shortened and made the right length.”59 The broadcasts were translated daily by the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service, but they were euphemisms followed by the KR’s glowing claims about the “joyous” planting of the rainy season rice crop, the end of corruption, and the countrywide campaign to repair U.S. bomb damage.
In the United States, the typical editorial neglect of a country of no pressing national concern was compounded exponentially by the “Southeast Asia fatigue” that pervaded newsrooms in the aftermath of Vietnam. The horde of American journalists who had descended on the region while U.S. troops were deployed in Vietnam dwindled. Only the three major U.S. newspapers—the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times—retained staff correspondents in Bangkok, Thailand, and they were tasked with coveringVietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (known as VLCs, or “very lost causes”) as well. As soon as U.S. troops returned home, the American public’s appetite for news from the region shrank. Journalists who did publish stories tended to focus on the Vietnamese boat people and the fate of American POWs and stay-behinds. Responsible for such broad patches of territory, they were slow to travel to the Thai-Cambodian border to hear secondhand tales of terror.60 Those who did make the trip found that many of the Cambodian refugees had experienced terrible suffering, hunger, and repression, but few had witnessed massacres with their own eyes. Soon after seizing the capital, the KR had hastily erected a barbed-wire barrier to prevent crossing into Aranyaprathet, Thailand, and had laid mines all along the border. The Cambodians with the gravest stories to tell were, by definition, dead or still trapped inside the country. U.S. officials estimated that only one in five who attempted to reach Thailand survived.