The New York Review Abroad (28 page)

“Why is there no mention of Sihanouk?” I asked my guide.

“On the advice of the experts,” he replied.

“What experts?” I asked.

“Vietnamese experts,” he said.

One entire wall of this room had been made into a map of Cambodia—perhaps fourteen feet high and as many wide. On glass eight inches in front of the wall the rivers and lakes of the country were painted blood red. Behind the glass, arranged in the shape of the country, were hundreds of skulls collected from a nearby mass grave. This was another contribution by the Vietnamese experts.

The same Vietnamese experts have assiduously tried to associate Pol Pot with Hitler, and they have had considerable success. Thus Tuol Sleng prison has been called “an Asian Auschwitz.” The museum was indeed derived in part from Nazi history, but the prison was not. This distinction seems to me to be important. In the spring of 1979, the Vietnamese, with the help of East German advisers, organized Tuol Sleng, according to officials of the Heng Samrin regime, so as to recall images of the Nazi concentration camps. Moreover, in 1983, in
preparation for the fifth anniversary of the Vietnamese takeover, the museum was remodeled. The task was carried out in good part by its efficient curator, Ung Pech. He was sent to East Germany to visit Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen for new ideas on how to make Tuol Sleng more closely resemble the Nazi “original.”

In fact, it is hard to think of two prisons more different than Auschwitz and Tuol Sleng. Auschwitz was a work camp and an extermination camp in which millions of people—perhaps as many as four million—died or were murdered. About half of them were Jews, and they died precisely because of that. In Tuol Sleng, by contrast, about sixteen thousand people had been killed, most of them because they were members of the Khmer Rouge apparat, or families of such members, on whom the organization had turned in its revolutionary and chauvinistic ferocity. In Auschwitz there was no such thing as a “confession,” no “party” to whom disloyalty was alleged and which controlled events. In Tuol Sleng, confessions were meticulously extracted from the tortured victims before they were done to death in the name of the party they were supposed to have betrayed. Forcing such confessions was vile and paranoid. But it was not unprecedented.

The constant invocations of Nazism helped to obscure the fact that the Khmer Rouge was a Marxist-Leninist organization and that Tuol Sleng resembled much more a Stalinist prison than a Nazi concentration camp. (“I have nothing to depend on, I have only the Communist Party of Kampuchea,” wrote Hu Nim, in his “confession.” “Would the party please show clemency towards me. My life is completely dependent upon the party.”) Yet I recall no one describing Tuol Sleng as an “Asian Lubyanka.” Stalinist crimes have not been registered upon modern memory to anything like the extent of those of the Nazis.

The Nazi death camps are preserved by both the communist and
the social-democratic societies that took over the wreckage of the Reich, as monuments and as warnings. Indeed, the horror of Nazism is one of the few issues on which communist and capitalist propaganda is agreed and which each seeks constantly to reiterate.
²
That is a powerful combination. By contrast there are no similar shrines to the victims of Stalin; on the contrary, the vast apparatus of the Soviet state and its allies, including Vietnam, are geared to obscuring rather than broadcasting the reality of the crimes that were committed.

Since 1979, Vietnam has refused to compromise over its occupation of Cambodia. It has controlled most of the country; the rest of the world has not allowed it to control Cambodia’s seat in the UN. That is still held by the Khmer Rouge, the Government of Democratic Kampuchea. Since 1982, they have been in alliance with an anticommunist resistance group, the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, and with Prince Sihanouk. Indeed, the Prince is the titular head of the government of “Democratic Kampuchea.” These three are not happy partners, and inside Cambodia itself the Khmer Rouge is much the strongest militarily.

During the past five years, as a result of Vietnam’s intransigence, the Khmer Rouge forces have been rebuilt by Vietnam’s enemies.
They have been supplied with Chinese weapons through Thailand. Their camps along the Thai border have been supplied with food provided by the United Nations. Many hundreds of thousands of genuine refugees have been fed there—but so have Khmer Rouge troops. Without the arms and the food, the Khmer Rouge would not have been able to restore themselves into what now is thought to be a fighting force of some 25,000. In recent months they seem to have been attacking more and more widely across the country.

The strategy of helping the Khmer Rouge, devised by China and implemented with various degrees of enthusiasm by the ASEAN countries of Southeast Asia as well as by China, has the support of the Western nations. Each government involved—though China has been ambiguous—has stated that it never wishes to see the Khmer Rouge back in power and that the strategy being followed is intended merely to force Vietnam to the bargaining table. And many of the countries that have voted for the Khmer Rouge to continue holding the Cambodian seat in the UN have done so because they fear the precedent of legitimizing Vietnam’s invasion. Yugoslavia is an obvious and telling example. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the Khmer Rouge have been revitalized. They will not go away.

