A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Samantha Power
in alleyways.”143 When she spotted people out in the countryside, they were working joylessly, furiously, without contemplating rest. The country’s stunning Buddhist temples had been converted into granaries.
It is difficult to imagine how confused Becker and the others must have been at that time. They had heard refugee reports of massacres and starvation. They suspected the number killed was in the hundreds of thousands. But they knew virtually nothing specific about the bloody Pol Pot regime. Becker was unable to muster the practical or moral imagination needed to envision the depths of what was happening behind the pristine and cheery front presented. She recalled:
We were the original three blind men trying to figure out the elephant. At that time no one understood the inner workings of the regime—how the zones operated; how the party controlled the country; how the secret police worked; that torture and extermination centers…even existed; the depth of the misery and death…We had the tail, the ears, the feet of the monster but no idea of its overall shape…144
By the time the two-week trip began winding down, the luster of being the first to visit had long since worn off. On December 22, 1978, the group’s last full day in the country, Becker became the first American journalist ever to interview the famed Pol Pot. Although she had heard of Brother Number One’s charisma, his smile was far more endearing and his manner more polished than she had predicted. But it was not long before he turned off his charm, treating Becker and colleague Dudman as if he had granted them an audience, not an interview. Pol Pot delivered a onehour stinging and paranoid indictment of Vietnam, forecasting a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact over Cambodia. He warned: “A Kampuchea that is a satellite of Vietnam is a threat and a danger for Southeast Asia and the world…for Vietnam is already a satellite of the Soviet Union and is carrying out Soviet strategy in Southeast Asia.”145 Ironically, as American decisionmakers formed their policy in the coming months, they operated on assumptions that mirrored Pol Pot’s.
Caldwell, the Scottish Marxist, was granted a separate interview with the supreme revolutionary leader. When he later traded notes with Becker, he delighted in describing Pol Pot’s mastery of revolutionary economic theory. Before retiring for the evening, Becker sparred with her zealous colleague one last time about the veracity of refugee accounts, which he still refused to believe, and the worthiness of the revolution, in which he refused to abandon belief. She was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of tumult and gunfire outside her room. A half dozen or more shots were fired, and an hour and a half of the longest, most terrifying silence of Becker’s life passed. When she finally heard the voice of her KR guide, she emerged trembling into the hall. Dudman was fine, she was told. Caldwell, the true believer, had been murdered.
Becker did not know why Caldwell had been killed, but she suspected that one faction wanted either to embarrass another or to plug the crack of an opening to the outside world before it widened. A murder would deter meddlesome foreigners from visiting again. On December 23, 1978, Becker and Dudman arrived in Beijing with the wooden casket containing Caldwell’s body. Two days later Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia.
Aftermath
“Humanitarian” Rescue
Kassie Neou, one of Cambodia’s leading human rights advocates today, survived Pol Pot’s madness and the outside world’s indifference. An English teacher before the genocide, he posed as a taxi driver, shedding his eyeglasses and working around the clock to develop a “taxidriver manner.” He had to make the KR believe that he had not been educated. Captured nonetheless, Neou was tortured five times and spent six months in a KR prison with thirty-six other inmates. Of the thirty-seven who were bound together with iron clasps, only Neou’s hope of survival was rewarded. The young guards executed the others but spared him because they had grown fond of the Aesop’s fables he told them as bedtime stories. When Neou discusses the terror today, he lifts up his trouser leg and displays the whitened, rough skin around his ankle where a manacle held him in place. The revolutionaries’ crimes were so incomprehensible that some part of him seems relieved to be left with tangible proof of his experience.
During his imprisonment, though he had been highly critical of the earlier U.S. involvement in Cambodia, Neou was one of many Cambodians who could not help but dream that the United States would rescue his people. “When you are suffering like we suffered, you simply cannot imagine that nobody will come along to stop the pain,” he remembers. “Everyday, you would wake up and tell yourself, ‘somebody will come, something is going to happen.’ If you stop hoping for rescue, you stop hoping. And hope is all that can keep you alive.” Survivors of terror usually recall maintaining similar, necessary illusions. Without them, they say, the temptation to choose death over despair would overwhelm.
Neou had fantasized that the United States would spare him certain death, but it was Vietnam, the enemy of the United States, that in January 1979 finally dislodged the bloody Communist radicals. In response, the United States, which in 1978 had at last begun to condemn the KR, reversed itself, siding with the Cambodian perpetrators of genocide against the Vietnamese aggressors.
Vietnam’s invasion had a humanitarian consequence but was not motivated by humanitarian concerns. Indeed, for a long time Vietnam and its Soviet backer had blocked investigation into the atrocities committed by their former partner in revolution. In 1978, however, as KR incursions into Vietnam escalated, Vietnam had begun detailing KR massacres. Vietnamese officials used excerpts from Ponchaud’s book, Year Zero, as radio propoganda. They called on Cambodians to “rise up for the struggle to overthrow the Pol Pot and Ieng Sary clique” who were “more barbarous…than the Hitlerite fascists.” Vietnam also began reindoctrinating and training Khmer Rouge defectors and Cambodian prisoners seized in territory taken from Cambodia. It crept ever closer to the Soviet Union, joining the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), signing a twenty-five-year treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Soviets, and receiving ever larger military shipments from them. The Soviet Union joined Vietnam’s anti-KR campaign, condemning the KR “policy of genocide.”
For the previous year, the United States had been flirting with restoring relations with Vietnam but was not keen on seeing it overrun its neighbor.146 From the U.S. embassy in Bangkok, Ambassador Morton Abramowitz wrote in a secret August 1978 cable to the State Department: “Neither the Khmers nor the world would miss Pol Pot. Nonetheless, the independence of Kampuchea, particularly its freedom from a significant Hanoi presence or complete Hanoi domination, is a matter of importance to us.”147 Far from encouraging the overthrow of the KR, as Neou and others would have hoped, U.S. officials urged the Vietnamese to think twice. In November 1978 Secretary of State Vance sent a message to the Vietnamese: “Don’t you see what lies ahead if you invade Cambodia? This is not the way to bring peace to the area. Can’t we try some UN instrument, use the UN in some way?”148
The United States had its own reasons for frowning upon a Vietnamese triumph. It planned to restore diplomatic relations with China on January 1, 1979. China’s hostility toward Vietnam and its Soviet military and political sponsor greatly influenced the U.S. reaction to the invasion. For neither the first nor the last time, geopolitics trumped genocide. Interests trumped indignation.
Aware of the Khmer Rouge’s isolation and unpopularity in the West, Hanoi thought it would earn praise if it overthrew Pol Pot. It also concluded that regardless of the outside world’s opinion, it could not afford to allow continued KR encroachments into the Mekong Delta. By December 22, 1978, Vietnamese planes had begun flying forty to fifty sorties per day over Cambodia. And on December 25, 1978, twelve Vietnamese divisions, or some 100, 000 Vietnamese troops, retaliated against KR attacks by land. Teaming up with an estimated 20, 000 Cambodian insurgents, they rolled swiftly through the Cambodian countryside. Despite U.S. intelligence predictions that the KR would constitute a potent military foe, McGovern’s earlier forecast of rapid collapse turned out to be prescient. Lacking popular support, the Khmer