Tuesday, April 9, 2013
http://www.greenleft.org.au
The corporate media will eulogise Margaret Thatcher, and criticise
those who dare use her death to point out her many terrible crimes. But
among her many crimes that will go unmentioned was the support her
government gave in the 1980s to the genocidal Pol Pot-led Khmer Rogue.
Below is an article by independent journalist John Pilger on the support the West, including Thatcher, gave the Khmer Rogue. Itwas first published on April 17, 2000 in the New Statesman. Visit www.johnpilger.com for more articles.
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On April 17 [2000], it is 25 years since Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge
entered Phnom Penh. In the calendar of fanaticism, this was Year Zero;
as many as two million people, a fifth of Cambodia's population, were to
die as a consequence. To mark the anniversary, the evil of Pol Pot will
be recalled, almost as a ritual act for voyeurs of the politically dark
and inexplicable.
For the managers of western power, no true lessons will be drawn,
because no connections will be made to them and to their predecessors,
who were Pol Pot's Faustian partners. Yet, without the complicity of the
west, Year Zero might never have happened, nor the threat of its return
maintained for so long.
Declassified United States government documents leave little doubt
that the secret and illegal bombing of then neutral Cambodia by
President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger between 1969 and 1973 caused
such widespread death and devastation that it was critical in Pol Pot's
drive for power.
"They are using damage caused by B52 strikes as the main theme of
their propaganda," the CIA director of operations reported on 2 May
1973. "This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of
young men. Residents say the propaganda campaign has been effective with
refugees in areas that have been subject to B52 strikes."
In dropping the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on a peasant society,
Nixon and Kissinger killed an estimated half a million people. Year Zero
began, in effect, with them; the bombing was a catalyst for the rise of
a small sectarian group, the Khmer Rouge, whose combination of Maoism
and medievalism had no popular base.
After two and a half years in power, the Khmer Rouge was overthrown
by the Vietnamese on Christmas Day, 1978. In the months and years that
followed, the US and China and their allies, notably the Thatcher
government, backed Pol Pot in exile in Thailand. He was the enemy of
their enemy: Vietnam, whose liberation of Cambodia could never be
recognised because it had come from the wrong side of the cold war. For
the Americans, now backing Beijing against Moscow, there was also a
score to be settled for their humiliation on the rooftops of Saigon.
To this end, the United Nations was abused by the powerful. Although
the Khmer Rouge government ("Democratic Kampuchea") had ceased to exist
in January 1979, its representatives were allowed to continue occupying
Cambodia's seat at the UN; indeed, the US, China and Britain insisted on
it.
Meanwhile, a Security Council embargo on Cambodia compounded the
suffering of a traumatised nation, while the Khmer Rouge in exile got
almost everything it wanted. In 1981, President Jimmy Carter's national
security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said: "I encouraged the Chinese
to support Pol Pot." The US, he added, "winked publicly" as China sent
arms to the Khmer Rouge.
In fact, the US had been secretly funding Pol Pot in exile since
January 1980. The extent of this support - $85m from 1980 to 1986 - was
revealed in correspondence to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. On the Thai border with Cambodia, the CIA and other
intelligence agencies set up the Kampuchea Emergency Group, which
ensured that humanitarian aid went to Khmer Rouge enclaves in the
refugee camps and across the border.
Two American aid workers, Linda Mason and Roger Brown, later wrote:
"The US government insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed . . . the US
preferred that the Khmer Rouge operation benefit from the credibility of
an internationally known relief operation." Under American pressure,
the World Food Programme handed over $12m in food to the Thai army to
pass on to the Khmer Rouge; "20,000 to 40,000 Pol Pot guerillas
benefited," wrote Richard Holbrooke, the then US assistant secretary of
state.
I witnessed this. Travelling with a UN convoy of 40 trucks, I drove
to a Khmer Rouge operations base at Phnom Chat. The base commander was
the infamous Nam Phann, known to relief workers as "The Butcher" and Pol
Pot's Himmler. After the supplies had been unloaded, literally at his
feet, he said: "Thank you very much, and we wish for more."
In November of that year, 1980, direct contact was made between the
White House and the Khmer Rouge when Dr Ray Cline, a former deputy
director of the CIA, made a secret visit to a Khmer Rouge operational
headquarters. Cline was then a foreign policy adviser on President-elect
Reagan's transitional team.
By 1981, a number of governments had become decidedly uneasy about
the charade of the UN's continuing recognition of the defunct Pol Pot
regime. Something had to be done. The following year, the US and China
invented the Coalition of the Democratic Government of Kampuchea, which
was neither a coalition nor democratic, nor a government, nor in
Kampuchea (Cambodia).
It was what the CIA calls "a master illusion". Prince Norodom
Sihanouk was appointed its head; otherwise little changed. The two
"non-communist" members, the Sihanoukists, led by the Prince's son,
Norodom Ranariddh, and the Khmer People's National Liberation Front,
were dominated, diplomatically and militarily, by the Khmer Rouge. One
of Pol Pot's closet cronies, Thaoun Prasith, ran the office at the UN in
New York.
