A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Samantha Power
another step entirely for them to move along the continuum toward understanding. One need only recall the exchange during World War II between Polish witness Jan Karski and U.S. Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter in which Frankfurter told the eyewitness, “I do not mean that you are lying. I simply said I cannot believe you.” Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel has spoken of the difference between “information” and “knowledge.” In Cambodia observers had initially resisted certifying the refugee accounts even as “information.” The words were available, describing death marches, roadside executions, and the murder of the rich, the intellectuals, and even office assistants. But the first photos were not smuggled out of Cambodia until April 1977, and they depicted harsh, forced labor conditions but not the systematic elimination of whole ethnic groups and classes.91 With the country sealed tight, statesmen and citizens could take shelter in the fog of plausible deniability. But even once they accepted the information, the moral implications of that information did not really sink in. For those back in Washington, 10,000 miles from the refugee camps at the Thai border, it would take years to promote the raw, unconfirmed data to the status of knowledge.
Response
Options Ignored; Futility, Perversity, Jeopardy
Those who argued that the number of Cambodians killed was in the hundreds of thousands or those who tried to generate press coverage of the horrors did so assuming that establishing the facts would empower the United States and other Western governments to act. Normally, in a time of genocide, op-ed writers, policymakers, and reporters root for a distinct outcome or urge a specific U.S. military, economic, legal, humanitarian, or diplomatic response. Implicit indeed in many cables and news articles, and explicit in most editorials, is an underlying message, a sort of “if I were czar, I would do X or Y.” But in the first three years of KR rule, even the Americans most concerned about Cambodia—Twining, Quinn, and Becker among them—internalized the constraints of the day and the system. They knew that drawing attention to the slaughter in Cambodia would have reminded America of its past sins, reopened wounds that had not yet healed at home, and invited questions about what the United States planned to do to curb the terror. They were neither surprised nor agitated by U.S. Apathy. They accepted U.S. noninvolvement as an established background condition. Once U.S. troops had withdrawn from Vietnam in 1973, Americans deemed all of Southeast Asia unspeakable, unwatchable, and from a policy perspective, unfixable. “There could have been two genocides in Cambodia and nobody would have cared,” remembers Morton Abramowitz, who at the time was an Asia specialist at the Pentagon and in 1978 became U.S. ambassador to Thailand. During the Khmer Rouge period, he remembers, “people just wanted to forget about the place. They wanted it off the radar.”
From the mountains of Vietnam, foreign service officer Ken Quinn had spotted early indicators of the Khmer Rouge’s brutality back in 1974 and had since been rotated back to the United States, where he served as the Indochina analyst at the National Security Council. Quinn remembers the impossibility of generating constructive ideas after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam:
The country was in a state of shock. There was a great sense that we were powerless. We were out. We were done. We had left. It was painful, but it was over…Vietnam had been such an emotional, wrenching, painful experience that there was just a huge national relief and a sense the country needed to be put back together. Our country.
Those who retained curiosity about the region continued to do so with the aim, in military parlance, of “fighting the last war.” Most observers remained unable or unwilling to look at events as they transpired or to see Cambodia as anything other than a stepchild of Vietnam. They interpreted events on the ground accordingly. As Becker later wrote:
Too many people in and out of government had staked their reputations, their careers, and their own self-esteem on the positions they took during the [Vietnam] war. Each side wanted the postwar era to shore up those old positions and prove them correct. News was [seen]…as potential ammunition against old American opponents, as proof of America’s guilt or honor.92
Certainly, it is impossible to overstate the importance of the historical context in dictating America’s response to atrocities in Cambodia. Neither President Ford nor President Carter, who took office in January 1977, was going to consider sending U.S. troops back to Southeast Asia. But it is still striking that so many Americans concluded that nothing at all could be done. Even the “soft” response options that were available to the United States were passed up.
The United States barely denounced the massacres. The Ford administration had initially done so, but official U.S. reprimands proved shortlived, as Washington tuned out. Twining, the designated Cambodia watcher at the U.S. embassy in Bangkok, continued collecting and passing along hefty and chilling refugee accounts.93 But these reports led only to a low-key U.S. government request to Amnesty International to begin investigations. A confidential June 8, 1976, policy paper on human rights from the State Department to embassy posts contained the following press guidance:
We share the concern about reported conditions in Cambodia…We are prepared to support any effective action that might be taken to inquire further into the question of violations of human rights in Cambodia…Reports of conditions in Cambodia are…difficult to verify.Information available to the [U.S.government] is not significantly different from that obtained by journalists and comes primarily from refugees. Nevertheless, these reports are too numerous to ignore and sufficient information certainly exists for further inquiry by appropriate international or private humanitarian organizations.
…We have already urged Amnesty International to investigate the situation in Cambodia but have avoided any public actions which would give the appearance of leading a campaign against Cambodia or would lend credence to Cambodian allegations that we are behind reports of their transgressions.94
Apart from casual appeals for “further inquiry,” the United States did not itself launch its own determined inquiry or act upon the facts already acquired.
U.S. officials could have publicly branded Pol Pot’s killings as genocide. But they did not do so. Indeed, I have not found a U.S. official who remembers even reading the genocide convention to see if events in Cambodia met its requirements. Because the treaty excluded political groups and so many of the KR murders were committed against perceived political enemies, it was actually a harder fit than one would expect. But even though many killings met the law’s terms, no faction emerged inside the Carter administration arguing for any change in U.S. policy toward Cambodia. Thus, it is not surprising that nobody thought to ask the State Department legal adviser’s office to issue a legal finding of genocide. Such a finding would have been moot in the face of the “reality” of U.S. nonengagement. And since the United States was not a party to the convention, a genocide proclamation would have created no legal obligation to act.
The United States could have urged its allies to file genocide charges at the International Court of Justice. The court could not weigh in on individual criminal guilt and had no enforcement powers to ensure its rulings were heeded. But if it had determined that genocide was under way, the ICJ could have issued a declaratory judgment on Cambodia’s responsibility and demanded that provisional measures be taken. This would have signaled to Cambodians that at least one institution was prepared to judge the KR slaughter.
Proxmire hoped that the United States might turn to the ICJ for a genocide finding, but he knew U.S. ratification of the genocide convention had to come first. By the beginning of 1977, it had been a decade since he had started delivering his daily speech urging ratification. In ten years he had stood up 1,761 times, drawing frequently upon the “textbook case of genocide” being committed by the Khmer Rouge.95 In 1977 and 1978 Proxmire ratcheted up his attention to the KR. “The destruction of 2 million Cambodians is the numerical equivalent of murdering every man, woman, and child in the entire state of Colorado,” he declared. “Every human being in Boston, Massachusetts. Every person in Washington, DC—and that includes you and me.” The numbers