The Logic of U.S. Support for the Khmer Rouge

This morning the Gray Lady offers a story by Julia Wallace, "Genocide Trial Begins for Khmer Rouge Leaders," about the trial for genocide and war crimes of two top Khmer Rouge officials:

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Hearings began on Friday into the most far-reaching charges, including genocide, against two former leaders of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge in what is likely to be the last chance to seek justice for 1.7 million deaths during their disastrous 1970s rule. 

The defendants, Nuon Chea, 88, and Khieu Samphan, 83, the most senior surviving leaders of the group, were sentenced to life in prison in August for masterminding mass evacuations of Cambodians from their homes. They have appealed those convictions. 

The trial that began Friday, expected to last until 2017, covers a broader range of crimes against humanity, as well as genocide and war crimes. It will address accusations that the Khmer Rouge ran work camps that enlisted Cambodians as slave laborers to build dams and airports and ran execution sites where those who fell afoul of the government’s policies were slaughtered, and will consider charges of genocide committed against Muslims and ethnic Vietnamese minorities.

“Of all the crimes in Democratic Kampuchea, there were none graver than the relentless and systematic effort of the senior Khmer Rouge leaders to identify and smash those they feared could one day oppose them,” said Chea Leang, one of the prosecutors. Democratic Kampuchea was the name of the state headed by the Khmer Rouge during their rule from 1975 to 1979. 

The first witnesses will appear later this month to testify about work sites in Tram Kak, the “ideological center” of the Khmer Rouge movement, where collectivized labor and communal living, the hallmarks of the rule, were enforced with extreme brutality. 

Mr. Nuon Chea is often described as the Khmer Rouge movement’s chief ideologue and was second-in-command to Pol Pot, the leader of the movement who died in the jungles of northwestern Cambodia in 1998. Mr. Khieu Samphan, a former teacher and Parliament member, joined the revolutionary Communist movement out of frustration with the corruption and decadence of 1960s-era Cambodia and became the Khmer Rouge’s head of state in 1976.

The tribunal, a joint effort of the Cambodian government and the United Nations, had split the case against the men into two trials to expedite a verdict. 

Both defendants said in court Friday that they would boycott the second trial because they were unhappy over the way it had been split. Mr. Nuon Chea rose to criticize judges for what he said was a lingering bias against him. He said he had been “hurt” by the court’s refusal to acknowledge the role that aggression by neighboring Vietnam played in the Khmer Rouge killings, and vowed that he would not come back to court until his motion for their disqualification had been heard.

For those of you like myself who have been aware of longstanding allegations by critics of U.S. hegemony, like Alexander Cockburn and Noam Chomsky, that the  United States actually supported the Khmer Rouge, but you weren't exactly clear about the dialectics of that support there was an excellent article that appeared yesterday on the Counterpunch web site by Gregory Elich, "Who Supported the Khmer Rouge? How the US Backed a Regime of Unrivaled Barbarism," that is well written and lays it all bare.

Nuon Chea wants to be able to use the purported aggression of Vietnam in his defense because that was the main reason the United States along with China, for decades no less, backed the uber-Maoist butchers of the Khmer once they were toppled -- they were a thorn in the side of the Vietnamese. As Elich explains,

With the conviction last summer of former Khmer Rouge officials Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea for crimes against humanity, the subject of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 received a small amount of attention in the Western mass media. What the media failed to mention was how the Khmer Rouge was maintained as a military and political force long after its fall from power. Nor has it been suggested why, at Western insistence, the scope of investigations at the tribunal would exclude the period after 1979.

*** 

Khmer Rouge leaders had a manic hatred for the Vietnamese and expended considerable effort in trying to whip up anti-Vietnamese sentiment. Claiming Southern Vietnam as their territory, the Khmer Rouge launched numerous cross-border raids, burning down villages and massacring their inhabitants. In all, around 30,000 Vietnamese civilians lost their lives in the attacks. 

No nation could long countenance the murder of its citizens by marauders from a neighboring nation, nor was it easy to remain blind to the ongoing genocide in Cambodia. On December 25, 1978, following repeated refusals by the Khmer Rouge to negotiate, Vietnamese armed forces in conjunction with Cambodian rebel forces, struck back. Such was the level of hatred the population felt for their rulers that uprisings spread throughout the nation and it took only two weeks to drive the Khmer Rouge from power.

The campaign by Vietnamese armed forces and the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation was one of history’s great liberations. The United States and China did not see it that way, however. Both shared an antipathy for Vietnam’s alliance with the Soviet Union and sought a way to overturn the recent turn of events. U.S. Secretary of State Harold Brown denounced Vietnam for its “minor league hegemonism,” and China sent troops into northern Vietnam to fight a two-week war to “teach Vietnam a lesson.” 

According to journalist Elizabeth Becker, U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski “himself claims that he concocted the idea of persuading Thailand to cooperate fully with China in its efforts to rebuild the Khmer Rouge.” Brzezinski said, “I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the D.K. [Khmer Rouge government-in-exile of Democratic Kampuchea]. The question was how to help the Cambodian people. Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him, but China could.” In fact, U.S. support went well beyond encouraging others to rebuild the Khmer Rouge. 

In neighboring Thailand, the Khmer Rouge formed a large guerrilla army, while Cambodian politician Son Sann established an army that would be ultimately named the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF). Prince Norodom Sihanouk launched his private army, the Armée Nationale Sihanoukiste (ANS). 

On the political front, in 1979 the United States and China wielded their influence and pushed through a vote in the UN General Assembly in favor of granting Cambodia’s UN seat to the ousted Khmer Rouge regime, and terminated a UN investigation into Khmer Rouge crimes. The following year, the United States again supported the Khmer Rouge in the UN as the “legitimate” representative of the Cambodian people. With U.S. backing, Cambodia would continue to be represented in the United Nations by a Khmer Rouge diplomat until 1993.

Elich's story goes on, providing layer upon layer of detail about the multitudinous ways the U.S. hijacked peace talks and funneled aid to the Khmer Rouge.  For anyone unconvinced that the U.S. could play a double game of supporting Islamic State at the same time marshaling an international coalition to degrade and destroy it, the American experience with the Khmer Rouge should be very illumininating.

John Pilger in a story last week, "From Pol Pot to ISIS: 'Anything That Flies on Everything that Moves.' " explores the connection from another angle. The exercise of U.S. military supremacy does not solve problems, it creates new ones. In the case of the Nixon administration's "Operation Menu," the saturation bombing of Cambodia to eradicate the North Vietnamese bases there led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. In the case of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the specious claim that Saddam Hussein was collaborating with jihadis to attack America, actually becomes self-fulfilling with the rise of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

What is interesting is that I think we in the U.S. are closer now to understanding the nature of Great Power conflict -- that a hegemonic state will foster adversaries in order to maintain a state of war -- than we have been since the Vietnam era. The failure of Obama's putative anti-war presidency is the prime mover here. But what is different now from 40 years ago is that democracy -- the feedback mechanism between ruled and rulers -- is far weaker in the U.S. People are beginning to realize that war is permanent and that there is nothing, absent a mass uprising, that we can do about it.

My prediction is that over the next several elections cycles a pronounced rejection of the two-party system will emerge.