In Bangkok, the Americans provided the "coalition" with battle plans,
uniforms, money and satellite intelligence; arms came direct from China
and from the west, via Singapore. The non-communist fig leaf allowed
Congress - spurred on by a cold-war zealot Stephen Solarz, a powerful
committee chairman - to approve $24m in aid to the "resistance".
Until 1989, the British role in Cambodia remained secret. The first
reports appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, written by Simon
O'Dwyer-Russell, a diplomatic and defence correspondent with close
professional and family contacts with the SAS. He revealed that the SAS
was training the Pol Pot-led force.
Soon afterwards, Jane's Defence Weekly reported that the British
training for the "non-communist" members of the "coalition" had been
going on "at secret bases in Thailand for more than four years". The
instructors were from the SAS, "all serving military personnel, all
veterans of the Falklands conflict, led by a captain".
The Cambodian training became an exclusively British operation after
the "Irangate" arms-for-hostages scandal broke in Washington in 1986.
"If Congress had found out that Americans were mixed up in clandestine
training in Indo-China, let alone with Pol Pot," a Ministry of Defence
source told O'Dwyer-Russell, "the balloon would have gone right up. It
was one of those classic Thatcher-Reagan arrangements." Moreover,
Margaret Thatcher had let slip, to the consternation of the Foreign
Office, that "the more reasonable ones in the Khmer Rouge will have to
play some part in a future government".
In 1991, I interviewed a member of "R" (reserve) Squadron of the SAS,
who had served on the border. "We trained the KR in a lot of technical
stuff - a lot about mines," he said. "We used mines that came originally
from Royal Ordnance in Britain, which we got by way of Egypt with
marking changed . . . We even gave them psychological training. At
first, they wanted to go into the villages and just chop people up. We
told them how to go easy . . ."
The Foreign Office response was to lie. "Britain does not give
military aid in any form to the Cambodian factions," stated a
parliamentary reply. The then prime minister, Thatcher, wrote to Neil
Kinnock: "I confirm that there is no British government involvement of
any kind in training, equipping or co-operating with Khmer Rouge forces
or those allied to them."
On 25 June 1991, after two years of denials, the government finally
admitted that the SAS had been secretly training the "resistance" since
1983. A report by Asia Watch filled in the detail: the SAS had taught
"the use of improvised explosive devices, booby traps and the
manufacture and use of time-delay devices". The author of the report,
Rae McGrath (who shared a joint Nobel Peace Prize for the international
campaign on landmines), wrote in the Guardian that "the SAS training was
a criminally irresponsible and cynical policy".
When a UN "peacekeeping force" finally arrived in Cambodia in 1992,
the Faustian pact was never clearer. Declared merely a "warring
faction", the Khmer Rouge was welcomed back to Phnom Penh by UN
officials, if not the people. The western politician who claimed credit
for the "peace process", Gareth Evans (then Australia's foreign
minister), set the tone by calling for an "even-handed" approach to the
Khmer Rouge and questioning whether calling it genocidal was "a specific
stumbling block".
Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot's prime minister during the years of genocide,
took the salute of UN troops with their commander, the Australian
general John Sanderson, at his side. Eric Falt, the UN spokesman in
Cambodia, told me: "The peace process was aimed at allowing [the Khmer
Rouge] to gain respectability."
The consequence of the UN's involvement was the unofficial ceding of
at least a quarter of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge (according to UN
military maps), the continuation of a low-level civil war and the
election of a government impossibly divided between "two prime
ministers": Hun Sen and Norodom Ranariddh.
The Hun Sen government has since won a second election outright.
Authoritarian and at times brutal, yet by Cambodian standards
extraordinarily stable, the government led by a former Khmer Rouge
dissident, Hun Sen, who fled to Vietnam in the 1970s, has since done
deals with leading figures of the Pol Pot era, notably the breakaway
faction of Ieng Sary, while denying others immunity from prosecution.
Once the Phnom Penh government and the UN can agree on its form, an
international war crimes tribunal seems likely to go ahead. The
Americans want the Cambodians to play virtually no part; their
understandable concern is that not only the Khmer Rouge will be
indicted.
The Cambodian lawyer defending Ta Mok, the Khmer Rouge military
leader captured last year, has said: "All the foreigners involved have
to be called to court, and there will be no exceptions . . . Madeleine
Albright, Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Ronald
Reagan and George Bush . . . we are going to invite them to tell the
world why they supported the Khmer Rouge."
It is an important principle, of which those in Washington and
Whitehall currently sustaining bloodstained tyrannies elsewhere might
take note.
1 comment:
Great article. Every Cambodian should have a chance to read this article. John Pilger is, no doubt, one of the best Cambodia's historians.
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