And while this has happened, there has been a tendency to forget or at least to play down the Khmer Rouge’s appalling human rights record when it was in power. There is still no certain calculation of the numbers who were murdered by the Khmer Rouge, or died as a result of its policies, between 1975 and the end of 1978. Most of the estimates that have been made conclude that between one and two million people died or were killed out of a population of roughly seven million. There has been little investigation of the Khmer Rouge regime; a former head of American Amnesty, David Hawk, has found it hard to arouse much interest in the United States, let
alone any funds, for a serious commission to study the Khmer Rouge phenomenon. The world has moved on and looked away. The group that Jimmy Carter called “the world’s worst violators of human rights” is now used as a convenient strategic chip in international politics.

The continuation of the Khmer Rouge undoubtedly represents a dreadful failure of political imagination and a denial of memory. But it is hard to attach sole responsibility for it to Vietnam’s opponents. Vietnam itself bears considerable responsibility. Leaving aside the support that Hanoi gave to the Khmer Rouge before 1978 (and the extent to which its spokesmen undercut the refugee stories about Khmer Rouge conduct, thus adding to disbelief in them, particularly on the Western left), Vietnam’s conduct since its invasion of Cambodia has rarely suggested that it wished to see a compromise in which the Khmer Rouge was removed as a significant force in Cambodia—which was what the ASEAN countries and their Western partners insisted was their aim.

After its occupation of Phnom Penh in January 1979, Hanoi might have signaled a serious desire to reach a compromise satisfactory to its neighbors. It is impossible to say whether any such suggestion would have been accepted by the Chinese or by the ASEAN countries, but the point is that it was never made. Time and again in the months after their invasion, the Vietnamese reiterated that their involvement in Cambodia was “irreversible” despite the fact that so many other nations found it intolerable. In this setting it was inevitable that those other nations would seek to apply all possible forms of pressure upon Hanoi to change its mind. The Vietnamese could have predicted that such pressures would include support for the Khmer Rouge.

When I traveled around Cambodia, it seemed that this was remarkably convenient for the Vietnamese. They could hope to have their occupation given legitimacy by a people who traditionally mistrusted them only if it was seen as the lesser of two evils, preventing the return of the Khmer Rouge. While Thailand and the Chinese were rebuilding Khmer Rouge strength along the Thai border, few if any Cambodians would have wanted the Vietnamese to leave. Within Cambodia, Vietnam’s constant propaganda was designed both to instill fear about what would happen were Vietnamese protection against the Khmer Rouge withdrawn and to concentrate responsibility for Khmer Rouge crimes on “the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique” alone.

In this way Hanoi avoided any “de-Nazification” or “de-Stalinization” campaign and was able, on the contrary, to fill the Heng Samrin administration with cadres who had previously worked, with varying degrees of diligence, for “Pol Pot.” Heng Samrin himself, Hun Sen, the foreign minister, even the minister of justice, Ouk Boun Chheoun, were all Khmer Rouge officials during most of the three years of Khmer Rouge rule. They are only three of thousands of former Khmer Rouge whom the Vietnamese “turned.”

Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were indeed condemned to death in a show-trial that the Vietnamese staged in Phnom Penh in August 1979. But over the next four years hardly any other Khmer Rouge officials were charged with any offense. After 1975, Vietnam imprisoned some 200,000 of its own people without trial and for indefinite periods in harsh “reeducation” camps. But former Khmer Rouge officers were often deemed to be more reliable than former officials or soldiers of the Thieu or Lon Nol regimes. For the Khmer Rouge, “reeducation” might consist of a short course in Hanoi’s interpretation
of Marxism-Leninism. For noncommunists it could mean indefinite incarceration.
³

Many of the fruits of “liberation” by Vietnam had been sweet in 1979; but it must have been bitter for many hundreds of thousands of ordinary noncommunist Cambodians to realize that their liberators placed more confidence in the torturers than in their victims, that many of those people were actually being promoted by the new order into positions of new authority over them. In one fishing village on a tributary of the Mekong I met an old woman who described with great passion how the Khmer Rouge murderer of her son was living, unpunished, in the neighboring village. I did not know whether any of the officials with me on that day had also previously worked for Pol Pot, but Elizabeth Becker noted in
The Washington Post
the awful discrepancy between the legacy of the Khmer Rouge rule and the propaganda purposes to which it was put: